Since Norsk Hydro was mentioned in the article, I have to mention in turn one of my favorite books ever: The Winter Fortress by Neil Bascomb. It's the true story of the Norwegian commando sabotage of the heavy water plant. Short version: after a failed attempt by the English, some locals who'd fled to England and received training parachuted in, blew it up, and then skied to neutral Sweden. Legends, the lot of them: they froze their balls off and didn't have enough to eat, but they pulled it off.
Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It's is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.
Boron contamination of graphite also slowed the Manhattan Project:
"
Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem.
"
Sounds like a good time travel story: the mission is to go back in time and plant a single uranium cube, to be found ~80 years hence, to convince people that the German bomb project was doomed so that– ahh, but let's not spoil it! :)
Awesome article and interesting to see Heisenberg get it wrong. It really was a perfect situation for the US because we could get all the radioactive material with little issue.
A clean reminder that logistics is everything.
Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.
Relatively recently, recordings were released of conversations between captured Nazi scientists held at a house in the UK (I think I saw it on HN). They were housed together and the house was bugged purposely to capture casual conversation for intelligence purposes.
IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.
Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?
Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
The sheer economic costs of the manhattan project were prohibitive to a nation like Germany, even if they'd managed to build a functional project team.
(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)
A nation like Germany on the cusp of losing a war sure. The opposite scenario of Germany controlling all the resources of Europe and Africa is a scary proposition.
I don't believe the silver was strictly necessary. Copper windings would have worked for the calutron. Silver was used because copper was not as easily available at the time. But the point is valid. The project was originally British, moved to the US for economic reasons.
> Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.
> one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible
This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).
When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.
(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)
Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).
Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It's is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.
https://www.abebooks.com/Winter-Fortress-Epic-Mission-Sabota...
" Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_graphite
A clean reminder that logistics is everything.
Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.
IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.
Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?
Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)
From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.
This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).
When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.
(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)
Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).
See Anathem for more on this.