12. The Nazis Were Nowhere Close to Getting a Nuke
Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s chief nuclear physicist, knew that splitting the atom could produce a powerful weapon, but never figured out how to weaponize the concept. In their last nuclear test in the spring of 1945, German scientists failed to achieve the preliminary first step of criticality – a self-sustaining chain reaction that the Manhattan Project had achieved in 1942. Criticality was the crucial foundation, without which an atomic weapon program cannot succeed.
Moreover, the German nuclear program lacked adequate support. After achieving criticality, it took America another three years, with a massive investment of resources and the personal support and attention of the head of state, to detonate the first atomic bomb. The Germans had not accomplished the criticality breakthrough by the time the war ended, and their nuclear program had never received anything close to the support enjoyed by the Manhattan Project.
