25. How Close Was Hitler to Getting a Nuke?
German physicists were supposedly on the verge of giving Hitler an atomic bomb, had the war lasted just a little longer. In reality, the Third Reich never came close. During the war, American and British scientists assumed that Hitler had an advanced nuclear program that might bear fruit at any time. They thus saw themselves as being in a race against Germany over who would first produce nuclear weapons.
However, it was discovered after the war that the German nuclear program was nowhere near as advanced as had been assumed: early in their research, German physicists took a wrong turn and followed it away from the path that leads to nuclear weapons. The war could have lasted another decade, and Hitler would have been no closer to having an atomic bomb in 1955 than he had been in 1945.
