27. A Persistent but Inaccurate Belief About the Possibility of a Nazi Atomic Bomb
There is a widespread – but inaccurate – belief that WWII German physicists were about to unlock the secret of fission, and thus give Hitler an atomic bomb. During the war, the Manhattan Project operated on the assumption that Hitler had an advanced nuclear program which might bear fruit at any time. Thus, those in the know viewed the US as in a race against Germany over which country 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 the Germans would have been no closer to an atomic bomb in 1955 than they had been in 1945.
Germany’s chief nuclear physicist, Werner Heisenberg, had nebulous ideas that splitting the atom could produce a powerful weapon. However, he never understood how to put that into practice. In Germany’s last test in 1945, scientists failed to achieve the preliminary first step of criticality – a self-sustaining chain reaction. The Manhattan Project had achieved that in 1942. Criticality was the crucial foundation without an atomic weapon program could not have succeeded. Additionally, the German nuclear program lacked necessary support. After its scientists achieved criticality, it took the US nearly three years to successfully test the first atomic bomb. That was with a massive investment of resources and the personal support and attention of the head of state. 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.
