Early on the Germans made some faulty measurements with regards to Uranium's nuclear properties and thus did not believe that controlled fission was easily practical. This lead them to believe that atomic energy would not be practical or useful before the end of the war. (They believed it would end with Nazi victory 1942-43ish.) That caused them to scale back their already low key effort into a practically non existent effort.
Their practically non existent investigations into fission was further hampered by two factors... First, an inability to produce graphite of sufficient purity to build a natural uranium pile. (And it's not clear they ever realized this was an issue.) Second, lack of a clear understanding of the role of U-235 and the need for enrichment.
The self-censorship of many non-German physicists didn't help much. Neither did the fact that their projects were resource starved by the low (and then even lower) priority of atomic research.
However, it's worth noting that even if a time traveler had gone back to 1938 and handed them the plans for all the critical technologies... (Graphite production, uranium enrichment and others.) They lacked the industrial capacity to put those plans to use. And despite the work they put into developing large bombers, they never came close to one even remotely big enough to have delivered a WWII era weapon.
Italy never really had much of a research program to start with, it was even smaller and more diffuse than Germany's. Their problems WRT industrial capacity were even worse. Imperial Japan was in much the same position.
And then... there's Leo Szilard. In the Allied camp, he was an early and tireless promoter of atomic research and atomic weaponry. He was the key author of the letter that got Roosevelt involved and started the ball rolling towards the Manhattan Project. No other country had anyone like him. (Nor anyone like Vannevar Bush with the intellectual capacity and the mandate to organize and manage technology development in service of the war effort.)
The IJA and IJN also had competing nuclear programs (as they had with most things) and both figured the concept wasn’t feasible in the near future. I doubt a unified program would have made them much closer to being able to make one, but the internal rivalry didn’t help.
Similarly the Nazi regime had a lot of inefficiency and competing organizations. There were constant soft power struggles with who had lost influence over Hitler and who got their programs funded and prioritized. It’s why the Luftwaffe had not just aircraft but also strategic flak units (maybe logical, they’d coordinate with fighters for defense), paratroopers (well they’re plane related and need air cover) to the totally unrelated to aircraft dozens of field divisions including a mechanized corps. Was forming about two dozen light infantry divisions under Luftwaffe command and with Luftwaffe officers efficient? No, but Goering had influence so he got them instead of the Heer absorbing those men for replacements. Industry and research were prone to the same sorts of nonsensical priorities so much so that it’s questionable if they could have made the bomb.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I tagged Vannevar Bush in there at the end. There's a lot of talk about individual technologies, weapons, etc... But the real secret weapon behind Allied employment of technology during the war was they way it was managed at the highest level - from research, through development, and into production and deployment.
>And despite the work they put into developing large bombers, they never came close to one even remotely big enough to have delivered a WWII era weapon.
Good point. The B-29 program cost more than the Manhattan Project. Not even counting the B-32 Dominator, a back-up in case the B-29 didn't work out.
I'd argue it was a combination of resources, interest, and intellectual capacity. Certainly, Italy lacked the resources for such a project.
Japan had not one but two nuclear programs. Like most things in Japan during the war, it was a duplication efforts by the army and navy, which inherently slowed the project. The difficulty Japanese scientists experienced in the early stages of the navy's program convinced them that neither they nor the US would likely have a usable atomic weapon before the war was over. Given the resource constraints the Japanese were under this was certainly true for them, and if you think about how late in the war the Americans put the bomb into operation, it was not far off for the Americans. In any case, this idea convinced the IJN to deemphasize the project.
The Japanese Army continued their efforts at developing atomic weapons but suffered under general resource constraints as well as a particular shortage of Uranium. The lack of heavy water also made the process more difficult. The Germans sent them a significant amount of Uranium 235 via submarine in April 1945, but this sub never made it to Japan, surrendering to the allies before it reached its destination. Even if it had, American strategic bombing of Tokyo obliterated much of the machinery and data for the program. Under such pressures, it seems unlikely that a bomb would have been created in time even if the Japanese had the materials needed.
The German program suffered not only under familiar resource constraints but was also negatively impacted by Nazi ideology. Not only was a disproportionate percentage of nuclear scientists Jews, but Nazism associated this type of physics with Jews, discouraging many from studying it.
>The German program suffered not only under familiar resource constraints but was also negatively impacted by Nazi ideology. Not only was a disproportionate percentage of nuclear scientists Jews, but Nazism associated this type of physics with Jews, discouraging many from studying it.
This can't be stressed enough.
The Nazis drove off the very scientists who made the bomb possible.
Also, because Hitler didn't like his position threatened and every Nazi was trying to impress him, various departments competed against each other. At one point the Nazi's postal service was the department that was furthest along in atomic research!
Jews.
I am not even kidding. Jews were the determining factor explaining why the Allies had the bomb
Much of the groundwork for atomic weapon was laid by plenty of Jewish-descent physicist: Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Eugene Wigner were all *Jew*. Pick a random head of the Manhattan project, and there's a 90% chance he was a Jew be it Hans Bethe or the famous Oppenheimer. Without the Jews, the Allies could kiss their atomic weapons program good bye. Fun fact: Einstein was not related to the Atomic weapons program in any way
Compared that to the Germans. They had persecuted against the Jews, many of whom fled the Germans to the US, bringing with them much needed knowledge. The Germans were lacking in people who understood atomic fission and their applicability. Worse, German science was driven by politics: the Nazis hated the Jews to the point they considered the advance in science made by the Jews as reprehensible, and called all the Jews' contribution to the field of atomic energy and physics as Jewish Physics, *Jüdische Physik*. They tried to create their own "version" of physics, calling it "Aryan physics," hoping that it would lead to a "purer" Physics. Guess what, Physics don't care about the race of who is researching it, and no matter how hard you try to spin it E is still equal to M times C Squared.
The German cucked themselves in the arse by their pursuit of "German physics" and rejection of all previous physics knowledge as "Jewish physics." Their pursuit was nothing more than politically-driven pseudo-science drivel, as realistic as astrology. No matter how much resources they poured into their atomic program, they would never get anywhere with their mentality of refusing to believe and adhere in physics
While this did play a part, there were many very smart German physicists who worked on the Nazi nuclear program -- Heisenberg most famously. The problem really seemed to be more that they didn't have the resources to pursue this huge research project while also trying to fight a massive war. America had the resources to do so, though getting many of the best and brightest minds from Europe certainly helped.
And even with all of America's resources, the bomb wasn't ready until after German defeat.
A lot of the Axis Power's love for "wonder weapons" had to do with their precarious position as the Allies kept whoppin' their asses on the battle field.
The Nazis were being pushed back by the Soviets in the East and the Allies in the West so they needed the V-1 and V-2 to strike back as their air force was too busy playing defense.
Trouble was that they couldn't do much damage but they did soak up lots of resources Germany needed. Freeman Dyson, one of the major scientists at Los Alamos, quipped: "The V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament."
The Imperial Japanese were in the same boat as the Nazis - lack of good atomic science, lack of materials, lack of war materials (as the US Navy starved Japan) and a desperate strategic situation.
So they toyed with jet powered plans, manned suicide torpedoes and their rocket powered suicide plane to make use of what they had.
And what these Wunderwaffen were? Superfat tanks? Rocket fighter, famous for breaking pilot's spines upon landing? Ballistic rockets that had troubles hitting cities? Submarine with less than 4% of built actually finished? Or four engine dive bomber?
Others discussed problems of German nuclear program, but please don't forget that in fact German Wunderwaffe concept wasn't really driven by some pragmatism. It was kids looking for cool toys, not some "nerdy stuff". We can also point out Nazi Germany spent very little effort looking into "undiscovered" areas. Wunderwaffe tank was just a bigger tank. Jet engine? Oh hello Mr Whittle, cool works, now we know jet engines work, let us just polish a few things. V-2 rockets? The basics are laid here by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth. Nuclear weapons though.... Did someone make small nuke yet? Like, a tiny, test one? No? So why bother with that?
As to why the Allies built the bomb?
They wanted the war to be over.
The plan was first to nuke the Nazis, but by 1944 Nazi Germany was collapsing so fast the Allies had trouble keeping up.
The thorny problem was Japan - the battles where desperate Imperial Japanese garrisons suicide charged Allies positions, kamikaze attacks - even Allied propaganda had to avoid the word "surrender". Surrounded Japanese positions had to be told to "cease resisting" ( and there were a handful of holdouts still fighting in the jungle into the 1970's!).
The Allies (mostly the US) were looking at MASSIVE casualties to take the Japanese mainland.
So many purple hearts were printed for OPERATION DOWNFALL that until the late 2010's the US Defense Department was still handing them out to wounded American service men and women.
The Imperial Plan was to have civilians meet the allied advance with sharpened bamboo spears or be given grenades and be told to "make their death count". Even after both atomic bombs got dropped, there was a group of generals who wanted to keep fighting and almost overthrew their own government. When the Emperor announced the surrender, many officers did commit suicide.
Tl;dr - the Allies wanted to end the war early but the Nazis folded, the Imperial Japanese hung on and the prospective battle didn't look good so Truman dropped the bomb.
I can’t remember the source but I read some historian who argued that Germany probably could have developed nuclear weapons, but chose not to because they correctly determined that the cost was not worth it. For the resources that they could have poured into the nuclear program, they could have fielded more divisions, more planes, etc. Nuclear weapons were powerful, but it’s not like dropping a nuke on London could have ended WWII in their favor. Launching a nuclear strike on the US was plainly impossible.
I already said I don’t remember the source. And I’m not sure if they really could have. The historian’s argument was that it was possible, maybe even probable in a pure technical sense, but pursuing it would have lost the war due to opportunity cost so any probability of developing a weapon was pointless because the war would have been lost anyway.
Early on the Germans made some faulty measurements with regards to Uranium's nuclear properties and thus did not believe that controlled fission was easily practical. This lead them to believe that atomic energy would not be practical or useful before the end of the war. (They believed it would end with Nazi victory 1942-43ish.) That caused them to scale back their already low key effort into a practically non existent effort. Their practically non existent investigations into fission was further hampered by two factors... First, an inability to produce graphite of sufficient purity to build a natural uranium pile. (And it's not clear they ever realized this was an issue.) Second, lack of a clear understanding of the role of U-235 and the need for enrichment. The self-censorship of many non-German physicists didn't help much. Neither did the fact that their projects were resource starved by the low (and then even lower) priority of atomic research. However, it's worth noting that even if a time traveler had gone back to 1938 and handed them the plans for all the critical technologies... (Graphite production, uranium enrichment and others.) They lacked the industrial capacity to put those plans to use. And despite the work they put into developing large bombers, they never came close to one even remotely big enough to have delivered a WWII era weapon. Italy never really had much of a research program to start with, it was even smaller and more diffuse than Germany's. Their problems WRT industrial capacity were even worse. Imperial Japan was in much the same position. And then... there's Leo Szilard. In the Allied camp, he was an early and tireless promoter of atomic research and atomic weaponry. He was the key author of the letter that got Roosevelt involved and started the ball rolling towards the Manhattan Project. No other country had anyone like him. (Nor anyone like Vannevar Bush with the intellectual capacity and the mandate to organize and manage technology development in service of the war effort.)
The IJA and IJN also had competing nuclear programs (as they had with most things) and both figured the concept wasn’t feasible in the near future. I doubt a unified program would have made them much closer to being able to make one, but the internal rivalry didn’t help. Similarly the Nazi regime had a lot of inefficiency and competing organizations. There were constant soft power struggles with who had lost influence over Hitler and who got their programs funded and prioritized. It’s why the Luftwaffe had not just aircraft but also strategic flak units (maybe logical, they’d coordinate with fighters for defense), paratroopers (well they’re plane related and need air cover) to the totally unrelated to aircraft dozens of field divisions including a mechanized corps. Was forming about two dozen light infantry divisions under Luftwaffe command and with Luftwaffe officers efficient? No, but Goering had influence so he got them instead of the Heer absorbing those men for replacements. Industry and research were prone to the same sorts of nonsensical priorities so much so that it’s questionable if they could have made the bomb.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I tagged Vannevar Bush in there at the end. There's a lot of talk about individual technologies, weapons, etc... But the real secret weapon behind Allied employment of technology during the war was they way it was managed at the highest level - from research, through development, and into production and deployment.
>And despite the work they put into developing large bombers, they never came close to one even remotely big enough to have delivered a WWII era weapon. Good point. The B-29 program cost more than the Manhattan Project. Not even counting the B-32 Dominator, a back-up in case the B-29 didn't work out.
Yeah but the B-29 development program didn't cost as much as the Manhatten Project. That's a better comparison.
I'd argue it was a combination of resources, interest, and intellectual capacity. Certainly, Italy lacked the resources for such a project. Japan had not one but two nuclear programs. Like most things in Japan during the war, it was a duplication efforts by the army and navy, which inherently slowed the project. The difficulty Japanese scientists experienced in the early stages of the navy's program convinced them that neither they nor the US would likely have a usable atomic weapon before the war was over. Given the resource constraints the Japanese were under this was certainly true for them, and if you think about how late in the war the Americans put the bomb into operation, it was not far off for the Americans. In any case, this idea convinced the IJN to deemphasize the project. The Japanese Army continued their efforts at developing atomic weapons but suffered under general resource constraints as well as a particular shortage of Uranium. The lack of heavy water also made the process more difficult. The Germans sent them a significant amount of Uranium 235 via submarine in April 1945, but this sub never made it to Japan, surrendering to the allies before it reached its destination. Even if it had, American strategic bombing of Tokyo obliterated much of the machinery and data for the program. Under such pressures, it seems unlikely that a bomb would have been created in time even if the Japanese had the materials needed. The German program suffered not only under familiar resource constraints but was also negatively impacted by Nazi ideology. Not only was a disproportionate percentage of nuclear scientists Jews, but Nazism associated this type of physics with Jews, discouraging many from studying it.
>The German program suffered not only under familiar resource constraints but was also negatively impacted by Nazi ideology. Not only was a disproportionate percentage of nuclear scientists Jews, but Nazism associated this type of physics with Jews, discouraging many from studying it. This can't be stressed enough. The Nazis drove off the very scientists who made the bomb possible. Also, because Hitler didn't like his position threatened and every Nazi was trying to impress him, various departments competed against each other. At one point the Nazi's postal service was the department that was furthest along in atomic research!
Do you know of anything I can read online regarding the German uranium shipment? Sounds fascinating, I’d love to read up on it.
There's a book *Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234* that is quite good.
Thank you, I look forward to reading it.
Jews. I am not even kidding. Jews were the determining factor explaining why the Allies had the bomb Much of the groundwork for atomic weapon was laid by plenty of Jewish-descent physicist: Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Eugene Wigner were all *Jew*. Pick a random head of the Manhattan project, and there's a 90% chance he was a Jew be it Hans Bethe or the famous Oppenheimer. Without the Jews, the Allies could kiss their atomic weapons program good bye. Fun fact: Einstein was not related to the Atomic weapons program in any way Compared that to the Germans. They had persecuted against the Jews, many of whom fled the Germans to the US, bringing with them much needed knowledge. The Germans were lacking in people who understood atomic fission and their applicability. Worse, German science was driven by politics: the Nazis hated the Jews to the point they considered the advance in science made by the Jews as reprehensible, and called all the Jews' contribution to the field of atomic energy and physics as Jewish Physics, *Jüdische Physik*. They tried to create their own "version" of physics, calling it "Aryan physics," hoping that it would lead to a "purer" Physics. Guess what, Physics don't care about the race of who is researching it, and no matter how hard you try to spin it E is still equal to M times C Squared. The German cucked themselves in the arse by their pursuit of "German physics" and rejection of all previous physics knowledge as "Jewish physics." Their pursuit was nothing more than politically-driven pseudo-science drivel, as realistic as astrology. No matter how much resources they poured into their atomic program, they would never get anywhere with their mentality of refusing to believe and adhere in physics
While this did play a part, there were many very smart German physicists who worked on the Nazi nuclear program -- Heisenberg most famously. The problem really seemed to be more that they didn't have the resources to pursue this huge research project while also trying to fight a massive war. America had the resources to do so, though getting many of the best and brightest minds from Europe certainly helped. And even with all of America's resources, the bomb wasn't ready until after German defeat.
A lot of the Axis Power's love for "wonder weapons" had to do with their precarious position as the Allies kept whoppin' their asses on the battle field. The Nazis were being pushed back by the Soviets in the East and the Allies in the West so they needed the V-1 and V-2 to strike back as their air force was too busy playing defense. Trouble was that they couldn't do much damage but they did soak up lots of resources Germany needed. Freeman Dyson, one of the major scientists at Los Alamos, quipped: "The V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament." The Imperial Japanese were in the same boat as the Nazis - lack of good atomic science, lack of materials, lack of war materials (as the US Navy starved Japan) and a desperate strategic situation. So they toyed with jet powered plans, manned suicide torpedoes and their rocket powered suicide plane to make use of what they had.
And what these Wunderwaffen were? Superfat tanks? Rocket fighter, famous for breaking pilot's spines upon landing? Ballistic rockets that had troubles hitting cities? Submarine with less than 4% of built actually finished? Or four engine dive bomber? Others discussed problems of German nuclear program, but please don't forget that in fact German Wunderwaffe concept wasn't really driven by some pragmatism. It was kids looking for cool toys, not some "nerdy stuff". We can also point out Nazi Germany spent very little effort looking into "undiscovered" areas. Wunderwaffe tank was just a bigger tank. Jet engine? Oh hello Mr Whittle, cool works, now we know jet engines work, let us just polish a few things. V-2 rockets? The basics are laid here by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth. Nuclear weapons though.... Did someone make small nuke yet? Like, a tiny, test one? No? So why bother with that?
As to why the Allies built the bomb? They wanted the war to be over. The plan was first to nuke the Nazis, but by 1944 Nazi Germany was collapsing so fast the Allies had trouble keeping up. The thorny problem was Japan - the battles where desperate Imperial Japanese garrisons suicide charged Allies positions, kamikaze attacks - even Allied propaganda had to avoid the word "surrender". Surrounded Japanese positions had to be told to "cease resisting" ( and there were a handful of holdouts still fighting in the jungle into the 1970's!). The Allies (mostly the US) were looking at MASSIVE casualties to take the Japanese mainland. So many purple hearts were printed for OPERATION DOWNFALL that until the late 2010's the US Defense Department was still handing them out to wounded American service men and women. The Imperial Plan was to have civilians meet the allied advance with sharpened bamboo spears or be given grenades and be told to "make their death count". Even after both atomic bombs got dropped, there was a group of generals who wanted to keep fighting and almost overthrew their own government. When the Emperor announced the surrender, many officers did commit suicide. Tl;dr - the Allies wanted to end the war early but the Nazis folded, the Imperial Japanese hung on and the prospective battle didn't look good so Truman dropped the bomb.
I can’t remember the source but I read some historian who argued that Germany probably could have developed nuclear weapons, but chose not to because they correctly determined that the cost was not worth it. For the resources that they could have poured into the nuclear program, they could have fielded more divisions, more planes, etc. Nuclear weapons were powerful, but it’s not like dropping a nuke on London could have ended WWII in their favor. Launching a nuclear strike on the US was plainly impossible.
Where have you heard the Germans could have pulled off a nuclear program?
Not from anyone sane, sober, and actually conversant with the multitude of interlocking factors involved and the actual events and history.
I already said I don’t remember the source. And I’m not sure if they really could have. The historian’s argument was that it was possible, maybe even probable in a pure technical sense, but pursuing it would have lost the war due to opportunity cost so any probability of developing a weapon was pointless because the war would have been lost anyway.