On Thursday, April 1, 2021 at 3:23:52 AM UTC-4, Keith Willshaw wrote:
> On 30/03/2021 16:40, a425couple wrote:
>
> > Richard Hardy, MSc. from University of Manchester (1977)
> > Answered March 25
> > I think that the Norwegian Heavy-Water pathway was a sideshow that
> > wasted many Norwegian civilians’ lives.
> >
> > Werner Heisenberg - Nobel prize winner and put in charge of building a
> > nuclear bomb for Germany - told Hitler that such a bomb would need a ton
> > weight of Uranium 235. The Actual amount was a pound weight/about 1/2Kg..
> >
> > After the war Heisenberg wrote a book saying that he deliberately made
> > the miscalculation - it was a schoolchild level mistake.But not every
> > nuclear scientist who knew him, believed him.
> >
> > Several Ironies: Hitler was sitting on huge deposits of Uranium in
> > Czechoslovakia;he had expelled most of his best nuclear scientists
> > because they were Jews, who went to America and actually succeeded in
> > building the bombs - but not in time to use on Germany;the Americans had
> > some, but not enough uranium.So had the Germans.At the end of the WW2
> > Hitler ordered a new larger and longer distance U boat to take German
> > high technology inventions to Japan.Admiral Doenitz succeeded Hitler and
> > ordered all German vessels on the high seas to surrender.On board the
> > special U boat were two Japanese scientists who then went to their bunks
> > to lie down and take Lethal pills. The German Captain saw a British
> > warship through his periscope, but hated the idea of surrendering to the
> > British. Then he saw a Canadian warship, so he surfaced and
> > surrendered.At the Canadian port (I think it was Halifax) the Canadians
> > were going through the U boat’s cargo when they found the German
> > uranium- which was more than the Americans had.
> >
> > When the German Uranium was added to the amount that the Americans had,
> > it was enough to build the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb
> > that was dropped on Nagasaki was a completely different type of Nuclear
> > bomb made from Plutonium.
> > 118 viewsView 1 upvote · Answer requested by Scott Webb
> >
> >
> > Philip Gardocki
> > Mon
> > Are you saying the Hiroshima bomb, was built using German Uranium? Is
> > there a source for this?
> >
> The Germans were not even close to getting a working reactor, in no
> small measure down to the crazy duplication of the project. Essentially
> 2 teams were selected to go ahead. The Germans had huge stockpiles of
> uranium but from the Belgian radium works but had failed to build a
> graphite moderated reactor as they used impure graphite that absorbed
> too many neutrons. They had just about enough heavy water for one
> working reactor but it was split between two rival groups. The
> Haigerloch reactor could never have gone critical which is just as well
> as the rudimentary control rods would likely have failed to maintain a
> safe state.
>
> Another group did try to produce U235 using the centrifuge system but it
> never produced more than a few grams of slightly enriched uranium. It
> took immense resources.
>
> Its just possible they could have built one uranium bomb eventually but
> far too late in the real world. The Red Army was on its way and boy were
> they pissed.

You're simply repeating the standard narrative that goes back to Samuel Goudsmit and Leslie Groves---but especially Goudsmit. Have you ever researched the primary sources that Goudsmit and the writers who followed him actually used, and which ones have become available since the 1995 declassifications at NARA and elsewhere?

You're wrong about the Haigerloch reactor. Heisenberg was quite confident that it would have worked if he had had more uranium cubes, and contemporary scholarship agrees with him.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/

You're wrong about German reactors in general. Manhattan Project foreign intelligence stated that at least one heavy water "pile" was in operation by mid-1944, along with at least one "Y project"---that is, an electromagnetic separator array broadly similar to the Manhattan Project's Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, TN. This is in addition to Kurt Diebner's German Army Ordnance pile near Gottow which was evidently ran for a few weeks. There is archival evidence for attempts to build other reactors, but the point that everyone misses is that WWII Germany was pursuing both accelerator driven systems and electronuclear breeding as alternatives to reactors. Numerous cyclotrons were built in Czechoslovakia, for example, probably at least dozens. There was also a second centrifuge project under the control of Army Ordnance and not the better known apparent pilot plant that was under the leadership of Paul Harteck.

I repeat: a great deal of long classified evidence concerning the WWII Axis nuclear weapons effort has surfaced since 1995 in the US, UK, Germany (though actually at least since the 70s in Germany's case), the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, The Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Japan, Bulgaria and Australia. How much of this evidence have you seen? Have you done any original archival research or have you just read a few books?