The Germans often had the most modern weapons during the Second World War, such as the V1 and V2 rockets.
In addition to these missiles, they also had an advantage in the field of aircraft, they already had a first form of jet aircraft: Messerschmitt Me 262.
I suppose it was not due to a lack of knowledge but perhaps due to financial possibilities?
The United States was the first to create the atomic bomb and had a monopoly on this powerful weapon for more than 5 years. How come the United States has been able to monopolize this for so long?
Answer
There are several reasons why the Germans have not made the progress that the Americans could. I’ll mention a few here, but refer to the book ‘Hitler’s bomb’ by Karel Rainsch for more information, even though it is a controversial work.
One main reason was the distribution of money. There were a number of organizations involved in uranium research, all of whom wanted a share of the money. So there was no such thing as the Manhattan project, which the Germans had much more before missile development.
The main scientist in Germany who was involved in the development of the bomb was Werner Heisenberg. That was a theoretician who approached building a nuclear reactor, which is necessary as a production source for plutonium if you do not want to build large enrichment installations, in a much more theoretical way. For a long time he worked with a reactor model in layers, which is much more difficult to get critical than a model in a grid, as Fermi conceived it in the US.
The graphite the Germans wanted to use as a moderator was contaminated with boron, which absorbs neutrons, leading them to believe that graphite is not a good moderator because it removes too many neutrons from the nucleus.
The use of natural uranium for a reactor, without expensive and difficult enrichment, is only possible in a graphite or heavy water moderated reactor. Graphite was excluded, so only heavy water remained, which the Germans wanted to get from Norway. However, the supply of that product to Germany has always been very effectively sabotaged by the Allies and especially the Norwegian resistance fighters (‘The heroes of the Telemark’).
In the end, the Germans in Kaisersloch, at the end of the war, were quite close to building a critical reactor, but their efforts were halted by the liberation and more specifically the Alsos mission, which from America had been tasked to extract the leading German scientists from Germany. before the Russians got their hands on them. Also included was Von Braun and Heisenberg. Heisenberg seems to have been very surprised at the successful detonation of an A-bomb at Hiroshima, since he was now unconvinced that a practical bomb would not actually be possible.
Dr. Sven Van den Berghe, SCK•CEN
Answered by
SCK CEN Academy for Nuclear Science and Technology
Boeretang 200, 2400 Mol
http://www.sckcen.be
.