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Bruce Bawer on the 'Anti-Jihad' Meltdown

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Kosh's Shadow5/06/2009 3:11:42 pm PDT

re: #343 eon

Which left them with only Werner Heisenberg in the high-energy physics field, and drastically slowed their A-bomb project. Fortunately for us.

Most people today (especially those who like to refer to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs as “crimes”) seem totally unaware that both Germany and Japan were trying very hard to create workable fission weapons. In fact, I have a book (Volume VI of the 1946-47 Wise Pictorial History of the Second World War) showing a photo of Japanese cyclotrons being dumped in the Pacific from a U.S. Navy ship in late 1945. The Germans even considered using modified V-2s to airburst loads of radioactive dust over London.

We were just lucky that we got to the nuclear “finish line” first.

cheers

eon

Heisenberg miscalculated the amount of fissionable material needed to make a bomb. He thought it would take much more than it did, meaning the war would be over before the Nazis made enough.
Later he claimed that was deliberate, but I am reasonably sure that it was a mistake.