The Germans had the delivery system of the future, but not the warhead.
People tend to overlook the fact that there were two types of atomic bombs; Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239. The Uranium 235 was obtained by the painstaking process to isotope separation, and for that we had to build the gigantic K-55 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge. We also took the entire government silver bullion supply (most of which came from the silver mined at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City Nevada) and made gigantic electromagnets for another separation technique.
Plutonium, in theory, was far easier to get. You make a pile of pure graphite blocks and pass slugs of U238 through it. The U238 “burns” in the pile, and a portion of the U238 transmutes into Pu239, which can then be chemically separated. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Except that Pu239 is one of the most toxic materials known to man. But hey, it’s Plutonium.
Given the limited resources available to Germany, they were never going to make Uranium bombs. They weren’t going to make a gaseous diffusion plant on the scale of Oak Ridge, and they didn’t have the Comstock Lode. But you only need a couple “burners” to make enough Plutonium. The real problem with a Plutonium bomb is getting it to go off. Critical mass is easy to achieve with U235, and we never seriously doubted the Uranium bomb would work. Even with the huge industrial apparatus at work in Uranium isotope separation, it took months to get enough U235 to make a bomb. Testing the Uranium bomb would have used up all of the available Uranium 235.
But for Plutonium bombs we had to make the concave prism of exactly timed and fired high explosive to compress the Plutonium to get a reaction, and even then we needed a Polonium 210 “trigger” to get an initial burst of neutrons to fire it off. That what Los Alamos was created for; the Plutonium was manufactured in Hanford Washington but the detonation work was all done at Los Alamos.
And that was the part that the Germans might have had trouble with, and the Soviets didn’t thanks to Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. So when Truman was told we had a working atomic bomb in July when he was at Potsdam, he was only told about the Plutonium device. The Uranium device was yet to be tested. On the Japanese.
Getting back to the two bomb discourse, it was the second bomb that freaked out the Japanese. Their scientists had been doing nuclear research, and had done some limited experiments in gaseous diffusion with Uranium Hexaflouride. So when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, their scientists knew within 24 hours that we had built a Uranium bomb. But they told the government that, given what it would take to get enough Uranium 235 to build one, that was probably all we had.
Then came the second bomb three days later. And their tests showed that bomb used Plutonium. At that point, they were stunned. My God, they built both kinds. And they’ll have more. There is nothing they cannot do, and our weapons are useless against them.
No wonder their culture gave the world Godzilla.
No wonder their culture gave the world Godzilla.
It is a pretty obvious metaphor, isn't it? The monster we can't destroy that was set loose in a nuclear explosion over the Eastern horizon across the ocean.
The thing that has always bothered me about the Godzilla story is the Japanese are absolutely innocent victims of the monster - just like they act like innocent victims of the bombs, ignoring the fact that their own actions resulted in the U.S. armed forces being on their doorstep armed with nuclear weapons.