Posted on 06/08/2015 2:17:41 PM PDT by StormPrepper
While it has been suggested that Werner Heisenberg was foot dragging or even possibly deliberately sabotaging their research, I don't think going in the direction of a heavy water reactor is an example of this.
That contraption would have worked. It would have worked as well as Femi's graphite reactor anyway.
More importantly it would have given them good research answers that they would need to either breed Plutonium, or build Isotope separators.
The big secret at the time was that chain reaction fission was even possible.
Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki and that was a plutonium implosion device of the same design as that tested at Trinity. Little Boy was the first one used in combat, a gun-type device using highly enriched uranium. It had not been tested prior to its use other than some criticality tests and gun tests using non-nuclear material. There never was a full-scale test of the Little Boy design. It was tested in combat.
No ... Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima. And yes, it was very much UNtested. OTOH, the uranium gun design is pretty darn foolproof (as nukes go)
Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki, and was somewhat similar to the Trinity device. Both were plutonium implosion devices. The implosion design is a bit more difficult, as the entire chemical explosive jacket must detonate simultaneously all the way around the plutonium pit.
It may have been reported, but Japan was nowhere close to making a bomb. Germany was somewhat closer, but abandoned the program in 1942, when Hitler decided to throw all his resources at the USSR. However, our intelligence still thought a German bomb (but never a Japanese bomb) was a likelihood and had assassination teams out as late as 1944 to kill Werner Heisenberg.
And while I believe it was the bomb that forced the Japanese surrender, they were also pressured by the fact that the USSR was entering the war.
They were both fission bombs. One was a Uranium gun bomb ( A Uranium projectile fired down an actual cannon barrel into a Uranium receptacle.) The other was an Implosion plutonium device. A much more complex weapon. Trinity was a plutonium implosion bomb too. They never tested the Uranium gun bomb, they just knew it would work, but the implosion device was a lot tougher to guarantee because of it's complexity. That's why they did the Trinity test.
That is not what the biographer of Werner Heisenberg says. Rather, he says they just didn’t know, and that Heisenberg didn’t begin to have the resources he needed to test the heavy water anyway.
Agree. Rhodes is a good scholar. There’s a pretty new bio of Heisenberg out too, called “Heisenberg’s War” that confirms what you said.
Excellent book. Highly recommended.
Amen. I plugged it myself. The sequel is almost as good.
That design was tested at trinity. It was the plutonium implosion design.
I agree it is an excellent book.
The deep background in nuclear physics, back into the 19th century, gives immense insight into why things played out the way they did.
And of course, we had to spend massive amounts of money just to get two bombs. Neither Japan nor Germany had the money or resources to do that.
I disagree that Hirohito “doubted” that a bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Dr. Nishina was sent by train immediately to report back and he said it was an atomic bomb. But it wasn’t Hirohito who needed to be convinced. It was the warlords. They weren’t convinced after two bombs, when he overruled them.
I can’t remember the book I read on it. It mentioned the “reacter” that we did find. It was a joke. And even it did work there was no understanding of the radaiation safty aspects. They would have been dead if it did work. I don’t think they were that stupid by accident.
In the book the atom bomb (as they called it then) was meant for Germany. But since Germany collapsed so fast the powers that be opted then for Japan. Groves said that if we hadn't produced anything after spending all that money and resources they would wind up in jail.
Since you've read the book, I'm just posting this for those that hadn't and maybe would like to buy it. I'm not sure if the local library has it. My dad bought it way back in th 80's when it first came out. It's been read so many times in our family the covers are about to fall off.
The resource listings in the back of the book leads to other great books on the subject. It seems that the anti-bomb detractors hadn't bothered to read or research anything. They just throw out bogus information.
Allegedly the Japanese atomic program was operating out of an area in what is now North Korea, to hide it from the B-29 raids.
There’s a book, Japan’s Secret War by Robert Wilcox that goes into the evidence. Wilcox is a believer, I’m not, but his work is interesting. Particularly his documentation of how the Red Army made a beeline to that location after the USSR’s entry into the war, where they dismantled whatever was there and hauled it back to Western Russia. Just like they did with all those German factories.
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