Using the German genius Heisenberg's flawed math See
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p34.html
for an account by Hans Bethe. Apparently much of the Germans' problem was too much deference to authority.
Physics Today, August 1995, had an article on Heisenberg including material from the "Farm Hall" tapes. The article includes copies of slides Heisenberg prepared for the top Nazi leadership (Goebbels, Goering, Speer, inter alia.) It is clear that Heisenberg understood the physical principles required to make a nuclear bomb. He had personally recommended against it in 1942, on the grounds that it would take too long and cost too much.
Edward Teller relates the story of trying to recruit Neils Bohr for the Manhattan Project. Bohr said that building the bomb would be impractical, you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory. Bohr returned to Denmark and was there when the Nazis invaded. Heisenberg met with him in Copenhagen, and apparently tried to convince him to accept some sort of position in Germany. Although much has been made of this meeting, there was absolutely no serious German "Manhattan District Engineering Project".
Bohr escaped to Sweden and then on to the U.S., where he joined the Manhattan Project. When Teller finally ran into him in Los Alamos, he was all set for one of those "I told you so moments". The cagey Bohr turned the tables on him and immediately confronted Teller with, "I told you, you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory!", a testimony to the enormous scope of the Manhattan Project.
Although the Germans did not seriously pursue a fusion bomb, the threat of a German atomic weapon was the impetus for the Manhattan Project. It is said that the U.S. spent more money looking for a German atom bomb than the Germans spent on nuclear research during the War. (Roosevelt lied! Intelligence was flawed!)
After the war, top German nuclear physicists were interred in relative comfort in an estate in the English countryside called Farm Hall. Their conversations were secretly being recorded to see if they revealed anything of value about a German weapons program. Heisenberg's reaction on seeing newspaper reports of Hiroshima are telling. His first reaction was that it could not be true, he asserted that somebody just made a bomb with a lot of uranium in it and made a mess and killed a lot of people. (Heisenberg, father of the "dirty bomb".) As it began to sink in over time that the Americans (and the British with a lot of help from scientists driven out of Europe by the Nazis) had done what the Germans had not done, there began to form in the minds of the German scientific community what has come to be known as the "explanation" (I forget the German word.) It was more a rationalization of their failure than a truthful explanation. According to the "explanation", the German scientist could have made a bomb, but they did not want to help the Nazis (why in this single endeavor alone is unclear) and besides they were morally superior to those Americans and their English toadies. (Sound familiar?)
"According to the "explanation", the German scientist could have made a bomb, but they did not want to help the Nazis (why in this single endeavor alone is unclear) and besides they were morally superior to those Americans and their English toadies. (Sound familiar?)"
Europe has *always* attempted to claim moral superiority to the U.S. to explain away Europe's second-rate performance.
In the Great War, both the French and the Germans claimed that American soldiers couldn't fight. Yet after the first contact between green American marines and crack German veterans, the Germans fled from their forest screaming "Run! It's the Americans. The Americans are killing *everyone*!" German snipers of that time had been artfully trained to kill men dead at 300 yards, and every German platoon had such men. In contrast, *every* American Marine had been trained in marksmanship out to 900 yards. It was an unheard of difference in training at the time.
Besides inventing the airplane and the combat submarine that gained fame in that war, the American mathematician Zimmerman made a contribution that is still used to this very day: he proved mathematically what makes a cypher unbreakable or not. This 1917 work was more advanced than what *any* European nation was using in cryptology through 1945.
The Germans and Japanese were completely outclassed in computers and atomic weapons in the next war, too. German and Japanese computers used either mechanical wheels or magnetic contact relays. American and British computers used light-speed vacuum tubes. Americans had self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions as early as 1942, as well...a feat that fewer than a dozen nations have managed to this very day. German rocketry stole whole-heartedly from the American scientist Robert Goddard, and it was the British who invented the Jet engine.
Yet to this day the America-haters will claim that the Germans and Japanese were more advanced. The Axis scientists "could have" invented the atomic bomb, they'll lie to each other. Uh huh. This sort of pretend-superiority continually gets the Europeans into trouble. It likely will again, too.
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