New evidence shows this uranium cube is likely relic of Nazi A-bomb program | Hacker News Reader

New evidence shows this uranium cube is likely relic of Nazi A-bomb program

arstechnica.com

62 pointsTomte39 comments

> The Germans had a two-year head-start, but according to Koeth, "fierce competition over finite resources, bitter interpersonal rivalries, and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction.

I wonder who'd win nowadays if the superpowers were to race for Super Weapon v2.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-by-c... i would expect it to be correlated with military spending

I would presume the ideal super weapon would be a lethal airborne virus that only you had the vaccination for. It would decimate your enemy but leave all their infrastructure intact.

It wouldn't be too expensive to achieve. You would just need to find an existing virus and conduct gain of function research to make it more transmissible and more lethal.

Most of the countries that could develop and deploy such a bioweapon would need the labour as much as the infrastructure.

Pretty to think so--- supposing their AI/ML research was so limited that the were not planning automated manufacturing facilities.

Ideal if you could get most of your population to actually take the vaccine…

That can backfire pretty quickly, though. Viruses evolve, no vaccine is 100% effective, etc...

Well I hope we don’t soon find out. The current arms race is in hypersonic missile tech.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/slowing-hypersonic-arms-rac...

Boon recommendation:

The making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes.

An extremely interesting book that starts at a time when electrons were known but atoms were a disputed concept. It traces the development of nuclear physics by following the people, the close relationships within the nuclear science community and every incremental discovery and realization and insight that led to understanding nuclear fission, chain reaction and ultimately the two bombs that would end WW2.

Despite the title of the book, the focus is really on the story of how we came to understand nuclear physics. The bombs happen to be an unavoidable part of this story - so the book is forced to eventually turn to project Manhattan and all that follows.

Also the excellent John McPhee book, "The Curve of Binding Energy," centered on Dr. Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb."

i'll see your book and raise you one, "turing's cathedral" covers the origins of computers from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to Princeton and Los Alamos, leading up to the ENIAC and how von Nuemann used it to simulate the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, how the shockwaves would reflect off the interior of the shell to reach the pressure to kick off fusion. the narratives of people and machines are well balanced for an entertaining read.

Imagine being the first scientist who realized what might be about to happen

The opening hook in the book happens to be Leo Szilard realizing that a nuclear chain reaction is possible while crossing a street :-)

It then goes back in time to Rutherford.

Fantastic book. The way it explains the history of nuclear science is better than anything else I've read.

The "sequel", "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", is also great, though there's a bit less science innit; much of it is about what happened to Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project.

As a companion book, "American Prometheus", by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, is a superb biograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Kind of wild that Werner Heisenberg was the principal scientist of Hitler's nuclear weapon development program during the war and then pretty much immediately after the war transitioned into a a civilian role, becoming the director of the Max Planck institute.

Also, from his wikipedia article:

From 24 January to 4 February 1944, Heisenberg travelled to occupied Copenhagen, after the German army confiscated Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics. He made a short return trip in April. In December, Heisenberg lectured in neutral Switzerland. The United States Office of Strategic Services sent agent Moe Berg to attend the lecture carrying a pistol, with orders to shoot Heisenberg if his lecture indicated that Germany was close to completing an atomic bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

Why the Germans did use 664 instead of 666 uranium cubes is beyond me...

666 is number of the beast. I wonder how many thiest scientists would have refused to work on it if they were to use 666

I don't think Germans are as superstitious as Americans. You won't find a single building "missing" the 13th floor in Germany.

The nazis were crazy into the occult. I don’t doubt all sorts of wacko stuff went down because of that.

Hollywood Nazis are crazy into the occult.

You can read a more sober look into the matter here: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-nazis-as-occult-masters-its-a-good...

Pauwels and Bergier 1959 book Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des Magiciens) goes into detail on much of that part of Nazi charm.

Sample: [http://koreshan.mwweb.org/virtual_exhibit/vex3/ac-0130.pdf]

I don’t think that is quite accurate - the majority of the German people identified as Christian, and while Himmler did want to replace the church he was forbidden by Hitler because Hitler did not want to risk alienating the Christian populace during the war.

Alternate ideas that were popular at the time were Nazism as a state religion (which is what they depicted in Man In The High Castle), and “Positive Christianity” which basically removed the Old Testament, gave Jesus an Aryan lineage, and might have included Hitler as a sort of saint or contemporary savior.

But that said - the occult stuff has made for some of my favorite movies and video games. If not for the Nazis, Indiana Jones would have ended up battling gangsters and mad scientists with army of zombie Africans and its not the same movie at all.

(If anyone knows the name of that 50s adventure series with the mad scientist that used a machine to turn Africans into his zombie army, I can’t remember to save my life.)

This was then - everyone was far more religious in the first part of the 20th century than today! You can't take current German sensibilities as representative of that time.

This was the same regime that shunned "Jewish science".

Is this the same Germany that just a few centuries before killed more than 10,000 “witches”?

Probably 664 is what they had available, or what their calculated geometry called for. It seems silly to speculate that they could have or should have gone for 666 but deliberately chose not to. If that were the case, why not 665 or 667? Is there any reason to think 666 would have been a more appropriate number?

Having seen photographs of the “diabolical chandelier” I expected 664 to be a centred cubic number, but it isn’t. That leaves me somewhat perplexed as to how they actually arranged the geometry of the fissile material.

They didn’t want anybody else writing their plans, which ultimately couldn’t be executed by anybody.

I'm curious why the Germans spent so much effort building a complex prototype nuclear reactor, which isn't of much use in a war, versus focusing on a nuclear bomb exclusively, which is of use in the war. Did they simply not have the right type of fissile material for a bomb? Or was a reactor needed to better understand the physics involved?

They were going at it completely wrong, partially due to the whole Deutsche Physik movement.

OTOH Heisenberg, particularly, was hated by the “Deutsche Physik” agitators and had certainly reason to strongly dislike them; cp. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#SS_investiga...>.

German Scientist didn't believe that a nuclear bomb could be completed in time to make a difference in the war. They estimated that America would complete their bomb first, only after 1944 and that if Germany hadn't won the war by 1944, victory would be impossible.

And they were right, America didn't complete their bomb until 1945, and by that point it was too late to make any impact in the outcome of the war (other than forcing Japan to surrender).

So they decided to focus resources elsewhere. The amount of resources spent on the German Nuclear reactor program was actually quite small.

In addition to Phireʼs comment: “HEISENBERG: I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine but I never thought that we would make a bomb and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.” (Transcript of Surreptitiously Taped Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall. August 6-7, 1945. <http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf>)

You can buy a cube of depleted uranium on Amazon. For a cube 2.54" cube it's priced at $4500 and can't be exported outside the States. Extraordinary what one can buy in the States!

There is a great part in “Now it can be told”[0] which discusses the counter intelligence efforts of the Manhattan Project - specifically when trying to figure out how far along Nazi development was. The upshot is: approximately nowhere, IIRC the test reactors never fully worked.

However, in the process of finding out how much progress was made, they talked to multiple French nuclear scientists in newly liberated Paris. One of the scientists figured out that the US had working atomic weapons. This guy then managed to play this card to such effect (eg by suggesting that he may talk to the Soviets) that he was able to extract a lot of concessions from the US.

Now we have a nuclear armed France which IIRC was rapidly accelerated by tech transfer negotiated as a result. Pretty wild.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/170428.Now_It_Can_Be_Tol...

I don't get it, what bomb program? The Haigerloch machine is obviously a power reactor, similar to the more modern CANDU line.

One of those cubes would look great next to my W cube.

of course they coated the cubes in cyanide

Had no idea about this until recently, but for 4chan. "Saturn Cube" and Esoteric Nazi beliefs is an entire rabbit hole you can go down into. Cube with magical powers is a world wide belief, and most people aren't even aware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com