Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal
science.org
science.org
If I remember right, the Japanese scientists confirmed signs of an atomic explosion, but the leaders were stuck in a debate as to whether or not to accept the findings
Maybe someone better educated can correct me if I didn't get that history quite right
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Nishina#Atomic_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunsaku_Arakatsu (check out his academic advisor!)
>It was abandoned after the surrender.
Japan is strongly believed to be on the order of months away from assembling a nuclear weapon, and not just one, they have the materials for many. For them it is not geopolitically useful to actually finish a weapon, but they are more than capable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...
At any rate, getting a reactor running still was a long way from the industrial capacity the Americans used to get a working device. Industrial capacity Germany just didn't have late in the war. And after Afrika Korps' defeat, they weren't getting any easily accessible materials anymore.
To the point where we found some material in what purported to be fresh ore that had clearly been in a reactor at one point, but couldn't track down which particular reactor it matched. For a while there was a bit of a scare that some nation had a reactor unknown to international authorities that was selling its waste products on the open market.
Turns out there was just an ore deposit that had exactly the correct conditions to be a low grade (but completely natural) nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon.
Fun fact also: For all the effort put into the Manhattan project, MORE time/resources were spent on its eventual delivery system (the B-29) than the bomb itself. So even if Germany/Japan had a nuclear bomb, could they have also developed a practical delivery method, something capable enough to trust with such a weapon?
I had this discussion last week with someone who asked about whether Canada could build a bomb. Ya. Easy. Modern industrial capacities dwarf anything from the 1940s and Canada certainly has the brainpower and raw materials. But could Canada so easily develop a delivery platform, say an ICBM or stealth fighter? Likely not.
It's not comparing like with like, but the V-weapons programs probably cost about as much as the Manhattan Project.
Rest assured that if this alternate history scenario had occurred historians would not be talking about the inefficiency of the attack, they would be talking about the most devastating attack that Germany was able to conduct against Americans on their own soil during the war. It would have completely changed the American mindset and culture forever.
The delivery method was much closer in reach than the bomb, given their missile program if they had a concrete target they could probably easily build a scaled up version of a v1 or v2 to deliver the weapon.
This was a very specific single technical problem, requiring a silo from basic science to theoretical physics to advanced engineering, etc., with each layer having its own space of failure modes.
Something like the reverse is true with sufficiently-capable and sufficiently-efficient AI, which we are rapidly evolving to.
In our current situation, the attack surface is quite literally our entire highly interdependent civilization and its components. AI does not need to be autonomous, it just needs to employed, either will wilful bad intent, or, poorly stated goals, or, poor alignment, or, simple mistakes and errors, to break things.
The challenge with security is always that the attacker need only succeed once.
This does not mean doomerism has it right, especially in narratives based on poor understanding or extapolation beyond what is now konwn. The chance of "extinction" in particular is overstated.
The chance of one or more compounding "Chernobyl scale" gray swan events however is ever increasing.
Personally I don't think that's remotely contestable.
As a civilization and society and industry we need to have process, and public process at that, about the nature of the risks faced.
That process has not yet emerged in any coherent way; a hundred letters have been signed and such but to no actual effect, bar one performative "executive order" this week.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260811-the-uk-stately-...
The Beeb has run this a couple of times.
> Mrs Fry also says Winston Churchill was outraged when he learned the generals had been bussed into the lavish Simpson's-in-the-Strand in central London for lunch. He ordered what he called "the pampering of the generals" to be stopped.
> But spoiling the generals and boosting their egos was providing so much useful information that the British intelligence officers decided to carry on, and simply stopped telling Churchill about it.
It was Peierls and Frisch, two Jewish German scientists, who figured out those dynamics, modeled them with the Neutron Diffusion equation, and repeatedly prodded UK intelligence until they were taken seriously. Then the project got sent across the Atlantic for safety and scale-up and the rest is history.
Germany could have had the Atom Bomb in WWII, but Nazi Germany could not have because Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
Jewish Scientists.
It's interesting, and concerning, to see the exact same thinking in the US today.
The claim was that theoretical, mathematical models of physics, like special relativity, were a product of "Jewish thinking," designed to deliberately confuse the world.
There's a recent video in which Tucker Carlson interviews Jess Elofson and they mutually agree that algebra is nonsense, with Elofson calling it "fake math". They didn't go so far as to relate it to some ethnic source (from the part I watched), but "designed to deliberately confuse the world" is the big selling point. The people they hate are people smarter than them.
On the plus side, this is why these anti-intellectual movements always fail, because in the end they just can't get much useful done, other than attacking and destroying which doesn't require finesse or understanding.
Edit: I have to retract what I wrote about not relating it to an ethnic source. Elofson literally used the term "goy slaves" in that interview.
With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.
I'm sure they had suspicions and cared a bit, but in order to stay silent about their passion subjects they would have had to care more than a bit.
speaking of which, pretty sure he's turning Iran to sand after the elections, he'll have nothing left to lose and US is only country to ever use nuclear weapons on a million innocent civilians, twice, so why stop now?
we're out of other weapons except these which seems wildly illegal to use especially on civilians
* https://apnews.com/article/iran-lamerd-us-prsm-lockheed-mart...
Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
I think it's pretty clear that ck2 was talking about using nukes.
There's no law with any teeth at that level. Who's going to enforce it?
Of course the ICC might issue arrest warrants for US leaders, just as they have for Netanyahu, but the practical implication of that is mostly that ICC members will be subject to attacks of all kinds.
> Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
Since neither of those things are true, what do you think this unlikely thought experiment might tell us?
So yes, the US used them, no problem.
This administration has gone to very great lengths to tear down the safety walls.
The boats in the Caribbean demonstrate this well. Service members who object to targeting civilians without any due process are forced out.
The difference between that is only a matter of scale. And even that scale factor has been breached in terms of the number casualties from the termination of USAID.
It may be delusional right now to imagine service members following a nuclear attack order on Iran, but it isn't clear it will stay that way.