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points by mmooss 7 hours ago | 0 comments
Relatively recently, recordings were released of conversations between captured Nazi scientists held at a house in the UK (I think I saw it on HN). They were housed together and the house was bugged purposely to capture casual conversation for intelligence purposes.

IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.

Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?

Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?

[–] ZnerflBerp 6 hours ago
The sheer economic costs of the manhattan project were prohibitive to a nation like Germany, even if they'd managed to build a functional project team.

(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)

[–] fooker 5 hours ago
A nation like Germany on the cusp of losing a war sure. The opposite scenario of Germany controlling all the resources of Europe and Africa is a scary proposition.
[–] jcranmer 5 hours ago
> The opposite scenario of Germany controlling all the resources of Europe and Africa is a scary proposition.

It shouldn't be. In WW2, in 1942, Germany did essentially control all of Europe, save only the UK. And at the height of its power, Germany's vast industrial machine produced roughly on par with the UK. Not the entire British Empire, just UK.

It turns out that the Nazis were complete incompetent buffoons when it came to economic management. Their grand master plan for Europe was to overrun the east, not for some vast rich treasure trove of minerals to fuel an industrial juggernaut, but to plop down more homesteads to feed their inefficient agricultural economy. And even if the Nazis had a grand plan to become an industrial juggernaut, they still faced the prospect of the industrial juggernaut par excellence, the US.

[–] lazide 3 hours ago
The US at the start of WW2 was primarily an inefficient agrarian economy.

The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.

Germany started middling and ended destroyed.

[–] jcranmer 2 hours ago
No, that's categorically not true!

Germany required like 10 percentage points more of its labor force in agriculture in 1939 than the US did, and that still wasn't enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food; the US was of course one of the major food exporters in the world (in neither case were agriculture workers more than a third of the population, I should note). US agriculture also had largely mechanized in the 1910s, albeit many farms did switch back to draft animals during the 1920s and 1930s due to the collapse in agricultural prices, making animal feed grown on your own farm cheaper than buying fuel for the tractor. Europe agriculture largely didn't mechanize until the 1950s, after WW2.

[–] hunterpayne 1 hour ago
Complete nonsense. The US became the largest economy in 1870 (70 years before the start of the war). And in 1875 it became the 1st country to start using crude oil. Even in 1940, the US exported 75% of the worlds oil. Most of the main directions of advance by Germany and Japan were trying to get access to the 15% of the worlds oil they could get to (Romania, Baku and Indonesia). The US economy was 3x the size of Germany's (#2 by GDP) and was the majority of the world's industrial and manufacturing.

Let's try this another way, during WWII the US built warship tonnage equivalent to all the rest of the world's navies combined...in just 1943. Then the US did that again in 1944. At one point, the US hit a Japanese fleet with 17 fleet carriers at once. Keep in mind the Japanese only built 9 fleet carriers total and that was considered the most powerful fleet in the world at the beginning of the war.

[–] dboreham 5 hours ago
I don't believe the silver was strictly necessary. Copper windings would have worked for the calutron. Silver was used because copper was not as easily available at the time. But the point is valid. The project was originally British, moved to the US for economic reasons.
[–] throwaway81523 6 hours ago
The silver bus bars in the magnetic separators were kind of a stunt, if that's what you're thinking of.
[–] jcranmer 6 hours ago
> Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?

From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.

[–] kragen 6 hours ago
> one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible

This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).

When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.

(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)

Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).

[–] mmooss 2 hours ago
Not to take away from your comment, but to clarify: That's not the paranoia the Nazi scientists meant. They meant fear of the SS, being spied on, being stabbed in the back by a co-worker in a power struggle, fear for the families, etc.
[–] kragen 1 hour ago
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the paranoia was similar in the two cases. I appreciate the clarification.
[–] brians 5 hours ago
Or look at it the other way: having seen what assembled scientists can do, we separated them, gave them an Orwellian environment, and slept easy.

See Anathem for more on this.

[–] insom 3 hours ago
A double Stephenson comments section :)