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points by raldi 7 hours ago | 0 comments
Clickbait antidote: The cubes revealed only that the uranium was a bit less dense than textbook values because of tiny internal voids.

That measurement fed a computer model, but if I'm reading the article right, most of the work was actually based on wartime records on heavy water and graphite. Anyway, the model showed they would have needed twice the uranium and heavy water they actually had.

[–] hunterpayne 4 hours ago
It should be noted that they didn't have the supplies for the design they tried. There were designs that could have worked with what they had. And its unlikely that during the war anyone knew exactly which designs the Germans tried and even less chance that someone would have known if a specific novel design would have worked. Its an interesting detail but largely irrelevant.

Its also suspected Heisenberg didn't want the design to work (its the given reason why he wasn't killed by Berg). But it was still a reasonable possibility during the war that the Germans could have made it work.

[–] Crunchified 7 hours ago
IIRC, US Colonel Hogan got Luftwaffe Colonel Klink to drink a bunch of that heavy water as a cure for baldness as a truckful of it transited through Stalag 13.

Phew, that underground mission was more important than I thought!