Rendered at 12:13:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
kjander79 18 hours ago [-]
This is an awesome read, and likely correct in the narrative, but the cubes they have at hand to study have a bit of a provenance problem - how do we know they were the ones used for the German research?
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.
monocasa 17 hours ago [-]
We have very good tracking of these kinds of things, just based on the material properties of the samples.
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.
pseudohadamard 1 hours ago [-]
What the story completely omits to mention is that the entire field was seen as "Jewish science" and therefore verboten for any kind of real funding or support. It never had a chance from the get-go.
Just goes to show what happens when a world-leading science power lets political superstition overrule the science.
Lumich 15 hours ago [-]
« likely correct in the narrative » — What if it is built on flawed premises?
I was keyed up for my first view of an atom-bombed city, prepared
for the radically new sights suggested by the exciting descriptions
I had read and heard. But to my utter astonishment, Hiroshima
from the air looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities I
had observed!
Alexander de Seversky, Air Power: Key to Survival, 1950
That's the second puzzling comment you've posted on this subject. Are you suggesting atom bombs don't exist?
18 hours ago [-]
WalterBright 18 hours ago [-]
It's generally forgotten that Japan was also developing a nuclear bomb. They were a long ways from making a viable one, though. It was abandoned after the surrender.
fusslo 18 hours ago [-]
I cant remember which, but a documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki said that after the first bomb, Japanese scientists were deployed to confirm or deny the US's claim of an atomic weapon.
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
I'm curious. We know that there's a lot of energy in the atom. Some of it can be released by fission, which results in fission products, radiation, and heat.
However, there doesn't seem to be anything in the process that would account for any sort of explosion. Radiation doesn't contribute. Heat alone is insufficient. In addition, you need an instant and manyfold increase in the volume of matter generated on the other side of the reaction. With TNT, for example, this increase is three orders of magnitude. Fission products are completely insignificant in this respect.
So nothing comparable exists for nuclear fission, else it would be a problem for reactors. So how can it explode? What is the mechanism?
womble2 3 hours ago [-]
Heat alone is not insufficient, the heat generated is so intense that is turns the surrounding air into a plasma which then absorbs the x-rays emitted creating a stupendous over-pressure in the air which drives the shockwave.
Reactors don't explode because the amount of heat then generate is carefully monitored and matched the the rate at which that heat can be pulled from the reactor and converted into work.
Lumich 30 minutes ago [-]
Thanks. This is a novel explanation to me. So to rephrase, some volume of air (~1,2 kg/m³ at sea level) is “plasmarized” and then eats the X-rays, upon which it expands in a shockwave.
It is usually stated, however, that the X-rays go first, and at the speed of light. Plasmarization, OTOH, would be subject to some inertia, however little, wouldn't it. So there'd be a delay before plasma formation, and the X-rays would already be “over the horizon” (joke – they wouldn't follow Earth's curvature, would they).
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
The leaders knew immediately that it was an atomic bomb.
Books:
Code-Name Downfall by Allen
Downfall by Frank
The surrender was due to their fear that the US had a third bomb and would drop it on Tokyo.
defrost 5 hours ago [-]
They rebuilt Tokyo that fast already ?
The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history. Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.
Perhaps that "third bomb on Tokyo" fear was a bit made up and ahistoric.
7speter 16 hours ago [-]
All the people dying from side effects of radiation wasn’t enough proof that an atomic weapon was used?
AngryData 16 hours ago [-]
Well the effects of radiation were still poorly understood, but also there wasn't that much radioactive material left over in any concentration. And the gamma ray blast would appear superficially like normal burns from being near a firebomb until atleast a few days later.
Contrary to Fallout lore, most nuclear bombs dont leave much concentrated radioactive material unless it was done on purpose. You either need a shittier and smaller explosion with the same material, or you need a ground burst which reduces the effective blast area.
The US was on ground zero in under 2 weeks in Japan and couldn't detect anything over the background in radioactive isotopes.
Lumich 2 hours ago [-]
« And the gamma ray blast would appear superficially like normal burns from being near a firebomb until atleast a few days later. »
Would it? How so?
First, the notion of “normal burns from being near a firebomb” is inadequate. There are various types of firebombs. The ones “generously” employed by Uncle Sam against the Japanese (primarily civilians, and later idem against the Koreans and the Vietnamese) are napalm bombs. The way they work is that burning napalm is blasted about in lumps and sticks to anything it hits, including clothes and human skin. The injuries caused by napalm lumps are special. They're called keloids.
Figure 9.3 on page 171 of Palmer's book (free PDF available, link in 49938615, which is among the comments on this topic) shows keloid burns in Hiroshima bombing victims. These have been interpreted as “flash burns”. However, this defies common sense. First, they show characteristically strong locality, irregular shapes, sharply defined edges, and look exactly like napalm burns. Second, how would you explain a hypothetical “flash” (of whatever nature) from a distance more than a couple inches away to produce such conspicuously localized injuries? (And even from ten inches away you'd need strong directionality.) The forensics flatly contradict and preclude such a “flash” interpretation.
Palmer, who is an MD, found that not much can be found about napalm in the medical literature, which curiously contrasts with its very wide-spread application against humans by the U.S. Air Force (p.140, referred to on p.175 and p.241):
As of this writing (in 2019), a simple search for “napalm” on
PubMed retrieves 29 articles, of which only 7 (seven) are written
in English, and none of these provides much useful detail.
colechristensen 18 hours ago [-]
Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for his work on strong-force related physics in the 1930s.
>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.
buildsjets 17 hours ago [-]
Do you have a reliable source you can share which supports that claim? Because el wiki says nothing of the sort. It discusses two main projects, "Ni-Go" and "F-Go", neither of which successfully enriched fissile material. One was built but did not operate successfully, the other was not built.
> Today, Japan is considered to be a latent or threshold nuclear state, capable of developing weapons in a short timespan. It is unique among non-nuclear weapons states in that it possesses a full nuclear fuel cycle and plutonium stockpile, as part of its civilian nuclear energy industry, and advanced developments in the industries necessary to make nuclear weapons.
mmmBacon 16 hours ago [-]
While your comment is true today. It doesn’t support the GP’s claim that Japan was near a nuclear weapon at the end of WW2 and only lacked the will to do so.
OJFord 16 hours ago [-]
That was not the claim. They said 'is on the order of months away', not 'was'.
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical. To generate the enriched uranium requires a lot of time and an enormous investment of money. Consider Iran has been doing that for years and years.
Lumich 14 hours ago [-]
« For them it is not geopolitically useful to actually finish a weapon »
Why, they could take their revenge, couldn't they.
This whole thing is stories built upon stories built upon stories. It's stories all the way down till you reach The World Set Free by British propaganda writer H.G. Wells, published in 1913–14 as part of the British war propaganda preparations against Germany. I don't recommend the book, it's psychologically dull and constructed, but that's where Leo Szilárd picked up the idea of an “atomic superbomb” in 1932 when reading the novel, which led to the Einstein letter in 1939. Well, according to the story anyway.
13 hours ago [-]
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
A more reliable account is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.
Lumich 5 hours ago [-]
He certainly had the benefit of hindsight. I haven't read it yet.
Meanwhile, here's an interesting 1979 “oral history” testimony by general Crawford Sams, medical expert and administrator, who was very close to the application of the “final product”, as it was his job to shape the narrative in a certain way, as part of which he established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission:
I mentioned deterrents against war. There was a letter
brought over by this first group that came up to Japan from
the Philippines with me, from the Manhattan Project, in
which the President was looking for a new deterrent against
a future war, because air power had failed. […] So the
object of this instruction, called *Letter of Instruction*,
was “You will play up the devastating effect of the atomic
bomb.” All right? So I was the one who set the deadline this
time. Anybody who had been in Hiroshima and died within six
months, whether they got run over by a bicycle or whatnot,
would be credited to the atomic bomb.
Destruction took time (as elsewhere):
We built up the evidence to show on a cookie-cutter basis
that it took about thirty-six hours for about two-thirds of
that town to burn.
Didn't happen in an instant:
You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]:
a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing
happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent. They’re
talking about after that, “One bomb and away goes Chicago,”
you know?
More here, with links to source (WUSTL, the transcript is much better than the audio, which is really low quality):
This was already known. The British put the German scientists into a big country house after the war and bugged all the rooms. After the US dropped the atomic bombs the German scientists spent weeks discussing with eachother how the Americans could have done it. They never got it right.
> HAHN [discovered nuclear fission] was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.
> HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
> VON WEIZSÄCKER again expressed horror at the use of the weapon and HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the “most devilish thing imaginable”.
> WEIZSÄCKER: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in GERMANY under the HITLER regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.
Fascinating. You definitely must post it, I'd enjoy reading a discussion about this, as would others in this thread.
throwaway219450 18 hours ago [-]
Is this the same mansion that the war office put a bunch of high ranking PoWs in? Same idea - butter up the generals, bug the entire building and wait for them to spill secrets (which they did so often, and with such value, that military intelligence ignored Churchill’s request to shut it down).
> 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.
17 hours ago [-]
yalok 19 hours ago [-]
Amazing. Kind of reminds of the modern day discourse on potential dangers of AGI and humans misuse of it.
Robotbeat 18 hours ago [-]
Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.
aaroninsf 17 hours ago [-]
That would be a false similarity in some important ways.
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.
NDlurker 19 hours ago [-]
That was incredibly interesting. Thank you for sharing.
tempestn 18 hours ago [-]
You should submit that as a post, if you haven't already. Fascinating read.
OG_BME 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this!
fierycatnet 18 hours ago [-]
Nice gem
smallmancontrov 19 hours ago [-]
Heisenberg used a bad approximation that led him to incorrectly believe he would need tons of U235 to produce a bomb. His model for bomb viability was essentially "a random neutron walk should not leave the core until producing enough generations to explode." In reality, you don't need that much U235 because earlier generations have exponentially more descendants and they are closer to the core -- the later generations can leak neutrons out of the core like a sieve and the exponential party deep in the core won't even notice, effortlessly replacing them by cooking a tiny fraction of a generation longer.
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.
nostrademons 11 hours ago [-]
It looks like Heisenberg wasn't wrong about the chemistry, only about the economics and willingness of Americans to throw massive amounts of resources at a project:
> HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their ₤500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.
In reality, the Manhattan project cost about $2B, roughly ₤500,000,000 at the exchange rate of the time. And 85% of it went into building the huge isotope-separation plants in Oak Ridge and Hanford. Heisenberg's estimate was just about on the mark; he just didn't understand that America was willing to spend ₤400M building huge factories to do the necessary uranium separation.
> WIRTZ: We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand.
In reality, America put 600,000 people to work on it. The Germans were incredulous because they could never get political buy-in for the massive scale mobilization needed to build the bomb. America was willing to spend more and employ more people.
ianburrell 19 hours ago [-]
Another problem is that Germans went for heavy water reactors and didn't even get as far as prototypes. Americans built graphite moderated reactors and quickly built plutonium production reactors at Hanford. Also, Allies were able to prevent Germans getting heavy water from Norway.
antonvs 18 hours ago [-]
> Jewish Science gave a decisive advantage.
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.
RajT88 18 hours ago [-]
The word "algebra" comes from Arabic al-jabr - so it's Muslim math to them I guess would be the talking point?
With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.
xhkkffbf 14 hours ago [-]
It was invented before Islam began. I believe the creator was Persian.
RajT88 10 hours ago [-]
I took a spin through wikipedia - the roots go well back into pre-Christianity.
It's pointless to try and make this point with fans of Mr. Carlson. They don't want to know.
belviewreview 13 hours ago [-]
Fake math? Does he know that all the electric circuits in the equipment that is used to broadcast his program are designed using algebra?
throwawayffffas 17 hours ago [-]
Wait until Tucker hears about imaginary numbers.
ludicrousdispla 3 hours ago [-]
maybe he'd just consider it a hyperbolic statement
sandworm101 19 hours ago [-]
>> Jewish Science
Jewish Scientists.
smallmancontrov 19 hours ago [-]
I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.
ahartmetz 19 hours ago [-]
Some part of the German physics community even did "German physics" which did not include quantum physics and relativity.
gloryjulio 18 hours ago [-]
Agree with that. There were also 'Soviet Science'.
eli_gottlieb 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!
atq2119 18 hours ago [-]
I'm okay with that if it helped prevent Nazi Germany from building an atom bomb...
darubedarob 19 hours ago [-]
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darubedarob 19 hours ago [-]
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gib444 18 hours ago [-]
I'm trying to reconcile such wildly clever people not wondering if they were being surveiled? Or didn't they care?
smallmancontrov 18 hours ago [-]
This was after Germany surrendered.
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.
db48x 16 hours ago [-]
And they mostly hated the Nazis and were glad to be rid of them. Plus secercy obviously no longer mattered now that a bomb had actually been used. Nothing they had to say could materially advance an enemy’s nuclear program.
xhkkffbf 14 hours ago [-]
Perhaps they suspected and they deliberately said things that they knew their new overlords would want to hear?
18 hours ago [-]
sandworm101 18 hours ago [-]
The science is only half of the question. Another substantial issue was, even with equal knowledge to the US, did German and/or Japan have the industrial capacity to create a nuclear weapon?
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.
philipkglass 18 hours ago [-]
The Manhattan Project was so very expensive because they pursued plutonium production and uranium enrichment simultaneously. They also developed three uranium enrichment methods in parallel. Two of these actually contributed to the Hiroshima bomb. The uranium enrichment projects were much more expensive than the plutonium project. Britain and France built their first atomic bombs much more economically by pursuing the plutonium path alone.
throwawayffffas 18 hours ago [-]
No that's the entire point of the article even if they had the physics down, they did not have enough uranium in the whole of Germany for a working reactor let alone a uranium fission bomb.
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.
13 hours ago [-]
wolvoleo 10 hours ago [-]
They could have mined enough. They controlled the czech republic which provided a lot of the Soviet's nuclear materials.
comeonbro 18 hours ago [-]
This reply was initially the common folk story:
It's not comparing like with like, but the V-weapons programs probably cost about as much as the Manhattan Project.
But looking further into it, that claim holds up badly enough to completely drop it pending significant further research.
delichon 18 hours ago [-]
The Manhattan Project employed around 130,000 people compared to something like 17,000 on the V-2 project (plus 60,000 concentration camp prisoners). Cost comparisons are in the neighborhood of $1.9B for the A bombs versus $800M for the V-2.
delichon 18 hours ago [-]
Germany did put U-boats off of the US East Coast. It would probably be a one way trip to put one off of the Brooklyn docks. If they had two and used the first to clear a path for the second, it could have worked.
sandworm101 18 hours ago [-]
Yes but that would be wildly inefficient. A nuke on the ground ("lay-down" delivery) is already maybe 40% as powerful as one in the air. Put it under even a few feet of water and that becomes only 20% as most of the energy goes sideways/down through water/dirt rather than directly at the target buildings. Water is shockingly dense at scale.
torginus 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure, water is very good at conducting shockwaves. If you had an aquarium the size of an olympic swimming pool you could kill all of them by dropping a hand grenade in it.
Teever 17 hours ago [-]
Inefficient compared to a B-29 dropping a bomb over a city but not inefficient compared to whatever other means (if any) Germany had of attacking an east cost city like New York.
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.
gopher_space 18 hours ago [-]
The thought experiments around Mutually Assured Destruction back in the day showed us that you don't actually need a delivery system to participate.
sitkack 16 hours ago [-]
A big enough bomb and it can be fixed in place.
simonh 18 hours ago [-]
If North Korea can manage it, I think with a bit of commitment it should be doable.
Danox 18 hours ago [-]
Germany’s racism/ethnic/religious hate killed their efforts for the bomb..
unrented7977 17 hours ago [-]
As much as I'm sure that gives you the warm fuzzies to think about, it's utter nonsense. That's not how this works.
lambdaone 17 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely how it worked for the Manhattan Project.
slashdev 16 hours ago [-]
How so?
w0de0 14 hours ago [-]
Oppenheimer, as well as many other Manhattan Project researchers (eg Rabi & Weisskopf), were first or second generation German-Jewish immigrants/refugees. Max Bonn, Oppenheimer’s mentor, was also a refugee in the end; Oppenheimer was born to immigrants in the US but studied under Bonn in Germany prewar.
Moreover, the physical foundation for atomic power was largely the work of German, often German-Jewish, scientists.
So it’s plausible to suppose a counter-factual in which Germany, one less crippled by bigotry (and it is a disability…), develops the bomb.
And it’s not just the bigotry: it’s the anti-intellectualism. Einstein could write a letter to a well-educated patrician of the New York Dutch aristocracy (FDR), and so help change the world. The pig farmer and the corporal would never have read such a letter (even if were they not already trying to murder the writer and all his cousins for nonsense reasons).
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
Hitler explicitly called particle and nuclear physics "Jew science" and disregarded it. For a man who adored mythical wonder weapons that did not pencil out at all, he did not put effort into building nuclear bombs.
Add to that, most of the physicists at that point in history were very unhappy with Fascism in general, and fled Italy or Germany when they could.
Many of those who came and helped the US build it's bomb did so reluctantly. Only really Teller seemed genuinely excited about big nuclear bombs. Everyone else wanted anyone but the Nazis to get it.
However, it's important to note that it's very unlikely anyone else had the resources to actually devote to their equivalent of the Manhattan project, so even though pretty much every state at the time had a nuclear bomb program of some sort, the vast majority were more exploratory than production focused.
KetoManx64 16 hours ago [-]
> Germany’s racism/ethnic/religious hate killed their efforts for the bomb..
Interesting fact: Ghislane Maxwell's (yes the Epstein one) father was involved in the publishing of all the history textbooks that are taught in public schools.
killingtime74 16 hours ago [-]
Where? in America or in Germany? it's kind of ambiguous what you're saying.
rurban 17 hours ago [-]
What they didn't mention is that German had the worlds largest Uranium reserves those times, even larger than the famous Belgian-Kongo mines. They didn't knew it then. But the Nazis promised the miners to close the unhealthy mines, the avg. age of a miner was 45. They didn't, but later the Russians used this German and Czech uranium to produce their nuclear arsenal. What Germany missed was to enrich the uranium. Siemens could have done it, but Speer/Heisenberg probably missed that opportunity.
Lumich 1 hours ago [-]
« later the Russians used this German and Czech uranium to produce their nuclear arsenal. What Germany missed was to enrich the uranium. »
Which would be all the more curious, if true, as we were probably on the right track, i.e. judging by the 1950s Soviet development of GUZ enrichment (Gas-Ultra-Zentrifugen), “with a little help from their German friends”, such as Gernot Zippe and Manfred von Ardenne, while “the West” was far behind in this domain.
Zippe kehrte 1957 nach Österreich zurück. Als er 1957 in
Amsterdam eine Konferenz zur Zentrifugen-Forschung besuchte,
stellte er fest, dass die Forschung im Westen weit zurücklag.
The Soviets had the first nuclear power station (Obninsk, 1954 – атом мирный, “peaceful atom”), whereas the USA was focussed on “exterminating enemies”.
During the Manhattan Project, Usanians didn't get centrifugation to work properly, and their other enrichment processes were inefficient. Curious, curious.
LightBug1 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bigyabai 19 hours ago [-]
Today's analysts would be quick to point out that Nazi Germany's progress was about 3 weeks away from getting the bomb.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
moritzwarhier 1 days ago [-]
the purpose of square-bracketed text in quotes is to mark editorializing
happytoexplain 19 hours ago [-]
That's why it's notable. If it were part of the original quote, it wouldn't be.
stackghost 19 hours ago [-]
I think the point is that in an article about Nazi Germany, editorializing "Hitler" to add "Adolf" is probably not required because almost every adult in the English-speaking world knows who Hitler was.
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
The more I learn about that fella, the less I like him.
1-more 18 hours ago [-]
You joke, but Destined to Witness is a really interesting memoir of German-Liberian Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi growing up in the rise of Nazi Germany as a young kid and then experiencing WWII as a civilian German teen. I ended up learning how the Nuremberg laws came down on kids at playgrounds, etc., something I'd never considered. Sure it pales in comparison to everything else, but it's always interesting to learn one more way the Nazis were just awful.
scun 1 days ago [-]
Coincidentally TIL about a Namibian politician who decided to drop the "Hitler" from his name. I only mention it because his first name is also Adolf
18 hours ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
joshblack1982 19 hours ago [-]
Not to be confused with Adolf Hitler's half-nephew Bill Hitler, who fought against Adolf Hitler.
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
but imagine if they did, wow, history would absolutely be completely different and they'd still be in power
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
Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
18 hours ago [-]
leptons 17 hours ago [-]
If the US did use a nuke in Iran, you can bet the very next day (or hour) that a nuke will fall on Ukraine.
AnimalMuppet 18 hours ago [-]
Why do you think that anyone here considers US use to be "no problem"?
tempestn 18 hours ago [-]
I read your parent to be saying the opposite. That more people would be upset if Putin were using weapons like these, but no one cares when the US does. (Speaking of the Lockheed PSM, not nukes.)
AnimalMuppet 17 hours ago [-]
>>> 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?
I think it's pretty clear that ck2 was talking about using nukes.
tempestn 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, obviously they were talking about nukes in the beginning of the comment, but not in the part you referenced before.
> we're out of other weapons except these which seems wildly illegal to use especially on civilians
> Imagine if Putin was using those on Ukraine civilians but US uses them no problem?
Emphasis mine.
brap 18 hours ago [-]
If you think US will drop a nuke on Iran you are delusional, borderline insane.
sitkack 16 hours ago [-]
Seeing as the pentagon has no issue with volunteering for extra judicial murder, it is not off the table. at all.
s1artibartfast 16 hours ago [-]
What odds would you give it?
ted_dunning 17 hours ago [-]
If you think that the US is the same US as ten years ago when that was an insane delusion, then you are the one smoking too much weed.
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.
db48x 16 hours ago [-]
The termination of USAID caused no casualties.
leptons 17 hours ago [-]
You also just described the person in charge of these weapons.
fluffybucktsnek 17 hours ago [-]
Are we doubting the levels of stupidity in US's current administration?
buildsjets 17 hours ago [-]
The President of the United States of America is delusional, and borderline insane.
brap 17 hours ago [-]
If you genuinely believe this nonsense you can probably make millions on Polymarket, go ahead.
saulapremium 5 hours ago [-]
The only thing predictable about him is his unpredictability so there is no money to be made there. That doesn't make GP wrong though.
bryanrasmussen 16 hours ago [-]
don't you make millions on Polymarket by setting a date? I personally don't doubt Trump might decide at some point that he wants to nuke someone, and then gets talked down, and then decides he wants to, and gets talked down, and then decides he wants to and then doesn't get talked down but might be kept from doing it if people are willing to stop him, but what date should I bet on this?
hmm, I just checked polymarket, evidently it's blocked in my area. I could go to the trouble of getting around the block, but I don't really care to make millions on Trump nuking Iran or any of the other stupid things I think Trump might do because probably millions aren't going to be worth that much at that point anyway.
But if you genuinely believe in the goodness of Donald Trump or the ability of the people around him to stand up to him, well you can probably also make some sort of money on Polymarket betting against the negative views that seem to somehow have arisen about him. Good luck.
antonvs 15 hours ago [-]
Which nonsense are you referring to? There are plenty of examples of the current US president being delusional. In fact you can even apply the DSM definition of "delusional," not just the colloquial English one, and it fits well.
"Borderline insane" is trickier. Severely cognitively challenged would be closer to the mark.
antonvs 18 hours ago [-]
> wildly illegal to use
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?
cyberpunk 16 hours ago [-]
The US dropping the second bomb is one of the worst crimes in human history. As far as I know, there were no consequences for this.
So yes, the US used them, no problem.
s1artibartfast 16 hours ago [-]
What law did it break? Crime has a specific meaning different than "bad thing"
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.
Just goes to show what happens when a world-leading science power lets political superstition overrule the science.
quoted in:
Michael Palmer, Hiroshima revisited, 2020–23
https://mpalmer.heresy.is/webnotes/HR/
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!)
I'm curious. We know that there's a lot of energy in the atom. Some of it can be released by fission, which results in fission products, radiation, and heat.
However, there doesn't seem to be anything in the process that would account for any sort of explosion. Radiation doesn't contribute. Heat alone is insufficient. In addition, you need an instant and manyfold increase in the volume of matter generated on the other side of the reaction. With TNT, for example, this increase is three orders of magnitude. Fission products are completely insignificant in this respect.
So nothing comparable exists for nuclear fission, else it would be a problem for reactors. So how can it explode? What is the mechanism?
Reactors don't explode because the amount of heat then generate is carefully monitored and matched the the rate at which that heat can be pulled from the reactor and converted into work.
It is usually stated, however, that the X-rays go first, and at the speed of light. Plasmarization, OTOH, would be subject to some inertia, however little, wouldn't it. So there'd be a delay before plasma formation, and the X-rays would already be “over the horizon” (joke – they wouldn't follow Earth's curvature, would they).
Books:
Code-Name Downfall by Allen
Downfall by Frank
The surrender was due to their fear that the US had a third bomb and would drop it on Tokyo.
Perhaps that "third bomb on Tokyo" fear was a bit made up and ahistoric.
Contrary to Fallout lore, most nuclear bombs dont leave much concentrated radioactive material unless it was done on purpose. You either need a shittier and smaller explosion with the same material, or you need a ground burst which reduces the effective blast area.
The US was on ground zero in under 2 weeks in Japan and couldn't detect anything over the background in radioactive isotopes.
Would it? How so?
First, the notion of “normal burns from being near a firebomb” is inadequate. There are various types of firebombs. The ones “generously” employed by Uncle Sam against the Japanese (primarily civilians, and later idem against the Koreans and the Vietnamese) are napalm bombs. The way they work is that burning napalm is blasted about in lumps and sticks to anything it hits, including clothes and human skin. The injuries caused by napalm lumps are special. They're called keloids.
Figure 9.3 on page 171 of Palmer's book (free PDF available, link in 49938615, which is among the comments on this topic) shows keloid burns in Hiroshima bombing victims. These have been interpreted as “flash burns”. However, this defies common sense. First, they show characteristically strong locality, irregular shapes, sharply defined edges, and look exactly like napalm burns. Second, how would you explain a hypothetical “flash” (of whatever nature) from a distance more than a couple inches away to produce such conspicuously localized injuries? (And even from ten inches away you'd need strong directionality.) The forensics flatly contradict and preclude such a “flash” interpretation.
Palmer, who is an MD, found that not much can be found about napalm in the medical literature, which curiously contrasts with its very wide-spread application against humans by the U.S. Air Force (p.140, referred to on p.175 and p.241):
>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...
Why, they could take their revenge, couldn't they.
This whole thing is stories built upon stories built upon stories. It's stories all the way down till you reach The World Set Free by British propaganda writer H.G. Wells, published in 1913–14 as part of the British war propaganda preparations against Germany. I don't recommend the book, it's psychologically dull and constructed, but that's where Leo Szilárd picked up the idea of an “atomic superbomb” in 1932 when reading the novel, which led to the Einstein letter in 1939. Well, according to the story anyway.
Meanwhile, here's an interesting 1979 “oral history” testimony by general Crawford Sams, medical expert and administrator, who was very close to the application of the “final product”, as it was his job to shape the narrative in a certain way, as part of which he established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission:
Destruction took time (as elsewhere): Didn't happen in an instant: More here, with links to source (WUSTL, the transcript is much better than the audio, which is really low quality):https://telegra.ph/Crawford-Sams-12-05
> HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
> VON WEIZSÄCKER again expressed horror at the use of the weapon and HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the “most devilish thing imaginable”.
> WEIZSÄCKER: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in GERMANY under the HITLER regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.
Fascinating. You definitely must post it, I'd enjoy reading a discussion about this, as would others in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
> HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their ₤500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.
In reality, the Manhattan project cost about $2B, roughly ₤500,000,000 at the exchange rate of the time. And 85% of it went into building the huge isotope-separation plants in Oak Ridge and Hanford. Heisenberg's estimate was just about on the mark; he just didn't understand that America was willing to spend ₤400M building huge factories to do the necessary uranium separation.
> WIRTZ: We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand.
In reality, America put 600,000 people to work on it. The Germans were incredulous because they could never get political buy-in for the massive scale mobilization needed to build the bomb. America was willing to spend more and employ more people.
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.
It's pointless to try and make this point with fans of Mr. Carlson. They don't want to know.
Jewish Scientists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moreover, the physical foundation for atomic power was largely the work of German, often German-Jewish, scientists.
So it’s plausible to suppose a counter-factual in which Germany, one less crippled by bigotry (and it is a disability…), develops the bomb.
And it’s not just the bigotry: it’s the anti-intellectualism. Einstein could write a letter to a well-educated patrician of the New York Dutch aristocracy (FDR), and so help change the world. The pig farmer and the corporal would never have read such a letter (even if were they not already trying to murder the writer and all his cousins for nonsense reasons).
Add to that, most of the physicists at that point in history were very unhappy with Fascism in general, and fled Italy or Germany when they could.
Many of those who came and helped the US build it's bomb did so reluctantly. Only really Teller seemed genuinely excited about big nuclear bombs. Everyone else wanted anyone but the Nazis to get it.
However, it's important to note that it's very unlikely anyone else had the resources to actually devote to their equivalent of the Manhattan project, so even though pretty much every state at the time had a nuclear bomb program of some sort, the vast majority were more exploratory than production focused.
Interesting fact: Ghislane Maxwell's (yes the Epstein one) father was involved in the publishing of all the history textbooks that are taught in public schools.
Which would be all the more curious, if true, as we were probably on the right track, i.e. judging by the 1950s Soviet development of GUZ enrichment (Gas-Ultra-Zentrifugen), “with a little help from their German friends”, such as Gernot Zippe and Manfred von Ardenne, while “the West” was far behind in this domain.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gernot_Zippe
The Soviets had the first nuclear power station (Obninsk, 1954 – атом мирный, “peaceful atom”), whereas the USA was focussed on “exterminating enemies”.During the Manhattan Project, Usanians didn't get centrifugation to work properly, and their other enrichment processes were inefficient. Curious, curious.
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.
> 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?
Emphasis mine.
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.
hmm, I just checked polymarket, evidently it's blocked in my area. I could go to the trouble of getting around the block, but I don't really care to make millions on Trump nuking Iran or any of the other stupid things I think Trump might do because probably millions aren't going to be worth that much at that point anyway.
But if you genuinely believe in the goodness of Donald Trump or the ability of the people around him to stand up to him, well you can probably also make some sort of money on Polymarket betting against the negative views that seem to somehow have arisen about him. Good luck.
"Borderline insane" is trickier. Severely cognitively challenged would be closer to the mark.
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.