User:NuclearSecrets/sandbox

Reasons for failure
Since 1945, there have been attempts to explain the failure of the wartime German atomic efforts to achieve its goals, with different parties, both internal and external to the project, placing blame differently. In some cases, this "failure" is cast as a failure to produce an atomic bomb (which was not one of the late wartime goals), and in others, to achieve a nuclear chain reaction.

Ideology
Samuel Goudsmit, the Dutch-American scientific head of the Alsos Project, published a book in 1947 which argued that the failure of the German program was the same as "the failure of German science." As historian David Cassidy summarized, Goudsmit's view was that this meant, "first, failure [of science] as a German institution to mount an effective opposition to Hitler, to prevent corruption of itself by Nazi ideology, and to prevent cooptation of its members by this regime at war; second, failure as science to make any significant progress on a research project into which five years of effort and resources (of varying amounts, to be sure) had been poured."

In particular, Goudsmit pointed to the Deutsche Physik movement, a push by anti-Semitic scientists to enroll the Nazis into abetting a ...(etc etc)

(Problems with G's argument)

Moderator choice and external sabotage
The Germany nuclear reactor designs used unenriched uranium, and thus required a suitable neutron moderator for operation. The Germans discounted graphite early on, because the neutron absorption coefficient value for carbon calculated by Walther Bothe was too high, probably due to the boron in the graphite pieces having high neutron absorption. In the Manhattan Project, purified graphite proved to be a very effective moderator, by comparison. Heisenberg and others later claimed that Bothe's "mistake" was a major cause of their failure, though historian Mark Walker labels this as an attempt to find a scapegoat, ....

Consequently, the German program went with heavy water as their moderator choice. This produced many difficulties, as acquiring suitable volumes of high-purity heavy water became a constant wartime difficulty. Heavy water was already under mass production at Norsk Hydro in Norway prior to the German invasion of Norway in April 1940.The Norwegian production facilities for heavy water were quickly secured (though some heavy water had already been removed) and improved by the Germans. The Allies and Norwegians had sabotaged Norwegian heavy water production and destroyed stocks of heavy water by 1943.

(Problem with sabotage argument)

Self-sabotage
(Heisenberg, Powers, etc)

Organizational incoherence
(Lack of organization, interest)

Technical error and incompetence
(Popp, Heisenberg at Farm Hall)

Non-failure?
(Did it really fail? Only if you think they were trying to make a bomb. If they weren't, then no.)