Abstract
In the 75 years since the end of World War II there is still no agreement on the answer to the question of why the presumed race between the USA and Nazi-Germany to build the atomic bomb did not take place. New insights and answers are derived from a detailed analysis of the most important document on the subject, the official report of a German army ordnance dated February 1942. This authoritative document has so far not been adequately analyzed. It has been overlooked, particularly that the goal of the Uranium Project was the demonstration of a self-sustaining chain reaction as a precondition for any future work on power reactors and an atomic bomb. This paper explores why Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues did not meet this goal and what prevented a bomb development program. Further evidence is derived from the research reports of the Uranium Project and from the Farm Hall transcripts. Additional conclusions can be drawn from the omission of experiments, which could have been possible and would have been mandatory if the atomic bomb would have been the aim of the program. Special consideration is given to the role of Heisenberg in the Uranium Project.
Highlights
Additional conclusions can be drawn from the omission of experiments, which could have been possible and would have been mandatory if the atomic bomb would have been the aim of the program
Special consideration is given to the role of Heisenberg in the Uranium Project
After the war did the company confirm that it would not have been a problem [56]. All these strange facts cast doubt on the seriousness of Heisenberg’s and Diebner’s decision in favor of heavy water unless one assumes that both, and perhaps Bothe, had used again an opportunity to avoid an early breakthrough of the Uranium Project
Summary
Its failure makes it one of the few harmless chapters of the disastrous moral legacy of the Nazi-regime. The Allied victors, having to justify the development of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wanted to find out why the presumed race against the German scientists had not occurred. This part of history became a domain of American and British historians. Mark Walker has dominated the thinking about the Uranium Project His conclusion is that the German physicists did not hesitate “to work on weapons of mass destruction for the Third Reich” [4].
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