Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.
Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.
The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.
Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.
Maybe if Germans had not wasted their engineering efforts on idiotic “superweapons” like the Schwerer Gustav [0] or the 130m long V-3 cannon [1], they could have succeeded with their nuclear program.
Well, it's supporting your argument, as I perceived it. Germany unnecessarily suppressed groups for reasons not related to maintaining its authoritarianism. During the First World War the German army had Jews like Fritz Haber. In the Second they didn't. I don't see China doing the same. If Germany is used as a model for what we can expect from China, then the values we would get have to be adjusted upwards to compensate for China not wasting its human resources* the way Germany did.
>(By the way, the death toll of Mao’s cultural revolution clocks in around 50 million.)
The 1970s wants its news back. China isn't doing that sort of thing anymore.
*There's of course a lot more to the Holocaust than "wasting human resources". Please read this in good faith.
Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.
Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.
The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.
Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.