[andygrovetheman]

On a mostly-unrelated note:

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.

[tzahola]

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.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon

[a1369209993]

There's something hilariously ironic about that, given the next couple of decades.

[erikpukinskis]

Given what?

[a1369209993]

The Cold War and how nukes turned out to be a much greater superweapon than anything the Germans built.

[blattimwind]

> Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.

The tl;dr is: mostly they didn't want to build it. Then funding was cut, because the project went on too slow.