What if the Germans take England And the B36 becomes operational

Discussions on alternate history, including events up to 20 years before today. Hosted by Terry Duncan.
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wm
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Re: What if the Germans take England And the B36 becomes operational

#76

Post by wm » 10 Nov 2019, 20:02

Takao wrote:
10 Nov 2019, 17:35
Then the British must have been even more technologically backwards the the Soviets...They didn't detonate their first bomb until '52.

The British didn't plan to detonate their bomb before 1952, and stuck to the plan.
Especially that they decided to create their own in 1947, and weren't in any hurry because Britain was an impoverished country. In the same year, British factories had to suspend production for want of coal.

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T. A. Gardner
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Re: What if the Germans take England And the B36 becomes operational

#77

Post by T. A. Gardner » 11 Nov 2019, 05:27

wm wrote:
08 Nov 2019, 23:51
T. A. Gardner wrote:
30 Oct 2019, 08:07
The Germans didn't do it at all. They never built a working nuclear weapon.
They never built it because they didn't intend to build it. The project was defunded. In 1943 the entire budget was about $60,000 (in today's money) - if I'm not mistaken.
More like they didn't build it because they really had little clue as to how to do it. The one reactor the Germans designed and built (that never ran), was likely going to be a massive failure. Without some knowledge of how to get a sustained nuclear reaction going, their program couldn't advance towards a bomb.

Some of the reactor's issues include:

The Uranium cubes used were not precisely machined and aligned. Instead, they were strung on 'necklaces' of stainless steel wire with a random geometry. This was going to cause the neutron flux produced to be uneven. So, they might get a reaction going in some parts of the strings, while little or nothing happens in other parts.

The control system on the reactor was to raise an lower the fuel out of it. There were no control rods. The first time the fuel is raised after running, it's going to kill everybody within as much as 100 meters of it from the radiation emitted.

As for a weapon: That requires highly enriched uranium. That in turn requires a massive program to do the enrichment. The Germans didn't have such a program beyond small laboratory samples.

The Nazi leadership took a dim view on things nuclear and on modern physics in general considering it a "Jewish" science. This resulted in Germany losing most of their best physicists before the war, in a very real sense crippling any future program in nuclear power or weapons.


Anthonycumia1776
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Re: What if the Germans take England And the B36 becomes operational

#78

Post by Anthonycumia1776 » 11 Nov 2019, 09:29

Takao wrote:
09 Nov 2019, 02:49
wm wrote:
08 Nov 2019, 23:46
Anthonycumia1776 wrote:
30 Oct 2019, 04:49
4 years AFTER getting the ENTIRE PLANS via spies, what does that say about the so called "brailance" of soviet scientists.
The Soviets were seriously handicapped by their technical backwardness, especially their measuring equipment wasn't up to the task (although Soviet scientists were brilliant).
You can't run fast if you don't have shoes, pants, and even briefs.
See Rockets and People by Boris Chertok, he writes extensively about it.
That's a cop out, the Soviets reverse engineered a B-29 in 2 years, and exploded their first atomic bomb years ahead of Western predictions.
Its easy to copy something, creating something requires far, far, faaaaaar more effort, time, resources, and skill.

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wm
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Re: What if the Germans take England And the B36 becomes operational

#79

Post by wm » 12 Nov 2019, 02:11

T. A. Gardner wrote:
11 Nov 2019, 05:27
More like they didn't build it because they really had little clue as to how to do it. The one reactor the Germans designed and built (that never ran), was likely going to be a massive failure.
As I've said the project was defunded and basically ceased to exist. It didn't get the funds required (as many other promising military projects) because it wouldn't be able to deliver results in a year.

The latter efforts were mostly academic studies designed to avoid military service.
That they weren't successful proves the project ceased to exist, not that they were too stupid to do it.

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