Far fetched is being kind. The book has been torn apart by historians and (especially) physicists as utter drivel.
Sigh, you take a quiet weekend away and this happens....
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German Nuclear Program (Bomb/Reactor)
Sigh, you take a quiet weekend away and this happens....
David Flin
Gone Fishin'
Oh, as a former editor of Nuclear Engineering International, I found it one of the funniest things I've read on this site.
altamiro
Banned
You might be mixing up overall uranium content in an ore and U-235 content in natural uranium. The latter is 0,7% everywhere in the world, including Canada. The former obviously varies and there are some rocks in Canada with 5-8% uranium indeed. The enrichment level refers to the U-235 content.
Normally the enrichment for civilian light water reactors is somewhere around 3-5%, but there are designs able to work with natural uranium such as the CANDU, or the first iteration of the Soviet RBMK (of the Chernobyl fame).
Now the fact is that designing a reactor that can generate heat in a controlled manner is MUCH easier than designing a nuclear bomb. What if the Nazi scientists (starting early enough) got this insight as well? It might allow shorter deadlines and therefore tangible impact on the outcome of the war which in turn would get them way more political support and manpower. Most likely it would be STILL not fast enough but Allies finding a Type XXI equivalent sub under construction with an experimental reactor inside after surrender is signed is still a more plausible outcome than a bomb.
David Flin
Gone Fishin'
It's obviously hard to tell, given that we have got the benefit of hindsight, but the difference between generating heat in a controlled manner and generating it in a manner that will create an atomic bomb is, in the words of an expert of my acquaintance; "Bleeding obvious."
Mainly a question to sate my own curiosity and potentially have the Nazis waste more resources on an essentially useless super weapon, but couldn’t they have created nuclear artillery? Make the bomb, stick it in a modified Gustav gun, and fire it somewhere in range. It’s no B-29, but as far as I’m aware it should theoretically work as a delivery platform.
Garrison
Donor
Highly doubtful. Firing a gun type weapon could result in a detonation. an implosion bomb would probably be wrecked and a dirty bomb might launch but given the prevailing winds I wouldn't want to be manning that gun.
You'd need vacuum-tube era electronics that can withstand 900 gee acceleration (V-2 was only 5 gee)
That’s a thought, the Nazis nuking themselves on accident.
Unfortunate, the other post gave me hope that the Nazis would literally have the gun blow up in their face.
Garrison
Donor
Well cheer up, its the Nazi's so they might build some 'foolproof' launch system and blow themselves up anyway. There is no complex problem Nazi engineers couldn't look at and figure out a way to make it even more complicated and possibly lethal.
By lethal, should I presume you mean lethal to their users and bystanders rather than the enemy?
Kamikaze Zeppelin is probably their best bet for a delivery system, except that they've already scrapped and recycled them.
If that's all they find they aren't lookin g very hard.
marathag
Banned
It would take time and testing, to shrink it to even Gustav size bore, and then get Gustav moved to where it could make a difference without being destroyed by air attack
The easy answer is no.
Slightly more detailed is that the early nuclear weapons where far too heavy (roughly 10,000 pounds) for anything except the 80 cm Schwere Gustav "Dora"railroad gun. That weapon too five weeks to prepare to fire once reaching its destination and required a crew of 4,000. Bound to draw some attention., especially from a thousand or so B-17/24/25/29/32 and or Lancaster/Mosquitoes along with at least that many P-38/47/51 and/or Spitfires/Tempest/Typhoons. It also had a max range of 47 kilometers (29 miles).
The other factor is WHY early bombs were so damned heavy, wiring. While less an issue with Little Boy, where most of the weight was high explosive, Fat Man, and all early implosion weapons, were loaded with heavy copper wiring, capacitors and TUBES (no transistors existed at the time) Every bit of the eletronics had to work perfectly down to the millisecond (the effort taken to ensure that every length of wire discharged at the same millisecond itself was incredible) and tubes of the day simply would not have survived the firing sequence (I have profound doubts about the Little Boy design maintaining the breathtakingly precise alignment necessary to induce the fission reaction after being fired out of an artillery piece)
marathag
Banned
US solved that for VT fuzes.
You also need a battery. That seems to have been harder than the tubes
The Mk-I (aka Little Boy) would, in theory, fight without needing be miniaturized. The weapon had an external diameter of 71 cm, which would have allowed for the addition of a different casing that could include driving bands to engage the barrel's rifling.
Magic words: The U.S. (or WAllies) did a lot of things, despite being pathetic cretins compared to the mighty genetically superior Aryan supermen of the Reich.
It's a gun-type weapon, won't firing it out of a giant cannon at 900 gees cause the hemispheres to assemble?
Very possibly. Be a rather bad day for the gun crew.