They were certainly vital to your space program. The US got the scientists & the Russians got what was left of their missiles.

No doubt, the Germans were WAY ahead of us in rocket technology. We were in the stone ages of rockets compared to the Germans.

Just like Japan could not build but a handful of ships during the war, the USA was building thousands. Same for aircraft production.

They were motivated.

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I think Oak Ridge had about 75k people at its height.

I drive past the Graphite Reactor every day. SmileWavy

Also, on topic, I read the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes years ago (very good book, BTW) and it gets into this subject. The community of scientists working in this field at the time was pretty close-knit (kind of like it is now in the neutron scattering world I work in) and once it started becoming clear that nuclear reactions could be used to release a lot of energy (bombs), some folks decided to get out of Germany (Leo Szilard comes to mind). It seems that the very people capable of developing nuclear weapons at the time had no desire to let Germany be the country to develop them.

It was used as a text book in my Nuke classes

Nothing to see here move along.

If Germany had a nuke Albert Speer would have been the one to know....and he didn't say anything about Germany having one. Btw Speer was the one Nazi bigwig who pleaded guilty at Nurnberg and was given 20 years which he served.

A very good read indeed - Rhodes next book on the subject "The Dark Sun" - The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb is also very interesting.
At the end of all this - the Nazis were a fair ways off from achieving nuclear explosives before the end of the war. This story really belongs in Geraldo Rivera's portfolio.

Cheers
JB

It's funny - I bought the book at a dollar store, and then was able to use it in college!

didn't use them
 

"If Hitler had nukes, or had them within his grasp, he would have expenses all resources to develop them and would have used them. The fact that he didn't proves that he didn't have them."

Interesting logic. Herr Schicklgruber had poison gas and didn't use that on enemy armies. Not that I'm defending the little goose-stepping *******.

BTW - college friend's father was in the German army. End of the war he and family relocated to Vermont. Asked my friend, why? He said that good Nazis went to Vermont and bad Nazis went to Brazil.

Here's a picture of a friend - 101st into Normandy on June 5th. Broke his ankle on touchdown. Tough titty, Mr. Kitty. Cries when he talks about killing two Germans face-to-face. 96 years old, looks like he could still put whoop-ass on just about anyone. Says this wasn't taken before drop but while in camp; a smiley picture to send home to your family if you died.




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My town Port Hope Ontario was producing all the uranium for the Manhattan project. Most of the uranium and tritium came from Canada.
They still produce tritium and reactor grade uranium at the same factory.

Glad I live far from town. ;)

They had no idea if it word really work and they did it with extra resources while building 140+ aircraft carriers, 33 million tons of shipping, thousands of naval vessels and 300,000 aircraft.

At the end of the European war, Germany loaded up a submarine with lower grade uranium and shipped it to Japan in hopes that they were further along and might be able to make use of it against the US.


Bummer for them the sumbeeches had to surrender.

Interesting thread. My wife's grandfather worked as a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge. My wife's mother grew up as a child in the Oak Ridge community.

This is timely as my wife has two items she had put in the car today to get restored. One is a certificate of appreciation for her grandfather regarding his work with the manhattan project.

The second is a picture of an early reactor itself (which I assume he took). Looks like fuel rods. I asked my wife- she said "The only person who knows that is dead."

He died before I met my wife, but some other family members had met him, and they were quite impressed- Just to share- and this may be previous thanksgiving libations talking- he claimed Anne's grandfather worked on/was assigned what was a miniature DIY nuclear reactor made to power a house. He claimed it was the size of a refrigerator, and went into great detail about it's construction and specifics. I need to go check with that person again ( himself a medical doctor with enough background in physics and such for basic understandings of the reactions- I consider him as "semi" credible witness :D), but, I think, Anne's grandfather even used it on occasion, however, as you can imagine, things never quite worked out. That would have been the ultimate "popular mechanics" project!

One thing is for certain though, Anne's grandfather died deathly afraid of radiation. After a career of what he did, he gained such a respect for it, and his overdoseage, that he refused all medical xrays. According to the family member, they really had no idea just how potent things were back then, and even being mindful, were being cavalier.

Sorry for the bad condition of the pics- but like I said- they were in the back of Anne's car to be professionally restored (today). The pic of the reactor is so old, it is a glued backing on the frame and I cannot get it out to re-align it. It is absolutely beautiful in person! http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1465259174.jpg
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the blue light is the reactor working
it is call cherenkov radiation
caused when the radiation hits the water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

That may be partly because Hitler himself was gassed in WWI in the trenches (was a corporal, I think).

He had a full moustache and some gas leaked past his gas mask at the edges of his moustache and he breathed some of it. Was ill for some time.

He immediately shaved off the ends of the moustache so it would not happen again.
That's why he had the small narrow moustache he's famous for.

WOW... That made my day! Thanks.

That picture above is from what was called the Low-Intensity Test Reactor. It was built around 1950 right in the middle of the Oak Ridge National Lab campus to check out different operational issues and to train operators. That picture appeared on the cover of the Scientific American magazine's October 1951 issue.

ORNL built and operated many reactors over the years (13 of them, I believe), including one designed to power an airplane. If you drive interstate 40 west of Knoxville in the winter time (no leaves on the trees) you can still see the giant towers they used to lift a reactor up in the air to measure radiation doses/shielding studies. Here's a picture of the reactor suspended in the air.. Crazy stuff back then:

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