Heisenberg's uncertainty finally resolved

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sat Feb 9 19:12:52 PST 2002



>I suspect that it was the lack of resources combined with
>Heisenberg's failings as a project leader that doomed the
>German a-bomb project.
>

THis is almoset certainly true. After the war, the physicist Samuel Goudschmidt did a postmortem on the Nazi bomb project, and concluded that it was hopeless underfunded. Basically, Hitler never believed in it and didn't put his money where his mouth was. Building a bomb was a big effort. The Mnahattan Project essentially created what we think of as Big Government and the MIC. The Russians took another four years with infinite resources and excellent espionage (from Klaus Fuchs, not Julius Rosenberg, who gave them nothing of value), and the fundamental bit of information, namely that it could be done. See David Holloway's excellent Stalin and the Bomb. jks

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