Uranverein pronunciation

German atomic bomb project
Leidenfeld germany ww2
Did germany have nuclear weapons in ww2

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The Historiography of “Hitler’s Atomic Bomb”

This essay examines how authors, including scientists, historians, journalists and others, have written about the wartime German work on uranium and is designed to supplement my book on this subject.¹

Origins

The first accounts of the German efforts to harness the military applications of uranium fission were written immediately after the war by two scientists, Samuel Goudsmit and Werner Heisenberg, followed a little more than a decade later by the writer Robert Jungk. Each of these authors had a specific goal in mind. Goudsmit came to Germany as part of the Alsos Mission, a scientific intelligence-gathering unit of the US Army charged with investigating the progress Germans had made towards atomic bombs. Over the course of his work Goudsmit gathered together scientific reports, read through correspondence, and interviewed scientists, but with the preconceived conviction that National Socialism had ruined German science and that the uranium project would reflect this.^{Footnote 1} Once he returned to the United States, he began

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Uranprojekt: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s Nuclear Weapons Program during World War II

Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team of Nobel Laureates was working on the Manhattan Project, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945. The Manhattan Project would ultimately yield the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs that released more than 100 Terajoules of energy at Hiroshima and Nagaski, but not surprisingly, Nazi Germany was not far behind with their own nuclear weapons program.

When the Nazis’ quest for a nuclear weapon began in earnest in 1939, no one really had a handle on how important nuclear weapons would prove to war and geopolitics. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, along with the Cold War-era tests and their

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German nuclear program during World War II

World War II weapons project

This article is about German nuclear research during World War II. For nuclear power decommissioning in modern Germany, see nuclear power phase-out.

Military unit

Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. These were variously called Uranverein (Uranium Society) or Uranprojekt (Uranium Project). The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended only a few months later, shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many notable German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and urani