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- Title
Misinterpreted Documents and Ignored Physical Facts: The History of 'Hitler's Atomic Bomb' needs to be corrected.
- Authors
Popp, Prof. Dr. Manfred
- Abstract
Summary: Misinterpreted Documents and Ignored Physical Facts: The History of 'Hitler's Atomic Bomb' needs to be corrected. Why have the German physicists not developed an atomic bomb during World War II? For more than 25 years, the historians agree that they knew how to build the bomb, but that a bomb-development programme of the size of the US-Manhattan-Project would not have been possible in wartime Germany. A detailed analysis of all preserved documents on the German atomic bomb research during the 'Third Reich', however, reveals considerable mistakes by the authors due to incomplete analysis of documents, misinterpretations of scientific explanations and ignoring of physical facts. It is shown that until the end of the war the German physicists did not know that an atomic bomb can only be made with fast neutrons, except Heisenberg, who, however, discovered it rather late, did not communicate it clearly and did not study any bomb physics. The physically correct interpretation of the documents reveals that the German physicists worked unsuccessfully on a reactor, which would have been a prerequisite for a plutonium bomb. But they did not know how to build a bomb because they never worked on a realistic bomb theory.
- Subjects
GERMANY; NUCLEAR weapons research; WORLD War II; MILITARY research; PHYSICISTS; NUCLEAR reactors; HEISENBERG, Werner, 1901-1976; HISTORY of nuclear physics; SCIENCE; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY
- Publication
Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte, 2016, Vol 39, Issue 3, p265
- ISSN
0170-6233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/bewi.201601794