
Uranium cubes reveal why the German nuclear project failed
Summary
Historical debates persist regarding the progress of Nazi Germany's wartime nuclear program and its final reactor project. While Allied scientists feared their adversaries might develop an atomic weapon first, the German effort ultimately did not succeed in reaching its goals.
During World War II, physicists on the Manhattan Project worried that the Nazi German nuclear program might achieve the first nuclear bomb before the US and its allies. That's not what transpired, but historians have debated just how close the Germans came to achieving criticality in their last attempt at building a reactor: the B8 pile. Werner Heisenberg, who led…
Source: Read the full story at Ars Technica - All content