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This is why the German's used heavy water instead of graphite as a neutron moderator, which made it much harder to build a reactor. Their early reactors consisted of concentric spheres of heavy water and uranium powder. This was an unfortunate combination, as uranium powder ignites on contact with water. Leaks caused explosions on two separate occasions [0].

In contrast, the first allied nuclear reactor was a literal pile of uranium and graphite on a squash court.

[0] The Bastard Brigade (great book on all of this)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

Sounds like a good time travel story: the mission is to go back in time and plant a single uranium cube, to be found ~80 years hence, to convince people that the German bomb project was doomed so that– ahh, but let's not spoil it! :)

Can it be read standalone or it needs the first book?

Holy shit this is out? I went to the book tour for Polostan. Ordered; ty!

One of the Operation Gunnerside members was later part of the Kon-Tiki Expedition [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition

Also the 1965 film "The Heroes of Telemark", the documentary "The Real Heroes of Telemark" by Ray Mears, and his book of the same name.

That looks good; thanks. Growing up, I loved the firsthand account published in the 80s. Probably mentioned as a source in this newer book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100634.Skis_Against_the_...

This story is also covered in The Bastard Brigade, which details many other Allied attempts to sabotage the Germany nuclear program. Fun fact: Heisenberg was close to being assassinated by a famous baseball player (Mo Berg). Very entertaining and interesting book.

Little extra fun fact since Norsk Hydro was mentioned in the article and now you've mentioned it again-

Norsk Hydro was founded as a hydro power plant + nitrogen fertilizer production company (the nitrogen production needing lots of electricity, and the hydro plant to provide said energy...) but around WWII, pivoted to light metals, and built aluminum and magnesium factories with German company IG Farben, in order to support them in the war, as they were partially under Nazi occupation by then. That all went south but then after the war they kept on with the aluminum business.

The company went on to become experts in aluminum extrusions, and were then contracted not just for the base metal but also to manufacture the first bonded aluminum bare chassis for the S1 Lotus Elise in 1995, which went on to be the basis for the Tesla Roadster.

Nordic skiing is great.

As a snowboarder I was reluctant, but got into it a few years ago. We pull our young daughter in a chariot with skis about 10km into a little cabin by a river with a wood stove.

Cheese, salami and hot chocolate and we make the return loop. Three evenings a week all winter long is a great way to spend time outside.

It should be noted that they didn't have the supplies for the design they tried. There were designs that could have worked with what they had. And its unlikely that during the war anyone knew exactly which designs the Germans tried and even less chance that someone would have known if a specific novel design would have worked. Its an interesting detail but largely irrelevant.

Its also suspected Heisenberg didn't want the design to work (its the given reason why he wasn't killed by Berg). But it was still a reasonable possibility during the war that the Germans could have made it work.

IIRC, US Colonel Hogan got Luftwaffe Colonel Klink to drink a bunch of that heavy water as a cure for baldness as a truckful of it transited through Stalag 13.

Phew, that underground mission was more important than I thought!

Also very good reading on this subject is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by "Richard Rhodes".

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

Building a reactor was a step on the way to building a bomb.

Two isotopes were used for fission bombs in WWII: Uranium 235 and Plutonium. More than 99% of naturally occurring Uranium is Uranium 238, which will not sustain a chain reaction necessary for a bomb. There are only trace amounts of Plutonium in nature, but it can be produced in reactors that use U238 for fuel. So, to make a fission bomb you need to either separate U235 from U238 or build a reactor to create Plutonium.

It's worth noting that the shortage of heavy water was no accident. The Allies sabotaged the heavy water production facility in Norway that Germany relied on[1].

________________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage

The US built a reactor first too [1], followed by others [2] as part of the Manhattan Project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

It mega-helped that Edgar Sengier saw the importance of uranium ore and shipped 1200 tons of it out of the Congo to New York before the U.S. government even realized it would need it.

We always knew they weren't close because Moe Berg was going to shoot Heisenberg during his lectures in Zurich if he suspected they were.

The transcripts from that bugged house were turned into a play, we saw it in Richmond, London, a few years ago. It was really well done and seemed to by enjoyed by everyone, not just those interested in the science & its history.

https://www.whatsonstage.com/shows/outer-london-theatre/farm...

The sheer economic costs of the manhattan project were prohibitive to a nation like Germany, even if they'd managed to build a functional project team.

(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)

> Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?

From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.

> one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible

This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).

When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.

(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)

Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).

Smart people still work for trump regime. Lets put it this way - it won't be viewed kindly by history neither. Yet it keeps happening, people have various priorities and high intelligence doesn't guarantee high morals. musk keeps doing nazi gestures and behavior and clearly his values are not far neither, yet he is supposedly smart and definitely doesn't have to behave that way, its a personal choice.

Also, a lot of people are trivial to manipulate and have emotional weaknesses that are easy to abuse by skilled manipulators, smart or not.

The Vintage Space has an excellent video that does talk a fair bit about individually scientists feelings toward the Nazi regime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGvS4T-r_fk

Without agreeing with the stereotype that scientists are supposed to be smart¹, yeah this is something that worries me. Be it naziism, slavery, racism the way that it was considered normal and legal when my grandparents were alive: there are so many things about which I wonder how large groups (not just a few outliers) can be convinced to believe it.

How do I know what I'm doing in life is right? By what mechanism could I ensure that I believe someone who tells me that Jews aren't the cause of all evil if I lived in ~1940 Germany? What makes people increasingly vote for racist parties since covid? The average person hasn't gotten any smarter or dumber in many thousands of years; evolution is not that fast. At best, genes might be expressed differently based on environmental factors, but I'm not aware that this is a factor for the aforementioned inhumane beliefs. How "scientists" (or anyone) could believe this is a really good question, sadly

Of course, this is ignoring the group that did fight against the nazi regime and/or beliefs. This is just about the (sufficiently large) group that could be convinced to work towards inhumane treatment or even genocide

¹ we can all do amazing things when we have the right idea in the right situation with the means to execute it. Of course, good ideas occur to a smarter person more frequently, and they might be inclined to become scientists because it's an environment seemingly meant for working on new ideas, but that doesn't mean everyone there is per se smart. Lots of people are only topically smart (not to be confused with topical knowledge: I scored both top % and bottom % depending on which part of the iq test you looked at, so that's not about knowledge but about abilities. Many people think I'm smart, but I think they mainly notice the parts where I'm unusually good rather than the 'boring' parts where I perform normally or below average, or they attribute it to laziness)