Just how close was it ...........!

[Tankus]

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.

BBC

[andsome]

I think we always knew they were pretty damned close.

[deuces wild]

The full story of the race:

http://www.3rd1000.com/nuclear/cruc18.htm

The Germans were actually spending very little money on atomic-bomb work. Heisenberg revealed this in an article in Nature in 1947. In the early part of 1942 he had tried to get some of the top flight Nazis to a luncheon for the purpose of getting more help. Fortunately for us, he failed. The Germans expected a quick victory and thought a successful bomb project would take at least twenty years. In addition, the Germans were blinded by belief in their own superiority; many of their scientists, selected for political reasons rather than for their scientific abilities, had a contempt for so-called non-Aryan science. Nevertheless, they tried to get information about our own atom-bomb program. They knew that Niels Bohr would be valuable to the Allies. Hitler issued an order for the capture of the Danish scientist, who was working in Denmark at that time. The Danish underground learned about this, and smuggled Bohr and his family and Georg von Hevesy out of the country in a fishing boat which landed them in Sweden. Bohr was still not safe, and 19 days later a British Mosquito bomber picked him up for a flight to England. Because of fear that the Germans might intercept the plane, the pilot was instructed to drop Bohr by parachute through the bomb bay should his plane be attacked. Bohr almost died during the flight. As the plane rose into high altitudes the pilot instructed him to put on his oxygen mask. But Bohr did not get the warning, for he was not wearing his earphones which were too small for his rather large head. He became unconscious but fortunately recovered when the plane came down to lower altitudes.

Nice going Brits! :D :flowers:

That the scientists in the mesa laboratory did their job well was known to a handful of men who in rain and lightning witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb. This test explosion took place at 5:30 am, July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Air Base in a desert of New Mexico, 120 miles southeast of Albuquerque. The bomb, containing (according to the Smyth Report) between 4 and 22 pounds of plutonium and U-235 (a British report gave the weight as between 22 and 66 pounds), fissioned with a blinding glare, vaporized the steel tower on which it had been exploded, and left a crater half a mile in diameter covered with sand sintered to a green, glassy consistency. It was estimated that a temperature as high as 100,000,000oF was reached in the center of the explosion. The age of nucleonics was here.

Finally, the whole world learned about the new terror fashioned by science when at 8:15 AM Monday, August 6, 1945, a single uranium filled atom bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" dropped through the open bomb bay of the Enola Gay from an altitude of 31,600 feet wiping out the city of Hiroshima (pop. 240,000) precisely 47 seconds later killing 75,000 people. The bomb had been carried in a B-29 piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr. (1915-Present). To avoid the possibility of premature detonation, an accident which would have wiped out all life on Tinian Island from which the plane took off, the bomb was not assembled until the plane was in the air and at a safe distance from the island. Captain William S. Parsons (?-?) assembled the atom bomb with its deadly plutonium or U-235 or both.

Since there was still no official reaction from Japan, the Americans felt there was no alternative but to prepare a second atomic attack.  The plutonium bomb "Fat Man" was loaded into a B-29 known as Bock's Car named after its commander, Capt. Frederick C. Bock. However, on this mission, the aircraft was flown by Major Sweeney, with Capt. Bock flying one of the observation planes. The primary target was to be Kokura Arsenal, with Nagasaki as the alternative.  Bock's Car took off on August 9, with "Fat Man" on board. This time, the primary target of Kokura was obscured by dense smoke left over from the earlier B-29 raid on nearby Yawata, and the bombardier could not pinpoint the specified aiming point despite three separate runs. So Sweeney turned to the secondary target, Nagasaki. There were clouds over Nagasaki as well, and a couple of runs over the target had to be made before the bombardier could find an opening in the clouds. At 11:00 AM "Fat Man" was released from the aircraft and the bomb exploded. The yield was estimated at 22 kilotons. Approximately 35,000 people died at Nagasaki in the immediate blast.

The objective of Manhattan District project had been reached. Never before in the history of man had such a colossal task been completed in so short a time. A heritage of scientific brains unsurpassed in the annals of theoretical science, a reservoir of brilliant engineering and industrial talent, a life-and-death situation that compelled planned, coordinated, and accelerated action, and finally an expenditure of two billion dollars made this epochal achievement possible. The long search for the key to some of the energy locked up in the heart of the atom was ended. The goal of the ancient alchemists had not only been reached but had been left far behind. And in this triumph, modern man had created a new problem for himself, a problem as challenging as the bomb itself--the problem of survival in a world which might be foolish enough to remain divided into hostile camps. This is the life-and-death problem raised by science and capable of solution by scientists and other men of good sense and good will.

Very sad but the result was the end of the war and saving hundreds of thousands of more lives...not to say what the world would now look like under Imperialistic or Socialist rule and "ethnic cleansing". :unsure: