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[00:01]
A
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinono Show. Thomas, we got a new series that you wanted to start here. You mentioned it and I was like, we need to jump all over it, especially since you mentioned the Oppenheimer movie that's out and that this would be a good supplement or side by side to it. So tell everybody a little bit about what you're, what you're thinking.
[00:30]
B
I want to discuss the German atomic bomb, like everything about it. Like, if such a program existed, you know, conceptually what it, you know, what was the catalyst for it, you know, what was the state of, of science at the time. And also in kind of more apocal terms, you know, I want to talk about nuclear weapons generally or atomic weapons in that era. You know, people, people have a misunderstanding about, about, about the bomb and about nuclear weapons generally. They, people like Thomas Schilling and like Herman Khan, they made the point that nuclear weapons are like any other weapons. They're just far, far more muscle bound. The, the ability to impose, you know, devastating attrition in an instant says some, you know, marks them apart as does, you know, very like strategic variables relating to their destructive power creates peculiar paradigms. I mean, all that is true, okay, but they don't have, they don't have great utility in any kind of like general applied sense. And there's, there's actually very few paradigms where they really are, are a game changer or that they really advance, you know, the military strangers of the state, you know, instantaneously. You know, like it. This is kind of like, this is kind of like mythical belief in super weapons. Just. I mean, it's like an ongoing thing that just seems that we have people assign a kind of mystique, you know, to war tech. And I guess like nuclear weapons could be viewed as kind of like the zenith of that. So I mean, there's just that. But beyond that, there's deliberately cultivated narratives around, around the, the issue historically, like the development of the first atomic bomb. A lot of this has to do with anti fascism, you know, like ideological anti fascism. A lot of this has to do with rationalizations for, you know, America's development of the bomb and attempt to defend its monopoly on such capabilities. You know, the. There. So there's this idea that was presented by the War Department in the aftermath of, you know, the nuclear assault on Japan that, well, we developed this thing because, you know, the Third Reich was, was feverishly developing an atomic capability. And you know, that would have, that would, that would have changed everything, you know, and this, this evil tyrannical regime set bent on world domination could have held. Held the planet hostage with atomic weapons. That's, and that's preposterous for a lot of reasons, but it does beg the question as to was, was the German Reich developing an atomic bomb actively? That's a complicated question for a lot of reasons, not the least of which. Not the least of which for reasons not the least of which is the fact that Oppenheimer was not the father of the atomic bomb. Neither was Einstein. A man named Otto Hahn was. And this didn't used to be controversial. Okay, who was, who was Otto Hahn? Otto Hahn was born in 1879. He died when he was quite elderly in July 1968. Han is the father of nuclear chemistry and specifically nuclear fission. Okay. Han and his assistant, a lady named. Meitner, they discovered the radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protectinum, and most importantly, uranium. In the second episode. I'm no physics guy, but I do know something. As much as a layman can kind of understand these things. We'll get into why uranium is so important and like what uranium actually is. I'm gonna like bore everybody to death. But it's important to understand and applied capacities. You know, how atomic research developed into a, a discreetly military endeavor. Okay. But Han also, through his experience, through his experiments which were myriad, he discovered the phenomena of what's called atomic recoil and nuclear, nuclear isomerism. And he pioneered a lot of the techniques that ultimately gave rise to carbon dating. Okay, so the guy was a, the guy was a, was, was, was an intellectual giant. But quite literally everybody subsequent, every, every researcher engaged in nuclear science and specifically weapons based nuclear research, they were, they were literally, they were literally borrowing from Han's research. Okay, that's indisputable. And like I said at, in the epoch he was credited as such this idea that, you know, like, oh, that the Germans were just like these crazy fools and they didn't understand physics or something or I mean that's as nine beyond beliefs. Also like this idea that like, oh, like you know, because of anti Semitism, you know, the, the Germans didn't have a coterie of top scientific minds like that. That's preposterous. Like, not only is that preposterous, but quite literally, you know, the technology that facilitated the development of nuclear weapons was literally invented by the Germans. Okay, now for background too. Han, he received in 1944 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And, and just we'll get into this again in the second and third episodes. I think we, I think it should probably be a three part series. But the, but, but just nuclear fission was the wasn't is the basis for nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. Okay. It makes all those things pot not just possible, but conceivable. Okay. Interestingly, interestingly, during World War I, because Han was a little bit older, he served with a land there regiment which you know, in the Kaiser's, in the Kaiser Reich was like a, a reserve regiment, generally consistent. Like it was kind of like the Home Guard or like what the British used to call the Territorial Army. But he actually was mobilized and deployed and he was, he was attached to a chemical weapons unit, chemical warfare unit headed by Fritz Haber. On the Western front, Eastern front and Italian front, he was in heavy action. He was awarded the Iron Cross second class. So I mean he, why do I raise this specifically? It's not just because, it's not just because it's interesting trivia, but it, I'm trying to demonstrate the aspect of Han's character. Han was not averse to the, you know, applying science in, in, in military endeavors. Okay. Including the somewhat horrible endeavor of chemical warfare. All right. This becomes an issue later on as do what Han's view was of, you know, applying nuclear fission to, to weapons development. Okay. And plus it's just interesting background and there's, I, I, I believe there's very much, I believe there's very much a natural progression conceptually, okay. From chemical warfare to nuclear warfare. And I, I mean it's arguable, but I think it's important and I think people, people understand people who understand institutional thinking and the men who populate those institutions and the way they kind of the paradigms that they play with, as it were. I, I think that it's somewhat inarguable, but this kind of thing was very much on, on, on the minds of, of, of European physicists. Okay. The concrete engineering of what became the atomic bomb wasn't. And we'll get into why that was. But it's like I said, there's this like mythology, there's this punitive mythology that it's that both somehow simultaneously, the Germans were idiots who had no idea how to apply what was called the new physics to war fighting and the engineering of weapons. But on the other hand, they were like these maniacs hell bent on, on developing an atomic bomb. And you know, only the, only, only these like, only the, only these like, you know, genius astronomy, like, you know, we're able to save the day. And of course, like Einstein is the Father of nuclear physics and, and Oppenheimer is the father of the atomic bomb. That's total nonsense. Okay. And it's not a partisan take. It's an arguable for those who I'm sure are gonna send me hate messages about it. That's just not true. It's like, well, I can, you know, I can source all of these claims. The. Let's jump to the end of the war because I think Irving's book the Virus House, as well as, which is a source I rely on tremendously. It's the best book on the German atomic bomb. There's also a book by, of not by. It's about, it's about Edwin Teller. And it, the narrative kind of begins on the date that the. Of the Hiroshima attack because that's really. People don't realize. I think the degree towards the Manhattan Project truly was secret and it, the attack did shock the world. It's rather amazing the degree to which the Manhattan Project was able to maintain operational security. But I, I say let's start there for a few reasons as will become evident, the, it's the point at which the world was quite literally introduced to the atomic bomb, including a coterie of German scientists who had been taken prisoner by MI6 and squirreled off to the United Kingdom. So August 6, 1945, the BBC Home Service, they broadcast the first news that an atomic bomb had been dropped in Hiroshima. The bulletin announced that the bomb in question contained as much explosive power as 2000 of the RAF's 10 ton bombs. President Truman had declared that the Germans had worked feverishly to find a way to use atomic energy, but had failed. Now at a premises called Farm hall. This was a country house near Huntington in the, in, in England, A coterie of German physicists were being held prisoner there incident. What was called Operation Epsilon. Epsilon was the code name for this endeavor that took place between May 1 and June 30, 1945, whereby the Allies identified 10 German scientists who are believed to have worked on the German atomic bomb program. And these men were, they were captured and they were again, they were squirreled away to, to England and detained in this, in this kind of mansion house near Cambridge called Farm Hall. Okay? The proximity to the university is not an accident either because it was, it was a weird kind of incarceration that these guys endured because on the one hand it was very punitive. On the other hand, you know, if they, if you wanted these men to speak, you know, London wanted these men to speak to, you know, their own academics about the you know, about the bomb and things. And if you're, and if you're just, you know, kind of like treating people like forcing them to live, you know, like, like, you know, like abject in squalor or whatever or, you know, or, or abject prisoners in the traditional sense that that wouldn't have happened. So I mean it's, it kind of reminds me of the early days of like Speer's detention. Okay. Although obviously he ultimately endured true horrors as we got into in an earlier series. But the, the goal, nominally, and I think this is basically true of what, what MI6 and the US War Department both claimed independently was that the goal was to determine how close the German Roy could come to the development of a viable atomic bomb. First among the detainees was Otto Han. Okay? It, and this was attested to not just by, not, not just by his fellow detainees, but, but by his interrogators and, and, and the, you know, in the MI6 men who were guarding him and debriefing him there, there was concern that Han would commit suicide because he was so beside himself that this bomb had been created and he blamed himself. You know, it's not like, you know, this was, this was very poignant. Okay. And I don't, this is on my mind like I watched the Oppenheimer movie the other day, like this idea that like Oppenheimer single, like single handedly created the atomic bomb and lived with this terrible guilt. That's ridiculous. Like it's not, you know, it's, it's as if they like extrapolated like Hans life and mind and memories and you know, transpose it onto this kind of character of Oppenheimer who has some relation to the historical man but has become kind of like this, you know, this almost like mythical figure. But the, a major T.H. rittner, he was the British officer in charge at Farm Hall. He, he, he, he asked Rahan to be brought to his office immediately to make sure that his, he was stable of mind and also he just wanted to speak to him about, you know, what had just happened. According to Radner, Hahn was horrified and again, he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He told Rittner, Han told Rittner. And apparently according to independent witnesses, not just Rittner himself, Han and Rittner developed something of a rapport, okay, during his time there. And Hahn had told Rittner, you know, on multiple occasions that he'd had forebodings about the potentialities of his discovery of nuclear fission. But he never thought that you know, a weapon would be rapidly engineered and deployed with that kind of destructive power, like, not because it was impossible, but we'll, we'll get into what, what, you know, he thought would give, would give the scientific community pause, among other things. Now, who are the other detainees of Farm hall? They were Dr. Eric Bage or Bodge, Dr. Kurt Der, a professor named Walter Gerlock, Otto Hahn, of course Paul Hartik, the famous Werner Heisenberg, a man named Horst Korshing, a professor named Max von Lau, another professor named Carl Friedrich von weiziker, and a Dr. Carl Wirtz. Now, the premises at Farm hall were bugged, okay, Everywhere it was from the kind of common recreation area to the private court of. And this wasn't this, this wasn't just incidental. One of the key purposes of, of detaining the German atomic scientists was the eavesdrop on the, the conversations between the, you know, the men themselves. Now as the, what the mers picked up as the, as the news was, was relayed was that Heisenberg, Heisenberg disputed the possibility that the Americans even had a bomb and dropped it. Like he, he didn't dispute that, that Hiroshima was destroyed, but he, he, he believed it was some kind of conventional weapon, like some kind of muscle bound conventional weapon or series of firebomb raids like, had been conducted over Tokyo where 100,000 people died in 24 hours. Like, he thought this was, he thought this was propaganda, okay? Not because it would be impossible to create a bomb, but he, you know, the scientific community was, it was a peculiar thing in the, even, even, you know, even on the EVA hostilities, the number of men who truly understood, you know, the new physics and were insinuated into, you know, the applied research of these things. It was an incredibly small fraternity, okay? And men like that then kind of looked at themselves with the exception of a certain coterie that ended up in America. They looked at themselves as being part of a community that kind of transcended politics. Okay? Heisenberg, he was personally friendly with Dr. Goudsmith, who was the head of the American intelligence mission which had debriefed him when he was initially taken prisoner. And Goudsmit was a fellow physicist and they, Heisenberg and Goudsmith knew of each other. And Heisenberger developed like a pretty good rapport with him. And he asked God, Goudsmit whether whether atomic weapons research was something that the Allies were endeavoring to, you know, take on or if, or if there was any, you know, background of such applied experiments, you know, the end goal of weaponizing atomic energy. And Goudsmit assured him that that was not the case. And Goudsmit, I guarantee, had no idea about the Manhattan Project. He was speaking totally honestly. Okay, so maybe it was naivete, as some people might say, in the part of Heisenberg thinking like that, you know, the kind of, the kind of, the kind of fraternity of pure science would mean that, you know, no one would, no, no colleague would lie to another on such an important and like literally earth shaking matter. But that again, it was different times. It was different. You know, it was. These guys weren't ordinary academics or scientists, you know, they, they were like the elite of the elite of the elite. And also, again, like Goud Smith, I believe was telling the truth. Like he didn't know about the Manhattan Project, you know, and plus two, I mean, like the, it shocked everybody because like the war in Europe was done. Like Japan was utterly destroyed and couldn't even defend itself. You know, that's why it's like, that's why there's this lame, like the Fed's like, oh, Japan had to be invaded because they were just crazy and like a million Americans would have died like that. That's ridiculous. The bomb was deployed. These things developed their own momentum. The bomb is going to be deployed somewhere. It had been developed to destroy Europe, which is totally insane if you think about that, you know, like genocide in your own race with nuclear weapons. But it, but aside from that, it's. I don't think the Soviets would have stopped, you know, and they, you know, they were, they were, they were actively. The Soviets had gone to war against Japan in the final days, you know, like, who's to say, who's to say they would have abided, you know, Truman's demands had, had the bombs, plural, not been deployed. But in any event, that's the rapidity to which too, that's something to keep in mind, like the kind of the core concepts of weaponizing nuclear energy. This is really only six years old. Okay, So I believe there was something of this idea that America could just rapidly, you know, kind of develop a competency in the new physics, you know, and within basically half a decade, you know, develop a weaponized capability. Like, it seemed unlikely, you know, it's, it was extraordinary. And putting oneself in the shoes of Heisenberg, I mean, think about the disorientation of, of what he had just endured and kind of like what of the German like experience generally, like in, you know, 1945, 1946, and finally too, the. The Americans and the British came who, you know, in operational terms, they worked fairly closely in the immediate aftermath of the German defeat for practical reasons, but also political ones. The last German uranium pile laboratory to be seized, that was the library staffed by Weizacker and Wirtz. It was actually located in the French occupation zone. And the US army, with the assistance the British at all costs, aimed to prevent radioactive material and the research data from this pile laboratory, uranium pile laboratory from falling into French hands. Like they, they, they were singularly fixated on this, okay? And the Germans knew this. And that's, and that's how, and that's why Viziker and Vert ended up in the hands of, of the British and not the French. But the reasoning too, in Heisenberg's mind was like, okay, like, if you, if you guys have the bomb, like, why, why are you fixated on, you know, grabbing all the uranium you can and preventing it from falling into, you know, rival hands or whatever? Like, it just. But again too, nobody, nobody knew about the Manhattan Project other than those involved. And you know, the, the, the, the, the, the five stars around Truman himself. It, overall, the feelings of the Germans. Irving characterized it as a sense of recrimination. They were shocked by the fanaticism of people who are not under direct, like, physical threat, who just develop, like rapidly develop an atomic bomb. It like, in their mind, it's like it indicated the kind of fanaticism that had been like, hysterically attributed to them and the Japanese by the New Dealers. You know, it's like you guys have, you guys have, you guys have an ocean between the people you claim your enemies and you're like feverishly developing atomic bombs. Like that's, there's something frankly insane about that. It, well, let me ask.
[25:20]
A
Could they, could they really have been shocked? I mean, it. How would a Han and a Heisenberg, how, how up would they have been on, you know, New Deal, what the New Deal was bringing in what, you know, what was basically going to happen where. Yeah, of course this group of people wants once control of the bomb.
[25:44]
B
They're megalomaniacal because these guys are scientists, not politicians. And again too, it. We're speaking of things that happened 80 years ago and that we take for granted. Like it didn't, you know. And, and also I believe they thought that, you know, the degree to which, and the degree. I mean, listen to, listen to the Hitler's December 11, 1941 speech. You know, it's. People were, people were somewhat flabbergasted that America was Literally talking about making total war on Europe for, frankly, ambiguous reasons. You know, and I mean, then people didn't even. There was a question as to whether, you know, an atomic bomb would even work as intended. You know, there's a, There's a fact like we addressed at the beginning of, you know, what military utility does really have outside of very narrow kind of strategic paradigms, other than the fact that you can like, kill a whole lot of people immediately, you know, And America had. Germany was in ruins, the Red army was in Berlin, the Japanese, Japan was literally a pile of rubble that was getting bombacked. The Stone Age every day, like deploying like, like launching a nuclear attack on like a ruined country under those conditions, that's somewhat shocking. You know, I mean, even, even if one understands the character of the men in control of the enterprise. So, yeah, I don't think, I don't. I don't think he was like, feigning, putting on errors or something. And like I said too, these were the guys who actually made this possible. It wasn't Oppenheimer, it wasn't Einstein. You know, it wasn't Enrico Fermi. You know, it was these guys, you know, and it's, I mean, there's something, you know, yeah, it's a trope that scientists are naive, but it's also kind of true. It was certainly true here. I mean, like I said, who are these guys faking it to? Like, they, you know, they had, they weren't. And like, none of these, none of these guys were National Socialists. It's not like they were going out to, like, it's not like they were pulling a gearing and saying, like, I've got to protect the historical record and, you know, wrong foot, my enemies. Like, that didn't even feature into the equation. You know, like, Heisenberg wasn't a National Socialist. Han actually, like, was at odds with the regime not to do some liberal, but he just, he just didn't like National Socialism. And he didn't, you know, he was, he wasn't a guy who was willing to. Unlike von Braun, who was, you know, willing to go along and be pragmatic. You know, these guys were, you know, but Von Braun was, was a, was basically like a, you know, a mechanical engineer and like an aviation prodigy. You know, like, he wasn't. That's a different, like theoretical physics is a weird thing. And it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it's. It's like both concrete and abstract, and it, it tends to it tends to, it tends to attract kind of, you know, dreamy, hyper intellectual personalities and stuff. So, no, I don't, I don't think there's anything fake about it. But the Hana described and people and, and independent witnesses attested to this. Like, people had been with him when he was first, when he had his first breakthroughs in his, you know, fishing research. When Han first learned the potentiality or the implications, rather, it wasn't clear what the concrete potential was of uranium. Uranium efficient discovery. He said that considering that war was obviously imminent, he contemplated seizing as much uranium as possible, the majority of which in Europe was in Belgium, and literally throwing it into, throwing it into the sea or otherwise hiding it, to ward off some kind of catastrophe, you know, resulting from one of the combatant states attempting to weaponize it. And then he realized that's not practicable. And also, you know, I get, but I mean, I, you know, that's, that, that's, that's, that's the core that comes to the core of your question. Like, Han had those kinds of thoughts because that in his mind, that's what any remotely kind of, like, morally, anybody with remotely normal, normal, like, moral constitution would have those kinds of thoughts. Like, he wouldn't just like, you know, there's something wrong here with the Americans and British just like, putting up huge factories and like, feverishly like, you know, producing pure uranium, like, without, without question. Because, like, you know, and it's like, why, like, was, was, was the Red army storming across America was like, no, I mean, was with a Japanese threatening America? Like, no, I mean, like, there's something, there's something unseemly about it, you know, and like, it's not, I, I, I, I, I totally understand what he's getting at or was getting at, and I'm not at all some peace nick. In fact, like, at scale on these questions, I think I'm pretty callous. Okay? At least that's what I'm told. The interestingly coursing what he stated in the course of this conversation with his fellow detainees after the broadcast that, you know, Hiroshima had been destroyed. What he said and what he, what he, and what he reiterated later was that the level of cooperation, you know, under military auspices, obviously, that facilitated the Manhattan Project, that would have been impossible in Germany. You know, he made the point, he's like, he's like, you know, the men in the room, he's like, some of us didn't, wouldn't have wanted to do it on principle, but he's like, even if we had, you know, there would have, there would have been different ideas on how to proceed with this and there would have been different ideas on, you know, managing outcomes potentially, you know, and like, and trying to like, build in, you know, safeguards into the, into the structure itself or, you know, there would have been, there would have been resentments from, you know, taking orders from party men, you know, and that to your point, yeah, that's the subtext of what he said, of what Coursing said is that these men who worked on that Manhattan Project, they were, they were like absolute fanatics. Like, they were, you know, they, they were, they were frankly crazy. And that, yeah, that, that goes without saying, especially you consider the confessional background and motives and things of these men in America. I mean, but it, the now what, what was the background here of just going to introduce the background of what, if any understanding of the weapons potential of Han's experiments existed on April 29, 1939. This was, this was kind of when the world became aware of the potential of some kind of potential potentially, you know, game changing of, of the new physics. Han's experiments have been widely publicized obviously throughout Europe. And there's a French professor named Frederick Jalot or Jaloy. He was the, the son in law of Madame Curry. He reproduced Han's experiments meticulously and he and his team, they were confirmed like, like, it was confirmed that like Han was, you know, what, what, what he, what he had stated to have proven as regards, among other things, the existence in neutrons during the process and uranium fission and their situation like that, that it was, it was signed off on is. Yes, this is legitimate. Now in a letter to Nature magazine, which in those days was, was like a leading kind of like, it was a combination like, kind of like pop science stuff, but also like major scientific discoveries. That's where they would be featured in which admittedly sounds weird today, but it, I mean that's the way things were. You know, it's this French team led by Joloy. Their letter was titled, quote, liberation of neutrons and the nuclear explosion of Uranium. And essentially that was sort of like the first kind of like public declaration of, you know, nuclear fission having like tremendous weapons potential, but I emphasize potential. You know, it. There was nothing, there was nothing demonstrably proven here, but the, what this led to was in the next few days and Gottingen, which is a renowned university town, or at least it was then in Germany at the physics colloquium, a guy named Wilhelm Hannel Hanley, who was, he didn't Know, Han, but he was like a protege of him because, like, you know, he was an up and coming physicist. You know, everybody, you know, he was kind of the, he was kind of like the grand old man everybody looked to. He read a short paper on what he called a uranium burning engine. I mean, he was talking about a nuclear reactor, okay? And that, like, little paper by this guy, the trajectory of German atomic research was basically going towards nuclear reactors. You know, the idea of like, or like a uranium burning engine, okay, you know, like an endless energy source. And that frankly, that would have solved what became Germany's quagmire militarily, in part more so than an atomic bomb would. And that's a really interesting counterfactual. But that. And amidst all this kind of excitement, you know, it's got to be said, despite the impression people have, I mean, not just court historians, even people who, you know, are more kind of critical in their thinking about historical topics, there's this idea that the, so that the German Reich was some kind, was almost some kind of like rightist mirror of the Soviet Union. It's not true at all. You know, like the National Socialist Party, it was, it was, it was literally elected Hitler himself by the Enabling act and by various referendums. He had tremendous power. But even that wasn't really unprecedented. You know, like the Reich President had, had literally like extra constitutional authority as he saw fit. But, you know, the German state and the National Socialist Party were discrete entities and there, there was tension there, like structurally, you know, and there was even beyond that even. It was, it wasn't, it wasn't simply because there's plenty of professors who weren't National Socialists, even the guys who were basically sympathetic, like they didn't want the government messing in their affairs. You know, like, these were not just guys who, you know, owed their, owed their careers and prestige to, you know, something the Berlin government had done for them, you know, and they also, they didn't want to be ordered to work with other people, you know, like they, that they didn't feel comfortable with or didn't, you know, respect or whatever. It was like very provincial, kind of like very ego driven, but also just very, you know, I mean, that's the nature of academy, you know, and that's, that's especially, you know, especially the, especially the hard sciences and especially what was then called the new physics, which was literally like the cutting edge of, of scientific endeavor, you know. So, I mean, it's, it was like trying to herd cats, you know, this, this idea that, you know, this Is this idea that the Reich was like just some party state is nonsense. It's this idea that like Germans, like, you know, some Prussian, some Prussian officer type just like snaps his fingers and then like the crowd saw like, you know, do what they're told. Like that's, that's nonsense too. Like it was, you know, it's, it's, it's, it was, it was, it was, it was highly chaotic. You know, this, the subsequent conference that was, that, that was arranged based on all these, based on all these, you know, kind of findings and confirmed them, confirmed and, and confirmed research. It ultimately was held in secrecy at, at, in Berlin at a building on Unter den Linden. The. And this was when the War Department got very interested in what was going on. The, the War Office as well as Reich ministries attached to it actually are just kind of like practically because they were in the same orbit or had overlapping spheres of authority within a very short space of time. In 1939 had begun their own uranium research program. It was low key. It was basically, you know, corralling data that had already been produced, you know, in France and in the German Reich, you know, and kind of running a comparative analysis and trying and again, like duplicating some of these experiments to make sure that, you know, this was in fact the results were what they purported to be. And this led to, this led to a Hamburg professor, Hamburg professor named Paul Hartek and his assistant, a guy named Dr. Wilhelm Groth. They'd written a letter to the War Office just before, just before the Berlin conference and about 10 days after the publication of the, of the, of the Paris, the French Physicist letter Nature magazine. And this letter was cited again and again and again by American New Dealer media as well as like OSS types, all in sundry. The letter stated, quote. And so the letter to the War Office, okay, by these, by this Hamburg professor, it said, quote, we take the liberty of calling your attention to the newest development in nuclear physics which in our opinion will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones. That wasn't really a groundbreaking statement. I mean, yeah, people still speculated that that was true. And obviously what was right into the statement was that this was some sort of, this was some sort of like, you know, low key, almost kind of hidden communication between German scientific academe and the War Office saying, like, look, like, this is not only possible, this is, you know, essential. We've got to beat the Allies the punch and know, pursue this course of research essentially, like take this Letter to the FUR and the AR Ministry and like, let's make it happen. There's no evidence that that's what this letter indicated. Okay. And frankly, like, if that's what it was, like, why would an open letter be written? You know, like, it's not really how things are done, but, you know, so I think some of what is argued around these, these, these surviving kind of statements. When I say surviving, I mean, you know, like in literal letter form. I think some of it is in bad faith. The, you know, and again, the something the letter concluded with, quote, the country that makes first use of unsurpassable advantage over the others. I believe what he meant by it is just nuclear fission generally. And again, the trajectory of this kind of research was towards nuclear reactors. Okay. Or a uranium burning engine. I believe that's what they were getting at. And which is true. Okay. I mean, any, anybody who found a way to, you know, utilize atomic energy for an industrial military purpose, like, yeah, obviously, like first use compares, confers a massive advantage. But I don't read it as being like again, some kind of secret agreement, you know, to pursue atomic weapons research in concert. And I don't read that final sentence as a statement to the effect of, you know, we have got to develop and deploy atomic bombs as soon as possible. That's not in context. That's not what it means. And I'm not playing lawyer ball at all. And frankly too, it's a bit outside the scope. But the course of German scientific research, not just relating to the new physics, but even in conventional engineering, other things, I, it makes sense that a nuclear reactor would kind of be the, would kind of be the Holy Grail of German research that makes any sense, you know, and again, that would have alleviated not just emergent exigencies in the Second World War, but, you know, problems that had compromised Germany's operational effectiveness and its ability to survive protracted wars in general. Okay, I mean, in the preceding, you know, millennia or what have you, but that the reaction in London was especially kind of severe to the French physicist letter, you know, the Nature magazine letter, the, the, the, the British press, when they, you know, just like, as they did subsequently when insinuating Mr. Churchill into office, they undertook this like, full court press, full of lowered accounts of, of the new, quote, super bomb based on uranium fission that was being developed in Germany. You know, like they, they just presented this as a foregone conclusion, as a fact. You know, the four days after the letter appeared, both the British treasury and the Foreign Office were approached by Sir Henry Tizzard. He was chairman of this commit, chairman of the committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defense, which had outsized power, as did pretty much every. Everything related to the Air Ministry. I think we talked about that in our Churchill series. He said that in no uncertain terms, Britain should take preemptive action to deny large sources of uranium to the Germans. And as I stated, the largest stockpile of uranium in Europe was in Belgium. And there's a sizable industry for extracting your radius, for extracting radium from uranium from uranium ores imported from the Belgian Congo as well. So like in Belgium, you didn't just have, you know, like the raw stores of uranium. There's like the infrastructure to, you know, process it in basic ways to make it Utah. So essentially what Tizzard was suggesting or demanding perhaps was, you know, that Britain find a way to, you know, wage war on the continent and capture whatever uranium Belgium had, you know, with hostility, which operationally, obviously there was. That was not going to happen. But the fact that this was well within their contemplation and I don't think this was just propaganda in the case of the uk, I think they probably actually believe this. I mean, obviously their conceptual horizon was totally corrupted by this kind of hysterical idea of, you know, Germany is our enemy, but within the boundary rationality of that, of that paradigm. I think they actually did believe that a fission bomb was, was, was at that moment possible. And that's kind of a fascinating. This kind of. There's a, that's, that's, that's. It's like Frederick foresight stuff, but in real life. And I think that's kind of fascinating. And there's many, many intrigues really, like espionage and stuff and, and what have you that like around that. But I, I'm, I'm gonna stop here. And second episode, I think we'll have to go a little bit longer and I want to get into the, I want to get into the actual virus house, which is the title of the book, which was the dedicated research facility for the German atomic bomb, such that it could be said to have existed as a dedicated program. And then in the third episode, we'll deal with kind of like the aftermath and things of that nature. That sounds good.
[49:06]
A
Are you going to address the popular conception that the Fuhrer was adamant about getting a bomb and that the scientists were working against him?
[49:21]
B
Yeah, and I think it's basically like Heisenberg said and some of his colleagues said when, when he said that, you know, we didn't really want to develop a bomb. He was talking in terms of, like, personal conscience, not like, the hell with Hitler and let's sabotage the war effort. It was that if, you know, if they've been ordered in a formal capacity or if the. Or if the. Or if the atomic program had been like the rocket program and under direct military authority, you know, that they would have resisted that because, you know, the unpredictability of outcomes and just kind of like the. In their mind, like, the naked immorality of just unleashing that much power when not, you know, necessary for, you know, in the matter of existential survival, I think that's. I mean, that's the way to understand it. But people want. People want to rehabilitate Heisenberg and I mean, they should, like, no German needs to be, quote, rehabilitated. But in their mind, they want to think of Heisenberg and Han as, you know, good guys. So they, like, exaggerate the degree to which, you know, these men had some kind of ideological objection to fascism. But, yeah, we'll get into that. We'll start with just like, a brief understanding of what uranium is. I'm very much a layman, okay? So, I mean, like, I, I'm not suggesting, I'm not being pedantic. Like, I. When I started reading about this topic, like, I had to read up on uranium. So, like, we'll take like 10, 15 minutes next episode and, like, learn about our friend uranium, and then we'll get into, you know, we'll get into the. The views of the. The War Ministry, you know, contra. The New Dealer War Department, you know, and. And the. The kind of lack of convergence respectively, of. Of a common understanding of the military potential of atomic weapons. And, you know, like I said, I, I want to get into, like, the motivations of why America developed the bomb. And, you know, that's a complicated topic, but. Yeah, well, I'll try to wrap it up in three episodes.
[51:34]
A
All right, do plugs and we'll end this.
[51:37]
B
Yeah, you can still find me on Twitter, which I guess now is X or whatever. Like, formerly Burb App Capital R E A L underscore number 7 HMAS777. You can always find me on Substack, which is my primary platform. It's real re lcore Thomas 777 substack.com you can always find me on my website. Number 7h1s777.com I'm. I'm preparing season two of the mind Phaser Podcast. And as well as I'm going to Utah in a couple weeks to film the first dedicated episode of Thomas TV on the channel. My YouTube channel is ThomasTV number 7H1A S TV. So exciting things are afoot. In addition to, like this, you know, Pete and Keith woods and other fellas are nice enough to host me and, you know, like, be looking out for that stuff too. But, yeah, that's all I got.
[52:45]
A
Thank you. Until the next time.
[52:47]
B
Yeah, thank you, man.
[52:50]
A
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinones Show, Part two on what I'm calling the German bomb series, Little miniseries with Thomas. How are you doing, Thomas? And where are we going today?
[53:05]
B
I wanted to continue kind of with, you know, the. The background of, you know, what the state of what was called the new physics was in the lead up to the second World War, especially because as we touched on, more than touched on, as we. As we got into, but not completely last time, there's this idea very much reinforced by the Oppenheimer film, which in some ways I thought was a good film. In other ways I thought it was not a good film at all. I mean, well, we can get into that maybe when it's more apropos. But there's this narrative that there was this kind of mad race. There's two, one or two narratives. It's either that there was this race by all major powers to weaponize atomic energy. And feverishly, you know, at Cambridge, University of Chicago, University of Berlin, you know, presumably somewhere in the Soviet Union, you know, this was all going on and, you know, this. This desperate race was, proverbially speaking, was won, you know, by the Manhattan Project team. That's not true at all. Nothing like that was afoot. The other, the other, the other kind of narrative is that, you know, the Einstein memo was born of some kind of secret knowledge Einstein presumably had or that he had gleaned, you know, from the kind of German fraternity, as it were, of, you know, researchers in the new physics that, you know, Heisenberg presumably was, you know, had come to. Into knowledge presumably, you know, borrowing from Fermi's concrete experiments that, you know, uranium could be weaponized into a super bomb. So Einstein desperately, you know, contacted, you know, people he knew in. In the close to the New Deal regime, you know, like, you know, including people he talked about in another series, you know, on the board of Jewish Deputies, the American Jewish Committee, they put him in touch with Sachs, you know, Einstein, Roosevelt's Wall street man, who then said, oh, my God, you know, the. This is, you know, there's like, like Some corny movie plot like, you know, that the, this evil Nazi regime is, you know, months away from, from this super weapon. You know, we've, we've got to alert Mr. Roosevelt immediately like that. That's ridiculous. I mean, aside from the, aside, many, like, value judgments they were in about the combatant regimes like this was not underway at all. Like we talked about last time, literally, on the evil war in 1939, the best minds in Germany. First of all, there was no, there was no organization here like the War office, which itself was kind of a hodgepodge of academics, you know, like bureaucratic administrators, you know, like party men, like guys, you know, like military men, at least in a liaison capacity, you know, who had some idea that, you know what's there, that, you know, that there's a, you know, that there's some kind of applied potential, you know, to atomic physics. But the direction they were going was what we consider to be, you know, conceptualizing what I want to. A crude nuclear reactor. Okay, that did change somewhat as time went on, but there was never, not only was there never a Third Reich version of the Manhattan Project underway, but that wasn't even within anybody's contemplation and nor, nor is the kind of organization in place to do that. You know, I mean, anybody will tell you when you're talking about academics, especially men at the top of their field in, in some kind of experimental science, trying to organize these people in a dedicated capacity is, Is like hurting cats, number one. Number two, you know, the Third Reich was really the Third Reich, unlike the Soviet Union and frankly, unlike the New Dealer United States. It was, it was this kind of like, competing off in hostile, like fiefdoms of authority and these factions who really didn't like each other, who are kind of only bound by, like, faith in the furor, you know, like, as this kind of like, messianic personage. I don't mean that in crude terms nor in overly praising terms. It's just the reality, okay? So, like, people have this kind of mistaken idea, you know, like we talked about before, of the Third Reich is kind of like this, like, fascistoid, like, version of the Soviet Union where they're like, from the top down, just everything was, you know, corralled into the service of the state and its military needs. Like, that wasn't the case at all. And that, that's one of the things that, you know, the catalyst for Goebbels total was going to be known as the, as the total war speech. The catalyst for that was he was Making the case, like, basically like begging. A lot of some of the patrons of the party, like, look like, put aside your differences. We have to mobilize completely, you know, if we're going to survive. And by that point, I mean, the die was cast, you know, so it. But be that as it may, I'll also say finally, and then we'll get into the meat of this. There's this idea in America, and I think, I mean, even among historians with a critical eye, and even with some people who have military knowledge either through direct experience or based on their theoretical, you know, endeavors, there's this idea that nuclear weapons are just kind of like this trump card, you know, or that, you know, like Thomas Shelling said, and in the context he said it was correct, that they're just like any other weapons, except owing to command and control nuances, you know, and the computerization of decision making at key junctures and the destructive power of them, you know, they, they, they, they're just capable of implementing far, far more attrition far, far quicker than, you know, conventional weapons. And that is the correct way to think about them. In conditions of bipolarity as regards the political map and general parody in terms of strategic forces and being in a military situation such as the world of 1939 or even of 1943, 44, it's not clear how an atomic bomb would have helped Germany. I mean, Germany could have annihilated the UK And I mean, yeah, that would have helped. I mean, in terms of, obviously, it could no longer be utilized as, you know, U.S. army Air Corps and Royal Air Force is unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to, you know, strategically bomb Germany with massive conventional loads. But, you know, the path of victory in World War II for Germany is the conquest of the Soviet Union. You know, Moscow has to fall in 1941, and thereby, you know, Germany becomes a superpower. You know, it captures the Central Asian world island, if you want to use Mackinder's language. Okay, just, you know, atomic bombing Moscow and killing, you know, 10 million Russians. Well, I mean, the Third Reich killed 10 million Russians. I mean, did that win the war? You know, like, I, I think it was Ahmadinejad, who was an interesting guy, at least. More. I mean, he was at least most interesting Iranian head of state since Khomeini. You know, he made the point when kind of Netanyahu was at his most kind of histrionic, you know, freaking, that everybody's developing a bomb. You know, all Israel's enemies are or developing the bomb. You Know, it's like, did nuclear weapons help the Soviet Union? You know, like when the Soviet Union went down, not with a bang, but a whimper, I think it had, I think it had something like 12,000 warheads, you know, that could be married launch vehicles and deployed, you know, as like strategically, you know, like intercontinentally, you know, or at least like within theater, you know, over intermediate distance. I mean, it's that there's like this idea like nuclear weapon is just, you know, you like, own, you own your enemy, like in proverbial or actual terms, you just own the battle space. Like that. That doesn't make any sense. You know, in the case of America, obviously, I mean, America just had to devastate Germany and Japan, you know, and it could. And then, and then America gets the planet, you know. But I mean, no, nobody else was in that situation. You know, ironically, in a totally counterfactual scenario, we're like a nuclear armed Japan. Like that actually, like Japan could have extorted a lot of concessions if they had nuclear atomic bombs or something comparable. I thought about that and not, I think, not incidentally, that's why they were so fixated on a biological weapons program, you know, and like the father of modern biowarfare is she Shiroishi. And he got poached immediately by u. S. Occupation forces and delivered to the war department, soon to be the defense department. They ended up actually teaching at Berkeley of all places. You know, as, as like in this kind of role of civilian role is like this, in old age, is like this unassuming, like biologist. But he, he was, he was a, he was, he was a war master of bioweapons. Okay, gay, that, that's something of a tangent. But in any event, all these things are important. They're not, they're not just speculative, you know, sort of counterfactuals that are fun to play with. As we, I think we finished last time with the, the. Let the. The letter by the French physicist to nature magazine, you know, which discussed the potential of, of. Of, you know, some, some kind of military application of, of uranium, you know, and reactions from uranium. If you know, the, the isotope needed could be, you know, cultivated. Okay. And this, this really did this caused. To say it caused a stir in the scientific community would be a gross understatement. But the response essentially by the Germans was a guy named Abraham Esau. He was chairman of the quote, Reich bureau of standards, which translates to the right bureau, the right bureau of standards in education, specifically the physical sciences, was. It's, you know, a Domain of authority and kind of keeping, you know, such that the universities could be corralled into a directly military role. It was, you know, this, this was, this was kind of like this, this was kind of like the party's way of, of, of not just keeping tabs on these things, but trying. But you know, we're trying to direct such potential as it emerged in a constructive capacity. But of course, again, we're talking about, you know, literally cutting edge theoretical physics here. Like, you can't pick and choose like who you want to staff these things. You need people to actually understand the damn thing in question. You need, and beyond, you need people who are competent. It's like Esau, he wasn't any kind of like national Socialist or party man, but he was basically patriotic. He, he'd been, he'd been a leading authority on high frequency electronics. He'd been an academic physicist for most of his career, but he was politically active. Again, he wasn't, he wasn't any kind of like party loyalist, but he had followed kind of the ascendancy of nationalism in Germany. And he was like, definitely behind it, you know, at least in like. But, but frankly, I mean like patriotic Germans generally were, you know, but he, he was excited at, you know, kind of nuclear physics being brought within his, you know, kind of penumbra of authority, if you want to look at it that way. And he convened a conference, I think we mentioned the Jenna conference, which was directly convened in response, you know, to the announcement by the, by the French researchers on their applied experiments. On his short list, of course, was, you know, Otto Hahn. Han was unable to attend because he was engaged otherwise in Sweden, Professor, a guy named Professor Yosef Matok from Vienna was, was, was deputized in favor of his, you know, regular assistant, Liza Meitner, who was also in Sweden, you know, with the man himself, to like to speak for him or like sit in for him. The conference took place in, you know, relative secrecy. April 29, 1939, at the Ministry of Education building. As we talked about the doctor, Dr. Doms, who's the head of the Ministry's research department, he vocally attacked Hahn in absentia for publishing, you know, his vital discovery, what he perceived as like his vital discovery, you know, to the scientific, to the wider scientific community, when that's not the way science works. Okay, Unless you're, I mean, if had, had this been two years later, you know, and had Germany been actively at war, I think that case could be made. But even then, again, this was not the Manhattan Project. Nobody, nobody had nobody among this coterie of new physicists in. In Germany or Austria, you know, had an idea that, you know, this is a military technology. I mean, beyond the fact that. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Beyond the fact that, you know, any kind of. Any kind of applied technology where you're talking about a truly renewable energy source that theoretically, at least you know, is. Is. Is essentially inexhaustible. I mean, yeah, obviously there's military implications of that, just like there's military implications everything else. But that's. But that was. That. That would have been like saying, you know, that, you know, that. Would. That have been like saying that, you know, aviation should have been kept secret, you know, as it was under. As, you know, as trials are underway in America to, you know, perfect a truly viable aircraft, but American elsewhere. But the. But metallic took up. He went to bed very much on Han's behalf, and he. He basically cowed the committee into silence. You know, things. We're not. We're not a military. This is not a military. This is not neither a party nor a military, you know, conference. You know, we're not. We're not under your authority or anybody else's. You know, basically like, how dare you insult the man who's, you know, basically changed the world by his research and discoveries? And that honestly set the tenor, man, like, not. Not just in the Jenna conference, but moving onward again, like it. Something like it described never could have happened in the Soviet Union, like, no matter what. No matter what the technology under discussion was, even if it was a purely speculative technology at that. At that juncture, you know, so it's. There is. Is more of a. You know, I say this is important not just because I've got, you know, peculiar fixations as a. As a researcher, but, you know, it's. It's. It's important to, you know, developing a properly characteristic view of the German Reich and its internal situation. You know, this is not a place where scientists were cowed by the party or by the regime. You know, there certainly were, as always, representative official D who tried to throw their weight around, but they were not in the driver's seat here at all for a lot of reasons. The. Basically, the long story short, in addition to a lot of theoretical postulates unrelated directly, you know, to the subject at hand, which I have no understanding of because I'm no physicist at all. I'm not even like an educated layman in physics. Okay, I'm the first to admit that. But to the kind of highlight of the event, if you want to look at it in those terms. Two Gottingen professors got him juice and a guy named Hanley. They, they'd outline once again, I mean, not them once again, but they'd outlined again, as was on the mind of every man present, you know, a. The practicability of a quote, uranium burner. Okay. I mean this was again, this was such that there could be said to be a, a sort of priority afforded to any conceptual model. I mean this, this was it. Okay. And again that, that obviously has tremendous military application, but it, but not in the way that was being bandied by, you know, people, people like Einstein later on and, and also by some, some, some people particularly in MI6 and later in OSS. In the case of the former, I, it's interesting and we'll get into that. The, the. I don't want to jump too far ahead. We'll, we'll get into the kind of the Take from London or the view from London on the potentiality of an atomic bomb. But in any event, the. There'd been a general ban placed on the export of uranium compounds from Germany and the Reich Ministry of Economics was. They were adjusting well. They, they were. They're trying to determine like there was a recently captured mines in Czechoslovakia. I cannot pronounce. Yakimov. Yakimov. If anybody on deck, like in the comments. I'm sorry if I'm butchering that. I, I'm first admit I, I'm terrible with these pronunciations, but Central Europe is, is rich in, in, in uranium ore. Okay. Like natural uranium ore. The, this, this hadn't been mined yet, but it, you know, had been accessed in some basic capacity. But you know, who basically who was going to get, get it first? Like, hadn't been decided, you know, was it just going to be squirreled away and given to the, you know, given to the OKW to basically sit on so nobody else could have it? You know, was it, was it going to be given to, you know, this. To what, what, what, what was basically going to be given to like, you know, the, the burgeoning kind of committee that. Or the burg kind of quorum that attended the conference at Jenna. Like what, what would become of it? But it, what they had allowed was a uranium sample had had been dispatched to Gottingen for special analysis and the, the special analyst who was dispatched, you know, to essentially to, to report his findings was, was, was a guy from the War Office. Okay. And what was not known to the attendees of the Jenna conference and was not probably known to really anybody. The Reich Chancery. I'm sure that there was some line of communication there. And Hitler himself, I speculate and again, this is pure speculation, probably knew just because he was so hands on in, in terms of weapons development and things like that the War Office had begun its own uranium research program. But again, you know, it's. If they were developing a bomb and if this was like the raison d' etre of it, you know, like why, why, why, why, why, why were they appealing to civilians at all? You know, I mean, because that would presume the knowledge. That would presume not just the, the conceptual basis for such a program but the knowledge in order to implement it as well as the political will. And it's just not, you know, depicts what develops here is a, I think an indisputable picture of, you know, basically everybody, everybody within the party administration who had an understanding, you know, who's realistic about, you know, the, the fact that, you know, inevitably like a war was going to emerge between, you know, the, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, anybody in the scientific community, you know, who was at all engaged, you know, with the reality of national politics at the time and anybody who, you know, had, had been paying attention, you know, to, to the new physics with any, with any sort of understanding of it beyond that of a layman, like, understood that there was some kind of like great applied potential for this, but that might not be emergent for 20 years. You know, it might, it, it, you know, it might never be fully realized. But again too like it wasn't clear what that was and such that there was any kind of like agreement in these like very kind of crude conceptual terms. In Germany it was as, you know, it was basically as like this is an energy source that's going to change the world. You know, was not like this is, this is how he builds super bombs, you know. And interestingly, but such that the United Kingdom had a view of this after the chairman of a Belgian mining concern, he, he got wind of the situation in Czechoslovakia with respect to uranium. A. A guy named M. Edgar Sinji. He was president of the Belgian Mining and Surina Union Minier. Okay. I think that's how you pronounce it. He contacted a guy named Tizard who was chairman of the Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defense in London. Okay. And when he did, the outcome of their meeting was basically Tazard. He was unwilling to, he was unwilling to. To provide the funds or the authority for Sinjier to. Or Sinja to, to purchase all available uranium stocks which there were several thousand tons in Belgium and far more available in the open market that had been extricated from Czechoslovakia or extracted, you know, before the, before the, before the country fell apart and you know, what have you, and became. Came under the dominion of the Reich. But you know, it, the fact was, I mean it, that this was not. It was. The UK was very much by this point, this was May of 1939, you know, they were shifting to a war footing. You know, I mean it can't be argued that this was, you know, oh, you know, the climate of appeasement was ruling and nobody, you know, realized, you know, the danger that way ahead. If you want to take that kind of court historians view, I mean that, that can't be argued. Okay. The, the, what Tzar did say is that if some kind of mass of uranium reserves or at least that which was then available in the open market, if the bulk of that should fall into enemy hands, he said that maybe something that, you know, that, that could be catastrophic in strategic terms. But I mean it wasn't, it wasn't clear what that was. You know, it's like it was basically that, you know, we hear that, you know, the crowds want it, so we don't want, you know, because they want it, we want them to not have it. You know, but we don't want it either because it may be nothing. You know, the, the admiral basically this tazard like took this to the admiralty which you know, in, in, in the UK Then as I assume now even always, it always had outsized clout in terms of like war and peace questions. They said that, you know, they said that, you know, not only do we have the funds to gamble with on this, like literally, but they said the possibility of developing a quote explosive of unprecedented power from uranium was so remote as to be negligible. So again, this was like science fiction. Okay. It kind of reminds me of if you keep up with. I don't know if anybody does but I. And maybe they've moved on from this kind of fixation. But like some years back, you know, if you picked up parameters, you know, like the US Army War College magazine or read these, speaking of the Brits read some of these like Royal Navy publications they were talking about like rail guns and these kinds of like super guns that were gonna, that were primarily going to be based on, you know, this is basically going to be like some kind of new like quasi surface warfare platform that's just going to like change everything. You know, it was a lot of, I mean then is now like, I mean now it's more, you know, guys kind of trying to rationalize already bloated budgets and stuff. But there's, there's always, there's always, there's always, there's always generals and admirals as well as civilian analysts and intelligence men, you know, like, like sounding alarm bells about, about some future, you know, like super weapon. You know, this was not like it, this was not something new. Okay. Yeah, I mean they, the 20th century was remarkable in terms of kind of the punctuated, the punctuated equilibrium as so to speak of, you know, scientific advancement by leaps and bounds. But this, this idea that, you know, there, there's a firm understanding of the potential of uranium that, and that, you know, this somehow would, you know, absolutely make, you know, Germany its strategic situation as it was in 1939, you know, the master of the world. Like that's, that's ridiculous. G.P. thompson had an interesting take. He was a, he was, he was a leading British physicist perhaps, perhaps the leading physicist who was close to, you know, the, like not just the war party, as it were, but to, you know, military circles and both intelligence and the Admiralty. He said, you know, it's highly, he said, he said the Germans are probably more afraid of us developing some Iranian based technology, you know, as than we are of them. And he suggested, he suggested a disinfo campaign indicating that the British had in fact tested uranium bombs of unprecedented force, you know, so potent that the authorities had, you know, stopped, stopped testing of them for fear of compromising the, compromising the, the program completely. You know, it. Churchill himself, he said that any talk of it, mind you, like Church was like something of a techno. I mean on the one hand he's like Pan is a Luddite. I. Which he was. And he, and he, he, he, and he was a disaster as a, as, as, as a commander in chief. But he did have like a fetish for like war tech, you know, albeit not in an foreign way, but his view was the same. He said that like any, any German talk of a quote, super bomb is pure bluff. You know, he's like, you know, this is ridiculous. Like, nothing like this. There's no indicators, there's no current indicators that something like this is going to be deployed, you know. And he said even if it was, you know, the, the, you know, the, both the admiralty and the air ministry, as well as the army, you know, their, their view is that, you know, even if such an application had been cultivated, it would, you know, anything that would lead to results on a large scale would not be emergent for years. You know, this was Churchill talking. You know, this is like arch warmonger Churchill, you know. So I mean it, the
[83:36]
A
question.
[83:37]
B
Yeah, yeah,
[83:40]
A
could that the line of, you know, we've been testing these plutonium based weapons and it's remarkable what the kind of power they have. Could that be a way of propagandizing and saying we know what these things can do, we can't allow the enemy to have them?
[84:02]
B
Yeah, I think that, that's where I think that, I think that, I think the people who are agitating for that disinvo campaign, I think that was the subtext of it too. You know, it wasn't just to, you know, kind of like bluff the Germans because frankly the UK did not really have the forces in being to, to bluff in other ways other than ledgered main. But yeah, also I think it could have, it could have served. Yeah, exactly what you said. It could have served as, you know, an ongoing pretext as well. You know, like these kinds of things are being developed and in enemy hands. Oh my God. Like basically it became, you know, kind of like the, the albeit it was, it was a, it was, it was top secret. But what became, you know, like the, the New Dealer rationale for the Manhattan Project. But it's, but again, I mean the reason it didn't is because it seemed like just so outlandish. And again, these weren't, these weren't a bunch of, you know, these weren't a bunch of World War I generals who were like, oh, I don't know about this, you know, this, this high fluting science. Like, you know, these were like, these were guys at the top of the field, you know, in the UK, you know, in, in the 1930s. I mean, to say that like they, they didn't, you know, have an indigenous, you know, academic community that was very much on the cusp of new physics research. I mean, that is preposterous. It just didn't seem, it just, it just wasn't, it wasn't what people were thinking. Okay. And I mean. Yeah, okay, anytime you're talking about, anytime you're talking about, anytime you're talking about a rare element, okay, obviously like explosives or something, that comes to mind. This is like the nature of it. But that wasn't, this was not something that was just universe like the, the way it's presented is that this is just something that was like universally understood to be like, you know, the potential of, you know, of, of uranium. And it was only a matter of time before, you know, the, the, the correct formula as it were. Was calculated in order to, like, bring it into reality, you know, and that's, you know, all we can. The closest we can get to literally peeking inside the minds of people in the epoch is, you know, their, you know, their, their declarations. Either they're either, you know, they're, they're, you know, either their private diaries and their correspondences or, you know, their, their public declarations or their statements, the presence of witnesses. And there's not any, there's not any indication that, you know, anybody within the scientific or military community in Europe as of 1939, you know, had this in. Within their contemplation. And again, part of this was. Part of this was, you know, part of this was a conceptual bias because again, like, if you're, if you're, if you're a felt marshal in the Vermont or, you know, if you're a British admiral of the Royal Navy, like, why, what. What's. What's an atomic bomb gonna do for you? You know, like what, like, honestly, like, how, how's that going to solve, you know, the, the exigencies that you're charged with resolving? You know, I mean, it, it's Germany. Germany becomes a superpower and, and, and, and resolves its. And resolves like the long emergency it's. It's faced with if, if it, if it can drop atomic bombs on people. I mean, it's not, you know, again, it, It's. There's a very, there's very. There's a very peculiar strategic configuration where, where nuclear weapons have real utility and it basically never emerges. And, you know, it certainly, it certainly wasn't emergent in the case of Germany in 1939. You know, and people can argue that point all they want, but I, I don't. I. I've yet to come across a convincing case otherwise, even in, even in, even in the abstract, in more concrete terms, relying on, relying on the direct advice and claims of a Professor F.A. lindeman and later Lord Cherwell, Churchill wrote to the Secretary of State for, for air defense. For air and air defense, saying that, you know, any suggestion of. Of. Of, quote, Nazi super weapons were without foundation. He said only, you know, as his expert, namely Lindemann, it told him only a minor constituent of uranium was effective, which, which, which, you know, which took. Which took, quote, many years to extract. You know, the chain process can take place only if concentrated in a large mass. You know, the, as soon as the energy develops, you know, it's, you know, likely that, you know, we would require a mild detonation. Instead of a chain reaction which presumably, you know, would, Would, Would. Would incinerate, you know, like the uranium core that was needed in the first place. And, you know, or, you know, based on this, based on the nature of these things and, you know, unknown variables, you know, if inadequate mass were cultivated, you know, a chain reaction could ensue that, you know, was just massively destructive, you know, and in ways we can't even conceptualize, you know, all the basic, not basic in terms like uninformed, because this was a new science, but all the kind of. All the kind of, you know, usual objections at the time to, you know, why, you know, we don't. This is, you know, we don't want to. We don't want to tickle the dragon's tail, as it were, you know, and this was Churchill himself, like, relying on his experts, you know, and it's again, like, what, if anything, he had. He had an incentive to, you know, confabulate, you know, some kind of threat where there wasn't one, not diminish a threat where, you know, where, where it was. I mean, obviously it's. But it. And just for those who don't know a lot about this, and, I mean, I'm one of them, so I'm not being pedantic, like, what is uranium and why uranium? Again, uranium is what was available. Central Europe is one of the natural, you know, deposits of uranium that can be harvested and extracted, mined and, you know, utilized in weapons development. Obviously, uranium is a chemical element. What is a chemical element? It's an irreducible substance that cannot be broken down into other substances. Its symbol is U. Its Atomic number is 92. In solid form, it's a silvery gray metal. It uranium atom is 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which six are valence electrons. Uranium radioactively decays by emitting alpha radiation. And the half wave of this is. It's between something like 200,000 and like 4.5 billion years, different isotopes. So, like, uranium, like, this is. This was like, revolutionary and being able to, like, date the Earth, like, quite literally, I did not know that until recently, but the most common isotopes in natural uranium is uranium 238 and uranium 235. Okay? And uranium, incidentally, is the highest atomic weight of the primordially occurring element. Primordially occurring elements. Now, why uranium 235? Uranium 235 is. It's. It's in every. In every. In every thousand parts. About. In every thousand parts of natural uranium, there's about Seven parts of a lighter isotope, which is the mass number 235. The chemical properties are the same, obviously, but the physical properties differ. Uranium235, essentially, it's got to be the, the atomic structure of it has got to be manipulated in a way so that in very crude terms it does not absorb what it is being bombarded with. You know, like the, the reaction has to actually be cultivated, okay? And this can only be achieved with uranium 235 isotope, okay, the. Such that Professor Esau had any idea that uranium 285 was like something. It was like special. That it, you know, it was distinguishable in terms of its potential for, you know, applied, applied utility, you know, like military or otherwise. He, if he knew, if he had a deeper understanding than his colleagues of why, he didn't disclose that, but he did say that at once we should secure all available uranium stocks in Germany, that we should cultivate Uranium 235 wherever we find it. He said that a joint research group over his administration, but representing, you know, like all interested factions, you know, party, state, military, you know, and this was, you know, people kind of like shrugged this off, like, well, that's other asl, like trying to, you know, insinuate himself into some kind of, you know, honcho role, I mean, which. Within. With. Under. Under the, under the German Reich especially, you know, in the pre war years, that was not uncommon, but. Or they kind of viewed him as just, you know, another scientist kind of, you know, being hysterical. And for most of the people present at the, at the Jenna conference and these subsequent sort of meetings of this coterie that had had, you know, that was involved in the, you know, or that there were. That was, you know, within this kind of core of people from the, the Department of Educational Standards as well as the War Office, you know, that nobody heard about uranium or uranium research until, until the war broke out. You know, as it happened, when the war did break out, there was,
[95:25]
A
you
[95:25]
B
know, there was the, There was, There was the, There was the nominally civilian research team that we just mentioned that the War Office had kind of secretly, you know, organized. And like I said, like I, I believe there's a direct line from them to the chancery to Adolf Hitler, although I can't prove that, but there were actually two teams in total working on relatively small scale uranium research. Like on the day World War II broke out, okay? Dr. Kurt Diebner, who is the. Was the. Here the Army's expert on nuclear physics of these, the, The. The deepers, was unceremoniously dismantled the very day after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Professor Esau somehow secured an interview with General Becker, who's the Chief of Army Ordinance. He obtained a promise of full War Office support and full and exclusive support for his, for his, you know, for his team's research endeavors at the expense of deep nerds. Now, some people will speculate it's kind of like the dog that didn't bark in evidentiary terms, like, well, how did he pull this off? Especially considering he was a civilian and Deepner was insinuated into the army establishment. He must have, he must have promised some kind of results. I don't think that. I don't, I don't see how that's possible because, I mean, you know, Becker, among other things, you know, he didn't get to that position without having a basic understanding of, of, of, of, of, you know, of chemistry at least. You know, I mean, he was, you're not talking about some man in the street as relates to applied science, you know, even something that was then is kind of theoretically abstract or, you know, unknown as, as, as atomic physics. But I, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't see what Esau could have produced either in order to kind of like in consider, in consideration of that guarantee that supposedly would have been made that Diebner couldn't have, I speculated. Just comes down to Becker having more confidence in one man over the other. But again, who knows? I think all of this is kind of much to do about nothing. Because the point is, I think the key takeaway is that this was not viewed as a priority. Know, not that it was, you know, I, I, I think probably in crude terms, Becker didn't really give a, you know, I mean, he, Germany was now at war with Britain and France, you know, and his priority was, you know, doing what he had to to win that war. You know, like what one egghead is bringing to the table versus another one. Well, he makes the better argument. He gets the, you know, he gets the, he gets the cheddar, you know, I mean, that's, these things that often are. And like I said, I mean, the speculation is basically people filling in the gaps with what they want to, to substantiate a narrative that's, you know, not, that's not substantiated by the record, you know. I mean, so that's specious. Anyway, what Becker did agree to, what Esau did come away with, aside from like a promise of, you know, kind of funding and support, was an official voucher certifying the military importance of the project for the war efforts. But I mean like all kinds of, all kinds of things were kind of given that proverbial stamp, I mean, especially later on and kind of more liberally by the ss, believe it or not. I mean, anything and against the ss, basically, whatever you're given is Himmler like any kind of scientific merit, you know, whether it was, you know, like, you know, find, you know, transforming like, you know, coronated jet fuel or. I don't mean silly, but you know what I mean? Like it's, I don't like the fact that, the fact that Esau was able to, the fact he was able to get, you know, like the, the chief of army ordinance, you know, to sign off on his research. I mean, that basically just means he was competent and like whatever he came up with, like probably would, you know, be util. Whether it was or not, you know, like whatever he came up with belonged to the army, you know, not to Esau, not to any private sector university patron. So that's, oh, that's, that's kind of the foundation of, that's kind of the foundation of, you know, like leading into the war. Like what, what the state of, you know, atomic research was of course, ultimately like during the war. The title of Mr. Irving's book, the Virus House, I mean that was the heavy water facility that was dedicated to, you know, that was dedicated to, you know, cultivating uranium 235. So I mean, there's something there. Yeah. And I hope I'm not boring everybody to death. I'll try to wrap this up in the next episode. But it, but yeah, that's, I don't want to, I don't want to get into that now because then we'd be talking for the next hour. But yeah, that's, that's basically the, the foundation. And you know, like I said, I think it's. The reason why I wanted to cover this now was I think it's time we're gonna go on to the Oppenheimer movie, which in a lot of ways is not a bad film, especially for Hollywood. And like some people believe Christopher Nolan was kind of surreptitiously signaling the political things. I mean, that's a subject for another stream, but I thought it was timely. Man, I hope people are, I mean, I, I, it's, it's essential to understanding the total picture of the conflict. So I hope people are getting something out of it. The feedback seems good so far.
[101:26]
A
Yeah, I think the, the, Yeah, I think that the very first Time we ever talked, we talked about dispelling and changing narratives. And, you know, the narrative of this is wrong. The narrative that people believe of the German bomb program is wrong. So I don't see how anybody can, you know, if one of the goals. If one of the goals is to open people's eyes to World War II and exactly what it was. I think there's no more important. There's no more important subject than a potential, you know, bomb that, you know, they.
[102:15]
B
Oh, he would have just dropped it everywhere. No, I mean, people, too. Like I said, the important. You know, I spent a lot of time with game theory and, like, formal logic. I mean, it's like my background, like, educationally, but also it's. You know, the Cold War was so. I mean, nuclear weapons, like, the Cold War can only be understood within the context of the nuclear paradigm. You know, like, it was just it. It literally defined every aspect of it, like military, political, philosophical. Like, people can't get their minds around really the idea that, you know, in a different strategic paradigm, let alone One in the 20th century, that, you know, nuclear weapons could have not been, you know, the kind of trump card or like, the key to victory that obviated, you know, all, like, lesser killing technologies, you know, like, I can't emphasize that enough. It's like, again, like, even people. I'm not any people who've got their own conceptual prejudices one way or the other about the Third Reich. Like, it's not. Put that out of your mind. Totally think it's truly strategic terms and about irrationality of what Berlin had to accomplish in order to realize its war aims and win the war. Like, again, how would an atomic bomb facilitate that? I mean, on the one hand, like, yeah, it's better always to have, like, potential firepower on hand. That's devastating. But it's not okay. I mean, it's. It's, you know, it's not. It's. It's not like. Like, the utility of these weapons is not. There's not a spectrum, a wide spectrum utility to them. You know, it. And I think people forget that, you know, even people who are basically informed about things and, you know, conceptually literate. But. Yeah, all right, I'm rambling, man. I won't. I won't. I won't keep you any longer. But thanks so much for hosting me, man. I owe you a lot. I mean, we're friends, and I appreciate being able to cover these things, but I really, really appreciate the chance to appear on your program. Like, believe it. No, I'M very.
[104:26]
A
You're always. You're always welcome. All you have to do is contact me with a subject and, you know, we'll do it. But before we do that, hit up some plugs and we'll get out of here.
[104:35]
B
Yeah, legit. I'm always on Substack, and in September, I'll be dropping season two of the podcast. In the interim, I'll keep dropping like one off content that you can listen to, like the Nico Clow interview and other stuff, I promise. But in September, season two will drop and when it does, all. All. All other content, all other podcast content will be free. It's real. Thomas. 777 substack.com you can find me on the app formerly known as Twitter. It's real R, capital R E A L underscore number seven. H O M A S 777. I'm on Telegram. It's at Thomas Graham, number seven. HMAS 777 Graham or. No, it's Thomas. Yeah, no, it's. That's right, that's right. I'm not going senile. I'm just tired. And that's the YouTube channel. There's nothing there yet except a couple one off things, you know, like an intro and, you know, some stuff that I've recorded with friends, like my dear friend Carrie on my YouTube channel. It's Thomas TV. That's when I go to Utah in a couple weeks. It's to begin shooting dedicated content for Thomas tv. So I'm excited about that. You know, we're doing a lot more with the brand, not just, like, sexing up the production values, which I owe to my dear friend Rake and his team. Like, literally, like, I could not do any of this stuff without them. They're the guys who do all, like, the editing and stuff and make things, like, presentable, like, legit. I'd be. If it was just me, like, I. I'd be like some like, hobo, like, looking like he was on Public access in like 1980 or something. Like, it'd be like something from, like. Yeah, it'd be like something from like, Public Access and like some alternate dimension of. But so keep that in mind that they're the guys who really are owed props for anything I do in this regard. But yeah, that's about where we're at. I. I'm hoping to be able to drop Steel Storm three by early spring, Nuremberg by summer, and that's all I got for right now until part three.
[107:09]
A
Thank you, Thomas.
[107:10]
B
Yeah, thank you, Pete.
[107:12]
A
I want to welcome, everyone back to the Picanha Show. I'm here with Thomas. How are you doing, Thomas?
[107:19]
B
I'm doing very well. Thanks for hosting me again. I hope. I hope people have been getting something out of this series. You know, I'm a historical writer, and I know something about political theory and the law and formal logic, but I'm not a scientist at all. I'm not even like, a layman who, you know, is highly competent in science or something. So I hope I'm not embarrassing myself in the way I explain some of these things. Um, but I've gotten feedback. Like, a friend of ours who's a German dude who also has a degree in physics, like, told me that, like, he's like, yeah, I'm proud of you for, like, not totally this up. So that made me feel kind of good. Like, our German friends, as well as, like, our physicist friends generally don't pull any punches in that regard. So. But today, I mean, there's just a lot here. Okay. I mean, but I think, well, maybe go one more episode, just as a, you know, after this one is kind of a bookend and maybe field questions. But I'll. I'll explain what I mean with the statement I'm about to issue fourth as we get into the meat of today's episode. But, you know, the German. The German atomic bomb program such that it. Such that there could even be said to be one that existed. It was basically strangle, in utero when. When the Wehrmacht was, like, stopping its tracks at the gates of Moscow. Okay. And I'll get into what I mean by that as we move along. Okay. If nothing else, you know, military exigencies and the long emergency of a long war, a prolonged war which Germany could not afford to wage, made rendered any kind of German version of the Manhattan Project, you know, not feasible, even if it was strategically sound as regards, you know, its impetus. You know, would it. Would it even resolve Germany's military quagmire? Emergent military quagmire. But there's a lot in between, you know, 1939 and December 1941, that still needs to be addressed. And the person that Heisenberg features very prominently here. Okay, for those who know Heisenberg was not an experimental physicist, he was a very much a theoretical physicist and frankly, something of a philosopher with theological interests. You know, he was not. He was not really the counterpart to Oppenheimer or something. You know, And I say that, like, in the most praising terms. I think a guy like Wolfgang Smith is kind of very much a descendant A spiritual descendant of Heisenberg. So the fact that Heisenberg came to be, you know, kind of helm the, the virus house research and all attendant projects, I mean, that tells you something too. You know. I mean, it's. And I'll. I'll expand upon that with discrete facts and testimony, but that's something people need to keep in mind. You know, it's just. There's a lot of connecting the proverbial dots in the absence of direct testimony or concrete evidence to point to in order to, you know, paint a picture of what this, of what this endeavor was and, you know, what gave rise to it and how it was not what was claimed, but you know, to what degree. To what. To what degree it was. The people who claimed the German atomic bomb program was. Was. Was well underway in a dedicated capacity. The degree to which that was propaganda deliberately cultivated by interested parties contra, you know, people actually believing this was the case owing to the. Not just the fog of war, but, you know, the kind of opaque nature of. Of what was then, you know, the new science, you know, and, and everything else. It's hard to say. I think it depends on who we were talking about, but we'll get into that too, particularly the. The views of people like Stimson versus, you know, those in. You know, I mean, Stimson was an outlier in the New Deal administration anyway, but, you know, he. The view of him versus, you know, people who, who. People in the administration who, who are most receptive to Einstein and Sachs's claim. I, I mean, there's a, There was a. There's a difference in, in conceptual horizon there. But I want to get into. We left off last time with the April 29, 1939 conference. And as, as we. As we got into the focus of that discussion really was the feasibility of a. Of a quote, uranium engine. You know, like we said, such that these, Such that these discussions among this coterie that the War Office had corralled, had, had. It had a focus and later like such that their. Such that their experimental activities, you know, had a discrete focus was. It was really towards what we conceptually what we consider a nuclear reactor. And that becomes relevant. That becomes independently relevant as. As time went on, really relating to the weaponization of. Of. Of Uranium 235, as we'll see but a few days prior, a guy named Niels Bohr, who was a Dane, but he was in some way, he had like an outsized impact on German physics, okay. And he was very much like a mentor of Heisenberg among other. Among other luminaries, he and a guy named J.E. wheeler, they published the American Physical Review, which was read pretty much by everybody in the Western world who was at all involved in physics. Even throughout the war, you know, this endured, Reiterated the idea that uranium 235 had weapons potential. You know, so this was even independent of any New Deal propaganda, independent of any kind of anxieties, well founded or not, within the British intelligence establishment, just worldwide. There were people who were arguably splendidly disinterested in the political climate and the burgeoning battle lines who were playing with this idea. It was at least on their radar. So the climate, the intellectual climate into which everybody was sort of thrust, who was taking on a role in experimental physics and in any combat nation, actual or potential. You know, there was. There was. There was this kind of subtext of, you know, military potential, direct military potential here. Okay. So, I mean, to be fair, like, that's got to. That's got to be accounted for. Otto Hahn, who, you know, who was an experimental physicist and who did have tremendous clout just, Just, just across the board. Like, not just, but it's. Particularly within the, within the committee in Berlin. He said that any project essentially, you know, try and cultivate uranium 235, it. It be. It'd be astronomically expensive and it would present, you know, just insoluble difficulties. Professor Bage, who was a. A preeminent researcher and he was kind of the top researcher who was attached to Heisenberg in a direct capacity, like he was literally his protege. He said, well, let's call it Heisenberg himself. And, you know, if, if this is possible or if this is just, you know, a pipe dream, not even the development of a bomb is not. That's not the question on the table. Just, you know, the, the, you know, the. But The. The extraction of light uranium isotope in appreciable quantities. You know, like, he. If this is possible and if it's feasible, you know, within, you know, our present means, you know, he'd be the man who could. Who could, you know, sort of shed light on this. Now, Heisenberg, Willow, universally respected, like, again, there was a basic element of disdain for theoretical physics among many of these experimental physicists. And that very much. That very became apparent when Heisenberger kind of joined this. Join this, this, this, this quorum. Not quite. I mean, it was anything but a quorum. It was a coterie, you know, and that there was a lot of. There's. There's a lot of. There's A lot of contrarianism for its own sake kind of thrown up in these discussions which in fact David Irving in his book makes that point and he had opportunity to, you know, speak to some of the men who actually were in attendance at these meetings, at least in like a more than oblique capacity. The, what was finally agreed upon was basically that if there was any, if there was, if there's any slight, the official statement, what was decided by like the minutes of, of these kinds of, like the collected minutes of these, of these debates discussions was what Professor Geiger said if there was any, if there was even the slightest chance of liberating energy from the atomic nucleus, it would, you know, in any of these experiments that it had to be followed up. Okay, the, it was recommended that General Becker, you know, the, the ordinance department chief, that, that a dedicated quote, nuclear physics research group be organized under these auspices. And you know, like we talked about last time, like Esau had an amicable relationship already with Becker. And so, so it was, it was, it was, it was made so for security reasons. And this too I think clouded perception of the Allies, at least in those who were within military intelligence for security reasons. The project, the language employed in documents relating to was all characterized as, as research for the creation of potential fuel sources for rocket propulsion. Okay. Like the actual Reich rocket program was, it became, it came under the auspices of, of the SS eventually. You know, that's why von Braun like actually was in, was in, was in uniform in the ss. You know, like he was, you know, like it was formally incorporated into the organization and in a very top down way, you know, the, the rocket program is an example of how, of everything that, you know, the, that, that, that the virus house program wasn't, you know, and I also believe owing to the intrinsically military language of, you know, this kind of deliberate mischaracterization of the program as a rocket program. I think that may have convinced people who came across kind of scraps and, and statements out of the ear, you know, who were spying on the Third Reich. I I think they just made they, they axiomatically determined like, you know, well this is, this is a direct, this is a, this is a direct military endeavor, you know, and that, that's not unreasonable. It's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw, especially if one understood how the German general staff system worked and kind of what the interplay was between, you know, technological research within what was nominally the private sector. And you know, it's, it's the ability of the military to capitalize on, on These. On these developments, you know, but it. I think that's. I think that's interesting. And it's also. It goes to like, where priorities were, you know, like kind of the people. People in the Vermo kind of like what they viewed as like the zenith kind of. Of. Of. Of Vortech, you know, was what was aerospace stuff, you know, with. Like. With. With rocketry obviously kind of being the. The absolute zenith of. Of that. But the. It. What also happened was on. On, uh. On September 16th, first of all, Kurt Diebner, who we talked about last time, he was appointed to lead, at least nominally, the nuclear physics research group under ordinance Department auspices, Dr. Baggy began keeping a diary for the first time in his life because, I mean, I think he realized. I'm sure he realized that whatever the outcome of these endeavors, it was something, you know, he was participating in scientific history, you know, as it was being made. But on the. He notes that on September 16, 1939, Der summoned him personally to report to the army ordinance department. He writes, participated in a, quote, conference about an important matter, then returned to Leipzig. This was the last from this point on, the reason why he uses that. That deliberately minimalist language. And he referenced the possibilities of uranium for any. Any of any application reactors, super bombs. Anything was considered was classified as a state secret, okay? And all. All reference to the possibilities of uranium and energy derived from uranium was. Was actively suppressed. Okay. The first instance. And again, this goes to show you the kind of frosty relationship between the private sector and the army in this regard. You know, kind of splendidly contra. The situation existed between the aviation industry and the military establishment, which is positively incestuous. A Siemens research chemistry. Know Seaman research physicist. You know, Seaman was a huge conglomerate, you know, like they, they. They were basically insinuated everything on the cutting edge of. Of. Of applied sciences, you know, as related to industry and everything else. They. He submitted an article to the main, like, German news agency that contained a detailed description of, you know, like a kind of like the atomic science of the day, you know. And it's. It's supposed, you know, like marvelous potential for purposes civilian and military. And it refers specifically to the power contained in the uranium nucleus. And it said, quote, it potentially contained enough to blast the ruins of a giant city up into the stratosphere. What terrific powers of annihilation and air force would have it could fight an enemy with bombs like these. End quote. And the writer called in no uncertain terms for increased experiments with masses of uranium, which again, the Reich had access to in Czechoslovakia. There were uranium reserves in Portugal too. And later on, late at late, very late in the war, even the British were convinced that this played into some of the kind of, you know, the reasons why like in their view, the furor sort of treated Franco with kid gloves. The majority of these, the majority of these resources were in Portugal. But obviously, you know, the, the key to the, to the peninsula was Iberian peninsula was Spain. But that's something of a tangent. But the, the, this, this article was totally suppressed and the author was warned like nothing of this nature can appear in prison. There was papers on general atomic research were allowed, including directly related to, you know, experience involving uranium and including the light isotope. But no direct mention of their context was to be made and certainly not any even speculative suggestion about, you know, their employment and weapons programs. Now we can look at that any number of ways. You know, like it's like we talked about before and I think you raised, When you're looking ahead, I mean, the Germans are actively at war by this point. This was the, you know, the two weeks prior the United Kingdom and France had declared war on Germany. But even at, even at nominal peace, you know, in a strategic landscape such that Germany was situated, you know, the way you've got to be careful with what you introduce into the stream of information. You got to be careful even about the disinformation you insinuate. And probably it was in the minds of plenty of people that the last thing that the Reich needed was, you know, the New Dealers and the British being able to seize upon statements by top scientists that Germany's working on super weapons. You know, Hitler especially was very cognizant of this, like so is Goebbels. And that, that there's, there's, there's a very interesting give and take around both men's respective ideas on the role of, you know, media at war and as a political apparatus. But my point is that it's not, it's not just like prima facie evidence that, oh, Berlin demanded this be suppressed. They obviously were, you know, this was, their goal was to, you know, do exactly that what was suggested in the article by the Siemens physicist. You know, it's quite a bit more nuanced because if run across very, very basic treatments of that anecdote that, you know, proffer precisely that asinine conclusion. The. Now one of the problems faced, whatever the state of applied research utilizing Uranium 235 by the German scientists was, you know, whether, whether as a dedicated weapons program or just as, you know, trying to identify what potentiality existed utilizing these, you know, these, these, this element specifically Uranium 235 is an energy source like whatever, whatever the, whatever the ultimate goal was. There was a, there, there's a problem with, there's a problem with isolating uranium 235 and cultivating it. Okay. And such was the, you know, there, from there, from whence emerges the concern about, you know, it just being a cost prohibitive affair which makes it, you know, functionally useless, particularly as a, a military, a military endeavor. The September 26, 1939, the second conference of the nuclear physicists at the Ordinance Department was held. The subject of that conference was specifically means of extracting energy from the uranium nucleus either in, either in controlled amounts, you know, as would facilitate a reactor or a uranium furnace or in the uncontrolled chain reaction, reactive violence of an explosion. Okay, the first, the first accomplishing the first would, would involve mixing the uranium with some substance capable of literally slowing down the high energy fast neutrons emitted during the fission process without absorbing them for technical reasons I don't quite understand. Neutrons of a certain energy band are particularly prone to captured by uranium. So for them not to be lost, they, these, these, these fission neutrons had to be, had to be rapidly slowed down by some kind of breaking substance or in science, scientific language like moderating elements or moderator. Okay, the second, second possibility was that if, if, if, if ever it's going to be made to be utilized this as an explosive. You know, if a super bomb was in fact possible, you know, the, it was the rare isotope that was needed to fission with thermal neutrons. Okay, so how do you, how you, how do you get the, how do you get the uranium 235 that you need? You know, in the case of the first question, Professor Hartik, he discussed the design of a uranium reactor to solve both problems. Okay. He had a colleague named Dr. Han Seuss, not Dr. Seuss, the guy who wrote like the cat in the head, like this guy was like an actual, like doctor named Seuss. Like, take from that what you will. I know some dick is going to mention stability sneet or something like. It's not about that. Sue said proposed that heavy water was, was, was to be used in the, in the. As, as, as, as the moderating element. Okay. What is heavy water? It's a form of water, obviously, whose hydrogen atoms are all deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen, rather than the common hydrogen isotope that makes up most of the hydrogen in normal water. The presence of heavier hydrogen, the heavier hydrogen isotope it gives the water different nuclear properties, and the increase in mass alters the physical and chemical properties as it relates to normal water. Okay. Now, So as this research went on, in other words, you know, kind of like the. The challenges, like, stacked up and up and up, and as I'm sure you've gleaned, basically what became clear, according to the path, the course of German research. And America was able to avoid this entirely owing to plutonium. And we'll get into that briefly if there's time or if people are interested. But basically, like, when it came clear at the second conference, what was being floated is that, well, it's not a question of do we build a bomb or do we build a reactor or not. Not even do we. But, like, what. What's the potential here is that if you want. If you want to do anything like the latter, you have to develop the former anyway. Okay. So, I mean, this is just becoming like, who's going to pay for all this when this may not even be possible and we may not even have access to the uranium. Uranium pile reserves that we need in order to accomplish it. The Heisenberg. Enter Heisenberg. He was commissioned specifically to investigate theoretically whether a chain reaction in uranium was possible given the known properties of. Of neutron fusion and uranium fission and the characteristics therein. Over time. This is pre1941. After 1941, things change. Reasons we'll get into that kind of became the focus. It starts to be said to be like a dedicated focus towards a directly military application. Okay. I think this is when discussions corral discreetly around the potential of an atomic bomb within German physics quarters generally and specifically within this ordinance department coterie of great physics minds. Okay. And partly, yeah, obviously, because partly, like, that's something that, you know, the Vermont needed to know about if this was possible, you know, owing to the fact that Germany was now at war. But also, I mean, if that's possible, if, you know, basically, like, it's, you know, if. If there's potential for, you know, energy release at all, you know, like the most kind of. The most kind of concrete way, you know, to understand that in experimental terms is to determine if, you know, like an explosive chain reaction can be cultivated. Okay. I think that must be accounted for and based upon Heisenberg's own notes, like, I'm talking about, like, his personal, like, opinion work product that was, you know, not for anybody else's eyes. This seems to be the case because he never once talks about, you know, I mean, first of all, there was his reactions when he was in captivity to the, you know, to the Hiroshima Nagasaki attacks. But also like in his own, I say opinion work products. It wasn't a proper diary. You know, like never once does he write, you know, some of the effect of, you know, like this. We're, we're working towards development of a bomb. I mean he writes a lot and he, and he raised issues with, with colleagues about, you know, the morality of, of, of this research for various, you know, in various capacities. But never once does one get the idea that, you know, he saw himself as insinuated into some sort of like German Manhattan Project. The. Around the same time the War Office somewhat abruptly they took over the, they took over the building on the campus, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. Okay, because it had, it had the best equipment for, for, for applied atomic research, probably, probably in Europe, definitely within Germany. All, all scientists participating in, you know, the, the War Office project were, they were, they were asked to transfer this one central institute. You know, so they're like, basically like all hands would be on deck under one roof. This is, this is absolutely necessary, okay. Especially when talking about this kind of advanced research. The problem is these men all had, you know, these weren't military men to a man. They were, you know, civilian researchers. They had egos, they, they were all, you know, kind of the kingfish of the pond. They were situated at, in their respective institutions. But it's also, you know, some of these guys were young, but a lot of them weren't, you know, it's like they, people become very attached to their research. Particularly men, I'd have to imagine of brilliant intellectual, you know, they didn't want to, they didn't want to be part of a team. I mean, who the hell does, you know, like in that capacity. So most, almost, most of them, like almost all of them objected and many of them just declined. They just declined what amounted to a direct order. Okay? But it's like the cachet that these men had was, you know, you cannot, you can't, you can't replace nuclear physicists, okay? And like it's the, who was corralled there at the Berlin Dalam or the Kaiser Vellum Institute, like Weiziker, Vitz, Bop, Borman, Fisher and Heisenberg was often present. So I mean there was like a core there, there was, there was, there was a core like working group that did exactly what was, what was directed. But it indicated a real, you know, it indicated a real lack of, of concrete focus and kind of top down discipline towards a directed goal. You know, and that's. That's. I think that's more symptomatic than causative. I mean, it's not. You know, it's not. It's. That's important to understand too, is that, you know, we're not talking about, you know, a true German atomic bomb project, but that was sabotaged by outside egos and eccentricities. It. And I want the second key takeaway too, is that there's this. There's this idea that, you know, there was some, like, brain drain in Germany because, like, you know, all the brilliant physicists were Jewish, like, and got chased out. That's not true at all. Heisenberg probably was like the leading physics mind, like, on this planet, you know, and, you know, Vizagar Vitz, Bob Esau, Borman. I mean, all these guys, like, they were boggy, deep nerd. Like, they. They were the top of their game. And frankly, you know, they weren't. None of these guys were like party men and. Or dedicated national socialists, but they weren't about to reject their fatherland, which frankly, had done tremendous things for them in terms of facilitating their research in all kinds of ways and, you know, providing them with, you know, not just the material means, but the kind of social capital and, And. And structural resources to, you know, to practice their. Their, you know, their. Their. Their experiments and everything else. Or in Heisenberger's case, you know, like, there's really. Probably in. Probably in France and probably in. In like, the Nordic countries. I mean, he would have been like a luminary, but it, you know, he. I mean, Germany was. Germany was the center man. It was the axial pivot of scientific research and endeavor in Europe. That can't be denied, you know. And like, the. That's also. There was a disadvantage here because Matok, but his. One of the, you know, one of the. One of the researchers, he said in uncertain terms that, you know, he was delighted to be assigned this project because, you know, he could continue with atomic research and his young colleagues who he thought had great potential. He said we could protect them from getting called up to the draft. You know, we could continue our scientific research in the manner which we were accustomed, like whether other people had to tighten their belts, you know, other. Other young guys, you know, who had a. A bright future in whatever career field. You know, we're having to go fight, you know, for the fatherland. You know, it's like we were basically unmolested, you know. So, I mean, that's. That's totally different. A totally different idea or sensibility then was the case with the Manhattan Project scientists and in the UK man, like, there was the, you know, there was, like we talked about, you know, Churchill had very. He and his. And his sponsors. I mean, they very effectively, you know, kind of, kind of drown out dissident voices as respect to the war effort, you know, and it had become something of a career killer and especially in university life, which frankly, you know, was. There was a lot of Jewish influence there. You know, these, these, these guys in the UK were the counterparts, you know, to the, to the virus house team as well as the Manhattan Project team. You know, they, they were very much, they were very much working in a dedicated capacity after 1941 to weaponize atomic energy to be turned against Germany. And they had no qualms with this at all. You know, I mean, it wasn't even a question of qualms with, with the Germans. This wasn't even on their radar. You know, I mean, I can't emphasize that enough. And if this was in the military's mind, which I, I don't think it could have been because, I mean, they, that the men who could conceptualize these things were, were all, you know, in, in academe, I, you know, if you, if you're, if the men who can actually perform the experiments as required to facilitate the engineering of such devices as it'd be coveted by the armed forces. I mean, if you can't make them do that, I mean, you're, you're pissing into the wind.
[143:41]
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It.
[143:42]
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No. What changed in 1941 for the Germans? Everything changed in December. But before that, in July 1941, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which has something of an outsized role in the, in what we can think of as kind of like the Churchill defense establishment or like, you know, arms establishment. I mean, for obvious reasons, you know, I mean, I mean, the UK Realized early on it had to transition to a major. Make the transition to a major air power. Otherwise, you know, like the Royal Navy would only be as dominant as, as, as the Royal Air Force could be to defend it. So they, so they, so the Air Ministry and all of its attendant kind of appendages developed a lot of clout. There was a, a special committee appointed to research, uh, the, the potential of atomic energy. Okay? It concluded that an effective uranium bomb and again, uranium until, until American research became kind of known to the world, like after 45, in a complete capacity. Everybody's, you know, uranium was what everybody thought of when they thought of weapons potential. The, this. The Aircraft Production Committee's report was that about 25 pounds of uranium 235, the yield could be equivalent to about 800 tons of TNT. And the committee, the committee's conclusion was that Germany, having taken steps to cultivate heavy water coupled with, you know, their, their increase in mining of uranium ore within, you know, they knew that they newly gained access to in what was Czechoslovakia. That it's obvious that, you know, even, you know, they're the state of Germany is that they're not, they're not looking to utilize this for peaceful purposes. You know, the only immediate benefit to the German Reich of finding ways to release the energy contained therein would be, you know, in a weaponized capacity. I think by this point, I think the British probably believe this. I mean, who the hell knows? I mean like we talked about, these guys were zealots anyway. But considering that, you know, there was far less known, I mean Bradne had some top scientists, but there's far less known there than was known in America, you know, about what the kind of
[147:05]
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real world
[147:09]
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application these things would look like. I think that they probably believe like, you know, anything that the Germans were willing to dedicate this kind of effort to is, is going to be explicitly military and probably, you know, some kind of massive force multiplier that's misguided for a lot of reasons. Not ethically, factually, um, but in a fog of war kind of scenario with the state of science at the time that was, you know, available even to an expert. I, I, I, I think they probably believed what they conveyed. The Churchill. The, they further said that the material for an atomic weapon at the earliest, at the very earliest could be available to Britain by the end of 1943. You know, but that also, you know, begs the question as to like, what would we do with it? Anyone? Would it even work? But the, this of course led the British to try and see what they could find out about the Iranian research program through their contacts in Norway. The, the primary German heavy water facility was at Rajukin, Norway. If I'm butchering that, forgive me Rajukin I think R J U K A N the problem is, as I think the subscribers know because we got into it in our Churchill episodes, the Norwegians did not have particularly warm feelings about the British, particularly when the British had intended to assault and invade and occupy Norway preemptively. Okay, so throughout the summer 1941, as intelligence came in from Trondheim to London, know from their intelligence operatives that, you know, heavy water production, that Rukan, you know, was steadily increasing, the, the, the priority of the priority of the Prime Minister, you know, as well as everybody in the intelligent into military establishment was to, you know, bring the Norwegian intelligence service on board and you know, essentially get somebody to, you know, kind of penetrate the Rijukan facility or at least, you know, develop a, a way of conveying information back to London that might be usable in terms of how, you know, the facility could be, could be compromised and derailed from its purpose. They, the Norwegians essentially told him to go to hell. You know, they, they. The official response from there was a guy named Welsh, he was lieutenant Commander in British in, in, in. In the British army, went on to serve in the intelligence service. He married a Norwegian woman and he was chief of the Norwegian section of, of the intelligence service. He he contacted, when he, when he contacted his counterparts in Norwegian intelligence, apparently they literally said to him in a telegram, blood is thicker than heavy water. You know, like basically go yourself. You know, like, we're not, we're not. We, we want to be thrilled that the, that, that, you know, the, the Vermont is here and we don't know what the hell they're doing, you know, at this facility. But you know, we're not, we're not going to help you and Piggy Churchill find other ways to attack our country, you know, and I think that's very interesting, especially considering how in, particularly in, in, in English history books, you know, like quizzling is held out as just this, like, it's just this buffoon when in reality was a great man. But also they, it's pretended that like Norway was a. Either fully on board with the Allies with this like victim state, you know, like a lot like, you know, there was a, about 5, between 5 and 10,000 Norwegians like joined the Waffen SS and for a population that's in Norway that's substantial. Like Newt Hampson was kind of like the national scribe in Norway. You know, he literally wrote a eulogy to Adolf Hitler. Like they, I mean the Norwegians are great people, but I, it, it's just an interesting kind of wrinkle that, you know, they refuse to participate in kind of these, these designs of, of London even at the height of the, of the, the early phase of the war. At the same time the, the British approached, at least as we know from the record, the British approached the, the senior British scientific representative in, in the, in, in the Air Ministry committee. He wrote, he wrote to the chairman of Roosevelt's scientific advisory committee, like when he was in Washington, I believe, like if I read that right, you know, basically like you know, kind of feeling out, you know, the, the Yanks about, you know, what the state of their research was. And of course, like they, nobody outside the Manhattan Project, you know, like, knew anything. Like, even if they had, I, I, it's, I mean, it's debatable if they would have disclosed that or not. But, you know, there was, it was, security was very, very tight, to say the least. But he floated the question, you know, it proves possible to manufacture a uranium bomb, you know, should it in fact be used? You know, like, should we should, should, you know, one of our respective general staffs or both, like, are they willing and should they sanction the total destruction of Berlin and the entire, you know, or, or like the entire country in Germany, you know, with, with a weapon such as this, you know, and it, that's really the only, the kind of, the kind of lame, indirect reply was from Stimson, who and Stimson, like I mentioned earlier tonight, but also like in the past I've mentioned that Stimson was a, he was an outlier in the new New Dealer regime. But, you know, he said years after the fact that, you know, in 1942, 1943, we believed, based on, you know, intelligence derived that we consider reliable that, you know, the Germans were far ahead of us and weaponized atomic research. I think Stimson probably believed that. But it's interesting I raised the issue of the, the UK scientific representative, like, not only raising this moral quagmire but, you know, kind of putting it to paper literally in the documentary record. That's the only, that's the only such moral qualm I've ever heard from a British source about, about the, about the atomic bomb from, you know, from the era before it was it even, you know, had been devised into existence. Bomber Harris spoke very candidly and intelligently on the morality of strategic bombing, you know, later on, but, but not of the out of the nuclear question, but it's, I think this stuff's useful to kind of, it paints a picture of what was in the minds of the relevant players, you know, and like I said, by the, in reality, America was far ahead of everybody in terms of, you know, applied atomic weapons research. Plutonium was first synthesized, synthetically produced and isolated in late 1940 by Deuteron bombardment of uranium 238 in a cyclotron at University of California, Berkeley. Okay. And the ultimately, plutonium, Plutonium proved to be a game changer. The Nagasaki bomb was a, was a plutonium bomb. Okay. But even like, aside from that, just it separating plutonium from a chain, you're acting uranium pile and then using that as an atomic explosive. Just the fact that that possibility had been recognized, that meant that, you know, from, you know, basically from inception the Manhattan Project was like on the path to like developing an atomic bomb, like in concrete terms, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, in all kinds of ways. I mean like good and dead. But the, the, The, what the hell was gonna say? Oh, the summer of 1941 in Germany, the, the army research department had formally contracted Norwegian Hydro for a supply of 1500 kilograms of heavy water between October and the end of the year. Or. But from October 9, the end of the year, only 361 kilograms have been delivered. It was slow going. In other words, like, if, if this was in a, like, even if, even if the process which was outlined at the second Berlin conference would essentially amount to do, you know, the creation of a reactor and subsequently, you know, the utilization of that reactor and the heavy water coolant to, you know, to cultivate uranium 235. Like, even if that, even if that was the objective and it was on track, arguably in terms of, you know, both intent and capability, this seems far too slow a process to make any kind of difference on the battlefield. We'll get into exactly what I mean in a minute. But what's important is that once, once this, once this heavy water cultivation got underway. Heisenberg attested, he said it was from September 41. He's like, we saw an open road ahead of us leading to an atomic bomb, okay. He's like, this is when I became convinced this was at least possible. And that's when, you know, just kind of what was, what was gleaned from, you know, just these processes that were actively underway. Things came into focus in a kind of conceptual capacity, if that makes sense. Like I'm not a scientist, so I take these guys words for it in their testimony when they suggest that this is, this is a, you know, a real process, whatever the endeavor is Neil's bore and this is important. The end of October 1941, Heismer traveled to Denmark to seek out Niels Bohr, who was one of the preeminent physics minds on this planet. And Heisen, he was something of a mentor to Heisenberg. Heisenberg asked him in at Bohr's home. He said, you know, and obviously Heisenberg wasn't being loose lipped and telling him like what he was working on. He asked for just, you know, basically like, you know, what, what do you think of the like is there a moral obligation to not cultivate, you know, a weapon from atomic energy? Like, basically like what's the moral implications of working on an atomic bomb in wartime if such a thing were possible? You know, board said that, you know, it, you know, well, you know, the, the responsibility one's fatherland versus, you know, his duty to, you know, the scientific community as well as, you know, like human progress. You know, these things all need to be weighed. Borer afterwards came away believing that this was like Heisenberg's, kind of like it was either Heisenberg sort of like thinly veiled confession or it was him trying to convey to him and sort of like a culted language that he was building an atomic bomb, quite literally. And he, he see, he, he later said boarded that he was deeply shocked. This I believe Bore basically told all of his intimates within kind of the small fraternity of European physicists that, you know, Heisenberg came to see me and the Reich is building a bomb. Okay. And I think that's when the kind of myth of the German atomic bomb program like really kind of took off in earnest. Not in a propaganda capacity. Like I think people actually believe this and I think Bohr actually believed this too. But even if that were true, and I'm going to wrap up here in a moment, but as fall became winter in 1941, the Wehrmacht was stopped dead in its tracks at the gates of Moscow. You know, and as we've talked about many times in our series, you know, the Reich, the Soviet Union had to fall in December. You know, the, the entire German state, its national economics, everything about it was configured towards, quote, short wars with long respites. You know, like, that's why I always emphasize that the Third Reich was not some like mirror of the Soviet Union. It was not mobilized for war from the top down. It did not even have a wartime mobilization scheme in place, you know, until 1943. You know, this was the fact that the assault on Moscow failed. I mean, this was a disaster. Like ultimately this cost the war. But immediately in December 41, Hitler issued the edict that the needs of the German national economy are to give way to the necessities the armaments economy. And that meant that, you know, Fritz Toad on December 3rd, and for those who don't know, Fritz Toad was the Albert Speer succeeded Fritz Toad as armaments and munitions minister. After Toad was killed, Toads informed Hitler that the economy was literally at the breaking point. And from then on, any expansion in one sector to meet military necessities had to be balanced by you know, reduction in another. You know, Hitler drafted a decree essentially with like toast input as to
[163:14]
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you
[163:14]
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know, what, what this would entail, you know and essentially like shedding all like non essential projects from like any firms or institutions like engaged in applied research of a non military nature. Like essentially like that was over, you know. It's. Professor Schumann, one of the JENNA conference attendees, he drafted an open letter to all institutes working on the ARENA project and he said, he stated no uncertain terms that the, the quote, the work and the project undertaken by the research group is making demands which can be justified in the current recruiting and raw materials crisis only if there's a certainty of getting some benefit from it in the near future. You know. And that and that and that. That was that man. It's. We can. There's more to the story of the virus House. As the war went on and particularly as you know the tide truly turned. I mean NC was no longer a possibility after December 41st but after Stalingrad, you know it can. There's obviously like an open ended question is like why did the Iranian project continue? But that owed to, that owed to a, that owed to kind of the nature of modern bureaucracy, particularly in a state of total war. You know, like these things that are earmarked for funding of a way even in an emergency of just kind of continuing to go on, you know, were there, were there some people too like within. That's just the research group but within the military establishment who did understand the implications of this uranium research and did think that there was potential for a real viable device to be cultivated from it, you know, in a way that could like help Germany. Yeah, I think there were. David Irving certainly seemed to think there were. We get into some of that next episode and I promise like I'll wrap it up. But there was just a lot here man, you know and like I think, I think the entire story needs to be told. But yeah, that's, I'm, I'm getting uncomfortable from like sitting for the best hours and I don't want to bore people to death. But yeah, we'll, we'll take this up man for a part four and I'll, I'll wrap it up then, I promise.
[165:46]
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Yeah, I don't think it's boring. I think people are getting a lot out of this. So yeah, we'll do, we'll do. Wrap it up with parts. Yeah. But do plugs real quick and we'll get it out. We'll get out of here.
[166:02]
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Yeah. You can find me on Twitter still or X Rayther. I hate all like porny. That seems like I don't like. I don't like. I was on my phone like on the train. There's like some chick next to me and like you only open the abs like a big X. It's like, man, I don't. That just looks. I just don't like it. But it's real. Capital R E A L underscore number 7H1E S777 on on bird app or X app or whatever. The home of my podcast and some of my like longer form stuff is on Substack. That's the prime primary place to hit me up. And it's real. Thomas777.substack.com you can find my website, which is still under construction, but there is stuff there. It's just thomas777.com Number7homies777.com My YouTube channel is Thomas TV. Leaving for Utah in a few days to shoot dedicated content for it, which I'm excited about. As time goes on, we're going to do more with that, but I got a lot going on right now. I'll be dropping more long form, like books like in the spring, you know, season two of the pod is coming up in September. Yeah, all kinds of stuff, man.
[167:22]
A
I appreciate it. Safe travels. Until the next time.

Summary7 min read

The Pete Quiñones Show

Series: Germany’s WW2 Atomic Weapons Program with Thomas777 – Complete
Episodes: Parts 1–4
Date: Aug 7, 2026
Host: Pete Quiñones
Guest: Thomas777 (historian, political theorist, author)

Overview

This miniseries, led by Pete Quiñones and historian Thomas777, presents an in-depth critical history of the German atomic weapons program during World War II. Designed as a comprehensive counter-narrative to mainstream accounts (and as a foil to popular treatments like the "Oppenheimer" film), the discussion scrutinizes longstanding myths and propaganda about German nuclear ambitions, challenges the conventional “mad dash for the bomb” story, and explores the actual state, motivations, and personalities behind nuclear research in the Third Reich.

The objective is not only to correct misunderstandings about the German atomic bomb project but also to stimulate critical thinking about the role of strategic weapons in WWII and how historical narratives are constructed for ideological purposes.

Key Themes & Arguments

Demystifying the Myth: German research into nuclear power and weapons was not a centralized, maniacal, or secretive “Manhattan Project”-style effort.
Personality & Paradigm: Otto Hahn, not Oppenheimer or Einstein, is credited by Thomas777 as the true father of the atomic bomb, highlighting the dominant role of German scientists in early nuclear research.
Utility & Context: The notion that nuclear weapons are “superweapons” with universal military utility is critiqued; Thomas notes their actual strategic value in WWII was limited, especially for Germany.
Propaganda & Narrative: The Anglo-American narrative of a looming Nazi bomb threat was, in large part, a postwar ideological construction to justify the Manhattan Project and the bombings of Japan.
Culture of Science: The academic and institutional culture in Germany did not favor militarized “total war” research as seen in the US/UK or USSR.
Technical & Bureaucratic Hurdles: German atomic research focused more on reactors (“uranium burners”) than bomb-making, hampered by infighting, resource constraints, and a lack of centralized will and capacity.

Detailed Episode Highlights

PART 1

Setting the Stage: The Real 'Father of the Bomb', Science and Myth-Making

[00:00-15:00]

Pete introduces the series, pitching it as a revisionist supplement to popular takes like the "Oppenheimer" movie.
Thomas immediately rebuts the idea that the US developed the bomb solely due to fear of an imminent Nazi bomb: “This idea that the Third Reich was feverishly developing an atomic capability...is preposterous for a lot of reasons.” (B, 03:42)
Credits Otto Hahn, not Oppenheimer or Einstein, as the true founder of nuclear fission and modern nuclear chemistry.

[15:00-35:00]

Discusses Hahn’s important discoveries (100% of weapons-oriented nuclear research built on his findings).
German contributions to nuclear science were substantial and not undermined by anti-Semitism.
Hahn, and other German scientists, were not ideologically in step with the Nazis but did not “sabotage” the war effort in any organized way.

The Farm Hall Episode—German Scientists Learn of Hiroshima

[35:00-46:00]

Explains Operation Epsilon and the internment of German physicists at Farm Hall; their shocked reaction to the Hiroshima bombing.
Heisenberg’s disbelief that the Americans had managed to build the bomb: “He thought this was propaganda.” (B, 38:45)
"A major part of the reason for this myth that the Germans were furiously chasing the bomb comes from postwar anti-fascist propaganda." (B, throughout)

[46:00-52:00]

Discusses the scientists’ moral discomfort—Otto Hahn considered suicide after learning of the bomb’s use, blaming himself.

PART 2

The True State of German Atomic Research Pre-War and Early War

[53:05+]

Dispels Hollywood-style "race for the bomb" narrative: “There was never a Third Reich version of the Manhattan Project underway...nothing like that was afoot.” (B, 53:30)
Competing academic and party-military fiefdoms prevented unified, focused bomb research.
German research moving chiefly toward reactors (“uranium burning engines”), not bombs.

[~64:00+]

UK and French scientists confirm theoretical possibilities, but practical weaponization considered remote.
British intelligence and press stoke fears of a “Nazi super bomb”—more a product of propaganda than real assessment.
The German state lacked the “top-down” mobilization typical of totalitarian regimes like the USSR or even Allied total war states.

Resource Competition, Bureaucratic Chaos

[90:00+]

Important insight into the fractured, rivalrous, and non-totalitarian nature of German scientific/military collaboration.
Early war “atomic projects” in Germany more about maintaining turf, and securing resources/funding, than a drive to weaponization.

PART 3

From Research to National Emergency: The Virus House and Heavy Water

[107:18+]

Heisenberg, the central figure—more of a theoretical genius and philosopher than a practical project manager.
1939 conference records show consensus: “If there’s even the slightest chance to liberate energy from the atomic nucleus…it must be followed up.” (B, 112:20)
Officially, the project characterized as research into rocket propulsion to conceal its nuclear nature.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute becomes the center for atomic research, but compliance among scientists is uneven due to resistance from established academic authorities.

The Reality of the German Atomic Bomb Program

[143:00+]

By 1941, advances (notably in heavy water from Norway) suggest an “open road…leading to an atomic bomb,” per Heisenberg’s later accounts. (B, 147:00)
The “myth” of the Nazi atomic bomb really gathers steam after Heisenberg’s conversation with Niels Bohr, which Bohr misinterprets as evidence the Germans are building a bomb.
After the defeat before Moscow (Dec 1941), resource crisis and economic decrees force abandonment of major “non-essential” projects; atomic weapons research survives more as bureaucratic inertia than real hope of success.

PART 4 (Series Wrap-Up/Preview)

Lessons, Strategic Realities, and Final Myths Challenged

[165:00+]

Thomas: “The German atomic bomb program…was strangled in utero when the Wehrmacht stopped at the gates of Moscow…after that point, total commitment to armaments meant all non-immediate projects were cut.”
Many scientists welcomed atomic research as a way to shield young researchers from conscription, not primarily for the bomb’s military promise.

Notable Quotes & Moments

“The idea that the Germans were just these crazy fools who didn’t understand physics…that’s asinine beyond belief.”
– Thomas777, [04:50]

“Otto Hahn was not averse to applying science to military endeavors, including the somewhat horrible endeavor of chemical warfare…There is a natural progression from chemical to nuclear warfare.”
– Thomas777, [11:20]

“There’s a kind of mythology—punitive mythology—that both the Germans were idiots who couldn’t invent the bomb and, simultaneously, madmen obsessed with it. Both are nonsense.”
– Thomas777, [14:00]

“Heisenberg didn’t believe Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb, but by conventional means or propaganda. The scientific community was tiny, and trust in each other was high.”
– Thomas777, [40:10]

“These men…weren’t party men, weren’t National Socialists. But they weren’t going to betray their fatherland, which had done tremendous things for them.”
– Thomas777, [113:00]

“If there was any slight chance of liberating energy from the atomic nucleus…that had to be followed up.”
– Conference minutes quoted by Thomas777, [112:20]

“There’s this idea that nuclear weapons are just a trump card. That does not make sense. There’s a very narrow strategic paradigm where they have real utility.”
– Thomas777, [56:00]

Important Timestamps

[00:29] – Thomas introduces the theme: myth vs. reality of German atomic program.
[20:00-25:00] – Analysis of Otto Hahn, uranium discovery, and German contributions.
[35:00-45:00] – Operation Epsilon (Farm Hall): German physicists’ reactions to Hiroshima.
[49:21] – On whether German scientists were “sabotaging” the bomb effort.
[53:00-67:00] – Dissecting the pre-war and wartime structure of German scientific research.
[83:39] – British disinformation proposals: “We’ve tested plutonium weapons…” as propaganda.
[107:18+] – The Virus House project, Heisenberg’s actual responsibilities; internal disorganization.
[143:41] – Turning point, 1941: the effect of the failed Moscow offensive on the bomb program.
[147:00] – Heisenberg believes the bomb is theoretically open “from September 1941.”
[163:13] – Hitler’s national emergency decree; atomic research is deprioritized.
[165:46-167:21] – Closing remarks, practical realities of why the German bomb effort effectively ended.

Conclusions & Takeaways

There was no unified, focused, or large-scale German atomic bomb project akin to the Manhattan Project.
German research was more focused on the potential of nuclear reactors, with bomb-making remaining remote due to technical, economic, and bureaucratic obstacles.
The mainstream Anglo-American narrative about a looming Nazi bomb was in large part a retrospective rationale for Allied choices and an ideological warning.
The strategic utility of nuclear weapons, especially in the context of WWII for Germany, was far less than popularly imagined.
Personalities, academic culture, and regime dynamics in Germany made a “total war” bomb project practically impossible.

Series Structure

Part 1: German nuclear science origins, Otto Hahn, the postwar myth, Farm Hall episode.
Part 2: State of German prewar/wartime science, rivalry, reactor vs. bomb focus, British/Allied attitudes, propaganda.
Part 3: Technical challenges (uranium, heavy water), the Virus House, Heisenberg’s role, the effect of war developments.
Part 4 (to come): Wrap-up: why the “Nazi bomb” never emerged; further ramifications; open Q&A.

This series is an essential counterpoint for anyone grappling with the standard WWII atomic narrative or seeking a nuanced, evidence-based account of the German atomic program.

Loading summary

Transcript35 lines

[00:01]
A
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinono Show. Thomas, we got a new series that you wanted to start here. You mentioned it and I was like, we need to jump all over it, especially since you mentioned the Oppenheimer movie that's out and that this would be a good supplement or side by side to it. So tell everybody a little bit about what you're, what you're thinking.
[00:30]
B
I want to discuss the German atomic bomb, like everything about it. Like, if such a program existed, you know, conceptually what it, you know, what was the catalyst for it, you know, what was the state of, of science at the time. And also in kind of more apocal terms, you know, I want to talk about nuclear weapons generally or atomic weapons in that era. You know, people, people have a misunderstanding about, about, about the bomb and about nuclear weapons generally. They, people like Thomas Schilling and like Herman Khan, they made the point that nuclear weapons are like any other weapons. They're just far, far more muscle bound. The, the ability to impose, you know, devastating attrition in an instant says some, you know, marks them apart as does, you know, very like strategic variables relating to their destructive power creates peculiar paradigms. I mean, all that is true, okay, but they don't have, they don't have great utility in any kind of like general applied sense. And there's, there's actually very few paradigms where they really are, are a game changer or that they really advance, you know, the military strangers of the state, you know, instantaneously. You know, like it. This is kind of like, this is kind of like mythical belief in super weapons. Just. I mean, it's like an ongoing thing that just seems that we have people assign a kind of mystique, you know, to war tech. And I guess like nuclear weapons could be viewed as kind of like the zenith of that. So I mean, there's just that. But beyond that, there's deliberately cultivated narratives around, around the, the issue historically, like the development of the first atomic bomb. A lot of this has to do with anti fascism, you know, like ideological anti fascism. A lot of this has to do with rationalizations for, you know, America's development of the bomb and attempt to defend its monopoly on such capabilities. You know, the. There. So there's this idea that was presented by the War Department in the aftermath of, you know, the nuclear assault on Japan that, well, we developed this thing because, you know, the Third Reich was, was feverishly developing an atomic capability. And you know, that would have, that would, that would have changed everything, you know, and this, this evil tyrannical regime set bent on world domination could have held. Held the planet hostage with atomic weapons. That's, and that's preposterous for a lot of reasons, but it does beg the question as to was, was the German Reich developing an atomic bomb actively? That's a complicated question for a lot of reasons, not the least of which. Not the least of which for reasons not the least of which is the fact that Oppenheimer was not the father of the atomic bomb. Neither was Einstein. A man named Otto Hahn was. And this didn't used to be controversial. Okay, who was, who was Otto Hahn? Otto Hahn was born in 1879. He died when he was quite elderly in July 1968. Han is the father of nuclear chemistry and specifically nuclear fission. Okay. Han and his assistant, a lady named. Meitner, they discovered the radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protectinum, and most importantly, uranium. In the second episode. I'm no physics guy, but I do know something. As much as a layman can kind of understand these things. We'll get into why uranium is so important and like what uranium actually is. I'm gonna like bore everybody to death. But it's important to understand and applied capacities. You know, how atomic research developed into a, a discreetly military endeavor. Okay. But Han also, through his experience, through his experiments which were myriad, he discovered the phenomena of what's called atomic recoil and nuclear, nuclear isomerism. And he pioneered a lot of the techniques that ultimately gave rise to carbon dating. Okay, so the guy was a, the guy was a, was, was, was an intellectual giant. But quite literally everybody subsequent, every, every researcher engaged in nuclear science and specifically weapons based nuclear research, they were, they were literally, they were literally borrowing from Han's research. Okay, that's indisputable. And like I said at, in the epoch he was credited as such this idea that, you know, like, oh, that the Germans were just like these crazy fools and they didn't understand physics or something or I mean that's as nine beyond beliefs. Also like this idea that like, oh, like you know, because of anti Semitism, you know, the, the Germans didn't have a coterie of top scientific minds like that. That's preposterous. Like, not only is that preposterous, but quite literally, you know, the technology that facilitated the development of nuclear weapons was literally invented by the Germans. Okay, now for background too. Han, he received in 1944 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And, and just we'll get into this again in the second and third episodes. I think we, I think it should probably be a three part series. But the, but, but just nuclear fission was the wasn't is the basis for nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. Okay. It makes all those things pot not just possible, but conceivable. Okay. Interestingly, interestingly, during World War I, because Han was a little bit older, he served with a land there regiment which you know, in the Kaiser's, in the Kaiser Reich was like a, a reserve regiment, generally consistent. Like it was kind of like the Home Guard or like what the British used to call the Territorial Army. But he actually was mobilized and deployed and he was, he was attached to a chemical weapons unit, chemical warfare unit headed by Fritz Haber. On the Western front, Eastern front and Italian front, he was in heavy action. He was awarded the Iron Cross second class. So I mean he, why do I raise this specifically? It's not just because, it's not just because it's interesting trivia, but it, I'm trying to demonstrate the aspect of Han's character. Han was not averse to the, you know, applying science in, in, in military endeavors. Okay. Including the somewhat horrible endeavor of chemical warfare. All right. This becomes an issue later on as do what Han's view was of, you know, applying nuclear fission to, to weapons development. Okay. And plus it's just interesting background and there's, I, I, I believe there's very much, I believe there's very much a natural progression conceptually, okay. From chemical warfare to nuclear warfare. And I, I mean it's arguable, but I think it's important and I think people, people understand people who understand institutional thinking and the men who populate those institutions and the way they kind of the paradigms that they play with, as it were. I, I think that it's somewhat inarguable, but this kind of thing was very much on, on, on the minds of, of, of European physicists. Okay. The concrete engineering of what became the atomic bomb wasn't. And we'll get into why that was. But it's like I said, there's this like mythology, there's this punitive mythology that it's that both somehow simultaneously, the Germans were idiots who had no idea how to apply what was called the new physics to war fighting and the engineering of weapons. But on the other hand, they were like these maniacs hell bent on, on developing an atomic bomb. And you know, only the, only, only these like, only the, only these like, you know, genius astronomy, like, you know, we're able to save the day. And of course, like Einstein is the Father of nuclear physics and, and Oppenheimer is the father of the atomic bomb. That's total nonsense. Okay. And it's not a partisan take. It's an arguable for those who I'm sure are gonna send me hate messages about it. That's just not true. It's like, well, I can, you know, I can source all of these claims. The. Let's jump to the end of the war because I think Irving's book the Virus House, as well as, which is a source I rely on tremendously. It's the best book on the German atomic bomb. There's also a book by, of not by. It's about, it's about Edwin Teller. And it, the narrative kind of begins on the date that the. Of the Hiroshima attack because that's really. People don't realize. I think the degree towards the Manhattan Project truly was secret and it, the attack did shock the world. It's rather amazing the degree to which the Manhattan Project was able to maintain operational security. But I, I say let's start there for a few reasons as will become evident, the, it's the point at which the world was quite literally introduced to the atomic bomb, including a coterie of German scientists who had been taken prisoner by MI6 and squirreled off to the United Kingdom. So August 6, 1945, the BBC Home Service, they broadcast the first news that an atomic bomb had been dropped in Hiroshima. The bulletin announced that the bomb in question contained as much explosive power as 2000 of the RAF's 10 ton bombs. President Truman had declared that the Germans had worked feverishly to find a way to use atomic energy, but had failed. Now at a premises called Farm hall. This was a country house near Huntington in the, in, in England, A coterie of German physicists were being held prisoner there incident. What was called Operation Epsilon. Epsilon was the code name for this endeavor that took place between May 1 and June 30, 1945, whereby the Allies identified 10 German scientists who are believed to have worked on the German atomic bomb program. And these men were, they were captured and they were again, they were squirreled away to, to England and detained in this, in this kind of mansion house near Cambridge called Farm Hall. Okay? The proximity to the university is not an accident either because it was, it was a weird kind of incarceration that these guys endured because on the one hand it was very punitive. On the other hand, you know, if they, if you wanted these men to speak, you know, London wanted these men to speak to, you know, their own academics about the you know, about the bomb and things. And if you're, and if you're just, you know, kind of like treating people like forcing them to live, you know, like, like, you know, like abject in squalor or whatever or, you know, or, or abject prisoners in the traditional sense that that wouldn't have happened. So I mean it's, it kind of reminds me of the early days of like Speer's detention. Okay. Although obviously he ultimately endured true horrors as we got into in an earlier series. But the, the goal, nominally, and I think this is basically true of what, what MI6 and the US War Department both claimed independently was that the goal was to determine how close the German Roy could come to the development of a viable atomic bomb. First among the detainees was Otto Han. Okay? It, and this was attested to not just by, not, not just by his fellow detainees, but, but by his interrogators and, and, and the, you know, in the MI6 men who were guarding him and debriefing him there, there was concern that Han would commit suicide because he was so beside himself that this bomb had been created and he blamed himself. You know, it's not like, you know, this was, this was very poignant. Okay. And I don't, this is on my mind like I watched the Oppenheimer movie the other day, like this idea that like Oppenheimer single, like single handedly created the atomic bomb and lived with this terrible guilt. That's ridiculous. Like it's not, you know, it's, it's as if they like extrapolated like Hans life and mind and memories and you know, transpose it onto this kind of character of Oppenheimer who has some relation to the historical man but has become kind of like this, you know, this almost like mythical figure. But the, a major T.H. rittner, he was the British officer in charge at Farm Hall. He, he, he, he asked Rahan to be brought to his office immediately to make sure that his, he was stable of mind and also he just wanted to speak to him about, you know, what had just happened. According to Radner, Hahn was horrified and again, he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He told Rittner, Han told Rittner. And apparently according to independent witnesses, not just Rittner himself, Han and Rittner developed something of a rapport, okay, during his time there. And Hahn had told Rittner, you know, on multiple occasions that he'd had forebodings about the potentialities of his discovery of nuclear fission. But he never thought that you know, a weapon would be rapidly engineered and deployed with that kind of destructive power, like, not because it was impossible, but we'll, we'll get into what, what, you know, he thought would give, would give the scientific community pause, among other things. Now, who are the other detainees of Farm hall? They were Dr. Eric Bage or Bodge, Dr. Kurt Der, a professor named Walter Gerlock, Otto Hahn, of course Paul Hartik, the famous Werner Heisenberg, a man named Horst Korshing, a professor named Max von Lau, another professor named Carl Friedrich von weiziker, and a Dr. Carl Wirtz. Now, the premises at Farm hall were bugged, okay, Everywhere it was from the kind of common recreation area to the private court of. And this wasn't this, this wasn't just incidental. One of the key purposes of, of detaining the German atomic scientists was the eavesdrop on the, the conversations between the, you know, the men themselves. Now as the, what the mers picked up as the, as the news was, was relayed was that Heisenberg, Heisenberg disputed the possibility that the Americans even had a bomb and dropped it. Like he, he didn't dispute that, that Hiroshima was destroyed, but he, he, he believed it was some kind of conventional weapon, like some kind of muscle bound conventional weapon or series of firebomb raids like, had been conducted over Tokyo where 100,000 people died in 24 hours. Like, he thought this was, he thought this was propaganda, okay? Not because it would be impossible to create a bomb, but he, you know, the scientific community was, it was a peculiar thing in the, even, even, you know, even on the EVA hostilities, the number of men who truly understood, you know, the new physics and were insinuated into, you know, the applied research of these things. It was an incredibly small fraternity, okay? And men like that then kind of looked at themselves with the exception of a certain coterie that ended up in America. They looked at themselves as being part of a community that kind of transcended politics. Okay? Heisenberg, he was personally friendly with Dr. Goudsmith, who was the head of the American intelligence mission which had debriefed him when he was initially taken prisoner. And Goudsmit was a fellow physicist and they, Heisenberg and Goudsmith knew of each other. And Heisenberger developed like a pretty good rapport with him. And he asked God, Goudsmit whether whether atomic weapons research was something that the Allies were endeavoring to, you know, take on or if, or if there was any, you know, background of such applied experiments, you know, the end goal of weaponizing atomic energy. And Goudsmit assured him that that was not the case. And Goudsmit, I guarantee, had no idea about the Manhattan Project. He was speaking totally honestly. Okay, so maybe it was naivete, as some people might say, in the part of Heisenberg thinking like that, you know, the kind of, the kind of, the kind of fraternity of pure science would mean that, you know, no one would, no, no colleague would lie to another on such an important and like literally earth shaking matter. But that again, it was different times. It was different. You know, it was. These guys weren't ordinary academics or scientists, you know, they, they were like the elite of the elite of the elite. And also, again, like Goud Smith, I believe was telling the truth. Like he didn't know about the Manhattan Project, you know, and plus two, I mean, like the, it shocked everybody because like the war in Europe was done. Like Japan was utterly destroyed and couldn't even defend itself. You know, that's why it's like, that's why there's this lame, like the Fed's like, oh, Japan had to be invaded because they were just crazy and like a million Americans would have died like that. That's ridiculous. The bomb was deployed. These things developed their own momentum. The bomb is going to be deployed somewhere. It had been developed to destroy Europe, which is totally insane if you think about that, you know, like genocide in your own race with nuclear weapons. But it, but aside from that, it's. I don't think the Soviets would have stopped, you know, and they, you know, they were, they were, they were actively. The Soviets had gone to war against Japan in the final days, you know, like, who's to say, who's to say they would have abided, you know, Truman's demands had, had the bombs, plural, not been deployed. But in any event, that's the rapidity to which too, that's something to keep in mind, like the kind of the core concepts of weaponizing nuclear energy. This is really only six years old. Okay, So I believe there was something of this idea that America could just rapidly, you know, kind of develop a competency in the new physics, you know, and within basically half a decade, you know, develop a weaponized capability. Like, it seemed unlikely, you know, it's, it was extraordinary. And putting oneself in the shoes of Heisenberg, I mean, think about the disorientation of, of what he had just endured and kind of like what of the German like experience generally, like in, you know, 1945, 1946, and finally too, the. The Americans and the British came who, you know, in operational terms, they worked fairly closely in the immediate aftermath of the German defeat for practical reasons, but also political ones. The last German uranium pile laboratory to be seized, that was the library staffed by Weizacker and Wirtz. It was actually located in the French occupation zone. And the US army, with the assistance the British at all costs, aimed to prevent radioactive material and the research data from this pile laboratory, uranium pile laboratory from falling into French hands. Like they, they, they were singularly fixated on this, okay? And the Germans knew this. And that's, and that's how, and that's why Viziker and Vert ended up in the hands of, of the British and not the French. But the reasoning too, in Heisenberg's mind was like, okay, like, if you, if you guys have the bomb, like, why, why are you fixated on, you know, grabbing all the uranium you can and preventing it from falling into, you know, rival hands or whatever? Like, it just. But again too, nobody, nobody knew about the Manhattan Project other than those involved. And you know, the, the, the, the, the, the five stars around Truman himself. It, overall, the feelings of the Germans. Irving characterized it as a sense of recrimination. They were shocked by the fanaticism of people who are not under direct, like, physical threat, who just develop, like rapidly develop an atomic bomb. It like, in their mind, it's like it indicated the kind of fanaticism that had been like, hysterically attributed to them and the Japanese by the New Dealers. You know, it's like you guys have, you guys have, you guys have an ocean between the people you claim your enemies and you're like feverishly developing atomic bombs. Like that's, there's something frankly insane about that. It, well, let me ask.
[25:20]
A
Could they, could they really have been shocked? I mean, it. How would a Han and a Heisenberg, how, how up would they have been on, you know, New Deal, what the New Deal was bringing in what, you know, what was basically going to happen where. Yeah, of course this group of people wants once control of the bomb.
[25:44]
B
They're megalomaniacal because these guys are scientists, not politicians. And again too, it. We're speaking of things that happened 80 years ago and that we take for granted. Like it didn't, you know. And, and also I believe they thought that, you know, the degree to which, and the degree. I mean, listen to, listen to the Hitler's December 11, 1941 speech. You know, it's. People were, people were somewhat flabbergasted that America was Literally talking about making total war on Europe for, frankly, ambiguous reasons. You know, and I mean, then people didn't even. There was a question as to whether, you know, an atomic bomb would even work as intended. You know, there's a, There's a fact like we addressed at the beginning of, you know, what military utility does really have outside of very narrow kind of strategic paradigms, other than the fact that you can like, kill a whole lot of people immediately, you know, And America had. Germany was in ruins, the Red army was in Berlin, the Japanese, Japan was literally a pile of rubble that was getting bombacked. The Stone Age every day, like deploying like, like launching a nuclear attack on like a ruined country under those conditions, that's somewhat shocking. You know, I mean, even, even if one understands the character of the men in control of the enterprise. So, yeah, I don't think, I don't. I don't think he was like, feigning, putting on errors or something. And like I said too, these were the guys who actually made this possible. It wasn't Oppenheimer, it wasn't Einstein. You know, it wasn't Enrico Fermi. You know, it was these guys, you know, and it's, I mean, there's something, you know, yeah, it's a trope that scientists are naive, but it's also kind of true. It was certainly true here. I mean, like I said, who are these guys faking it to? Like, they, you know, they had, they weren't. And like, none of these, none of these guys were National Socialists. It's not like they were going out to, like, it's not like they were pulling a gearing and saying, like, I've got to protect the historical record and, you know, wrong foot, my enemies. Like, that didn't even feature into the equation. You know, like, Heisenberg wasn't a National Socialist. Han actually, like, was at odds with the regime not to do some liberal, but he just, he just didn't like National Socialism. And he didn't, you know, he was, he wasn't a guy who was willing to. Unlike von Braun, who was, you know, willing to go along and be pragmatic. You know, these guys were, you know, but Von Braun was, was a, was basically like a, you know, a mechanical engineer and like an aviation prodigy. You know, like, he wasn't. That's a different, like theoretical physics is a weird thing. And it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it's. It's like both concrete and abstract, and it, it tends to it tends to, it tends to attract kind of, you know, dreamy, hyper intellectual personalities and stuff. So, no, I don't, I don't think there's anything fake about it. But the Hana described and people and, and independent witnesses attested to this. Like, people had been with him when he was first, when he had his first breakthroughs in his, you know, fishing research. When Han first learned the potentiality or the implications, rather, it wasn't clear what the concrete potential was of uranium. Uranium efficient discovery. He said that considering that war was obviously imminent, he contemplated seizing as much uranium as possible, the majority of which in Europe was in Belgium, and literally throwing it into, throwing it into the sea or otherwise hiding it, to ward off some kind of catastrophe, you know, resulting from one of the combatant states attempting to weaponize it. And then he realized that's not practicable. And also, you know, I get, but I mean, I, you know, that's, that, that's, that's, that's the core that comes to the core of your question. Like, Han had those kinds of thoughts because that in his mind, that's what any remotely kind of, like, morally, anybody with remotely normal, normal, like, moral constitution would have those kinds of thoughts. Like, he wouldn't just like, you know, there's something wrong here with the Americans and British just like, putting up huge factories and like, feverishly like, you know, producing pure uranium, like, without, without question. Because, like, you know, and it's like, why, like, was, was, was the Red army storming across America was like, no, I mean, was with a Japanese threatening America? Like, no, I mean, like, there's something, there's something unseemly about it, you know, and like, it's not, I, I, I, I, I totally understand what he's getting at or was getting at, and I'm not at all some peace nick. In fact, like, at scale on these questions, I think I'm pretty callous. Okay? At least that's what I'm told. The interestingly coursing what he stated in the course of this conversation with his fellow detainees after the broadcast that, you know, Hiroshima had been destroyed. What he said and what he, what he, and what he reiterated later was that the level of cooperation, you know, under military auspices, obviously, that facilitated the Manhattan Project, that would have been impossible in Germany. You know, he made the point, he's like, he's like, you know, the men in the room, he's like, some of us didn't, wouldn't have wanted to do it on principle, but he's like, even if we had, you know, there would have, there would have been different ideas on how to proceed with this and there would have been different ideas on, you know, managing outcomes potentially, you know, and like, and trying to like, build in, you know, safeguards into the, into the structure itself or, you know, there would have been, there would have been resentments from, you know, taking orders from party men, you know, and that to your point, yeah, that's the subtext of what he said, of what Coursing said is that these men who worked on that Manhattan Project, they were, they were like absolute fanatics. Like, they were, you know, they, they were, they were frankly crazy. And that, yeah, that, that goes without saying, especially you consider the confessional background and motives and things of these men in America. I mean, but it, the now what, what was the background here of just going to introduce the background of what, if any understanding of the weapons potential of Han's experiments existed on April 29, 1939. This was, this was kind of when the world became aware of the potential of some kind of potential potentially, you know, game changing of, of the new physics. Han's experiments have been widely publicized obviously throughout Europe. And there's a French professor named Frederick Jalot or Jaloy. He was the, the son in law of Madame Curry. He reproduced Han's experiments meticulously and he and his team, they were confirmed like, like, it was confirmed that like Han was, you know, what, what, what he, what he had stated to have proven as regards, among other things, the existence in neutrons during the process and uranium fission and their situation like that, that it was, it was signed off on is. Yes, this is legitimate. Now in a letter to Nature magazine, which in those days was, was like a leading kind of like, it was a combination like, kind of like pop science stuff, but also like major scientific discoveries. That's where they would be featured in which admittedly sounds weird today, but it, I mean that's the way things were. You know, it's this French team led by Joloy. Their letter was titled, quote, liberation of neutrons and the nuclear explosion of Uranium. And essentially that was sort of like the first kind of like public declaration of, you know, nuclear fission having like tremendous weapons potential, but I emphasize potential. You know, it. There was nothing, there was nothing demonstrably proven here, but the, what this led to was in the next few days and Gottingen, which is a renowned university town, or at least it was then in Germany at the physics colloquium, a guy named Wilhelm Hannel Hanley, who was, he didn't Know, Han, but he was like a protege of him because, like, you know, he was an up and coming physicist. You know, everybody, you know, he was kind of the, he was kind of like the grand old man everybody looked to. He read a short paper on what he called a uranium burning engine. I mean, he was talking about a nuclear reactor, okay? And that, like, little paper by this guy, the trajectory of German atomic research was basically going towards nuclear reactors. You know, the idea of like, or like a uranium burning engine, okay, you know, like an endless energy source. And that frankly, that would have solved what became Germany's quagmire militarily, in part more so than an atomic bomb would. And that's a really interesting counterfactual. But that. And amidst all this kind of excitement, you know, it's got to be said, despite the impression people have, I mean, not just court historians, even people who, you know, are more kind of critical in their thinking about historical topics, there's this idea that the, so that the German Reich was some kind, was almost some kind of like rightist mirror of the Soviet Union. It's not true at all. You know, like the National Socialist Party, it was, it was, it was literally elected Hitler himself by the Enabling act and by various referendums. He had tremendous power. But even that wasn't really unprecedented. You know, like the Reich President had, had literally like extra constitutional authority as he saw fit. But, you know, the German state and the National Socialist Party were discrete entities and there, there was tension there, like structurally, you know, and there was even beyond that even. It was, it wasn't, it wasn't simply because there's plenty of professors who weren't National Socialists, even the guys who were basically sympathetic, like they didn't want the government messing in their affairs. You know, like, these were not just guys who, you know, owed their, owed their careers and prestige to, you know, something the Berlin government had done for them, you know, and they also, they didn't want to be ordered to work with other people, you know, like they, that they didn't feel comfortable with or didn't, you know, respect or whatever. It was like very provincial, kind of like very ego driven, but also just very, you know, I mean, that's the nature of academy, you know, and that's, that's especially, you know, especially the, especially the hard sciences and especially what was then called the new physics, which was literally like the cutting edge of, of scientific endeavor, you know. So, I mean, it's, it was like trying to herd cats, you know, this, this idea that, you know, this Is this idea that the Reich was like just some party state is nonsense. It's this idea that like Germans, like, you know, some Prussian, some Prussian officer type just like snaps his fingers and then like the crowd saw like, you know, do what they're told. Like that's, that's nonsense too. Like it was, you know, it's, it's, it's, it was, it was, it was, it was highly chaotic. You know, this, the subsequent conference that was, that, that was arranged based on all these, based on all these, you know, kind of findings and confirmed them, confirmed and, and confirmed research. It ultimately was held in secrecy at, at, in Berlin at a building on Unter den Linden. The. And this was when the War Department got very interested in what was going on. The, the War Office as well as Reich ministries attached to it actually are just kind of like practically because they were in the same orbit or had overlapping spheres of authority within a very short space of time. In 1939 had begun their own uranium research program. It was low key. It was basically, you know, corralling data that had already been produced, you know, in France and in the German Reich, you know, and kind of running a comparative analysis and trying and again, like duplicating some of these experiments to make sure that, you know, this was in fact the results were what they purported to be. And this led to, this led to a Hamburg professor, Hamburg professor named Paul Hartek and his assistant, a guy named Dr. Wilhelm Groth. They'd written a letter to the War Office just before, just before the Berlin conference and about 10 days after the publication of the, of the, of the Paris, the French Physicist letter Nature magazine. And this letter was cited again and again and again by American New Dealer media as well as like OSS types, all in sundry. The letter stated, quote. And so the letter to the War Office, okay, by these, by this Hamburg professor, it said, quote, we take the liberty of calling your attention to the newest development in nuclear physics which in our opinion will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than the conventional ones. That wasn't really a groundbreaking statement. I mean, yeah, people still speculated that that was true. And obviously what was right into the statement was that this was some sort of, this was some sort of like, you know, low key, almost kind of hidden communication between German scientific academe and the War Office saying, like, look, like, this is not only possible, this is, you know, essential. We've got to beat the Allies the punch and know, pursue this course of research essentially, like take this Letter to the FUR and the AR Ministry and like, let's make it happen. There's no evidence that that's what this letter indicated. Okay. And frankly, like, if that's what it was, like, why would an open letter be written? You know, like, it's not really how things are done, but, you know, so I think some of what is argued around these, these, these surviving kind of statements. When I say surviving, I mean, you know, like in literal letter form. I think some of it is in bad faith. The, you know, and again, the something the letter concluded with, quote, the country that makes first use of unsurpassable advantage over the others. I believe what he meant by it is just nuclear fission generally. And again, the trajectory of this kind of research was towards nuclear reactors. Okay. Or a uranium burning engine. I believe that's what they were getting at. And which is true. Okay. I mean, any, anybody who found a way to, you know, utilize atomic energy for an industrial military purpose, like, yeah, obviously, like first use compares, confers a massive advantage. But I don't read it as being like again, some kind of secret agreement, you know, to pursue atomic weapons research in concert. And I don't read that final sentence as a statement to the effect of, you know, we have got to develop and deploy atomic bombs as soon as possible. That's not in context. That's not what it means. And I'm not playing lawyer ball at all. And frankly too, it's a bit outside the scope. But the course of German scientific research, not just relating to the new physics, but even in conventional engineering, other things, I, it makes sense that a nuclear reactor would kind of be the, would kind of be the Holy Grail of German research that makes any sense, you know, and again, that would have alleviated not just emergent exigencies in the Second World War, but, you know, problems that had compromised Germany's operational effectiveness and its ability to survive protracted wars in general. Okay, I mean, in the preceding, you know, millennia or what have you, but that the reaction in London was especially kind of severe to the French physicist letter, you know, the Nature magazine letter, the, the, the, the British press, when they, you know, just like, as they did subsequently when insinuating Mr. Churchill into office, they undertook this like, full court press, full of lowered accounts of, of the new, quote, super bomb based on uranium fission that was being developed in Germany. You know, like they, they just presented this as a foregone conclusion, as a fact. You know, the four days after the letter appeared, both the British treasury and the Foreign Office were approached by Sir Henry Tizzard. He was chairman of this commit, chairman of the committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defense, which had outsized power, as did pretty much every. Everything related to the Air Ministry. I think we talked about that in our Churchill series. He said that in no uncertain terms, Britain should take preemptive action to deny large sources of uranium to the Germans. And as I stated, the largest stockpile of uranium in Europe was in Belgium. And there's a sizable industry for extracting your radius, for extracting radium from uranium from uranium ores imported from the Belgian Congo as well. So like in Belgium, you didn't just have, you know, like the raw stores of uranium. There's like the infrastructure to, you know, process it in basic ways to make it Utah. So essentially what Tizzard was suggesting or demanding perhaps was, you know, that Britain find a way to, you know, wage war on the continent and capture whatever uranium Belgium had, you know, with hostility, which operationally, obviously there was. That was not going to happen. But the fact that this was well within their contemplation and I don't think this was just propaganda in the case of the uk, I think they probably actually believe this. I mean, obviously their conceptual horizon was totally corrupted by this kind of hysterical idea of, you know, Germany is our enemy, but within the boundary rationality of that, of that paradigm. I think they actually did believe that a fission bomb was, was, was at that moment possible. And that's kind of a fascinating. This kind of. There's a, that's, that's, that's. It's like Frederick foresight stuff, but in real life. And I think that's kind of fascinating. And there's many, many intrigues really, like espionage and stuff and, and what have you that like around that. But I, I'm, I'm gonna stop here. And second episode, I think we'll have to go a little bit longer and I want to get into the, I want to get into the actual virus house, which is the title of the book, which was the dedicated research facility for the German atomic bomb, such that it could be said to have existed as a dedicated program. And then in the third episode, we'll deal with kind of like the aftermath and things of that nature. That sounds good.
[49:06]
A
Are you going to address the popular conception that the Fuhrer was adamant about getting a bomb and that the scientists were working against him?
[49:21]
B
Yeah, and I think it's basically like Heisenberg said and some of his colleagues said when, when he said that, you know, we didn't really want to develop a bomb. He was talking in terms of, like, personal conscience, not like, the hell with Hitler and let's sabotage the war effort. It was that if, you know, if they've been ordered in a formal capacity or if the. Or if the. Or if the atomic program had been like the rocket program and under direct military authority, you know, that they would have resisted that because, you know, the unpredictability of outcomes and just kind of like the. In their mind, like, the naked immorality of just unleashing that much power when not, you know, necessary for, you know, in the matter of existential survival, I think that's. I mean, that's the way to understand it. But people want. People want to rehabilitate Heisenberg and I mean, they should, like, no German needs to be, quote, rehabilitated. But in their mind, they want to think of Heisenberg and Han as, you know, good guys. So they, like, exaggerate the degree to which, you know, these men had some kind of ideological objection to fascism. But, yeah, we'll get into that. We'll start with just like, a brief understanding of what uranium is. I'm very much a layman, okay? So, I mean, like, I, I'm not suggesting, I'm not being pedantic. Like, I. When I started reading about this topic, like, I had to read up on uranium. So, like, we'll take like 10, 15 minutes next episode and, like, learn about our friend uranium, and then we'll get into, you know, we'll get into the. The views of the. The War Ministry, you know, contra. The New Dealer War Department, you know, and. And the. The kind of lack of convergence respectively, of. Of a common understanding of the military potential of atomic weapons. And, you know, like I said, I, I want to get into, like, the motivations of why America developed the bomb. And, you know, that's a complicated topic, but. Yeah, well, I'll try to wrap it up in three episodes.
[51:34]
A
All right, do plugs and we'll end this.
[51:37]
B
Yeah, you can still find me on Twitter, which I guess now is X or whatever. Like, formerly Burb App Capital R E A L underscore number 7 HMAS777. You can always find me on Substack, which is my primary platform. It's real re lcore Thomas 777 substack.com you can always find me on my website. Number 7h1s777.com I'm. I'm preparing season two of the mind Phaser Podcast. And as well as I'm going to Utah in a couple weeks to film the first dedicated episode of Thomas TV on the channel. My YouTube channel is ThomasTV number 7H1A S TV. So exciting things are afoot. In addition to, like this, you know, Pete and Keith woods and other fellas are nice enough to host me and, you know, like, be looking out for that stuff too. But, yeah, that's all I got.
[52:45]
A
Thank you. Until the next time.
[52:47]
B
Yeah, thank you, man.
[52:50]
A
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinones Show, Part two on what I'm calling the German bomb series, Little miniseries with Thomas. How are you doing, Thomas? And where are we going today?
[53:05]
B
I wanted to continue kind of with, you know, the. The background of, you know, what the state of what was called the new physics was in the lead up to the second World War, especially because as we touched on, more than touched on, as we. As we got into, but not completely last time, there's this idea very much reinforced by the Oppenheimer film, which in some ways I thought was a good film. In other ways I thought it was not a good film at all. I mean, well, we can get into that maybe when it's more apropos. But there's this narrative that there was this kind of mad race. There's two, one or two narratives. It's either that there was this race by all major powers to weaponize atomic energy. And feverishly, you know, at Cambridge, University of Chicago, University of Berlin, you know, presumably somewhere in the Soviet Union, you know, this was all going on and, you know, this. This desperate race was, proverbially speaking, was won, you know, by the Manhattan Project team. That's not true at all. Nothing like that was afoot. The other, the other, the other kind of narrative is that, you know, the Einstein memo was born of some kind of secret knowledge Einstein presumably had or that he had gleaned, you know, from the kind of German fraternity, as it were, of, you know, researchers in the new physics that, you know, Heisenberg presumably was, you know, had come to. Into knowledge presumably, you know, borrowing from Fermi's concrete experiments that, you know, uranium could be weaponized into a super bomb. So Einstein desperately, you know, contacted, you know, people he knew in. In the close to the New Deal regime, you know, like, you know, including people he talked about in another series, you know, on the board of Jewish Deputies, the American Jewish Committee, they put him in touch with Sachs, you know, Einstein, Roosevelt's Wall street man, who then said, oh, my God, you know, the. This is, you know, there's like, like Some corny movie plot like, you know, that the, this evil Nazi regime is, you know, months away from, from this super weapon. You know, we've, we've got to alert Mr. Roosevelt immediately like that. That's ridiculous. I mean, aside from the, aside, many, like, value judgments they were in about the combatant regimes like this was not underway at all. Like we talked about last time, literally, on the evil war in 1939, the best minds in Germany. First of all, there was no, there was no organization here like the War office, which itself was kind of a hodgepodge of academics, you know, like bureaucratic administrators, you know, like party men, like guys, you know, like military men, at least in a liaison capacity, you know, who had some idea that, you know what's there, that, you know, that there's a, you know, that there's some kind of applied potential, you know, to atomic physics. But the direction they were going was what we consider to be, you know, conceptualizing what I want to. A crude nuclear reactor. Okay, that did change somewhat as time went on, but there was never, not only was there never a Third Reich version of the Manhattan Project underway, but that wasn't even within anybody's contemplation and nor, nor is the kind of organization in place to do that. You know, I mean, anybody will tell you when you're talking about academics, especially men at the top of their field in, in some kind of experimental science, trying to organize these people in a dedicated capacity is, Is like hurting cats, number one. Number two, you know, the Third Reich was really the Third Reich, unlike the Soviet Union and frankly, unlike the New Dealer United States. It was, it was this kind of like, competing off in hostile, like fiefdoms of authority and these factions who really didn't like each other, who are kind of only bound by, like, faith in the furor, you know, like, as this kind of like, messianic personage. I don't mean that in crude terms nor in overly praising terms. It's just the reality, okay? So, like, people have this kind of mistaken idea, you know, like we talked about before, of the Third Reich is kind of like this, like, fascistoid, like, version of the Soviet Union where they're like, from the top down, just everything was, you know, corralled into the service of the state and its military needs. Like, that wasn't the case at all. And that, that's one of the things that, you know, the catalyst for Goebbels total was going to be known as the, as the total war speech. The catalyst for that was he was Making the case, like, basically like begging. A lot of some of the patrons of the party, like, look like, put aside your differences. We have to mobilize completely, you know, if we're going to survive. And by that point, I mean, the die was cast, you know, so it. But be that as it may, I'll also say finally, and then we'll get into the meat of this. There's this idea in America, and I think, I mean, even among historians with a critical eye, and even with some people who have military knowledge either through direct experience or based on their theoretical, you know, endeavors, there's this idea that nuclear weapons are just kind of like this trump card, you know, or that, you know, like Thomas Shelling said, and in the context he said it was correct, that they're just like any other weapons, except owing to command and control nuances, you know, and the computerization of decision making at key junctures and the destructive power of them, you know, they, they, they, they're just capable of implementing far, far more attrition far, far quicker than, you know, conventional weapons. And that is the correct way to think about them. In conditions of bipolarity as regards the political map and general parody in terms of strategic forces and being in a military situation such as the world of 1939 or even of 1943, 44, it's not clear how an atomic bomb would have helped Germany. I mean, Germany could have annihilated the UK And I mean, yeah, that would have helped. I mean, in terms of, obviously, it could no longer be utilized as, you know, U.S. army Air Corps and Royal Air Force is unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to, you know, strategically bomb Germany with massive conventional loads. But, you know, the path of victory in World War II for Germany is the conquest of the Soviet Union. You know, Moscow has to fall in 1941, and thereby, you know, Germany becomes a superpower. You know, it captures the Central Asian world island, if you want to use Mackinder's language. Okay, just, you know, atomic bombing Moscow and killing, you know, 10 million Russians. Well, I mean, the Third Reich killed 10 million Russians. I mean, did that win the war? You know, like, I, I think it was Ahmadinejad, who was an interesting guy, at least. More. I mean, he was at least most interesting Iranian head of state since Khomeini. You know, he made the point when kind of Netanyahu was at his most kind of histrionic, you know, freaking, that everybody's developing a bomb. You know, all Israel's enemies are or developing the bomb. You Know, it's like, did nuclear weapons help the Soviet Union? You know, like when the Soviet Union went down, not with a bang, but a whimper, I think it had, I think it had something like 12,000 warheads, you know, that could be married launch vehicles and deployed, you know, as like strategically, you know, like intercontinentally, you know, or at least like within theater, you know, over intermediate distance. I mean, it's that there's like this idea like nuclear weapon is just, you know, you like, own, you own your enemy, like in proverbial or actual terms, you just own the battle space. Like that. That doesn't make any sense. You know, in the case of America, obviously, I mean, America just had to devastate Germany and Japan, you know, and it could. And then, and then America gets the planet, you know. But I mean, no, nobody else was in that situation. You know, ironically, in a totally counterfactual scenario, we're like a nuclear armed Japan. Like that actually, like Japan could have extorted a lot of concessions if they had nuclear atomic bombs or something comparable. I thought about that and not, I think, not incidentally, that's why they were so fixated on a biological weapons program, you know, and like the father of modern biowarfare is she Shiroishi. And he got poached immediately by u. S. Occupation forces and delivered to the war department, soon to be the defense department. They ended up actually teaching at Berkeley of all places. You know, as, as like in this kind of role of civilian role is like this, in old age, is like this unassuming, like biologist. But he, he was, he was a, he was, he was a war master of bioweapons. Okay, gay, that, that's something of a tangent. But in any event, all these things are important. They're not, they're not just speculative, you know, sort of counterfactuals that are fun to play with. As we, I think we finished last time with the, the. Let the. The letter by the French physicist to nature magazine, you know, which discussed the potential of, of. Of, you know, some, some kind of military application of, of uranium, you know, and reactions from uranium. If you know, the, the isotope needed could be, you know, cultivated. Okay. And this, this really did this caused. To say it caused a stir in the scientific community would be a gross understatement. But the response essentially by the Germans was a guy named Abraham Esau. He was chairman of the quote, Reich bureau of standards, which translates to the right bureau, the right bureau of standards in education, specifically the physical sciences, was. It's, you know, a Domain of authority and kind of keeping, you know, such that the universities could be corralled into a directly military role. It was, you know, this, this was, this was kind of like this, this was kind of like the party's way of, of, of not just keeping tabs on these things, but trying. But you know, we're trying to direct such potential as it emerged in a constructive capacity. But of course, again, we're talking about, you know, literally cutting edge theoretical physics here. Like, you can't pick and choose like who you want to staff these things. You need people to actually understand the damn thing in question. You need, and beyond, you need people who are competent. It's like Esau, he wasn't any kind of like national Socialist or party man, but he was basically patriotic. He, he'd been, he'd been a leading authority on high frequency electronics. He'd been an academic physicist for most of his career, but he was politically active. Again, he wasn't, he wasn't any kind of like party loyalist, but he had followed kind of the ascendancy of nationalism in Germany. And he was like, definitely behind it, you know, at least in like. But, but frankly, I mean like patriotic Germans generally were, you know, but he, he was excited at, you know, kind of nuclear physics being brought within his, you know, kind of penumbra of authority, if you want to look at it that way. And he convened a conference, I think we mentioned the Jenna conference, which was directly convened in response, you know, to the announcement by the, by the French researchers on their applied experiments. On his short list, of course, was, you know, Otto Hahn. Han was unable to attend because he was engaged otherwise in Sweden, Professor, a guy named Professor Yosef Matok from Vienna was, was, was deputized in favor of his, you know, regular assistant, Liza Meitner, who was also in Sweden, you know, with the man himself, to like to speak for him or like sit in for him. The conference took place in, you know, relative secrecy. April 29, 1939, at the Ministry of Education building. As we talked about the doctor, Dr. Doms, who's the head of the Ministry's research department, he vocally attacked Hahn in absentia for publishing, you know, his vital discovery, what he perceived as like his vital discovery, you know, to the scientific, to the wider scientific community, when that's not the way science works. Okay, Unless you're, I mean, if had, had this been two years later, you know, and had Germany been actively at war, I think that case could be made. But even then, again, this was not the Manhattan Project. Nobody, nobody had nobody among this coterie of new physicists in. In Germany or Austria, you know, had an idea that, you know, this is a military technology. I mean, beyond the fact that. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Beyond the fact that, you know, any kind of. Any kind of applied technology where you're talking about a truly renewable energy source that theoretically, at least you know, is. Is. Is essentially inexhaustible. I mean, yeah, obviously there's military implications of that, just like there's military implications everything else. But that's. But that was. That. That would have been like saying, you know, that, you know, that. Would. That have been like saying that, you know, aviation should have been kept secret, you know, as it was under. As, you know, as trials are underway in America to, you know, perfect a truly viable aircraft, but American elsewhere. But the. But metallic took up. He went to bed very much on Han's behalf, and he. He basically cowed the committee into silence. You know, things. We're not. We're not a military. This is not a military. This is not neither a party nor a military, you know, conference. You know, we're not. We're not under your authority or anybody else's. You know, basically like, how dare you insult the man who's, you know, basically changed the world by his research and discoveries? And that honestly set the tenor, man, like, not. Not just in the Jenna conference, but moving onward again, like it. Something like it described never could have happened in the Soviet Union, like, no matter what. No matter what the technology under discussion was, even if it was a purely speculative technology at that. At that juncture, you know, so it's. There is. Is more of a. You know, I say this is important not just because I've got, you know, peculiar fixations as a. As a researcher, but, you know, it's. It's. It's important to, you know, developing a properly characteristic view of the German Reich and its internal situation. You know, this is not a place where scientists were cowed by the party or by the regime. You know, there certainly were, as always, representative official D who tried to throw their weight around, but they were not in the driver's seat here at all for a lot of reasons. The. Basically, the long story short, in addition to a lot of theoretical postulates unrelated directly, you know, to the subject at hand, which I have no understanding of because I'm no physicist at all. I'm not even like an educated layman in physics. Okay, I'm the first to admit that. But to the kind of highlight of the event, if you want to look at it in those terms. Two Gottingen professors got him juice and a guy named Hanley. They, they'd outline once again, I mean, not them once again, but they'd outlined again, as was on the mind of every man present, you know, a. The practicability of a quote, uranium burner. Okay. I mean this was again, this was such that there could be said to be a, a sort of priority afforded to any conceptual model. I mean this, this was it. Okay. And again that, that obviously has tremendous military application, but it, but not in the way that was being bandied by, you know, people, people like Einstein later on and, and also by some, some, some people particularly in MI6 and later in OSS. In the case of the former, I, it's interesting and we'll get into that. The, the. I don't want to jump too far ahead. We'll, we'll get into the kind of the Take from London or the view from London on the potentiality of an atomic bomb. But in any event, the. There'd been a general ban placed on the export of uranium compounds from Germany and the Reich Ministry of Economics was. They were adjusting well. They, they were. They're trying to determine like there was a recently captured mines in Czechoslovakia. I cannot pronounce. Yakimov. Yakimov. If anybody on deck, like in the comments. I'm sorry if I'm butchering that. I, I'm first admit I, I'm terrible with these pronunciations, but Central Europe is, is rich in, in, in uranium ore. Okay. Like natural uranium ore. The, this, this hadn't been mined yet, but it, you know, had been accessed in some basic capacity. But you know, who basically who was going to get, get it first? Like, hadn't been decided, you know, was it just going to be squirreled away and given to the, you know, given to the OKW to basically sit on so nobody else could have it? You know, was it, was it going to be given to, you know, this. To what, what, what, what was basically going to be given to like, you know, the, the burgeoning kind of committee that. Or the burg kind of quorum that attended the conference at Jenna. Like what, what would become of it? But it, what they had allowed was a uranium sample had had been dispatched to Gottingen for special analysis and the, the special analyst who was dispatched, you know, to essentially to, to report his findings was, was, was a guy from the War Office. Okay. And what was not known to the attendees of the Jenna conference and was not probably known to really anybody. The Reich Chancery. I'm sure that there was some line of communication there. And Hitler himself, I speculate and again, this is pure speculation, probably knew just because he was so hands on in, in terms of weapons development and things like that the War Office had begun its own uranium research program. But again, you know, it's. If they were developing a bomb and if this was like the raison d' etre of it, you know, like why, why, why, why, why, why were they appealing to civilians at all? You know, I mean, because that would presume the knowledge. That would presume not just the, the conceptual basis for such a program but the knowledge in order to implement it as well as the political will. And it's just not, you know, depicts what develops here is a, I think an indisputable picture of, you know, basically everybody, everybody within the party administration who had an understanding, you know, who's realistic about, you know, the, the fact that, you know, inevitably like a war was going to emerge between, you know, the, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, anybody in the scientific community, you know, who was at all engaged, you know, with the reality of national politics at the time and anybody who, you know, had, had been paying attention, you know, to, to the new physics with any, with any sort of understanding of it beyond that of a layman, like, understood that there was some kind of like great applied potential for this, but that might not be emergent for 20 years. You know, it might, it, it, you know, it might never be fully realized. But again too like it wasn't clear what that was and such that there was any kind of like agreement in these like very kind of crude conceptual terms. In Germany it was as, you know, it was basically as like this is an energy source that's going to change the world. You know, was not like this is, this is how he builds super bombs, you know. And interestingly, but such that the United Kingdom had a view of this after the chairman of a Belgian mining concern, he, he got wind of the situation in Czechoslovakia with respect to uranium. A. A guy named M. Edgar Sinji. He was president of the Belgian Mining and Surina Union Minier. Okay. I think that's how you pronounce it. He contacted a guy named Tizard who was chairman of the Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defense in London. Okay. And when he did, the outcome of their meeting was basically Tazard. He was unwilling to, he was unwilling to. To provide the funds or the authority for Sinjier to. Or Sinja to, to purchase all available uranium stocks which there were several thousand tons in Belgium and far more available in the open market that had been extricated from Czechoslovakia or extracted, you know, before the, before the, before the country fell apart and you know, what have you, and became. Came under the dominion of the Reich. But you know, it, the fact was, I mean it, that this was not. It was. The UK was very much by this point, this was May of 1939, you know, they were shifting to a war footing. You know, I mean it can't be argued that this was, you know, oh, you know, the climate of appeasement was ruling and nobody, you know, realized, you know, the danger that way ahead. If you want to take that kind of court historians view, I mean that, that can't be argued. Okay. The, the, what Tzar did say is that if some kind of mass of uranium reserves or at least that which was then available in the open market, if the bulk of that should fall into enemy hands, he said that maybe something that, you know, that, that could be catastrophic in strategic terms. But I mean it wasn't, it wasn't clear what that was. You know, it's like it was basically that, you know, we hear that, you know, the crowds want it, so we don't want, you know, because they want it, we want them to not have it. You know, but we don't want it either because it may be nothing. You know, the, the admiral basically this tazard like took this to the admiralty which you know, in, in, in the UK Then as I assume now even always, it always had outsized clout in terms of like war and peace questions. They said that, you know, they said that, you know, not only do we have the funds to gamble with on this, like literally, but they said the possibility of developing a quote explosive of unprecedented power from uranium was so remote as to be negligible. So again, this was like science fiction. Okay. It kind of reminds me of if you keep up with. I don't know if anybody does but I. And maybe they've moved on from this kind of fixation. But like some years back, you know, if you picked up parameters, you know, like the US Army War College magazine or read these, speaking of the Brits read some of these like Royal Navy publications they were talking about like rail guns and these kinds of like super guns that were gonna, that were primarily going to be based on, you know, this is basically going to be like some kind of new like quasi surface warfare platform that's just going to like change everything. You know, it was a lot of, I mean then is now like, I mean now it's more, you know, guys kind of trying to rationalize already bloated budgets and stuff. But there's, there's always, there's always, there's always, there's always generals and admirals as well as civilian analysts and intelligence men, you know, like, like sounding alarm bells about, about some future, you know, like super weapon. You know, this was not like it, this was not something new. Okay. Yeah, I mean they, the 20th century was remarkable in terms of kind of the punctuated, the punctuated equilibrium as so to speak of, you know, scientific advancement by leaps and bounds. But this, this idea that, you know, there, there's a firm understanding of the potential of uranium that, and that, you know, this somehow would, you know, absolutely make, you know, Germany its strategic situation as it was in 1939, you know, the master of the world. Like that's, that's ridiculous. G.P. thompson had an interesting take. He was a, he was, he was a leading British physicist perhaps, perhaps the leading physicist who was close to, you know, the, like not just the war party, as it were, but to, you know, military circles and both intelligence and the Admiralty. He said, you know, it's highly, he said, he said the Germans are probably more afraid of us developing some Iranian based technology, you know, as than we are of them. And he suggested, he suggested a disinfo campaign indicating that the British had in fact tested uranium bombs of unprecedented force, you know, so potent that the authorities had, you know, stopped, stopped testing of them for fear of compromising the, compromising the, the program completely. You know, it. Churchill himself, he said that any talk of it, mind you, like Church was like something of a techno. I mean on the one hand he's like Pan is a Luddite. I. Which he was. And he, and he, he, he, and he was a disaster as a, as, as, as a commander in chief. But he did have like a fetish for like war tech, you know, albeit not in an foreign way, but his view was the same. He said that like any, any German talk of a quote, super bomb is pure bluff. You know, he's like, you know, this is ridiculous. Like, nothing like this. There's no indicators, there's no current indicators that something like this is going to be deployed, you know. And he said even if it was, you know, the, the, you know, the, both the admiralty and the air ministry, as well as the army, you know, their, their view is that, you know, even if such an application had been cultivated, it would, you know, anything that would lead to results on a large scale would not be emergent for years. You know, this was Churchill talking. You know, this is like arch warmonger Churchill, you know. So I mean it, the
[83:36]
A
question.
[83:37]
B
Yeah, yeah,
[83:40]
A
could that the line of, you know, we've been testing these plutonium based weapons and it's remarkable what the kind of power they have. Could that be a way of propagandizing and saying we know what these things can do, we can't allow the enemy to have them?
[84:02]
B
Yeah, I think that, that's where I think that, I think that, I think the people who are agitating for that disinvo campaign, I think that was the subtext of it too. You know, it wasn't just to, you know, kind of like bluff the Germans because frankly the UK did not really have the forces in being to, to bluff in other ways other than ledgered main. But yeah, also I think it could have, it could have served. Yeah, exactly what you said. It could have served as, you know, an ongoing pretext as well. You know, like these kinds of things are being developed and in enemy hands. Oh my God. Like basically it became, you know, kind of like the, the albeit it was, it was a, it was, it was top secret. But what became, you know, like the, the New Dealer rationale for the Manhattan Project. But it's, but again, I mean the reason it didn't is because it seemed like just so outlandish. And again, these weren't, these weren't a bunch of, you know, these weren't a bunch of World War I generals who were like, oh, I don't know about this, you know, this, this high fluting science. Like, you know, these were like, these were guys at the top of the field, you know, in the UK, you know, in, in the 1930s. I mean, to say that like they, they didn't, you know, have an indigenous, you know, academic community that was very much on the cusp of new physics research. I mean, that is preposterous. It just didn't seem, it just, it just wasn't, it wasn't what people were thinking. Okay. And I mean. Yeah, okay, anytime you're talking about, anytime you're talking about, anytime you're talking about a rare element, okay, obviously like explosives or something, that comes to mind. This is like the nature of it. But that wasn't, this was not something that was just universe like the, the way it's presented is that this is just something that was like universally understood to be like, you know, the potential of, you know, of, of uranium. And it was only a matter of time before, you know, the, the, the correct formula as it were. Was calculated in order to, like, bring it into reality, you know, and that's, you know, all we can. The closest we can get to literally peeking inside the minds of people in the epoch is, you know, their, you know, their, their declarations. Either they're either, you know, they're, they're, you know, either their private diaries and their correspondences or, you know, their, their public declarations or their statements, the presence of witnesses. And there's not any, there's not any indication that, you know, anybody within the scientific or military community in Europe as of 1939, you know, had this in. Within their contemplation. And again, part of this was. Part of this was, you know, part of this was a conceptual bias because again, like, if you're, if you're, if you're a felt marshal in the Vermont or, you know, if you're a British admiral of the Royal Navy, like, why, what. What's. What's an atomic bomb gonna do for you? You know, like what, like, honestly, like, how, how's that going to solve, you know, the, the exigencies that you're charged with resolving? You know, I mean, it, it's Germany. Germany becomes a superpower and, and, and, and resolves its. And resolves like the long emergency it's. It's faced with if, if it, if it can drop atomic bombs on people. I mean, it's not, you know, again, it, It's. There's a very, there's very. There's a very peculiar strategic configuration where, where nuclear weapons have real utility and it basically never emerges. And, you know, it certainly, it certainly wasn't emergent in the case of Germany in 1939. You know, and people can argue that point all they want, but I, I don't. I. I've yet to come across a convincing case otherwise, even in, even in, even in the abstract, in more concrete terms, relying on, relying on the direct advice and claims of a Professor F.A. lindeman and later Lord Cherwell, Churchill wrote to the Secretary of State for, for air defense. For air and air defense, saying that, you know, any suggestion of. Of. Of, quote, Nazi super weapons were without foundation. He said only, you know, as his expert, namely Lindemann, it told him only a minor constituent of uranium was effective, which, which, which, you know, which took. Which took, quote, many years to extract. You know, the chain process can take place only if concentrated in a large mass. You know, the, as soon as the energy develops, you know, it's, you know, likely that, you know, we would require a mild detonation. Instead of a chain reaction which presumably, you know, would, Would, Would. Would incinerate, you know, like the uranium core that was needed in the first place. And, you know, or, you know, based on this, based on the nature of these things and, you know, unknown variables, you know, if inadequate mass were cultivated, you know, a chain reaction could ensue that, you know, was just massively destructive, you know, and in ways we can't even conceptualize, you know, all the basic, not basic in terms like uninformed, because this was a new science, but all the kind of. All the kind of, you know, usual objections at the time to, you know, why, you know, we don't. This is, you know, we don't want to. We don't want to tickle the dragon's tail, as it were, you know, and this was Churchill himself, like, relying on his experts, you know, and it's again, like, what, if anything, he had. He had an incentive to, you know, confabulate, you know, some kind of threat where there wasn't one, not diminish a threat where, you know, where, where it was. I mean, obviously it's. But it. And just for those who don't know a lot about this, and, I mean, I'm one of them, so I'm not being pedantic, like, what is uranium and why uranium? Again, uranium is what was available. Central Europe is one of the natural, you know, deposits of uranium that can be harvested and extracted, mined and, you know, utilized in weapons development. Obviously, uranium is a chemical element. What is a chemical element? It's an irreducible substance that cannot be broken down into other substances. Its symbol is U. Its Atomic number is 92. In solid form, it's a silvery gray metal. It uranium atom is 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which six are valence electrons. Uranium radioactively decays by emitting alpha radiation. And the half wave of this is. It's between something like 200,000 and like 4.5 billion years, different isotopes. So, like, uranium, like, this is. This was like, revolutionary and being able to, like, date the Earth, like, quite literally, I did not know that until recently, but the most common isotopes in natural uranium is uranium 238 and uranium 235. Okay? And uranium, incidentally, is the highest atomic weight of the primordially occurring element. Primordially occurring elements. Now, why uranium 235? Uranium 235 is. It's. It's in every. In every. In every thousand parts. About. In every thousand parts of natural uranium, there's about Seven parts of a lighter isotope, which is the mass number 235. The chemical properties are the same, obviously, but the physical properties differ. Uranium235, essentially, it's got to be the, the atomic structure of it has got to be manipulated in a way so that in very crude terms it does not absorb what it is being bombarded with. You know, like the, the reaction has to actually be cultivated, okay? And this can only be achieved with uranium 235 isotope, okay, the. Such that Professor Esau had any idea that uranium 285 was like something. It was like special. That it, you know, it was distinguishable in terms of its potential for, you know, applied, applied utility, you know, like military or otherwise. He, if he knew, if he had a deeper understanding than his colleagues of why, he didn't disclose that, but he did say that at once we should secure all available uranium stocks in Germany, that we should cultivate Uranium 235 wherever we find it. He said that a joint research group over his administration, but representing, you know, like all interested factions, you know, party, state, military, you know, and this was, you know, people kind of like shrugged this off, like, well, that's other asl, like trying to, you know, insinuate himself into some kind of, you know, honcho role, I mean, which. Within. With. Under. Under the, under the German Reich especially, you know, in the pre war years, that was not uncommon, but. Or they kind of viewed him as just, you know, another scientist kind of, you know, being hysterical. And for most of the people present at the, at the Jenna conference and these subsequent sort of meetings of this coterie that had had, you know, that was involved in the, you know, or that there were. That was, you know, within this kind of core of people from the, the Department of Educational Standards as well as the War Office, you know, that nobody heard about uranium or uranium research until, until the war broke out. You know, as it happened, when the war did break out, there was,
[95:25]
A
you
[95:25]
B
know, there was the, There was, There was the, There was the nominally civilian research team that we just mentioned that the War Office had kind of secretly, you know, organized. And like I said, like I, I believe there's a direct line from them to the chancery to Adolf Hitler, although I can't prove that, but there were actually two teams in total working on relatively small scale uranium research. Like on the day World War II broke out, okay? Dr. Kurt Diebner, who is the. Was the. Here the Army's expert on nuclear physics of these, the, The. The deepers, was unceremoniously dismantled the very day after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Professor Esau somehow secured an interview with General Becker, who's the Chief of Army Ordinance. He obtained a promise of full War Office support and full and exclusive support for his, for his, you know, for his team's research endeavors at the expense of deep nerds. Now, some people will speculate it's kind of like the dog that didn't bark in evidentiary terms, like, well, how did he pull this off? Especially considering he was a civilian and Deepner was insinuated into the army establishment. He must have, he must have promised some kind of results. I don't think that. I don't, I don't see how that's possible because, I mean, you know, Becker, among other things, you know, he didn't get to that position without having a basic understanding of, of, of, of, of, you know, of chemistry at least. You know, I mean, he was, you're not talking about some man in the street as relates to applied science, you know, even something that was then is kind of theoretically abstract or, you know, unknown as, as, as atomic physics. But I, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't see what Esau could have produced either in order to kind of like in consider, in consideration of that guarantee that supposedly would have been made that Diebner couldn't have, I speculated. Just comes down to Becker having more confidence in one man over the other. But again, who knows? I think all of this is kind of much to do about nothing. Because the point is, I think the key takeaway is that this was not viewed as a priority. Know, not that it was, you know, I, I, I think probably in crude terms, Becker didn't really give a, you know, I mean, he, Germany was now at war with Britain and France, you know, and his priority was, you know, doing what he had to to win that war. You know, like what one egghead is bringing to the table versus another one. Well, he makes the better argument. He gets the, you know, he gets the, he gets the cheddar, you know, I mean, that's, these things that often are. And like I said, I mean, the speculation is basically people filling in the gaps with what they want to, to substantiate a narrative that's, you know, not, that's not substantiated by the record, you know. I mean, so that's specious. Anyway, what Becker did agree to, what Esau did come away with, aside from like a promise of, you know, kind of funding and support, was an official voucher certifying the military importance of the project for the war efforts. But I mean like all kinds of, all kinds of things were kind of given that proverbial stamp, I mean, especially later on and kind of more liberally by the ss, believe it or not. I mean, anything and against the ss, basically, whatever you're given is Himmler like any kind of scientific merit, you know, whether it was, you know, like, you know, find, you know, transforming like, you know, coronated jet fuel or. I don't mean silly, but you know what I mean? Like it's, I don't like the fact that, the fact that Esau was able to, the fact he was able to get, you know, like the, the chief of army ordinance, you know, to sign off on his research. I mean, that basically just means he was competent and like whatever he came up with, like probably would, you know, be util. Whether it was or not, you know, like whatever he came up with belonged to the army, you know, not to Esau, not to any private sector university patron. So that's, oh, that's, that's kind of the foundation of, that's kind of the foundation of, you know, like leading into the war. Like what, what the state of, you know, atomic research was of course, ultimately like during the war. The title of Mr. Irving's book, the Virus House, I mean that was the heavy water facility that was dedicated to, you know, that was dedicated to, you know, cultivating uranium 235. So I mean, there's something there. Yeah. And I hope I'm not boring everybody to death. I'll try to wrap this up in the next episode. But it, but yeah, that's, I don't want to, I don't want to get into that now because then we'd be talking for the next hour. But yeah, that's, that's basically the, the foundation. And you know, like I said, I think it's. The reason why I wanted to cover this now was I think it's time we're gonna go on to the Oppenheimer movie, which in a lot of ways is not a bad film, especially for Hollywood. And like some people believe Christopher Nolan was kind of surreptitiously signaling the political things. I mean, that's a subject for another stream, but I thought it was timely. Man, I hope people are, I mean, I, I, it's, it's essential to understanding the total picture of the conflict. So I hope people are getting something out of it. The feedback seems good so far.
[101:26]
A
Yeah, I think the, the, Yeah, I think that the very first Time we ever talked, we talked about dispelling and changing narratives. And, you know, the narrative of this is wrong. The narrative that people believe of the German bomb program is wrong. So I don't see how anybody can, you know, if one of the goals. If one of the goals is to open people's eyes to World War II and exactly what it was. I think there's no more important. There's no more important subject than a potential, you know, bomb that, you know, they.
[102:15]
B
Oh, he would have just dropped it everywhere. No, I mean, people, too. Like I said, the important. You know, I spent a lot of time with game theory and, like, formal logic. I mean, it's like my background, like, educationally, but also it's. You know, the Cold War was so. I mean, nuclear weapons, like, the Cold War can only be understood within the context of the nuclear paradigm. You know, like, it was just it. It literally defined every aspect of it, like military, political, philosophical. Like, people can't get their minds around really the idea that, you know, in a different strategic paradigm, let alone One in the 20th century, that, you know, nuclear weapons could have not been, you know, the kind of trump card or like, the key to victory that obviated, you know, all, like, lesser killing technologies, you know, like, I can't emphasize that enough. It's like, again, like, even people. I'm not any people who've got their own conceptual prejudices one way or the other about the Third Reich. Like, it's not. Put that out of your mind. Totally think it's truly strategic terms and about irrationality of what Berlin had to accomplish in order to realize its war aims and win the war. Like, again, how would an atomic bomb facilitate that? I mean, on the one hand, like, yeah, it's better always to have, like, potential firepower on hand. That's devastating. But it's not okay. I mean, it's. It's, you know, it's not. It's. It's not like. Like, the utility of these weapons is not. There's not a spectrum, a wide spectrum utility to them. You know, it. And I think people forget that, you know, even people who are basically informed about things and, you know, conceptually literate. But. Yeah, all right, I'm rambling, man. I won't. I won't. I won't keep you any longer. But thanks so much for hosting me, man. I owe you a lot. I mean, we're friends, and I appreciate being able to cover these things, but I really, really appreciate the chance to appear on your program. Like, believe it. No, I'M very.
[104:26]
A
You're always. You're always welcome. All you have to do is contact me with a subject and, you know, we'll do it. But before we do that, hit up some plugs and we'll get out of here.
[104:35]
B
Yeah, legit. I'm always on Substack, and in September, I'll be dropping season two of the podcast. In the interim, I'll keep dropping like one off content that you can listen to, like the Nico Clow interview and other stuff, I promise. But in September, season two will drop and when it does, all. All. All other content, all other podcast content will be free. It's real. Thomas. 777 substack.com you can find me on the app formerly known as Twitter. It's real R, capital R E A L underscore number seven. H O M A S 777. I'm on Telegram. It's at Thomas Graham, number seven. HMAS 777 Graham or. No, it's Thomas. Yeah, no, it's. That's right, that's right. I'm not going senile. I'm just tired. And that's the YouTube channel. There's nothing there yet except a couple one off things, you know, like an intro and, you know, some stuff that I've recorded with friends, like my dear friend Carrie on my YouTube channel. It's Thomas TV. That's when I go to Utah in a couple weeks. It's to begin shooting dedicated content for Thomas tv. So I'm excited about that. You know, we're doing a lot more with the brand, not just, like, sexing up the production values, which I owe to my dear friend Rake and his team. Like, literally, like, I could not do any of this stuff without them. They're the guys who do all, like, the editing and stuff and make things, like, presentable, like, legit. I'd be. If it was just me, like, I. I'd be like some like, hobo, like, looking like he was on Public access in like 1980 or something. Like, it'd be like something from, like. Yeah, it'd be like something from like, Public Access and like some alternate dimension of. But so keep that in mind that they're the guys who really are owed props for anything I do in this regard. But yeah, that's about where we're at. I. I'm hoping to be able to drop Steel Storm three by early spring, Nuremberg by summer, and that's all I got for right now until part three.
[107:09]
A
Thank you, Thomas.
[107:10]
B
Yeah, thank you, Pete.
[107:12]
A
I want to welcome, everyone back to the Picanha Show. I'm here with Thomas. How are you doing, Thomas?
[107:19]
B
I'm doing very well. Thanks for hosting me again. I hope. I hope people have been getting something out of this series. You know, I'm a historical writer, and I know something about political theory and the law and formal logic, but I'm not a scientist at all. I'm not even like, a layman who, you know, is highly competent in science or something. So I hope I'm not embarrassing myself in the way I explain some of these things. Um, but I've gotten feedback. Like, a friend of ours who's a German dude who also has a degree in physics, like, told me that, like, he's like, yeah, I'm proud of you for, like, not totally this up. So that made me feel kind of good. Like, our German friends, as well as, like, our physicist friends generally don't pull any punches in that regard. So. But today, I mean, there's just a lot here. Okay. I mean, but I think, well, maybe go one more episode, just as a, you know, after this one is kind of a bookend and maybe field questions. But I'll. I'll explain what I mean with the statement I'm about to issue fourth as we get into the meat of today's episode. But, you know, the German. The German atomic bomb program such that it. Such that there could even be said to be one that existed. It was basically strangle, in utero when. When the Wehrmacht was, like, stopping its tracks at the gates of Moscow. Okay. And I'll get into what I mean by that as we move along. Okay. If nothing else, you know, military exigencies and the long emergency of a long war, a prolonged war which Germany could not afford to wage, made rendered any kind of German version of the Manhattan Project, you know, not feasible, even if it was strategically sound as regards, you know, its impetus. You know, would it. Would it even resolve Germany's military quagmire? Emergent military quagmire. But there's a lot in between, you know, 1939 and December 1941, that still needs to be addressed. And the person that Heisenberg features very prominently here. Okay, for those who know Heisenberg was not an experimental physicist, he was a very much a theoretical physicist and frankly, something of a philosopher with theological interests. You know, he was not. He was not really the counterpart to Oppenheimer or something. You know, And I say that, like, in the most praising terms. I think a guy like Wolfgang Smith is kind of very much a descendant A spiritual descendant of Heisenberg. So the fact that Heisenberg came to be, you know, kind of helm the, the virus house research and all attendant projects, I mean, that tells you something too. You know. I mean, it's. And I'll. I'll expand upon that with discrete facts and testimony, but that's something people need to keep in mind. You know, it's just. There's a lot of connecting the proverbial dots in the absence of direct testimony or concrete evidence to point to in order to, you know, paint a picture of what this, of what this endeavor was and, you know, what gave rise to it and how it was not what was claimed, but you know, to what degree. To what. To what degree it was. The people who claimed the German atomic bomb program was. Was. Was well underway in a dedicated capacity. The degree to which that was propaganda deliberately cultivated by interested parties contra, you know, people actually believing this was the case owing to the. Not just the fog of war, but, you know, the kind of opaque nature of. Of what was then, you know, the new science, you know, and, and everything else. It's hard to say. I think it depends on who we were talking about, but we'll get into that too, particularly the. The views of people like Stimson versus, you know, those in. You know, I mean, Stimson was an outlier in the New Deal administration anyway, but, you know, he. The view of him versus, you know, people who, who. People in the administration who, who are most receptive to Einstein and Sachs's claim. I, I mean, there's a, There was a. There's a difference in, in conceptual horizon there. But I want to get into. We left off last time with the April 29, 1939 conference. And as, as we. As we got into the focus of that discussion really was the feasibility of a. Of a quote, uranium engine. You know, like we said, such that these, Such that these discussions among this coterie that the War Office had corralled, had, had. It had a focus and later like such that their. Such that their experimental activities, you know, had a discrete focus was. It was really towards what we conceptually what we consider a nuclear reactor. And that becomes relevant. That becomes independently relevant as. As time went on, really relating to the weaponization of. Of. Of Uranium 235, as we'll see but a few days prior, a guy named Niels Bohr, who was a Dane, but he was in some way, he had like an outsized impact on German physics, okay. And he was very much like a mentor of Heisenberg among other. Among other luminaries, he and a guy named J.E. wheeler, they published the American Physical Review, which was read pretty much by everybody in the Western world who was at all involved in physics. Even throughout the war, you know, this endured, Reiterated the idea that uranium 235 had weapons potential. You know, so this was even independent of any New Deal propaganda, independent of any kind of anxieties, well founded or not, within the British intelligence establishment, just worldwide. There were people who were arguably splendidly disinterested in the political climate and the burgeoning battle lines who were playing with this idea. It was at least on their radar. So the climate, the intellectual climate into which everybody was sort of thrust, who was taking on a role in experimental physics and in any combat nation, actual or potential. You know, there was. There was. There was this kind of subtext of, you know, military potential, direct military potential here. Okay. So, I mean, to be fair, like, that's got to. That's got to be accounted for. Otto Hahn, who, you know, who was an experimental physicist and who did have tremendous clout just, Just, just across the board. Like, not just, but it's. Particularly within the, within the committee in Berlin. He said that any project essentially, you know, try and cultivate uranium 235, it. It be. It'd be astronomically expensive and it would present, you know, just insoluble difficulties. Professor Bage, who was a. A preeminent researcher and he was kind of the top researcher who was attached to Heisenberg in a direct capacity, like he was literally his protege. He said, well, let's call it Heisenberg himself. And, you know, if, if this is possible or if this is just, you know, a pipe dream, not even the development of a bomb is not. That's not the question on the table. Just, you know, the, the, you know, the. But The. The extraction of light uranium isotope in appreciable quantities. You know, like, he. If this is possible and if it's feasible, you know, within, you know, our present means, you know, he'd be the man who could. Who could, you know, sort of shed light on this. Now, Heisenberg, Willow, universally respected, like, again, there was a basic element of disdain for theoretical physics among many of these experimental physicists. And that very much. That very became apparent when Heisenberger kind of joined this. Join this, this, this, this quorum. Not quite. I mean, it was anything but a quorum. It was a coterie, you know, and that there was a lot of. There's. There's a lot of. There's A lot of contrarianism for its own sake kind of thrown up in these discussions which in fact David Irving in his book makes that point and he had opportunity to, you know, speak to some of the men who actually were in attendance at these meetings, at least in like a more than oblique capacity. The, what was finally agreed upon was basically that if there was any, if there was, if there's any slight, the official statement, what was decided by like the minutes of, of these kinds of, like the collected minutes of these, of these debates discussions was what Professor Geiger said if there was any, if there was even the slightest chance of liberating energy from the atomic nucleus, it would, you know, in any of these experiments that it had to be followed up. Okay, the, it was recommended that General Becker, you know, the, the ordinance department chief, that, that a dedicated quote, nuclear physics research group be organized under these auspices. And you know, like we talked about last time, like Esau had an amicable relationship already with Becker. And so, so it was, it was, it was, it was made so for security reasons. And this too I think clouded perception of the Allies, at least in those who were within military intelligence for security reasons. The project, the language employed in documents relating to was all characterized as, as research for the creation of potential fuel sources for rocket propulsion. Okay. Like the actual Reich rocket program was, it became, it came under the auspices of, of the SS eventually. You know, that's why von Braun like actually was in, was in, was in uniform in the ss. You know, like he was, you know, like it was formally incorporated into the organization and in a very top down way, you know, the, the rocket program is an example of how, of everything that, you know, the, that, that, that the virus house program wasn't, you know, and I also believe owing to the intrinsically military language of, you know, this kind of deliberate mischaracterization of the program as a rocket program. I think that may have convinced people who came across kind of scraps and, and statements out of the ear, you know, who were spying on the Third Reich. I I think they just made they, they axiomatically determined like, you know, well this is, this is a direct, this is a, this is a direct military endeavor, you know, and that, that's not unreasonable. It's not an unreasonable conclusion to draw, especially if one understood how the German general staff system worked and kind of what the interplay was between, you know, technological research within what was nominally the private sector. And you know, it's, it's the ability of the military to capitalize on, on These. On these developments, you know, but it. I think that's. I think that's interesting. And it's also. It goes to like, where priorities were, you know, like kind of the people. People in the Vermo kind of like what they viewed as like the zenith kind of. Of. Of. Of Vortech, you know, was what was aerospace stuff, you know, with. Like. With. With rocketry obviously kind of being the. The absolute zenith of. Of that. But the. It. What also happened was on. On, uh. On September 16th, first of all, Kurt Diebner, who we talked about last time, he was appointed to lead, at least nominally, the nuclear physics research group under ordinance Department auspices, Dr. Baggy began keeping a diary for the first time in his life because, I mean, I think he realized. I'm sure he realized that whatever the outcome of these endeavors, it was something, you know, he was participating in scientific history, you know, as it was being made. But on the. He notes that on September 16, 1939, Der summoned him personally to report to the army ordinance department. He writes, participated in a, quote, conference about an important matter, then returned to Leipzig. This was the last from this point on, the reason why he uses that. That deliberately minimalist language. And he referenced the possibilities of uranium for any. Any of any application reactors, super bombs. Anything was considered was classified as a state secret, okay? And all. All reference to the possibilities of uranium and energy derived from uranium was. Was actively suppressed. Okay. The first instance. And again, this goes to show you the kind of frosty relationship between the private sector and the army in this regard. You know, kind of splendidly contra. The situation existed between the aviation industry and the military establishment, which is positively incestuous. A Siemens research chemistry. Know Seaman research physicist. You know, Seaman was a huge conglomerate, you know, like they, they. They were basically insinuated everything on the cutting edge of. Of. Of applied sciences, you know, as related to industry and everything else. They. He submitted an article to the main, like, German news agency that contained a detailed description of, you know, like a kind of like the atomic science of the day, you know. And it's. It's supposed, you know, like marvelous potential for purposes civilian and military. And it refers specifically to the power contained in the uranium nucleus. And it said, quote, it potentially contained enough to blast the ruins of a giant city up into the stratosphere. What terrific powers of annihilation and air force would have it could fight an enemy with bombs like these. End quote. And the writer called in no uncertain terms for increased experiments with masses of uranium, which again, the Reich had access to in Czechoslovakia. There were uranium reserves in Portugal too. And later on, late at late, very late in the war, even the British were convinced that this played into some of the kind of, you know, the reasons why like in their view, the furor sort of treated Franco with kid gloves. The majority of these, the majority of these resources were in Portugal. But obviously, you know, the, the key to the, to the peninsula was Iberian peninsula was Spain. But that's something of a tangent. But the, the, this, this article was totally suppressed and the author was warned like nothing of this nature can appear in prison. There was papers on general atomic research were allowed, including directly related to, you know, experience involving uranium and including the light isotope. But no direct mention of their context was to be made and certainly not any even speculative suggestion about, you know, their employment and weapons programs. Now we can look at that any number of ways. You know, like it's like we talked about before and I think you raised, When you're looking ahead, I mean, the Germans are actively at war by this point. This was the, you know, the two weeks prior the United Kingdom and France had declared war on Germany. But even at, even at nominal peace, you know, in a strategic landscape such that Germany was situated, you know, the way you've got to be careful with what you introduce into the stream of information. You got to be careful even about the disinformation you insinuate. And probably it was in the minds of plenty of people that the last thing that the Reich needed was, you know, the New Dealers and the British being able to seize upon statements by top scientists that Germany's working on super weapons. You know, Hitler especially was very cognizant of this, like so is Goebbels. And that, that there's, there's, there's a very interesting give and take around both men's respective ideas on the role of, you know, media at war and as a political apparatus. But my point is that it's not, it's not just like prima facie evidence that, oh, Berlin demanded this be suppressed. They obviously were, you know, this was, their goal was to, you know, do exactly that what was suggested in the article by the Siemens physicist. You know, it's quite a bit more nuanced because if run across very, very basic treatments of that anecdote that, you know, proffer precisely that asinine conclusion. The. Now one of the problems faced, whatever the state of applied research utilizing Uranium 235 by the German scientists was, you know, whether, whether as a dedicated weapons program or just as, you know, trying to identify what potentiality existed utilizing these, you know, these, these, this element specifically Uranium 235 is an energy source like whatever, whatever the, whatever the ultimate goal was. There was a, there, there's a problem with, there's a problem with isolating uranium 235 and cultivating it. Okay. And such was the, you know, there, from there, from whence emerges the concern about, you know, it just being a cost prohibitive affair which makes it, you know, functionally useless, particularly as a, a military, a military endeavor. The September 26, 1939, the second conference of the nuclear physicists at the Ordinance Department was held. The subject of that conference was specifically means of extracting energy from the uranium nucleus either in, either in controlled amounts, you know, as would facilitate a reactor or a uranium furnace or in the uncontrolled chain reaction, reactive violence of an explosion. Okay, the first, the first accomplishing the first would, would involve mixing the uranium with some substance capable of literally slowing down the high energy fast neutrons emitted during the fission process without absorbing them for technical reasons I don't quite understand. Neutrons of a certain energy band are particularly prone to captured by uranium. So for them not to be lost, they, these, these, these fission neutrons had to be, had to be rapidly slowed down by some kind of breaking substance or in science, scientific language like moderating elements or moderator. Okay, the second, second possibility was that if, if, if, if ever it's going to be made to be utilized this as an explosive. You know, if a super bomb was in fact possible, you know, the, it was the rare isotope that was needed to fission with thermal neutrons. Okay, so how do you, how you, how do you get the, how do you get the uranium 235 that you need? You know, in the case of the first question, Professor Hartik, he discussed the design of a uranium reactor to solve both problems. Okay. He had a colleague named Dr. Han Seuss, not Dr. Seuss, the guy who wrote like the cat in the head, like this guy was like an actual, like doctor named Seuss. Like, take from that what you will. I know some dick is going to mention stability sneet or something like. It's not about that. Sue said proposed that heavy water was, was, was to be used in the, in the. As, as, as, as the moderating element. Okay. What is heavy water? It's a form of water, obviously, whose hydrogen atoms are all deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen, rather than the common hydrogen isotope that makes up most of the hydrogen in normal water. The presence of heavier hydrogen, the heavier hydrogen isotope it gives the water different nuclear properties, and the increase in mass alters the physical and chemical properties as it relates to normal water. Okay. Now, So as this research went on, in other words, you know, kind of like the. The challenges, like, stacked up and up and up, and as I'm sure you've gleaned, basically what became clear, according to the path, the course of German research. And America was able to avoid this entirely owing to plutonium. And we'll get into that briefly if there's time or if people are interested. But basically, like, when it came clear at the second conference, what was being floated is that, well, it's not a question of do we build a bomb or do we build a reactor or not. Not even do we. But, like, what. What's the potential here is that if you want. If you want to do anything like the latter, you have to develop the former anyway. Okay. So, I mean, this is just becoming like, who's going to pay for all this when this may not even be possible and we may not even have access to the uranium. Uranium pile reserves that we need in order to accomplish it. The Heisenberg. Enter Heisenberg. He was commissioned specifically to investigate theoretically whether a chain reaction in uranium was possible given the known properties of. Of neutron fusion and uranium fission and the characteristics therein. Over time. This is pre1941. After 1941, things change. Reasons we'll get into that kind of became the focus. It starts to be said to be like a dedicated focus towards a directly military application. Okay. I think this is when discussions corral discreetly around the potential of an atomic bomb within German physics quarters generally and specifically within this ordinance department coterie of great physics minds. Okay. And partly, yeah, obviously, because partly, like, that's something that, you know, the Vermont needed to know about if this was possible, you know, owing to the fact that Germany was now at war. But also, I mean, if that's possible, if, you know, basically, like, it's, you know, if. If there's potential for, you know, energy release at all, you know, like the most kind of. The most kind of concrete way, you know, to understand that in experimental terms is to determine if, you know, like an explosive chain reaction can be cultivated. Okay. I think that must be accounted for and based upon Heisenberg's own notes, like, I'm talking about, like, his personal, like, opinion work product that was, you know, not for anybody else's eyes. This seems to be the case because he never once talks about, you know, I mean, first of all, there was his reactions when he was in captivity to the, you know, to the Hiroshima Nagasaki attacks. But also like in his own, I say opinion work products. It wasn't a proper diary. You know, like never once does he write, you know, some of the effect of, you know, like this. We're, we're working towards development of a bomb. I mean he writes a lot and he, and he raised issues with, with colleagues about, you know, the morality of, of, of this research for various, you know, in various capacities. But never once does one get the idea that, you know, he saw himself as insinuated into some sort of like German Manhattan Project. The. Around the same time the War Office somewhat abruptly they took over the, they took over the building on the campus, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. Okay, because it had, it had the best equipment for, for, for applied atomic research, probably, probably in Europe, definitely within Germany. All, all scientists participating in, you know, the, the War Office project were, they were, they were asked to transfer this one central institute. You know, so they're like, basically like all hands would be on deck under one roof. This is, this is absolutely necessary, okay. Especially when talking about this kind of advanced research. The problem is these men all had, you know, these weren't military men to a man. They were, you know, civilian researchers. They had egos, they, they were all, you know, kind of the kingfish of the pond. They were situated at, in their respective institutions. But it's also, you know, some of these guys were young, but a lot of them weren't, you know, it's like they, people become very attached to their research. Particularly men, I'd have to imagine of brilliant intellectual, you know, they didn't want to, they didn't want to be part of a team. I mean, who the hell does, you know, like in that capacity. So most, almost, most of them, like almost all of them objected and many of them just declined. They just declined what amounted to a direct order. Okay? But it's like the cachet that these men had was, you know, you cannot, you can't, you can't replace nuclear physicists, okay? And like it's the, who was corralled there at the Berlin Dalam or the Kaiser Vellum Institute, like Weiziker, Vitz, Bop, Borman, Fisher and Heisenberg was often present. So I mean there was like a core there, there was, there was, there was a core like working group that did exactly what was, what was directed. But it indicated a real, you know, it indicated a real lack of, of concrete focus and kind of top down discipline towards a directed goal. You know, and that's. That's. I think that's more symptomatic than causative. I mean, it's not. You know, it's not. It's. That's important to understand too, is that, you know, we're not talking about, you know, a true German atomic bomb project, but that was sabotaged by outside egos and eccentricities. It. And I want the second key takeaway too, is that there's this. There's this idea that, you know, there was some, like, brain drain in Germany because, like, you know, all the brilliant physicists were Jewish, like, and got chased out. That's not true at all. Heisenberg probably was like the leading physics mind, like, on this planet, you know, and, you know, Vizagar Vitz, Bob Esau, Borman. I mean, all these guys, like, they were boggy, deep nerd. Like, they. They were the top of their game. And frankly, you know, they weren't. None of these guys were like party men and. Or dedicated national socialists, but they weren't about to reject their fatherland, which frankly, had done tremendous things for them in terms of facilitating their research in all kinds of ways and, you know, providing them with, you know, not just the material means, but the kind of social capital and, And. And structural resources to, you know, to practice their. Their, you know, their. Their. Their experiments and everything else. Or in Heisenberger's case, you know, like, there's really. Probably in. Probably in France and probably in. In like, the Nordic countries. I mean, he would have been like a luminary, but it, you know, he. I mean, Germany was. Germany was the center man. It was the axial pivot of scientific research and endeavor in Europe. That can't be denied, you know. And like, the. That's also. There was a disadvantage here because Matok, but his. One of the, you know, one of the. One of the researchers, he said in uncertain terms that, you know, he was delighted to be assigned this project because, you know, he could continue with atomic research and his young colleagues who he thought had great potential. He said we could protect them from getting called up to the draft. You know, we could continue our scientific research in the manner which we were accustomed, like whether other people had to tighten their belts, you know, other. Other young guys, you know, who had a. A bright future in whatever career field. You know, we're having to go fight, you know, for the fatherland. You know, it's like we were basically unmolested, you know. So, I mean, that's. That's totally different. A totally different idea or sensibility then was the case with the Manhattan Project scientists and in the UK man, like, there was the, you know, there was, like we talked about, you know, Churchill had very. He and his. And his sponsors. I mean, they very effectively, you know, kind of, kind of drown out dissident voices as respect to the war effort, you know, and it had become something of a career killer and especially in university life, which frankly, you know, was. There was a lot of Jewish influence there. You know, these, these, these guys in the UK were the counterparts, you know, to the, to the virus house team as well as the Manhattan Project team. You know, they, they were very much, they were very much working in a dedicated capacity after 1941 to weaponize atomic energy to be turned against Germany. And they had no qualms with this at all. You know, I mean, it wasn't even a question of qualms with, with the Germans. This wasn't even on their radar. You know, I mean, I can't emphasize that enough. And if this was in the military's mind, which I, I don't think it could have been because, I mean, they, that the men who could conceptualize these things were, were all, you know, in, in academe, I, you know, if you, if you're, if the men who can actually perform the experiments as required to facilitate the engineering of such devices as it'd be coveted by the armed forces. I mean, if you can't make them do that, I mean, you're, you're pissing into the wind.
[143:41]
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It.
[143:42]
B
No. What changed in 1941 for the Germans? Everything changed in December. But before that, in July 1941, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which has something of an outsized role in the, in what we can think of as kind of like the Churchill defense establishment or like, you know, arms establishment. I mean, for obvious reasons, you know, I mean, I mean, the UK Realized early on it had to transition to a major. Make the transition to a major air power. Otherwise, you know, like the Royal Navy would only be as dominant as, as, as the Royal Air Force could be to defend it. So they, so they, so the Air Ministry and all of its attendant kind of appendages developed a lot of clout. There was a, a special committee appointed to research, uh, the, the potential of atomic energy. Okay? It concluded that an effective uranium bomb and again, uranium until, until American research became kind of known to the world, like after 45, in a complete capacity. Everybody's, you know, uranium was what everybody thought of when they thought of weapons potential. The, this. The Aircraft Production Committee's report was that about 25 pounds of uranium 235, the yield could be equivalent to about 800 tons of TNT. And the committee, the committee's conclusion was that Germany, having taken steps to cultivate heavy water coupled with, you know, their, their increase in mining of uranium ore within, you know, they knew that they newly gained access to in what was Czechoslovakia. That it's obvious that, you know, even, you know, they're the state of Germany is that they're not, they're not looking to utilize this for peaceful purposes. You know, the only immediate benefit to the German Reich of finding ways to release the energy contained therein would be, you know, in a weaponized capacity. I think by this point, I think the British probably believe this. I mean, who the hell knows? I mean like we talked about, these guys were zealots anyway. But considering that, you know, there was far less known, I mean Bradne had some top scientists, but there's far less known there than was known in America, you know, about what the kind of
[147:05]
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real world
[147:09]
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application these things would look like. I think that they probably believe like, you know, anything that the Germans were willing to dedicate this kind of effort to is, is going to be explicitly military and probably, you know, some kind of massive force multiplier that's misguided for a lot of reasons. Not ethically, factually, um, but in a fog of war kind of scenario with the state of science at the time that was, you know, available even to an expert. I, I, I, I think they probably believed what they conveyed. The Churchill. The, they further said that the material for an atomic weapon at the earliest, at the very earliest could be available to Britain by the end of 1943. You know, but that also, you know, begs the question as to like, what would we do with it? Anyone? Would it even work? But the, this of course led the British to try and see what they could find out about the Iranian research program through their contacts in Norway. The, the primary German heavy water facility was at Rajukin, Norway. If I'm butchering that, forgive me Rajukin I think R J U K A N the problem is, as I think the subscribers know because we got into it in our Churchill episodes, the Norwegians did not have particularly warm feelings about the British, particularly when the British had intended to assault and invade and occupy Norway preemptively. Okay, so throughout the summer 1941, as intelligence came in from Trondheim to London, know from their intelligence operatives that, you know, heavy water production, that Rukan, you know, was steadily increasing, the, the, the priority of the priority of the Prime Minister, you know, as well as everybody in the intelligent into military establishment was to, you know, bring the Norwegian intelligence service on board and you know, essentially get somebody to, you know, kind of penetrate the Rijukan facility or at least, you know, develop a, a way of conveying information back to London that might be usable in terms of how, you know, the facility could be, could be compromised and derailed from its purpose. They, the Norwegians essentially told him to go to hell. You know, they, they. The official response from there was a guy named Welsh, he was lieutenant Commander in British in, in, in. In the British army, went on to serve in the intelligence service. He married a Norwegian woman and he was chief of the Norwegian section of, of the intelligence service. He he contacted, when he, when he contacted his counterparts in Norwegian intelligence, apparently they literally said to him in a telegram, blood is thicker than heavy water. You know, like basically go yourself. You know, like, we're not, we're not. We, we want to be thrilled that the, that, that, you know, the, the Vermont is here and we don't know what the hell they're doing, you know, at this facility. But you know, we're not, we're not going to help you and Piggy Churchill find other ways to attack our country, you know, and I think that's very interesting, especially considering how in, particularly in, in, in English history books, you know, like quizzling is held out as just this, like, it's just this buffoon when in reality was a great man. But also they, it's pretended that like Norway was a. Either fully on board with the Allies with this like victim state, you know, like a lot like, you know, there was a, about 5, between 5 and 10,000 Norwegians like joined the Waffen SS and for a population that's in Norway that's substantial. Like Newt Hampson was kind of like the national scribe in Norway. You know, he literally wrote a eulogy to Adolf Hitler. Like they, I mean the Norwegians are great people, but I, it, it's just an interesting kind of wrinkle that, you know, they refuse to participate in kind of these, these designs of, of London even at the height of the, of the, the early phase of the war. At the same time the, the British approached, at least as we know from the record, the British approached the, the senior British scientific representative in, in the, in, in the Air Ministry committee. He wrote, he wrote to the chairman of Roosevelt's scientific advisory committee, like when he was in Washington, I believe, like if I read that right, you know, basically like you know, kind of feeling out, you know, the, the Yanks about, you know, what the state of their research was. And of course, like they, nobody outside the Manhattan Project, you know, like, knew anything. Like, even if they had, I, I, it's, I mean, it's debatable if they would have disclosed that or not. But, you know, there was, it was, security was very, very tight, to say the least. But he floated the question, you know, it proves possible to manufacture a uranium bomb, you know, should it in fact be used? You know, like, should we should, should, you know, one of our respective general staffs or both, like, are they willing and should they sanction the total destruction of Berlin and the entire, you know, or, or like the entire country in Germany, you know, with, with a weapon such as this, you know, and it, that's really the only, the kind of, the kind of lame, indirect reply was from Stimson, who and Stimson, like I mentioned earlier tonight, but also like in the past I've mentioned that Stimson was a, he was an outlier in the new New Dealer regime. But, you know, he said years after the fact that, you know, in 1942, 1943, we believed, based on, you know, intelligence derived that we consider reliable that, you know, the Germans were far ahead of us and weaponized atomic research. I think Stimson probably believed that. But it's interesting I raised the issue of the, the UK scientific representative, like, not only raising this moral quagmire but, you know, kind of putting it to paper literally in the documentary record. That's the only, that's the only such moral qualm I've ever heard from a British source about, about the, about the atomic bomb from, you know, from the era before it was it even, you know, had been devised into existence. Bomber Harris spoke very candidly and intelligently on the morality of strategic bombing, you know, later on, but, but not of the out of the nuclear question, but it's, I think this stuff's useful to kind of, it paints a picture of what was in the minds of the relevant players, you know, and like I said, by the, in reality, America was far ahead of everybody in terms of, you know, applied atomic weapons research. Plutonium was first synthesized, synthetically produced and isolated in late 1940 by Deuteron bombardment of uranium 238 in a cyclotron at University of California, Berkeley. Okay. And the ultimately, plutonium, Plutonium proved to be a game changer. The Nagasaki bomb was a, was a plutonium bomb. Okay. But even like, aside from that, just it separating plutonium from a chain, you're acting uranium pile and then using that as an atomic explosive. Just the fact that that possibility had been recognized, that meant that, you know, from, you know, basically from inception the Manhattan Project was like on the path to like developing an atomic bomb, like in concrete terms, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, in all kinds of ways. I mean like good and dead. But the, the, The, what the hell was gonna say? Oh, the summer of 1941 in Germany, the, the army research department had formally contracted Norwegian Hydro for a supply of 1500 kilograms of heavy water between October and the end of the year. Or. But from October 9, the end of the year, only 361 kilograms have been delivered. It was slow going. In other words, like, if, if this was in a, like, even if, even if the process which was outlined at the second Berlin conference would essentially amount to do, you know, the creation of a reactor and subsequently, you know, the utilization of that reactor and the heavy water coolant to, you know, to cultivate uranium 235. Like, even if that, even if that was the objective and it was on track, arguably in terms of, you know, both intent and capability, this seems far too slow a process to make any kind of difference on the battlefield. We'll get into exactly what I mean in a minute. But what's important is that once, once this, once this heavy water cultivation got underway. Heisenberg attested, he said it was from September 41. He's like, we saw an open road ahead of us leading to an atomic bomb, okay. He's like, this is when I became convinced this was at least possible. And that's when, you know, just kind of what was, what was gleaned from, you know, just these processes that were actively underway. Things came into focus in a kind of conceptual capacity, if that makes sense. Like I'm not a scientist, so I take these guys words for it in their testimony when they suggest that this is, this is a, you know, a real process, whatever the endeavor is Neil's bore and this is important. The end of October 1941, Heismer traveled to Denmark to seek out Niels Bohr, who was one of the preeminent physics minds on this planet. And Heisen, he was something of a mentor to Heisenberg. Heisenberg asked him in at Bohr's home. He said, you know, and obviously Heisenberg wasn't being loose lipped and telling him like what he was working on. He asked for just, you know, basically like, you know, what, what do you think of the like is there a moral obligation to not cultivate, you know, a weapon from atomic energy? Like, basically like what's the moral implications of working on an atomic bomb in wartime if such a thing were possible? You know, board said that, you know, it, you know, well, you know, the, the responsibility one's fatherland versus, you know, his duty to, you know, the scientific community as well as, you know, like human progress. You know, these things all need to be weighed. Borer afterwards came away believing that this was like Heisenberg's, kind of like it was either Heisenberg sort of like thinly veiled confession or it was him trying to convey to him and sort of like a culted language that he was building an atomic bomb, quite literally. And he, he see, he, he later said boarded that he was deeply shocked. This I believe Bore basically told all of his intimates within kind of the small fraternity of European physicists that, you know, Heisenberg came to see me and the Reich is building a bomb. Okay. And I think that's when the kind of myth of the German atomic bomb program like really kind of took off in earnest. Not in a propaganda capacity. Like I think people actually believe this and I think Bohr actually believed this too. But even if that were true, and I'm going to wrap up here in a moment, but as fall became winter in 1941, the Wehrmacht was stopped dead in its tracks at the gates of Moscow. You know, and as we've talked about many times in our series, you know, the Reich, the Soviet Union had to fall in December. You know, the, the entire German state, its national economics, everything about it was configured towards, quote, short wars with long respites. You know, like, that's why I always emphasize that the Third Reich was not some like mirror of the Soviet Union. It was not mobilized for war from the top down. It did not even have a wartime mobilization scheme in place, you know, until 1943. You know, this was the fact that the assault on Moscow failed. I mean, this was a disaster. Like ultimately this cost the war. But immediately in December 41, Hitler issued the edict that the needs of the German national economy are to give way to the necessities the armaments economy. And that meant that, you know, Fritz Toad on December 3rd, and for those who don't know, Fritz Toad was the Albert Speer succeeded Fritz Toad as armaments and munitions minister. After Toad was killed, Toads informed Hitler that the economy was literally at the breaking point. And from then on, any expansion in one sector to meet military necessities had to be balanced by you know, reduction in another. You know, Hitler drafted a decree essentially with like toast input as to
[163:14]
A
you
[163:14]
B
know, what, what this would entail, you know and essentially like shedding all like non essential projects from like any firms or institutions like engaged in applied research of a non military nature. Like essentially like that was over, you know. It's. Professor Schumann, one of the JENNA conference attendees, he drafted an open letter to all institutes working on the ARENA project and he said, he stated no uncertain terms that the, the quote, the work and the project undertaken by the research group is making demands which can be justified in the current recruiting and raw materials crisis only if there's a certainty of getting some benefit from it in the near future. You know. And that and that and that. That was that man. It's. We can. There's more to the story of the virus House. As the war went on and particularly as you know the tide truly turned. I mean NC was no longer a possibility after December 41st but after Stalingrad, you know it can. There's obviously like an open ended question is like why did the Iranian project continue? But that owed to, that owed to a, that owed to kind of the nature of modern bureaucracy, particularly in a state of total war. You know, like these things that are earmarked for funding of a way even in an emergency of just kind of continuing to go on, you know, were there, were there some people too like within. That's just the research group but within the military establishment who did understand the implications of this uranium research and did think that there was potential for a real viable device to be cultivated from it, you know, in a way that could like help Germany. Yeah, I think there were. David Irving certainly seemed to think there were. We get into some of that next episode and I promise like I'll wrap it up. But there was just a lot here man, you know and like I think, I think the entire story needs to be told. But yeah, that's, I'm, I'm getting uncomfortable from like sitting for the best hours and I don't want to bore people to death. But yeah, we'll, we'll take this up man for a part four and I'll, I'll wrap it up then, I promise.
[165:46]
A
Yeah, I don't think it's boring. I think people are getting a lot out of this. So yeah, we'll do, we'll do. Wrap it up with parts. Yeah. But do plugs real quick and we'll get it out. We'll get out of here.
[166:02]
B
Yeah. You can find me on Twitter still or X Rayther. I hate all like porny. That seems like I don't like. I don't like. I was on my phone like on the train. There's like some chick next to me and like you only open the abs like a big X. It's like, man, I don't. That just looks. I just don't like it. But it's real. Capital R E A L underscore number 7H1E S777 on on bird app or X app or whatever. The home of my podcast and some of my like longer form stuff is on Substack. That's the prime primary place to hit me up. And it's real. Thomas777.substack.com you can find my website, which is still under construction, but there is stuff there. It's just thomas777.com Number7homies777.com My YouTube channel is Thomas TV. Leaving for Utah in a few days to shoot dedicated content for it, which I'm excited about. As time goes on, we're going to do more with that, but I got a lot going on right now. I'll be dropping more long form, like books like in the spring, you know, season two of the pod is coming up in September. Yeah, all kinds of stuff, man.
[167:22]
A
I appreciate it. Safe travels. Until the next time.

Germany's WW2 Atomic Weapons Program w/ Thomas777 - Complete

Germany's WW2 Atomic Weapons Program w/ Thomas777 - Complete

The Pete Quiñones Show

Overview

Key Themes & Arguments

Detailed Episode Highlights

PART 1

Setting the Stage: The Real 'Father of the Bomb', Science and Myth-Making

The Farm Hall Episode—German Scientists Learn of Hiroshima

PART 2

The True State of German Atomic Research Pre-War and Early War

Resource Competition, Bureaucratic Chaos

PART 3

From Research to National Emergency: The Virus House and Heavy Water

The Reality of the German Atomic Bomb Program

PART 4 (Series Wrap-Up/Preview)

Lessons, Strategic Realities, and Final Myths Challenged

Notable Quotes & Moments

Important Timestamps

Conclusions & Takeaways

Series Structure

The Pete Quiñones Show

Overview

Key Themes & Arguments

Detailed Episode Highlights

PART 1

Setting the Stage: The Real 'Father of the Bomb', Science and Myth-Making

The Farm Hall Episode—German Scientists Learn of Hiroshima

PART 2

The True State of German Atomic Research Pre-War and Early War

Resource Competition, Bureaucratic Chaos

PART 3

From Research to National Emergency: The Virus House and Heavy Water

The Reality of the German Atomic Bomb Program

PART 4 (Series Wrap-Up/Preview)

Lessons, Strategic Realities, and Final Myths Challenged

Notable Quotes & Moments

Important Timestamps

Conclusions & Takeaways

Series Structure