Forensic tracking could verify uranium cube came from Nazi nuclear effort

New methods could eventually be used to track illicit trafficking of nuclear material.

Read the whole story

 

[haydenmuhl]

Are we sure it's not actually the Tesseract?

 

[Deleted member 1]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

 

[vinyl1]

The Nazis were way behind in nuclear research, and were still following a number of blind alleys when the war ended.

Part of the problem was they kicked out such scientific giants as Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. You'll never get anywhere if you're dumb enough to do that.

 

[OrangeCream]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Not really, uranium is just too dense and stable to make a good dirty bomb.
https://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/non- ... bombs.html

Radiation is often measured in "Curies," equivalent to a gram of radium. A one Curie radiation source is dangerously radioactive and requires special handling. One Curie of Cs-137, with a half life of 30 years, contains just over a hundredth of a gram of cesium, less than a pinch of salt, but to get a Curie of uranium requires 3057 kilograms, or over three tons.

You need a lot of it, and then because it's so dense you need a lot of energy to disperse it.

 

[NezumiRho]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Possibly, but I think we can rest easily for now. These naturally occurring cubes produce little radiation of their own, and any group that could produce a dirty bomb would be better (?) served using big standard chemical weapons instead or just sabotaging a gas main.

Deploying a dirty bomb is enormously difficult. You don't get the kind of blast a conventional device yields; worse, any radioactive material your device releases is at the mercy of the weather, obstructions both natural and man-made, and relies on the vagaries of the wind to spread.

At a guess, you could probably contaminate an apartment building at best.

 

[infernal666]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Not really, uranium is just too dense and stable to make a good dirty bomb.
https://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/non- ... bombs.html

Radiation is often measured in "Curies," equivalent to a gram of radium. A one Curie radiation source is dangerously radioactive and requires special handling. One Curie of Cs-137, with a half life of 30 years, contains just over a hundredth of a gram of cesium, less than a pinch of salt, but to get a Curie of uranium requires 3057 kilograms, or over three tons.

You need a lot of it, and then because it's so dense you need a lot of energy to disperse it.

Powder it and mix with an oxidiser,powdered uranium is stupidly flammable- https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1969.pdf

 

[LtWiggledworth]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.

 

[Mr Pink 2021]

Seems like Heisenburg had a little uncertainty.

 

[Deleted member 817175]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

They actually did have "a few more scientists on their side" in the beginning.

Some of the finest scientists on our side started out on their side.

 

[jandrese]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

They might have been able to produce a low power nuclear reactor with this technique, but it would have been far too unwieldy to pack into a bomb. The German program hadn’t even started on enrichment even at the end of the war. It wasn’t going to be a factor even with twice the scientists, especially as the country falls under an allied bombing campaign.

 

[Stern]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

They needed more and better scientists, more uranium, a vastly larger, functioning economy, industrial capacity that wasn't smashed to bits by the English and Americans, and a workforce that wasn't busy being chewed up on the eastern front. Oh, and competent management and leadership. As it happens, they were short on all of these.

The German scientists had only pretty vague ideas on how nuclear chain reactions worked, and how to cause them, and had more or less resigned themselves to only being able to generate power before the war ended. They still thought they were years ahead of the allies, and when captured at the end of the war actually tried using their knowledge as a bargaining chip. The announcements of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came as huge shocks, as they couldn't imagine anyone being able to build atomic weapons for a long time.

 

[jwachter]

Reminds me of this story:

Sir Ian Jacob, Churchill’s military secretary, once told historian Andrew Roberts that the Allies won the war "because our German scientists were better than their German scientists".

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicat ... gghead-gap

 

[ZhanMing057]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

That's pretty much fantasy talk. The entire German nuclear program costed less than 2 percent that of the Manhattan project, and employed less than 1 percent of the labor involved. They were never going to get close, and at the rate at which they funded the bomb, they wouldn't have gotten close even if the war dragged into the 50s.

There are transcripts of surreptitiously taped conversations of german nuclear scientists shortly after the war ended. The short version is that they mostly agreed that they weren't even close and were pretty much dumbfounded that the Americans succeeded. That plus a healthy dose of bickering over speculation of internal sabotage.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

"only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes..."

ONLY 50% more? ONLY? Given the incredible expenditure or energy and time required to mine the ore, crush the rocks and separate the materials the statement above is absurd in the extreme.

If Heisenberg had been able to get most of the cubes from the other group, it would have been sufficient.

 

[LtWiggledworth]

Reminds me of this story:

Sir Ian Jacob, Churchill’s military secretary, once told historian Andrew Roberts that the Allies won the war "because our German scientists were better than their German scientists".

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicat ... gghead-gap

Well, the massive meatgrinder in the east probably was a bigger factor than the relative competency of each sides' German scientists.

 

[ssamani]

I had no idea about this aspect of Nazi Germany. For all those people saying that they needed more scientists, more uranium etc, etc. aren’t really taking in what the article is saying. They had more scientists but split them up. They had 50% more uranium but that was at another site. Given the limitations on resources it is unlikely that they would have developed a nuclear weapon in time to influence the outcome of the war, but there’s a glibness that can overlook future threats.

 

[karolus]

"only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes..."

ONLY 50% more? ONLY? Given the incredible expenditure or energy and time required to mine the ore, crush the rocks and separate the materials the statement above is absurd in the extreme.

If Heisenberg had been able to get most of the cubes from the other group, it would have been sufficient.

Is that something you're certain of?

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

So, maybe I missed the method used here - but distinguishing between cyanide and styrene surface coatings even at trace levels should be very doable for a modern FTIR with the right accessories.

https://heritagesciencejournal.springer ... 020-0349-8

 

[pavon]

"only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes..."

ONLY 50% more? ONLY? Given the incredible expenditure or energy and time required to mine the ore, crush the rocks and separate the materials the statement above is absurd in the extreme.

It's not that absurd when they already had 60% more located at another research facility.

 

[ZhanMing057]

"only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes..."

ONLY 50% more? ONLY? Given the incredible expenditure or energy and time required to mine the ore, crush the rocks and separate the materials the statement above is absurd in the extreme.

If Heisenberg had been able to get most of the cubes from the other group, it would have been sufficient.

Except for the difference between starting the reaction and creating a useful explosive device, not just a dirty bomb that would have cost more Allied lives, but would not have mattered for the outcome of the war.

The Manhattan project is one of the biggest collaborative efforts that the world has ever seen. It took spending ~1% of US GDP for a number of years to get close, and employed over 100,000 people at its peak. Even if the Nazis put it as top priority - which it wasn't, by a long shot - they didn't have the people or the resources to make it happen.

 

[blackhawk887]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

This pile was at best months from criticality. The US reached criticality in December 1942, and needed another 2.5 years and a staggering amount of resources to master a breeding reactor and the insane plutonium chemistry and implosion techniques needed to make and test a bomb. By late 1944, Germany didn't have the resources or time to do any of this. Really, losing the heavy water ended any chance at a German bomb.

 

[imikem]

Put me in the camp of those who think that Nazi Germany was a decade away, at the very "best", from producing an atomic weapon. And that is assuming against any reasonable probability that somehow the war effort was able to protect the relevant resources and industry.

IOW, well into the range of pure fantasy.

The Soviet bomb, however was an amazing, if unfortunate, success story.

 

[jessedouglas]

If it had, our world might look very different today.

It's unlikely that German scientists successfully testing a heavy water reactor in late-44, early-45 would have had any impact on the world today whatsoever.

 

[blackhawk887]

I had no idea about this aspect of Nazi Germany. For all those people saying that they needed more scientists, more uranium etc, etc. aren’t really taking in what the article is saying. They had more scientists but split them up. They had 50% more uranium but that was at another site. Given the limitations on resources it is unlikely that they would have developed a nuclear weapon in time to influence the outcome of the war, but there’s a glibness that can overlook future threats.

The Manhattan project was really several projects running in parallel, pursuing multiple key technologies for producing bomb-grade material and a working bomb assembly and delivery method. The US found the fastest way by literally trying everything. Even if the Germans had the resources and time to pursue the fastest path, they didn't know what that path was. They would have made all the same false starts the US did. They weren't anywhere remotely close to a few uranium blocks and a few months from a bomb.

 

[wagnerrp]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Not really, uranium is just too dense and stable to make a good dirty bomb.
https://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/non- ... bombs.html

Radiation is often measured in "Curies," equivalent to a gram of radium. A one Curie radiation source is dangerously radioactive and requires special handling. One Curie of Cs-137, with a half life of 30 years, contains just over a hundredth of a gram of cesium, less than a pinch of salt, but to get a Curie of uranium requires 3057 kilograms, or over three tons.

You need a lot of it, and then because it's so dense you need a lot of energy to disperse it.

Powder it and mix with an oxidiser,powdered uranium is stupidly flammable- https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1969.pdf

As are most things.

 

[malor]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Not really, uranium is just too dense and stable to make a good dirty bomb.
https://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/non- ... bombs.html

Radiation is often measured in "Curies," equivalent to a gram of radium. A one Curie radiation source is dangerously radioactive and requires special handling. One Curie of Cs-137, with a half life of 30 years, contains just over a hundredth of a gram of cesium, less than a pinch of salt, but to get a Curie of uranium requires 3057 kilograms, or over three tons.

You need a lot of it, and then because it's so dense you need a lot of energy to disperse it.

It's really good at poisoning a water table, though. Plutonium and uranium are so toxic that they really should be thought of as poisonous metals, IMO, rather than radioactive ones. Using the radioactivity is really hard. Using the toxicity is far easier.

edit: in other words, nuclear waste usually isn't that scary in terms of radioactivity, but it's terrifying in terms of how much damage it can do if it gets into the water supply.

 

[curl | bash]

It certainly didn't help that the Nazis basically rejected contemporary physics.

 

[blackhawk887]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Possibly, but I think we can rest easily for now. These naturally occurring cubes produce little radiation of their own, and any group that could produce a dirty bomb would be better (?) served using big standard chemical weapons instead or just sabotaging a gas main.

Deploying a dirt bomb is enormously difficult. You don't get the kind of blast a conventional device yields; worse, any radioactive material your device releases is at the mercy of the weather, obstructions both natural and manmade, and relies on the vagaries of the wind to spread.

At a guess, you could probably contaminate an apartment building at best.

And that's all you would need to poison the US capitol building.

If you wanted to do that, there are a lot of things that are far more effective and easier to get than unenriched uranium metal.

 

[Nardella]

Were I the type to want to collect NAZI artifacts, it's hard to imagine am item that would be more desirable than one of these cubes. That said, I imagine that a large percentage of that kind of collector are interested in the more symbolic items, like weapons, documents, and uniforms rather than items related to science and technology.

 

[wagnerrp]

Even if the Germans had the resources and time to pursue the fastest path, they didn't know what that path was. They would have made all the same false starts the US did. They weren't anywhere remotely close to a few uranium blocks and a few months from a bomb.

For comparison, the US fired up its first reactor at the end of 1942. The Germans hadn't even gotten that far.

 

[ZhanMing057]

Were I the type to want to collect NAZI artifacts, it's hard to imagine am item that would be more desirable than one of these cubes. That said, I imagine that a large percentage of that kind of collector are interested in the more symbolic items, like weapons, documents, and uniforms rather than items related to science and technology.

I would love to have one (in a sealed and lead glass case) in my office, if only so that when people ask what it is I can casually say "oh that's just my Nazi uranium cube".

I do wonder how much they go for on the collector's market. Probably a few zeros more than what I could afford, though.

 

[SiberX]

Everybody's in here arguing over how far along German nuclear scientists were during the war, and I'm just marveling at the idea of a cube 2 inches on each side (comparatively tiny) that weighs 2.5 kilograms.

I handle reasonably sized lead weights regularly as a scuba diver, so I thought I had a good handle on what a dense metal is like, but a cube that size made of lead (already the densest thing regular people commonly handle, other than gold which is always in small quantities) would only weigh a mere 1.5kg by comparison. Uranium is crazy dense!

 

[Deleted member 817175]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

This pile was at best months from criticality. The US reached criticality in December 1942, and needed another 2.5 years and a staggering amount of resources to master a breeding reactor and the insane plutonium chemistry and implosion techniques needed to make and test a bomb. By late 1944, Germany didn't have the resources or time to do any of this. Really, losing the heavy water ended any chance at a German bomb.

I read somewhere once that the Germans spent nearly as much on the V-2 rocket as we spent on the Manhattan Project. Intuitively this does not seem possible unless there was a spectacular amount of corruption involved.

But we did bomb the V-2 works extensively. My grandfather was over Peenemunde multiple times.

Given the magnitude of both the intelligence and strategic bombing efforts I assume anything remotely on the scale of Oak Ridge, Tennessee would have been identified and bombed flat repeatedly.

I think the lesson of WW2 isn't "this is how close we came to losing" even though apparently that is what is needed to make a compelling documentary. The lesson of WW2 is not to be a Nazi, it fucks with your critical reasoning ability in a way that causes you to sneer at scientific progress, indulge in rampant conspiracy theorizing, and rush into fights you're not prepared to finish.

Kind of like some more recent political movements that come to mind...

 

[Faceless Man]

The Nazis were way behind in nuclear research, and were still following a number of blind alleys when the war ended.

Part of the problem was they kicked out such scientific giants as Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. You'll never get anywhere if you're dumb enough to do that.

They didn't kick out Bohr, they had him under house arrest in Oslo, and tried to get Heisenberg to win him over, but the British got him out, and nearly killed him on the way.

They did have a significant problem in that there were a lot of Jewish people in the forefront of the science around nuclear fission, and most of them fled the Nazis early on.

 

[cptskippy]

All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

They might have been able to produce a low power nuclear reactor with this technique, but it would have been far too unwieldy to pack into a bomb. The German program hadn’t even started on enrichment even at the end of the war. It wasn’t going to be a factor even with twice the scientists, especially as the country falls under an allied bombing campaign.

This was the conclusion made in a biography of Enrico Fermi I read in the mid 90s. The wires used in the heavy water reactor absorbed too many neutrons to make a sustainable or runaway reaction. Regardless, the method was not easily weaponized into a bomb.

The uranium and graphite reactor developed in Chicago for the Manhattan project was trivial to weaponize in comparison. Not to dismiss or downplay the tremendous work and loss that went into developing a bomb.

 

[pipe13]

664 cubes and just a few are accounted for? That's a decent size for a dirty bomb.

Not really, uranium is just too dense and stable to make a good dirty bomb.
https://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/non- ... bombs.html

Radiation is often measured in "Curies," equivalent to a gram of radium. A one Curie radiation source is dangerously radioactive and requires special handling. One Curie of Cs-137, with a half life of 30 years, contains just over a hundredth of a gram of cesium, less than a pinch of salt, but to get a Curie of uranium requires 3057 kilograms, or over three tons.

You need a lot of it, and then because it's so dense you need a lot of energy to disperse it.

It's really good at poisoning a water table, though. Plutonium and uranium are so toxic that they really should be thought of as poisonous metals, IMO, rather than radioactive ones. Using the radioactivity is really hard. Using the toxicity is far easier.

edit: in other words, nuclear waste usually isn't that scary in terms of radioactivity, but it's terrifying in terms of how much damage it can do if it gets into the water supply.

Could you perhaps provide more details? My current understanding is that uranium is about as toxic as lead, i.e. yes you *do* want to be careful with it, but not a blind panic.

As for plutonium, I think some citations there as well. My suspicion -- and again just a suspicion -- is the general fear of plutonium arises from the finely powdered plutonium from the milling process in fabricating implosion bombs and triggers. While still a relatively weak alpha emitter, plutonium is several times as radioactive as uranium. And while alpha emitters are generally harmless or nearly so outside one's body, inhaling a metal powder whose fine particles will lodge in one's lungs and stay there in one place is a whole 'nother story.