Why the Nazis Failed to Build an Atomic Bomb?
Heisenberg claimed that Germans intentionally stalled the nuclear program.
In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann first detected nuclear fission in their experiments in a laboratory in Berlin. They were bombarding uranium with neutrons when they discovered Barium, an element approximately half the size of uranium. Their former colleague Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch came to the shocking realization that the Uranium nucleus had split in two.
This sparked global discussion in the physics community, and the troubling implications of the breakthrough soon came into the conversation. The possibility of creating a nuclear weapon now seemed more plausible than ever.
In April 1939, less than a year later, the “German Uranium Project” was formed by the education ministry after the scientific community informed it about the newly discovered energy source capable of creating extremely powerful explosives.
After Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September of that year kickstarted World War II, the Heereswaffenamt (HWA — German Army Weapons Agency) took control of the Uranium Project and set up a special unit, appointing physicist Kurt Diebner as the head. This band of less than 100 German scientists would try but fail to produce…
