[ad_1]
One of the 664 two-inch uranium cubes produced in Nazi Germany during an unsuccessful attempt to create a nuclear reactor during World War II. (John T. Consoli / University of Maryland)
A cube of uranium. A Nazi plan to build a nuclear bomb. A search of the fate of the remaining pieces of an experience that could have changed the story.
It sounds like a base for a war thriller. Instead, the story appears in the latest issue of Physics Today, the magazine of the members of the American Institute of Physics.
This is the story of 664 cubes of uranium produced by German researchers. They sought to decipher the nuclear code in an underground laboratory located in the "cellar atoms" of a castle in Haigerloch. But the experiment has failed.
When a two-inch cube of the failed reactor was routed to Timothy Koeth, a physicist at the University of Maryland at College Park, his curiosity was piqued.
Miriam Hiebert, a PhD student in the Materials Science and Engineering program, volunteered to help her learn more about her past.
Despite the genius of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, the German nuclear weapons program was blocked by bureaucracy during the Second World War.
Instead of pooling its resources, Nazi Germany divided the researchers into three rival teams, and the real contest that, according to the Germans, fueled innovation eventually stifled it.
But they became much closer to a nuclear weapon than previously thought.
Koeth and Hiebert used archives to reconsider the Nazi nuclear program. What they discovered is annoying.
"If the Germans had pooled their resources rather than divide them," write Koeth and Hiebert, "they would have been much closer to creating a functioning reactor before the end of the war."
The researchers want to find all the cubes. The story of the failure of the Nazi nuclear program is an intriguing read – a reading that turns what might be considered a historical curiosity into a much more disturbing story.
– Erin Blakemore
Read more
In a cosmic first, scientists detect "ghost particles" from a distant galaxy
On the last German nuclear base, fears of a new arms race
Letters from the Second World War
[ad_2]
Source link