Nuclear science history

Nuclear Forensics Shows Nazis Were Nowhere Near Making Atomic Bomb

Today’s nuclear forensic scientists are typically concerned with detecting radioactive materials being smuggled across borders or tracking down the facilities where those materials originated. But recently, nuclear scientists turned their investigative skills to a nagging question from the annals of science history: During World War II, were the Germans close to achieving a working nuclear reactor?

By analyzing a uranium cube uncovered in the 1960s that had been used in Germany’s nuclear program during the war, the scientists—led by Maria Wallenius of the European Commission’s Institute for Transuranium Elements, in Karlsruhe, Germany—determined that the Germans weren’t even close (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, DOI:10.1022/anie.201504874).

The uranium cube in question was suspected to be part of famed physicist Werner Heisenberg’s last wartime experiment, called B8, which took place in March 1945. In that experiment, carried out near Haigerloch, Germany, 664 uranium cubes suspended in deuterated, or “heavy,” water were used as fuel. The U.S. military’s Alsos mission recovered most of those cubes in April 1945. But a few of them went missing. Two decades later, several uranium cubes—presumed to have been part of B8—were discovered in southern Germany.