the lancaster kicks ass said:
They never actually made their A-bomb though...
because we destroyed their supplies of heavy water..............
No. It would have made no difference. But, the US intelligence people had no idea if it was important or not, so they destroyed it. Significant resources were devoted to heavy water research in the Manhattan project, because they didn't know what they were doing and thus had to cover every possiblity even though they didn't believe heavy water was necessary (and they were right). Heavy water was of no real special value as a moderator, regular water or graphite was quite sufficient and much more available.
Research the effort to create U-235 and plutonium for the making of A-Bombs. The German's were not even close to achieving this! Remember, after millions of $ were spent developing the first US uranium enrichment faclility at Berkley, it failed only producing about a gram of U-235. Another method was developed, and a huge facility at Okridge Tenn. was constructed, to produce about 90 grams of U-235 per day. And the German's had no idea that the man made elemement U-239 (plutonium) even existed or could be produced.
In fact, the German's had just established their first atomic pile and had not yet even generated a successful chain-reaction when the war ended, putting them where the USA was in 1942 at the very start of the Manhattan Project. Hiesenberg had incorrectly calculated that it would take tons of U-235 to create nuclear bomb, when in fact it only takes few kilograms (about 40 kg at the purity level of Littleboy).
It is even possible that Hiesenburg intentionally mislead the Nazi's as to the viability of a nuclear bomb, but I personally doubt this, he did the math, and just goofed it, it's not an easy calculation only afew phyicists of the time were capable of working correctly. But the fact that no one else in the project was capable of checking his math shows just how far from a bomb they really were. The article at
http://www.eas.asu.edu/~holbert/eee460/anv/Why the Germans Failed.html pretty compellingly disputes the idea that Hiesenberg intentionally sabotaged the Nazi bomb program.
A few more links on the topic:
http://www.mnlegion.org/paper/html/manhattan.html
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/manhattan/project.html
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/manhattan/index.html
http://www.brook.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/MANHATTN.HTM
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Lunatic