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Originally posted by sigfreund:

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Originally posted by icom706:
The Germans were not that far behind - rumor has that they had a dirty bomb / some sort of test go boom on them.

Unless you can refute virtually everything in the book Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History Of The German Bomb by Thomas Powers, yes, they were. In fact the Germans weren’t even close.

As for rumors, that’s an absolute new one on me—but I suppose that 70+ years after the war and despite all the efforts made by the Allies immediately to determine just how far along the Germans were toward the Bomb, perhaps it was just overlooked until now. Where did you get it?

The Germans were NOWHERE NEAR close to getting an atomic bomb. IIRC, they never even had a reactor go critical on them. They were hung up on getting heavy water for their reactor (as stated above, they erroneously ruled out graphite, which Enrico Fermi used to make the first US reactor pile in 1942-3). The only supply of heavy water sank to the bottom of a lake, and then they had no way forward. There was no hope of establishing a heavy water plant in wartime Germany at that time, as the US/RAF practically owned the skies over Germany.

There was actually some weird 'documentary' I saw years ago (no idea where) that implied that the Germans actually tested an atomic bomb. This is a crock. First of all, Trinity was seen as a flash as far away as Albuquerque, and broke windows in Alamogordo. There isn't anywhere in Germany that is remote enough to 'hide' an atomic detonation. There was no contest - the US was the only country that could afford to spend $2 BILLION (1942-1945 dollars) on such a program. The Manhattan Project was the single biggest weapons program in the world until the F-35 came along. Only the Soviets could spend such money, and only after the war was over (and they relied HEAVILY on espionage, as they got their hands on detailed blueprints of our bomb).

I suppose they could have used their U235 to make a crude set of dirty bombs, but then, they would have been better off using their existing stockpiles of nerve gas (the Germans alone had very effective nerve agents; the allies only had advanced forms of WWI agents, such as mustard and phosgene).