(Denyav) wrote in message ...
So now I've answered that question, maybe Denyav can answer why he thinks
the Manhattan Project went from "failure" to success in days, whilst
creating a non-US implosion device took years? (Somehow I expect he
won't.)

I am pretty sure if somebody had offered to any non-US country an almost
completely assembled plutonium bomb including a designed and Made in Germany
triggering syetem,any non US country would become a nuclear power overnight and
moreover the Charlatan who who took triggering system from Germans would be
hailed as a national hero who solved the seemingly insolvable triggering
problem at the last minute.

BTW when UK started producing plutonium? I guess 7 years behind Third Reich?

Most of the German atomics researchers ended up under Soviet control.
They published a great deal of work under Russian sounding pseudonyms
because Stalin found that the prominance of German names in the
Russian leterature was politically embarasing. They has a reputation
for thorough and hard work, through somewhat unimaginative, that
contributed greatly to the Soviet nuclear effort.

The standard knowledge is that the Germans made a test reactor that
was 'pre-critical': They lowered an array 1 inch cubes of uranium
suspended from chains into a shielded tank of heavy water. The
neutron population increased by a factor of 7 within the 'pile' due to
fissioning induced by a small neutron source placed near the pile.
From this they correctly deduced that they would need to increase the
linear dimensions of their 'pile' by 50% for the reaction to become
self sustaining. This puts the Germans in late 1944-1945 at about the
level the Allies were at 1942. There were no control rods on this
test device: control was to be by raising or lowering the uranium
array of draining the heavywater.

In some areas they were ahead. They worked in the direction of using
ultra high speed electronically switched centrifuges to stratify
uranium hexaflouride gas to enrich unranium and managed to make a few
milligrans of uranium at 5% or so. This was on only a single
centrifuge and a multilevel array would have been required.
Centrifuges are a better way to enrich unranium and this has become
the modern method. It was in fact perfected by ex German researchers
in the Soviet Union and then when they were realeased in the West.

The allied approach of breeding plutonium or building massive gaseous
diffusion plants to enrich natural unranium are not required to make
an atomic bomb.

One of the great 'frauds' that was used to justify WMD claims against
the Regime of Saddam Hussein related to the use of lightweight high
strength aluminium tubeing which was supposedly for the fabrication of
these centrifuges but turns out to have been for "Katuysha (little
Kate) unguided bombardment weapons.

The Germans must have been reasonably sure of success eventualy as
they set aside a Heinkel He 177 Grief to deliver such a bomb.