Nazi atomic weapons?

[Iosef Cross]

Iosef, not this again.

You cannot measure a wartime economy purely in terms of dollar values. That is an Economics 101 level mistake. You should know better than to do this.

No. Cash values are extremely valuable to compare the resources spent on the nuclear program.

Also, you appear to really believe that you are right in this subject, it is not rational for you to do so.

In wartime, the cash economy is far less relevant if you are the government, because you do not, strictly speaking, need to pay people for things. You can simply confiscate the tools you need, or forcibly conscript/enslave the labor you need.

In WW2, neither the US nor Germany ceased to be a monetary economy. The governments financed the war thought these means:

1- Increased national debt.

2- Increased taxes.

3- Fixed prices and rationing to the armed forces.

Even with rationing prices are still the correct way of measuring resource consumption. Why? Let's assume that we have 100 units of resource B and 50 units of resource A. Initial prices are 10 for B and 20 for A. Total expenditures are 20,000 and taxes are of 25% over income, meaning that government expenditures are of 5,000.

If the goverment enter in a world war and needs to increase their resource consumption to 50% of total production, they can fix prices at 5 for B and 10 for A, continue to tax 25% of total income and ration half of output to the government. The use of money to measure relative resource use is still 100% valid, nominal GDP will decrease to 10,000 and the price level will fall by 50%, a large proportion of the resources would be rationed, since nominal demand for the goods will be larger than the supply.

A nuclear program consumes highly skilled engineers, massive amounts of electricity, a great deal of chemical equipment, and so forth. It is these areas where Germany would face dire shortages, where it would have to take assets off other programs in favor of the atomic bomb.

If you don't have actual data on the consumption of electricity, chemical equipment, etc in proportion to German and US supply of respective resources, you do not have an argument.

I have only these data: Germany total electricity production for 1940 was 67 billion kw/h, US electricity production for 1939 was 120 billion kw/h and over 200 billion kw/h for 1943 and 1944. If the US nuclear program consumed 1/6 of the 200 billion kw/h, the electricity consumption of the nuclear program would be about 35 billion kw/h, about the same as the electricity consumption at the time of the USSR.

The total amount of steel that Germany allocated to the armed forces during WW2 was nearly 100 million tons (1.2-1.5 million tons per month for the 68 months of WW2), while the total amount of steel used in the US nuclear program certainly wasn't in the order of tens of millions of tons. They probably consumed 1-2 million tons of steel for the nuclear program, about the same proportion of Germany's supply as money.

The number of men conscripted in the German armed forces was 17.9 million men, more than the US, with conscripted 16 million men. The number of people employed in the nuclear program was in the order of tens of thousands.

While a large individual undertaking, the US nuclear program consumed a small proportion of the resources that any major power allocated to war. With the possible exception of electricity and scientific minds. WW2 was big.

[Simon_Jester]

Iosef, not this again.
You cannot measure a wartime economy purely in terms of dollar values. That is an Economics 101 level mistake. You should know better than to do this.

No. Cash values are extremely valuable to compare the resources spent on the nuclear program.
Also, you appear to really believe that you are right in this subject, it is not rational for you to do so.

Why is not rational for me to believe that the price of oil is irrelevant if there is zero oil to be had? Or that the price of electricity per kilowatt-hour is irrelevant if there is zero electricity to spare? Or that the price of heavy water is irrelevant if the only factory within your reach has been blown up by Norwegians?

Not all commodities can be freely interchanged with money. Some things are physical goods, that actually exist in real life, and not just as abstractions. If these physical goods are not available within the reach of a nation at war, no amount of money will supply them. If all the uranium in the world is found in mines controlled by my enemies, no amount of money will buy me uranium. Likewise heavy water.

To make matters worse, the enemy will actively try to destroy bits of my economy. When power plants in my country are destroyed, I cannot simply burn cash to generate more electricity- I must build power plants. Which in turn requires valuable materials such as steel and copper, along with labor.

In peacetime, the illusion of a world where anything that exists can be had for enough money is maintained by trade: what you cannot make for yourself, you can buy from foreigners. In war, this is not always true. Foreigners who hate you and want you to die will refuse to trade with you, and will interfere with your trade with other third parties. This makes imports difficult.

Moreover, the need to not lose the war imposes physical non-dollar constraints on what you can do: you must have soldiers, you must make bullets, you must move bullets to where the soldiers are. If you have no soldiers or no bullets, or piles of bullets in one place and piles of soldiers in another, you lose the war quickly, and it ceases to matter that you were spending money on nuclear research.

All these things complicate the picture of a wartime economy that you draw.

A nuclear program consumes highly skilled engineers, massive amounts of electricity, a great deal of chemical equipment, and so forth. It is these areas where Germany would face dire shortages, where it would have to take assets off other programs in favor of the atomic bomb.

If you don't have actual data on the consumption of electricity, chemical equipment, etc in proportion to German and US supply of respective resources, you do not have an argument.

Others have already explained these things to you, at length. You neither know nor care whether I have an argument, because you ignore all things that do not fit in your notion of how economies work. Therefore, I will be damned if I will do research others have already done only for you to ignore it. Again.

I have only these data: Germany total electricity production for 1940 was 67 billion kw/h, US electricity production for 1939 was 120 billion kw/h and over 200 billion kw/h for 1943 and 1944. If the US nuclear program consumed 1/6 of the 200 billion kw/h, the electricity consumption of the nuclear program would be about 35 billion kw/h, about the same as the electricity consumption at the time of the USSR...

While a large individual undertaking, the US nuclear program consumed a small proportion of the resources that any major power allocated to war. With the possible exception of electricity and scientific minds. WW2 was big.

Electricity and especially scientific minds were critical assets. No number of tons of concrete or chemical equipment could make an atomic bomb if the scientists weren't capable of designing one, if the engineers couldn't solve the problems involved in making one, if the power to do isotope separation wasn't available, or if the facilities where all this was being done were under enemy attack.

All of which would be serious problems for the Germans.

[PeZook]

Even with rationing prices are still the correct way of measuring resource consumption. Why? Let's assume that we have 100 units of resource B and 50 units of resource A. Initial prices are 10 for B and 20 for A. Total expenditures are 20,000 and taxes are of 25% over income, meaning that government expenditures are of 5,000.

Yeah, and regressive taxes defined as a function would make people work harder...

What happens when you don't have 50 units of resource A, but it's critical that you do? What happens if your nation has to steal the resource from Allied merchant ships and try to ship it home through a blockade?

If the nuclear program needs 100 units of resource B which you have lots of, and 50 units of resource A which you have to ship from overseas while dodging massive Allied fleets, it doesn't matter what monetary resources you assign to the task ; It won't magically make your blockade runners not sink when bombed. That's what people are getting at: Germany could've spent a trillion reichsmarks on heavy water, but it would still all be on the bottom of Lake Tinnsjø.

So in order to answer the question of "Could Germany do X in WWII?" you first need to see if they could physically get at the needed resources, rather than if they had the money to buy them off the world market controlled by their enemies.

[K. A. Pital]

I have only these data: Germany total electricity production for 1940 was 67 billion kw/h, US electricity production for 1939 was 120 billion kw/h and over 200 billion kw/h for 1943 and 1944. If the US nuclear program consumed 1/6 of the 200 billion kw/h, the electricity consumption of the nuclear program would be about 35 billion kw/h, about the same as the electricity consumption at the time of the USSR.

Gets worse. Germany in pre-war borders produced 46,5 billion kwh in 1942, 47,4 billion in 1943 and 49 billion in 1944 before collapsing in late 1944-1945. If the US really consumed 35 billion kw/h for it's nuclear program, that would be 75% of Germany's total electricity output. Possibly 50 to 70% of the electricity output of the entire Reich.

Needless to say, it's an insurmountable bottleneck if the figures are true. I'm not sure why you continue to argue the point when you have proven Simon to be correct.

[Ilya Muromets]

I have only these data: Germany total electricity production for 1940 was 67 billion kw/h, US electricity production for 1939 was 120 billion kw/h and over 200 billion kw/h for 1943 and 1944. If the US nuclear program consumed 1/6 of the 200 billion kw/h, the electricity consumption of the nuclear program would be about 35 billion kw/h, about the same as the electricity consumption at the time of the USSR.

Gets worse. Germany in pre-war borders produced 46,5 billion kwh in 1942, 47,4 billion in 1943 and 49 billion in 1944 before collapsing in late 1944-1945. If the US really consumed 35 billion kw/h for it's nuclear program, that would be 75% of Germany's total electricity output. Possibly 50 to 70% of the electricity output of the entire Reich.

Needless to say, it's an insurmountable bottleneck if the figures are true. I'm not sure why you continue to argue the point when you have proven Simon to be correct.

Or to put it in simpler terms, Iosef, since you seem to be willfully ignoring others painstakingly detailed explanations, let's put your simplistic figures in the simplest form imaginable. Relevant points in boldface so you don't ignore them.

That 67 kw/h is running everything the Germans have. They have nothing to spare.

In contrast, that 120 kw/h of the US is more than the country really needs at that time, and America had plenty to spare when they started their project.

The power facilities the Germans had were constantly subjected to attacks, which means many were destroyed, and not all could be repaired--and even those being repaired don't count while they were still being fixed. You can't bring enough dedicated power to bear on a power-intensive project if parts of your power grid keep getting knocked out.

On the other hand, the power facilities in the US were safely stashed on the nigh-unassailable mainland. This problem did not exist for the Americans because their power facilities couldn't be attacked.

If Germany diverted even your pithy 35 billion from 67 billion (and assuming an unrealistically idealistic world where that remains consistent), that only leaves 32 billion kw/h for everything else. Congratulations, you just deprived several production facilities of much needed power. GERMANY LOSES FASTER.

[K. A. Pital]

If Germany diverted even your pithy 35 billion from 67 billion (and assuming an unrealistically idealistic world where that remains consistent)

The Reich itself would have to devote ~50% of it's electricity to the nuclear program. It produced over 70 billion kwh by 1943 (for the entire Reich!). Devoting 50% of the Reich's (not just Germany alone - for Germany, as we found out, the figures would've been much higher) output to a single program would mean a collapse of German industry. Iosef can't do the math, apparently.

Being precise, the output of the entire Reich was 73,943 million kwh in 1943. That would mean the Oak Ridge plant alone could consume as much as 47% of the Reich's electricity output. Not good. Or, like I said, earlier, insurmountable energy bottleneck which Germany can't do shit with.

[Simon_Jester]

It's possible the Germans could operate a plant on a smaller scale than Oak Ridge with their reduced electrical output. But doing so would also reduce the rate at which they could make fissiles, which would delay bomb production badly... at which point their ability to get even one bomb ahead of the Americans is out of the question.

[Ilya Muromets]

Either way, all this proves is that the following overly-optimistic appraisal:

1- If they focused their resources, they could make a few nukes by 1945 with a significant probability.

... is outright impossible no matter how you slice it. Re-arrange what resources the Reich had to match US production, and the Nazis commit economic suicide. Scale down to work with what they had and could get, and it's too small and too slow to match US production. 1945? Heh. Try 1955. At best.

[NettiWelho]

Sure, the germans could have had nukes before anyone else, IF they had avoided going into a war in the first place while keeping the other axis countries out of it too

[Thanas]

Sure, the germans could have had nukes before anyone else, IF they had avoided going into a war in the first place while keeping the other axis countries out of it too

You do not really know what you are talking about, do you?

[NettiWelho]

You do not really know what you are talking about, do you?

stop regional expansion right after munich agreement, negotiate for danzig with poland with friendly attitude but under no circuimstances invade or otherwise provoke the allies into declaring war(this includes not signing the molotov-ribbentrop pact), continue trading for raw materials(and secure a source for nuclear materials) and invest in new science and engineering projects and all sudden germany is the only country with nuclear weapons(no massive investment in nuclear projects behalf of western allies due to no war and lowered threat) and jet airforce

[PeZook]

stop regional expansion right after munich agreement, negotiate for danzig with poland with friendly attitude

A....ahahahahahahahaha!

Yeah, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about

[TC Pilot]

Yeah, I don't see the Germans radically altering their rearmament program and foreign policy on the basis of acquiring a weapon no one in the world even knows is even theoretically possible to develop, either.

[NettiWelho]

Yeah, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about

...how exactly is not repeating mistakes of megalomanicas not knowing? or am i suddenly in some kind of strange world where ww2 did not start by western allies declaring war on germany after they entered poland after failed demands for danzig? is munich agreement completely alien event to you? you know; "peace for our time" etc?

what the fuck am i missing here?

edit:

Yeah, I don't see the Germans radically altering their rearmament program and foreign policy on the basis of acquiring a weapon no one in the world even knows is even theoretically possible to develop, either.

what im suggesting here is NOT changing their plans because of divine intervention or possibility of nuclear weapons BUT choosing the other option to war(polands guaranteed independence was made public; and hitler did not believe the allies would honor it, he was genuinely dumbstruck when he found out they declared war on him over poland)

[TC Pilot]

...how exactly is not repeating mistakes of megalomanicas not knowing? or am i suddenly in some kind of strange world where ww2 did not start by western allies declaring war on germany after they entered poland after failed demands for danzig? is munich agreement completely alien event to you? you know; "peace for our time" etc?

what the fuck am i missing here?

In the lead-up to the start of the war, Poland demonstrated a total unwillingness to negotiate over Danzig; they rejected all of Hitler's diplomatic overtures, even despite the fact they were in a strategically untennable position following the annexation of Czechoslovakia. It was precisely this unwillingness on Poland's part to "negotiate for Danzig with friendly attitude" which Hitler grasped upon to attack Poland in the first place. In fact, Poland's unwillingness to allow Soviet troops to enter her territory is one of the major reasons why the Soviets didn't come to any agreement with the Allies.

Of all the countries that were victimized by Hitler prior to WW2, Poland's behavior pretty much made the least sense.

what im suggesting here is NOT changing their plans because of divine intervention or possibility of nuclear weapons BUT choosing the other option to war(polands guaranteed independence was made public; and hitler did not believe the allies would honor it, he was genuinely dumbstuck when he found out they declared war on him over poland)

What the fuck are you babbling about? How is "choosing the other option" not "changing their plans"?

[NettiWelho]

What the fuck are you babbling about? How is "choosing the other option" not "changing their plans"?

NOT changing their plans because of divine intervention or possibility of nuclear weapons BUT choosing the other option to war, please read the whole sentence, it tends the change the meaning of few first words in there sometimes


...and same thing again: how cool with EVERYONE overlooking the "but under no circuimstances invade or otherwise provoke the allies into declaring war" part completely, ie, if no agreement is reached on danzig discussions then drop it there, perioid

after long perioids of just lurking, my perceived quality of this forum is dropping rapidly due to having to quote my own messages because people responding to only 1 section they dont like and completley disregarding any clarification appearing somewhere else in the message

edit:


in essence: hitler takes western guarantees of polish independence seriously and avoids the war

[PeZook]

in essence: hitler takes western guarantees of polish independence seriously and avoids the war

...and gets run out of office. Do you know the least bit about the situation before the war?

Poland and Germany fought a war for East Prussia not twenty years before ; There was bad blood and antipathy reaching back centuries, from both sides.

In the lead-up to the start of the war, Poland demonstrated a total unwillingness to negotiate over Danzig; they rejected all of Hitler's diplomatic overtures, even despite the fact they were in a strategically untennable position following the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

You forgot the part where Poland would be cut off from the critically important port of Gdynia, which meant economic collapse, and that most of its leadership suspected Hitler was just looking for a pretext, rather than negotiating in good faith.

[NettiWelho]

in essence: hitler takes western guarantees of polish independence seriously and avoids the war

...and gets run out of office.

By who and what army? honestly i cant see the führer/reichskanzler being kicked out of office for refusing to start another war(the guarantee of poland was made public, that with promise at munich id consider that a reasonable excuse to back off and triviliaze it in the inner ciricle), especially after the kind of power consolidation they have on his job

Do you know the least bit about the situation before the war?

I take you mean the internal political trends of germany? but yeah, id consider my knowledge on the subject greater than average but lacking for any serious debate without double-checking everything through google before submitting each post here making any statements concerning them

Poland and Germany fought a war for East Prussia not twenty years before ; There was bad blood and antipathy reaching back centuries, from both sides.

yes, i am also generally aware of interwar events

In the lead-up to the start of the war, Poland demonstrated a total unwillingness to negotiate over Danzig; they rejected all of Hitler's diplomatic overtures, even despite the fact they were in a strategically untennable position following the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

You forgot the part where Poland would be cut off from the critically important port of Gdynia, which meant economic collapse, and that most of its leadership suspected Hitler was just looking for a pretext, rather than negotiating in good faith.

Then, like in my previous messages mentioned, germany drops pushing the issue any futher if the talks prove fruitless, preserving peace takes priority over regional gains

as a side note:i was merely trying to present the most plausible chain of events for Nazi Germany acquiring nuclear weapons that i could muster, not claiming that "it was truly outrageous luck the events didnt unfold this way" or even a truly realistic scenario(this is kinda given since, as proven before, it did not even come close to nazis getting a nuke)

besides, its not alt-history if no changes the the real timeline are allowed to be made

[Thanas]

The most plausible way to avoid war is the Reichswehr putsching in 1933 or 1934. Other than that, you are pretty out of luck.

Note that even such a coup d'etat might do squat to avoid a war, given how many Generals really, really hated Poland and vice versa. You might have a limited war with the western allies staying out of it, but that is about all. You might even have a grand coalition against Poland due to them angering pretty much every neighbour they have, but that is about it.

And if Germany wins a war against Poland, they sure as heck have better things to do with the money than sinking it into developing such a weapon.

[Steel]

If Germany diverted even your pithy 35 billion from 67 billion (and assuming an unrealistically idealistic world where that remains consistent)

The Reich itself would have to devote ~50% of it's electricity to the nuclear program. It produced over 70 billion kwh by 1943 (for the entire Reich!). Devoting 50% of the Reich's (not just Germany alone - for Germany, as we found out, the figures would've been much higher) output to a single program would mean a collapse of German industry. Iosef can't do the math, apparently.

Being precise, the output of the entire Reich was 73,943 million kwh in 1943. That would mean the Oak Ridge plant alone could consume as much as 47% of the Reich's electricity output. Not good. Or, like I said, earlier, insurmountable energy bottleneck which Germany can't do shit with.

Just how inefficient is nuclear weapon production? 35billion kWh is ~30MT. Thats 2,000 Hiroshima bombs. I assume the energy required to do centrifuging to a given enrichment increases exponentially, but at that level of inefficiency I have a hard time believing that even limited enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear power is a net energy gain.

To make a megaton worth of fission weapons would take centuries at that rate

What are the actual numbers on this?

[Sea Skimmer]

Just how inefficient is nuclear weapon production? 35billion kWh is ~30MT. Thats 2,000 Hiroshima bombs. I assume the energy required to do centrifuging to a given enrichment increases exponentially, but at that level of inefficiency I have a hard time believing that even limited enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear power is a net energy gain.

To make a megaton worth of fission weapons would take centuries at that rate

What are the actual numbers on this?

You got to understand, you could enrich uranium more then one way. The reason the US guzzled up so much power was because the easiest and most straightforward way was found to be electromagnetic separation using calutrons. So we turned 14,000 tons of government silver bullion (copper was in too short of supply) into electromagnets, built the Y-12 plant and dumped a large fraction of the US electrical supply into that plant. The process was very inefficient but at its peak the plant could make about 1kg of weapons grade purity uranium a day.

The next method was gaseous diffusion. This is basically a filtering process, the uranium gas (all these methods involve first converting the uranium feedstock into some kind of gas) was pumped through thousands upon thousands of metal filter membranes. This method was also used a fair bit in the Manhattan Project and also needed a fair bit of power for all the pumping, but developing and maintaining all the membranes was the larger problem.

Only after these methods were perfected did gas centrifuging come into the equation. It’s by far the most cost effective method, but it was also the hardest to develop because among the many problems the centrifuges have to spin at just barely below the speed of sound. It was very easy for such centrifuges to explode as a result, and when you need thousands of them working in series to accomplish anything you need VERY high reliability. The other two methods have way less in terms of moving parts.

In the long run electromagnetic separation was abandon in the US in 1946 because of its insane energy consumption, and gas centrifuging soon came to dominate Uranium enrichment because of its economy. But it was not available for mass production of weapons material during WW2. The energy and other costs of centrifuging are still very high, but it’s more like ‘we need a whole power plant’ then ‘we need the entire Tennessee Valley Authority’ as you did for a calutron plant.

[TC Pilot]

NOT changing their plans because of divine intervention or possibility of nuclear weapons BUT choosing the other option to war, please read the whole sentence, it tends the change the meaning of few first words in there sometimes

No, I got it just fine the first time, you're just incoherent. Choosing not to go to war is changing the plans, so far as Hitler's concerned. He wanted a war with Poland, regardless of what the West did; it's integral to what he viewed as the destiny of the German race, to violently expand into the East.

...and same thing again: how cool with EVERYONE overlooking the "but under no circuimstances invade or otherwise provoke the allies into declaring war" part completely, ie, if no agreement is reached on danzig discussions then drop it there, perioid

No one overlooked it. PeZook just snipped out your comment on "negotiate for Danzig with friendly attitude" because the statement is patently ridiculous and highlights that you don't seem to have a clue what you're talking about.

after long perioids of just lurking, my perceived quality of this forum is dropping rapidly due to having to quote my own messages because people responding to only 1 section they dont like and completley disregarding any clarification appearing somewhere else in the message

You must not have paid attention much if you think saying this sort of thing would help your case at all. Three people, including one of the guys in charge of this sub-forum, have basically told you you're spouting nonsense. Here's a hint: before throwing accusations around, take a look at what you're actually writing, if only grammatically.

in essence: hitler takes western guarantees of polish independence seriously and avoids the war

So basically it just comes right back to what I said originally: Hitler just has to not be Hitler.

You forgot the part where Poland would be cut off from the critically important port of Gdynia, which meant economic collapse, and that most of its leadership suspected Hitler was just looking for a pretext, rather than negotiating in good faith.

I know. It's no different than Czechoslovakia's national/strategic/economic suicide at Munich, but at least the Czechs didn't have a precedent of the Allies shamelessly dodging their alliance obligations, or a hostile Soviet Union at its back.

[CaptHawkeye]

If the US had opted not to expend resources on the Manhattan Project, what could it have potentially built, used, designed, or planned otherwise?

[Zinegata]

The Manhattan Project was using just the leftovers of the US war production, which was already drowning the Japanese and German warmachines in material. Maybe diverting it to other projects would give the US more tanks, ships, or planes, but what'd be the point?

[CaptHawkeye]

None whatsoever. The US ended up actually canceling a lot of stuff despite the Manhattan Project because it would unnecessary to win the war. I'm just curious to gauge what kind of stuff they could have opted to build minus the Manhattan Project. Probably not much though. As it was the resources that went into the A-bomb were not tactical or strategic and were largely infrastructure and financial based. Except for the use of a bomber capable of dropping the weapon.