[AR] Re: arocket Digest V7 #93
- From: Christopher Manteuffel <cmanteuf@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 13:10:09 -0400
This is way off-topic. But as someone who interned at a nuclear
non-proliferation group, I just want to share some of the historical
context that I learned.
On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 1:08 AM FreeLists Mailing List Manager <
ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No, that's what I meant, if Hitler used sensibility he would of pumped more
money and sooner into the V-2,
even 6 months sooner and England would of surrendered under a barrage of
V-2 ballistic missile attacks.
During the Iran-Iraq war, both sides lobbed hundreds of Scuds- vastly
improved V-2s- at each others capitol cities during the so called "Scud
Duel" to no real effect, other than killing and maiming a lot of people.
Why do you think that this would be different?
Another way of looking at it is that a B-17 carried twice the weight of
explosives six times farther than a V-2, and could come back and do it all
again in a few days, and so far as the World War Two Strategic Bombing
Survey could figure, didn't really cause a noticeable drop in German
production until very late in the war. So is your position that British
civilians were much more cowardly than German ones? That Britain couldn't
tolerate the level of destruction that Germany historically did?
Of cource the A-Bomb on
top of the V-2 would of been it but
once again Hitler's antisemitism drove out the Jewish scientists including
Einstein which would of given Germany
the brains to build the bomb..
The first US atomic bomb that would fit on top a V-2, so far as I can tell,
would be the Grable test from the Upshot-Knothole series, May 25th 1953,
after the US had 8 years and over 40 instrumented test firings of nuclear
weapons. And this is not because everyone was totally fine with large,
heavy devices and just thought to start shrinking them one day in 1953. So
there is no possible world where a Nazi V-2 carries nuclear weapons, even
if you grant the Germans the same economic might as the US had.
And just a comment on the scale of the Manhattan Project: it's always hard
because of purchasing power comparisons, but by the numbers I trust most,
the entire V-2 project cost less than just the K-25 (Gaseous Barrier
Diffusion) plant alone- and that plant was unable to enrich enough uranium
to produce a bomb before the war ended (the S-50, K-25, and Y-12 plants, in
that order, were used in series to enrich sufficient uranium for Little
Boy), and that was months after Germany's surrender. The Manhattan Project
operated at an economic scale that is difficult to comprehend, and it is
impossible for me to envision the Nazis meeting that challenge. (This was
not obvious in 1942. If your estimate for the costs of an atomic bomb is
based off the MAUD report, the idea of a Nazi bomb is frightening. If your
estimate is based off the Manhattan Project, it's an amusing joke.)
Chris Manteuffel
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