LtWiggledworth Ars Praetorian
AUG 26, 2021 8:56 PM

goodolejackburton wrote:
All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."

It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."

There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."

Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.