to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

Rockets and People
even frightening: Germany did not have large stores of heavy water, but to
make up for this she seized the only heavy water factory in the world; she
became the holder of thousands of tons of very pure uranium compounds
and established control over an almost completed cyclotron; she had at her
disposal cadres of physicists, chemists, and engineers not yet robbed of their
vitality by all-out war; and her chemical industry was the most powerful in
the world.” 5
If the Germans had managed to create an atomic bomb before the Americans
and then put two or three bombs into two or three of the many hundreds of A-4
rockets launched at Britain, the world today might look completely different.
It is surprising that the primary reasons for the slow pace of work on the
German atomic project were not technical.The lack of progress resulted instead
from conflicts among high-level scientists and the regime’s arrogant and condescending
attitude toward a discipline that lacked rocket science’s active promoters.
From the first days of the war, the German economy was consumed by the immediate
needs of one blitzkrieg after another.The Germans’ early military successes in
Europe and the Soviet Union led the Germans to believe in the complete superiority
of their military technology. And if that was the case, then why spend funds
and divert efforts to new labor-intensive developments and scientific research projects
aimed at creating an even more perfect weapon?
But that was not the single cause of the German physicists’ failure. On this
point I concur with the very competent research of David Irving, who writes in
The Virus House, “In late 1940, German physicists had not foreseen any serious
difficulties on the way to the military use of atomic energy....Having rejected
graphite in January 1941, German scientists committed a fatal mistake. Now it is
well known.” This error worked to the advantage of missile specialists because
there clearly was not enough graphite in Germany for both fields of endeavor.
We and the Americans also used graphite control surfaces to control missiles up
until the mid-1950s. Now it is well known that it is better to use other methods
instead of control vanes of any material. But more than ten years of persistent
work by specialists from the USSR and United States were required to
switch to this method.
Irving writes,
248
Who knows how the situation would have turned out if the mistake had
been corrected in a timely manner. This mistake, which was fatal for the
German atomic project, proved to be fortunate for humankind. It became
the main obstacle and hindered the Germans from creating a critical reac-
5. David Irving, The Virus House (London: Kimber, 1967). The American edition was David Irving, The
German Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).