pdf - WHALE

German atom bomb research. It is this absence that explains why
the Germans never placed much emphasis on achieving a
functioning reactor in order to enrich uranium to make weapons
grade plutonium for an atom bomb: they did not need to do so,
since there were other methods of enriching and separating
enough U 235 to weapons grade purity and a stockpile of critical
mass. In a nutshell: the Allied Legend about the German failure to
obtain the atom bomb because they never had a functioning reactor
is simply utter scientific nonsense, because a reactor is needed only
it one wants to produce plutonium. It is an unneeded, and
expensive, development, if one only wants to make a uranium A-
bomb. Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bombmaking
and the political and military realities of the war after
America's entry, that the Germans took the decision to develop
only a uranium bomb, since that afforded the best, most direct, and
technologically least complicated route to acquisition of a bomb.
Let us pause a moment to put the indications of the German
project in the context of the Manhattan Project taking place in the
United States. There, with a production capacity larger than
Germany's, and with an industrial base not being targeted by enemy
bombing, the American project decided to concentrate on
development of all available means to production of working atom
bombs, i.e., uranium and plutonium bombs. But the production of
plutonium could only be achieved in the construction of a
functioning reactor. No reactor, no plutonium bomb.
But it should also be noted that the Manhattan Project also
constructed the giant Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee to enrich
uranium to weapons grade by gaseous diffusion and Lawrence's
mass spectrometer processes, a facility that at no stage of its
operation relied upon a functioning reactor in order to enrich
uranium.
So, if the Germans were pursuing a similar approach to that
employed at Oak Ridge, then we must find indicators to
corroborate it. First, to enrich uranium by the same or similar
methods as employed in Tennessee, the Reich would have had to
build a similarly huge facility, or smaller facilities scattered
throughout Germany, transporting the various levels of dangerous
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