The point is, when they started developing the bomb they didn’t have anything to deliver it with. The 29 was still undergoing testing, wasn’t in action yet & the standard bomb bay wasn’t big enough anyway.
& don’t forget that most of the work brains behind the bomb were a bunch of Hungarians… From reading the book it’s an absolute bloody wonder they managed to do it when they did. There’s one case of some bloke putting a report away in his desk instead of passing it up the line & that alone caused a 3 month delay. Also looks like they might have had the bomb at least a year earlier if they’d listened to the Brits.
There is a lot of myth here.
I fail to see where listening to the British, would have produced a bomb as much as a year before. The British did indeed approach the American government in august 1941 (the MAUD committee), but at this stage America was still not at war and in 1941 a peace budget did not allow for exotic weapons development programs – in particular when nobody knew if the weapon was going to work.
It was this MAUD rapport that was hidden away, but it contained no body of scientific work and was more of a political suggestion to build the atomic bomb (it did not address the design or manufacture of a bomb in any detail). An estimate of the MAUD rapports connection to the reality of developing an atomic bomb can be judged by its 25 million dollars price tag – the Americans eventually spend 2 billion dollars on the Manhattan Project.
Although the MAUD committee’s representatives helped convince the American scientific community as a whole, that such a weapon might indeed be possible. The actual rapport would not have shortened the development process by even a day and was actually not an invitation to further joint development – as has often been suggested.
Actually it was the British who declined full cooperate in atomic weapon development, when George Braxton Pegram visited the UK in November 1941. Not until the Quebec Agreement in august 1943, did the two countries cooperate fully in the development work. However, at this stage the British did not poses any significant scientific advantage and the exchange was mostly one-way – from America to Britain.
The relatively long development time was not due to lack of scientific understanding, but due to the construction of the infrastructure needed to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for the weapons (and naturally also the actual production of weapon quality materials). It’s quite clear that no rapport could have helped shorten this physical hurdle. The bomb was actually developed exceedingly fast exactly because it was an American project. No other nation could have succeeded in this during the war – not even Germany.
It’s true than Hungarians participated in the Manhattan Project, but to say it was mostly Hungarians is taking away credit from the American scientific community – the core was mostly American born, including such distinguish scientists as Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn Theodore Seaborg, Robert Serber and Richard Chace Tolman. If any foreign scientist deserves extra credit, it’s the Italian Enrico Fermi. However, there were scientists from nearly every European country – also notably the warmongering Edward Teller from Hungary, who in time was behind the Hydrogen bomb and an active promoter of its use.
Sign In
