Germany and the Bomb

Catalog description

Nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, now part of the Free University of Berlin, by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in December of 1938 in Dahlem. In fact, this laboratory, is only a few blocks away from the Stanford campus in Berlin. A few months later, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch provided the theoretical basis for understanding the perplexing experimental results by Hahn and Strassmann and named the process fission. Their discovery, and the fear that Germany was developing nuclear weapons, was the motivation for the U.S. Manhattan Project that lead to the development of and first use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Germany, in fact, had its own Uranprojekt and Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) projects lead by Werner Heisenberg, a leading physicist at that time, but failed to develop a nuclear weapon. This course explores the history of the German nuclear bomb program during WWII and the reasons why Germany failed to develop an atomic bomb.