Re: What if no Manhatten Project

from their people in Los Alamos that the thing worked. This made for
much smaller fear of risk and certainty that if properly done you got
a boom.

And then they actually got real evidence.
But this only slides the things farther down the timeline. The research may
go on the back burner for a while, but nobody's going to kill it outright,
and the more the Cold War gets under way, the more both sides get interested
again. The Soviets probably still have moles in the US project, and most
definitely in the British intel departments, so they will know when the
Westeners ratchet the work up a notch, and do the same.

In the end it is possible that the Soviets win the race, for the three
following reasons:
- non-mutual insider information, as mentioned,
- greater willingness to spend on military budgets,
- the same motive behind the V-Waffen (the enemy has a stronger air force,
so let's find a way to deliver a strategic blow that bypasses it).

The most important factor in the Soviet nuclear program was the word
from their people in Los Alamos that the thing worked. This made for
much smaller fear of risk and certainty that if properly done you got
a boom.

On Jun 29, 2:21 am, "Michele" <don'tspammeat...@tln.it> wrote:

believe the Western Allies had enough contacts/spies/defectors
in the USSR to make that call on any Soviet Atomic effort and/or
progress, until its been announced in Pravda, or on a float during
the MayDay parade, Ex post facto.

Fine. So this is only a variation, consisting in the fact that the Soviets -
who had no qualms about sacrificing consumer goods and postwar
reconstruction to military spending - arrive there first. And the Westerners
play catch up. Still it ends with a nuke-equipped Cold War, I think.

They had clues that the Nazis were looking into that. I don't
believe the Western Allies had enough contacts/spies/defectors
in the USSR to make that call on any Soviet Atomic effort and/or
progress, until its been announced in Pravda, or on a float during
the MayDay parade, Ex post facto.

**
mike
**

Yes.

And that's the key point.
Why did Britain and USA decide they had to do it? Because of the fear the
Nazis would get one first.

An intriguing question.

It was touch and go for awhile whether the fission weapons research would
take off into an all-out program during the war. But one needs to look
carefully at how momentum for the project accumulated, and then posit
specific ways and times that it might have gotten shelved or put on a side
track. If you don't take this approach you won't have a clear idea of the
state of research in the field that would have been acheived, which would
then affect strongly what would come later.

For example if no Manhattan Project, would there be an S-1 project? S-1 was
the smaller scale fission research program running from December 1941 to
that set the stage for the industrial phase project that was approved June
1942, and initiated in September . But the research work during the 6 months
or so after actual initiation were continuations of the S-1 effort, and
would have taken place without the Manhattan Project.

A key case in point is Fermi's reactor, CP-1. By 1941 scientists (Fermi
esepcially) in the U.S. knew how to build a graphite nuclear reactor, all
they needed that they didn't have was the money to do it. Fermi began his
project of pile construction before S-1 was even initiated, and as long as
he received sufficient (relatively small) funding and a moderate degree of
priority for materials acquisition he would have completed the pile at the
end of 1942, Manhattan Project or no.

It is hard to see how this milestone would not have occurred, no matter
what.

Reactor research, if not bomb research, was certain to continue throughout
the war and afterward. So we would be dealing with a world hosting nuclear
reactors for scientific, industrial and possiby military power applications.

This could continue for years before someone decided to make a bomb.

I am inclined to think though, that no later than the start of the the Cold
War in 1947, the U.S. would have started to work on an atomic bomb, for fear
the Soviet Union would get one first.

I am reading a bio of Szilard.

I get the impression that a wrong turn or two in the early efforts to
engineer the nuclear chain-reaction might have led to no big US A-bomb
development effort during the war.

The Bomb was not important for the outcome of WWII.   But I guess it
might have slowed down Soviet agression in Europe and W. Asia.

If the project was delayed and there was no big push during WWII,
then when would the Bomb have been first tested, if ever?