[News] The enigma of the uranium cubes that the Nazis used to create their nuclear program

[S e u o n g]

 

In World War II, Germany and the United States competed in a fierce battle to see who could develop a nuclear program first.

In the early 1940s, several teams of German scientists began to produce thousands of uranium cubes that would be the core of the reactors they were developing as part of the nascent Nazi nuclear program.

The Germans were far from achieving an atomic bomb, but they hoped that these experiments would serve them to an advantage over the United States.

In fact, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 in Berlin.

The Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were the first to know how an atom could be divided, and that doing so would release a large amount of energy.

 

Years later, however, the Manhattan Project and its atomic bomb showed that in reality the Americans were far ahead of the Germans in atomic technology.

The uranium cubes, however, hold clues to the secrecy and suspicion between the two countries over the nuclear race.

 

 

Today the whereabouts of the vast majority of the thousands of cubes that were manufactured is a mystery.

"It is difficult to know what happened to these cubes," Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in the United States, tells BBC Mundo.

"The records that exist are not the best."

In the United States, only a dozen of them have been identified, making them a precious treasure for researchers trying to reconstruct the early days of the nuclear age.

 

Failed experiment
One of the teams experimenting with uranium cubes was led by physicist Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer of quantum mechanics and a 1932 Nobel Prize winner.

 

The project by Heisenberg and his colleagues was to tie 664 of these 5-cm cubes to hanging cables and submerge them in heavy water.

Heavy water is made up of oxygen and deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that is twice the mass of ordinary hydrogen.

The idea is that dipping the cubes would set off a chain reaction, but the experiment didn't work.

According to Timothy Koeth, a researcher at the University of Maryland who has tracked down the cubes, Heisenberg would have needed 50% more uranium and more heavy water for the design to work.

"Despite being the birthplace of nuclear physics and almost two years ahead of the US, there was no imminent threat of a nuclear Germany at the end of the war," Koeth says in an Institute article. American Physics.

 

LINK: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-59511739