Hitler Was Close to Getting the A-Bomb
This myth has it that German physicists were on the verge of unlocking the secret of fission and giving Hitler an atomic bomb. During the war, the Manhattan Project operated on the assumption that Hitler had an advanced nuclear program which might bear fruit at any time. As such, those in the know viewed the US as being in a race against Germany over which country would first produce nuclear weapons.
However, it was discovered after the war that the German nuclear program was nowhere near as advanced as had been assumed, because early in their research, German physicists took a wrong turn and followed it away from the path that leads to nuclear weapons. The war could have lasted another decade, and Germany would have been no closer to producing an atomic bomb in 1955 than she had been in 1945.
Germany’s chief nuclear physicist, Werner Heisenberg, had nebulous ideas that splitting the atom could produce a powerful weapon, but he never understood how to put in practice nuclear fission. In Germany’s last test in the spring of 1945, scientists failed to achieve the preliminary first step of criticality – a self-sustaining chain reaction that the Manhattan Project achieved in 1942. Criticality was the crucial foundation without which an atomic weapon program could not have succeeded.
Additionally, the German nuclear program lacked the necessary support. After achieving criticality, it took the US nearly 3 years, with a massive investment of resources and the personal support and attention of the head of state, to successfully test the first atomic bomb. The Germans had not accomplished the criticality breakthrough by the time the war ended, and their nuclear program had never received anything close to the support enjoyed by the Manhattan Project.