What People Don’t Know About the World War II Race for Nuclear Weapons

What People Don’t Know About the World War II Race for Nuclear Weapons

Larry Holzwarth - May 31, 2021

What People Don’t Know About the World War II Race for Nuclear Weapons
An Alsos team in France, late 1944. US Army

19. The German atomic weapon program proved much smaller than expected

When the senior scientists for the Alsos missions reviewed the scale of the German research into atomic weapons they expressed dismissal. Samuel Goudsmit, the senior scientist for the Alsos mission, personally inspected some of the German research sites, including those unearthed in Haigerloch. He wrote to General Groves of the site, describing it as “…compared to what we were doing in the United States…small-time stuff”. Later Goudsmit speculated over the usefulness of the Alsos missions, which placed numerous scientists, engineers, and support troops at considerable personal risk. “Sometimes we wondered”, he wrote, “if our government had not spent more money on our intelligence than the Germans had spent on their whole project”. The Alsos missions knew, as did Generals Groves, Marshall, and Eisenhower, the Germans were years away from an atomic bomb by 1944. However, that fact remained classified for years after the war.

Despite the heavy security surrounding the American atomic bomb, Soviet espionage agents and spy rings penetrated both the Manhattan Project and the German efforts during the war. Although the Alsos missions deprived the Soviets of several of the most notable German scientists involved, and much of their records, the Soviets acquired many others. Many of the records obtained in Alsos raids had already been copied and sent to the Soviet Union by its many agents in Germany during the war. The Soviet atomic bomb program did not really gain momentum until 1942, when the Manhattan Project’s programs were well underway. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb, aided in a large part by the materials stolen from the Manhattan Project in the United States and the German efforts during World War II.

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