Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The Atomic Bomb--According To James DeMeo


> Dr. DeMeo once posted to his mailing list the claim
> that both
> Germany and Japan had successfully detonated atomic bombs before the
> end of
> World War Two. That is totally contrary to well-established
> historical
> facts. There was never any secret about how to make an atomic
> explosion. The
> information needed to do it was published in an encyclopedia two
> years
> before the war. At the start of the war, America, Britain, Canada,
> Russia,
> Japan, Germany, and Italy all had atomic bomb study groups. But only
> America
> had enough spare industrial capacity to both build a bomb and fight
> a war at
> the same time. It took 4% of Americas' total industrial capacity for
> four
> years to do it, and there was never any chance that any other nation
> could
> have done it while simultaneously fighting a war. What is more,
> Germany
> could not have done it because at the start of the war, the
> Norwegian
> resistance had blown up the only supply of heavy water in Europe, in
> a
> well-known exploit that was the basis of a book and a movie after
> the war.
> Heavy water is essential to making the bomb. Also, Werner
> Hiesenberg, 1938
> Nobel prize winner, and almost the only top-ranking physicist to
> remain in
> Germany durring the war, misplaced a decimal point and therefore
> reported to
> the German High Command that it would take 100 times as much uranium
> to
> build a bomb as was really the case. After the war he claimed the
> mistake
> was intentional, to discourage Hitler from trying to build the
> bomb. I
> don't know if that was true or not, but in any case, he would not
> have tried
> to take credit for preventing Germany from getting the bomb if they
> had in
> fact gotten it, and it is not likely that a bomb could have been
> built
> without his knowing about it since he was their top physicist.
> Historians
> are as certain that only America actually built an atomic bomb as
> they are
> of anything about the war, and to claim anything else should require
> the
> most impressive of evidence. This looks to me like an attempt by the
> right-wingers who have been taking some heat from the left about
> America
> being the only country ever to use an atomic bomb in combat to
> counter that
> claim with the frightening scenario of an Axis nuclear capacity,
> thus
> justifying the nuclear attacks on two Japanese cities full of unarmed civilians.  The claim
> is not
> supported by the facts, but, predictably, Dr. DeMeo, given his
> right-wing
> sympathies, fell for it.

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