America’s Atomic Arms Race With Nazi Germany

In July 1945, the United States ran their first atomic test and detonated “Trinity” in the New Mexico desert. Was it humanity’s first atomic detonation? Oppenheimer later acknowledged it was not, though he was a bit cryptic about the details. Which is understandable, given the differences between the propaganda official history we were taught – that the awesome United States developed the world’s first atomic bomb – and the reality that America was not the first. You’ll learn more if you read Oppenheimer and Heisenberg: Friends, Enemies and Architects of Destiny – but if you don’t like books – or if you just want to watch a quick video on WWII’s race for the atomic bomb while you wait for your copy to arrive, here’s a video that covers the official version of events.

Of course some of the details on J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t make it into this video, or even Nolan’s blockbuster movie. Some details of what Germany achieved during WWII are still classified until 2045. Officially, Werner Heisenberg, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for coming up with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and for being one of the founding fathers of quantum physics – officially he was a genius before WWII, then an incompetent bumbling fool for about six years, then within days of the Americans dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he was a genius again, who suddenly understood how atomic bombs could be made (again.)

Nothing to see here, (that’s why about 2,000 German scientists were brought to the U.S. in Operation Paperclip at the end of the war – and they needed to classify so much for a hundred years) so move along! Really, there’s nothing interesting about Oppenheimer or Heisenberg or German atomic bomb development that wasn’t in this video. Nothing about the cargo of German U-boats that landed in the Americas after WWII ended or who accompanied the cargo on the submarines or why Oppenheimer said the Trinity test in New Mexico was not the first atomic detonation or why all the famous physicists on both sides of the Atlantic learned to read Sanskrit…. No reason at all for you to want to read – Oppenheimer and Heisenberg: Friends, Enemies and Architects of Destiny