Is a duplicated error evidence for or against sabotage?
Heisenberg did not claim to have sabotaged it. Wikipedia claims that the story comes from selective quotation of the last letter here. But, when the bomb was announced, the imprisoned Heisenberg’s reaction of frantic work is suspicious to me: it suggests that he knew where the mistake was and wanted to go back and do the work he had blocked (but I don’t know the details; maybe he was working on something independent of the mistake).
Well, for 2 physicists of equal competency, differing results would suggest sabotage, since for both to give the wrong answer suggests that either they are not good enough to get the right answer at all, or they both got the answer and simultaneously decided to sabotage. Heisenberg was great, though, surely greater than anyone on the Japanese project; so I tend to regard the net as a wash, and focus more on Heisenberg’s reaction—which as I said suggests he genuinely made a mistake and was not engaged in passive resistance, and his surprise & flurry of activity was a give-away.
No numbers, unfortunately. But I did notice:
We did not know a process for obtaining of 235-Uranium with the resources available under wartime conditions in Germany, in quantities worth mentioning. Even the production of nuclear explosives from reactors obviously could only be achieved by running huge reactors for years on end.
Of course, for a few kilograms of enriched uranium or plutonium, you don’t really need huge reactors running for years and years—the hard part is enrichment. Yesterday I was reading a history of modern Korea, and North Korea obtained enough plutonium for a bomb or 3 by running a 20 or 50 megawatt reactor for 2 or 3 years, IIRC. But perhaps by Heisenberg’s 1940s standards such a reactor is beyond huge.
Is a duplicated error evidence for or against sabotage?
Heisenberg did not claim to have sabotaged it. Wikipedia claims that the story comes from selective quotation of the last letter here. But, when the bomb was announced, the imprisoned Heisenberg’s reaction of frantic work is suspicious to me: it suggests that he knew where the mistake was and wanted to go back and do the work he had blocked (but I don’t know the details; maybe he was working on something independent of the mistake).
Well, for 2 physicists of equal competency, differing results would suggest sabotage, since for both to give the wrong answer suggests that either they are not good enough to get the right answer at all, or they both got the answer and simultaneously decided to sabotage. Heisenberg was great, though, surely greater than anyone on the Japanese project; so I tend to regard the net as a wash, and focus more on Heisenberg’s reaction—which as I said suggests he genuinely made a mistake and was not engaged in passive resistance, and his surprise & flurry of activity was a give-away.
No numbers, unfortunately. But I did notice:
Of course, for a few kilograms of enriched uranium or plutonium, you don’t really need huge reactors running for years and years—the hard part is enrichment. Yesterday I was reading a history of modern Korea, and North Korea obtained enough plutonium for a bomb or 3 by running a 20 or 50 megawatt reactor for 2 or 3 years, IIRC. But perhaps by Heisenberg’s 1940s standards such a reactor is beyond huge.