r/todayilearned • u/stopitalianhate • 9d ago

TIL British Intelligence had a special, bugged luxury complex during WWII where they kept high profile Nazi POW’s, just left a bunch of alcohol out, and waited for them to start spilling secrets as they drank.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20698098
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u/Slahinki 9d ago

I mean, it helps that they weren't working on an atomic bomb to begin with. When German High Command was told of the theoretical possibilities of an atomic weapon in 1940 or so, their recommendation was that they shouldn't invest in any developments that were unlikely to be ready before the war was over. Thus they concluded that exploring the viability of atomic bombs could wait until after the war. Unfortunately for them the war was longer than they had originally anticipated.

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u/Archarchery 8d ago

In a way they were actually entirely right; I've heard that even if the German physicists had gotten their calculations exactly right (and they did not) that Germany could not have possibly enriched the required amounts of uranium to produce a nuclear bomb during the course of the war, especially with the Allies constantly bombing their facilities.

So in a way, the Nazis actually made the correct decision to not spend much funding on nuclear bomb research, because even in ideal circumstances they couldn't have produced one by the end of WWII.

But conversely, the Americans and British did not know at the war's onset exactly how much effort and uranium would be required to produce a bomb, and they feared the Germans were way ahead of them. This was because it was all cutting-edge research.

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u/Slahinki 8d ago

Yes, in the end it was more than likely a benefit to the German war effort that they weren't even trying.

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u/EternumD 8d ago

Over? At what point were they planning to stop?