During WW2 Y-12 at Oak Ridge mainly used Calutrons (a type of mass -spectometer) to get the most enrichment. The electrical windings on the calutrons were silver, loaned from the US mint for the war effort. To add to @VeronicaConnor 's point, this was an example of the national level of effort needed to get a nuclear program running.
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The Cosmic Cube is technically not witchcraft either, but in Marvel comics continuity it’s basically a magic MacGuffin
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The Japanese tried to get their hands on the Nazi uranium, but due to a lack of eBay, FedEx and Amazon, they failed.
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Uranium, even if “pure”, is unusable for fission/bomb purposes unless it is the U-235 isotope.
Obviously if the bad guys got it it would save them the time of mining/refining, but the hard part is removing the U-238 from the U-235, which has vexed the Iranians for decades. “More than one ton of Nazi uranium is still missing” is just staticy clickbait.
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Which you don’t get from pure uranium.
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IIRC, that was ‘Preparation 38’, i.e. unprocessed uranium oxide anyway; not cubes.
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On the downside, they got their hands on German V-1 designs and turned them into human guided cruise missiles
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These days, the major impediment to nuclear proliferation is not the technology (which is over 70 years old at this point) but the material. Having a source of uranium and being able to enrich it or produce plutonium. This is a costly and time consuming process.
Israel used a shortcut and received its enriched uranium from European and then South African sources.
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Maybe so, but the Yokusuka MXY-7 Ohka was a Japanese development from the get go and hasn’t that much in common with the Fieseler Fi 103, especially in the propulsion department.
If anything, the Fi 103R was likely inspired by Japanese tactics.
There was, however, this:
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At least it wasn’t Preparation H-Bomb.
:: shows self the door ::
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The “shortcut” for Israel wasn’t the ore, which Israel bought as unrefined yellowcake from Argentina and Belgium. It was that France built them a nuclear reactor.
Iran, also, has no problem getting enough ore:
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Well and the two a month that were in the pipeline. If the Japanese hadn’t surrendered, we would have kept cranking them out. One of my favorite “What ifs” is what the US could have done with all those resources if we weren’t building nukes with them? More factories for bombers and tanks? More graving docks for more/and or bigger ships? Perhaps we would have built the Montana class battleships.
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Surprisingly, the South Africans actually chose to use the simpler “Gun-type” bomb rather than an implosion device, despite the fact that it is a much less efficient use of fissile material. So they, at least did not regard fissile material as the worst bottleneck.
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I wonder if they didn’t have plans for an implosion device? Getting that exactly right is apparently the most difficult part of the plutonium bomb, so everyone seems to build the gun type first because it’s much easier.
If I remember my history on this (and I probably don’t so everyone please correct me) it was Einstein who almost withheld the design of the implosion detonator geometry once he had figured it out because he didn’t want that on his conscience.
The only thing Einstein had to do with developing and building atomic bombs was signing that letter to FDR.
And the idea for an implosion device came from the Brits who brought it along when they joined the team at Los Alamos. Which was a godsend as the Little Boy gunbarrel design works just fine with uranium, but not so well with plutonium. Which was a bit of a problem as making weapons-grade uranium at scale didn’t work as well as making plutonium once they worked out how to optimize reactors to do just that.
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ISTR that the Israelis went with an implosion device first, perhaps because they were able to source some of the HIGHLY precise igniters needed.
That’s thanks to a Belgian mining manager who saw the writing on the wall and moved tons of ore to the USA rather than storing it in Belgium
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20190716a/full/
Of coursr, this mine then became a cold war flashoint
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I should probably look at a map of where it was last located, but my first guess is the Soviets got it.
Or else the Nazis dumped it somewhere in secret.
