In article ,
"John Carrier" wrote:

Germany had an outstanding group of theoretical physicists. They had access
to a limited amount of uranium ore. Never the less, they did not succeed in
producing a sustained nuclear reaction by war's end (we did it in 1942 at U
of Chicago).

The big problem for the German program was Heisenberg. Before the war,
he'd calculated some fission cross-sections incorractly, and apparently
never recalculated them. He thought the mass for a chain reaction was
something on the order of forty *tons*. If he'd had a somewhat smaller
ego, he might have done some recalculation of his assumptions and gotten
it right.

Even after the war, he insisted that the Americans hadn't actually built
a uranium fission bomb until he was shown the correct cross-section
calculations.

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