INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
One of the 664 two-inch uranium cubes produced in Nazi Germany."Tracking the journey of a uranium cube"Physics Today- - -A cube of uranium
A Nazi plan to build a nuclear bomb
A search for the fate of the remaining pieces of an experiment that might have altered history.It sounds like a basis for a war thriller
Instead, the story appears in the latest issue of Physics Today, the membership magazine of the American Institute of Physics.It's the tale
of 664 uranium cubes produced by researchers in Nazi Germany
They sought to crack the nuclear code in a subterranean laboratory in the "atom cellar" of a castle in Haigerloch
But the experiment failed.When a two-inch cube from the failed reactor made its way to Timothy Koeth, a physicist at the University of
Maryland at College Park, his curiosity was piqued.Miriam Hiebert, a doctoral student in the materials sciences and engineering program
there, volunteered to help him learn more about its past.Despite the genius of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, the German nuclear
weapon program was stymied by bureaucracy during World War II.Instead of pooling its resources, Nazi Germany split the researchers into
three competing teams, and the very contest the Germans thought would fuel innovation ended up stifling it.But they came much closer to a
nuclear weapon than scholars previously thought.Koeth and Hiebert used archival materials to reconsider the Nazi nuclear program
What they uncovered is unnerving."If the Germans had pooled rather than divided their resources," Koeth and Hiebert write, "they would have
been significantly closer to creating a working reactor before the end of the war."The researchers want to track down all of the cubes
The account of the Nazis' failed nuclear program is an intriguing read - one that turns what could be seen as a historical curio into a much
more ominous story.(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a
syndicated feed.)Get the latest election news, live updates and election schedule for Lok Sabha Elections 2019 on
TheIndianSubcontinent.com/elections
Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates from each of the 543 parliamentary seats for the 2019 Indian general
Election results will be out on May 23.
