Nazi Germany Couldn’t Have Built a Working Reactor, Let Alone a Bomb, Study Finds

According to historians, the Manhattan Project began as a response to Nazi Germany’s perceived lead in nuclear technology. While their reactor never really took off, scholars are divided as to how close they got—and the answer may be that they weren’t at all close to criticality, a new study argues.

In what they call “nuclear archaeology,” researchers conducted a literature review of historical documents on Uranprojekt—Nazi Germany’s nuclear program—and then devised a model to reproduce realistic measurements of its progress…