ALSOSProject ALSOS was an effort at the end of World War II by the Allies (principally Great Britain and the United States), branched off from the Manhattan Project, to discover, and recover, as much about the German atomic bomb effort as possible. The personnel of the project followed close behind the front lines, first into Italy, and then into France and Germany, seaching for personnel, records, material, and sites involved. It was led, technically, by Samuel Goudsmit and militarily by Boris Pash. Moe Berg contributed in various phases. Its impetus was largely provided by General Leslie R. Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop an atomic bomb (which itself was sparked out of fears of a German weapon). The project managed to find and remove many of the German research effort's personnel and a good bit of the surviving records and equipment. Most of the senior research personnel (including Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Carl von Weizsacker) were sequestered in England for several months. Their discussions were secretly taped, and transcipts of those tapes have been released. In the end, ALSOS concluded that the Allies had surpassed the German atomic bomb effort monumentally by 1942. Compared to the Manhattan Project, one of the largest scientific endeavors of all time, the German project was considerably underfunded and understaffed, and it is questionable whether Germany would have had the resources or isolation which were required for the Allies to produce such a weapon. Goudsmit, in a monograph published two years after the end of the war, further concluded that a principle reason for the failure of the German project was that science could not flourish under totalitarianism -- an argument seemingly rebutted by the Soviet Union's development of a nuclear weapon by 1949.Further reading
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"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) |
