During World War II, one of the biggest concerns of the Allies was the development of a German atomic bomb.

As such, the Allies and various partisan groups in occupied countries

made the destruction of anything related to the Nazi atomic program a high priority.

One place in particular was subject to Allied bombing, command omissions, and partisan

sabotage throughout the war. Learn more about the Telemark raids and how Norway became an important front in the Second World War on this

episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The I previously did an episode on the Nazi atomic weapon program or the lack thereof.

The allies working on their own atomic weapon were concerned about the Nazis

developing their own weapon. Before the war many of the world's greatest physicists all came

from Germany and the Allies were certain that they were in a race to build an atomic

bomb. It wasn't that the Germans weren't thinking about it, it was just that they never

quite got as far as the Allies thought they did by the end of the war. When the Americans built their atomic bomb,

they did so through the separation of uranium isotopes.

They went through the extremely difficult and expensive process

of separating uranium 235 isotopes from uranium

238 isotopes. German physicists such as Werner Heisenberg

knew of this option but figured it was far too difficult and expensive to

actually do in reality.

In fact, after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,

Heisenberg didn't initially believe it because he thought that the separation of uranium isotopes

would have been too hard to do.

German research pursued another option, which was still difficult, but not nearly as difficult

as the path the Americans took.

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