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Entry: The Arsenal Of Time Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/the_arsenal_of_time#25898 Post contents: Richard :The history of technology is not subject to historiographic whimsy, whig or otherwise. My point is that in 1938, as ow, not all of our contemporaries are living in the same time, and my sentiment is that, with German still the lingua franca of physics at the time, we were bloody lucky the Hun jumped the gun, and let the demands of conventional ordnance and aircraft productions derail or side track high-tech programs so precocious that we -- and the Russians--spent a postwar decade cheerfully reverse-engineering them. Hitler's weak grasp of the time scale of transforming research into weapons systems --materiel cannot be willed into existence -- led to many formidable systems, e.g the ME262, coming too little and late to change the course of the war. Only a few years delay in the onset of hostilities would have quantitatively changed the picture , allowing , for example , Otto cycle submarines or the Messerschmidt jets introduced late in 1944 to be produced in the numbers of the piston aircraft that preceded them, the Aliies would have been on the short end of air superiority. The industrial scale of diffusion and calutron enrichment were simply beyond the Third Reich's means , but despite the pre-war implosion of the German physics establishment - I had the rare opportunity of discussing it with Heisenberg and von Weisacker three decades ago, time and money enough would have allowed them to go the heavy water reactor route. They did't get a nuclear weapons program off the ground because Speer had a war to fight and pulled the plug on their program. We put ten thousand of chemical engineers and metallurgists to work with an unlimited budget. Heisenberg got a blackboard and three dozen postdocs. Had he got more, Moe Berg might well have plugged him in Zurich instead of chatting over tea at ETH. The bottom line is that the lack of time and Hitler's strategic myopia transformed a rapidly evolving high tech arsenal into an historical footnote - vergeltungswaffen don't win wars. Strategic weapons can- the problem being that it would be harder to attach the epithet 'Good' to World War II had it been fought a l'outrance , with the weapons of the World War III that never was. Dan should note that Corporal Hitler's reluctance to unleash Tabun and Soman is widely attributed to his having been floored by a whiff of mustard gas in WWI. William Bernard guesses wrong. His comment is as irrelevant to what I have written as it is mistaken to my views on Iran. Sent at: 2008 07 24