Why did Hitler slow the research of nuclear weapons in 1942?

by Dominoes282

I was recently researching the different nuclear programs of the world powers in WWII and found that Hitler and Heisenberg didn't operate at full power in their program in early 1942 even though they were pretty close in their stages of development compared to Project Manhattan for example. Here are some questions.

  • Why?

  • Did Hitler know the advantages he would have had with the bomb?

  • Was Heisenberg intentionally slowing the progress because he recognized the actual power of the bomb?

Thank you

restricteddata

I recently answered a similar question in another thread. To what I've posted there, I would specifically add:

  1. Hitler didn't order anything related to the nuclear work; it was Speer and the people in charge of choosing which programs to fund to do this sort of things,

  2. They concluded that it was unlikely that any nation would be able to develop nuclear weapons in the short term, and that it wasn't worth the investment and risk,

  3. There is no evidence that Heisenberg purposefully slowed the progress of the atomic work; he pursued what he thought was important very passionately, but what he thought was important was reactor development,

  4. The Germans and Americans were in about the same place in early 1942, but that was not a very advanced place; the US project accelerated from a research project to a production project over the course of 1942, and that shift was a major one in terms of investment, research, and infrastructure that the Germans never even came close to.

The German and American projects are hard to compare from 1942 onward because the German project remained a relatively small research project focused primarily on developing prototype reactors. The US project focused on enriching uranium and producing plutonium on a massive scale with the explicit aim of producing a bomb.

It is important to remember, and sometimes hard to see in retrospect, that even in the late stages of the Manhattan Project, its success was not a sure thing — it was a truly remarkable thing that they succeeded, and no other nation, even with more modern technology, has ever developed a nuclear weapon on that short a timescale.