Following that, according to Speer, “on the suggestion of the nuclear physicists we scuttled the project to develop an atom bomb . . . after I had again queried them about deadlines and been told that we could not count on anything for three or four years.” Work on what Speer calls “an energy-producing uranium motor for propelling machinery”—the heavy-water pile—would continue.1575 “In the upshot,” Heisenberg wrote in Nature in 1947, summarizing the war years, German physicists “were spared the decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.1576 The circumstances
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