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To be successful, Heisenberg’s team needed
about 50 percent more uranium.
Rummaging around in the National Archives
in College Park, Maryland, Koeth discovered a
box labeled “German Uranium.” Inside, he found
recently declassified documents revealing that
another German team, led by nuclear physicist
Kurt Diebner in Gottow, Germany, had about
400 cubes the same size and shape as Heisen-
berg’s uranium.
“The combined inventory would have been
more than enough to have achieved criticality”
in Heisenberg’s reactor—an important early step
in developing a nuclear bomb, Koeth and
Hiebert concluded.
“Thankfully for us all,” they added, “the
competitive approach and limited scientific
resources of the German nuclear research pro-
gram may have been what foiled Heisenberg
and his colleagues in their pursuit of nuclear
power.” America’s Manhattan Project, by con-
trast, was fully collaborative and centralized
under the command of Temporary Brigadier
General Leslie Groves.
Plus, Koeth told website phys.org, the
Germans still would have needed more heavy
water to get the reactor running. “There was no
imminent threat of a nuclear Germany by the
end of the war,” he said.
And what about the identity of the mysterious
gift-giver, Ninninger?
The answer came in what Koeth and Hiebert
call a “bizarre stroke of luck almost too good for
scientific minds to believe”: a few days after the
cube arrived, Koeth was
“poking around” in a
used bookstore and
stumbled across a copy
of the 1954 book Minerals
for Atomic Energy by one
Robert D. Nininger.
Despite the different
spellings, Koeth quickly
realized that he’d found
his man.
Nininger, as it turned
out, had worked with a
Manhattan Project opera-
tion in New York that
oversaw efforts to procure uranium. The scien-
tist, who died in 2004, had apparently kept the
cube as a souvenir and passed it along to some-
one else who passed it along to someone else
who passed it along to Koeth. (Luckily for all
involved, uranium is only minimally radioactive.)
Some of the details of the story are unclear:
an account provided by university publication
Maryland Today noted that Koeth “won’t fully
disclose” how the cube came into his possession.OCTOBER 2019 11
A WORLD WAR II CODEBREAKING MACHINE, whim-
sically named after a cartoonist who dreamed up fantas-
tic contraptions, is up and running again in Britain’s
Bletchley Park.
For the first time, the public can watch the “Heath Rob-
inson” machine (above) in action at the National Museum
of Computing, in the same Bletchley Park complex that
housed Allied codebreakers during the war.
A team of six spent seven years reconstructing the
machine. “It was quite an achievement because all we had
was a few photographs and a hand-drawn diagram,” the
museum’s Phil Hayes, chief engineer on the project, told
BBC News.
The Heath Robinson was supposed to automate code-
breaking and crack Germany’s Lorenz cipher used by
Hitler and his generals. But it was slow, cumbersome, and
vulnerable to repeated breakdowns. The device got its
nickname from the “Wrens”—members of the Women’s
Royal Naval Service, who worked to keep it running.
W. Heath Robinson (1872–1944) was known for creating
cartoons that depicted elaborate machines carrying out
simple tasks, in the vein of Rube Goldberg.
To overcome the Heath Robinson’s weaknesses, devel-
opers created Colossus, the world’s first programmable
computer. Still, two improved “super Robinsons” contin-
ued their work through the end of the war.BRITISH REBUILD
FAMED BLETCHLEY
CODEBREAKING
MACHINE
Physicists Timothy Koeth and Miriam Hiebert with the
cube (opposite); to create a reactor, Germans assembled
664 such cubes into a forbidding “chandelier” ( below).