You know how, in Captain America: The First Avenger, a Nazi analog organization tries to harness the power of a mysterious glowing cube to create a weapon of mass destruction that will overwhelm its enemies only for their efforts to be sabotaged by the Allied forces and you Dice to end up in a secret US research facility after the defeat of the Axis powers?
Did you know it really happened?
Of course, it wasn’t an infinity stone that fueled Nazi research – it was uranium. The dice, of which there were over 1,000, also didn’t end up in a secure SHIELD facility waiting for various Avengers to congregate. In fact, they ended … well, nobody’s really sure – but thanks to exciting new nuclear forensic research, a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is getting closer to an answer.
“[It’s] not just a really fun science project and series of experiments, but also a kind of history project, ”said PNNL researcher Brittany Robertson, who presented the results at the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting this week.
“We look for various pieces of information and archived information and even letters between scientists to find out what we can measure and how we can actually make some interpretations.”
From the early 1940s, the Nazis and the US were embroiled in a race for nuclear technology. The US had the Manhattan Project (and we all know how it turned out) and the Nazis had Werner Heisenberg – “like the Heisenberg, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” laughs Robertson. “Heisenberg.” – and Kurt Diebner. The focus of research was on these five-centimeter-long cubes made of almost pure uranium: the hope was to use nuclear fission to convert it into plutonium and create an atomic bomb.
A replica of the failed attempt by the Nazis to build a nuclear reactor. Photo credit: ArtMechanic, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Fortunately, the program was interrupted before it was successful, and the Allies confiscated many of the dice after the war. But their fate afterwards is rather bleak: around 600 were shipped to the US, today only about 12 are known, the rest are used in the US nuclear project, sold to private collectors and research institutes or are simply lost in the fog of time.
Even with the dice we know, the origin is more of a mystery. The origins of the cube at PNNL are unknown, said lead researcher Jon Schwantes, with no one being sure how it got into the lab in the first place. In fact, he explained, the team’s first task was to confirm that the cube was part of the Nazi nuclear program at all.
“We don’t know for sure that the dice are from the German program, so we want to find out first,” says Schwantes. “Then we want to compare the different cubes to see whether we can assign them to the respective research group [Heisenberg or Diebner] that’s what she created. “
Robertson with the PNNL cube. Photo credit: Andrea Starr / PNNL
Anecdotally, the cube at PNNL is a Heisenberg cube, but “[w]We didn’t have any actual measurements to support this claim, ”explained Robertson. To prove the cube’s origin, she turned to radiochronometry, a technique that dates radioactive material by measuring how much it has decayed. For the Nazi dice, this means measuring the relative content of uranium they were originally made of compared to thorium and protactinium, which they would break down into over time.
Then there is the coating on the cube that the Nazi scientists used to protect the cube from oxidation. Strange for a supposed Heisenberg cube, the PNNL cube is coated with styrene – Diebner’s favorite material.
“We are curious to see whether this special cube belongs to the two research programs,” said Schwantes. “It is also an opportunity for us to test our science before we use it in an actual nuclear forensic investigation.”
Other cubes have a similarly mysterious origin: the PNNL team worked in collaboration with the University of Maryland, which has its own cube – one that tries to “found” with the notation “Taken from reactor that Hitler” in the department “found” to build. Gift from Ninninger. ”But if knowing that there are a few hundred lost uranium cubes is troubling, remember, it’s better than the alternative.
“I’m glad that by the end of the war the Nazi program wasn’t as advanced as they wanted it to be,” said Robertson. “[B]Because otherwise the world would be a completely different place. “
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