Quote:
Originally Posted by H0910
Would the united states have been able to build the atomic bomb without the help of Canada? keeping in mind that Canada provided them with uranium and it was a canadian who built the bomb's trigger
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Actually, there were many sources of fissionable material that went into the first atomic bombs; Belgium sold the entire output of the Belgian Congo uranium mines to the US just before the war. Some of it came from Canada, and some from the American Southwest. If Canada had not sold it's fissionable materials, there were other sources that could have been tapped, albeit with somewhat more difficulty.
The team of physicists and engineers who designed and built the complex inner mechanism of the bombs included many nationalities, from Europe and North America. Not to take away from the accomplishment of building the triggering device, but there were many people capable of such work and had it not been a Canadian, it would have been a Brit, or Frenchman, or Hungarian, or an American. The atomic bombs were so complex and involved, it took the contributions of a huge number of very talented people to construct them; no one person was indispensable, and the bombs would have been built in any case, if any one person had not existed, or had not been available.
If you want to tout Canadian accomplishments in WW II, a better question would be what kind of rifle would the US Army had fielded if John Garand had not existed? Garand was a Canadian, and used his considerable talent to design and develop what became the war's best infantry rifle, better known as the M1 Garand.
atomib bomb
