> For example, one of the questions that people ask me again and again is how close the Germans were to getting an atomic bomb. The answer is, more or less, not very close at all. Why not? Because even if their scientific understanding was not too far away — which it was not, even though they were wrong about several things and behind on several others — they never came close to the stage that would be necessary to turn it into an industrial production program, as opposed to just a laboratory understanding. That sheer fact is much more important than whether Heisenberg fully understood the nature of chain reactions or anything like that.
I found this article to be very interesting. The point above in particular, for example, has parallels with the allied code-breaking efforts, which were similarly organized primarily as an industrial operation. (The Bletchley Park data base lists more that 10,000 people who were associated with work there during the war). As with the Manhattan project, much is written about key figures, like Turing and Flowers, whose contributions were of course crucial, but the true genius of the effort was the fact that the British, and later the Americans, created a large industrial organization for code breaking.