Alsos Mission - Legacy

Legacy

After seeing the German project at Haigerloch, Goudsmit wrote that:

It was so obvious the whole German uranium set up was on a ludicrously small scale. Here was the central group of laboratories, and all it amounted to was a little underground cave, a wing of a small textile factory, a few rooms in an old brewery. To be sure, the laboratories were well-equipped, but compared to what we were doing in the United States it was still small-time stuff. Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent more money on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their whole project.

In the end, the Alsos Mission contributed little to the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany, because the German nuclear and biological weapons programs that it had been formed to investigate turned out to be smaller and less threatening than had originally been feared. In the field of nuclear weapons development at least, the underfunded and disorganized German program lagged behind the Allies' own efforts. However, in its appropriation of the accomplishments of European science, the Alsos Mission played a small part in the wartime and subsequent scientific and technological developments that characterized and transformed the postwar world.