Shedding light on Nazi-era uranium cubes with modern nuclear forensics

After allied forces seized the uranium cubes that Nazi Germany was using to develop its nuclear technology during the second world war, thereby ensuring that programme did not succeed, most of them were lost to history. Only about a dozen of them remain today, at a few institutions like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state, US. Now, researchers there are using modern nuclear forensics techniques to date these cubes and prove that they did indeed come from Germany’s failed second world war nuclear programme. They are also testing their coatings, which were applied to limit oxidation, to discover where they were created.