Posted By:
Captain Al
in Alberta, Canada Mar 16, 2005
A German historian claims the Nazis tested an atomic bomb in the final months of WWII acording to this BBC report. He also claims they had a working atomic reactor. It seems rather incredible we are just hearing about it now. According to Ranier Karlsch it is because documents were classified when the small group of scientists were captured. The same thing happened to German rocket scientists, but we have known all about them for a long time. I think this is just a lame attempt to credit Germany with a scientific first. Doesn't he realize the war is over and his side lost?
From what I understand, this guy isn't claiming Germany had an atomic bomb, so much as that they were close to getting a dirty bomb. Radioactive, but not anywhere near as much explosive power.
He claims there are eye witness accounts of a bright flash and sudden gust of wind and that it destroyed a 500 sq mile area. That doesn't sound like a dirty bomb. And where was this working reactor in Berlin?
Not much technology involved in dirty bombs. Just pack radioactive material around a conventional explosive and set it off. And why waste scarce uranium on a device that had little destructive power when the goal is to make a big one that could alter the course of the war?
His description of a 'hybrid nuclear weapon' smaller than those used by the Allies does not seem possible. You require a certain amount of fissionable material to start a chain reaction. The Allies were hard pressed to come up with that amount so I think their's were the lowest yield possible. See Physics, Vol. 3 by Isaac Asimov for an explanation of how to enrich uranium and build a nuclear reactor.
The BBC article says 500 sq m. Does that mean miles or meters?
I would imagine a blast that destroyed 500 sq. miles would be pretty hard to conceal.
Katherine
Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 | 09:55 PM
Who knows? Write to the Beeb and ask them to clarify their abbreviations? But you're right, 500 square miles would be pretty hard to conceal.
(On a side note, I always thought Brits only used kilometers and never miles, but then I started reading a whole lot of British books where the cars go X miles per hour and it's so many miles to Birmingham. Hm...)
Oh, they've been trying to make us say km for ages now, but most of us (especially the older generation) are stubbornly sticking to miles. If there's one thing we're good at, it's holding on to less efficient things from the olden days.
I think Alex is right. It must be meters. The first time I went to the link it showed up as '500 sq m--'. Now it says '500 sq m'. But I still should have taken it as meters. Forgot it was the BBC. Even so, 500 sq meters is not impressive for a conventional bomb. The British had what they called 'Earthquake' bombs. They weighed 22,000 lbs. The Lancaster bomber was the only plane that could carry it. I'm sure it did more damage than that.
dfstuckey
in Auckalnd New Zealand
Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 | 03:57 AM
NZ has a long anti-nuclear history: While the first uranium atom was split to release energy, our Lord Rutherford was saying " The amount of energy to be derived from dividing an atom is minmal. Anyone talking about atomic energy is talking moonshine."
Then again, it was a German woman who did it, both of which would have got up Ernest's regal nose.
DarkMoon
Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 | 04:18 AM
there are still unconfirmed theories about how these hitler 'atom' bomb really worked. In this year there are specialists from different physics institute examining the radioactivity of the test sites.
One possible explanation of how the atomic bomb weren't ready enough to be used as a weapon is the size of the bomb mechanism. Using Uran 235 or a special blend of centrifuged Uran (germans had specially developped centrifuges for uran isotopes), and an array of conventional bomb material could produce the heat and pressure to comprime the uran 235 to a critical mass.
However such an array wasn't usable for use in a small bomb of one ton weight so the german couldn't produce a really effective atomic bomb because it would means to have more effective Uran like Plutonium the germans didn't have.
I read in an article in a navy mag, that the Germans did have the parts needed to build the bomb but had surrendered before testing it; so they sent them in an u-boat to Japan...I forgot what happened to the u-boat tho...
Nazi scientists developed the uranium centrifuge in 1942 at Kiel. They had a huge source of uranium in western Czechoslovakia. What was in short supply was electrical power for the centrifuges which used electromagnets. They also needed freedom from Allied bombing. Nazi U-boats shipped large quantities of uranium yellow cake to Asia for the Japanese A-bomb project from late 1943 onwards. The Japanese project at the Rikken Institute of Tokyo was destroyed by bombing but the project then shifted to Hungnam in northern Korea under the Japanese Imperial 8th Army laboratory. I do not accept that the alleged bomb let off at Ohdruf in March 1945 was merely radioactive material packed around explosives. I believe it was enriched uranium in a gun type device with uranium at less than bomb grade enrichment. I believe that this was the trump card that Himmler was trying to negotiate a favourable surrender to the west with in 1945. The Americans were negotiating with the SS through Operation Sunrise. I believe the OSS negotiators stalled for time and told Himmler what he wanted to hear. Himmler could only use a Nazi nuke as a negotiating card as long as he did not use it. By negotiating the allies probably held off it's use until it was too late to use it.
'I believe it was enriched uranium in a gun type device with uranium at less than bomb grade enrichment.'
With less than bomb-grade uranium, it wouldn't have achieved fission. Fat lot of good that then.
As for the yellow cake taken to Japan, I once calculated how much enriched uranium could have been extracted from the roughly 700 kg of uranium oxide, and it came out at less than a half-kilo. Utterly useless on its own.
I have to say that I find the obsession with a Nazi Bomb slightly strange. What are these people who promote it trying to prove? That the Germans were cleverer than we've given them credit? Another retrospective justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? No-one has produced concrete evidence thus far, only edifices of surmise built upon existing evidential foundations and shaky physics.
As for the power of the so-called bomb, it looks like Aunty Beeb may have confused metres with miles, and area with radius, to whit, according to this page (AP Press - Hitler's Bum):
'...the blast felled trees within a radius of about 500 to 600 yards.'
The confusion of meters and miles was my fault. As mentioned above I saw 'sq m--' when I first went to the link. I was later changed to 'sq m' which would more than likely mean meters to the BBC.
There's no question that Germany had some brilliant engineers and physicists in the '30s and '40s. However, one country could not compete with the combined brain power in the rest of the world. Some, like Von Braun, did not reach their full potential until they were able to operate in a free society. Obviously their method of "produce or be shot" is not quite as good as the incentive of monetary reward and scientific recognition.
Still, almost everyone agreed that if anyone in the world could build the bomb it was Heisenberg. As I recall it's always been something of a mystery just why he didn't.
Accipiter
in the Northern Hemisphere, unless They have lied. Member
Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 | 02:47 PM
500 square meters? That's not terribly impressive. An average hand grenade has about a 700 square meter coverage without any difficulty, and with a lot less production cost.
I know that one of the main things keeping the Nazi nuclear weapons program from success was the difficulty in getting the materials they needed. Towards the end of the war, they were trying to get a big shipment of something (tritium? deuterium? I forget what, exactly) from a processing plant in Norway, but the Norwegian resistance was able to alert the British and the convoy was sunk. Without that shipment, the Nazis were supposed to have been unable to make anything. I'd have to read this guy's book to tell just how valid his claims are.
'Still, almost everyone agreed that if anyone in the world could build the bomb it was Heisenberg. As I recall it's always been something of a mystery just why he didn't.'
True, but people are often wrong. Who would have thought a pair of bicycle mechanics would beat the esteemed Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution to achieving powered flight? Yet everyone now remembers the Wrights, and hardly anyone remembers Langley...
But the essence of the solution is in your statement '...if anyONE in the world could build the bomb it was Heisenberg.' Perhaps that was true - but the US had the combined brains of dozens of top scientists from around the world, Heisenburg was virtually alone. It's not really much of a mystery at all. The group dynamics of so many scientists thinking about the problems in the Manhattan Project made it far more likely that they would succeed than a tiny isolated group in central Europe.
I never stated that I felt Heisenberg should have beaten the American's to the bomb. I fully agree that the group (however fractuous) working on the Manhattan project stood a much better chance of getting there first. This was never in question. The question is why Germany through Heisenberg's team didn't accomplish it as well.
Heisenberg made many obvious errors and wrong assumptions. I don't have my book here with me and it's been a long time since I read it so I don't have specifics unfortunately, but the general consensus seems to be that Heisenberg either a) wasn't all he was cracked up to be or was past his period of greatness, or b) he deliberately failed to deny Germany the use of the bomb. In his lifetime he seems never to have discussed either possibility. If I recall correctly, most scientists and scientific historians seemed to simply stay out of it while he was still alive, and now that he's dead, it would be almost impossible to definitively determine just why he failed. He certainly had the knowledge, mental reasoning skills, and even resources to produce at least one working atomic bomb.
While Germany didn't have the capability throughout most of the war to engage in full scale production of atomic weapons, only one or two would have really been necessary to reach a negotiated peace, if not outright victory, in Europe. How long would Great Britain have lasted with much of London obliterated? Especially when they didn't know if Germany possessed more bombs.
David B.
in Reading, England.
Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 | 08:35 AM
The Germans certainly weren't helped by their fixation on using Deuterium-Oxide (heavy-water) as a moderator.
Potentially a D20 design could have been a more efficient WMD factory that tne Stagg Fields Pile. But heavy water is hard to get and hard to work with. The Allies carbon-moderator designs were a huge advantage.
