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Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi Nuke'
ninjee writes "Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.
It is the only known drawing of a "nuke" made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive.
The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb.
But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed.
The report containing the diagram is undated, but the researchers claim the evidence points to it being produced immediately after the end of the war in Europe. It deals with the work of German nuclear scientists during the war and lacks a title page, so there is no evidence of who composed it.
One historian behind the discovery, Rainer Karlsch, caused a storm of controversy earlier this year when he claimed to have uncovered evidence the Nazis successfully tested a primitive nuclear device in the last days of WWII. A number of historians rejected the claim.
The drawing is published in an article written for Physics World magazine by Karlsch and Mark Walker, professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, US."
If dynamite caused radiation sickness and cancer, this would be exactly right. As it stands, however, even a Nazi dirty bomb would have had at least a huge psychological effect, if not a very large military one.
It might have opened our eyes to the true dangers of radiation sooner, but I don't think so. It could be an interesting jumping-off point for an alternative history story: What if it gave other groups the idea to make their own dirty bombs in the unsettled postwar years?
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
Is it possible it was a design "speculated" from spy reports from the allies? It does capture two crucial design decisions (gun assembly and plutonium core), but manages to mix them up in a single entity. Which would be an easy mistake to make if one was relying on shaky intelligence from someone close to the Manhattan project, but not too close.
The design still looks approximated though, and does not take into account the scale or space requirements of a v2-type rocket.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
Different how, exactly? They WOULD have still lost the war. There's no 'likely' about it. One atomic bomb would have made remarkably little difference.
The material and manpower advantage of the allied armies and the Soviet Union in particular was utterly overwhelming by 1945.
"Dead men are no longer interested in military history." -Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus
You're also talking about an era where governments (US, UK and AUS amongst them) exposed their own soldiers to nuclear tests to see how they would react, so I'm not sure about the psychological effects being that profound.
Mind you, we also had radioactive toothpaste and people bought it!
dirty bombs are completly ineffective though. the us military has looked into their use. the radiation from one is confined to too small an area. ensuring, with a large enough explosion that a larger area is covered just lessens the amount of radioactive material in a given area, lessening the effect. either way it is a simple cleanup operation.
Hitler was able to shrug these things aside when it suited him. I mean, you've only got to look at the guy to see that he didn't fit into the Nazi ideal of an Aryan race!
I think that during WWII, if a couple of blocks of, say, London had been contaminated by a dirty bomb, people would have been relatively unmoved.
They had more fatal stuff to worry about.
An what about a democracy using the bomb over human populations? (united states)
Scary, really scary.
It wouldn't be. The problem is that no one would understand the effects and hence, be scared of it.
If you look at the diagram on this page, there seems to be what looks like a date on the upper right side. It seems to say "Halteose fur AS/12/44". Any ideas what that means?
Also, the associated article states that the bomb appears to be a hybrid fission/fusion device, which was far more advanced than the two fission-only devices used on Japan.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I think the point is that although this method is practical for Uranium bombs (the Hiroshima bomb used it), a much more complex 'implosion lens' design is required for Plutonium (or at least the grade of plutonium potentially available to the bomb makers, which had a relatively high rate of spontaneous neutron emission from 'contaminating' Pu-240). The latter design was used in the Trinity test and Nagasaki bombs.
Incidentally, the other German bomb design in the Physics World article (the one supposedly tested) was, if correct, a early attempt to exploit both fission and tritium/deuterium fusion in a weapon. Obviously they didn't manage to achieve even the yield of a small fission bomb, let alone a hydrogen bomb, but the (apparent) fact that they were thinking this way is itself remarkable (if true).
You forget about Stalin. Stalin makes Hitler look like a mamma's boy.
"Well Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." - Dr. Roger Fleming
Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII.
Nonsense. If that were the case, there would have been no radiation safety precautions during the project, and all the scientists and workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and other Manhattan sites would have rapidly died of acute radiation poisoning.
Long-term effects of varying levels of exposure were not understood, but it was certainly known that neutron activation will render materials radioactive, and that the bomb would produce significant amounts of radioactive debris, and that people would die from it.
What makes you think the US would be the target? You've been watching too many "documentaries" from Hollywood.
It's pretty easy to guess based on that they did before hand, and what they wrote about. Mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and the handicapped. An unelected government, state control of media and commerce, propaganda, police state, slave labour of the non-Aryans, using land outside Germany as living space.
I'm sure it would be have full employment, low crime and the trains run on time, though most people wouldn't see that as much of a trade off.
It probably wouldn't have been dissimilar from Stalin's USSR or Mao's China or, well insert and dictatorship that killed large numbers of its own people. Brutal totalitarian regimes tend to follow a pattern really.
Better? No. Only if they got overthrown and something better came along, so it was better inspite of them, not becuase of them.
I bet history books would have had a different angle on it if someone else had dropped atomic bombs on USA.
Yeah, they'd probably be written in German or Japanese. And they'd probably say it was justified because to stage an invasion of a country wherein a significant percentage of the population is armed would have been far more costly to both the invader and the invadee.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman