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."

Comments

Re:Forget it.

[Derleth]

Neither of which would have been terribly impressive, since they would be ground-bursts and not much different from a few tons of dynamite.

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?

Re:Forget it.

[Xner]

Agreed, it looks more like someone's fantasy about what a 1940s era atomic weapon should look like than a real one.

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.

Re:Forget it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Forget it.

[hedge_death_shootout]

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.

Re:Forget it.

[khallow]

The effect would be more local. Instead of flattening an entire city, it would pollute a small area. But the demoralising on troops would be quite effective I guess.

It wouldn't be. The problem is that no one would understand the effects and hence, be scared of it.