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

You underestimate German rocketry

[Moraelin]

Germany invested a lot in rocketry research, and the V2 wasn't the only thing the had designed.

Ballistic missiles are known by everyone because of the cold war hype, but with that era's technology and bearing in mind that they didn't need to go all the way to america with it, a cruise missile is where it's at. I.e., a rocket with wings. You don't have to launch the thing upwards with a rocket to hit Britain from France, you can just as well launch it horizontally or on a flat arc and use wings to provide the needed lift. Like the V-1 did, for example.

And they did research and build just that too: rockets with wings.

The Me-163 Komet for example was an interceptor aircraft with a liquid-fuel rocket (not turbojet) engine. It reached a speed of approximately 600 mph (almost 1000 km/h) and had a maximum range of about 80 km.

Nasty thing and more dangerous for the pilot than for the enemy, but to chuck a small bomb without a pilot across the channel it would have worked outstandingly.

And I have no doubt that, if they absolutely needed to chuck a 4 ton bomb (the weight of the hiroshima bomb), they could have slapped 2, 3 or 4 of those engines on an airframe with bigger wings.

It's a lot easier to design such a one-shot contraption, when you don't have to worry about being able to land safely, or about structural damage during flight. It can, for all you care, come apart at the end, as long as it does it on the other side of the channel.

Translation of the labels?

[Goonie]

It may be too difficult to read given the poor-quality reproduction on the BBC article, but if possible could somebody translate the labels on that diagram?

From what I can tell, it looks to be a straightforward version of the "gun design" used in the Hiroshima bomb, which a) is so obvious that I think even I could have figured out the basic concept, and b) won't work with real plutonium as Pu-240 contamination will cause the weapon to blow itself to bits before enough of the plutonium has fissioned. So, even if it was true, they had a very long way to go before they could have made a bomb.

An implosion design, by contrast, would be a much bigger deal, though as I understand it just having the idea is a very long way from making it work.

Two final things: one of the reasons why the Nazis never got very far on their nuclear weapons project is that they could never get a reactor working; one of the key reasons for that was their supply of heavy water was kept from them by Norwegian partisans working with British SOE. Their story is a pretty amazing one.

And finally, while it's not possible to make a plutonium gun bomb now; it should be possible in the very distant future. Pu-240 (the contaminant) has a much shorter half-life (about 6500 years) than Pu-239 (about 24,100 years). So, over (lots of) time, the proportion of the Pu-240 should gradually reduce. So maybe these Germans were just a little ahead of their time...

Re: Dirty bomb

[philbert26]

Maybe not a classic atomic bomb. But I remember reading somewhere that the Nazi bomb would have been something closer to a "dirty bomb". Which spreads radioactive material with conventional explosives.

In 1945 the Germans put their supply of uranium on a submarine, with the intention of delivering it to the Japanese. I imagine a dirty bomb would have been the most likely purpose. More information here.

You forget

[Sycraft-fu]

Nobody knew about those properties of radioactive materials in WWII. That is one of the reasons the US decided to use nuclear bombs on Japan. You have to remember that bombing was amazingly imprecise back then. If you wanted to take out military bases and industrial production in a city you pretty much leveled the city trying to do so. Bombing strategy was to drop a whole mess of bombs in the general area (we are talking like quare mile here) of your target. By chance some of them would hit it.

So the appeal of the atomic bomb wasn't it's additonal features, those were unknown. It was just thought to be a really big bomb. Rather than needing to send hundreds of bombers and dropping tens of thousands of bombs, you could send in just one bomber and drop one bomb. You'd risk a lot less assets, eliminate targets much faster, and save lives (yours at least) and money.

You also have to remember that, even had it been known what a direty bomb was, nobody would have been impressed. For one thing direty bombs are pretty fucking worthless militarily. Most radio active elements, but particularly the ones we are tlaking about here (uraunium and plutonium) are very, very heavy materials. This means their airborne time is very low. Well if you just spread them around, you really aren't going to cause a lot of effect. They need to get inside people to do real damage, or people need prolonged exposure. Just being externally exposed to a little uranium lying somewhere near you won't do much.

Also you have to remember this was a very, very dirty war. It was pretty much no holds barred. Gas attacks of various kinds, of example, were used. Civilians died all the time just due to the nature of war. As I said, you'd take out an entire city to try and take out it's infastructure. So if you managed to make a few hundred people sick with radation poisining, oh well, big deal, people were dying all the time from the war.