Slashdot Mirror
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."
Second, if you look at the diagram you'll see that it is initiated a gun-type trigger, something that is impossible for Pu. This makes the diagram look like the work of someone that doesn't know what they are doing. Maybe this was deliberate (though rather obvious) misinformation by a scientist who didn't want Hitler to get the bomb.
Third, it is undated, and unnamed, from an unknown source. Not worth even reading.
In any event, Germany had no means of effectively delivering such a weapon. They lacked the heavy aircraft which the USA used. The V2 rocket only had a fraction of the payload capacity needed. The best they could have done is load it on a cargo vessel and attempt to sail into someone's harbour. Or leave it behind in a city like Paris after retreating. Neither of which would have been terribly impressive, since they would be ground-bursts and not much different from a few tons of dynamite.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
This is great! There might be hope after all! Maybe in 60 years the US will find diagrams of WMD in Iraq!
It's no secret that Heisenberg worked on a nuclear weapon during the WWII. However, some claim that he deliberately didn't make any real progress. There's plenty of more information here.
Underholdning.info
Several unexploded WW2-era bombs are apparently being uncovered in east London. Supposedly the plan was for them to remain unexploded for a long period, then detonate, to act as Hitler's revenge long after the war was lost. Nasty.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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
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!
He claims to have stopped the scientists from developing the bomb any further - not because he was opposed to the concept if such a weapon (he certainly wasn't). The reason was that it was clear it would need much more time than was available in order to complete the work.
What was considered feasible was the idea of an "energy producing Uranium motor" for use in vehicles, and research was switched in that direction around 1944.
Antony Beevor's excellent book on the fall of Berlin also makes it clear that the Germans' nuclear research facilities were well known to the Russian's and were a major influence on Stalin's tactical decisions regarding Berlin. He was determined to obtain the fruits of this research.
The book also makes clear that Heisenburg did not try to sabotage the programme but was eager to succeed. This view is also backed up by the famous meeting between Heisenburg and Nils Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941 and Hesinburg's views at that time.
Of course even though one new where Heisenburg was in 1941 you could never tell what direction he was taking at that time.
Read 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K Dick, it explores an alternate reality in which the combined Germano-Japanese forces won the war.
Excellent book
Actually, if Hitler had nukes, he would most likely nuke himself.
They overestimated the amount of material needed, by at least an order of magnitude.
If this thing detonated near some observation bunker, all the audience would most likely evaporate. And even if they didn't, Hitler would try to lug the bombs by trains to Russia and by seaships (not u-boots) to US coasts. They would be far too big for a plane.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
"If the Nazis had completed work on the nuclear bomb / rocket nuke then the world would be a very difrent place than it is today."
This is why we should all be glad that Captain Kirk allowed Edith Keeler to be run over by that car.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Is there an inverse Godwin's Law? "Any discussion of the Nazis will inexorably tend towards a discussion of Godwin's Law"
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.
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.
I'm currently reading Karlsch's latest book "Hitlers Bombe" which unfortunately has not been tranlated in English yet.Anyway in this book he's done very good work demonstrating that the Germans were VERY actively conducting nuclear research during the war.They even had a comittee working on the concept of nuclear weapons before the U.S had the faintest idea of what they were about (early 1939).What the germans did wrong was that instead of building a giant research/production complex (like the US did with the Manhattan project) they let various institutes/authorities start individual projects between which there was erratic and irregular cooperation.Research was conducted by the Karl Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, the HWA (Heereswaffenamt...Army Weapons Authority?..or something like that :D),the German Post Ministry (!) ,the Navy,companies like Siemens and Degussa and several other individuals and insitutions.This obviously led to research slowing dowm and ressources being wasted.Now..as to the germans lacking in raw materials ,this is not entirely right since they had the oldest european Uranium mines in Joachimstal ,belgian mines in africa (after they conquered Belgium) and of course the norwegian heavy water production facility of the "Norsk Hydro" company(as norway was under their control as well).Karlsch also demonstrates they did built a reactor which nevertheless was rather imperfect and could not enrich uranium to the extent they required.In the end he claims that research which was recently conducted in the region of Thueringen proves the detonation of a *radioactive* bomb.Combining various elements (information from russian archives,eyewitness reports etc) he estimates that this was most likely a "tactical" fission/fusion nuclear weapon.
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
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.
If Hitler was a complete madman, you would think he would have used chemical weapons on the invading Russians. The 2 sides had basically brutalized each other, themselves and anyone who got in their way for 4 years... the only answer must be they lacked the means of delivery?
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.
There is a well recorded event during the nuclear research in Germany during WWII where an accident happened and many researchers died of radiation poisoning. And while I don't know for sure, I assume that the western researchers also knew of the dangers of radiation, since even Marie Curie had suffered from radiation poisoning. Most probably no one expected there to be so much from a bomb, however.
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.
Poison gas was NOT used by any side in WWII. It was in WWI where poison gasses were used by both sides.
They had a very informative special on Discovery about Germany and the nuclear research during WW2. The story about the uranium on a sub and the other story about the entire shipment of heavy water being sunk in a lake set them so far back they couldn't catch up again. Things like this in history are probably why it was unanimous to decide to do something about Iraq when they thought they were building WMDs. If Germany had waited a few short years they would have been quite a bit more lethal.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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.
>
> We would have: SCHRAEGSTRICHPUNKT! Nachrichten für Sonderlingen! Sachen von Bedeutung! instead. Ayeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Das Schrägstrichpunkt is nicht fuer das portmangritten und goatseposten. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und machen sie 503-errorn mit der trollenpost unt der Soviet-reversen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumbkopfen. Das craksmoken moderateren keepen das mausclicken hans in das pockets muss! Relaxen und watchen das blinkenlights.
Recent historic documents have come to light that France is still not convinced of the threat posed by Hitler and should be given more time to come in line with UN Resolutions!
(yeah, probably flamebait, but I thought it was funny)
In the lest five years I have seen several reports about this incidents on TV and even the german goverment has started to investige this matter very closely.
There are three recorded unexplained and very large explosions on german soil, two in Thueringen one month before surrendering to the russians and one three months later a bit away which then was a russian military compound.
All three ran around one kiloton but instead of huge amounts of destruction they seemed to release a huge amount of energy in form of light and radiation.
Around the location there are several strange nuclear testing-reactors spread over 30km.
Several hundred people have seen the mushroom-clouds because it was launched only five kilometers from the next village. The area was closed by russians for the next 40 years, all involved people detained in russia and even the soil of the explosion-area was removed two meters deep. Therefore you find only small but still unusual amounts of radiation. On the other hand the country of Thueringen has by far the highest amount of radiation in whole europe right after Tschernobyl. Something really did happen back then
But in fact noone knows for sure what happened there. 40 years of sowjet intelligence have whipped out absolutly every little detail.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
My physics professor at the University of Nevada Reno, the late Samuel Goudsmit (best known as co-discoverer of the electron's spin), was technical lead on the ALSOS project immediately after World War II. His team went into Berlin and certain other areas shortly after the Allies captured them, in order to sieze any Nazi nuclear material and atom bomb research. They found lots of stuff, then spent a few months studying it closely.
As described in the Wikipedia article (and in Goudsmit's 1947 book, ALSOS: The failure of German science), the Germans never got even remotely close to developing an A-bomb. Their approach to the physics was fundamentally mistaken and would never have led to anything workable. Good news for civilization, bad news for alternate-history writers and sensationalist journalists, but in any case conclusively settled. Goudsmit was a smart guy and knew his stuff.