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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."
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.
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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
If you drop hundreds of thousands of various types of ordnance onto an industrialised area then as much as 20% will not explode. Even ordnance flung into Baghdad some 60 years later didn't all explode on impact.
I doubt this was intentional.
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.
I live in Linz, Austria, where the "Hermann-Göring-Werke" (a huge steel-producing factory) were (now known as "VOEST"), and the Allies (mostly US-American bombers) dropped an extremely high number of bombs there, a lot of them designed to explode after up to 144 hours. They still find unexploded bombs now and then, all over the city, and people still die from exploding bombs, like a few months ago, where one bomb exploded after building workers accidently hit it with an excavator, who were killed by that. And they had to barricade a huge area around that, because they found another unexploded bomb and feared the 144 hour timer could have been activated by the first explosion. Oh, that was the worst incident within the last year, but often enough, roads get blocked for several hours because they have to defuse some bomb they found somewhere, which happens about every one or two months or so. Very "nice".
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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.