Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi Nuke' 639
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."
Re:Forget it. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
What about the Schlechter Wolf bombs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Forget it. (Score:0, Interesting)
I agree with the OP. The drawing is fake. No nuclear physicist would ever have designed a gun-type Pu bomb on the basis that it doesn't work, and even the most preliminary math would have shown that.
Re:What about the Schlechter Wolf bombs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Heisenberg (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about the Schlechter Wolf bombs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Heisenberg (Score:3, Interesting)
By all accounts Nazis were closer to developing a working flying saucer [unrealaircraft.com] than a working nuclear bomb...
Re:Germans didn't have a Nuke (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Forget it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not worth reading, yes, but for the weak minded, it will suffice. Am I the only foil-hatted one to suspect this piece of yellow journalism was timed to sow some additional fear/causus belli over the Iranian bomb program?
When I heard the soundbite over ABC Radio, there was absolutely no question by the news people as to its veracity, only a verbatim repeat of whatever the original source was. Thanks for nothing, press.
And to reiterate, the Nazi bomb program never got past a quite preliminary phase before more pressing matters, such as Germany's deteriorating strategic situation, as well as their own misallocation of resources among hundreds of competing defense programs, caused them to abandon the atom bomb.
Re:Heisenberg (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about the Schlechter Wolf bombs? (Score:4, Interesting)
You underestimate German rocketry (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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:Heisenberg (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: Dirty bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [uiuc.edu].
You forget (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Good Point and Chemical Weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forget it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not your fault, but Thanks BBC. The partial picture on the news story is closer and has more detail, the enlarge picture (which BBC has linked and you link to directly) is of a lower quality, thus I can't read ANYthing on it...
Three known nuclear explosions on german soil (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
ALSOS project disproved this (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Forget it. (Score:3, Interesting)