First atomic bomb was German !?!

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Boby
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Re: 1943 famine in India -- British act of genocide?

#706

Post by Boby » 08 May 2016, 16:02

ljadw wrote:The Manhattan project costed almost 2 billion WWII $ ,something as 30 billion today $ ;Germany could not do this .
Did not the V- project cost billions of RM? At least is what all people is repeating.

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Re: 1943 famine in India -- British act of genocide?

#707

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 09 May 2016, 08:12

ljadw wrote:There is a difference between alleviate and prevent .

It is questionable to talk about an Indian nation in 1943, besides 4 years later, a big part of Bengalen seceded from India .There were also a lot of fugitives from Birma .

I know of the letter, but ,it is not so that the letter provoked the decision to start the nuclear program . And if Einstein was in Germany and had convinced Hitler to start a nuclear program, the result would still be the same as in the OTL : no nuclear weapon for Germany,as Germany had not the resources to make a nuclear weapon .

Before the war,the scientific community knew that it was theoretically possible to make a nuclear weapon, it was not a secret,the problems were :money, and raw materials and engineers and other staff, not the presence of a theoretical scientist as Einstein .

The Manhattan project costed almost 2 billion WWII $ ,something as 30 billion today $ ;Germany could not do this .

The Indian land / country / people existed thousands of years prior to the coming of the British.

In 1947, India was partitioned and parts of bengal (and other provinces in the west) formed Pakistan. So? That doesnt make the people who died in 1943 "non-Indians"! Germans died in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia in 1945 during the Soviet massacres. The fact that these parts were later given some other name and stolen by the allies didnt make those people non-germans? The Poles from eastern Poland who dies in German and Russian hands during the war didnt become non-poles when these parts were later purloined by the USSR ?

The US nuclear programme was a fall out of the Briggs committee proceedings. And the Briggs committee was formed in late october '39 (first meeting on 21 october) after Einstein's letter was handed over to Roosevelt on 11 October.

The V weapons programme cost germany over 5 billion Deutsche Marks. It was quite possible really under the circumstances to have invested in an atomic bomb.


Boby
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Re: 1943 famine in India -- British act of genocide?

#708

Post by Boby » 09 May 2016, 09:52

sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:
ljadw wrote: .

The V weapons programme cost germany over 5 billion Deutsche Marks. It was quite possible really under the circumstances to have invested in an atomic bomb.
According to wikipedia 90% of the cost was for building construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost

But can the germans do it? Did they not lacked material and know-how?

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Re: 1943 famine in India -- British act of genocide?

#709

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 09 May 2016, 11:06

Boby wrote:
sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:
ljadw wrote: .

The V weapons programme cost germany over 5 billion Deutsche Marks. It was quite possible really under the circumstances to have invested in an atomic bomb.
According to wikipedia 90% of the cost was for building construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost

But can the germans do it? Did they not lacked material and know-how?
Hi Boby..

You are referring to the cost break up for the Manhattan Project i.e, the US nucelar project.

The Germans were well on the way to "do it". Uranium enrichment and getting the Reactors to reach the critical take off stage were the bottlenecks.

The impact of chasing scientists and intellectuals out of Germany in the 30s and the later drafting of physicists in the wehrmacht (some actually fell in action in Russia!) created a lost generation of scientists. I feel this ultimately made the difference.

These are good books on this subject :
Judt Matthias; Ciesla Burghard (1996). Technology transfer out of Germany after 1945.
Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939–1949

Nuclear Fission (the first mini "bursting" of the uranium nucleas) was discovered in 1938 by German physicist Otto Hahn. Ironically he soon commuicated this to Lise Meitner, his ex colleague, who had fled Nazi persecution to Swede. She figured out that this "bursting" in fact was nuclear fission :)

The Brown shirts and thugs broke more than just a few shop windows in the streets of 30s Germany. They broke the intellectual capability of a great Nation !

Ciao
Sandeep

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wm
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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#710

Post by wm » 16 May 2016, 22:59

williamjpellas wrote:Wm, thanks for the input. Just to be clear as we continue the conversation, the alleged Rugen Island detonation was in 1944, according to Luigi Romersma, the Italian journalist who said in numerous print sources that he was an eyewitness, and also according to Hans Zinsser, a Luftwaffe He-111 pilot who claimed to have seen a mushroom cloud and experienced electromagnetic phenomena in the region of the explosion that were consistent with an atomic detonation of some kind.
I've made this long time ago to show the area around Rugen where most of windows should have been broken, exactly as it happened when the silo in Oppau/Germany had exploded with the force of 1-2kt.
It should be mentioned the Oppau explosion was heard 300km from the ground zero:
Image

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#711

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 17 May 2016, 04:51

The bottomline is the Germans didn't have the bomb in 44 - 45 . They were not close either.
If the Germans had anything resembling a nuclear bomb they would surely have tried to operationalise it in the last desperate days.
However I have often wondered why Hitler didn't authorise the use of the nerve gases that the Germans had doubtlessly invented.

Ciao
Sandeep

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Re:

#712

Post by witcher » 17 May 2016, 16:48

LWD wrote:
phylo_roadking wrote:
But what does it matter now.....
It matters...that really off-the-wall thinking isn't corrected, or at least the correction provided...if the more "imaginative" among us actually prefer the weird/wonderful/impossible that's their business. I prefer the truth even if it does happen to ne more mundane.
Here's two other examples I was involved with...
http://www.feldgrau.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20714
and
http://www.feldgrau.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25424
Sometimes, Witcher, people will simply defy the conventions of good scholarship to stick with or spread their own particular belief.
I don't think you had to go that far afield to prove your point. :)

By the way stellung we're still waiting for your list of criteria which indicate that the explosion you described was not a chemical one.

Sir, Are you still holding on that Little Boy was the first bomb test?

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wm
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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#713

Post by wm » 17 May 2016, 22:56

sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:However I have often wondered why Hitler didn't authorise the use of the nerve gases that the Germans had doubtlessly invented.
They were convinced the Americans had them too (as they patented them in the US in the thirties).
And the Germans could have dished it out, but their horse-driven army and their defenseless cities couldn't take it. The use of gas massively favored the Allies - with their trucks, bombers, better artillery, air superiority/supremacy even if their gases were not quite as good.

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#714

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 18 May 2016, 19:37

wm wrote:
sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:However I have often wondered why Hitler didn't authorise the use of the nerve gases that the Germans had doubtlessly invented.
They were convinced the Americans had them too (as they patented them in the US in the thirties).
And the Germans could have dished it out, but their horse-driven army and their defenseless cities couldn't take it. The use of gas massively favored the Allies - with their trucks, bombers, better artillery, air superiority/supremacy even if their gases were not quite as good.
Well yes. Another of those special stunts pulled by Speer. He claimed later to have been dead against the Nerve Gases. But one doesn't know if that was another of his post war neck saving antics. This episode is extremely perplexing to me. I havent been able to figure this out.

However it was actually Speer who introduced IG Farben's Otto Ambrose to Hitler. And it was Ambrose who de-sold the nerve gases to the Fuehrer. The allies had no clue about Tabun.. Sarin or Soman till they found these in Germany.

If Speer and Ambrose hadnt misled Hitler, the Germans may have used them against the allied troops on the battlefields in 1944. And if they did....they would have won the war.

Ciao
Sandeep

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wm
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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

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Post by wm » 18 May 2016, 23:13

Because they had better insecticides, which nerve gases actually were? Against which activated charcoal in American gas masks was sufficient protection?
The next day their front-line and the rear of their army would be drenched in some persistent agent like mustard gas. German horses would love that, as their non-motorized infantry.

Then German cities would be attacked with gas, and their countryside with anthrax as the people behind Operation Vegetarian wanted to do.
The use of gas massively favored the Allies, they would win even faster and easier.

btw actually they knew earlier, this is the first although inaccurate mention of nerve gas:
Tactical and Technical Trends, No. 1, June 18, 1942

NERVE GAS

Unconfirmed reports from various sources describe the effects of a so-called "Nerve Gas" said to have been used by the Germans in Russia.

C.W.S. COMMENT: American chemists do not know of any agent which it is practicable to make having the characteristics ascribed to "Nerve Gas." However, because of the persistent rumors that a gas of this type exists, investigations along this line are being continued.

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#716

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 19 May 2016, 09:21

wm wrote:Because they had better insecticides, which nerve gases actually were? Against which activated charcoal in American gas masks was sufficient protection?
The next day their front-line and the rear of their army would be drenched in some persistent agent like mustard gas. German horses would love that, as their non-motorized infantry.

Then German cities would be attacked with gas, and their countryside with anthrax as the people behind Operation Vegetarian wanted to do.
The use of gas massively favored the Allies, they would win even faster and easier.

btw actually they knew earlier, this is the first although inaccurate mention of nerve gas:
Tactical and Technical Trends, No. 1, June 18, 1942

NERVE GAS

Unconfirmed reports from various sources describe the effects of a so-called "Nerve Gas" said to have been used by the Germans in Russia.

C.W.S. COMMENT: American chemists do not know of any agent which it is practicable to make having the characteristics ascribed to "Nerve Gas." However, because of the persistent rumors that a gas of this type exists, investigations along this line are being continued.

Your quote doesnt take us anywhere I am afraid. The allies had nothing on nerve gas before occupying Germany.

The use of sarin, tabun and soman would have wiped out entire allied formations where they stood. And before they knew whats happening, the allied armies would have been history in Europe. That's how nerve agents operate. They are generically different from chlorine based agents ..mustard gas et al. The Americans had NO ANTIDOTES to those nerve agents during WWII ..simply because they never worked on any such possibility. I would like to be corrected with facts if I am in the wrong please.

Yes the allies would have retaliated with mustard gas once they stopped puking blood. But no..this assualt wouldn't have been decisive against German horses or people. During WW I horses were used on a larger scale by the Germans and "poison gas" was widely used by both sides. The mass distribution of gas masks would have alleviated the problem. And just imagine what the Germans would have retaliated with, against the allied civilian population! Nerve gases delivered by the V rockets and bombers!?

We are all lucky that such an eventuality didnt come to pass though :o

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#717

Post by wm » 19 May 2016, 16:17

Entire formations? They would simply use their gas masks.
Actually against mustard gas there is no antidote even today. So it would be a tie. Both sides would have to use gas masks all the time.
And this simple fact favored the Allies - because they had much better means of delivery of gas, and much better logistics.

The first captured unexploded German nerve gas shell would reveal what the gas was.
The discovery of nerve gas maybe wasn't easy, but its mechanism of action and its antidote mechanism of action were trivial, and obvious to any good chemist who had access to its sample.

And a longer war means the first three atomic bombs would be exploded over German cities. And then more of them. And that would not be pleasant at all.

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#718

Post by sandeepmukherjee196 » 19 May 2016, 19:31

Soman was operationalised in 1944 by the Germans. Gas masks .. Charcoal filters et al are not foolproof against soman since it can be used in a pre vapourised liquid form too. The US army had some kind of an overall, kind of a smock or jacket in stock somewhere in the warehouses. I don't know if the allies were actually nerve gas proof.

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#719

Post by williamjpellas » 20 May 2016, 21:10

To my knowledge, sandeep is correct when it comes to the state of the art, so to speak, of German nerve gas. It was far more deadly than any comparable US or other Allied gas weapon---so far as is known or has surfaced in the public realm to date. However: wm is absolutely correct to point to vastly superior Allied logistics and control of the air as certain to be decisive in the event of a gas weapon - WMD exchange in the latter days of WWII. And the Allies had an ace up their sleeve. Even as the Germans had superior gas agents, the British had superior biological weapons. Their stockpile of anthrax was as fearsome and deadly a Doomsday weapon as any of the warring powers had or thought to possess. In short, had Germany even thought about attacking the Allies with nerve gas, the British would have seeded the entire German nation with anthrax within a week. This would have meant genocide of the German people for all intents and purposes. In my opinion, this deterrent is also the most likely explanation for why the alleged-to-exist German nuclear weapons (in whatever form) were not used---at least not against the Western Allies. There is of course the matter of various documents attesting to their existence and purported use against the USSR on the eastern front.

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Re: First atomic bomb was German !?!

#720

Post by williamjpellas » 20 May 2016, 21:18

wm wrote:
williamjpellas wrote:Wm, thanks for the input. Just to be clear as we continue the conversation, the alleged Rugen Island detonation was in 1944, according to Luigi Romersma, the Italian journalist who said in numerous print sources that he was an eyewitness, and also according to Hans Zinsser, a Luftwaffe He-111 pilot who claimed to have seen a mushroom cloud and experienced electromagnetic phenomena in the region of the explosion that were consistent with an atomic detonation of some kind.
I've made this long time ago to show the area around Rugen where most of windows should have been broken, exactly as it happened when the silo in Oppau/Germany had exploded with the force of 1-2kt.
It should be mentioned the Oppau explosion was heard 300km from the ground zero:
Image

Hmmm, interesting information, wm. It would indeed seem unlikely that there would not be, for example, various scattered eyewitness reports and recollections of the same type as occurred after the Oppau ammonium nitrate chemical plant explosion in 1921. You mention the size of that explosion as equivalent to 1-2 KT, which is the figure most historians use for the Oppau blast, though some say it was smaller. Still, your point is well made. Where are the residents who were living in the region, and where are their reports, if the Rugen Island test really did occur, as Romersma and Zinsser maintained? Obviously nearly all who were alive at that time would now be dead, but surely some who were in a position to know would have survived the war and could have told their story at any point in the decades following the war. Perhaps some did, and maybe their testimonies exist somewhere---in obscure newspaper or magazine articles, or in family archives (as with the papers unearthed by Karlsch at the Schumann estate), etc. But even with strict postwar Allied censorship and de-Nazification efforts, it would seem unlikely that nothing in the way of recollections of area residents has appeared in the public realm about all of this, so far as is known to this point in time. On the other hand, sometimes a discussion in a public forum like this one will serve to shake something loose. Historically significant documents have appeared from time to time in the past after being kept in the hands of private citizens, in some cases for decades or even centuries. The Kuroda Papers having to do with the WWII Japanese Army - Riken Institute atomic bomb project are one example.

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