Visitor
(1/28/01 10:04:14 pm)
Reply Nuclear capabilities ??
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All,
How close was Nazi Germany to uncovering the information that would lead to nuclear capabilities.
I know that Peenemunde in the 1930s was a hive of activity especially under Werner von Braun, but were they really close to a breakthrough before allied bombing ended the foray?
regards,
Chris.
Sigfrid
Visitor
(1/29/01 3:06:40 am)
Reply Atomic Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Germany never was close to have the atomic bomb, because of Dr. Heisenberg efforts for not giving Hitler the bomb and the sabotage missions of the british in the heavy water plant of Norway.
But remains the question: why the germans were making V2 wich could reach New York? Were they planning to put atomic heads in the V2 to bomb USA?
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 202
(1/29/01 10:04:08 am)
Reply Re: Atomic Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Everyone,
I disagree that Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, et al, actively conspired to keep the Uranbombe out of Hitler’s hands.
I realize that it is fashionable in Germany now to find more anti-Nazi heroes resisting Hitler, but I don’t think that this was the case. With all due respect for Heisenberg and his talents, scientists and Nobel Prize winners are not usually the most practical of military people. Conversations among German scientists in captivity, which were secretly recorded by the British, show that experimental radiochemists like Hahn and theoretical physicists like Heisenberg were almost in tears after the war when they heard that the Americans had nuked Japan—and that they had failed Germany miserably, whose cities lay in ruins. Thus, Werner began a spin after the war to sop his pride.
What was needed was not more heavy-water, which was a false-start, but to build massive uranium isotope-separation plants using the vaunted German chemical industry. This would have needed to have been done at top priority. The expensive A-4 rocket program should have been put on the back-burner. It would have been lucky for them to build a uranium warhead light-enough and small-enough to be carried by a V-2 anyway. And what do you do with an 4-12 billion Reichsmark warhead? Launch it with a rocket that had a 50 percent failure rate? I don’t think so! The best bet would be a specially-outfitted turbojet schnellbomber, until the size and weight of the bomb could be brought down. But you might want your enemies to *think* that you could lob a rocket onto them with an atomic warhead on it. So the real advantage of the U-bomb would have been that it gave you a diplomatic bargaining-chip, particularly if the Allies were unsure of the new weapon, but sufficiently paranoid about its use.
The absolute latest that Germany could have undertaken such a project is February, 1942, when Speer became armaments Tsar. Heisenberg, and others, attempted to convince him and Milch that atomic weapons had potential—but the case of the scientists was so esoteric and speculative that Speer and Milch immediately discounted it for what it really was, a cynical attempt to get more funding from the government for research in their own disciplines.
If Himmler had been informed, however, the story would have been different; he would have seen superweapons as an opportunity for the SS and would have had less technical prejudice against such unusual ideas. He would have assigned a war-expediter and engineer to handle the problem like Dr. Kammler, an SS general. And Dr. Kammler would have busted some heads and got some things done, exactly as General Groves did in the United States. If Germany had been able to build the isotope-separation plants, dispersed and even underground to protect them from bombing raids, she would have been able to have a U-bomb for her arsenal by 1945—two, if the bomb could be improved (i.e., with less enriched-uranium needed).
Germany would never have beaten the United States in a nuclear armsrace, and had limited sources of quality uranium-ore besides, but a bomb or two in her coffers would have been a deterrent to any kind of Allied bombing of Germany, and possibly meant a chance to get a separate peace with the West, given some very *skillful* diplomacy on Hitler’s part.
My point is that, the reason that the Allies developed atomic weapons (at great cost) while the Germans mostly only speculated about them, is because the former were largely influenced by Jewish refugees from Germany who were therefore extremely paranoid. This was not the case of the German scientists, who may have had differences of opinion with the Nazis, but were nonetheless loyal Germans; otherwise, they would have defected also.
Thanks,
Scott
Edited by: Scott Smith at: 2/3/01 9:51:12 am
pdhinkle
Member
Posts: 164
(1/29/01 11:59:16 pm)
Reply Atomic Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sigfrid:: Yes the brits were trying to knocking out anything connected with the heavy water plants in Norway, trains and ships also.
V2 capablity?, with an atomic war head? The first version of the V2 did bomb London! A Better one would have to be built to go transcontinental, they worked on that in the 1950s and made some in the 1960s, without onboard computer controls how would they expect to hit NY or Washington in the 1940s?
Per: see I changed my entry!
Edited by: pdhinkle at: 1/31/01 12:22:15 am
JimmyHatfield
Member
Posts: 38
(1/30/01 2:31:39 am)
Reply Re: Atomic Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wow, i was under the impression that we(american governmemt) were the reason that the german refugee's built the bomb. i didn't know it was just because they were jews, thanks for the info;)
really thought that's stupid to think that the jews are the reason we have nukes, just because they built them doesn't mean we didn't tell them to.
"When I am King you will be first against the wall." -Radiohead
per
Visitor
(1/30/01 9:37:09 am)
Reply atomic............
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To pdhinkel
I have to correct u on your statement that the brits destroyed the heavy water plant at Vemork. It was Norwegian soldiers who destroyed the plant. Brithis commandoes tried to land in the mountains but that operation did go to hell. All of the soldier were eighter killed or captured by the germans. The brits also tried to bomb the plant without any luck. When the Germans then decided to move the production of heavy water to germany, the same norwegian soldiers sunk the ferry that brought the remaning production ecuipment over "tinn lake" on its way to germany.
This was some of the finest behind the line operation in the north of europe during the war.
Sanjay
Visitor
(1/30/01 10:04:19 am)
Reply cold fission bomb?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a few time ago i was discussing this subject with father of my friend who is nuclear scientist by profession he was pointing out that a group led by Dr paul harteckk had parallel to effort of heisenburg had attempted to construct a-bomb based on principle of cold fisssion heisenburg was opposed to hartekks theories,but with secret help from hitler ,himmler and his ss organisation a underground effort was made,two or three months before end of war hitler had taunted speer and other ministers that what your noble prize winners could not achieve a post master has achieved.it was further said that attempt was made to make it underground below a postoffice in some remote part of germany,also may indian newspapers of that period reported that of allies discovering some half constructed bombs based on harteckks theories?
do any one know of harteckk and his works and what happened to it or is it a just myth?
Sigfrid
Visitor
(1/30/01 1:11:39 pm)
Reply Jews and the bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I really disagree with the affirmation that the jews per se caused USA to have the bomb. Maybe would be better to say that Hitler and Mussolini's persecution of any kind of opposition gave USA very good scientist to make the bomb.And while in Germany there were many parallels groups working with the same project (and without communication) in USA the project was one and very good coordinated (P. Manhattan).
By the way, is understable that W. V. Brown hadn't talk anything in the post-war era about Hitler's projects to bomb New York or Washington
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 203
(1/30/01 1:32:01 pm)
Reply Re: Jews and the bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Everyone,
What happened was a German-Hungarian Jewish physicist named Dr. Leo Szilard left the continent for England in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. In 1934, he conceptualized the theory of the “chain reaction,” which would make self-sustaining nuclear reactions and Kernphysik explosions possible.
In 1938, German radiochemists led by Otto Hahn successfully demonstrated the fission of uranium atoms at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1939, the prospect of atomic energy was discussed openly by the international press. After the war erupted, censorship ensued and this piqued the interest of Soviet spies.
In 1940, Szilard persuaded the most influential Jew in the world, Dr. Albert Einstein (a brilliant and eccentric physicist and an outspoken Zionist and Germanophobe) to write a letter to President Roosevelt urging that the United States (which was not even in the war yet) build an atomic bomb before Germany did. This was more than just a little paranoid, but most political refugees are! Dr. Edward Teller, another German-Hungarian Jew, who had lost his foot in a streetcar accident in Germany, and is sometimes called the “father “ of the Hydrogen Bomb, drove Szilard (who did not drive a car) to meet with Einstein on that fateful day. Politically, Szilard was very liberal (but not Communist), while Teller was very conservative and decidedly anti-Communist.
The U. S. Navy was interested in the idea of atomic energy not as Einstein's Doomsday Bomb but as a propulsion source for ships and submarines and it worked on the idea some. After Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration undertook a crash program on the advice of infamous Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to build an atomic bomb, and thus the Navy shelved the atomic-propulsion idea. Billions of dollars were appropriated by Congress in secret, without knowing exactly what the money was going for, and an Army civil engineer, General Leslie R. Groves was assigned to command the Manhattan Engineer District Project, which Army Chief-of-Staff General George C. Marshall considered would be the ultimate/decisive military weapon.
General Groves found the scientists too esoteric and difficult to work with. Szilard refused to work for American military “fascists” like him at all and contributed to the project from the academic confines of the University of Chicago. Dr. Enrico Fermi of Columbia University was brought on board and he developed the first self-sustaining chain reaction in Chicago in 1942.
To direct the atomic bomb-program, General Groves selected a brilliant American Jew named J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theorist about Black Holes, who might have gotten the Nobel Prize for this if he had lived long enough to see their actual discovery by astronomers. Oppenheimer ably directed the Manhattan Project and its precocious collection of brilliant minds. He placed the irascible Teller in charge of thermonuclear theory.
Groves and Oppenheimer set up shop at Los Alamos, New Mexico to work in secret and to isolate the atomic scientists from the intellectually and socially unbridled American academic communities—a major security risk of leftwing potboiler activity during the Depression. Unfortunately, the military and FBI tended to focus on the threat of German espionage not Soviet, so the Russians knew about the Manhattan Project from the start.
Basically, the Americans followed two main avenues simultaneously—because they could afford to: Isotope-separation or enrichment of uranium, and plutonium transmutation. They followed two avenues for isotope-separation: a series of more traditional DuPont industrial diffusion-processes, and an ultimately inefficient electromagnetic process, developed by Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the cyclotron.
After the fall of Germany, and the revelation that the Germans had no *serious* atomic-bomb program, in spite of Heisenberg’s tangential research, the American scientists felt used and deeply-resented President Truman’s decision to use the bomb on Japan when the war was effectively won. Similar resentment continues to this day among scientists, much of whose funding comes from military projects like Star Wars. After the war, Oppenheimer wanted the international control of atomic energy (which the Soviet’s rejected) and Teller wanted to build a bigger thermonuclear or Hydrogen Bomb to act as a deterrent to Soviet aggression.
Prof. Dr. Paul Hartek would have been the best choice as director for the German atomic bomb program, which was never consolidated or organized by the military. Hartek would have needed to build isotope-separation plants using I.G. Farben industrial technologies, and he would have needed an SS-general like Kammler to command and expedite the project, which would have required thousands of prisoner laborers to construct the plants, in underground bunkers if possible.
More than likely the first model of the Uranbombe would have been something similar in size to the Allied "Tall Boy" bomb—too tall and heavy for most standard bombers or rockets, but giving about ten-kilotons in explosive yield. Germany had about 700 tons of high-grade uranium oxide from the Belgian Congo, seized when Germany entered Belgium in 1940. This was in-turn seized by the Americans in 1945 and was enriched at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to make U-235 for the Little Boy bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Germany also had access to low-grade uranium ores from Joachimstal in Bohemia. She would have eventually had to perfect the plutonium-process as well in order to build more rounds of atomic ordnance. This was the method employed by the Soviet Union from 1939-49 under the direction of NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria.
The Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 used plutonium produced at Hanford, Washington. Plutonium production requires building uranium fission-reactors or Uranbrenner. Heisenberg had come close to achieving a chain-reaction using heavy-water as the neutron moderator in 1945 as the Allies were closing in. But Dr. Kurt Diebner came closer to theoretical success with “beehive” reactor models that were similar in configuration to Fermi’s, which employed graphite instead of heavy-water. The SS would not have been so deferential toward Nobel Prize winners like Heisenberg (who was a protege of the Danish pacifist and physicist Niels Bohr) and would have been much more open to less credentialed or less “cosmopolitan” scientists like Hartek and Diebner.
The entire cost of the V-weapons program was about 3 billion dollars according to Speer. The Manhattan Project cost 2 billion dollars to build one uranium bomb (dropped on Hiroshima), two plutonium bombs (one of which was used in war at Nagasaki) and a partial third plutonium bomb (which was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945). I think Germany could have pulled off a U-bombe or two, but not along parallel lines of development and manufacture like the Americans, who tended to back all prospects, however remote, because they could afford to. The Soviets had an advantage after 1945 because they knew that an atomic bomb *could* be made and Beria was willing to give the project maximum funding in peacetime without any personal political risk typical of expensive scientific projects. He was responsible to Stalin simply to explode a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible, and extensive use was made of the Soviet labor-camp system. The plutonium bomb exploded by the Soviets in 1949 was a virtual copy of the American Fat Man bomb because Beria did not want to allow anything that could delay or go wrong with a newer Soviet design.
German research got about 2.5 metric tons of heavy-water delivered to it from 1939-44. The high-concentration heavy-water plant at Vemork was attacked by Allied agents and damaged in 1943, but the main loss was the heavy-water itself, which poured into the drains. Massive security sweeps were ordered in Norway as a result of this commando activity. Thus, the Vemork fertilizer-plant itself was bombed by the Allied air forces and damaged, killing Norwegian workers and civilians. Norway lodged a formal protest in December, 1943, and rebuilt the plant with Swedish credit in a few months.
But the worst setback for the Germans was on February 20, 1944, when Norwegian Special Operations Executive agents of Britain sank a barge containing 37 drums of varying concentrates of priceless heavy-water, killing 27, including 4 German servicemen. Thereafter, authorities sent shipments from Norway and Italy in smaller lots of lower-concentration and simply rebuilt the small high-concentration unit in Germany proper. This method allowed the electrical surpluses in Norway and Italy to produce large volumes of low-concentrations of heavy-water to be sent to Germany for the final concentration. Shortage of heavy-water supplies crippled Heisenberg’s research but he nearly succeeded, despite his own flawed conceptual methods, in producing a chain-reaction with about 121 liters in 1945. But heavy-water was the least practical line of research as events turned out, although the Americans did build a heavy-water research reactor in Illinois using heavy-water from the surplus electrical power generated in the Canadian Rockies and along the Columbia River in Washington.
Some interesting books on this subject that I would strongly recommend:
David Irving. The German Atomic Bomb. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1967.
Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves. Now It Can Be Told. NY: Harper & Row, 1962.
R. V Jones. The Wizard War. NY: Coward, McMann & Geoghegan, 1978.
Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986 (1988 Pulitzer Prize).
Richard Rhodes. Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Edited by: Scott Smith at: 2/3/01 9:48:53 am
Marcus Wendel
Webmaster
Posts: 996
(1/30/01 7:47:52 pm)
Reply Re: Jews and the bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott,
Thanks for yet another excellent post.
/Marcus
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 206
(1/31/01 12:15:54 am)
Reply Re: Jews and the bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Marcus,
I appreciate the opportunity to vent on your forum.
Scott
pdhinkle
Member
Posts: 165
(1/31/01 12:32:52 am)
Reply Re: Jews and the bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott is right!, Albert Einstein did contact the US Pres. in 1940. For one reason or another, they appeared not to be interested!
Einstein, eccentric,like all his peers! I can not pidgeon hole people/groups into catergories!
Chris Goodall
Visitor
(2/1/01 2:07:11 pm)
Reply Thank you all
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to all who participated (especially Scott).
I found all the posts entertaining and insightful.
kind regards,
Chris.
wildboar
Member
Posts: 12
(2/1/01 2:31:36 pm)
Reply information about german a-bomb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello Chris Goodall
chris if you very much interested to know about german a-bomb and its details you can find it on following website
http://www.luft46.com
there please go in armament section,it has very good and uptodate information.the site is basically about wwii german aircrafts but its details about german a-bomb in armament section is very great
inform about your opinion about that site
Mahesh
Visitor
(2/2/01 2:32:50 pm)
Reply did soviets got hold of german research?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
after explosion of first atomic bomb by soviet union in 1948 it was doudted by many that beria and stalin had got help of german scientist who worked on similar project can any body provide details?
Scott Smith
Member
Posts: 214
(2/4/01 11:45:10 am)
Reply Re: did soviets got hold of german research?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahesh,
I'm not aware that the Soviets got ahold of any German atomic scientists. The Russians did have some good academic talent of their own, but they also had a major advantage in that they knew what *could* be done. In 1945, General Groves thought that it would take another twenty years for the Soviets to get atomic capability, but he was full of beans; they did it in four years.
The Soviets did have an additional advantage in the form of wartime espionage in the United States, not all of which was reliable, but Beria's agents were able to reconstruct the design for the bomb exploded in 1949 based almost exactly on the plutonium bomb used by the Americans in 1945.
In 1949, the Russians could have made numerous improvements on the antiquated American wartime bomb design, but Beria only cared about exploding an atomic device as quickly as possible so that Stalin could have another poker chip in his arsenal. The hard part was building the huge atomic infrastructure to manufacture the plutonium for the bomb, but cost was no issue for Beria.
An interesting thing is that the Soviet electronic infrastructure was so poor during the war that Russian atomic scientists were making their own test equipment from captured German radio parts from Luftwaffe aircraft that had been shot down. Soviet industry could build great guns and tanks but not standardized vacuum-tubes and so forth.
The Russians did get some important German rocket scientists, however, such as Helmut Grötrup. He may have had some leftist sympathies of his own, and also personal issues with Wernher von Braun, but Grötrup's wife says that he simply didn't like the terms of the U.S. Army "contract," which spirited German scientists away as booty under Operation Paperclip without their families. So Grötrup went back to the Soviet Zone and went to work for the Russians for many years after the war.
See Chapter 17, "V-2's on the Steppes." Frederick I. Ordway III, and Mitchell R. Sharpe. The Rocket Team. Thomas Crowell, NY: 1979, (PP. 361-388).
Regards,
Scott