As part of the Tripartite Agreement, if any member was attacked by an outside force, the other members would automatically come to that Axis elements assistance. _As a practical matter_ if the Germans declare war on the Americans, the Japanese should have done the same to the Russians. Because at that point, having themselves staged an unannounced surprise attack on Pearl Harbor 'only in defense' as an element of strategic diplomacy goes right out the window. Sink or Swim, you're in it together.When did the Japanese give their word that they would attack the Soviets at some point after December 1941? Whose word would have been broken if Japan had attacked the USSR? [url=http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/s1.asp]Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact April 13, 1941
This is where 'a gentleman's agreement' effectively becomes rubber-to-road pragmatic.
Not for a one way mission. And nuking Tankograd with 5-6 Ju-290s in overload condition is by no means a 'bad idea'.Manchuria to Tankograd is an awfully long distance. BTW, can you quantify the Soviet forces pulled from the Far East to Moscow?
As for the OOB outside Moscow, I know as late as October 19-22nd they had only about 90,000 men trying to speedbump the Wehrmacht outside Vyazma (sp.) and yet were able to bring up 3 rifle and 2 tank divisions at the flick of a wrist.
By December 5th, these numbers have suddenly spiked to 1.1 million; enough to stage a localized counteroffensive with 2:1 advantagement in the outskirts of Moscow and Guderian is thanking his lucky stars that he pulled his men up short or it would have been a rout for sure with only 1/10th strength in many of his lead units (2,000 man regiment with 200 man company numbers etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moscow
http://niehorster.orbat.com/012_ussr/41 ... beria.html
No. I'm saying that if the need is high enough (atomic weapons are single investment-path war winners as _no other single technological edge ever has been before or since_) you go to where you can concentrate on their development. Korea or Japan. Just like the Russians went to the heart of their own outback, used slave labor that made the death camps seem quaint and put together the world's largest tank manufacturing complex in under a year and a half.You're ignoring just how dependent Japan was on imports of even very basic things such as rice and coal.
FWIW, I don't know about rice but the Japanese had sufficient coal, they lacked the miners and so used Allied POWs for the task. But since neither rice nor coal is in and of itself essential to an atomic weapon, the question becomes how much you can use engineering shortcuts to leverage the manpower which we were -forced by our own scientists- to waste 3 years and 20 billion dollars figuring out the theoreticals for...
The evidence is explicit in the History. WHY would Hitler attack in the West if experiences in Aachen and elsewhere as well as certain knowledge of what had been done to the Russians (and what they were revisiting upon Germanic peoples, 10 fold, in reoccupied areas) showed the disposition of the Western Allies to be kinder conquerors?The rest of your post makes for intriguing reading, but your points would come across stronger if you could provide any kind of evidence to support your ideas.
WHY would Patton seek to 'cut off the line of retreat' of ANYONE when the obvious direction to flee is not -towards- Southern Europe (then occupied by both Russian and American forces) but NORTH, to Norway, with little or no interference?
Hitler is presented as a madman as justification for every bad decision ever made. Holding ground at all costs (deceived by his own top people into thinking he was closer to atomics than was the case). Committing to daylight attacks to get the Allies to respond in (massed force = great nuclear target) kind.
But flip it. And say that he wasn't. Why did he do what he did?
I believe that there is more to be said here than meets the eye and as soon as you start to question what is obvious (Vengeance Weapons are useless without proper targeting, unless they carry weapons whose devastation is itself a magnification of the psychology of terror warfare, tenfold), as being a deliberate rather than randomly maniacal act you are left with the basics of what _cannot be ignored_.
The German high command expected to have Nuclear (or Nuclear Like) Capabilities, _Real Soon_.
As for a specific reference, let's try this one:
http://www.thewebfairy.com/missilegate/rfz/swaz/
Laugh all you want to at the author's mystic-Nazi motives or his foo-flyer in Antarctica revelations but do Google keyword searches on the chapters covering elements of the atomic story.
Specifically Hartek and Diebner, the number and types of German (sluice, centrifuge, calutron, NOT Allied unique developments but _German ones_) refinement processes for Uranium; the Buna plant that made no rubber; the disappearance of such a large quantity of the prewar Uranium stockpiles from other nations; Leslie Groves and the _American_ Uranium shortage, 'what was really on U-234' and Oppenheimer's comments on gun-design weapons.
The emphasis today should then be turned to finding deep-wreck (beyond 1,500ft) of German supply subs in a search for unaltered (as U-864 almost certainly has been) evidence of large transfers of weapons grade precursor Uranium (metallicized would be even bettter).
If the Germans are moving radioisotopes around in 1,000 ton or greater quantities then again, it can only be for _one reason_. They know what atomics can do and they know how to make them. Perhaps have even detonated one.
Finally, and _most specifically_ the eavesdrop reports on the conversations of the scientists discussing a 'photochemical refinement process' should be explained as well as how they came up with the 'magic number' for the Uranium density factors in getting an RCR capable electron orbit separation radii sufficient to bombard into a fissionable weapon yield.
Here's something to get you started:
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Finally, Harteck again must have stunned his British captors with a remark made near the end of the transcript for August 6, 1945:
HARTECK: The multiplication factor with "235" is 2.8, and when one collides with the other how long is the path until it happens? 4 centimeters, Rx is the radius. Then you have to multiply that by the mean free path and divide it by the square root of the multiplication factor. That should be 3.2. Rx is about 14 centimeters, the weight is 200 kilograms; then it explodes.36
Even Bernstein cannot ignore this, and his comment indicates the there is a "possible something" lurking behind Harteck's figures:
This apparently off-hand calculation of the critical mass by Harteck which does lead to a sensible answer, unlike Heisenberg's shows some evidence that he had done this problem before. It is difficult to believe that he would have known, for example, that the critical radius involved the inverse square root of the multiplication factor if he had not thought about it. How Harteck got the number 2.8 for the multiplication factor is unclear.
During the war the Los Alamos people, who certainly knew a lot more than he did, used 2.2. Only after the war was the number increase to 2.52 as the measurements became better. Perhaps it was Harteck who supplied the German Army Ordnance report of January 1942 with its numbers in the scientists' attempts to interest the Army in continuing support of bomb research.37
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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/socio ... pter09.htm
If that ONE STATEMENT can be proven from independent sources with access to the published Farm Hall documents, it essentially debunks the most critical portion of the Allied Myth: Namely that Heisenberg as the nutty professor, represented the general ignorance of the German scientific community as to the most fundamental element of building a bomb. Namely, how much uranium you need to refine for in achieving a critical mass. Not 10 tons. Not 1 ton.
500lbs.
"The Germans couldn't even get the cascade figures right." Thus becomes "The Germans GOT the cascade figures right, better than we did. Being anal retentive Germans who always dot their i's and cross their t's, where did they do the backing research that proves the theory?"
There would be a paper trail. Both of scientific/engineering reports themselves and of the monetary backing for equipment and facilities necessary to support a weaponization vs. pile related effort.
FOIA -those- documents, undoubtedly from U.S. not German secure depositories, and the whole house of cards starts to collapse on the presumption that 'mother never pregnant' means the Germans didn't seriously try to conceive.
The sad part, for me, is that science is never static. There is never any -one element- of 'only a German could do it' wunderkinism. And if there is anything at all to how this can be done, how the Germans came up with their own nuclear solutions, there is nothing to keep a Pakistani or Iranian or North Korean from having already remade the discovery.
Which in turn means that we could in fact be dealing with basketball-sized micronukes today. At a geo-strategic level (i.e. effecting 'globalist' agendas) where we, the JQ Average public don't even know that the game has changed. And our society is a hostage to nuclear weapons technology utterly different from that which predominated in the Cold War.
Even as a 'dirty bomb' doesn't mean a sack of medical refuse with a wad of C4 and a chemical pencil.
IMO, we are doing some incredibly insane things, irreversible and utterly against our own (Western) interests in the push to 'normalize relations' with a hostile religion and the totalitarian socialist capitalism which is using it as a stalking horse via North Korea and Pakistan.
If there is technology like this which is driving diplomatic considerations against our better judgment, we _need to know_, publically, so that we can make some choices about the level of risk we will accept vs. the amount of threat that is actually out there with the capability-X.
We can't do that while operating under a 1940s delusion of what is possible with nuclear arms and other technologies.
Even if the exact technical details must remain hidden, if there was an active German nuclear program that 'came close', it should be revealed.
CJ