Nazi Atomic weapons in 1943

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: sy.gunson

Just because you can't accept the facts, doesn't entitle you to piss all over it and dismiss it as made up.

Sorry, Sy, but MadScientist is right. Nuclear physics was in its infancy in those days and the Germans nuclear projects (one of which was run by Werner Heisenberg) never worked out how to obtain a sufficient concentration of fissile material to make a bomb. They were completely on the wrong track,

This is true.

and their efforts were also sabotatged by many brave German scientists who didn't want to see Hitler get his hands on an atom bomb.

Is there any evidence for this? I mean excluding the obviously self-serving testimony of the losers after being captured by the Allies?

The interrogations which found that although Other Unspecified or Dead People were Nazis, nobody was themselves a Nazi.

And people who didn't want to admit that their great science was steamrolled by Americans, Brits, and European Jews they kicked out.

a reply to: mbkennel

Is there any evidence for this?

I believe there is, although I'm no expert in the subject. There is the (conflicting) testimony of Bohr, Heisenberg and Bohr's own archives. Perhaps more credible, if oblique and open to interpretation, are the transcripts of the wiretaps at Farm Hall, near Cambridge, where scientists working on the Nazi programme were held until after the war. Their reactions to the news from Hiroshima are particularly telling.

The playwright Michael Frayn, has researched the subject extensively, and discussed the matter in the long afterword to his play Copenhagen, whose subject is Heisenberg's own actions vis-à-vis the Nazi programme, and the degree to which these were influenced (or manipulated) by Bohr. You may find it interesting to read or watch the play.

More here, though a definitive answer will probably never emerge.

originally posted by: Adaluncatif
This design you have shown should work. You don't have to have criticality to have a measure of fission. Any amount of fission produces energy. High temperature and pressure from this RPG like device should cause fusions in lithium deuteride producing some neutrons and some fission in the fissionable material. This would be a subcritical explosion, but it would by definition be a nuclear explosion, since the majority of the blast is supplied by the fission process. It would be a very dirty bomb. This would be half way between a dirty bomb and a traditional nuclear bomb.

This is very close to my understanding of what sort of weapon the Kurt Diebner - German Army - end of the war desperation program was trying to produce, and the process with which they hoped to set it off. FWIW, one of the reasons I continue to probe this topic is because it appears to me that the Germans were onto something potentially workable and that their basic concept was viable. More complicated than some other approaches, particularly the bread and butter U-235 bomb pursued by the Japanese and completed and used by the US, but still apparently viable in theory. Bedlam has posted considerable information that appears to show pretty conclusively that the Schumann - Trinks U233 boosted fission bomb concept / design would not have worked, but Adaluncatif mentions both the RPG analogy (the "Bazooka Effect") used in some articles about this topic, and also the fact that a nuclear explosion of some sort can be achieved by working different angles of the weapons physics than were employed by the Manhattan Project. So I'm not sure that "finis" has been written to this story. Also, while it may be that the S-T design itself would not have worked---and I'm still asking for more input on this point---it is all but certain that the Germans pursued other bomb concepts. Remember, we are not certain whether the Baltic coast tests were of the S-T bomb, or of one or more other designs, or all of the above.

Meanwhile, it appears that a major find has recently been made by that pesky Rainer Karlsch. In this case he is working with an Austrian filmaker named Andreas Sulzer. While the article below appeared recently in Newsmax, a right wing organ, it was first published in the online edition of the Washington Post, obviously a left-leaning paper. I am linking the Post version because it contains photographs. Note that this bit of historical detective work and archaeology was originally set off---as Simon mentioned upthread---by the discovery of unusually high radioactivity near a school located in (or near) the small Austrian town of Perg.


Filmmaker Says He Uncovered Nazis' Biggest Underground Secret Weapons Facility


Note also, yet again, the name of Hans Kammler, the SS General who from some point in 1944 appears to have been the top man in charge of the entire "black project" hierarchy of Nazi secret weapons projects, and who disappeared enirely from the historical record shortly after the war ended. What happened here, and why, and who knew about it?

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: mbkennel

Is there any evidence for this?

I believe there is, although I'm no expert in the subject. There is the (conflicting) testimony of Bohr, Heisenberg and Bohr's own archives. Perhaps more credible, if oblique and open to interpretation, are the transcripts of the wiretaps at Farm Hall, near Cambridge, where scientists working on the Nazi programme were held until after the war. Their reactions to the news from Hiroshima are particularly telling.

What they say, after losing the war, and under arrest by their enemy which executes Nazis, aren't likely to be entirely truthful.

Is there independent evidence of any internal sabotage? I'm unaware of it.

I saw the play Copenhagen too. It's a good play but not necessarily history.

Personally I think that Heisenberg and his team were just not good enough, or funded enough. Regarding that link and use of heavy water. The way I heard it is that theory showed that graphite would be the best. Both Allies and Germany tested it, but found the results were different from theoretical predictions. Slightly ironically, Heisenberg, the theorist, believed experiment and not theory and gave up and switched to inferior deuterated water. Fermi, the experimentalist, looked more into the graphite and found that processing impurities were causing the problem. He sourced more chemically pure graphite, and it was as good as predicted, and Hanford was built.

Heisenberg wasn't trying to sabotage---and in any case, an obviously wrong decision would have been sniffed out by the many other people involved in the project. He and colleagues just missed something critical.

If Heisenberg was stalling, sabotaging, or incompetent does not matter...Because while he was in charge of his group, there were other German "black" groups working the problem.

originally posted by: oletimer
If Heisenberg was stalling, sabotaging, or incompetent does not matter...Because while he was in charge of his group, there were other German "black" groups working the problem.

And this is precisely the crux of the issue in this thread. Heisenberg and some of the other scientists in his group were, justifiably, well known around the world both before and after WWII. But his group was by no means the only center of wartime German nuclear weapons R&D, and it is now well established that they were definitely not the most likely to have produced a weapon. For that we must look to Kurt Diebner's German Army sort-of "skunk works" advanced weapons bureau, to the Reichspost-funded laboratory under the guidance of Manfred von Ardenne, to General Kammler's black projects empire, and perhaps even to other sources beyond these.


Again, this search may not produce a smoking gun that will fundamentally alter the more or less established history of the war, particularly of the end of the war in Europe. But then again, it might. In any case there are some very important questions that have yet to be answered.

A follow up here to something I posted earlier, in the interest of accuracy:

It turns out that there is some question about exactly what is actually buried in the Asse II salt mine near Hanover. Although there are claims that at least some of the waste in the mine is, in fact, from one aspect or another of the WWII German atomic bomb projects, most of it is probably left over from postwar nuclear power plants. Here is an article from Der Spiegel, which, in the typically weird and bizarre fashion that only that publication can achieve, fails completely to make any mention whatsoever of the WWII connection. However, there is a cool photo from inside the mine and it discusses the attempt at cleaning up what is now an environmental disaster.

www.spiegel.de...

The Daily Mail piece, which I posted previously and will re-post here for comparison, mentions a 1967 statement by one of the mine supervisors in which he specifically mentioned that some of what was buried in the mine came from the bomb project(s).

'A statement by a boss of the Asse II nuclear fuel dump, just discovered in an archive, said how in 1967 'our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb.'

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

a reply to: AngryCymraeg

As to "why show (Luigi Romersma) something so secret", the answer should be obvious. Mussolini, as one historian said, was the closest thing to a friend Adolf Hitler ever had. Both were disciples of Nitzsche, and Hitler had even given Mussolini a complete set of Nitzsche's writings as a gift. Hitler was of course also counting on his closest (only) "friend" to stay in the war, if for no other reason than to tie up Allied troops on his mountainous southern border rather than have them disengage and come 'round to land in, say, Mediterranean France. What better way to do so than to have his the Italian's trusted chronicler, Romersma, attend the nuclear test as an eyewitness? Romersma said somewhere that there were also a few Japanese VIPs in attendance, though I have tried several times to find that reference and I seem to have lost it.

Romersma was certainly no crank and he was one of the more eminent journalists from any nation in the 20th century. There is no reason not to take him seriously as a reliable eyewitness. There is also the Zinsser Affadavit in which a Luftwaffe pilot gave very detailed descriptions of a mushroom cloud from this same detonation.

a reply to: sy.gunson

No, gamma and X-rays are photons, electro-magnetic radiation.

a reply to: williamjpellas

Gunson has no grasp of physics, so he repeats assertions without critical review of what they assert. Re the Nazi wartime work on "fusion and fission" set off by conventional explosives, see the first historian to report them. Solidly based on captured documents now in US Archives - David Irving (originally in The Virus House, reprinted as The German Atomic Bomb) reports accurately both Army and Navy experiments with this concept. Neither series of tests "showed the slightest trace" of actual atomic reactions. For good reason, the theory itself is faulty: tiny nuclear weapons became possible about 1962, but they are still not that tiny, and require an actual critical mass of something. [There was once an idea to make a transuranic anti-tank shell, but it would have cost $400,000 a shell in 1955 dollars and delivered one only every several decades. Truly tiny is not practical.]

originally posted by: sy.gunson
reply to post by mad scientist

 

So the magic decrypt "Stockholm to Tokyo, No. 232.9" December 1944 (War Department), National Archives, RG 457, declassified October 1, 1978 is a fake then.

Good then I am sure you can back up that claim with proof. I am waiting.

And whilst you struggle to prove your ridiculous claim you have no grasp how tactical nukes create X-rays do you?
If so I welcome your explanation.

If you know so much please explain how the American Swann device works?
I doubt you can.

X rays are created by the heat of a fission reaction. And in fact its these xrays that are used to create a fusion reaction. Now im not sure why your asking about swann it was inefficient and could be unreliable do to tolerances needed. It was weaponized when it was modified aka Robin. This detonator was once again modernizedor more corectly added to the Teller-Ulam design creating thermonuclear.

originally posted by: AlaskanKnight
a reply to: williamjpellas

Gunson has no grasp of physics, so he repeats assertions without critical review of what they assert. Re the Nazi wartime work on "fusion and fission" set off by conventional explosives, see the first historian to report them. Solidly based on captured documents now in US Archives - David Irving (originally in The Virus House, reprinted as The German Atomic Bomb) reports accurately both Army and Navy experiments with this concept. Neither series of tests "showed the slightest trace" of actual atomic reactions. For good reason, the theory itself is faulty: tiny nuclear weapons became possible about 1962, but they are still not that tiny, and require an actual critical mass of something. [There was once an idea to make a transuranic anti-tank shell, but it would have cost $400,000 a shell in 1955 dollars and delivered one only every several decades. Truly tiny is not practical.]

That's not quite correct. Irving does, indeed, mention a German experiment in hollow charge implosion detonations. IIRC this was done in 1943 under the supervision of Dr. Kurt Diebner---one of the leading scientists in the heereswaffenamt, the German Army Weapons Bureau. Irving rightly noted that this earlier experiment was unsuccessful inasmuch as it did not produce any kind of detonation. However, it also did not utilize any fissile material as far as I know. Thus it appears to have been a proof of concept type of test rather than an attempted detonation as such.

In any case, Irving made no mention of the March 1945 Ohrdurf tests. Nor did he have access to the now declassified documents cited by Karlsch, nor to many other pieces of evidence such as the Schumann-Trinks design schematic now housed in the Bundesarchiv German Army Museum.

GARBAGE. What a complete load of bull# and physics not of this universe.

a reply to: mad scientist

They're all inefficient. Even the Tsar Bomba only fully consumed 2.3kg of fissile materials.

a reply to: sy.gunson

Gamma and Xrays are photon emissions, not neutron.

Also, Gamma and Xrays both occur natually.

There is a difference between a hollow "shaped" charge used for armor penetration and the "lensing" charges used in nuclear weapons.

I couldn't see the diagrams you posted (they just don't appear when I look at that post) so I am ignorant of the specific designs to which you are referring to.

a reply to: SLAYER69

The only thing I can point you to at the moment is that their heavy water facility was attacked by the Brits.

After shooting down one Lancaster carrying SAS troops, the other Lancaster got through, the estimate for the nazi troops searching for the other SAS fire team were in the thousands, yet the gate to the heavy water facility was left open, and not one sentry was found. The were able to the blow up the tanks, and evade detection.

It shows that 1. The heavy water had use to the Germans, and 2. the occult was running the war.

a reply to: WithWings

There have been some significant developments in Second World War historiography since this thread was last active around 4 years ago. Many of these developments have direct bearing on the topic being discussed here.

It turns out that even as I and others were generally groping in the right direction, a wide ranging and extremely comprehensive archival dig was being conducted by a former MIT senior staff scientist named Todd Rider. Dr. Rider spent years combing through long buried files in Germany, the US, Austria, Russia, the UK, and Australia. The result was the extraordinary book, Forgotten Creators, which appeared earlier this year (2021). I am still working through it and expect that it will take months to properly grasp the scope and depth of the detail revealed in its 4000-plus pages, several hundred of which are concerned specifically with the WWII German nuclear weapons program. According to Dr. Rider, he approached a number of publishers and did not receive any interest, and so he has decided to offer it free of charge for anyone who wants to download it. You can do so here: riderinstitute.org...

As far as I am concerned, this book is the definitive source on what Germany was doing with its nuclear research and development in the Second World War. Nothing else that has appeared in the public realm and in the English language even begins to approach the depth, breadth, and quality of Rider's investigation. In my opinion, the only work to which it can rightly be compared is Chuck Hansen's The Swords of Armageddon.

For several months, I have been writing posts on other websites which contain specific archival finds that are detailed in Forgotten Creators. Because these are relatively long and would take a great deal of time to rewrite, I am going to provide links to some of the posts for anyone who is interested in learning how much evidence there is for the existence of at least prototype German nuclear weapons in WWII and possibly even a few that were ready for use in the closing weeks of the conflict.

I wish to thank everyone here who engaged in this discussion, because it provided part of the impetus that led Dr. Rider to contact me. In the same spirit of cooperation, free inquiry, and free exchange of information, I offer the links below.

www.quora.com...

www.quora.com... e-war/answer/William-Pellas

www.quora.com...

historum.com... 457.183962/page-20

originally posted by: sy.gunson
reply to post by thumper76

 

Allow me to quote from the Monsanto report prepared from a review of captured intelligence on the Nazi nuclear project for A.H. Compton of the Manhattan Project. The report poses several questions rhetorically and then the authors answer those questions from their investigations:

Source: [Excerpts from NARA file G371 report by Monsanto scientists Weinberg and Nordheim to A.H Compton of Manhattan project on state of Nazi nuclear science in WW2. Dated Nov 8 1945.]

“Point III. What was the state of German theory of the chain reaction?

Answer (C) Generally we would say their approach was in no wise inferior to ours; in some respects it was superior.”

VI. What bearing does this have on publication of the parts of the PPR dealing with principles of the chain reaction?

Answer: the Germans know how to design a lattice which will work. From the practical standpoint this is all that matters. The details of elegant perturbation theory or transport theory (which would be contained in Vol. III) or the details of heat transfer calculations (Vol. IV) would tell them nothing essential to the determination of lattice dimensions. They already knew how to calculate the optimum dimensions.

A question of ethics is raised by the existence of the German reports. In many cases, useful information is contained therein.

Hence the Monsanto Report authors are stating the case for concealment of Nazi nuclear science.



PS worth noting that Nordheim and Weinberg also prefaced their report by saying it was limited by the information which they were given access to, hinting that there was further information they could not read.

This post is entirely correct. Nordheim and Weinberg complained elsewhere that they did not have access to many papers and reports concerning wartime German nuclear work.

mad scientist wrote: "Except of course to cause fusion you need temperatures of millions of degrees and massive pressure using X-Rays. Hence why a fission device is used to ignite the thermonuclear reaction. So basically your saying fusion is used to ignite a fission weapon - that statement is completely backward and no you haven't proved anything except a lack of knowledge of basic physics."

The issue of whether it is possible to provoke a nuclear detonation by means of a fusion-fission methodology rather than fission-fusion (or fission-fusion-fission) is contentious in what little publicly available literature there is on the subject. Freidwardt Winterberg says that this is possible. Chuck Hansen says that is isn't. J. G. Linhart is in the Winterberg camp. A recent Nature dot com article sides with Hansen.

My two cents is that given the demonstrable achievability of at least a brief prompt fusion reaction in boosted fission bombs---also known as fusion-boosted fission---it would seem that at least a hybrid approach utilizing fission and fusion in synergy with one another is definitely possible. This is not the same thing as a true "hydrogen bomb", which is what you are talking about here.

PS It's "you're", not "your".