Hitler's Terror Weapons (16 page)

Because he was working on the stable Period of the Reactor being less than a second, Heisenberg contended that it was impossible to harness energy in any reactor producing heat, or too dangerous to find out, which amounted to the same thing. Until the end of the war Heisenberg and Diebner practised interesting sub-critical reactor geometry, but no attempt was made to get a reactor going. This explains the perplexity of Karl Wirtz, his experimentalist, who confirmed that “enough heavy water was available, in principle, to achieve a critical reactor”
⁹⁹
, and that if in 1944 Heisenberg's group and Diebner's group had combined their heavy water resources in a single experiment, there would have been sufficient to moderate a working pile. Rift there might have been, but if either had really wanted to go ahead with the definitive experiment, a word in the right quarters would surely have been sufficient.

If Goudsmit did not understand the mathematics of reactor stability, his ignorance of what was being said by Heisenberg in the report could have led him to draw an unwarranted conclusion. After the liberation of Strasbourg on 29 November 1944, while evaluating dossiers found in a filing store at the University, Professor Goudsmit said he found a scientific paper by an unnamed author which described a German “reactor bomb”. This report, if it ever existed, has not yet been declassified by the US authorities and all there is to go on is Goudsmit's vague sketch of the so-called reactor-bomb (see
Appendix
), which is actually nothing more than a copy of Heisenberg's B-III experiment. It seemed pretty obvious to Goudsmit that, if Heisenberg believed his nuclear reactor would blow up, then surely that would amount to a sort of reactor bomb. This would be, in fact, the German atom bomb!

He is supposed to have informed Groves at once that the Germans had not been working on the fast fission uranium bomb and were thinking they could drop a nuclear reactor instead. Unlikely as it may seem, Groves accepted all this and included it in his own book.
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The whole thing is set out in black and white, but of course makes no sense if Heisenberg knew the principle of the fast fission atom bomb, which he obviously did. That was why Groves lied about that aspect of Heisenberg's knowledge. Groves knew they would both be dead by the time the transcripts were declassified. But what was the point of the subterfuge?

The answer must be that American Intelligence knew Heisenberg had designed, or at least had a hand in planning, a viable rudimentary German atomic bomb, and it was not convenient politically, then or now, to admit that embarrassing fact. This meant that atomic history had to be re-designed in some manner. Justifiably it leads us to theorize that the Heisenberg bomb actually did look like experiment B-III, and by labelling it the “reactor bomb” for the contingency that someone might blab, Groves and Goudsmit conjured up a falsified theory to explain it away.

The German Atom Bomb

The probable amount of plutonium-enriched uranium powder used in the bomb would have been in the region of 750 kilos. The sphere, resembling Heisenberg's B-III sub-critical reactor, had a diameter of no more than a couple of feet. Paraffin and uranium would have been arranged in alternate layers no wider than an inch each. Paraffin is an excellent absorber of radiation, but its primary purpose here was to stop the Pu
²⁴⁰
emissions causing premature fission. It is on account of Pu
²⁴⁰
being so radioactive that there is a risk of predetonation. This is the reason why an implosion fuse working at the speed of light is required in order to set off a plutonium bomb. Did Germany have such a fuse? According to the CIOS-BIOS/FIAT 20 report, in May 1945 Germany had every kind of fuse known to the United States in October 1946 – radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustic, infra-red, light beams and magnetics “to name just some”. Nuclear physicist Pat Flannen commented:

“The plutonium-enriched uranium would have to be kept atomically isolated until the moment of detonation. Shielding, capable of stopping the Pu
²⁴⁰
from undergoing premature fission, would have to be provided, that would have to remove itself at the moment of nuclear assembly so quickly that the Pu
²⁴⁰
would have no time to react before the Pu
²³⁹
did. For this bomb to work, three things would be required:

A. – An excellent radiation-absorbing substance such as paraffin to block the emissions of the Pu
²⁴⁰
but which would nevertheless disperse quickly on umpact, being a liquid.

B. – The closest proximity of the plutonium-enriched uranium sub-critical masses, so that fast assembly could be assured. No more than a couple of inches.

C. – The highest assembly speed possible, more than Mach 3.5.

If imploded at the speed of light, the cutaway sketch meets all of these criteria.”

An English scientist who delivered a written opinion about the feasibility of the German test stated that the fallout would still be detectable today if the device had been tested “and large parts of Europe would still be uninhabitable”. This question of fallout is commonly misunderstood by non-nuclear scientists. When an atom bomb is detonated, neutrons react against a surrounding jacket of material such as U-
²³⁸
or beryllium to enhance the blast, which has the secondary effect of increasing fallout. If the purpose of the German test was only to prove the reaction and the correctness of the theory, and the blast effect was not required, the structural parts of the bomb would have been layered with zirconium or bismuth within a tamper of lead. Fallout in this case would have been negligible.

The Atomic Bomb Testing Station

In June 1945, before the first American atomic test in New Mexico, former inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp, which supplied labour for Ohrdruf, reported that the Russians had discovered two German ‘atom bombs' on a Baltic island.
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This would probably have been Bornholm, which was occupied in a surprise move by Russian forces at the end of the war. The London
Evening Standard
and the Danish
Politiken
published communiques from Washington that there had been a secret atomic laboratory on the island and this had been the reason for its sudden liberation' by the Soviets. The team of German scientists on Bornholm, which included a Yugoslav, were all said to have been taken off to Moscow with their equipment and documentation.

Peenemünde, on the Usedom Peninsula, was a development and test centre for various V-weapons. Allen W. Dulles, who eventually became head of the US Secret Service, was attached to OSS Zürich during the war and on 19 June 1943 sent a cable to his superior in Washington, William Donovan, stating that heavy water was being shipped from Norway to Peenemünde where a German atomic laboratory had been identified.
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The report was passed to David Bruce, head of British Military Intelligence, in London and resulted in the devastating air raid on Peenemünde on 17 August 1943. Thus the most serious reports indicated activities in the Baltic, and in particular Bornholm and Peenemünde. Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two English newspapers, the
Daily Telegraph
and
Daily Express
reported on 9 August 1945 that a senior “Nazi atom scientist” had been killed at Peenemünde during the raid although his identity was not revealed. What use such a report has for the newspaper-reader is difficult to fathom. Two days later, on 11 August, the
Daily Telegraph
at page five under a heading
Nazis' Atom Bomb Plans
referred to defensive measures being taken in Britain in August the previous year on the basis of a “highly secret memorandum which was sent that summer to the chiefs of Scotland Yard”. The article went on:

“Reports received from our agents on the Continent early last year indicated that German scientists were experimenting with an atomic bomb in Norway. According to these reports, the bomb had an explosive radius of more than two miles and was launched by catapult.”

Disappointingly the
Daily Telegraph
supplied no further details either of bomb or its unique means of delivery and later:

“reliable agents in Germany reported that the bomb had been tested and proved a failure.”

A one kiloton device within a lead tamper sprays lethal neutrons over an area two kilometres in diameter. When testing such a device, it might have been interpreted by agents as a failure if a mammoth explosion had been expected. The German observer Zinsser (whose report is reproduced in full below) mentioned having observed several ‘atom bomb' tests, and this may have been one of them.

In the train of the two nuclear attacks on Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945, the US Intelligence services began questioning all Germans in captivity who might possess information respecting possible German nuclear tests. An official paper was forwarded by COMNAVEU London on 24 January 1946 respecting the interrogation of a German prisoner on 19 August 1945.
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The layout of the first page is as follows:

INTELLIGENCE REPORT

Subject: Germany Aviation.

Evaluation, Scale A1 to E0: B1.

Subject: Investigations, Research, Developments and Practical Use of German Atomic Bomb.

(1) Enclosure will be of interest to BuAer (E-32) and BuOrd (Re8).

(2) Enclosure is a discussion of the developments of the German atomic bomb. (Only one page declassifed)

Prepared by:

R.F.Hickey, Captain, US Navy.

Tulley Shelley, Commodore, US Navy, Intelligence Officer.

The accompanying page reads as follows:

“47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day: In the beginning of October 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lübeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.

48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the colour of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue colour.

49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter colour against the sky covered with a grey overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.

50. Personal observations of the colours of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-coloured rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.

51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing. The appearance of atmospheric disturbance lasted about 10 seconds without noticeable climax.

52. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the aerodrome at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 metre altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 metres altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.

53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Merseburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occurred.

Note: It does not seem very clear to me why these experiments took place in such crowded areas.

For the Commanding

Officer Helenes T. Freiberger, AC. Captain

Distribution List: 248 copies in all.

Making Sense of the Zinsser Report

The Zinsser Report has a distribution list of 248 copies to eighteen different departments. This means that for security reasons the document will not be worded so lucidly as if it were a secret report from one person to another. The report is written by a US Navy Intelligence officer and couched in the usual intelligence style which is intended to make it difficult to read.

First, this is a report about observations made by a German prisoner while in captivity in the United States on 19 August 1945. All his captors are prepared to state is that his name is Zinsser and that he is a flak rocket expert. We are not enlightened as to whether he is Luftwaffe or a civilian scientist, but, as he is not described in the report as a “P/W”, it is a fair assumption that he is a scientist from Peenemünde where the new generation of flak rockets were assembled and tested. Numerous converted He 111-H bombers were attached to the Karlshagen experimental station near Peenemünde for the testing of new types of aerial weapons. These reliable machines served for rocket launching, flight measurement and aerial photographic roles.

Because of an obviously trained eye for detail, Zinsser is accustomed to observing explosions, but this explosion is different and is “in contrast to normal explosions”. Since all Luftwaffe aircraft would have been warned to avoid transit near a proposed explosive test area that day and in the report he states that the combustion was lightly felt from his “observation plane”, it is obvious that Zinsser was an appointed test observer. A flier off his course and passing by accident through a test area would not describe his aircraft as an “observation plane”, nor would he have stayed around to make copious detailed notes about what he saw.

Where did this test take place? What is definite is that it did not occur fifteen kilometres from Ludwigslust. If we insert one word we can make sense of it. Zinsser flew “from Ludwigslust (south of Lübeck)
TO
about 12 to 15 kms from an atomic bomb test station”. This could be anywhere but would be about the right distance to observe a 1-kiloton neutron bomb test. An Italian emissary representing the exiled former Italian dictator Mussolini stated that on 11 October 1944 he attended the test of a “small-scale atom bomb” at the Baltic island of Rügen, not far from Peenemünde. A two-second illumination of the entire atmosphere during a nuclear explosion indicates a device equivalent to 1000-tons TNT.
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