Possible new lead intoWW2 German Nuclear Weapons project?

[exkiwiforces]

It would be interesting to see where this new research leads too? I was following a story last year or the year before about a German father and son team finding a radioactive canister or radioactive container of some kind near a former WW2 underground factory in Southern Germany which caught the attention of the German authorities as they were arrested under a number of German laws dating back post 1945. But what was most interesting is that this place and a couple of other places in the general area have very high background levels of radiation than normal, in which has led to a number of interesting theories and possible cover ups from the German Government. The story at the time all went very quiet after the Father and Son team were arrested and now this possible claim in the WW2 German Nuclear Weapons project popping up just recently.

As current historical evidence and research says that Germany didn’t even come close to developing the Bomb or a dirty bomb due to a number of reasons in which are quite well known and other less well known . I did see a book recently in a bookstore on the German Nuclear Weapons project, but I decided to purchase a book on Qantas in WW2 instead. Might have to make another trip into town now and buy it now after this latest article on the German Nuclear Weapons project.

Just wondering if any of the history scholars or have a scientific background here want to add to this?

As I always found the German Weapons projects pre war and during the war to be quite interesting.

www.stuff.co.nz/science/112656896/nazis-planned-to-build-a-nuclear-bomb-with-uranium

[kiwiruna]

Hi Guys,

I recently watched an interesting Doco-drama/miniseries called the Heavy Water War, which deals with the German heavy water/nuclear program ant the attempts to stop it.

An enjoyable way to spend several hours the only downside lots of subtitles. Well worth watching if you can find it on the net,DVD etc.

[nuuumannn]

Funny, this was being discussed recently on another forum I visit; it started with a question about a possible delivery system, what would the Germans have used and grew into an overview of what was achieved.

Thankfully for the rest of the world, the Nazis treated its scientists and the concept with a similar degree of contempt, and scientists studying at the Gottingen Institute before the war that might have been of immeasurable use to the Nazis escaped because of the race politics at the time. These included Italian Enrico Fermi, Americans J Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, all of whom would secure work in the Manhattan Project. Werner Heisenberg in his lab in the southern suburbs of Berlin led the science aspects of the project, but the typical Nazi approach of several disparate groups working independently of each other meant there was no cohesion nor proper direction between the various working groups, despite the project being led from the OKW Des Heers at Bendlerstrasse in Berlin.

Thankfully the scientists never got as far as creating a workable reactor, nor did they had the ability to refine uranium to sufficient purity, let alone the ability to manufacture plutonium, which even the Americans had problems with - the impure plutonium being produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State resulted in the team at Los Alamos to seek a different isotope of uranium for their bomb project, initially the plutonium Thin Man bomb, which actually worked out for the better for the project since it meant the development of what would become the Little Boy bomb and the cancellation of the 17 foot long Thin Man, the benefits of which included not having to modify the B-29's bomb bay to fit the Thin Man internally.

The next issue was a sufficient delivery system. There has been talk in books and on the internet about a particular Heinkel He 177 with an enlarged bomb bay found in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, but the premise that it was to carry the German atom bomb is fiction. Nevertheless, the He 177 and its chronic unreliability would have made it an uncertain prospect as a nuclear bomber. The development of the V 2 rocket offered a solution in hindsight, but despite the rocket's use in action, it was frequently unreliable and the issue of instability in flight plagued it throughout its active career as a weapon. Rockets disintegrated from the forces acting on them in flight with regularity - something not overcome by the Nazis.

Despite what we hear from recurring stories, the reality was that the Nazis got nowhere near close enough to have built a bomb, let alone develop a suitable delivery system, although they had almost all the pieces of the puzzle at their disposal.