HITLER’S BOMB: B.S.?

“German his­to­rian Rainer Karlsch says in a new book, Hitlers Bomb, that the Nazis suc­cess­fully tested tac­ti­cal nukes. While I havent seen his book and I dont speak German, Im frankly very skep­ti­cal,” says Military​.com ana­lyst Joe Buff.

Not only does Dr. Karlsch pub­licly admit that he lacks defin­i­tive proof. But long-​​known facts, and his newly-​​revealed facts, in my mind just dont add up to any­thing like a work­ing nuclear weapon.
One sup­posed eye wit­ness to the test describes two huge explo­sions on one night in March, 1945. Others describe the same event in terms of just one long, slim pil­lar of light. This pil­lar swelled at the top so that it gained the appear­ance of a crown of branches and leaves atop a tree trunk. To me, in mod­ern terms, this does sound like a mush­room cloud. People liv­ing nearby said that after­ward they expe­ri­enced nose-​​bleeds, nau­sea, fatigue, and headache symp­toms. One man who was involved said that author­i­ties asked his build­ing com­pany to cre­mate hun­dreds of corpses that were burned and dis­mem­bered, and then after­ward destroy their own clothes — he said the bod­ies were obvi­ously those of con­cen­tra­tion camp or forced-​​labor inmates.
To me this reads a lot more like a dis­as­ter at a fac­tory han­dling toxic chem­i­cals, which might or might not have been intended for use as chem­i­cal weapons. Here are nine rea­sons why:

1. Any large explo­sion cre­ates a mush­room cloud.
2. Any above-​​ground nuclear det­o­na­tion, even a small tactical-​​yield one, begins with a blind­ing flash across the entire sky. Vision is espe­cially impaired at night, when most peo­ples pupils are dilated due to the dark. The atomic mush­room cloud only results a few sec­onds after this ini­tial flash. And in war-​​time 1945, in the remote area where these tests sup­pos­edly took place, between black­outs and chronic power short­ages and such, at night it would have been really, really dark. One eye wit­ness says they were look­ing out a win­dow and then saw the mush­room cloud. OK, but it wer­ent no nuke.
3. Acute radi­a­tion sick­ness severe enough to cause wide­spread nose-​​bleeds would cause other sub­cu­ta­neous hem­or­rhag­ing too — like bruises all over the body — and both vomit and diar­rhea would be bloody as well. Yet these symp­toms are not men­tioned, and they wouldve seri­ously stuck in peo­ples mem­o­ries if theyd occurred, I think.
4. Its extremely unlikely, espe­cially the way Nazi weapon sci­en­tists worked in gen­eral, for them to have con­ducted two nuclear tests at the same place in one night, as one wit­ness claims. A test early in any coun­trys nuclear weapons pro­gram is an incred­i­bly impor­tant event. Huge amounts of data are col­lected and need to be ana­lyzed before it makes any sense to expend addi­tional fis­sile metal on another test.
5. The Nazis did use slave labor in many of their indus­trial and weapons plants. Any vic­tim killed in a series of explo­sions at a chem­i­cal fac­tory would likely have been burned and dis­mem­bered — you dont need a tac­ti­cal nuke for that. And recovery-​​worker cloth­ing would indeed get con­t­a­m­i­nated by what­ever chem­i­cals caused the orig­i­nal dis­as­ter, so youd cer­tainly want to dis­pose of them once you dis­posed of the corpses.
6. References in some of the media cov­er­age to a Nazi dirty bomb seems mud­dled up with an actual fis­sion device. Hitler is stated to have been rely­ing on these dirty bombs to repulse the Soviet Armys advance on the Eastern Front. But its well known now, and it would have been under­stood by German physi­cists in 1945, that dirty bombs are largely psy­cho­log­i­cal weapons — and they wouldnt have dented the psy­che of Stalins revved-​​up min­ions march­ing on Berlin. The toxic effects of true dirty bombs are much more likely to be can­cers years down the road, not imme­di­ate and total inca­pac­i­ta­tion and/​or death such as occurred to vic­tims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To halt a few mil­lion Russkie foot-​​soldiers on a front across hun­dreds and hun­dreds of miles, the idea of using radi­o­log­i­cal bombs is just delu­sional — but then, I admit, toward the end Hitler was com­pletely delu­sional.
7. The actual sup­posed A-​​bomb test is described as hav­ing a yield much lower than that of the bombs the U.S. used on Japan. The German test, its said, was maybe about a kilo­ton. But in real­ity its actu­ally a much more dif­fi­cult engi­neer­ing prob­lem to cause an atomic blast of just one KT instead of 20 KTs. Sure, in the­ory the smaller yield can be obtained with less fis­sile fuel, which would seem to make it an eas­ier and quicker thing to do, but again theres a very big but. Achieving super-​​criticality at all with the amount of ura­nium or plu­to­nium needed to pro­duce a yield of exactly 1 KT is very, very hard, espe­cially with W.W.II-era tech­nol­ogy from any nation. Unless, that is, you will­ing design the weapon to use 20 KTs worth of bomb fuel and waste it in an inten­tion­ally inef­fi­cient blast — which would make no sense at all, even to a crazy Nazi.
8. Ah, you say, but maybe Hitler was going for 20KT and a bad design made the weapon fiz­zle, so it only yielded 1 KT. Sorry, that still doesnt answer the other objec­tions above.
9. Dr. Karlsch relies on analy­sis of mod­ern soil sam­ples to say that the Germans oper­ated a nuclear reac­tor near Berlin for per­haps some days or weeks. Its been well known since 1945 that the Nazis were work­ing on what was quaintly called in those days an atomic pile. The design was dread­fully flawed and its ura­nium was nowhere near puri­fied enough even to mere reac­tor grade — the pile would never have achieved a sus­tained crit­i­cal chain reac­tion. The flawed design, run­ning at its best sub-​​critical activ­ity level, would indeed leave behind traces to show up in soil sam­ples and get peo­ple excited sixty years later, if they enjoy get­ting excited by this sort of thing.
The book says that the nukes were never used against the Allies because the Nazis didnt have enough of them. With this part I agree: not enough, as in hav­ing exactly zero.

March 17th, 2005 | Nukes | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.