| How
close did Hitler really come to getting the bomb? |
 The
history books say the United States and Britain comfortably won the
race against Nazi Germany to build the world's first nuclear bomb.
Today, that reassuring view is being nibbled away by the evidence
from secret documents trickling out of private or former Soviet archives.
Hidden for six decades, these papers confirm that Hitler's scientists
indeed were way behind their Manhattan Project counterparts in building
a Bomb.
But the documents also suggest that by the end of the war in Europe,
in May 1945, the Nazis had advanced farther down the nuclear road
than is conventionally thought and had struck out in unexpected directions.
As early as 1942, the Germans had already cracked some of the biggest
conceptual problems behind making an atomic bomb, they say.As the
Reich's enemies closed in during the final months of the war, the
scientists made some extraordinary technical strides.
Using a prototype reactor hastily assembled in a disused beer cellar
in southwestern Germany, a team nearly achieved a self-sustaining
chain reaction, the key step to manufacturing nuclear explosive.
According to two new documentary finds unveiled this year, Hitler's
scientists even tested a nuclear weapon.
The device that these days would be called a "dirty" bomb.
The Reich scientists also sketched plans for the world's first mini-nuke
missile.
"The Nazis were not at all close to having an atomic bomb like
those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The German
progress towards such weapons was comparable to what the Americans
had achieved by the summer of 1942," Mark Walker, a professor
of history at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Even so, "during the last desperate year-and-a-half of war...
a group of physicists who had been working on nuclear reactors, nuclear
reactions and hollow-point arrangements of high explosives put them
together to test a nuclear device."
Work in atomic physics before World War II led scientists in Germany,
as well as in Britain and the United States, to speculate that an
awesome release of energy could be
obtained if the nucleus of a heavy atomic isotope was split apart,
its neutrons wacking into other atoms in a chain reaction.
Prompted by warnings from the jewboy Albert Einstein to President
jewboy Roosevelt of the Nazis' interest in a bomb,
the United States launched the Manhattan Project on Dec. 7 1941, coincidentally
the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor that prompted its entry into
World War II.
The scheme would cost the equivalent of some 30 billion dollars and
muster thousands of scientists and engineers, many of
them Jewish scientists who had fled Nazi prosecution of their crimes.
That same winter, the German military looked into the prospects for
a Bomb and concluded the goal was so tough it was not worth the huge
investment of billions.
As a result, Germany's so-called "Uranium Project" was a
diffuse affair, gathering between 50 and 100 scientists, scattered
across the country and prone to disagrements.
Many of them did not devote their efforts full-time to nuclear weapons
research and their access to raw materials and brainpower was constrained
by allied raids and conscription.
After the war, American physicist Samuel Goudsmit
investigated the Nazi nuclear effort.
In his account, published in 1947, Goudsmit said the lead German physicist,
the world-renowned theoretician Werner Heisenberg, had vastly overestimated
the amount of uranium 235 needed for an explosion, or critical mass.
Heisenberg also failed to understand that plutonium, a by-product
of enriching uranium, could also be a fissile material
and in fact was an even better fuel for a bomb than uranium 235, Goudsmit
said. (Plutonium was used for the Nagasaki bomb).
But the traditional picture of German incompetence has been proven
wrong by documentary finds, says Walker.
As early as February 1942, a German military overview of the Uranium
Project concluded that critical mass could be achieved with "around
10-100 kilos" (22-220 pounds) of enriched uranium, a figure comparable
to the Manhattan Project's own early estimate, of two to 100 kilos
(4.4 to 220 pounds).
And newly unearthed Russian documents show that in 1941 Heisenberg
drafted a de-facto patent application for a plutonium bomb, although
he referred to the substance as "element 94" in relation
to its position on chemistry's periodic table, says Walker.
What is already known is that Heisenberg's organisational rival, German
army physicist Kurt Diebner, pushed ahead with a design for a reactor
which was tested in February 1945 in the village of Haigerloch, near
Tuebingen.
It came within a whisker of achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction,
although if it had worked, the scientists would have been exposed
to lethal levels of radiation, allied experts who discovered the device
found.
In a controversial book, "Hitlers Bombe," published this
March 2005, independent German historian Rainer Karlsch said Diebner's
team also tested a nuclear device in Thueringia, eastern Germany,
on March 4 1945, killing several hundred inmates.
The device was not a weapon in the Hiroshima style, Karlsch says.
Instead, it appears to have been an attempt to use high explosives
to provoke fission in a hoard of enriched uranium and fusion in a
batch of deuterium compounds, creating a fierce, localised, highly
radioactive blast.
Karlsch bases his claim on eyewitness accounts and a Soviet military
espionage report. But the details are sparse and Karlsch has been
savaged in some quarters.
Even so, this astonishing tale is clearly not over.
"More archival material continues to be found, and is still trickling
out of Russian archives right now," says Walker. "I do not
expect any more major surprises...but that is what I thought in 1989,
when my first book on the Nazis' nuclear program was published."
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