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Nazi Atomic bomb used in 1943


tazjet

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A hand thrown nuke? Seriously? and weighing only 5 Kilos? Again seriously? Since a simple shaped charge is all that was required them and now to stop a tank then a nuclear hand grenade seems a little too much like over kill to me. Not to mention, I seriously doubt you have much luck getting more than a couple guys to knowingly die from being the launching device for such a grenade. "Frizt! Congratulations! You have been chosen to throw out the first nuclear hand grenade in history. Zieg Hile!" Those would rapidly become the most dreaded words in the Wehrmarcht.

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A hand thrown nuke.... gee, what's wrong with that picture.

Other than the mushroom shaped cloud of 10,000° F gas enveloping your ass? Nothing.

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I don't think it said Hand Thrown, but how are you supposed to deliver that 5 kg bomb? So that it wipes out hundreds of soldiers down to a man. They had panzershrikes, which is something like a bazooka, so maybe they used that??

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  • 7 months later...

Tazjet has much, much more information than he has shared in this thread. :tu: I don't have time today, unfortunately, to summarize what he has posted elsewhere on the web, but would like to add a couple of bullet points to this discussion.

First, the MAGIC intercept is real and genuine. I saw it, touched it, and photographed it personally at the US National Archives in Suitland, MD, in 2012. In the photos you will see the prefix "SRA" on the cover of the file in which the MAGIC intercept is located. "SRA" refers to intercepts of Japanese Army communications. "SRN" refers to Navy communications. This was explained to me by one of the Archive workers.

Second, I am wondering if Tazjet can post any documentation for his claim (which I can well believe) that German nuclear scientist Kurt Diebner instructed US weapons scientists regarding third generation or "boosted fission" atomic weapons in the years immediately after the war. Tazjet is 100% correct to point out that nearly all atomic and thermonuclear weapons that have been produced by nearly every nation since the late 1940s do not require a "critical mass" in the WWII American sense of the term to detonate. The US weapons relied on creating what might be termed an "organic" or "nominal" critical mass. That is, the size and shape of a fissile substance or "bomb fuel" necessary to make that substance detonate using fissioning neutrons from its own mass. Boosted fission is an excellent solution to the problem of detonation because it relies on other substances besides the "bomb fuel" itself to provide massive numbers of additional, fissioning neutrons, neutrons which are added to those from the bomb fuel---thus creating via other means the same or superior supercritical state as that found in the WWII American bombs.

Edited by williamjpellas
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The German surrender was unconditional, which means (among other things) that they lost all control of their own records. It beggars the imagination that we would not have come across documents describing the development and use of an atomic weapon, even if it was only a 'dirty bomb'. What we do have is a clear paper trail that shows their atomic effort was - like many of their research efforts - fragmented, desultory and unsuccessful.

Incidentally, while I won't guarantee the accuracy of my memory, I'm pretty sure we had one more atomic bomb in reserve at the end or WW2.

At the time of the second atomic mission, which originally targeted Kokura but diverted to the secondary target of Nagasaki, the third plutonium bomb was already "in the pipeline" and its various parts and components were making their way through the Manhattan Project and US Army Air Corps logistics stream for delivery to the 509th Composite Group on Tinian Island in the Marianas. According to a report from General Leslie Groves to Joint Chiefs Chairman General George Marshall, the Manhattan Project would have had as many as 9 or perhaps 12 or 13 fission bombs ready for use by 1 November 1945---the start date for Operation OLYMPIC, the invasion of the Japanese Home Island of Kyushu. I don't recall whether the exact figure just now and don't have time to double check my sources, sorry. But the breakdown would have been: 9 or 12 "Fat Man" plutonium bombs and perhaps one more "Little Boy" uranium bomb. The production capacity of the Oak Ridge, TN, U-235 bomb works was between 2 and 4 bombs per year, but the Hanford, WA plutonium bomb works was capable of far greater production. One reference I can give you for now is the book Working on the Bomb by S. L. Sanger.

Edited by williamjpellas
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I don't think it said Hand Thrown, but how are you supposed to deliver that 5 kg bomb? So that it wipes out hundreds of soldiers down to a man. They had panzershrikes, which is something like a bazooka, so maybe they used that??

Panzerschreck isn't likely, you'd run into the same issue the Americans did with the Davy Crockett: not enough range to keep the firers out of the blast. A 5-kilo device is also very small, even for wartime Germany to be using. They'd clearly be much better served by lumping that uranium together for use as a larger bomb. In fact, I'm not even sure it's possible to build a functioning nuclear device that small, the lightest devices I'm aware of are the American nuclear artillery shells and the W54 warhead, all of which weighed more like 25kg. Speaking of artillery, however, that would likely have been the most useful deployment system for any German nuke 1943-1945. The Germans had plenty of artillery weapons that could be used to throw a variety of sizes of warheads for different uses:

  • anti-tank guns like the PaK 44
  • a variety of indirect-fire howitzers firing shells from 25-250 pounds, the most likely candidates being the 150mm "100-pounder" guns
  • in theory, they could even use nuclear shells in anti-air guns to disrupt the heavy bombing raids from the Allies

But there's one category where the use of nuclear artillery in Nazi hands would have been most interesting: in the various superheavy and siege artillery platforms fielded by Germany. Shells for these could weigh 300-500 pounds, with several absurdly huge ones more than doubling that (the Schwerer Gustav K-E gun fired a shell 31 inches across and weighing an astounding 16,000 pounds). These generally turned out to be enormous wastes of resources, as they were essentially designed for another war like WWI, which of course didn't happen. But there are several occasions where a well-placed nuclear blast could have significantly disrupted Allied operations, especially from the west. The Soviets were more or less unstoppable after Kursk, their numbers were just too large for even a nuke to interfere. The one that jumps to mind immediately is stopping the Americans at Remagen, where the Karl-Gerät siege mortar with a nuclear payload could've prevented the 1st Army from crossing the Rhine.

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...But there's one category where the use of nuclear artillery in Nazi hands would have been most interesting: in the various superheavy and siege artillery platforms fielded by Germany. Shells for these could weigh 300-500 pounds, with several absurdly huge ones more than doubling that (the Schwerer Gustav K-E gun fired a shell 31 inches across and weighing an astounding 16,000 pounds). These generally turned out to be enormous wastes of resources, as they were essentially designed for another war like WWI, which of course didn't happen. But there are several occasions where a well-placed nuclear blast could have significantly disrupted Allied operations, especially from the west. The Soviets were more or less unstoppable after Kursk, their numbers were just too large for even a nuke to interfere. The one that jumps to mind immediately is stopping the Americans at Remagen, where the Karl-Gerät siege mortar with a nuclear payload could've prevented the 1st Army from crossing the Rhine.

Obviously the effect would depend on the number of shells available, however I'd suggest that preventing the crossing at Remagen would have had little effect on the Western Allied crossing of the Rhine. Keep in mind that only three weeks after Allied forces captured the Remagen bridge, the Allies crossed the Rhine in force in two places - the British just north of the Ruhr, and the Americans near Mainz. Both crossings were complete successes and German resistance quickly collapsed. Within a month of those crossings, Allied armies had reached the Elbe, and were in a position to attack Berlin if Eisenhower had ordered it.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allied_invasion_of_Germany the forces involved in the British crossing of the Rhine were on a similar scale to those employed on D-Day. The number of nuclear artillery shells needed to disrupt that force would have been massive. Then they would have had to find the resources to stop Patton and his troops at Mainz...

The problem for the Germans in March 1945 wasn't that they didn't have enough artillery shells to defend the Rhine, it was that they didn't have enough soldiers to defend the Rhine.

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I think it far more likely that Hitler would have used a nuke (if he had them) on targets like London, or Moscow, and hope to shock/terrify the enemy into surrender or at least a cease fire...He had the perfect deliver system - the V2 which was

basically unstoppable once launched... Blasting enemy units would not have been effective as the enemy had a massive advantage in numbers, and could afford to fill any gaps (particularly the Russians, who didn't seem to mind the massive

casualties as much as the other countries)...

of course Hitler was pretty much bat-spit crazy by then so....

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I think it far more likely that Hitler would have used a nuke (if he had them) on targets like London, or Moscow, and hope to shock/terrify the enemy into surrender or at least a cease fire...He had the perfect deliver system - the V2 which was

basically unstoppable once launched... Blasting enemy units would not have been effective as the enemy had a massive advantage in numbers, and could afford to fill any gaps (particularly the Russians, who didn't seem to mind the massive

casualties as much as the other countries)...

of course Hitler was pretty much bat-spit crazy by then so....

One problem with this idea was how big any hypothetical German bombs would be. The V-2's warhead was 1000 kilograms. The atomic bombs used by the USA at the end of the war weighed 4-5 times as much. Another was range - at 320 kilometres, Moscow was out of range by the beginning of 1944, and London by early 1945.

But, yes, I agree that they would've been of fairly limited tactical use. If nothing else, once used this way once, generals would know to disperse their troops as much as practical.

An alternative I saw in a novel (which I didn't buy) involved the Germans loading what they theorised was a viable atomic bomb onto a captured B-17 bomber and flying that across the Atlantic to bomb New York.

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One problem with this idea was how big any hypothetical German bombs would be. The V-2's warhead was 1000 kilograms. The atomic bombs used by the USA at the end of the war weighed 4-5 times as much. Another was range - at 320 kilometres, Moscow was out of range by the beginning of 1944, and London by early 1945.

But, yes, I agree that they would've been of fairly limited tactical use. If nothing else, once used this way once, generals would know to disperse their troops as much as practical.

An alternative I saw in a novel (which I didn't buy) involved the Germans loading what they theorised was a viable atomic bomb onto a captured B-17 bomber and flying that across the Atlantic to bomb New York.

Here again, tazjet has information to the effect that the Germans in WWII may have been working on what later became known as "third generation, boosted fission weapons". The key advantage of such weapons being that even with the state of the engineering art in WWII and even allowing for the absence of various, lighter-in-weight substances that would be developed later (such as composite materials used in fighter and civilian jets and also in spacecraft)---even with all of this, a boosted fission weapon, if one was present in the WWII German arsenal, would have been much smaller and lighter than its American cousins. This hypothetical German bomb would also almost certainly have had a much smaller yield than the US weapons did, probably along the lines of 1 kiloton or so, but their weight would have been well within the limits of the V-2 payload.

As for why this weapon, assuming for the moment that at least one existed, wasn't used, I submit that there is a logical explanation that fits perfectly within the framework of the established history of the War. Namely, that Churchill and Great Britain deterred Hitler from using it by threatening Germany with genocide or the next thing to it. How? With England's own Doomsday Weapon, its massive stockpile of weaponized anthrax. In simplest terms, Hitler did not have enough bombs with enough firepower to gamble that he could nuke his opponents---or, at minimum, England, if not the United States---into oblivion while also guaranteeing that Germany would not, itself, be destroyed in turn by Churchill's bioweapon.

Edited by williamjpellas
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Just a note that nuking the enemy's capital isn't a favored first-strike tactic in nuclear war planning because it risks leaving no one alive with the authority to order a surrender.

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Just a note that nuking the enemy's capital isn't a favored first-strike tactic in nuclear war planning because it risks leaving no one alive with the authority to order a surrender.

Carpet bombing cities was considered poor form as well, but both sides did that.

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Tazjet has much, much more information than he has shared in this thread. :tu: I don't have time today, unfortunately, to summarize what he has posted elsewhere on the web, but would like to add a couple of bullet points to this discussion.

First, the MAGIC intercept is real and genuine. I saw it, touched it, and photographed it personally at the US National Archives in Suitland, MD, in 2012. In the photos you will see the prefix "SRA" on the cover of the file in which the MAGIC intercept is located. "SRA" refers to intercepts of Japanese Army communications. "SRN" refers to Navy communications. This was explained to me by one of the Archive workers.

Second, I am wondering if Tazjet can post any documentation for his claim (which I can well believe) that German nuclear scientist Kurt Diebner instructed US weapons scientists regarding third generation or "boosted fission" atomic weapons in the years immediately after the war. Tazjet is 100% correct to point out that nearly all atomic and thermonuclear weapons that have been produced by nearly every nation since the late 1940s do not require a "critical mass" in the WWII American sense of the term to detonate. The US weapons relied on creating what might be termed an "organic" or "nominal" critical mass. That is, the size and shape of a fissile substance or "bomb fuel" necessary to make that substance detonate using fissioning neutrons from its own mass. Boosted fission is an excellent solution to the problem of detonation because it relies on other substances besides the "bomb fuel" itself to provide massive numbers of additional, fissioning neutrons, neutrons which are added to those from the bomb fuel---thus creating via other means the same or superior supercritical state as that found in the WWII American bombs.

There are enough errors and inconsistencies in the report to invalidate it and show it as a fake. Some can be found here in a previous post in this thread http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=191553&st=45#entry4696212

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Carpet bombing cities was considered poor form as well, but both sides did that.

True, but since the bombers of the day had trouble hitting anything smaller than a city they simply classified 'civilian workers' as a military resource and went on from there. The Powers That Be have historically been somewhat more considerate of their opposite numbers than that.

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The following intercepted Japanese diplomatic signal was intercepted during World War 2: "Stockholm to Tokyo" No. 232.9 December 1944 (War Department), National Archives, RG 457, declassified October 1, 1978.

*my italics

This is not a fantasy or an illusion. The signal interception known as a MAGIC decrypt was kept classified after the war. The Japanese throughout WW2 had no knowledge that their encyphered diplomatic signals from Berlin and Stockholm were being read in London and Washington.

It is public record that the US threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Dresdon almost a year before the attacks on Japan. I find it suspectious that 1 1/2 tons of incendiary bombs could cause such a widespread firestorm in the city and suspect Dresdon got attacked with an airburst weapon by the Americans.

The Germans arent believed to have achieved a fission weapon but I have seen sources which say they used two dirty bombs on Russian forces. I also believe Churchill threatened Germany with Anthrax attacks on Berlin if they used one of their dirty bombs on London. I thought information on both attacks was currently classifed. The Germans shipped enriched uranium to the Japanese after their currently surrendered (proof they had the material for a fission weapon).

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It is public record that the US threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Dresdon almost a year before the attacks on Japan. I find it suspectious that 1 1/2 tons of incendiary bombs could cause such a widespread firestorm in the city and suspect Dresdon got attacked with an airburst weapon by the Americans.

The Germans arent believed to have achieved a fission weapon but I have seen sources which say they used two dirty bombs on Russian forces. I also believe Churchill threatened Germany with Anthrax attacks on Berlin if they used one of their dirty bombs on London. I thought information on both attacks was currently classifed. The Germans shipped enriched uranium to the Japanese after their currently surrendered (proof they had the material for a fission weapon).

Incendiary weapons are a hell of a thing, and they were nearly perfected in WWII. Dresden wasn't even the biggest fire of the war. You know why the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not the capital, Tokyo? Because Tokyo was burned to the ground in early 1945. At the time, most of the city was made in the traditional Japanese fashion, built mostly of wood and paper. On the night of March 9th, the Operation Meetinghouse raid plastered the city in 1700 tons of ordnance, burning sixteen square miles and killing more than 100,000 people (more than either nuclear strike did immediately).

There are numerous other problems with the theory of a nuclear attack on Dresden. For one thing, your numbers on the amount of incendiaries dropped are completely wrong, the main strike group on February 13th carried 375 tons of incendiaries, with subsequent raids dropping even more. Second, remember that a lot of Dresden was tightly-packed timber buildings, softened up first by conventional high explosives. The other two issues are that the bomber deployment and damage patterns of the Dresden raids (February 13-15, 1945) don't come close to matching that of a nuclear weapon. The three main bombings involved a total of over 500 heavy bombers, whereas both nuclear attacks on Japan were done by a trio of B-29s each. One (Enola Gay and Bocks Car) carried the bombs, one photographed the results (Necessary Evil and Big Stink), and one specially modified aircraft carried various recording instruments (The Great Artiste). A nuclear blast also has a very distinctive footprint on the ground, which wasn't present at Dresden. A nuke would have a defined epicenter of total annihilation, growing less powerful as it expanded. Dresden was simply set on fire at a massive scale.

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Incendiary weapons are a hell of a thing, and they were nearly perfected in WWII. Dresden wasn't even the biggest fire of the war. You know why the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not the capital, Tokyo? Because Tokyo was burned to the ground in early 1945. At the time, most of the city was made in the traditional Japanese fashion, built mostly of wood and paper. On the night of March 9th, the Operation Meetinghouse raid plastered the city in 1700 tons of ordnance, burning sixteen square miles and killing more than 100,000 people (more than either nuclear strike did immediately).

There are numerous other problems with the theory of a nuclear attack on Dresden. For one thing, your numbers on the amount of incendiaries dropped are completely wrong, the main strike group on February 13th carried 375 tons of incendiaries, with subsequent raids dropping even more. Second, remember that a lot of Dresden was tightly-packed timber buildings, softened up first by conventional high explosives. The other two issues are that the bomber deployment and damage patterns of the Dresden raids (February 13-15, 1945) don't come close to matching that of a nuclear weapon. The three main bombings involved a total of over 500 heavy bombers, whereas both nuclear attacks on Japan were done by a trio of B-29s each. One (Enola Gay and Bocks Car) carried the bombs, one photographed the results (Necessary Evil and Big Stink), and one specially modified aircraft carried various recording instruments (The Great Artiste). A nuclear blast also has a very distinctive footprint on the ground, which wasn't present at Dresden. A nuke would have a defined epicenter of total annihilation, growing less powerful as it expanded. Dresden was simply set on fire at a massive scale.

With the nuclear footprint left after a blast we have to remember that most buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were constructed out of wood at the time. All concrete/stone/brick buildings survived the blasts although were moderate to heavily damaged. For example the present day war memorial in Hiroshima was directly below the fireball and yet it remained upright.

A 16 kiloton (or less) weapon isnt going to level a concrete/stone/brick building city. That would require a megaton device. I have attached a picture of Dresden after the attack which shows most buildings were concrete/stone/brick. An airburst weapon would also produce no fallout so I dont see why a nuke couldnt have been used.

My figures for the incendiaries is wrong with yours being similar to what is on Wiki assuming conventional ordinance was used.

post-143083-0-47449800-1383133639_thumb.

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More accurately Heisenberg didn't know, but Heisenberg was the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (institute). The KWI was not at the heart of the Nazi bomb project. The Army Ordnance Dept (Heereswaffenamt) was. HWA was led by Diebner and he was contracted to run specific trials at Kummersdorf in 1942 experimenting with miniature tactical nuclear weapons using hollow charge explosives.

After the war the occupation army forbade nuclear scientists from publishing their work or obtaining patents yet some wartime patents (which escaped the wholesale uplifting by ALSOS teams in 1945) for these bombs came to light through the research of Rainer Karlsh in 2005. Heisenberg's patents were unworkable, but Deibner's weren't.

Diebner published his designs in France during 1956 under the pseudonym Werner Tautorus. It was so good the US military copied the design for their own tactical mini-nukes.

I have redrawn the design which Tautorus published in France in 1956, but kept the original noculamenture:

Awarhead.jpg

I have to laugh! The description above is not only infeasible, but would never result in a nuclear explosion. And the claim that the US copied the design is utter BS.

Edited by Kahn
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There are enough errors and inconsistencies in the report to invalidate it and show it as a fake. Some can be found here in a previous post in this thread http://www.unexplain...45#entry4696212

To be sure, the Japanese Army attache officer making the report did not have everything about the purported German weapon completely correct from a technical standpoint. But he was perfectly clear in his belief that the German device was a "GENSHAI HAKAI DAN". This is the unmistakable and unique Japanese term for an atomic fission bomb. If the report is a "fake", it is up to you and like minded critics to demonstrate and document how and why, specifically, it is a "fake". I saw it myself in the National Archives of the United States of America. Did someone just randomly insert this MAGIC intercept into the Archives? If so, for what purpose? Surely it is a much greater and dramatically more implausible "conspiracy theory" to posit that someone chose this one issue for a scholarly hoax and somehow succeeded in planting this one piece of false evidence in the Archives. I guess the bandit has been waiting all these decades (since the MAGIC documents in question were not declassified until 1978) for someone to stumble across the document so he can pop up out of his chair in the senior citizens' home and scream through his dentures, "HA! GOTCHA! HAHAHAHAAA!!!" :w00t: Please. Wouldn't there be any number of better and "sexier" targets that would generate more notoriety and potential profits (eg, from writing a book based on the falsehood) than something like this? Here I am thinking of the so-called "Hitler Diaries" that surfaced a number of years ago but were quickly proven to be forgeries and fiction.

Look, anyone reading this can go to the Archives themselves and see the exact same thing that I did. That is why I took great pains to both photograph the documents and to breadcrumb the trail so they will be easy for any subsequent researchers to find. What is your explanation for the MAGIC intercept referenced by tazjet in this thread? Forgery? Okay: to what end? Who did it, and why, and how did they get away with it? Ever been to the Archives? I can tell you from personal experience that there is considerable security and oversight of all documents. Who had the means and the motive? If the document was not a forgery, was the Japanese officer sincere in his belief, but simply sincerely mistaken? This is the only alternate explanation that is even remotely possible, to my mind. In which case we might be talking about some kind of air-fuel / thermobaric weapon. But here again there is a lot more evidence pointing to much more advanced WWII German atomic bomb R&D than most believe occurred than just this MAGIC intercept.

Edited by williamjpellas
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I have to laugh! The description above is not only infeasible, but would never result in a nuclear explosion. And the claim that the US copied the design is utter BS.

Okay, "Khan", how and why is "the description...infeasible" and "would never result in a nuclear explosion"? Can you tell us why the physics of this design are unworkable? Do you even know who Schumann and Trinks were? The design you reference was, in fact, patented in France (of all places) in the 1950s, and was, in fact, the work of two WWII German atomic weapons scientists. Tazjet claims that this design was actually completed during the War itself. I have yet to see specific documentation of this claim but am certainly willing to keep an open mind and to follow the trail wherever it leads until we get to the bottom of this, it that's even possible given that much information about this topic is still highly classified. An intriguing thesis from tazjet is that Kurt Diebner, another world class WWII German weapons scientist, taught boosted fission to the Americans in the years immediately following the War. I have asked tazjet for documentation of this claim and have not yet seen any, but I would not be surprised if this happened. Any student of WWII knows that many top German scientists and engineers were captured by both the Americans and the Soviets. Werner Von Braun basically led NASA's moon rocket R&D. There was also a Japanese scientist who was one of the bigwigs in Unit 731---their bioweapon facility in mainland China---who got a get out of jail free card (read: he didn't swing from the gallows at the Pacific Theater war crimes trials) because the US wanted to learn what he knew. Thus, he was welcomed as a guest lecturer at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, in the late 1940s. Fort Dietrich was where the US Army had its own bioweapons establishment at that time.

Edited by williamjpellas
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Note, also, that tazjet is not writing in a vacuum. Some of the most important pieces of evidence that he presents were actually dug up by German professor Rainer Karlsch, as part of the research he did for his book, Hitler's Bombe. Unfortunately that book is not available in English, so you have to use a translator program (such as Google provides) to read it if you are not fluent in German. However, there is an English language article co-authored by Karlsch and the American historian Mark Walker that was posted on the Physics World website a few years ago. This article is basically a "Cliff's Notes" version of Karlsch's book and gives you the highlights of his claims, though it unfortunately does not give many specifics about the many intriguing bits of evidence that he uncovered---including some from the WWII KGB archives, which were briefly open to the West following the collapse of the USSR but which are, to my knowledge, now once more all but impossible to access. Anyone reading this can easily Google the Karlsch - Walker piece, which was titled, "New Light on Hitler's Bomb". In fact, I'll just post my own Google search, which turned up some other interesting links:

https://www.google.c...omb&safe=active

Well, well. One of the links from that search page goes to the BBC News website article about Karlsch's book. I don't think the BBC News is generally regarded as some kind of crank-fringe site, is it?

http://news.bbc.co.u...ope/4348497.stm

So, bon apetit and happy reading to one and all.

Edited by williamjpellas
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If the report is a "fake", it is up to you and like minded critics to demonstrate and document how and why, specifically, it is a "fake". I saw it myself in the National Archives of the United States of America. Did someone just randomly insert this MAGIC intercept into the Archives? If so, for what purpose? Surely it is a much greater and dramatically more implausible "conspiracy theory" to posit that someone chose this one issue for a scholarly hoax and somehow succeeded in planting this one piece of false evidence in the Archives. I guess the bandit has been waiting all these decades (since the MAGIC documents in question were not declassified until 1978) for someone to stumble across the document so he can pop up out of his chair in the senior citizens' home and scream through his dentures, "HA! GOTCHA! HAHAHAHAAA!!!" :w00t: Please. Wouldn't there be any number of better and "sexier" targets that would generate more notoriety and potential profits (eg, from writing a book based on the falsehood) than something like this? Here I am thinking of the so-called "Hitler Diaries" that surfaced a number of years ago but were quickly proven to be forgeries and fiction.

The post I linked to showed the errors in the document and showed it to be fake. I need not show why it was faked or by whom but it is a definite fake. Your decision not to read the post or to ignore what is there does not alter that the "facts" of the document are invalid and never happened.

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Okay, "Khan", how and why is "the description...infeasible" and "would never result in a nuclear explosion"? Can you tell us why the physics of this design are unworkable? Do you even know who Schumann and Trinks were? The design you reference was, in fact, patented in France (of all places) in the 1950s, and was, in fact, the work of two WWII German atomic weapons scientists.

For one thing, uranium-233 is much more difficult to work with as bomb material, the one American use of it was a lower-than-expected yield and used a combination U-233/Pu-239 core. India detonated one U-233 device in 1998, but its yield was extremely small, around 0.2 kilotons. Second, the drawing provided is several kinds of wrong, giving incorrect materials for the fuel, both lining layers, and the explosives, as well as the vacuum region. The fuel should be uranium-235 or plutonium-239, the liners would be aluminum or beryllium, and neither lithium compound listed there serves any purpose in a fission bomb (lithium hydride is a shielding material used in reactors, and lithium deuteride is for fusion). The vacuum is completely wrong, it would impede detonation because a vacuum doesn't pressurize.

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