Nazi Atomic weapons in 1943

reply to post by JimTSpock



Union College History Professor Mark Walker---universally acknowledged as one of the world's best current experts on WWII Nazi science and technology---clearly believes that the R&D effort under Kurt Diebner tested some kind of nuclear device at Ohrdurf in 1945. Per the Nova article posted earlier by "Jim T Spock" (heh!):


"By the very end of the war, the Germans had progressed from horizontal and spherical layer designs to three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes immersed in heavy water. They had also developed a nuclear reactor design that almost, but not quite, achieved a controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret under Diebner and with the strong support of the physicist Walther Gerlach, who was by that time head of the uranium project, built and tested a nuclear device.

At best this would have been far less destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Rather it is an example of scientists trying to make any sort of weapon they could in order to help stave off defeat. No one knows the exact form of the device tested. But apparently the German scientists had designed it to use chemical high explosives configured in a hollow shell in order to provoke both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion reactions. It is not clear whether this test generated nuclear reactions, but it does appear as if this is what the scientists had intended to occur."



That certainly sounds at minimum, like the same kind of design concept indicated by the Schumann - Trinks schematic, doesn't it? It is because of assessments like this, and because of the consistency in those assessments, as well as because of various documentary and eyewitness testimony such as has been posted in various places in this thread, that I am not ready to discard Simon's thesis. There is too much evidence pointing in another direction, one that is heading away from the more or less "established" or "conventional" history of the War. Exactly how far away, I don't know. But there is certainly more than enough smoke for me to look to see what sort of fire might be producing it.

reply to post by williamjpellas


Correcting a typo in my last post on the previous page. I meant to say "but some other light nuclei element or compound like tritium would"? I tried to find the specific references just now, but couldn't, but I know that the U-233 in the S-T schematic was coated with some sort of light, hydrogen-based element or compound.


Anyway, I think it's probably time to re-set this thread. When I have more time I will try to post a reasonable summary so we can all focus on answering the most crucial questions first, and then perhaps we can go back to probing the technical specifics. Or so I am suggesting. Many thanks to all here for the excellent input and information and for honestly considering what the MAGIC intercept and other documentation and testimony might mean.

williamjpellas
Thanks for the very detailed reply, Bedlam. So, even thousands of degrees C heat would not help the Li-6D to detonate the U-233 fissile core in this design. Correct? But lithium deuteride would (or might)? The S-T design also listed lithium deuteride as a coating on the U-233 fissile core. Again, just trying to get to the bottom of all this, if possible, and I appreciate your patience.


Returning to an earlier question: what, then, IS the S-T schematic? If the design is, in fact, unworkable / would not detonate, then what are we looking at? 'Twould seem to me that what it probably is, is a "scientific best guess" by one of the WWII German atomic R&D teams as they took their best shot at throwing something together on the chance it might work. Would that be an accurate characterization in your opinion?

I really REALLY hate ATS' posting system at times. Occasionally, the forum logs you out at random, and if you're posting at the time, your post goes down the rabbit hole and all you get is a little spinny arrow wheel. Bye, post!

To reply to you AGAIN, hopefully this time not eaten by the bad design monster, thousands of degrees will not help. Impact will not help. Li6D is a part of your complete nuclear breakfast, but not squirted on the outside during detonation.

Li6D IS lithium deuteride. It's just lithium deuteride that's had the Li7 removed. Natural lithium deuteride is 7.5% Li6, for the most part.You generally want Li6D for your fusion fuel, but you can sure use 50/50 mix, it's just less predictable.

As far as 'what is this drawing', are you sure of the provenance of this? Because it looks fake. Would you say the annotations on the drawing are supposed to have been there from the beginning, or were they added on as some sort of explanation later?

reply to post by williamjpellas


If the guy thinks the Germans had not achieved a functional reactor, why does he think they could make a nuke?

Reactors are pretty simple, comparatively, if you don't care about anything but getting a reaction going.

reply to post by williamjpellas


I posted the article. I know what it says. It took you that long to read it?

Walker says they tried to make a weapon but he does not know if it achieved any nuclear reactions. And his description sounds like the S-T design.

And obviously as Bedlam has pointed out on numerous occasions a high explosive device would not be able to trigger a nuclear fission explosion. Other historians have said it was probably a dirty bomb, which was in another article I linked to.

In the Walker article there is another schematic which does not resemble the S-T device and I think it looks like a gun type assembly weapon but where that came from I don't know. And that is a design which we know works...

It seems very clear to me that the S-T design would not work and the Nazi scientists were a long way from having the required knowledge of nuclear physics to design and construct a working nuclear weapon. Given more time and research they might have been able to, but in my opinion I don't think they got there. I don't think you will be able to get a definitive conclusion and will have to make up your own mind about what you think is the most likely scenario. I think if they did test anything it was probably a dirty bomb with a lot of high explosives, and maybe it didn't work the way they thought or intended.

reply to post by JimTSpock



Spock, yes, I just read your article, sorry for the delay. The reason I posted the quote from Walker that was included in the article is that I didn't realize until reading it that he appeared to be describing something very similar to the ideas found in the S-T schematic. I have seen and read other quotes from Walker but never saw anything that seemed to match S-T so closely. In other words, it appears that his conclusion is that the Diebner / Ohrdurf test detonation was at least trying to produce an explosion utilizing the same kind of blended, fusion-fission approach that is suggested by the S-T design. Thus I found Walker's comments to be significant.


Re: the annotations mentioned by Bedlam. Obviously the text mentioning Rainer Karlsch by name and that mentions the date of 1944 was added later. My understanding at this point in time is that the son of one of the German atomic scientists / weapons designers who was working on the S-T design gave the original schematic to Karlsch a few years ago. As I posted previously, the original document is now apparently in the possession of the German Army Archives in Freiburg, Germany. I wrote to the Archives asking about the S-T document and never received a reply.


Re: the apparent gun-type design mentioned by Spock, that is another document dug up by Karlsch, but it is probably not as significant as the S-T schematic. That's because the other design mentions the word "plutonium", which the Germans of that era DID NOT USE. The term "plutonium" was coined by Glenn Seaborg in the United States as his name for the artificially produced 94th element in the periodic table. The Germans were aware of it and knew that it could be produced by what they called "a uranium machine" (read: a breeder reactor) but they termed it either "element 94" or "eka osmium", NOT "plutonium". A small possibility exists, I suppose, that the term "plutonium" might have been added immediately after the war by someone who decided to use the American term. But that is unlikely. Note, also, that a plutonium gun-type weapon of that configuration would probably not work, anyway, because of the plutonium-240 contamination typically found in breeder reactor - produced plutonium. Putting that much plutonium so close to another sub-critical mass of it would almost certainly result in a spontaneous partial detonation---a "fizzle". Unless we were talking about extremely if not perfectly pure plutonium, and it is virtually impossible for any WWII combatant nation to have produced enough of that with the technology of the time to enable a bomb.

williamjpellas


Re: the annotations mentioned by Bedlam. Obviously the text mentioning Rainer Karlsch by name and that mentions the date of 1944 was added later. My understanding at this point in time is that the son of one of the German atomic scientists / weapons designers who was working on the S-T design gave the original schematic to Karlsch a few years ago. As I posted previously, the original document is now apparently in the possession of the German Army Archives in Freiburg, Germany. I wrote to the Archives asking about the S-T document and never received a reply.

A pity. It would be interesting to see the original.

a reply to: Bedlam

Bedlam, on the chance that you still check in on this thread from time to time, I was re-reading your excellent posts upthread and saw you reference "CM" a couple of times. I'm not familiar with that abbreviation and was wondering if you could tell me what it stands for and give me a little bit of detail as to how this concept fits in with how atomic and/or thermonuclear weapons work. Many thanks, when you can get around to all that.

originally posted by: williamjpellas
saw you reference "CM" a couple of times.

Critical Mass
en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: hellobruce

Bruce, thanks for that. I just saw the same physicist's shorthand explained on another site and was coming over here to say, never mind. But again, I appreciate you clearing that up for me. As I said, I am not a physicist and so some of the "language of the trade" is lost on me unless someone is kind enough to tell me!

After re-reading this thread recently and re-starting my research on the topic, I came across a site that discusses Simon's thesis here in some detail. A couple of the articles already cited in this thread are apparently archived there---I will link to it below---though it's hard to say because the site, "greyfalcon dot us", specifically the subsections called "Building Hitler's Bomb" and "Secret Projects 'Siegfried/Olga/Burg/Jasmin' in the Jonas Valley near Ohrdruf", infuriatingly neglects, in some cases, to include information about the author or authors of a given piece. However, it does do a good job of archiving the largest number of articles specifically about Rainer Karlsch's book and about research concerning this topic in general that I have yet found in one place. BTW, the homepage of the grey falcon site includes a prominent graphic that says "Black Sun Redux". This is a reference to Joseph Farrell's much-discussed, oft-vilified, and to my mind, significantly underrated book, Reich of the Black Sun. Unfortunately there is a fair amount of silliness and fringe speculation on the hompage that is mixed in with the more scholarly stuff, but bear with me.


greyfalcon.us...

greyfalcon.us...


One of the logical fallacies that is often cited by opponents of the "Axis Nations Might Have Had Nukes in WWII" idea is the claim that any nation trying to create atomic bombs must have had to employ an industrial and R&D infrastructure that was at least as large as what the United States, with some Allied help, built for the Manhattan Project. This is emphatically NOT true, particularly for the Germans. To be sure, the American approach, obviously, worked and worked well. BUT in some ways (as the Monsanto Report implies) it was not the most advanced and it was certainly not the most efficient one that could have been employed, even with the technology then available to the combatant nations. The Der Spiegel article mentioned earlier repeats this fallacy verbatim, even as it adds text that appears to give credence to German atomic weapon scientist Erich Schumann's "bazooka effect" detonation concept.


For one thing, he focuses on Erich Schumann, who served as chief of research for Germany's weapons division until 1944. At Schumann's estate, Karlsch discovered records from the post-war period. Schumann was a former physics professor and wrote that in 1944 he discovered a method of generating the high temperatures (several million degrees Celsius) and extreme pressure necessary to trigger nuclear fusion using conventional explosives. The hydrogen bomb is based on this principle.


Bedlam mentioned earlier that you need to create temperatures approaching or exceeding what you find in stars before lithium deuteride will fission neutrons, and even then the Li-6D has to be added in a particular pattern (concentrically via implosion?). Still, I am wondering if, provided Schumann's "bazooka effect" IS, at least in theory, a viable way to detonate some kind of nuclear or thermonuclear explosion, if at least some of the Li-6D indicated in the S-T schematic might have been induced to fission, even if it was nowhere near as efficient as the designs that would come later, after the war. I would think, based on bedlam's information, that any Li-6D fissioning would have been very low grade if it happened at all; here I am mainly interested in whether the "bazooka effect" is in fact viable, if it can in fact produce temperatures approaching "millions of degrees Celsius" (or if that is a mistake or misprint in the Der Spiegel piece) and if it is used in any modern A- or H- or boosted fission-bombs.


I have already noted, earlier, that the Der Spiegel article's claim that there was no way Germany possessed enough HEU to have built a bomb is also doubtful if not outright false.


Another note from the various articles archived on "grey falcon". Simon mentioned Luigi Romersma, the late Italian newspaper and war correspondent who claimed to have witnessed one of the alleged German nuclear bomb test detonations. Romersma tried several times to interest the world at large in his story in the years following the war but was generally rebuffed. He nevertheless went on to publish his story in both magazine and book form, and he had a very lengthy and distinguished career both during and following the war. If Wikipedia can be believed in this case, he was also a personal friend of Werner von Braun. Bet they had some interesting conversations.

en.wikipedia.org...

www.theguardian.com...

Romersma, in other words, was a trained and internationally prominent journalist and observer and while that in no way makes him an unimpeachable source, his professional background coupled with his insistence---both in person and in print, such as in his book, Le armi segrete di Hitler (Hitler's Secret Weapons)---until he died that his story was true should carry more weight in this discussion than it does. He is the same kind of pedigreed source that David Snell was, and Snell's story about interviewing the head of counterintelligence for the atomc bomb project(s) run by the Japanese at Hungnam, Korea, has obviously turned out to have legs.


A number of original WWII intelligence documents and related information were posted upthread and so I will not repost them here. However, there is one other area in which, to my mind, Mr. Gunson has done a service to scholarship about the war, and that is with his list of most of the various German nuclear weapons projects and laboratories. The sometimes bewildering array of often-competing Nazi-era laboratories and other centers of R&D is explained well here:

sites.google.com...

Of the names mentioned, Diebner and Manfred von Ardenne are in my opinion the most crucial, though all of the names on Gunson's list are definitely important figures in the WWII German atomic bomb efforts. Diebner---as well as the rest of the "heereswaffenamt" (German Army advanced weapons bureau)---for obvious reasons, as discussed here and elsewhere. Von Ardenne, because it was his top employee, Dr. Fritz Houtermanns, who wrote and circulated a memo that has somehow escaped serious scrutiny in most quarters until very recently. As far as I know, Joseph Farrell, in his book Reich of the Black Sun, is the first author to connect the dots where von Ardenne and Houtermanns are concerned. Yes, I am well aware of the snark and smear tactics directed at Farrell and his book (or at least, at parts of it) from some quarters, and if it helps this discussion, I will address those attacks later.

For now, this passage---from Chapter 8 in Reich of the Black Sun, The Heereswaffenamt and Houtermans Memoranda---should suffice to push this topic along:


One of the most problematical documents to explain from the standpoint of the postwar Allied Legend is the top secret memorandum concerning the development of an atom bomb anonymously submitted to the German Army Ordnance Bureau (Heereswaffenamt) in early 1942. This document not only correctly estimated the critical mass for a uranium-235 based bomb, but also indicated the possibility of transmutation of uranium into plutonium - called "Element 94" by the memorandum - and its use in a bomb. The memorandum's origin and authorship has been attributed to various interred Farm hall scientists, including Dr. Kurt Diebner. But the authorship is unknown, and the problem of its existence remains: How could the German army, knowing that the required amount of uranium for a nuclear bomb was comparatively small and therefore technically feasible, not have pursued its development? And how could they have pursued such laughably pathetic attempts toward a functioning reactor? The mystery only deepens when we consider a possible ancestry for the Heereswaffenamt memo written in a paper the previous year.



In 1941, Baron Manfred von Ardenne decided to circulate an unusual paper by his colleague Dr. Fritz Houtermans. The full title of the paper was "On the Question of the Release of Nuclear chain reactions, by Fritz G. Houtermans: A Communication from the Laboratory of Manfred Von Ardenne, Berlin-Lichterfelde-Ost." 2 The paper is remarkable in several respects, not the least for its revealing table of contents:

I. General Point of View

II. Competing Processes

III. Chain Reactions through Nuclear Fission with Fast Neutrons

IV. Nuclear Fission through Thermal Neutrons

Isotope Separation

Selection of a heavy Moderator Substance such as Hydrogen, especially Heavy Water

Relative Advance of the Probability for 1/v Process through Application of Low Temperatures

Self-Regulating reaction and the Significance of the Doppler Effect at Low Temperatures

V. Chain Reactions at Final Trial Volumes

VI. The Importance of a Chain Reaction at Low Temperatures as a Neutron Source as an Apparatus for Isotope Transformation


(Farrell goes on to suggest that it was Houtermans himself who wrote the "anonymous" memo and that it was anonymous precisely because Houtermans was Jewish. From here he brings in another oft-overlooked figure in SS General Hans Kammler, whose mysterious vanishing from the historical record strikes me as highly suspicious given that Kammler was in charge of all SS secret weapons projects):


So, having speculated that Nazi Germany had actually pursued a uranium bomb as the primary component of its bomb, and conducted a large and very secret uranium enrichment project in order to acquire it, we now come to the subject of the possibility of a plutonium bomb project, conducted once again in secret, and far from the "public exposure" laboratory tinkering of the Farm Hall scientists. In this respect there has already been one indication: the allegation of a second nuclear test of a bomb with a very small critical mass via the process of boosted fission, near the Three Corners region of Thuringia, an area that has the highest gamma background radiation in all of Germany.


Are there corroborating indications that the Germans might have successfully developed an atomic reactor, and hence, plutonium, in the secret recesses of Kammler's SS black programs secret weapons empire? Henry Picker, in his book Hitler's Table Talks, makes one significant statement. Not only does he indicate that the Reichspost had something to do with the atom bomb project, but he offers more detail. The bomb was to be constructed in a plant "in an underground SS factory in the southern Harz mountains, which had a foreseen production capacity of 30,000 workers." 5 Once again, the trail leads back to the SS, the southern Harz mountains of Thuringia, and large underground factories. This facility, according to Picker, "was transferred back to the USSR by the Red Army" after the German surrender. 6 According to Picker, it was for this reason that Stalin reacted with such detachment when President Truman informed him of the successful test of the plutonium bomb at the Trinity site in New Mexico, for Stalin had already acquired the necessary technology to make his own atom bomb. Moreover, Stalin awarded Manfred Von Ardenne the "Soviet 'Nobel Prize,' the Stalin Prize."


(In other words, von Ardenne's lab either directly gave The Bomb to the Soviets after the war or else greatly sped its development. How far did von Ardenne's project get during the war itself? Parenthesis mine.)


In any case, Houtermans' reactor concept was significantly different than Heisenberg's, or for that matter, even Enrico Fermi's successful atomic pile at the University of Chicago, since it aimed at the production not of energy, but of radioactive isotopes. For this reason, it would be able to operate at low temperature using liquid methane as a moderator, rather than heavy water or graphite. This meant that it would be an efficient producer of "element 93 or higher" that could be chemically separated and used as a nuclear explosive.10


This is significant, for it differentiates the von Ardenne-Houtermans effort both from the Heisenberg effort to design and construct a working atomic pile, and from Enrico Fermi's success in doing so .11


(And now for the connecting of the dots):


So at one end of the war, ca. 1945, we find the allegations on tested weapon of small critical mass which, if true, is most likely that of a plutonium bomb using a process of boosted fission, and at the other end, ca. 1941, we have a paper outlining a project to achieve a reactor for the production of the explosive fuel of such a bomb. There is an odd piece of corroboration that the Germans may also have been perilously close to, if not in actual possession of, a plutonium atom bomb, from the Pacific Theater and the Japanese program. Robert Wilcox, in his Japan's Secret War, recounts how the Spanish Nationalist government successfully ran a spy ring both for the Germans and for the Japanese, an espionage operation that had no little success in penetrating the Manhattan Project, even to the extent of acquiring in 1943 the earliest Allied designs for a detonator for such a bomb. Interviewing Angel Alcazar de Velasco, the alleged head of the ring, Wilcox quotes a rather astonishing statement:


The information was that the American work on a nuclear weapon was very advanced but they had a long way to go. There were even notes about the detonator. It was similar to one already in use by the Germans. 12


A complicated detonator - presumably for use in a plutonium bomb, since the detonator mechanism for a uranium bomb is a much simpler piece of equipment - already in use by the Germans in 1943!? Why would the Germans have had the need for such a complex detonator? The timing of the allegation is also disturbing, since it corroborates the assertions of the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, that the Germans were using some type of weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1943, in the region of Kursk.

Farrell thus made a direct reference to the MAGIC intercept at the beginning of this thread. He goes on to say in a footnote:


"13 The attaché actually maintained that these weapons - whatever they were - were also used in the "Crimea", making it most likely during the siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol in 1942. This would seem to weigh very heavily against this mystery weapon being an atom bomb. But if not, what other weapon could have caused such destruction? Powers notes that Allen Dulles in Zurich received reports of a German project in "vast underground factories" that were after "putting out a new explosive in aerial bombs. He has even heard that the container of the explosive is spherical." (Rose, op. cit.) A spherical detonator, of course, is the type of implosion-compression detonator used to assemble the critical mass of a plutonium bomb."


Now, does all of this add up, indisputably and undoubtedly, to the existence during WWII itself of German a-bombs, and along with them of some kind of end-of-the-war dirty dealings between the Allies (or at least the US and Britain) and the Nazis? No. But there is considerable credible information here, much of it from original intelligence documents and eyewitnesses, and taken together there is more than enough, in my opinion, to cause any reasonable and informed student of the war to question some important aspects of the more or less "standard history" as it has come down to us. Of that much, I am certain. Now, where all of this takes us remains to be seen. Whether further research leads to a smoking gun or to a reinforcement of the more or less "standard history", or to something else entirely, a thorough re-examination is in order.

Regarding Farrell and Reich of the Black Sun, it appears from his writing that he is not aware that the S-T schematic called for U-233 and not P-239. Here I am not sure if the Diebner design as discussed by Walker and Karlsch in the Physics World article was the same as the Schumann - Trinks design mentioned in this thread, or not. Farrell says that the test of the Diebner hybrid fission-fusion design would have been a boosted fission - plutonium implosion bomb, but I think it more likely that the German test detonations, assuming that they occurred and were, in fact, nuclear weapons in some form, used U-233 than P-239. Both elements can be produced in breeder reactors and also via other means, but remember that Heisenberg, at the 1942 Harnack Haus conference, specifically mentioned U-233. Lo and behold, so did the S-T design, which came two years later. Coincidence? Thorium, from which U-233 is produced via the protactinium decay chain, is four times more abundant on Earth than is uranium. U-233 is also more similar in its properties as an explosive to P-239 than either is to U-235, meaning that an implosion design would be the most reliable and, in WWII, probably the only means of detonating a U-233 bomb (unless the "Bazooka Effect" is something entirely different from an implosion method, something I hope bedlam will address at some point).


Anyway, it would be interesting to learn if Farrell has seen the S-T schematic and if he is aware of the Harnack Haus conference, and whether that information would affect his perspective, or not.

originally posted by: williamjpellas
The Der Spiegel article mentioned earlier repeats this fallacy verbatim, even as it adds text that appears to give credence to German atomic weapon scientist Erich Schumann's "bazooka effect" detonation concept.


For one thing, he focuses on Erich Schumann, who served as chief of research for Germany's weapons division until 1944. At Schumann's estate, Karlsch discovered records from the post-war period. Schumann was a former physics professor and wrote that in 1944 he discovered a method of generating the high temperatures (several million degrees Celsius) and extreme pressure necessary to trigger nuclear fusion using conventional explosives. The hydrogen bomb is based on this principle.

He most certainly did not do this with conventional explosives. In addition, you can't fuse Li6D this way at all.

Bedlam mentioned earlier that you need to create temperatures approaching or exceeding what you find in stars before lithium deuteride will fission neutrons, and even then the Li-6D has to be added in a particular pattern (concentrically via implosion?).

Nope, what I said was you can't get FUSION to go unless you have enormous temperature and pressure, and some way to make the thing as isothermal as possible, and contain it for long enough to get enough fusion to occur that you get a good net yield.

Li6D does not produce tritium to sustain a D-T reaction unless it's irradiated with a really high neutron flux. Heat and pressure won't do. So, what you have to have to make a fusion weapon using D-T is a lot of heat, a lot of pressure, and a big neutron flux. Plus some containment for a bit.

Remember, the only point of having Li6D at all, is that it produces tritium very quickly when bombarded with a lot of neutrons, you can stick deuterium to it, and it's stable at room temperature. The entire goal is to turn as much of it as you can into tritium so you can sustain a D-T reaction. Other than that, it has no real use.

Still, I am wondering if, provided Schumann's "bazooka effect" IS, at least in theory, a viable way to detonate some kind of nuclear or thermonuclear explosion, if at least some of the Li-6D indicated in the S-T schematic might have been induced to fission, even if it was nowhere near as efficient as the designs that would come later, after the war.

Li6D doesn't produce tritium without neutrons. So, no.

I would think, based on bedlam's information, that any Li-6D fissioning would have been very low grade if it happened at all; here I am mainly interested in whether the "bazooka effect" is in fact viable, if it can in fact produce temperatures approaching "millions of degrees Celsius" (or if that is a mistake or misprint in the Der Spiegel piece) and if it is used in any modern A- or H- or boosted fission-bombs.

It is not viable. If you want to calculate temperatures, you can meatball it by taking the net energy yield of your explosives, and see if you applied it ALL to the material, if it's possible to raise the temperature that high. Make sure you take into account the energy required to get you through the solid->liquid and liquid->gas transitions.

I have already noted, earlier, that the Der Spiegel article's claim that there was no way Germany possessed enough HEU to have built a bomb is also doubtful if not outright false.

What facilities did they have to do the enrichment en masse? It's not impossible, but it is nasty and slow.

originally posted by: williamjpellas
A complicated detonator - presumably for use in a plutonium bomb, since the detonator mechanism for a uranium bomb is a much simpler piece of equipment - already in use by the Germans in 1943!? Why would the Germans have had the need for such a complex detonator? The timing of the allegation is also disturbing, since it corroborates the assertions of the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, that the Germans were using some type of weapon of mass destruction on the Eastern Front ca. 1943, in the region of Kursk.

This seems to sort of come from nowhere without any sort of introductory info. Also, the term "detonator" is often used incorrectly, so I'm not sure if you're talking about the explosives, the initiator or the fuzing/detonator or some combo.

But, you can indeed have just as complex a driver and detonator arrangement for a uranium or mixed Pu-U bomb as you do for a plutonium based weapon. A compression uranium weapon is not only possible, but common. No-one uses gun type weapons anymore. AQ Khan's design is a compression uranium weapon.

originally posted by: williamjpellas
..."putting out a new explosive in aerial bombs. He has even heard that the container of the explosive is spherical." (Rose, op. cit.) A spherical detonator, of course, is the type of implosion-compression detonator used to assemble the critical mass of a plutonium bomb."

And pretty much any other modern weapon, no matter what you're using for the fissiles. It is especially necessary if you don't have as much fissile mass as you might otherwise want, and if you're boosting, it presents a way of doing that that's less pesky than others.

a reply to: Bedlam

bedlam, many thanks for weighing in, I do appreciate your detailed information.

Okay, so the "bazooka effect" is NOT a viable method of producing a nuclear or thermonuclear detonation, and the "millions of degrees" mentioned in the Der Spiegel article is not achievable via chemical explosive means. Which would mean at least two factually incorrect statements in that article, and that's before we discuss uranium enrichment. Is that correct?

Regarding Nazi Germany's uranium enrichment capabilities during the War, the most reliable (though not the only) information I have come across points to two individuals and one company. The two individuals were Paul Harteck, who created a "uranium sluice" separator that IIRC was a type of, and/or variation of, a centrifuge, and Claus Clusius, an industrial chemist who produced what is generally regarded as the first practical method of uranium separation / enrichment, the "Clusius tube"---the basis for thermal diffusion separators. Thermal diffusion works, but is torturously slow and as far as I know the Germans quickly moved beyond it. I mention it here because it came first and because the British MAUD committee and also the Japanese Riken Institute atomic bomb project used Clusius tube technology in their project concepts (the Japanese went so far as to build a prototype and then a handful of much improved production machines).

The company was I G Farben, which apparently used slave labor from one or more concentration camps to build some kind of production scale enrichment facility or facilities---I don't yet have enough specifics to give more precise information, sorry. But I can tell you that I G Farben appears repeatedly in the research into this topic and not for no reason.

Didn't know that A Q Khan's Pakistani bombs were uranium-implosion, but implosion would seem to be the detonation method of choice for most atomic or thermonuclear weapons these days. If memory serves the South African program utilized gun-type bombs and was planning to upgrade them with some form of boosted fission before the project was abandoned. But otherwise, yes, implosion is the standard today.

Farrell's comment doesn't necessarily come out of thin air, though I agree that he doesn't do enough in the passage I quoted to give sufficient context and background. It is possible that the American detonator mentioned by Alcazar de Velasco was for the Little Boy bomb and was not related to the Fat Man device, so Farrell might be making an unjustified leap in that passage. But then again he might not. I asked Wilcox about this point and he said he had to check his notes to see if he could tell me what de Velasco was getting at with his statement, but Bob is working on another book right now and didn't really have time to dig that out of his files.

originally posted by: williamjpellas
a reply to: Bedlam

bedlam, many thanks for weighing in, I do appreciate your detailed information.

Okay, so the "bazooka effect" is NOT a viable method of producing a nuclear or thermonuclear detonation, and the "millions of degrees" mentioned in the Der Spiegel article is not achievable via chemical explosive means. Which would mean at least two factually incorrect statements in that article, and that's before we discuss uranium enrichment. Is that correct?

Correct. The salient points are:

1) shaped charge explosives such as the ones which I believe you're talking about rarely exceed 500C, much less millions of degrees

2) if you do a rough calculation of the number of joules in any reasonable amount of chemical explosive, you do not have enough to raise the temperature of a decent mass of Li6D to anywhere near millions of degrees, and that's biasing EVERY loss in your favor

3) Li6D is not conventionally explosive in any way

4) in order to convert Li6D to a mixture of D-T, you have to have a huge neutron flux. Without the conversion, no fusion, and you might as well use modeling clay. You will not have that with a conventional explosive, and for the density of flux required to convert the Li6 to helium and tritium while the compression is still going on, you need another nuke.

Regarding Nazi Germany's uranium enrichment capabilities during the War, the most reliable (though not the only) information I have come across points to two individuals and one company. The two individuals were Paul Harteck, who created a "uranium sluice" separator that IIRC was a type of, and/or variation of, a centrifuge, and Claus Clusius, an industrial chemist who produced what is generally regarded as the first practical method of uranium separation / enrichment, the "Clusius tube"---the basis for thermal diffusion separators. Thermal diffusion works, but is torturously slow and as far as I know the Germans quickly moved beyond it.

I haven't seen the sluice concept. A Clusius tube cannot separate uranium isotopes, and in general there are no really successful ways to do thermal diffusion separation on uranium at 1G. Gas diffusion works, of course, but again, it's a big nasty plant that would be sort of obvious if we had found it. Mass spectroscopy works but is not very efficient, and we used it mostly as a sort of post process. Centrifuges are good, but again, hard to miss and I never heard that we found any. There are maybe three other ways that I won't discuss, one of which was known at the time but not pursued, but it does work. I am not sure Nazi Germany would have discovered the other two.

I mention it here because it came first and because the British MAUD committee and also the Japanese Riken Institute atomic bomb project used Clusius tube technology in their project concepts (the Japanese went so far as to build a prototype and then a handful of much improved production machines).

And then they found the Clusius coefficient for uranium was about as close to zero as could be, and thus the Clusius tube was a no-go.

It is possible that the American detonator mentioned by Alcazar de Velasco was for the Little Boy bomb and was not related to the Fat Man device, so Farrell might be making an unjustified leap in that passage. But then again he might not. I asked Wilcox about this point and he said he had to check his notes to see if he could tell me what de Velasco was getting at with his statement, but Bob is working on another book right now and didn't really have time to dig that out of his files.

Again, a lot of people use the word in ways I would not. But I've heard it used for the initiator, the explosive drivers, the actual detonator (a slapper, generally), and the fuzing system. Also used for the approach to the fuzing, one point, two point, multipoint etc. If someone tells me the detonation system was complex, it's sort of a tossup on what they're referring to. Heck, some weapon designs use magnetic flyer plates to get that nice flat wavefront.

FWIW, Alcoa used to be the source of detonators for nukes.

A Clusius tube cannot separate uranium isotopes, and in general there are no really successful ways to do thermal diffusion separation on uranium at 1G.

Both the Manhattan Project and the WWII Japanese atomic bomb project(s) built and used thermal diffusion separators. The American machinery was concentrated at the "S-50" plant and was based on the earlier US Navy work of a man named Philip Abelson. Note the photo of the S-50 facility.

www.osti.gov...

Over on the Axis History Forum thread re: the Japanese projects, a poster once gave me grief by claiming that thermal diffusion couldn't be used at all to separate U-235 from U-238. He cited the Smyth Report as his evidence, but he was speaking of LIQUID thermal diffusion and NOT gaseous thermal diffusion, which (like the gaseous diffusion K-25 plant) used uranium hexafluoride gas as feedstock at the start of the separation / enrichment process.

So, I am not sure if you mean that a Clusius Tube, unmodified and all by itself, cannot perform U-235 separation, or if you mean that thermal diffusion doesn't work, period. T-D does work, though it is slow and not the most efficient way to do it.

Interestingly, there is a passage in Mark Walker's book, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939-49, in which German lack of success with the Clusius-Dickel method is mentioned. It's on page 53:

books.google.com... &hl=en&sa=X&ei=zptVVN-eDcabgwTKvoCQCg&ved=0CDIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=paul%20harteck%20uranium%20sluice&f=false

There is much discussion of Harteck's work, but---confusingly, as is so often the case with nuclear weapons physics, engineering and history---some sources refer to a "centrifuge", others to an "ultracentrifuge" and still others to the "uranium sluice" that I mentioned before, though another name often appears in connection with the "sluice": Dr. Erich Bagge. A google search using the terms "Paul Harteck uranium sluice" turned up a number of interesting articles and books. Farrell appears again, BTW.

www.google.com...=active&q=paul+harteck+uranium+sluice

Wikipedia gives the following description of the "uranium sluice"; according to the bibliography the description comes from Walker's book.

Dr. Bagge developed a gaseous uranium enrichment device (Isotopenschleuse or isotope sluice)[3] for enriching the U-235 isotope content of uranium in 1944, using three methods; centrifugal force, electromagnetism and thermal diffusion. It was built by BAMAG-MEGUIN under the direction of Kurt Diebner.

There's our friend Diebner again. Karlsch is correct to point to Diebner, the Heereswaffenamt, and Diebner's circle in general and away from Heisenberg and most of the members of the "Uranium Club" in terms of who got farthest down the road to nuclear weapons in Nazi Germany. Anyway it appears from Walker's description that the "uranium sluice" was actually called an "isotope sluice" (in German: Isotopenschleuse). It was a machine that attempted to combine features found in centrifuges, electromagnetic separators (like Calutrons) and thermal diffusion machines, and to combine them in some way that would be synergistic and thus more efficient than any of those methods were on their own. Bagge went on to patent this or a similar machine in 1955 but it apparently never entered widespread use. Perhaps the state of the art had passed it up by that point in time.