Actual German nuke tests in 1945?
 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...1154%2C00.html

for all of you who'll be interested - UB, leslie, telboy etc - this has just popped up.

if true, this will make for some fundamental re-appraisals of WW2 from D-Day to Berlin and will help further justify the any and all means necessary the allies took to end the war absolutely as fast as possible.

if true, it shows just how fine the margins of victory and defeat really were. an operational, nuclear-tipped V2 right when the nazis were most desperate? christ alive.

this story is well worth watching...

I had read many times about Heisenberg's reactor in Gottow but this is the first I have heard of actual tests.


I guess this throws the whole debate open again as to Heisenberg's true intentions during the war.


Thanks for posting the link!

no worries - good point about heisenberg. he always claimed that he deliberately drew the research into a cul-de-sac in covert protest at the nazi regime.

Indeed he did! Although it was probably a lack of time and resourses that stopped him completing the project.

The transcripts from the captured scientists that were held over in the UK, show they were all baffled and suprised when the USA announced the detination of their bomb in Japan.

My money has always been on him trying his best and failing.


Wouldn't it be fantastic to travel back and hear that discussion between him and Bohr in Copenhagen? Their close relationship was finished at that point. Bohr was even quoted as saying that Heisenberg made his political views clear in that meeting - ie Germany was going to win.

any links to this? or recommended books to read ?

One that comes to mind is Brighter than a thousand suns which deals with the German and Allied efforts.

Not got this one but it was on my list. I dare say it will be revised now!


Uncertainty: Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...079650-7514215

Do a search on Amazon for Heisenberg. Most of the books I have are physics books written by or about him and not specifically about the bomb. Other than that google search, you are bound to turn something up. :)

Stuck at work for another 15 mins..........
 

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11a.htm

The ten captured scientists interned at Farm Hall, England, included: Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Kurt Diebner, C.F. von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Erich Bagge, Horst Korsching.

The scientists have just listened to a BBC report on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

KORSCHING: That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.

GERLACH: You can't say that as far as the uranium group is concerned.

KORSCHING: Not officially of course.

GERLACH (shouting): Not unofficially either! Don't contradict me! There are far too many other people here who know.

HAHN: Of course we were unable to work on that scale.

HEISENBERG: One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done.

BAGGE: It wasn't much earlier here either.

...

HEISENBERG: On the other hand the whole heavy-water business, which I did everything I could to further, cannot produce an explosive.

HARTECK: Not until the engine [reactor] is running.

HAHN: They seem to have an explosive before making the engine and now they say, "In the future we will build engines."

HARTECK: If it is a fact that an explosive can be produced either by means of the mass spectrograph--we would never have done it as we could never have employed 56,000 workmen. ...

C.F. VON WEIZSAECKER: How many people were working on the V-1 and V-2 rockets?

DIEBNER: Thousands worked on that.

HEISENBERG: We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.

WEIZSAECKER: I believe the reason we didn't do it was because all the physicists didn't want to do it, on principle. If we had wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded!

HAHN: I don't believe that, but I am thankful we didn't succeed.

...

HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.

DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.

WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.

HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.

...

WEIZSAECKER: I don't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed, but we must admit that we did not want to succeed. ...

WIRTZ: I think it characteristic that the Germans made the discovery and didn't use it, whereas the Americans have used it. I must say I didn't think the Americans would dare to use it.



Where to Find the Complete Transcripts



The American copy of the transcripts, originally sent to Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, are now located in National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, in Record Group 77, Manhattan Engineer District.

Published versions include:

Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts, with an introduction by Sir Charles Frank (Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). The raw, unedited transcripts.

Bernstein, Jeremy, ed., Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996). Edited with a rather contentious commentary by Bernstein.

Hoffmann, Dieter, ed., Operation Epsilon: Die Farm-Hall-Protokolle oder Die Angst der Alliierten vor der deutschen Atombombe, Wilfried Sczepan, trans. (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1993). A translation back into German, but without Heisenberg's important speech on bomb construction on August 14, 1945.

Might be able to get a copy at a second hand book shop.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...315118-8107860


Out of print. :(

yup, definitely - try "hitler's scientists" by john cornwell. recent, long but fascinating and accessible. it's also got heisenberg's PoW transcripts as posted by ubik in greater detail.

on an associated topic, you might want to try "the hunt for zero point" by ex-sunday times & jane's defence editor nick cook. covers off some of the other v-weapon programmes. no spoilers, but it includes an absolute jaw-dropper about alleged german attempts at building a time machine at the skoda skunkworks outside prague. the experiment failed totally but managed to kill every scientist in the room by fusing them into the rock walls.

Would you believe that if you saw it in an 'Indiana Jones' film.....?

Hmm. You might also want to look at some of the other reviews of the book first, questioning sources and the motives of some of the people who provided this "earth shattering" information.

A great read but one to be taken with a healthy handful, rather than just a pinch, of salt...

Edited to say I'm referring to "Zero Point" not The Times stuff...

SB

Like I said first time I have ever heard about this test. In all the years after the war I would have expected that someone would have come forward before now and mentioned it. :)

Well whatever the truth of it, its something that I did not know about HG, thanks for the information. We may well have been even luckier than we thought!

Les

i must say it does sound rather, erm creative. but you know what they say, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. and it wouldn't be out of their scientific character to have vainly, desperately and disastrously tried some very left field things.

cook's taken a lot of knocks for the UFO stuff but i'm not sure he's a crank.

you're welcome bud.

HG - what is the title of this book that has been released?

ubik -

hitler's scientists - john cornwell (hardback)

the hunt for zero point - nick cook (paperback)

the cornwell book is exceptional and is a de facto text on the subject.

cheers.

Cheers mate :thumb:


Only ever had an interest in Heisenberg but it sounds interesting enough to have a peep.

anyone seen this? http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/...xperiment.html

Very odd. A bit too far fetched methinks though

Geezer

or this?

http://teachnet.edb.utexas.edu/~lynd.../knutfrm1.html

Just got a loan of The Hunt for Zero Point from a mate at work, looking forward to reading this...