President Harry S. Truman knew that one bomb would not be enough to force Japan to surrender, so he ordered two. What many don’t know is that there was a third bomb in reserve, just in case.
This third bomb had not been assembled yet, but its plutonium core—the heart of the bomb—was ready, and kept at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When it became clear a third bomb would not be necessary, nuclear scientists at Los Alamos were delirious with excitement. Here there was in their hands, the rarest of the rare material—a 6.2 kg core of pure plutonium. They probed and prod the shinny metallic sphere and subjected it to countless experiments, until two sloppy scientists nearly blew up the laboratory and ruined it for every one. Both of them were dead within days, and the core acquired the nickname “demon core”.
If we could get it there with sufficient surprise to keep Stalin from spider-holing… the Moscow subway system was actually designed as a bunker system first and mass transit second.
The Americans invented nothing. All atomic bombs came from Germany. Germany tested two uranium bombs in 1944. They sent bomb material to Japan which they tested in North Korea. The US captured a uranium bomb at one site and two plutonium bombs at another. If this bomb in question was not German, it was a copy of a German bomb and you see what happened as these scientists had no idea of what they were doing. There are tons of documentation on the German bomb in a book by Dr. Rainer Karlsch and more in books but Friedrich Georg and Thomas Mahner, Edgar Meyer and an Italian government witness to an atomic test, Luigi Romersa. It is in German language.
US physicists were working on nuclear fission in the late 30s. While I definitely see a “nuclear race” and parallel development based on multiple sources, it’s a bit disingenuous to pin all success to the Germans.
And many of our top nuke guys were Germans and Italians fleeing Hitler and Mussolini, IIRC. Japan was scary close and had some of the world’s best cyclotrons, and despite Mac lobbying for them to be relocated for Allied scientists to use the order came down to destroy them all.
Nightmare, imagine nuclear kamikazes… IIRC they even had an “Atomic Blossom” designed based on the Yokosuka MXY7 just waiting for a warhead to plug in.
I said that to my Dad one time around 1978, I might as well have pulled the pin and rolled a grenade in to the Living room. It got that heated that quick.
Why don’t you google the names I provided, read their work and you can tell us?
This is not the forum for this subject. I gave you the author’s names, some have done multiple books. There are many more than these. The only obscure reference is Luigi Romersa who was Mussolini’s representative in 1944 researching Hitler’s super weapons claims. He was present on Ruegen Island, just north of Peenemuende, in Oct. 1944 for a test of an atomic bomb. He gives his account in: Defensa, Number 76-77,August-Septmber, 1984, Gestern Nachricht, Heute Geschicte (Yesterday’s News, Today’s History) in an article titled: Die Geheimwaffen von Hitler, etws meher als (nur) Phantasie, (The German Secret Weapons of Hitler, something more than only fantasy).
Giving the Germans 100% of the credit is 100% correct as they did 100% of the work, even building the bombs themselves we dropped on Japan. But the Germans even refined the U235 we used in future projects as a shit load of it was captured in a German submarine and taken to New Hampshire after the Germans surrendered. There were many 56 kilo containers of uranium oxide U235 the compound by which they chose to transport fissionable uranium. We captured it and it was taken to Oak Ridge, TN. This submarine was U-234, originally bound for Japan. This is another subject worth googling.
A- There’s no suggestion by the author that the weapons used were nuclear weapons but were actually radiological (meaning dirty bombs - something anyone with radiological material and some explosives can make).
B- There’s no evidence to support the testing of radiological weapons on Rügen.
C- The author himself has admitted that he couldn’t prove the claims he makes in his book (and one physicist criticized his book for displaying, “a catastrophic lack of understanding of physics”. Link.
This is on top of the facts that Germany stopped development on nuclear weapons by the end of 1943 and Japanese didn’t start until Spring 1945 - and got about as far as you’d expect it to in a country under siege, starved for resources, and totally reliant on imports just to maintain production of basic war matériel like rifles.
Friedrich Georg gets nothing but Ernst Jünger’s brother, who wrote poetry; a Prussian prince who was born in 1976; a 19th Century Russian astronomer, and; an Austrian actor born in 1966.
Edgar Meyer is an American bassist born in 1960, with his own website: edgarmeyer.com.
Luigi Romersa beings us to this, which brings us back to Karlsch and his… rather shaky book.
TL;DR: Your post has a nugget of (possible) truth at it’s core, but it is - the further you get from, “the Nazis may have tested dirty bombs,” - based more on fantasy than reality.
It is astonishing how much we didn’t understand about the weapons we were testing, especially after the war. So many observers and equipment operators working way too close to the device got seriously shortened life expediencies. We almost didn’t understand radioactive fallout until it happened.
IIRC a bunch of guys in the Chicago labs drew short straws because their nuclear pile began to run away and somebody had to pull things by hand.
No the Germans didn’t build them. It really is simple when you think about it. You just don’t make a bomb, or two. You need a mind numbing amount of infrastructure to make the first one, the next 1000 are easy. That is what we did. You have it backwards, Oak Ridge made bomb material, not the other way around.
How and where did Germany get its nuclear material?
I have never believed in the Germans to have a working atomic bomb program during the war. If you look at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos labs and all the testing and resources put into the Manhattan Project it’s easy to see how a country being bombed day and night by the allies could not have pulled it off.
More importantly, they lacked a supply of heavy water necessary for the refinement process. Also their key scientists were being watched and would have been assassinated if it was believed they were engaging in serious development of atomic weapons, one of the reasons Otto Hahn and other refused to engage in weapons research for Germany.