There are things still being found such as that underground factory near Vienna.
I don’t believe the final story has been asked and answered yet.
Also the UK MoD and DOD still have classified information still secret until 2045.
Why?
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This kind of thing is actually in my wheelhouse (former USAF ICBM Operations officer). A lot of people think history is somehow clouded in mystery, but it’s not. Two good books on the topic are Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Nuclear Express by Thomas Reed.
Rhodes’s book is exhaustingly detailed about the program. Most people don’t realize that nuclear fission of uranium was not some mystery, scientists all over the world worked together and compared notes via scientific journals all the way up through the '30s. Once they realized that an independently sustained fission event could lead to a weapon of immense power, the race was on.
Germany, led by Werner Heisenberg, pursued a heavy water path that may have been successful had they not been disrupted (twice) by a combination of British and Norwegian commandos, see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/06/winter-fortress-neal-bascomb-heroes-of-telemark-nazi-atomic-bomb-heavy-water/ or watch The Heavy Water War for a dramatization.
The British had the Tube Alloys program, which eventually started working alongside the American Manhattan Project.
The Japanese were also interested but made a political gamble to not pursue it. They, wrongly as it turned out, believed that the Americans would not have the industrial infrastructure to pursue such a program while also fighting a war on two fronts.
The Soviets were also pursuing it, but relied heavily on espionage to get there.
As far as the two bombs deployed, it was a hedge by using two competing designs of a “gun-type” assembly and an “implosion-type.” The first used Uranium-235 refined through gas diffusion, a process perfected by the US during the Manhattan Project (at great expense). The gun-type was a much more inefficient design, but the engineering was so simple that we never actually tested it before dropping it on Hiroshima.
The second type, implosion, used Plutonium-239 produced via reactors at Oak Ridge, Tennessee (the experimental “X” reactor used to test the production theory) and the full-scale reactors at Hanford, Washington. The engineering was so complicated that many of the engineers thought it was impossible to do correctly, right up until the successful Trinity test.
Have you read Broken Arrow? I have not yet, it’s on my list…
That’s the one about the 1961 B-52 crash, right? I’ve not read it, but am familiar with the incident.
Another one to check out is Command and Control by Eric Schlossler. I take issues with some of his points, but it covers a lot of ground. Much of th ebook is spent on the Damascus incident with a Titan II ICBM around Little Rock AFB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion). When I was a lieutenant, I worked for an O-6 who was a young enlisted security forces member on the ground there.
My father worked on nukes while he was in the Air Force. They have reunions every year and he was even the president of their group for a while. The stories these guys tell run from terrifying to hilarious. The number of almost disasters I have heard about at these events…
Partly, yes. The B-52 incident happened in my mom’s hometown. Had that last safety not did it’s thing, I would not be here (nor a whole lotta other people). Fascinating stuff. There was a PBS show about the Little Rock incident based on the book, quite good.
My father was in the Soviet Air Force working on TU95s in Uzyn. Those TU95 would fly with live nukes all the time. Wonder how many of them has accidents we will never know about?
Seriously? Is your father still around? I bet my dad would love to talk to him.
The US did not like to talk about AC crashes with nukes, you just know the USSR would clamp down on it.
Action word: JERICHO
I bet it’d be fun and educational if we could get him and my old prof the F-106 pilot together… I’ve long thought that if they hadn’t all been cut up and coulda been stripped of “national security secrets” it would have been appropriate for Wright-Pat and Monino to put together a joint display at each museum with an old A- or B-model BUFF and a first-gen Bear parked nose-to-nose and a mockup alert-shack behind each plane showing the Cold War aircrew experience for both sides.
The Bear Foxtrot reference brings back some memories for me.
These guys? https://usafnukes.com
Yeah, they are flying back from Arizona right now. Went to Sedona to get the **** out of NJ for a week.
Dude, we didn’t know about Chernobyl until my aunt called us from New Jersey, and we were in Kiev.
Such a good show. Sucks it only had 1.5 seasons.
I am sure if they [the museum] got enough money, the Russians would sell them anything, including a TU95. They will sell you a MiG29 for sure.
True, my thinking was more of a joint “Cold War Memorial” funded by both governments, designed by both museums and built on both sites remembering the men who kept an uneasy peace.
Yeah, no. While U234 did have Uranium oxide onboard, it was about 1200 lbs at an unknown concentration, and was also used (and evidently still is) as a catalyst for various fuel products:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-234
Estimates are that it was about 20% of what you’d need for a bomb.
Also ignores the 1200 TONS of abnormally high grade Uranium ore that we had in the States in 1940 courtesy of the Belgian Congo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe
Cite your sources, be willing to link out to articles, books or public research. You’ve got as much credibility as Alex Jones selling weight loss drugs at this point…
Damn, that’s seriously disturbing.
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I had almost forgotten about “By Dawns Early Light”. From what I remember I think I liked it.
Sure. We didn’t get the actual story of Hitler’s remains until the wall came down, but the real story compared to the 1945 Russian version wasn’t dramatically different.
And just because the Brits classify something “ultra double special secret” isn’t evidence of life changing reveal to come anymore than the complete release of of the Warren commission didn’t really offer all the government secrets Oliver Stone was hoping for.
There are some small things that will probably remain always unknown, but I think the biggest evidence that Germany never had a completed device or anything even close to it is the fact that it didn’t get dropped on us in Bastogne or some other location. Something like an atomic bomb, even in a 1 kiloton yield, was exactly the kind of wonder weapon Hitler was hoping for and dreaming about. If it existed at all in any form it would have absolutely been used and the argument is only would he have dropped it on us or the Russians.