Romersa book on Hitler’s atomic bomb programme
Tbis Guardian article sensationalizes.
Romersa book on Hitler’s atomic bomb programme
A book published in Italy today is set to reignite a smouldering controversy over how close the Nazis came to manufacturing a nuclear device in the closing stages of the second world war.
The 88 year-old author, Luigi Romersa, is the last known witness to what he and some historians believe was the experimental detonation of a rudimentary weapon on an island in the Baltic in 1944….
llied interrogators who questioned the German researchers concluded that there were vast gaps in their understanding of nuclear fission. In any case, the US had needed 125,000 people to develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, whereas Germany’s programme involved no more than a few dozen physicists, led by the Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.
But documents published recently by Mr Karlsch and an American scholar, Mark Walker of Union College, Schenectady, have punctured this consensus. Russian archives have shown that one of the German scientists lodged a patent claim for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941 and, in June, the two historians published an article in the British monthly, Physics World, that included what they claimed was the first diagram of one of the bombs Hitler’s scientists were trying to build - a device that exploited both fission and fusion.
The true novelty of Mr Karlsch’s research, though, is to have turned the spotlight off Heisenberg and onto a competing project run by one Kurt Diebner. A Nazi since 1939, Diebner had his own group at Gottow near Berlin. Mr Karlsch found evidence to show that, sponsored by Walther Gerlach of the Reich Research Council, this group abandoned its quest for an A-bomb to concentrate on a weapon made of conventional high explosives packed around a nuclear core. “It was a tactical battlefield weapon they probably wanted to use against the approaching Soviet armies,” said Professor Walker.
Could Mr Romersa have seen the detonation of an early prototype? He is not the only person to have claimed to have witnessed similar explosions…
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