I read about that somewhere. I think in one of the labs newsletters. And they eventually did get caught doing this. Not sure if it was the same person but the two halves met, there was huge flash of radiation and the guy holding them died from radiation poisoning.

Slovenian Guest:

Good video. I wonder if the Nazi bell written about by Nick Cook was really about some different way of making plutonium??? He says it was ant-gravity but I’m not really buying that. At the same time I do believe there is a such a thing as an Inertia drive that pushes against the inertia of the universe and expels no matter like a rocket. I just don’t see how the bell being built as reported by Cook would do that.

Well, that connects some dots and adds some data I didn’t know.

At this point, I think I am convinced: The Germans absolutely did have an atomic bomb program, and they were a lot closer than we’ve been told. That detail about the patents in Munich is telling; nowhere in the literature that I’ve found have I seen that bit about the patents being filed by the Germans on the Thuringia track.

Fascinating. I wonder why they have been so careful about denial? Is it, perhaps, because the Pu track can be done a lot more easily than the enriched Uranium one, and they were working even then to make proliferation a lot harder? Have the Iranians, for example, been going down the enrichment track because of this, while the Israelis knew about the Pu track, and made use of it?

mean, still… You look at the whole set of numbers on the V-1 and V-2, and you’re left incredulous. Each one of those damn rockets cost about what a B-24 did, with a proportionate impact for the entire program on the German wartime economy being larger than the US B-29 and Manhattan Project combined… All to build a one-shot delivery system for a ton of high explosives? WTF?

You make a lot of sense.

The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion. Under Slotin’s own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used and the only thing preventing the closure was the blade of a standard straight screwdriver manipulated in Slotin’s other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be “dead within a year” if they continued performing the test in that manner.

I think this also. I’ve read a bunch of what could be whacky stuff about this and some not so whacky.

There’s first person accounts of large blast the Germans did but they could have been fuel air explosives.

The Japanese I believe very much had a nuclear program that was almost successful. The book I commented on combined with some other data. Namely the kamikaze suicide aircraft program and this aircraft carrying submarine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

This thing cost a fortune and as far as I can see had no use but to carry nukes.

There’s a book about this: Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb.

According to the author he interviewed a scientist that worked on the program and he said they made one bomb which was tested successfully off the coast of North Korea a few weeks before the American bomb was dropped. Notably where NK made their nukes is the same place the Japanese were said to have done so.

The British built up some CW stocks, but Churchill decided not to deploy them unless the Germans did so first.

I’ve never seen anything about the reasoning on the Soviet side.

Plus, I don’t think that the V-2 ballistic missile would have done very well, with a liquid cargo as a warhead. It took a lot of work for the Soviets to develop a SCUD that could carry such, and it wasn’t at all easy for Saddam–I don’t think he ever really got that working, TBH. Even with Bull’s able help…

No, if I had to wager on whatever it was they thought they had going, I’d bet on a “Dirty Bomb” sort of affair, or a dry poison. Maybe even an atomic weapon of some sort, based on a track we officially don’t know about.

Friend of mine from the Iraq days was an NBC survey expert, and his highly unofficial claim to me was that when he’d been involved in going into Eastern Germany and Poland after the Wall came down and doing survey work, there were some very, very strange signs around areas of suspected Nazi weapons research. As in, they found radioactive decay remnants that you’d expect to find around a low-yield atomic weapon, indicating that something like that might have been tested.

Problem was, after close to fifty years of Soviet occupation, there was no real way of attributing what those signatures meant–The official explanation was that the stuff they found came from things the Soviets had moved from their own test sites into those areas, or that the Soviets had done testing in the area themselves.

Nobody wants to challenge the accepted version of things, but I have some issues with the “official version” of events during the aftermath of the war. I find it interesting that the Soviets glommed onto all the Japanese facilities in North Korea, and shipped them off for study and use, along with a bunch of the people who worked there. You look at the speed with which the Soviets managed to develop their weapons, and the question comes to mind, just exactly how much did they do themselves, and how much of a leg up did they get by way of looting German and Japanese facilities.

Somewhere, years ago, I read a book that outlined this whole list of known Japanese and German physicists who were well-known and publishing before the war, and who vanished within the chaos. There was a ton of talent there, that could very well have wound up under Soviet control, and which might argue for there being a bit more to the German and Japanese programs than we’ve been told.

You can only see the bare bones of an alternate narrative to the one we commonly accept, but there’s enough there to make one wonder.

I mean, still… You look at the whole set of numbers on the V-1 and V-2, and you’re left incredulous. Each one of those damn rockets cost about what a B-24 did, with a proportionate impact for the entire program on the German wartime economy being larger than the US B-29 and Manhattan Project combined… All to build a one-shot delivery system for a ton of high explosives? WTF? If I were sitting in a meeting where that was outlined, I’d have done a few back-of-the-briefing-paper calculations, and raised my hand to go “Uhmmm… Guys…?”. I can’t bring myself to believe that that many Germans were so besotted with von Braun’s vision and Nazi ideology that nobody on their side did those calculations and asked those questions.

I mean, yeah… They were all nuts, by any rational standard, but… That nuts?