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david irving Secretly Overheard:
that only Heavy Water (water in which the hydrogen atom has an
added proton, becoming Deuterium) could be used as a moderator
in a reactor or Uranmaschine. Heavy water was however difficult
and costly to distil – the Nazis controlled only one hydrogen plant,
in Norway, capable of manufacturing heavy water. This deficiency
dogged the entire German operation, while in Chicago in 1942 Enrico
Fermi successfully started up an experimental American atomic
pile, built of graphite blocks and uranium.
In the United States the U.S. Army corps of engineers was put
in charge of the vastly expensive “Manhattan project” to separate
enough of the uranium-235 isotope to build an atomic bomb, and
to separate enough plutonium from an atomic pile to build a different
kind of atomic bomb.
Originally, the émigré German scientists working on this
project had hoped to see these weapons dropped on Berlin and
other German cities, but when Hitler died on April 30, 1945, the
American bombs had still not been perfected. The first American
atomic bomb would be tested in New Mexico in July; a “20,000ton”
uranium bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on
August 6, and a plutonium bomb – the last atomic device left – on
Nagasaki a few days later.
General Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan project, had sent
Dr. Samuel Goudsmit to Europe late in 1944 as head of the ALSOS
Mission, to track down the Heisenberg team – of which British Intelligence
had learned – and their documents. It became apparent
that the German atomic effort had been hamstrung not only by
the shortage of heavy water, but also by the rivalries between the
individual scientists, whose ugly primadonna-like qualities would
boil to the surface again during their year-long captivity in Britain.
Heisenberg had jealously controlled the Reich’s limited stocks of
heavy water; as a theoretician he looked down on the experimental
experts like Dr. Kurt Diebner, head of the Heereswaffenamt’s
atomic research effort. Göring had appointed a Munich professor,
Walther Gerlach, as his Bevollmächtigter für die Kernphysikalische
Forschung des Vierjahresplans; but Gerlach was a lazy, good-natured
academic who ran rings round the Party and used the new
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007