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david irving Secretly Overheard:
forget me,” said Diebner. “I have got good connections there. As
for Dr. Korsching, Major Rittner noted, “[He] has often expressed
annoyance at the Anglophile behaviour of some of his colleagues.”
Much of their conversation centred on the little technical information
released by the Allies on August 8, 1945 about the making
of the uranium (Hiroshima) and plutonium (Nagasaki) bombs.
Bagge, talking about “plutonium” – a name coined by the Allies
– said: “This would mean that they had a running and stabilised
Maschine. On the other hand they say that they have not got one.
Therefore it is still difficult to believe.” (They were still unaware of
the use of graphite as a moderator in atomic piles.)
Heisenberg was also frankly puzzled by the small size of the
bomb: “I do not see how the [chain] reaction can take place in eight
pounds of something, since the mean free paths are fairly long.
They have always got free paths of 4 cms. In eight pounds they will
surely get no chain reaction whatsoever. But still it may not necessarily
be true, what is written in the newspapers.”
“Yes,” said Wirtz. “But I do believe that they have got it and I feel
sure that the bomb is not big.”
On the next day, August 9, Heisenberg did some calculations on
the size, and still drew a blank. “Well how have they actually done
it?” he snorted in frustration to Harteck. “I find it is a disgrace if
we, the Professors who had worked on it, cannot at least work out
how they did it.”
Harteck suggested the Allies might have separated several kilos
of protactinium, a tiny radioactive by-product of the manufacture
of radium. (Heisenberg calculated that 140,000 tons of uranium ore
would produce 20 kilos of protactinium). Heisenberg said, “They
have quite obviously worked on a scale of quite fantastic proportions.”
Harteck believed they had produced the explosive from an
atomic pile.
“If they have made it with a Maschine,” Heisenberg pointed out,
“then there is the fantastically difficult problem that they have had
to carry out chemical processes [to separate the plutonium] with
Colonel Friedrich Geist, Speer’s chief of technical research.
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007