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with Russia.”
david irving Secretly Overheard:
AFTER FIVE MONTHS of eavesdropping had yielded only minor
hauls of radium, uranium, and cash deposits, on September 23,
1945 M.I.6 hit a jackpot. The hidden microphones heard Paul Harteck,
the team’s brilliant physical chemist, secretly explain to Professor
Hahn the revolutionary and cheap process he had devised
for manufacturing heavy water.
Seizing a pad and paper, Harteck explained that it was based
on the fractional distillation of liquefied ammonia (NH 3 ). In his
notes he had written only “According to the new process from the
Institute of Physical Chemistry – Method for Heavy Water – an
apparatus will be built at a cost of 1.2 million marks, to be capable
of producing five tons of D 2 0” annually. I.G. Farben had okayed
his designs, but as recently as February 1945 the Reich had denied
him the means. “You have a column,” explained Harteck, sketching
three giant tubes, one within the other, “in which there are five or
ten tons of ammonia. . . One stage is 2.4 per cent [enrichment]. You
would have to have a column about 80 metres high if you want to
get twelvefold enrichment.”
“Would you put twelve columns side by side?”, asked Hahn.
“No, one giant column. Diameter about two metres, height
eighty meters.”
For an energy input of 2,000 kilowatts Harteck calculated he
could manufacture five tons of heavy water per annum. “The process
is cheaper confirmed Harteck, after concluding the technical
details. “. . . Yet apparently these people [the Americans] work with
graphite-blocks [as moderator in atomic piles] and not with heavywater.
“ He proposed to ask Major Rittner to let him meet top British
physical-chemists like Eric K. Rideal or H. S. Taylor. “If they
have not already got this [ammonia] process,” said Harteck, “then I
certainly would not show up badly.”
“Agreed,” said Hahn, but added sardonically: “You talk to them
then – and they say to you, ’Yes, we knew that long ago. ’ And they
go out and take out the patent afterwards.”
“Oh, a patent application is all the same to me,” said Harteck.
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007