ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 179
officer trained by the FBI, arrived at the locked steel door of a box-like
concrete entranceway in the side of a cliff above the picturesque German
town of Haigerloch, near Stuttgart.
Pash, who had been in a race against the French to get there, shot off
the lock and found himself in a chamber with a concrete pit about ten feet
in diameter in the middle. Within the pit hung a heavy metal shield
covering the top of a thick metal cylinder. The latter contained a potshaped
vessel, also of heavy metal, about four feet below the floor level.
What Pash had discovered is what history describes as one of only two
German reactors assembled, or partially assembled, before the end of the
war—the other, at Kummersdorf, being captured by the Russians.
Using heavy water as a moderator and 664 cubes of metallic uranium
as its fuel, the Haigerloch reactor had achieved a sevenfold neutron
multiplication just a few weeks earlier.
Heisenberg had calculated that a 50 percent increase in the size of the
reactor would produce a sustained nuclear reaction.
Had he done so, Hitler would have had the means to enrich enough
fissionable material to construct a bomb.
This is the official view of the extent of the German atomic bomb
program and it is terrifying enough. The Nazis had come close to
developing a weapon.
But look a little to the left and right of the official view, as I had before
leaving London, and an even more frightening scenario pulled into view.
On May 19, a German U-boat, the U-234, docked at the U.S. Navy port
of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, having surrendered to a U.S. Navy
destroyer two days earlier off the eastern seaboard. Her commander had
received high-level orders to sail from Kristiansand in Nazi-held Norway
to Japan on April 16.
On board, the Americans found an Aladdin's Cave of technical
equipment and blueprints, most of them related to advanced German jet
aircraft. The U-234 was also ferrying technical experts, a nuclear
technician among them.
This fact alone tipped off U.S. investigators that U-234 was no ordinary
U-boat. A secondary examination showed she had been modified
to carry a very dangerous cargo. Set in her six adapted mine-laying tubes
were 560 kilos of uranium held in ten gold-lined containers. The loading
manifest maintained that it was uranium oxide, the state in which
uranium is found when it is extracted from the earth and safe enough to
carry around in a paper bag. That the U-234's converted mine-laying
tubes were gold-lined indicates that its cargo was emitting gamma