pdf - WHALE

through the Oak Ridge facility would enrich uranium from
aproximately a .7 percent concentration in around 10-12 percent,
and thus the decision was taken to use the Oak Ridge production as
feedstock for Earnest O. Lawrence's far more efficient and effective
"beta calutrons," which were essentially a cyclotron with separation
tanks, using electromagnetic means to enrich and separate isotope
via mass spectrography. 18 Consequently, one may assume that if a
similar quantity of Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluices" were
used en masse, the result would have been a more rapid build-up of
enriched uranium feedstock. Similarly, the more efficient German
techno logy may also have allowed for relatively smaller separation
facilities.
Good as it was, however, the isotope sluice was not Germany's
most efficient or technologically advanced means of uranium
enrichment. This was the centrifuge, and its progeny - designed by
nuclear chemist Paul Hartek - the ultracentrifuge. 19 American
engineers, of course, knew of this possibility, but there was a
significant drawback they had to face: the highly corrosive uranium
gases used in this technology made it unfeasible to rely on
centrifuges as a means of enrichment. On the German side,
however, this was a solved problem. A special alloy called Bondur
was developed precisely for use in centrifuges. 20 But even
centrifuge technology was not, however, the best available method
the Germans had.
18
Hydrick, op. cit., p. 25.
19
The same technology was captured by the Soviet Union and further
perfected in its own bomb program. On the post-war German side, such ultracentrifuges
were provided by the Siemens company and other German firms
first to South Africa in its own bomb program (q.v. Rogers and Cervenka, The
Nuclear Axis: West Germany and South Africa, pp. 299-310). In other words,
the technology is not only originally German, but is advanced enough to be
employed today. It should be noted that, as of the mid-1970s, several of the
Germans involved in the corporate development of centrifuge enrichment
facilities for the Federal Republic (West Germany) had ties to the third Reich's
bomb project, among them Prof. Karl Winnacker, a former member of the I.G.
larben board (p. 300).
20
Hydrick, op. cit., p. 25.
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