pdf - WHALE

(3) At least three German technologies were arguably more
efficient and technologically advanced than their American
counterparts:
(a) Bagge and Korsching's "isotope sluice";
(b) Harteck's centrifuges and ultra-centrifuges;
(c) Von Ardenne's modified cyclotrons, the "Ardenne
source";
(4) At least one known facility was large enough in terms of its
physical size, labor requirements, and electrical consumption,
to have conceivably been sued as a large separation facility,
the I.G. Farben "Buna plant" at Auschwitz. The case is strong
because:
(a) No Buna was ever produced there in spite of thousands of
scientists, technicians, engineers, contract and slave
laborers working there;
(b) The site was close to the uranium ore fields of the Czech
and German Sudentenland, being located in Polish Silesia;
(c) The site was close to plentiful water supplies, also needed
in isotope enrichment;
(d) It was close to rail and road networks;
(e) It was close to plentiful (slave) labor;
(f) And finally -though not yet discussed - it was close to
several large underground secret weapons production and
research facilities in lower Silesia, and was close to one of
the two alleged test sites of German atom bomb tests
during the war;
(5) it may reasonably be assumed, in addition to the "Buna
factory", that the Germans constructed smaller facilities in the
area for separation and enrichment of isotope, using the Buna
plant's production as feedstock for these other facilities. 27
27 Powers, op. cit., p. 74. Powers also mentions another problematical fact
concerning the Clusius-Dickel method of thermal diffusion, that we will
encounter in chapter 7: "One pound of U-235 was not a daunting figure, and
Frisch calculated that 1,000,000 Clusius-Dickel tubes for thermal diffusion of
uranium isotopes could produce it in a matter of weeks. Such a large industrial
effort would not be cheap, but the two men concluded, 'Even if this plant costs
as much as a battleship, it would be worth having.'"
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