pdf - WHALE

This article, coming as it does a mere two days after the bombing of
Nagasaki, and almost a year since the actual alert in Britain was
called, deserves careful scrutiny.
First, and most obviously, the alert in Britain was apparently
conducted entirely in secret, as law enforcement, defense, and
medical personnel were placed on high alert. The reason for
security is obvious, since to have signaled a public alert would have
notified the Germans that there were Allied spies close enough to
the German bomb program to know about its tests.
Second, the site of the alleged test - Norway - is unusual in that
the timing of the test would place it a full two years after the British
commando raid on the Norsk heavy water plant at Ryukon. This
might indicate two things:
(1) It might indicate that Hitler's interest in maintaining troops
in Norway had more to do with the German atom bomb
project than anything else, since, if the report was accurate
to begin with, it would indicate a large scale German atom
bomb effort was underway there;
(2) Conversely, the report may have been deliberately
inaccurate, i.e., there may really have been a test, but one
that took place somewhere else.
Third, the presumed "alert" continued from August 1944 "for
several months," that is, the alert could conceivably have stretched
into October, i.e., into the time frame of the test mentioned in
Zinsser's affidavit. Thus, the news account indicates something
else: Allied intelligence was aware, and genuinely fearful, of
German atom bomb testing.
Fourth, the article mentions that the test concerned a bomb
launched from a "catapult". The V-l "buzz bomb", the first
generation of the cruise missile, was launched from large steamdriven
catapults. Putting two and two together, then, the "Norway"
test may have been a test of an atom bomb delivery system based
on the V-l, or of an atom bomb itself, or possibly both an atom
bomb and its delivery system.
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