Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS
it should be constructed, and each one in ignorance of
what the others were (or were not) doing. At least one
team - that led by Werner Heiscnberg, Nobel laureate
and dean of the Gentian physics community, who had
recently been appointed Director of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute at Dahlem - is reported to have
deliberately exploited the confusion which resulted to
drag its feet. Convinced that a bomb could be contructed,
Heisenberg set out to slow the process down,
and make as little actual progress as possible towards
its conclusion. Eventually, Albert Speer, Hitler's
Minister for Munitions, lost patience, and demanded
from Heisenberg a prediction of the length of time
which would be required to actually manufacture a
bomb. Heisenberg prevaricated still, but eventually
said that he believed it might be possible by 1945.
Speer decided to set up a single research project
charged with constructing a reactor. He assembled
some of the best brains in the field and asked them to
submit a budget. They requested 40,000 Rcichsmarks,
less than the cost of a single PzKpfw IV tank, and
this, more than anything, seems to have convinced
him that the project had a very low likelihood of success.
From then on, it seems, the nuclear research programme
concentrated on producing a reactor suitable
for power generation, rather than one to produce fissionable
material for a bomb. Naturally, such a power
station would inevitably produce small quantities of
fissionable material as a by-product, but it would be a
very long time before it would be possible to build a
bomb, even if the reactor worked perfectly.
Two atomic piles were eventually built, one near
Hechingen, the other near Erfurt, both using deutrium
as their moderator. Neither actually achieved a chain
reaction, largely because they were too small. By that
time - late 1944 - the infrastructure of German industry
was becoming increasingly chaotic. Such small
supplies of uranium ore as were available - from a
small field in Belgium and another in Bohemia - were
running low, and thanks to a successful bombing raid
by the RAE on the deutrium production plant in
Norway, that was in short supply too. The programme
was already dead in its infancy, and one might even
say that it was stillborn.
There was perhaps a subsidiary use of uranium as
a weapon of war under consideration. In 1943, HWA
commissioned a report from a biological laboratory
on the toxicity of radioactive material. From this it
has been widely concluded that uranium dust was to
have been employed as cargo in a conventional highexplosive
bomb or rocket warhead, but there is no
firm evidence to support this speculation and certainly
no evidence to suggest that even the most basic
experimentation ever took place outside the laboratory.
One could just as well conclude that the project
was aimed at improving worker safety.
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
Outside very special limits, suicidal attacks make little
tactical sense, and a suicidal strategy makes none
at all. Those truisms have always done more than pure
ethics or morality to control the use of one of the most
dreadful potential weapons known to man: disease.
Indeed, in limited 'experiments', where the vectors of
the disease in question could be completely controlled,
man has shown himself willing to use biological
agents of death. The US Army used it in the form
of smallpox-infected blankets distributed to native
Americans, and the Japanese did too in Manchuria in
the 1930s. But as an everyday weapon of war, it had
one enormous disadvantage: it was as likely to kill
you, in the long run, as it was to kill your enemy. That
is not to say that every country did not have its biological
warfare research establishments, but more to
suggest that much of the research carried out in them
was aimed more at providing a defence against the
agents of disease. There are persistent reports that
tests of biological agents were carried out on unwill-
Left: Like all armies, the Wehrmacht took chemical
weapons very seriously, as the protective clothing and
warning signs on this locker indicate.