Tài liệu The Virus House (Germany’s Atomic Research and Allied Counter-measures) docx

LINK DOWNLOAD MIỄN PHÍ TÀI LIỆU "Tài liệu The Virus House (Germany’s Atomic Research and Allied Counter-measures) docx": http://123doc.vn/document/1046138-tai-lieu-the-virus-house-germany-s-atomic-research-and-allied-counter-measures-docx.htm

  

Contents
Author’s Introduction 
  Solstice 
  A Letter to the War Office 
  The Plutonium Alternative 
  An Error of Consequence 
  Item Sixteen on a Long Agenda 
  Freshman 
  Vemork Attacked 
  An Unexpected Result 
  The Cynic in Command 
  The Alsos Mission Strikes 
  To the Brink of Criticality 
  The German Achievement 
Notes and Sources 
Index 
  

Illustrations
Professor Otto Hahn  page 
Professor Abraham Esau  page 
Professor Paul Harteck  page 
Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker  page 
Article in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung by Dr. Siegfried
Flügge  page 
Dr. Kurt Diebner  page 
Dr. Erich Bagge  page 
Professor Werner Heisenberg  page 
The reactor pit and alloy vessel at the Virus House 
page 
Diagram of the Leipzig Pile -  page 
Secret conference at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, Berlin-
Dahlem  page 
The first ultracentrifuge used to enrich uranium- 
page 
Dr. Samuel Goudsmit  page 
Professor Walther Gerlach  page 
The ferry Hydro on Lake Tinnsjö  page 
Entrance to the cave at Haigerloch, in southern Germany
 page 
Advertisement for Doramad “radioactive” toothpaste 
page 
Diagram of the B- assembly used in the Germans’ final
criticality project  page 
The Haigerloch pile showing its  cubes of uranium 
page 
Allied officers dismantling the Haigerloch pile in April
  page 
  

Author’s Introduction
    German atomic research program? It
seems hard to believe, for twenty years have passed and there is
little reference to it in the established chronicles of the Second
World War. In fact, there has up to now been no history of the
German atomic research effort between  and , simply
because of the thoroughness with which the Allied Intelligence
mission under Dr. Samuel A. Goudsmit divested liberated
Europe of almost every vestige of evidence that such a program
had ever existed. For a historian it would have been  and ini-
tially it was  something of a nightmare to piece the story to-
gether from such scraps as remained. I can now understand the
French Professor Joliot’s feelings when, having insisted that the
German nuclear physicists at Hechingen should produce for
him every remnant of the uranium metal that they must surely
have concealed, he was solemnly handed a lump of uranium the
size of a sugar cube that had been used for laboratory tests. (The
British and American officers had removed all the documents
and uranium from the French zone of Germany even before the
war ended.)
In the end, I went to the United States and searched for the
missing documents there; and I ran them to earth in abundance,
lying unused and neglected in a warehouse of the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I am grateful to
Mr. Robert L. Shannon and Mr. James M. Jacobs for their assis-
tance to me there. The most important German files, particu-
larly on the political history, were provided to me by Dr.
Goudsmit, to whom I am indebted for his hospitality at Brook-
haven National Laboratory, New York; I must also thank his as-
  

sistant, Mrs. Peggy Homan, who took care of many arrange-
ments for me during my American investigations.
Too many participants in these events have assisted me  in
conversations, correspondence, and commenting upon various
sections of the draft manuscript  for me to be able to thank
them all here. I have named all of them in my Notes on Sources.
But three I must particularly thank: Lieutenant-Colonel Knut
Haukelid, DSO, MC, who aided me during my researches in
Norway into the SOE operations against heavy-water produc-
tion; Professor Werner Heisenberg, who made time for several
very lengthy conversations with me, and who has read the whole
manuscript in draft; and Sir Patrick Linstead, FRS, who kindly
permitted me to make use of the extensive facilities of the Impe-
rial College physics library in South Kensington. Without their
help it would have been exceedingly difficult to present in detail
the story that follows.
 
London, August 
  

 
Solstice
  of the German nuclear research program during
the war can best be begun at the end, for it was a program which
 lacking strong military direction like that in America  was
beset by the personalities of its main scientists and nowhere do
the characters of the ten leading German atomic scientists come
more closely to the surface than in the records relating to the
events of August , .
During the evening the BBC Home Service broadcast the
first news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima
some hours before. The : .. bulletin announced that the
bomb had contained as much explosive power as two thousand
of the RAF’s ten-ton bombs, and that President Truman had
disclosed that the Germans had worked feverishly to “find a way
to use atomic energy,” but had failed. In Farm Hall, a country
house near Huntingdon, languished the man who had made the
atomic bomb possible, with nine of his fellow countrymen: he
  

was the German chemist Professor Otto Hahn, the man who
had discovered the fission of the uranium nucleus.
Some minutes after the first news was broadcast, Major
T. H. Rittner, the British officer in charge, asked for Hahn to be
brought to his office and broke the news to him. The elderly
German was horrified: he felt personally responsible for the
deaths of thousands of people. He told Rittner that he had had
the worst forebodings when he had first seen the potentialities of
his discovery, six years before; but he had never thought it
would come to this. Rittner fortified him with a strong drink
and tried to calm him. Together they waited for the bulletin to
be repeated at seven o’clock.
The other captives  all of whom had worked on Ger-
many’s nuclear project during the war*  had already sat down
to supper when Hahn’s absence was noted. Dr. Karl Wirtz went
to Rittner’s office to fetch him. Wirtz came in just as the :
.. was beginning; he listened with Hahn and Rittner, then
returned to the dining room and shocked the others into silence
with the announcement.
Uproar broke out. British Intelligence officers listening
through concealed microphones heard with satisfaction that
even the most eminent of the Germans were sure that such a
bomb had not been made. Professor Werner Heisenberg  one
of the most famous names in theoretical physics and a Nobel
Prize winner of long standing  suggested that it was a bluff.
Professor Gerlach, Göring’s last Plenipotentiary for Nuclear
* The ten German scientists detained at Farm Hall were: Dr. Erich Bagge, Dr.
Kurt Diebner, Prof. Walther Gerlach, Prof. Otto Hahn, Prof. Paul Harteck,
Prof. Werner Heisenberg, Dr. Horst Korsching, Prof. Max von Laue, Prof.
Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Dr. Karl Wirtz.
  

Physics, wrote in his diary afterward: “Heisenberg energetically
disputes the possibility that the Americans have this bomb.”
The Americans were no better than the Nazis, said Heisen-
berg; they had just developed some new explosive and had given
it this fancy name.
The possibility that the Americans had even had a uranium
project seemed remote. Heisenberg had himself asked Dr.
Goudsmit, the head of the American Intelligence mission which
had taken him prisoner in May, whether the Americans had
been working on the same lines as he had in Germany, and
Goudsmit, a fellow physicist who was not likely to mislead a col-
league, had assured him that they had not. Professor Heisenberg
had begun to drop hints about being ready to advise the Ameri-
cans should they wish to start a uranium project of their own
and Goudsmit had not ridiculed him. Nor was that all: it seems
that when the Germans’ last uranium pile laboratory was cap-
tured in April by the American mission, the German scientists
there  and von Weizsäcker and Wirtz in particular  had been
tricked into revealing the location of their uranium and heavy-
water stocks, with a promise that these would be needed when
the Germans resumed their research elsewhere; so how could
the Americans have an atomic bomb? In fact, the Americans’
object was to insure that the materials did not fall into the hands
of Professor Joliot and the French, in whose zone the pile labo-
ratory lay.
Heisenberg still could not believe that a fellow scientist like
Goudsmit  with whom he had stayed in America in  
would have misled him. So this talk of “atomic bombs” must be
bluff. Hahn, who had now rejoined them, said that he hoped
Heisenberg was right. If the Americans had used what is now
called plutonium  a process which the Germans had them-
selves mooted as being less expensive than using uranium- 
  

it would still have been an extremely complicated business. As
Hahn pointed out at once: “For [plutonium] they must have a
pile which will run for a long time.”
To camouflage his distress at the news, he found malicious
pleasure in the discomfort of his good friend Heisenberg. “If the
Americans have the uranium bomb, then you’re all second-
raters. Poor old Heisenberg!” Professor Heisenberg hotly asked
him: “Did they use the word uranium in connection with this
‘atomic’ bomb?”
Hahn said, “No.”
“Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms,” said Heisenberg.
Otto Hahn refused to let him off. “At any rate, Heisenberg,
you’re just second-raters and you may as well pack up.”
Professor Heisenberg persisted that the bomb probably used
some unconventional chemical concept, like atomized hydrogen
or oxygen, or something; anything was easier to believe than
that Goudsmit had deliberately misled him. But Professor Paul
Harteck, a physical chemist from Hamburg, gently reminded
them that the bulletin had apparently spoken of one bomb’s
being equivalent to , tons of TNT. This touch of realism
was typical of Harteck, an outstanding scientist with a well-
developed bachelor sense of humor; with his small mustache he
bore some similarity, when he tried, to their late Führer, and
this had been hilariously exploited at the urge of his fellow pro-
fessors on one occasion already, when the British newspapers
had begun to hint that Hitler was still at large. But nobody was
in the mood for practical jokes today.
Von Weizsäcker, one of Heisenberg’s younger physicists,
cautiously asked his mentor what he could say to the “,
tons.” Heisenberg answered more circumspectly, but was still
reluctant to believe that the Allies had made an atomic bomb.
  

Professor Gerlach and the legendary Max von Laue pointed out
that the main news bulletin would be broadcast at nine o’clock.
In the two hours that followed, the discussion developed
still further. Dr. Korsching and Dr. Wirtz asserted that the
Americans must have made the bomb by separating uranium-
 by diffusion  a process which they had canvassed them-
selves. “It was anyway obvious that it must have been done by
isotope separation,” wrote Dr. Bagge, an isotope-separation ex-
pert, “if it was going to work as a bomb.”
Dr. Wirtz said: “I’m glad we did not have it.” Von
Weizsäcker agreed: “I think it is dreadful for the Americans to
have done it. I think it is madness on their part.” From across
the dinner table, Heisenberg intervened: “One can’t say that.
One could equally well say that it’s the quickest way of ending
the war . . .”
“That,” said Otto Hahn, “is what consoles me.” And after a
time he added, “I think we’ll bet on Heisenberg’s suggestion that
it is a bluff.”
At nine o’clock all ten scientists clustered round the wireless
in the drawing room.
“Here is the news,” began the announcer. “It’s dominated
by a tremendous achievement of Allied scientists  the produc-
tion of the atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a
Japanese army base . . .” After a while, further details were given:
“Reconnaissance aircraft couldn’t see anything hours later be-
cause of the tremendous pall of smoke and dust that was still
obscuring the city of once over , inhabitants.” The Allies
had spent £ million on the project; up to , people had
helped to build the factories in America and , people were
running them now. Few of the workers had known what they
were producing: “They could see huge quantities of materials
going in, and nothing coming out  for the size of the explosive
  

charge is very small.” Then came the final confirmation: the
American Secretary for War had announced that “uranium”
was used in making the bomb.
As the story unfolded in all its detail  a long statement
from Downing Street followed the main news bulletin  the
captive German scientists agreed that for the initiated there
could be no doubt that the Allies had perfected the uranium
bomb. “A very difficult situation [develops] in our small circle,”
wrote Gerlach.
The feelings of the Germans were a mixture of horror, dis-
belief, annoyance and recrimination. Commander Welsh of In-
telligence  to whom they referred as the “golden peacock” be-
cause of his passion for gold braid  and Dr. Goudsmit had ob-
viously led them deliberately astray. Dr. Erich Bagge com-
plained: “Goudsmit has led us up the garden path!” In his diary
he wrote: “. . . and now the bomb has been used against Japan.
They say that for several hours afterward the target city was ob-
scured by masses of dust and smoke. There is talk of ,
dead. Poor old Professor Hahn!” Hahn had described to them
his feelings when he had first learned the frightful implications
that his uranium-fission discovery might have: “For a time, he
said, he had mooted a plan to throw all the uranium into the sea
and ward off the catastrophe like that; but should one at the
same time deprive humanity of all the blessings that uranium
fission might bestow? And now it has arrived, this dreadful
bomb. The Americans and British  Chadwick, Simon, F. A.
Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) and many others  have put up
huge factories in America and produced pure uranium-
without hindrance.”
Now it began to dawn on the German scientists why they
had been detained since the collapse of Germany.