Drawing uncovered of 'Nazi nuke'

[emad]

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.
It is the only known drawing of a "nuke" made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive.

The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb.

But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed.

The report containing the diagram is undated, but the researchers claim the evidence points to it being produced immediately after the end of the war in Europe. It deals with the work of German nuclear scientists during the war and lacks a title page, so there is no evidence of who composed it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4598955.stm

[benburch]

1. Hmmm... That would never have gone off.

You cannot use gun-type assembly with Plutonium.

[hunter]

3. It has to do with the rate of spontaneous fission in plutonium...

The background of neutron radiation is too high, and the chain raction starts well before the slug reaches its target, which destroys the bomb before it can properly go off. You do make a very big mess, however.

Caveat Emptor, it is insane to build any sort of explosive device (or rocket) from information you "found on the internet."

[benburch]

4. Just so!

Hell, it is insane to build them, period!

As a youth I built several small liquid-fueled rocket motors. I almost lost my hearing from an explosion...

[Tesha]

5. (Without checking my sources...)

I'm pretty sure that it's contamination with Pu240 that causes the
high rate of spontaneous fissions in Plutonium. If you separate that
out and leave just the Pu239, you might have a low-enough rate of
spontaneous fissions to allow gun-type assembly of a bomb.

(Or maybe I'm mis-remembering this.)

Tesha

[LongTomH]

2. Another mystery about the Nazi Atom Bomb

The claim that the Nazis actually detonated a small nuclear device should be possible to prove or disprove. The test grounds should still register traces of radioactivity, let alone the labs where the enriched uranium or plutonium was produced.

There are several mysteries about the Nazi atom bomb project. One of the biggest comes from the claim by the scientists who worked on the project, that they deliberately failed, so that a madman like Hitler would never have such a horrible weapon. The counterclaim is that Werner Heisenberg merely overestimated the amount of uranium needed for a critical mass - by a magnitude or two.

There's also a controversy about a meeting between Heisenberg and his old mentor: Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941. The question is: What did Bohr and Heisenberg talk about during their "walk in the woods" during that visit? Was Heisenberg trying to persuade Bohr to help persuade the Nazi high command to put more resources into the bomp project, or was he telling his old mentor that he would deliberately fail?

There was a really good teleplay - title: "Copenhagen"- from the BBC, that played on PBS. It starred Stephen Rea as Niels Bohr and the radiant Francesca Annis as his wife. It may still be available for purchase in the PBS store.