Never happened. You can’t provide a link to a reputable cite showing this, either.
Even if you did, how did Zinsser know the flashes were from “plasma ion discharges”? He wouldn’t have known – he’d just have seen a big damn flashy boom. The addition of “Something very specific to mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons which can’t be replicated with conventional or fuel air explosives.” smacks of special pleading by someone trying to rule out counter-arguments.
But a Nazi detonation would certainly have been detected by postwar fallout analysis. Furthermore, the US would have had a strong, obvious incentive to tell everyone about a Nazi test detonation, and no reason to cover it up. The main moral argument for the US Manhattan Project was “what if Germany is close or ahead?” and a Nazi mushroom cloud would have been an absolutely irresistible public relations bonanza for a US government taking some heat after the war for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thus, simple deduction shows that it could not have happened; the lack of fallout and the inability to provide evidence from a reputable historian or historical resource are just the icing on the cake.
That would have to be a remarkably incurious crew not to smell a rat.
Nazi Admiral - “Hey we’ve just installed this huge obviously a bomb in your U-boat. We want you to sail into the middle of New York harbour then press this big red button”
Implausibly dense captain - “Sure, can’t see any problem there”.
It was Zinsser himself who said he flew from Ludwigslust TO 12 to 15 km from an “ATOMIC BOMB TEST STATION”
He also said:
We know from the Italian war correspondent Luigi Romersa sent by Mussolini and told in advance by Mussolini to report back on the test of an Atomic bomb, that it was along the Baltic coast where he witnessed a blast from a sealed bunker on 12 October 1944. Romersa was still alive in 2005 when a book was published in Germany on the topic. Romersa gave some relatively recent interviews and quite possibly these are posted on Youtube. Mussolini maintained to the day he died that Germany had the Atomic Bomb.
The test site was on the Bug Isthmus of Rugen, a long narrow spit of sand and scrub. During WW2 it was home to a airbase and a floatplane base host to a unit of the Luftwaffe’s KG200.
After the war access to this strip remained cut off by barbed wire fences and it was an off limits military reserve until quite recently and possibly still.
I have read that elevated levels of Caesium 137 and Cobolt 60 have been found on the isthmus.
Another point in reference to finding radioactive traces today is that at Hiroshima Uranium 235 can no longer be detected above background traces in local granite. It does not necessarily follow therefore that soil samples would any longer prove anything. The soviets built a nuclear reactor in the nearby vicinity when Rugen was part of East Germany and various fall out from accidents and nuclear testing have overlain the area since 1944.
I would be more excited than anyone if there were conclusive proof.
There is a photograph of the test explosion at Rugen. There was a witness Luigi Romersa. Other participants were part of a secret project and sworn to secrecy, however Japanese military attaches were also present at the test blast and reported it to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm in a signal sent on 12 December 1944. The MAGIC decrypt of that signal was classified secret until it’s release by the NSA in October 1978.
Also the electromagnetic interference blacked out all of Berlin for two days and this was reported in Swedish newspapers.
During wartime Germany in 1944 the public were under curfew and required to report to communal air raid shelters so no it does not seem odd that the general populace did not witness this.
Zinsser did not say the flashes were from ion discharges. I am relating to you that flashes from ion discharges are a feature peculiar to nuclear mushroom clouds…
Moreover the fact that flashes were blue is characteristic of the lower 19 elements of the periodic table therefore it is an indication that the bomb would have used elements like Lithium and Deuterium.
It so happens Schumann and Trinks made 42 wartime applications for a German atomic bomb triggered by the use of shaped hollow charges to compress Lithium against a target of uranium 233 coated with Beryllium oxide and Lithium-6 Deuteride which during the 1950s was a method adopted to create thermonuclear boosted fission warheads.
Why can’t it be replicated with conventional explosives… well why bother?
Furthermore the absolute largest modern Soviet Fuel Air Explosive is only capable of 300 kilotons and does not produce the characteristic ion plasma flashes in the explosive cloud.
Your deduction does not prove or disprove anything.
Now all you have to do is explain why not one German other than Zinsser ever mentioned this after the war. And why not one Soviet from a country in a death battle with the Nazis which wanted to discredit everything they did ever mentioned this before the the fall of the USSR or after. And why not one American hungry for the most sensational headline of the entire century ever mentioned it. And why nobody from any other country on earth ever mentioned this after the war. And why no trace of an enormous industrial complex that would have been saturated with radiation and cost many billions of marks and needed thousands of workers and a giant supply chain has ever been found. And why one person’s account trumps every law of common sense and a complete lack of independent evidence.
Here’s one I suppose you might have an answer for: Why does no reference to a Bug Isthmus turns up on Google except for posts you’ve made under a variety of names?
Well, you’re not citing that that are unique to nuclear, or that the flashes Zinsser saw were indeed ion discharges. So what you’ve got is sorta third-party hearsay that might corroborate other evidence…at best. That makes it important, if you wish to be believed, not to conflate it with actual evidence – qualify carefully when using this sort of thing.
Fact? An uncited assertion that some Nazi saw flashes he said were blue is hardly a fact. And seriously, in the chaos of an atomic cloud you’re saying a person can see what elements were used?
It sure does happen that they theorized about such things. Yep.
No Zinsser was not in the midst of atomic chaos, as you yourself noted earlier he was flying 12-15 kilometres from it although he did record his aircraft being struck by the shockwave.
You can see and deduce the characteristic elements involved from light wavelength emissions. That’s pretty basic science these days. How do you think Mars Rover mission Curiosity is detecting chemical composition from rocks?
It is a statement of fact that the first 19 elements fluoresce in blue.
Incidentally yes vocanic plumes during eruptions do have ionic discharges from huge amounts of static electricity charges built up from the friction of silicates striking each other at huge speeds, but alas there was no volcano there.
Zinsser was not third party or hearsay… he was an eyewitness, cross corroborated by declassified Japanese wartime diplomatic signals and by another witness Luigi Romersa. Furthermore Swedish newspapers corroborate a severe electrical disturbance cut off all communication with Berlin on 12 October 1944.
That in fact is four separate corroborations and if they were not credible then why did the US government feel they were matters sufficiently credible to justify classifying them top secret?
The problem is not with the facts but with your unwillingness to accept them.
No, it isn’t. Each element has its own unique emission spectrum. Lithium (element 3) has no emission lines in the blue part of the spectrum. Sodium (element 11) has a single very strong emission line in yellow. On the other hand, Copper (element 29) has some very strong emission lines in blue and green. You can’t simply say “Glows, blue, therefore light element” - it doesn’t work that way at all.
See here for the actual spectrum for each element:
“All communications”. Wow! So even the cables deep underneath the Baltic Sea were inoperable? That’s even more powerful than any of the modern nuclear weapons. However did those Nazis lose the war?
After WW2 there was a national resentment against foreigners which created an unspoken code of silence and non co-operation about many secrets of WW2 not just Atomic secrets.
Yes many Germans were co-opted to work with the Allies in the Cold War (witness Paperclip and Ghelen Org for example) however the Cold War also meant that the Allies particularly America also required German ongoing silence about scientific achievements during wartime, in part because USA wanted the soviets to enjoy no clues to help Russia in developing similar technology.
Remember that Zinsser was interviewed by US military intelligence for a classified report on German use of the Atomic Bomb, He was not interviewed for a newspaper report. Zinsser was also interviewed with a handful of scientists about the Rugen blast and the weapon itself.
The most authoritative account to date of the German atomic bomb is a book published in German by Springer Verlag in 2005, called Hitler’s Bomb by historian Rainer Karlsh, with assistance from Journalist Heiko Peterman.
That boo predates Darksun, by Dr Richard Rhodes by a decade. Darksun is mainly confined to discussion the evolution of the H-bomb and nuclear espionage between USA and Russia. It barely touches on the German atomic bomb project and lacks the benefit of research by Karlsh (aka Carlsh). Hitler’s Bomb cites obscure sources including postwar writings by the men themselves Ret.General Dr Eric Schumann and Dr Walter Trinks. Karlsh obtained the private wartime papers from the Trinks estate. Rhodes had no such access a decade earlier.
I was once very critical myself of Karlsh’s book until I bothered to research the nuclear physics involved. Once I understood how it was done it became very clear how the simplicity of the German bomb simplified for the nazis the whole process of obtaining fissile material. They did not need an enrichment project on the scale of Manhattan, because they developed a bomb only requiring 150 grams of Uranium 233.
The German bomb design could equally use small amounts of Plutonium or Uranium. Amounts small enough that they could be procured simply from cyclotron separation, however the Nazis had particle accelerators by the end of the war capable of 18 MeV and one at Bisingen captured by ALSOS capable of 31 MeV allowing them to acquire fissile material including Plutonium without any need for enrichment or nuclear reactors. Once I delved the nuclear physics I understood it was perfectly feasible.
There were underground nuclear laboratories, both in what became part of eastern Europe under Soviet domination in 1945. One was codenamed Quartz II near the Austrian town of Melk, built into a hill at Roggendorf. This facility was the furthest east that ALSOS went in 1945 to recover German equipment.
Another was at the Wenceslas Mine, near Ludwigsdorf (Ludwikowice) in Silesia known by the SS under codename “Maria.”
If you check out Complex Reise in Silesia you will find that it was indeed a huge complex with about 118,000 slave laborers. Many were Russian POWs or Jewish exiles from Gross Rosen Kz. The Jews mainly ended up in Treblinka and Stalin executed many POWs since surrender to the Germans was disloyalty.
Stalin himself did not want to acknowledge to his people that the Nazis were capable of building the bomb. Many Americans are equally inflated with national pride about US achievements. Those Americans who do have access to knowledge about it are either from the Intelligence community or the nuclear physics discipline each of whom have obligations of secrecy to the US Government which are taken seriously.
Such a US citizen did emerge a man who worked in records administration by the name Deitrich, from San Francisco. He reported many WW2 files about German use of atomic weapons being destroyed. He hardly made himself very famous and was dismissed as a nutcase because in general the populace swallows the conventional account of history.
What happened in WW2 happened during wartime secrecy and was swallowed up by Cold war secrecy is the short answer.
Wait a minute, Nazis seeing strange blue flashes of light… this all sounds familiar somehow. Oh crap, it wasn’t the bomb, the Nazis opened the Ark! It’s totally believable.
Because in July 1944 USA threatened Hitler unless he abandoned his nuclear weapons project and somehow sued for peace within six weeks Dresden would be targeted for destruction with an Allied Atomic Bomb.
During August 1944 Hitler extended peace feelers to London through Romania’s leader Antonescu.
Churchill then threatened Hitler that if a single nuclear weapon was ever used against the UK the RAF would drop Anthrax all across Germany. Hitler had no antibiotics to counter this threat.
All this stuff that Tazjet is spouting seems to be directly lifted from “Reich of the Black Sun”:
Unless the newspaper article linked there is faked seems there was a communications failure in Berlin on that date. But its 250 km from Rugen to Berlin, for there to be a significant EMP pulse that travelled that far it would have had to be a hihg altitude air detonated device right? The “eye witness” accounts seem to describe a ground explosion.
Willful misinterpretation on your part – nobody thinks I meant the observer was inside the fireball. I meant all the visual chaos a blast, would make it hard for an eyewitness to do scientific measurement with the naked eyeball. Or even be sure of details.
Not with the naked eye.
Not with the naked eye.
Unless you are Zinsser, your posting this to a messageboard is ABSOLUTELY 3rd-party hearsay. That’s what the term means. And you still haven’t given an online citation.
Why bother testing? The Trinity test was of a plutonium-core, implosion-based weapon - the timing on the explosive trigger on those was finicky enough that we weren’t quite sure it would work right the first time. But uranium-based gun designs (like the Hiroshima weapon) were very, very simple mechanically; so much so that no one felt the need for testing on that design before Hiroshima.
If you’re losing a war, and you’re not sure whether or not your lab will be blown up tomorrow, it seems folly to waste time on a test weapon. Build a uranium bomb you’re reasonably confident will work as specified, drop it on people you want to make very, very dead. /shrugs/
