Re: Kensington runestone in the Scandinavian press

Apparently on date Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:25:06 +1200, Eric Stevens
<eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> said:

>nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>><eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> said:
>>><tmcdonald2672@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>Eric Stevens wrote:
>>>>> <tmcdonald2672@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>>Eric Stevens wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>What can you tell me of Nazi Germany's atomic weapon tests?
>>>>>> Were they the subject of years of journalistic attention,
>>>>>>popular books, historical and political papers and books, study
>>>>>> How about using commensurables, just for shits and giggles?
>>>>>
>>>>> I thought I had. They are something which the participants did their
>>>>> damndest to keep hidden.
>>>> Yes, there were secrets. No, they did not last. And the Nazi
>>>>bomb turned out to be a non-factor in the war,
>>>
>>>But can you tell me of any Nazi nuclear weapon tests?
>>
>>AFAIK there weren't any.
>
>You therefore will be surprised to learn that you are wrong. Give me a
>day or two for others to bite at the bait and I will tell you what
>little I know. But there were such tests.

I find that very hard to believe. You can't just start nuclear bomb tests,
there are some pre-requisite steps.

First, you've got to have the right materials. Germany did acquire stocks of
these early on by conquering places that had them. The idea of a nuclear bomb
was common currency so this did create some alarm in certain quarters.

There's a whole bunch of theory and science that needs doing, but the general
gist of this is a working nuclear reactor is required, as this will produce the
other materials through fission reactions, which you need to build your actual
bombs.

Places like Iran would need a working nuclear power station before they could
start thinking about building nukes. And, there are some in Iran, ergo it is
possible that Iran can conduct atomic weapon tests (and it will be hard to
disguise these if they are successful.)

The nature of nuclear bombs is such that they come in a minimum size, ISTR the
ones dropped on Japan were somewhere near the minimum size and you can't get
them much smaller if you want them to go bang. This requires reactor time to
build up stocks before you start building your first bombs.

And, before you start dropping them on an enemy who may reverse engineer them
and fire them back with a working trigger, you need to test some. This would
put you into the happy position of being able to conduct a nuclear test
programme. Germany didn't get to this stage, they didn't even get the reactor
working properly.

You are talking about "nuclear weapon tests." Now, that's possibly things like
dirty bombs where you really only need to get some radioactive material and
pack it around a conventional bomb - that's a scary weapon when people fear
radioactivity and the notion of a bomb that can be called nuclear. But it's a
very ineffective weapon in reality.

Similar you can have weapons that don't work, e.g. maybe Heisenberg got a pound
of unrefined uranium and attached it to a 12v battery, this test would fail,
but could be described rather lamely as a nuclear weapon test.

What I was thinking of was actual nuclear weapons, being tested. This is the
sort that go bang impressively due to a nuclear fusion or fission reaction. The
Germans didn't test anything like that because there is no large,
still-radioactive, desert in the German equivalent of Nevada.

>>Which may make the comparison rather apt.

Conversely there is plenty of evidence that the Germans were conducting
research intended to result in a nuclear bomb, so despite this being in great
secrecy, there's no real doubt that it took place and is documented in many
nations intelligence files, as well as more generally in the open.

Just as, I suspect, there would be had the Templars actually kept on going.


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