The drawing appeared in an undated report about nuclear work in Nazi Germany
The historians working in Germany and the USA claim to have found a 60-year-old drawing showing the Nazi atomic bomb. This is the only known drawing of a "nuclear bomb" and it appeared in a report found in a private archive.
The researchers who allowed the drawing to see the light of day say that the drawing is a general schematic and does not indicate that the Nazis built or were close to building an atomic bomb, but a detailed report hinted that Nazi scientists may have come closer to the goal than previously thought.
The report in which the drawing appeared did not include a date, but the researchers claim that the evidence shows that it was created immediately after the end of the war in Europe. He discusses the work of German nuclear scientists during the war. The title page is missing, so there is no evidence of who composed it.
One of the historians who discovered the report, Rainier Karlsch, caused a storm of debate earlier this year when he claimed to have evidence that the Nazis had successfully tested primitive nuclear devices in the final days of World War II. Several historians rejected the claim.
The drawing was published by Karlesh and Mark Walker, professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, USA in Physics World magazine.
A mini nuclear bomb
The document that has now been revealed was discovered after the publication of Karlsh's book "Hitler's Atomic Bomb" in which he made the claim of the nuclear test. "The Nazis were far from the atomic bomb in the classical sense, but they hope to integrate a mini-bomb in a missile," said Dr. Karles after the new discovery. "The army believed that it would take about six months to bring the new weapon into action, but the scientists are well aware of the difficulties in enriching the necessary amount of uranium.
The director of the Nazi nuclear energy program was the physicist Werner Heisenberg. Although he had achievements in other areas of physics, Heisenberg failed to understand important aspects of the chain reaction of nuclear fission.
Some researchers say that this caused him to overestimate the amount of fissile material - uranium - needed to build an atomic bomb. However, from the discovered German report, it is estimated that about five kilograms of fissile material are required to reach the critical mass of a plutonium bomb. This is close to the real data and might imply that the Nazi scientists knew better about nuclear fission than the man who headed the program.
Prof. Paul Lawrence Rose, who wrote a book about the German uranium program in 1998, says that he has no reason to think that the report is not real, but he disagrees about the meaning of the critical mass data. "Indeed it is amazing to find the figure of 5 kg written on a document, we still need to find the motive for this. Even if it is true that the scientists understood it, Heisenberg's group would not accept and confirm it." Rose said.
It is possible that the author of the report had read Smyth's report on the development of the American atomic bomb published in July 1945, but Carlish Walker rejected the claim.
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