Secret Weapons (27 page)

However, their research left them a useful legacy. By the time the war ended, Canada had the second largest nuclear research establishment in the world, overshadowed only by the United States. Their work on constructing nuclear reactors led to the building of the NRX (National Research eXperimental) reactor at the Chalk River Laboratories near Ottawa. It remained the world’s largest nuclear reactor for many years and soon began producing radioisotopes. Those are still used today to diagnose and treat cancer, and Canada has since been the world’s largest exporter of radioisotopes. Another reactor ten times as large was soon under construction and this became the NRU (National Research Universal) reactor. When it began work in 1957 it was, like NRX, the most powerful reactor in the world, and remained so for many years.

The United States, however, became the focus of nuclear research and was destined to become the first nation to exploit the power of the atom. In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a key letter that was delivered personally to the President. In it he stated: ‘A single [atom] bomb might well destroy a city and some of the surrounding territory’. President Roosevelt was impressed, and he immediately appointed Lyman Briggs at the National Bureau of Standards to set up the ‘Uranium Committee’. Once the recommendations of the Maud Committee had been discussed, and the Americans knew that a bomb could be built with far smaller amounts of fissile materials than anyone had realized, it was decided to press ahead urgently with development. In 1942 this led to the Manhattan Engineer Project which had the express aim of producing an atomic bomb. The project derived its name from the concentration of expertise in Manhattan itself. Within the borough there were some ten research sites, almost all of which stand to the present day. Their original headquarters were in a skyscraper adjacent to City Hall. Little has ever been said about these establishments since; the tourist or investigator will find little to remind today’s citizens of what went on. A historian of the period, Dr Robert S. Norris, says that as many as 5,000 staff were coming and going. Each person knew only enough to do their job – few had any sort of overview.

The scientists originally on the committee were from various nations: the United States, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland and Britain. To the British, where the research had made most progress, it seemed timely to shift the work to America where there were more resources, and where – unlike Britain – the industrial and research establishment was not overrun by the need simply to survive the onslaught of Germany. In the United States there was an immediately warm response to the project. Soon, however, the disparate nature of the nationalities involved was seen as problematical. Many of the British team had family in Europe, including some in nations that were now enemies of the Allied cause. The Americans felt that this could compromise security, and soon took over the project.

They envisaged two types of atom bomb, one using uranium, the other plutonium. Work began at once on constructing an atomic pile under the leadership of a brilliant physicist, Enrico Fermi. It was called Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) and stood on a rackets court under the abandoned west stands of the original Alonzo Stagg Field stadium at the University of Chicago. In December 1942 the first sustained nuclear reaction was started – and the dream of atomic power was known to be real. America could now produce the isotopes (like U-235) she needed to plan an atomic bomb.

Work on the project now proceeded rapidly and a prototype weapon was successfully tested at Alamogordo, in the deserts of New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. Although the United States now had the atomic bomb, the war against Germany was already at an end, and the conflict with Japan was nearing its close. On 17 July 1945 Leo Szilard and 69 co-signatories from the Manhattan Project in Chicago petitioned the President of the United States with their avowed opposition to any use of such a weapon against civilians in war. One of them was a good friend of mine, George Svihla. He said to his dying day that the use of the bomb against Japan was indefensible: the United States could have announced the success of the atom bomb tests, and warned the Japanese that the weapon would assuredly be used if they did not capitulate; but to use it on cities crammed with civilians in the dying days of conflict seemed inhuman and morally wrong. The signatories also foresaw an era when atomic weapons would be used indiscriminately by all sides, with devastating effects. In that sense the petition was wrong – the ever-present threat of annihilation acted as a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons from that day on, and no nuclear bomb has since been used in warfare.

World leaders always seem to want to find a war in which they can prove their might, and the newly elected President Truman was convinced that America could make the ultimate grand gesture by using her new bomb, and hasten the end of the war into the bargain. He considered the appeals, but decided to disregard them. On 6 August 1945 a B-29 Superfortress bomber named
Enola Gay
delivered its uranium bomb (code named Little Boy) to Hiroshima. It was 9ft 9in (3m) long and 2ft 4in (71cm) in diameter and weighed 8,900lb (4,000kg). Its design was unbelievably simple: two sub-critical masses of U-235 at each end of the bomb were forced together in an instant by conventional explosive, and exploded straightaway. Of the 131lb (59kg) of the uranium in the bomb, less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. The force of the explosion was roughly equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT and it is believed to have killed 140,000 people outright. Yet the amount of uranium that was directly converted into energy is unbelievably small. It amounted to just 600 milligrams –
oz.

On 9 August a second atomic bomb was dropped. This was a plutonium weapon code named Fat Man and was detonated over Nagasaki. This bomb was 10ft 8in (3.3m) long and 5ft (1.5m) in diameter, weighing 10,200lb (4,600kg). Its explosive was a different man-made isotope, plutonium-239. In this alternative design, a single sphere of plutonium weighing 14lb (6.35kg) was installed in the weapon, and 64 detonators fitted around it fired simultaneously. These compressed the sphere so that it imploded on itself and, with the atoms now more tightly packed, it went critical and detonated. The energy released was equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT, yet it came from the conversion into energy of less than 1 gram of the plutonium (
oz). It killed about 40,000 people in an instant, and the following day Japan capitulated.

There is a now a new threat, namely that warmongers in unruly states may release nuclear weapons for terrorists to detonate. There is much money floating around in the impenetrable strata of the terrorist world, and the price of a nuclear bomb, purchased illicitly from a state that no longer needs them – or from agents of a state that doesn’t know they are being offered for sale – would be affordable by many terrorist groups. So, although the global warfare foreseen by the signatories of the Szilard petition has not come to pass, the threat of an atomic weapon is still the greatest terrorist threat of all. The ramifications of the secret weapons of World War II remain in most of our minds for much of the time.

There is no limit to the crazy ideas dreamt up by the wartime scientists and inventors. Hitler was the target of plans to change his sex, by secretly dosing his vegetable garden with female hormones, or to blind him with toxic vapours smuggled aboard his train in a vase of flowers. There were schemes to drop bombs containing molasses in front of the advancing German troops, to trap their boots in a sticky mass that prevented them from moving forward, or to smother them in coils of barbed wire dropped from aircraft. From South Africa came the idea of emptying millions of poisonous snakes on the heads of enemy troops. Once Italy joined the war, there was even a proposal to drop huge amounts of bombs into the mouth of Vesuvius, causing it release a flood of molten lava across southern Italy. There was a plan to poison thousands of tons of cabbages, and drop them in enemy fields to wipe out their farm animals, with the idea that starvation would soon bring Germany to its knees. There was also a scheme to light up the whole of southern England with tens of thousands of searchlights, so that enemy bombers could be easily seen at night – heedless of the fact that, in Britain, more than half the days are cloudy. Another abortive idea was to cover the innumerable rivers and lakes in Britain with a coating of oil and coal dust, to prevent reflections from water at night giving the German pilots valuable navigational clues. The first trials failed to dull down the water, and instead covered the technicians with a thick layer of sticky black oil. Proposals were then put forward to equip fighter aircraft with long, sharp blades that could be used to sever the cords of parachutes, causing troops to plunge to their deaths; it was even planned to release a cloud of chloroform or ether from Allied bombers, so that pursuing enemy fighter pilots would become unconscious and crash.

German saboteurs came up with equally bizarre proposals. They designed detonators that fitted inside a pen and pencil set, a shaving brush, a tin of talc, torch batteries and a bar of toilet soap. Bombs were designed to be smuggled inside a can of motor oil, a Thermos flask, lumps of coal, car batteries and the heel of a boot. A bomb disguised as a tin of Smedley’s brand English Red Dessert Plums went into production. They even designed a hand grenade the size and shape of a bar of chocolate, and planned that this should be presented to the Royal Family. Another bomb was designed to be smuggled inside a stuffed dog. An MI5 file entitled: ‘Camouflages for sabotage equipment used by the German sabotage services’ listed many such secret weapons, and was kept top secret for over 50 years after the war (it is now in the National Archives). The SS and the Hitler Youth set up a series guerrilla teams, code named Werewolf Units, who would carry out sabotage operations when Germany was under Allied occupation. They trained in assassination and how to poison the food and water needed by the civilian population. As many as 6,000 recruits were signed up by early 1945, and German inventors were asked to provide examples of secret weapons with which Germany could overcome her enemies.