Critical Mass
How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States Atomic Bomb
Dr. Delmar Bergen, retired director of the Nuclear Weapons Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the world’s first atom bombs were designed, has gone on record stating the Manhattan Project, counter to what has been believed for the past 70 years, did not alone create the first nuclear weapons dropped on Japan to end World War Two. United States forces received enriched uranium surrendered from Nazi Germany to help make the bombs, according to Dr. Bergen.

“It is my view as a physicist…, that the effort the Germans put into preparing and shipping the 560 kilograms of uranium oxide surrendered on board the German submarine U-234, shows it was enriched in the isotope U235. In other words, it was enriched to create a nuclear weapon,” said Bergen. “This runs counter to the traditional history of these events but I am confident in my conclusion…. My belief is that the German scientists associated with this cache believed the amount of U235 carried by U-234 was sufficient to create a nuclear bomb.”

The assertion comes on the heels of an historical conflict broiling in Germany where, in July 2011, 126,000 barrels of spent uranium from the Nazi atomic bomb program was reported to have been discovered (see: Daily Mail Online 13 July, 2011).

“Our association sank radioactive wastes from the last war, uranium waste, from the preparation of the German atom bomb,” reports a 1967 document from Germany’s ASSE II nuclear waste dump. The 126,000-barrel total would be well over 300,000 tons, a massive volume of uranium waste.

Historians have contested the claim of the document on Nazi spent uranium based on the assertion the Nazis never successfully enriched uranium. Their evidence has been the total lack of any spent uranium stores that would certainly exist if uranium had been enriched; and the argument the Germans never had a uranium enrichment production plant to begin with. The find of over 300,000 tons hidden in “crumbling” mines outside Hamburg, if true, eliminates one leg of their argument.
Anthony N. Stranges, a history of science professor at Texas A&M University, is a proponent for considering the new evidence and adjusting the history as appropriate when evidence proves valid.

Stranges says researcher Carter Hydrick has been waiting 15 years for the uranium waste to be found. A decade-and-a-half ago Hydrick, in his book Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States’ Atomic Bomb, predicted the store of uranium existed. His confidence was based not only on his assessment, with the help of Dr. Bergen and other physicists, of the evidence relating to the uranium surrendered on U-234 but on facts he discovered about an alleged “synthetic rubber plant” at Auschwitz that devoured more electricity than the city of Berlin but never produced any synthetic rubber.

“The electrical consumption (at the Auschwitz plant)… was preposterously high for making buna,” the synthetic rubber in question, according to Dr. Bergen. “The power expenditure was in line, however, with uranium enrichment requirements of an atomic weapon, based on my personal knowledge of its U.S. counterpart,” Bergen said.

The discovery of a Nazi uranium enrichment plant would eliminate the remaining argument against the Germans having a well-developed atomic bomb program, and add verification to Dr. Bergen’s conclusion the surrendered uranium was enriched.