Nazi Nuke Story

If you drive northwest out of Frankfurt, for 2.5 hours, you end up near the Jonastal Valley area of Thuringia (what was in old DDR).

This week, the region got into the news (in Germany, it's page three news....in the US, page two).

A guy who is described as a hobby historian and engineer.....seventy years old.....has stood up and claimed via ground-imaging of a particular area in the valley....he has finally discovered the Nazi nukes.

If you read through the story.....what he's done is take regular 3-D imaging capability which you can lay your hands on now and use for hobby searches, and has found five objects of significant size and shape.  Two.....he claims.....without having really dug them up yet....are nukes.

Because this is all on public (state-owned) property.....the local authorities have gotten a bit peeved over the story, and basically told the old guy (in his 70s) to stop this search.  He's taken his story to the newspapers, in hope that the public will insist that the government dig and recover the nukes.

The odds of the nukes existing?

This comes up about every year or two.  What can be said as fact.....is that Germany went into the nuke weapon research business without any dynamic push or effort.  Instead of a "Manhatten-project", they put up a "Tupelo (Miss) project" (my words to describe the effort).

The Uranprojeckt was started in the spring of 1939.  Oddly, just prior to the September invasion in 1939....someone made the decision to draft up a number of men into the German Army.....of which a number of the men associated with the Uranprojeckt were drafted.

On the level of stupidity....this is one of those "10" episodes.

A few weeks after the invasion, the Germans restarted the effort.  From the fall of 1939 to the January of 1942.....the Uranprojeckt made moderate progress.  After January 1942?  This becomes a series of debates.  What's generally said by historians who research the whole episode is that the leadership of Berlin began to prioritize other weapon systems and projects.....then took various core personnel from the Uranprojeckt to work on other non-Uranprojeckt assignments.  Whatever progress existed before January 1942.....slowed down to half-speed.

Adding to this whole problem is the fact that from 1932 on.....the climate to drive out Jewish academics succeed and the root of German scientists and engineers wasn't a thriving organization like it was in the 1920s.

There are some rumors (scant evidence) that at least one nuke test took place in a cave complex in the fall of 1944.  At present, the evidence isn't sufficient enough for anyone to stake their reputation on it, and it remains a question mark.

So, no one really believes these stories like this.....when someone stands up and says their 3-D imaging has identified some nuke.

For the 'what-if' theorists.....if the Nazis hadn't drafted off some core members of the Uranprojeckt for Poland's episode.....if they'd delayed the France invasion by a year.....if they'd gotten the Japanese to go by the scripted invasion to the Soviet Union.....if the US delayed entering the war by two years....if the Jews weren't on some 'bad-boy' list....and if the Me-264 long-distance bomber would have been built, then yes, New York City and Washington DC probably would have had a nuke or two each by 1946.  But things simply didn't occur that way.

So, you can rest tonight and feel ok.....there's probably not any Nazi nukes in existence, and you can go back to worrying about the other five-hundred things that might exist (Bigfoot, Loch Nessie, aliens, ISIS crossing the Texas border, etc).