Fortuitous Failure

THE GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB by David Irving. 329 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

In the spring of 1945, with the Nazis on the verge of defeat, a small group of scientists crowded into a cave in southern Germany for one last attempt at starting a chain reaction in their uranium pile. It was far too late to produce an atomic bomb that could help the fatherland. But the scientists-unaware that the U.S. had accomplished the feat more than two years before--were determined that Germany should produce the world's first nuclear chain reaction before the war ended. Their experiment, like the entire German A-bomb program, ended in failure.

To reconstruct the story of Germany's A-bomb project, British Historian David Irving interviewed German scientists, studied recently declassified papers, and discovered a supply of captured German documents that had been lying unused and neglected for many years in an AEC warehouse at Oak Ridge, Tenn. From his meticulous research he has put together a chilling account of a project that might have changed the outcome of the war and reduced London or New York, rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki to radioactive ashes.

Hamstrung Program. The Germans solved the theoretical problems and designed the devices that eventually could have produced an Abomb. They even conducted crude H-bomb experiments. But their scientific skills were not equal to the problems of dictatorial politics. When they tried to persuade their government of the importance of nuclear energy, German physicists pointedly avoided using the word bomb; they were fearful that Hitler might order the immediate production of a nuclear weapon and hold them responsible if they failed to perfect one. Unconvinced of its military value, Nazi leaders gave their atomic energy program a relatively low priority; they never came close to matching the tremendous expense and manpower poured into the U.S. Manhattan Project.

Historian Irving argues that lack of governmental support was the basic cause of the Nazis' nuclear failure. But some of his anecdotes suggest that the German scientists themselves were at fault. After Physicist Walther Bothe calculated that graphite would not be an effective "moderator"--the material that slows down neutrons in a reactor--no German scientist thought to question him. Instead, the Germans turned to heavy water for a moderator. However, they were hamstrung for the remainder of the war when an Allied sabotage team crippled the world's only heavy-water plant, at Vemork in occupied Norway. Meanwhile, Enrico Fermi had constructed the world's first working uranium pile in Chicago--using graphite as a moderator.

Lethal Burst. Even if a respite from the incessant Allied bombing had given them more time, it now seems doubtful that German scientists could have worked their way past their repeated oversights and gaffes. When U.S. troops captured the site of the final uranium pile in Haigerloch, Germany, accompanying U.S. scientists were astonished to discover that the Germans had made absolutely no provision for protecting themselves against atomic radiation. Had a successful chain reaction begun on the day of the last test, the Nazis' nuclear physicists would have been showered by a harmful, and perhaps lethal, burst of radiation.

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