Secret Weapons

by Brian Ford

  Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers

  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 — 1/50 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 (1/30oz). 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  DOOMED TO FAIL

  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.

  The most controversial of all these inventors was probably Viktor Schauberger, who had unconventional views on water and fluid flow (‘Water is alive!’ he used to say). He became known to Adolf Hitler because the two men were Austrian, and Hitler felt this gave them a sense of connection. Schauberger came up with a variety of ideas for motors to power submarines and even flying saucers. For a time he was imprisoned in a mental institution, and at the end of the war he was secretly confined for nine months by the Americans who interrogated him in the hope of obtaining some crucial information. His most famous design was for the Repulsin weapon, a kind of flying saucer, and rumours have persisted that the Nazis flew his design and that the Americans stole the idea and kept it secret. The United States is the most enterprising and entrepreneurial nation in the world, and it can safely be assumed that — if there was anything in these ideas — they’d be mass-producing the device and marketing it all over the world. The Nazi flying saucer is, I fear, just a legend.

  Death rays

  One of the most enduring myths of the saga of secret weapons is the death ray. The story has its roots in the tales from antiquity of mirrors being massed against an enemy fleet, the concentrated sun’s rays setting fire to raiders’ wooden ships. Indeed, Archimedes was reported to have set fire to the Roman fleet at Syracuse this way in 212 BC. An American inventor named Edwin R. Scott claimed to have perfected a death ray in 1924, and the same year Harry Grindell-Matthews asked for money from the Air Ministry in London to reveal h
ow a death ray worked. Most interesting of all were the claims in the 1930s by the distinguished nuclear pioneer Nikola Tesla who regularly said that he could make a death ray gun; the boasts were echoed by a Spanish physicist, Antonio Longoria, who claimed that he could kill small animals over a long distance.

  In military history, tales abound of secret teams of scientists perfecting this ultimate weapon of war — or, if not perfecting it, coming close. There is no doubt that the Imperial Japanese General Headquarters investigated whether Ku-go (Death Rays) would be feasible. There had been claims that a German ‘electric wave’ had been developed during World War I, and later American reports of the 1930s used to speculate on claims that a death ray could bring down aircraft — in large numbers — hundreds of miles away. It is easy to dismiss this as scientific nonsense, but to the non-scientific mind there is always the consciousness that science once suggested that powered flight was impossible, and that motorized transportation faster than a galloping horse would prove to be fatal … and so the realism of science was quickly countered with a demand to press on with research and achieve the impossible.

  An article on death rays from the United States, which was picked up by the Japanese authorities, led to research into methods of producing beams of microwaves. The work began in 1939 at laboratories in Noborito with a group of fewer than 30 scientists. Later Shimada City was a site of scientific research into secret weapons, and in 1943 their research teams had developed a high-powered magnetron that could generate a beam of the radiation. To the scientists, this was a necessary step in studying microwaves and infrared radiation. The Japanese developed heat-seeking technology which is used today in order to have a missile home in on the engines of a plane, and microwaves are widely used in many present-day applications including communication systems, medical treatment, radio astronomy and navigation (so not only to warm your pie).

  Among the physicists conducting this research was Sinitiro Tomonaga and by the end of World War II he and his team had produced a magnetron 8in (20cm) in diameter with an output rated at 100kW. Could this have been developed into a weapon? We cannot tell for sure, because the research papers were all methodically destroyed before the Allies invaded and occupied Japan, although there are reports of how effective it could have been in theory. The calculations suggest that, if properly focused, the beam available by the end of the war could have killed a rabbit over a distance of 1,000 yards (or metres) — but only if the rabbit stayed perfectly still for at least 5 minutes. Nothing more was heard of the Japanese death ray, though it would be wrong to regard Tomonaga as a forgotten scientist. After the war, Robert Oppenheimer invited him to carry on his research at Princeton University in the United States and Tomonaga was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for physics — jointly with Richard Feynman.

  The invisible shell

  It is August 2009. On BBC television from London is one of those pop-science shows, where the eager presenters are all hyperactive and hypnotically confident, and where any need for the viewer to think scientifically has been surgically excised. The set is rich in bright gadgets of every hue, the teeth dazzling, the smiles fixed. ‘Welcome to my world,’ says the presenter excitedly, this being the world of the vortex gun. ‘My prototype vortex cannon blew a bottle into a bin from twenty feet [about 6m],’ he reports. But he wants to go ‘a lot, lot further’. With a budget of £7,000 ($10,000) and the help of some technicians, the BBC have constructed a cannon in which acetylene and oxygen exploded to drive a spiralling plug of air, a cross between a smoke-ring and a whirlwind, for many yards across a disused quarry in rural England. First a pile of straw, then a wooden box, and finally a target made by piling bricks upon each other are knocked sideways by the blast of the high-speed vortex. It’s an excellent demonstration, and the script emphasizes its uniqueness. This, the viewer is told, has ‘never been seen before’ in this country.

  It is an important codicil, for thousands of vortex guns have been built elsewhere (mostly in the United States). The British viewers had the impression that this was a leap in the dark, unprecedented and unique, and no mention was ever made of the thousands of earlier vortex cannons already in existence for over 100 years. In reality, this was not new at all. There are booklets, kits, magazine articles, demonstrations on YouTube; building a vortex cannon is a well established weekend hobby for enthusiasts, and has been done for decades. Although the show said nothing of the fact, this had an earlier history, as a secret German weapon of World War II.

  The vortex cannon was constructed in early 1945 by an engineer named Dr Mario Zimmermayr at Lofer in the Austrian Tyrol. He came up with two designs, the Wirbelwind Kanone (Whirlwind Cannon) and the Turbulenz Kanone (Vortex Cannon). The design of the Vortex Cannon proved to be most promising. It was essentially that of a large mortar buried in the earth, which fired an explosive into a cloud of fine coal powder. The idea was to create a whirling tornado of air that would bring down enemy aircraft flying overhead. High-speed cine cameras were used to film the experiments, and they showed that a large and energetic vortex of exhaust gases was expelled from the device. It was reckoned that this could have an effective range of just over 300ft (100m) though it was never used in practice against enemy aircraft. There were reports of a similar vortex cannon being used against personnel in Poland although these have never been substantiated.

  But the concept was not new, even in World War II. Vortex guns had been built in Italy since the late 1800s, where they were used to fire vortices into the clouds above the Italian vineyards, in the hope of encouraging rain to fall and to break up large hailstones that could decimate a crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an Australian government meteorologist named Clement Wragg saw these guns exhibited in Europe. An article from the Melbourne Argus newspaper dated 29 January 1902 says: ‘Sufficient funds have been collected to purchase a Stiger vortex battery for preventing hailstorms, and tenders are now being called for a battery of six guns.’ These vortex cannons were impressive, each with a barrel 10ft (3m) long, and they were installed at Charleville, an agricultural township 470 miles (760km) west of Brisbane. On 26 September 1902 the mayor ordered six of the guns to open fire, and ten shots were fired at the clouds from each barrel. A few drops of rain were felt, and several hours later there was a light shower. Nobody could be sure the vortex cannons had caused it, but the results were encouraging and eventually 13 more were built in Australia. Some have been preserved and stand in Charleville to this day.

  A similar concept lay behind the Windkanone (Wind Cannon) that was manufactured in Stuttgart during World War II. This was a large angled cannon which could eject a high-speed mass of compressed air that was intended to bring down nearby aircraft. The device used a critical mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in the ratio of 2:1, obtained from electrolysis of water. The sharp explosion produced a bolus of highly compressed air that could cause damage at a distance. When experimentally demonstrated at Hillersleben in Saxony, it could break a wooden board 1in (25mm) thick at a distance up to almost 700ft (200m). It was recognized that it would be hard to aim and control the projectile, and so further tests were carried out using nitrogen dioxide, a brown gas which allowed the engineers to study the path it took. A prototype was installed to protect bridges over the river Elbe, though no hits on aircraft were ever recorded.

  Plans were also drawn up to use the pressure of sound waves against personnel, rather than aircraft. The Schallkanone (Sound Cannon) was designed by Dr Richard Wallauschek and was first produced in 1944. It comprised two parabolic sound reflectors that projected a beam of intense sound waves against enemy troops. A pulse of intense sound waves was produced by detonating a critical mixture of oxygen and methane that was forced under pressure into the detonation chamber. The chamber was carefully calibrated to produce a resonance of the frequency that increased dramatically in intensity up to a pressure of an atmosphere (15psi or 1 bar) some 175ft (50m) away. This was calculated to be enough to incapacitate a soldier instantly. Ther
e were reports that experiments with it worked, for example a dog tethered over 125ft (40m) from the weapon was said to have been killed.

  The device has re-emerged in more recent times. This kind of weapon appeared in the adventures of the boy detective Tintin, by the Belgian author Georges Prosper Remi (popularly known as Hergé), entitled L’Affair Tournesol which was published in English as The Calculus Affair. It has been used in fact, as well as fiction; ships are now being fitted with sound guns based on the same principle. The LRAD device, currently manufactured in the United States, is being fitted to ships around the world and is commonly brought out and primed for action as ships enter dangerous waters, or when they come into port where a raid might occur. The design initiated by the Nazis has found a peacetime application in keeping cruise passengers safe from modern-day pirates.

  Strange tanks

  During the war there were several designs for modern and state-of-the-art tanks. Super-heavy tanks were soon on the drawing board, and there were also attempts to find a method of transportation that would provide better traction than the standard caterpillar tracks. Few were as bizarre as the Tsar tank that the Russians had first manufactured in World War I. Instead of having parallel tracks it was fitted with two spoked wheels some 27ft (8m) in diameter. A single trailing wheel at the rear was only 5ft (1.5m) in diameter. The idea was that the large wheels could overcome obstacles on the ground and it was tested before the Army High Commission in August 1915 near Moscow. The rear wheel was liable to sink into the ground, and the front wheels were too narrow, and so they sank into mud; the prototype was marooned where it stood for years, and was eventually broken up for scrap iron by the Bolsheviks in 1923.

  An equally bizarre idea for propelling tanks across muddy terrain was the spiral drive which was proposed during World War II. Prototypes were constructed in which the vehicle was driven, not by giant rotating wheels, but by a cylindrical drive featuring spiral ridges like a corkscrew. They were unable to cross flat, level, solid ground but were excellent in mud and also for crossing snow. This idea was originally proposed to the War Office in London by Geoffrey Pyke, a strange combination of journalist and inventor, as a solution to the difficulties in crossing snow during the Allied invasion of Norway. At first it was rejected, but when Louis Mountbatten became Chief of Combined Operations in 1941, the proposal was accepted for development and a version of a screw-driven vehicle was built for testing. It was named the Weasel, though it existed only as a rough prototype. The concept was later considered by the Russians during the war years. They developed the idea still further and produced some more elaborate prototypes, but these strange tanks were not available until after the war.