[edwest]

"... that the V-2, perfected with wings and electronic equipment, could fly over 3,000 miles, and at 2,000 miles would hit the target 'on the button.'"

Mention is also made of a German "weather station" located 5,000 feet high on Gausted mountain in Norway, which was discovered by the British 21st Army Corps in May 1945. "Its purpose, according to Allied specialists, was the transmission of transatlantic radio signals and the telecontrol of flying bombs on long-range flights."

A side note about the guidance system that may have been used mentions valves (or radio tubes) as being too large, too fragile and needing a lot of current. A photo is shown of the 1940 Telefunken steel valve, DL 11. It only needed 1.2 volts at 60 milliwatts. "... so one thousand 'DL 11' needed the same current as a light bulb." After 1940, work was proceeding on advance models designated Sg66 and Sg70.

The author borrows a few photos from Leslie Simon's book German Research in World War II (published 1947). A few rockets are shown that clearly show a 'horse and rider' combination similar to the American space shuttle and booster. He provides color photos of various scale models showing the various configurations of rockets planned, including one reminiscent of the American X-20 Dyna-Soar project.

There is information about the German orbital station and the Space Mirror. This was originally published in Life on 23 July 1945. Apparently, the Americans wanted to show off this secret rather quickly. The Germans had concrete plans about using the mirror to send light to a receiving station which would then power "sun cannons" in the Redoubt in the Alps. (In the 1960s, in a newspaper comic strip, titled Our Space Age, Otto Binder showed the concept as a way to provide light to an area hit by a blackout or natural disaster.) The Russians attempted to orbit a smaller scale version of the space mirror in 1999, code name SNAMJA, but the equipment failed to deploy properly.

All in all, there is enough information in this book to show that the world may have missed an attack by some type of weapon of mass destruction. Mention is made of A9/A10 attacks against Russian manufacturing targets in the Urals. A look back at Volumes 1 and 2 of this series makes a convincing case that such a long-range attack was not planned to just drop a 1000 kg warhead on New York. A diagram that I frst encountered in a book dated 1946 shows an area of destruction with a 4 kilometer radius in Manhattan. Far-fetched? Recently, a diagram of a Plutonium bomb was located in Russian archives and published in Germany and on physicsweb. Here I will reference yet another book. This one titled Spying on the Bomb by Jeffrey T. Richelson: "In August 1941, [Fritz] Houtermans completed The Question of Starting a Nuclear Chain Reaction, reporting that a reactor using natural uranium as a fuel could produce plutonium, which could then be removed by chemical means and used as an explosive."

There are other things that I left out, so for those interested, there will still be some surprises. Highly recommended.


Ed