SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (47 page)

Viewed in the context of the previous chapters, an intriguing and highly suggestive constellation of relationships now emerges. At the
end
of the story, we have Gerlach

(1) heading up the most secret weapons project in Nazi Germany (the Bell);

(2) this project by all accounts involved the use of extremely high voltage, given that the device itself had ports for high voltage electrical cabling, given that the Henge pool also had similar ports, and given that Dr. Kurt Debus, an expert in high voltage, was a member of the Bell’s scientific research team;

(3) this project apparently utilized some dense and liquid material, the mysterious “Xerum 525”, that may very likely have been some isotope of mercury, as plausibly argued by Witkowski;

(4) this liquid was housed in lead lined bottles inside the Bell, which gave off strong radiations, indicating that the serum or liquid may have been mercury highly doped with radioactive materials;

(5) the liquid was rotated at extremely high speeds of mechanical (and possibly electrical) nature;

(6) and then was possibly subjected to sudden high voltage direct current pulses, as I Have argued.

All this is to say that Gerlach headed a project at the end of World War Two that apparently involved some liquid of similar characteristics to mercury which was then
stressed,
just as his article urged.

But at the
beginning
of the story, we have Gerlach writing an article outlining very similar possibilities for a popular German newspaper, and making a subtle though clear plea for a large scale scientific effort to investigate precisely radioactive and electrical
stressing
of
mercury.

Consequently, it appears that someone, somewhere inside Weimar Germany read Gerlach’s article, and decided to back his project. The Bell, therefore, may have been a project that by 1945 had possibly already been underway for twenty-one years! In other words, “the Bell” represents the culmination of a project begun nine years before the Third Reich even existed.

More importantly, Gerlach’s remarks also oddly corroborate the mysterious exchange of the scientists interred at Farm Hall who speak of a “photochemical” process of isotope enrichment unknown to the Allies, a process evocative of “cold fusion,”
³
for here in 1924 Gerlach is thinking in precisely such terms: transmutation of a low stability element by subjecting it to high stress of an electrical and radioactive nature. And lest it be forgotten, of all the scientists interred at Farm Hall, it was Gerlach alone who was singled out for the dubious honor of further interrogation by American authorities long after his Farm Hall colleagues had been released and returned to occupied Germany. It was Gerlach alone, of all the scientists interred at Farm Hall, who appeared to be off in his own world of “magnetic fields separation” and “the gravity of local space,” remarks which, I am sure, must have raised not only the eyebrows of his British captors but also his fellow scientists.

But is there anything in the literature that indicates such a “radioactively doped” form of mercury might possess some peculiar physical properties? As I wrote in my previous book on Nazi secret weapons,
The Reich of the Black Sun
, there would indeed appear to be just such a substance:

But what was the mysterious “Xerum 525”? When I first read of this strange material, I thought it might be some radioactive isotope of mercury, or possibly a more radioactive substance in chemical solution of some sort. It is perhaps worth noting that recently a strange substance known as “red mercury”, or mercury antimonite oxide, has been alleged to have strong neutron emitting properties when subjected to sudden explosive stress, and is alleged to be a non-fissile method of triggering the enormous fusion reactions of hydrogen bombs, as well as being capable, in its own right, of ….explosions in the small kiloton range. Perhaps the Nazis had stumbled onto a similar such substance during the war.
⁴

But just what exactly
is
red mercury? Is it a powerful new type of conventional explosive, capable of triggering fusion reactions in deuterium and tritium without the need for an atomic bomb as the fuse, as some allege, making a “pure fusion” bomb a nightmarish possibility? Or is it, as others maintain, a fanciful post-Cold War hoax?

B. Mercury Pyro-Antimonate, or Red Mercury (Mercury Antimony
Oxide)

Red mercury, or mercury antimony oxide – chemical symbol Hg
₂
Sb
₂
O
₇
– enjoyed a short, if notorious, career as the nuclear threat of the nineteen nineties. The story broke more or less simultaneously in various parts of the world, as the mysterious substance appeared to be behind a series of murders in the black market arms trade in post-apartheid South Africa, blocked smuggling attempts in the then recently-reunified Germany, and according to some stories, was even being sought by such “nations of concern” as Libya and Iraq as a basis for their own nuclear weapons programs. Then, almost as soon as the mysterious compound appeared, denunciations of the whole substance and subject as a “hoax” were issued by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and various other national and international nuclear regulatory agencies.

But one physicist who did
not
dismiss the story as a pure hoax was the American inventor of the neutron bomb, Dr. Sam Cohen. For Cohen, the possibility of “pure fusion” bombs – that is, hydrogen bombs that do
not
require an atom bomb as their trigger
⁵
- was brought home to him while he was on a visit to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories during a visit he made there in the spring of 1958.
⁶
During this visit, Cohen was briefed on a pure fusion bomb project.

This device, codenamed DOVE, fascinated me. It contained no fissile material; rather, its explosive power derived from heavy hydrogen – deuterium and tritium. Because of its extremely low nuclear cost and its high yield – comparable to that of a very large conventional bomb – it would in a military application, represent a revolutionary new class of weapons. A device of this nature, having a yield the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT, could kill enemy troops out to hundreds of yards, with no significant urban destruction and contamination.
⁷

The interest such a device held for the American military was more than just theoretical, for such devices would cost “roughly one-hundredth that of a battlefield fission weapon, meaning that these things could be turned out by the hundreds.”
⁸

The theory behind such a device was simple.

The most promising approach was to use a large spherical high-explosive charge to concentrate the explosive energy in a very small capsule containing deuterium and tritium. In theory, this would cause the desired thermonuclear reaction.
The program proceeded for some years and finally was terminated for lack of progress. Later, the Los Alamos laboratory had a go at it. But to my disappointment, and theirs, the problem remained intractable. The program ultimately was ended.
⁹

That is, theoretically, it should be possible to take the implosion detonator for a conventional atomic bomb, and instead of using it to compress a critical mass of plutonium to initiate fission, one could replace the plutonium with deuterium or tritium, compressing it sufficiently to increase the energy and density, and hence the statistical probability of collision (fusion) of heavy hydrogen atoms, and voila! One would have a “small” hydrogen bomb without the need of an atom bomb to detonate it.

But the effort failed, and it should be obvious why: no conventional explosive possessed sufficient brisance
¹⁰
to compress the heavy hydrogen to pressures sufficient to initiate fusion reactions. This affords a clue to what Dr. Cohen is
not
telling in his article: the United States was searching for a
conventional
explosive of sufficient bursting power that, when used in an implosion detonator, would compress heavy hydrogen to fusion energies and pressures. If such could be found, the atom bomb would become as extinct as the dodo bird, for two obvious reasons. First, if such a conventional explosive
could
be found, then it could be used as a powerful explosive in its own right, replacing the need for small yield strategic and tactical fission weapons, since it would be far smaller than a fuel air bomb of similar yield, and far less costly than its fission counterparts. Secondly, if such an explosive could be found, then, as Cohen intimates, it could be used as the detonator for a very small, “clean,” neutron-emitting hydrogen bomb, or, as Cohen does
not
intimate, as the detonator for the city-and-county-cracking blockbuster strategic hydrogen bomb. In either case, the cost would be far less than a conventional thermonuclear bomb.

However, as Cohen relates, there the story ended,
until
the crack-up of the Soviet Union and the new Russian Republic’s willingness to be more open about its nuclear weapons research.

Several years before Livermore began DOVE, the Soviets had started their own “pure-fusion” development. Unlike the U.S. they were quite open about it, claiming it was directed solely for peaceful applications. In 1957, Soviet nuclear-weapon designer I.A. Artsimovich presented a paper in Geneva describing experiments done in 1952, based on the same high-explosive implosion technology used in DOVE. He claimed progress had been made. Shortly thereafter, however, Soviet researchers stopped all public mention of the project.

On the other hand, the Soviet military had no hesitation in writing about such devices in their open military literature. In 1961, Colonel M. Pavlov, writing in
Red Star,
discussed almost precisely what I had briefed Paul Nitze on. Pavlov’s calculations of weapon effectiveness were almost identical to mine, which were classified. This indicated to me that although the Soviets were not talking about research on DOVE, they were doing it.
¹¹

Then, in 1992, a Russian nuclear weapons expert revealed details about what the Russians called “third generation nuclear weapons,” weapons that could “double the yield” with a “hundredfold reduction of weight compared to existing weapons.”
¹²
Cohen cites another Russian authority on the subject as stating “You can drop a couple of hundred little bombs on foreign territory, the enemy is devastated, but for the aggressor there are no consequences,”
¹³
for with such weapons there is none of the deadly, long lasting radioactive cloud to drift back over the user’s own country in a lethal radioactive fallout. Again, one is reminded of the Nazi’s use of fuel-air bombs in their rocket batteries on the eastern front, only in this case, it really
is
a combination of the phrases “tactical nukes” and “carpet bombing.”

As Cohen explains, the “doubling of yield” with a “hundred fold reduction in weight” clearly indicates that the Russians were
not
talking about standard battlefield tactical nuclear weapons, since even the most pure plutonium still had to be at least a few hundreds of grams simply to have enough material to generate spontaneous fission. Below a certain threshold of weight, fission was impossible, and a one hundredfold reduction would make a fission weapon inconceivable. The Russians therefore had to have been talking about a pure fusion weapon, about “some version of DOVE,
based on a detonation technology that doesn’t exist in the United States.
”
¹⁴
In other words, there were only two options for interpreting the Russians’ remarks: either they were lying, or they had discovered the holy grail of thermonuclear bomb engineering, a conventional explosive with enough brisance to compress heavy hydrogen to fusion pressures and energies.

And with this Cohen comments, albeit only briefly, on a whole new type of conventional explosive, of which red mercury is but one substance:

In recent years unclassified research has been conducted on a new class of materials (including red mercury), referred to as ballotechnics. These materials use a number of elements in low density powder form. When they are subjected to high-pressure shock compression, chemical reactions take place which under certain conditions can produce energy concentrations considerably in excess of those from high explosives. Ballotechnics therefore offer a significantly greater prospect for success in attaining a very low yield pure-fusion weapon than the high-explosive techniques we and other nations have explored.
¹⁵

Cohen also notes that red mercury was allegedly developed in the former Soviet Union precisely as a detonator for nuclear warheads. Indeed, its efficiency as a detonator was so great that a bomb the size of a hand grenade would be sufficient to blow a large ship out of the ocean.
¹⁶
After taking note of the fact that the CIA and various other American agencies dismissed the “red mercury” story as a hoax which they nevertheless were taking seriously – “whatever that means,” Cohen quips
¹⁷
– he then says nothing more about it.

2. The .01 Kiloton Yield Pure Fusion Bomb: The Logic of Fusion
Weapons Development

But what has all this to do with red mercury and the Bell? The answer is a complex one, and to see why, one should place Dr. Cohen’s remarks in the context of a general history of nuclear weapons developments. The pure fusion device represents the last in the various generations of nuclear weapons. One may summarize these various generations as follows: