Hollywood turned the story of the attack into The Heroes of Telemark , a sappy action-movie-on-skis starring Kirk Douglas. The true story is both more complicated—and more compelling. Speaking from his home in Seattle, Bascomb explains how geography made the Vemork plant so hard to attack; how two of the greatest German physicists of the age, Einstein and Heisenberg, ended up on opposite sides of the race to create a nuclear bomb; and why the Norwegian commandos who blew up the plant were ordinary men, who did extraordinary things.
Vemork is about miles west of Oslo, on the edge of this ice-bound precipice. It was the only plant in the world that produced heavy water, which was the key ingredient in the German atomic bomb research program.
They needed heavy water to create a nuclear reactor, which was the stepping-stone to producing plutonium, and then an atomic bomb. The Allies did not know how far along the Germans were [in their researches] but the one thing they did know was the Nazi concentration on heavy water.
So they took that one spot, and hit it. Hydrogen has a single proton and a single electron. Deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen, has a neutron in its nucleus. This makes it heavier. To produce heavy water you need a lot of water and a lot of power. And Vemork had both of those. It also had this ingenious production facility, invented by a man named Leif Tronstad , a Norwegian professor, who thought, Here we have a lot of water and a lot of power, so we can create heavy water, which we hope the world will need.
Nuclear fission was discovered in Very quickly after the start of WWII, the Allies were thinking, We can harness nuclear fission to do one of two things: create power or make a bomb.
The exact same thing was happening in Germany. A German physicist named Kurt Diebner was the spearhead of the program. He recruited a number of physicists, among them Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg , who began doing the basic research, getting heavy water and figuring out, like the Allies, how to create a reactor and a bomb.
By , they were all, in essence, in the same place. The British were investigating nuclear energy at the same time as the Americans, on a separate but very much dual track. They did a lot of the early research to prove that an atomic bomb was feasible, and in they joined forces with the Americans, thanks to Roosevelt and Churchill.
The Directorate of Tube Alloys was one of those curious code names the British love. Tronstad was a year-old Norwegian professor of chemistry at the University of Trondheim, who came up with the idea of the heavy water plant at Vemork. In , the Germans invade and take over Vemork. Tronstad fights in the battle for Norway , which the Norwegians lose, and goes back to teaching in Trondheim.
But by that time it was not possible to begin the production of either pure graphite or pure heavy water in Germany. In the end, the German scientists had only enough heavy water to conduct one or two large-scale nuclear reactor experiments at a time. By the very end of the war, the Germans had progressed from horizontal and spherical layer designs to three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes immersed in heavy water.
They had also developed a nuclear reactor design that almost, but not quite, achieved a controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret under Diebner and with the strong support of the physicist Walther Gerlach, who was by that time head of the uranium project, built and tested a nuclear device. At best this would have been far less destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Rather it is an example of scientists trying to make any sort of weapon they could in order to help stave off defeat. No one knows the exact form of the device tested. But apparently the German scientists had designed it to use chemical high explosives configured in a hollow shell in order to provoke both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion reactions.
It is not clear whether this test generated nuclear reactions, but it does appear as if this is what the scientists had intended to occur. A diagram of the final lattice design of a nuclear reactor developed by two different research groups in Nazi Germany, one led by Kurt Diebner and the other by Werner Heisenberg Courtesy Mark Walker.
All of this begs the question, why did they not get further? Why did they not beat the Americans in the race for atomic bombs? The short answer is that whereas the Americans tried to create atomic bombs, and succeeded, the Germans did not succeed, but also did not really try. The German government ultimately decided that with the uncertainty surrounding the bomb project, it was not worth the gamble.
The German project had fundamental flaws from its conception. Other scientists left in protest, significantly decreasing the number of experts available to work on a German bomb.
A substantial number eventually came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. The bigger problem, however, lay in lack of support.
Hitler was much more interested in developing the V-2, a long-range ballistic missile. Another problem was coordination among different departments. To begin with, communications between different areas were extremely poor. The Farm Hall transcripts also show the ignorance of Walther Gerlach, the scientific liaison to the German government, an important link in coordinating the project.
Furthermore, Speer was reluctant to bring up the bomb project with Hitler himself unless he could produce clear results. Significant work on the German project was halted in June of The Germans never achieved a successful chain reaction, had no method of enriching uranium, and never seriously considered plutonium as a viable substitute.
German resources were allocated to other priorities. The timing of this cut fits with the pressures Germany faced in the war at the time, as resources had to be allocated to the immediate war effort. A popular theory for the failure of the German project is that Heisenberg deliberately aborted it so that Hitler would not have the atomic bomb. But there remains little evidence of this.
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