8/11/2023 0 Comments Atomic skis telemark![]() ![]() Within months, he realizes he has to escape Norway, so he leaves his family behind and goes to England. Simultaneously, he begins working for the underground, providing the Allies with intelligence on the German interest in heavy water. In 1940, 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. Tronstad was a 38-year-old Norwegian professor of chemistry at the University of Trondheim, who came up with the idea of the heavy water plant at Vemork. The hero of your book is a Norwegian whose code name was The Mailman. The Directorate of Tube Alloys was one of those curious code names the British love. ![]() They did a lot of the early research to prove that an atomic bomb was feasible, and in 1942 they joined forces with the Americans, thanks to Roosevelt and Churchill. The British were investigating nuclear energy at the same time as the Americans, on a separate but very much dual track. The British team working on the bomb had a wonderfully Orwellian name, the Directorate of Tube Alloys. By 1942, they were all, in essence, in the same place. 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. A German physicist named Kurt Diebner was the spearhead of the program. The exact same thing was happening in Germany. Einstein and a group of physicists who’d escaped Germany began research as early as 1940, assembling supplies and trying to figure out whether an atomic bomb was feasible. 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. 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.īy Neal Bascomb author of The Winter Fortress At the outset of WWII, a race began to create a nuclear weapon. To produce heavy water you need a lot of water and a lot of power. It is very rare-there is one part heavy water for every 41 million molecules of regular water- and has this ability as a so-called “moderator.” In an atomic reaction, it slows down bombarding neutrons and doesn’t absorb them, which fosters a chain reaction. ![]() 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. Winston Churchill called heavy water “a sinister term, eerie, unnatural.” Deconstruct it for us. The Allies did not know how far along the Germans were but the one thing they did know was the Nazi concentration on heavy water. They needed heavy water to create a nuclear reactor, which was the stepping-stone to producing plutonium, and then an atomic bomb. It was the only plant in the world that produced heavy water, which was the key ingredient in the German atomic bomb research program. Vemork is about 100 miles west of Oslo, on the edge of this ice-bound precipice. You write that Allied leaders in World War II regarded the heavy water plant at Vemork as “on the thin line separating victory and defeat.” Put it on the map for us-and explain why it was so important. ![]()
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