NAZI WONDER WEAPONS
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was destroyed after being struck by a lucky shot from Dora, a 311 ⁄ 2-inch German railway gun considered the largest in the world. Such attacks were never reported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, due to the fear of losing control over a panicked and war-weary Russian popula tion. The use of a super-weapon on the Eastern Front also might explain why more is not known about this issue. Accurate war news from Russia was extremely hard to come by during the war and grew more so during the Cold War. To make public the use of a nuclear or unconventional weapon “would have been a propaganda disaster for Stalin’s government,” noted Farrell. “Faced with an enemy of superior tactical and operational competence in conventional arms, the Red Army often had to resort to threats of execution against its own soldiers just to maintain order and discipline in its ranks and prevent mass desertion. Acknowledgment of the existence and use of such weapons by the mortal enemy of Commu nist Russia could conceivably have ruined Russian morale and cost Stalin the war, and perhaps even toppled his government.”
I F T H E N A ZIS had operational atomic weapons, is it possible they were transferred to the United States? Documents exist showing that America’s secret development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, could not have produced enough enriched uranium to make a bomb by mid-1945. Since only a plutonium bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, researchers have wondered where America acquired the uranium bombs dropped on Japan less than a month later. Some have speculated that the United States used a Nazi bomb or used Nazi enriched uranium to manufacture its bombs. The Trinity bomb exploded near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, was a plutonium bomb. Why then would the United States first drop the Little Boy, an untested uranium bomb, on Japan on August 6, 1945? “A rational explanation is [that] ‘Little Boy’ was not tested by the Americans because . . . [t]he Americans did not need to test it, because its German designers already had,” surmised Farrell. This idea is supported by the statement of German authors Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner