In that case, I talk about the sabotage of a heavy water plant in Norway. And he was kind of in charge of going around the continent, trying to hunt down the Nazi scientists, and also to gather intelligence on them.Īnother branch of it was sort of the military branch, where they were trying to take out certain specific German targets that they feared were being used for atomic weapons. He was born in the US, but he grew up in Russia, fought in World War I and the Russian Revolution, both before he turned 18, so. There were the people trying to spy on them. There were kind of three branches that I talk about in the book. IRA FLATOW: Can you give us a rundown of who those people were? They just didn’t have enough expertise there, and that’s why he put together this team to try to go in and sabotage and spy on, and in some cases even tried to assassinate members of the Nazi atomic bomb project. And the head of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, realized that military intelligence just wasn’t capable of understanding what was going on in the realm of atomic science. There were a lot of scientists who were just terrified that, again, Germany was way ahead of us. IRA FLATOW: And you know, the Manhattan Project has gotten so much publicity, so to speak, over the decades that it’s sort of overshadowed the efforts of the Uranium Club, hasn’t it? So there were a lot of American scientists who were convinced that Germany had the inside track on the atomic bomb during the war, and it absolutely terrified them because they were going to give Adolf Hitler, they feared, atomic weapons. And they had the best industry in the world, too.
#HEAVY WATER WAR ATOMIC SOCIETY FULL#
They founded their version of the Manhattan Project, the dreaded Uranium Club, two full years before we started our Manhattan Project.
They had the best scientists in the world. But this side of it, the idea that Nazi Germany would’ve been working on their own atomic bomb, was something I’d never really heard of before.Īnd it made a lot of sense in some way, considering that Germany really had all of the pieces there to build an atomic bomb. I really enjoyed the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. SAM KEAN: I think it was just a story I’d never really heard before. But what made you decide to go into this specific detail of the war? So why did you write this book? As I say, I’ve read a lot of accounts. Sam Kean is a writer author of many books, and this book is The Bastard Brigade the True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb.
#HEAVY WATER WAR ATOMIC SOCIETY FREE#
And they had free reign to bomb and blow up anything that got in their way. It’s not only a story of good versus evil, but it’s a well-documented story, hundreds of end notes and references, of a little known effort by American and British spies and military to arrest and assassinate some of the top nuclear scientists in Germany before they could actually build any bomb. The book is called The Bastard Brigade, and in it author Sam Kean expertly retraces the race to control the future of the world. And I thought I had read so much about it until I came across a new book about the competition between American and Nazi scientists to build the first atomic bomb. I am an American history buff, especially about World War II.
Can’t get enough? Check out this excerpt from Sam Kean’s book Caesar’s Last Breath.Listen to a segment with Sam Kean talking about the alchemy of air.
He joins Ira here to talk about it, and you can read an excerpt from the book. Science writer Sam Kean tells that high-stakes story in his new book The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb. The Nazis had some of the greatest chemists and physicists in the world on their side, including Werner Heisenberg, and the Allies were terrified that the Nazis would beat them to the bomb-meaning the Allies were willing to try anything from espionage to assassination to bombing raids to stop them. Less well known is Nazi Germany’s “Uranium Club”-a similar project started a full two years before the Manhattan Project. Much has been written about the Manhattan Project, the American-led project to develop the atomic bomb. The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project ultimately went down in history as the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
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