Secret underground tunnel to Nazi nuclear test site found in Upper Austria ?

[Tender Branson]

Interesting stuff:

The ORF and the Standard are reporting that a few days ago a documentary film maker from Linz, who has long studied historical archives, deployed diggers to a field near the former Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and started digging.

The exact location is based on a report by a former CIA-member.

And in fact, the moviemaker and his digging crew found a granite building below the field with a stairway going down to an unknown, not yet entered system of tunnels.

It is speculated that the Nazis used this system of tunnels (built by thousands of KZ inmates, who died because of the hard work) for nuclear tests. Even now, the Gusen area still has higher than normal radiation levels.

It would be further evidence that the Nazis were not far away from a Nuclear Bomb (maybe even ahead of the US and the Soviets at that time, with the US/Soviets in fact "stealing" the material and knowledge to build their own bombs).

Anyway, the county administration ordered a stop on further digging in the area - because the filmmaker did not apply for a license to dig on the property (yeah yeah, bureaucracy) and because it's too dangerous to enter the tunnels because they could collapse.

http://derstandard.at/2000009755829/St-Georgen-an-der-Gusen-Unbekannte-NS-Anlage-entdeckt

http://ooe.orf.at/news/stories/2686104

Here's the background:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2529864/Austria-conduct-search-secret-Nazi-nuclear-weapon-laboratory-hidden-underneath-concentration-camp-complex.html

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[Tender Branson]

Anyway, the digging stop by the county authorities will only be temporary - because in 2015 the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute in Graz and the state of Upper Austria (primarily because of the state's Green Party leader and government member) will start a big digging project to uncover previously secret tunnels on that field and nearby mountain.

Maybe they really find that nuclear testing site somewhere below that mountain.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Possibly the Nazis might have progressed to the point of being able to build a crude reactor, but even had they developed bombs equivalent to Fat Man or Little Boy, they didn't have a delivery system able to carry such heavy bombs.  The best they could have done would have been to use it to as basically an atomic mine, hiding a bomb that would be blown up once the enemy had taken the area.  Maybe detonate it in Berlin itself as part of the Nero Decree.

[Redalgo]

It certainly is disturbing to consider in conjunction with the strides Germany was making in aviation!

[Cory]

Honestly I doubt this has anything to do with advanced atomic research. IIRC Heisenberg didn't think you needed control rods in a reactor and other things. Ergo the Nazi nuclear program is self-limiting in the sense that their first reaction will lead to a meltdown liquidating most of their people involved with the program.

The idea that the Nazis were close to a bomb contradicts literally everything else we know about their (largely non-existent) nuclear program.

Even if the Nazis did have bombs, and the means to deliver them by the time the could produce any it would be too late. A few atom bombs aren't enough to save Germany by late 1944/1945.

[Bacon King]

Fun fact: Allied intelligence had spies amongst the Swiss academia who would regularly attend lectures that Heisenberg gave on nuclear physics. There were standing orders to kill him if his understanding of the subject matter was ever determined to be sufficiently accurate and advanced to design a functional nuclear weapon. Fortunately for Heisenberg his ideas weren't entirely on the money

[Lief 🗽]

Possibly the Nazis might have progressed to the point of being able to build a crude reactor, but even had they developed bombs equivalent to Fat Man or Little Boy, they didn't have a delivery system able to carry such heavy bombs.  The best they could have done would have been to use it to as basically an atomic mine, hiding a bomb that would be blown up once the enemy had taken the area.  Maybe detonate it in Berlin itself as part of the Nero Decree.

You couldn't stick one on a V2?

[Bacon King]

Possibly the Nazis might have progressed to the point of being able to build a crude reactor, but even had they developed bombs equivalent to Fat Man or Little Boy, they didn't have a delivery system able to carry such heavy bombs.  The best they could have done would have been to use it to as basically an atomic mine, hiding a bomb that would be blown up once the enemy had taken the area.  Maybe detonate it in Berlin itself as part of the Nero Decree.

You couldn't stick one on a V2?

A nuke would have been too heavy of a payload for a V2 to carry and even if that wasn't a problem I think it would be really difficult to design a bomb that wouldn't blow up prematurely due to the V2's supersonic speeds

[Cory]

You couldn't stick one on a V2?

No because the V2 most likely isn't powerful enough to carry the heavy warhead and the technology for shaping the warhead to be placed in a rocket doesn't exist in 1945.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

You couldn't stick one on a V2?

No because the V2 most likely isn't powerful enough to carry the heavy warhead and the technology for shaping the warhead to be placed in a rocket doesn't exist in 1945.

The V2 had a warhead of about half a ton while Fat Man and Little Boy were both in the four to five ton range.  Conceivably a design similar to the proposed A10 MRBM might have been developed that traded range for increased payload, if one assumes that the Nazis had pushed for it sooner than they did in real life.  But nuking London or Moscow in 1945 wouldn't have won the war for Germany in any event.

However, the long slender Little Boy bomb wouldn't have been a problem form factor wise or reliability wise. It was considered the simpler weapon to make once you had the material (U-235) but getting it was more difficult than getting plutonium.  Trinity was a test of the plutonium Fat Man bomb, but they didn't bother testing Little Boy because they were sure it would work (barring mechanical failure of course).