The United States recently became the first medically advanced country with shortening rather than lengthening lifespans.  Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism associate this decline in life span with economic inequality rising to levels not previously recorded.

To find a very different country in which wealth equality was the greatest since records were kept and lifespan was increasing rapidly, we only need to go back 50 years, well within many of our memories.  It was when most environmental protection laws we still depend on were passed.  Population growth was minimal but still the greatest environmental concern as reflected in the hit movie Soylent Green in which people so completely covered the earth that cannibalism was needed to survive.

The divisive Viet Nam War was winding down but not before igniting mass movements.  Anti-war Ivy League students found social solidarity at 1969’s Woodstock Festival and a 1970 march in masse on Manhattan that didn’t turn out well.  Unionized blue-collar workers in hard hats building the city’s many new skyscrapers were so offended by the marchers’ anti-American flags that they beat them bloody and sent them running uptown as described in David Paul Kuhn’s book Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution.

The losers in this hard hat riot recovered well, however, since their Ivy League connections brought them corporate managerial jobs allowing them to bust the unions and scavenge the pensions of their patriotic attackers who left them with a lifetime hate of blue collar workers and the American flags on their hard hats.

Patriotic sentiments like those of the hard hats eventually brought militant anti-communist Ronald Reagan to the presidency after an earlier career working with producer Lew Wasserman and organized crime boss Sidney Korshak against Hollywood labor unions, which, unlike those of the hard hats, were often communist-friendly as described in Gus Russo’s book Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers.

The economic equality of the seventies quickly began disappearing as he lowered taxes on the rich and broke the patriotic union of air traffic controllers.  Most significantly he began mass immigration that greatly enriched the wealthy by increasing consumers while cheapening labor and thus weakening unions.  That was justified by an economic philosophy called neoliberalism popularized as an opposite of Soviet Union communism which glorified corporate power and devalued government.  Meanwhile opposition to it was marginalized by commercial media owned and controlled by the wealthiest.  Caesar Chavez brought his union members to the border to try and stop a flow of cheap labor that would stop his unionization goal but was ignored by a press that once lionized him.  Mass immigration brought fast population growth, once considered an environmental threat by the press but now ignored.  The Sierra Club, the most significant environmental organization, abruptly dropped population from its agenda at the demand of rich donors despite a failed revolt of its voting members.  Only a few lovers of nature like Edward Abbey pointed out that more people would allow it less room.

Discussed least of all was the fact that millions arriving from another culture would displace the one originally present, which happened rapidly in southern California and more gradually in the rest of the United States.  The French novel Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail accurately foresaw, however, how this would similarly destroy Europe, where it was also happening through encouragement by an increasingly globally unified group of the ultra-wealthy contemptuous of local cultures.

Neoliberalism was quickly adopted by both United States political parties at the demand of their donors, so an unquestioned monolithic mindset developed seeking endless exponential economic growth fueled by mass immigration.  Increasingly it resembled the other economic ideology of communism in viewing humans as economic widgets with their money value, as once was true of slaves, being their only characteristic of worth.  Survival of nature was similarly devalued so its protection in public lands increasingly lost support.  Support remained high for military public lands, though, because they brought billions to corporations of the military industrial complex as excuses for wars grew ranging from imaginary “weapons of mass destructions” in Iraq to trashing agreements that ended the Cold War so a military alliance against Russia could be pushed right up to its borders.

Despite a few hiccups like 1999’s Battle of Seattle, things rolled along quite well for neoliberalism for a few decades as mass immigration did cause populations of the US and Europe to explode and wealth going to fewer and fewer individuals exponentially increased.  The new millennium began turning sour for it, however, as Wall Street financially collapsed in 2008 and rioters attacked it in 2011’s Occupy movement.  Unlike the 1970 Hard Hat Riot in the same area, this time there were no hard hats chasing the occupiers away.  If any hard hats were still around, they were unlikely to have the well-paying jobs with strong union protection or the kind of deep family roots in the US that motivated militant patriotism among those of 1970.  This time it was still reasonably well-paid law enforcement that prevented an immediate serious threat, but if the small handful of people with Wall Street links and a virtual monopoly on wealth and power rarely seen since the Bourbons of the 1780’s had any sense of history, they might have had reason for worry.

It may not be coincidental that in the next decade universities dependent on wealthy donors radically shifted their emphasis from economics that looked at financial inequality to critical theory that looked at inequality among identity groups in a hierarchy identifying those of European descent as oppressors to be silenced and all others as oppressed who must always be believed, a process described in Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. It may seem paradoxical that a small group of super rich, many of European descent themselves, would promote this, but it was actually quite functional since it silenced the group most likely to successfully revolt against economic inequality and diffused the focus of violent rebellion away from those at the top.

Meanwhile those in power were shocked by the surprise presidential victory of Donald Trump despite his criticism of the mass immigration and population growth driving the neoliberal economy and his move away from the constant wars feeding the military industrial complex.  His emotional vigor but lack of political experience resembled that of Mohammad Mosaddegh who once connected with the people of Iran in a similar way as he brought their oil riches back to them from foreign control.  That was so unacceptable to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), however, that it transparently organized a coup driving him from office to jail.  Iranians weren’t blind to this, though, and their resentment of it rose into a violent 1979 revolution far more threatening to US interests than Mosaddegh ever was.

Trump’s criticism of the mass immigration driving the neoliberal economy was as threatening to those in power as Mosaddegh’s oil cut off and they similarly used the CIA and allied groups to destroy him, first with false claims he was controlled by Russia, then by constant media criticism, then by organizing  deadly riots, then concealing criminal activity on his opponent’s son’s laptop before an election, then secretly organizing a riot at the US Capitol that could be blamed on him, and finally using judiciary control to charge him with numerous felonies.

The handful of neoliberal billionaires able to monopolize most European and American wealth wanted even more power and viewed with admiration what Stalin once accomplished in the Soviet Union by turning communism into a secular religion.  Neoliberalism wouldn’t do that, however, because it emphasized freedom to get rich, but critical theory was perfect since it was a secular religion with the central tenet of silencing critics.

2020 was the year the superrich struck in the chaos of a global pandemic whose creation through gain -of-function research they had financed in China.  When the event that they were looking for, the rare death of an African-American in police custody finally happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were ready.  Millions of dollars were pumped to thuggish groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa that were encouraged to loot, burn, and kill on Main Street and ignore Wall Street so President Trump would be embarrassed just as the CIA once similarly paid rioters to overthrow Mosaddegh.

Simultaneously every organized group dependent on the flow of money from the top had to force all its people to sign a pledge of support for their new secular religion variously known as DEI, Woke, or critical race theory.

Overnight the Western world became so much like George Orwell’s 1984 that it became hard to believe the superrich didn’t use it as their play book.  The “Big Brother” in 1984 that all must pledge allegiance to became DEI.  The “Inner Party” at the top was the cadre of billionaires.  The “Outer Party” that enforced its power became all the employees doing the Inner Party’s bidding in corporation management, academia, media, and enforcement groups like the military, FBI, and CIA.  The great fear in the Outer Party was that any failure of loyalty would cause a fall into the lowest group, the Proles, whose deaths of despair went un-mourned.  Just as in 1984 every memory of a better past, such as statues, must be destroyed.

1984 even had an “anti-sex league” so the only love could be for “Big Brother” by increasingly alike followers becoming consuming widgets without identity in an economic system much like the visions of communism and neoliberalism.  Now the anti-sex league equivalent is transgenderism in which castration is encouraged for boys and breast amputation for girls so they become more like identity-less machines.

Renaud Camus wrote about the Great Replacement of the French by mass immigration but the threat to all human and cultural diversity is far vaster and involves the plan of a wealthy few to rule a world of identical biological objects who only exist to serve them and will scarcely notice when replaced by AI.

Will their plan succeed?  They may well destroy Donald Trump as his doppelganger Mosaddegh was once destroyed for trying to prevent theft of his Iranian people’s oil.  But his memory lived on among his people and led to a far more effective revolution than he ever contemplated.

Can that happen here?  As this is being written a song flew to Billboard’s top for the first time without previous recordings by its singer.  “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony is a revolutionary hymn to those trapped in today’s world of death of despair.  Oddly it is being called right-wing despite evoking images like those of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie sang about with the words “some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.”  Steinbeck and Guthrie identified with and were seen as left wingers and Oliver as a right winger, but maybe they’re not so different after all.

The last time I saw the word “love” it was in the phrase “Love is love”, which, being meaningless, gave me no idea what it was supposed to be promoting. I thought it must be homosexuality because I’d heard Stephen Fry say the words, which was depressing enough. How could an intelligent man do something so inane as to repeat a meaningless slogan? But if homosexuality was the subject, what was the message? I thought it might be that it is love and not lust that brings homosexuals together, which people might accept now that it’s a generation since anyone heard of anything like the study that found that a third of American homosexuals had had as many as a thousand sexual partners.[1] It stands to reason that the longer censorship goes on, the more you can count on public ignorance.

On the walls of the classroom where the words “Love is love” were displayed were other slogans, like “Black Lives Matter” and “Celebrate Neurodiversity”. The teacher’s tee-shirt bore the words “Protect trans kids”. No multiplication table or picture of Abraham Lincoln was in sight. Apparently neurodiversity refers to things like autism and Tourette’s.

But I looked the slogan up, and it’s not about homosexuality; it’s about queerness. At least, I assume there is a difference. The idea is to ask “straight, cis people to see queer people’s humanity”. According to the article, not all queer people like it.[2] Some think it’s telling them they must make themselves palatable if they want to be seen as human. One, who might have been asking too much of a slogan, complained that it didn’t address the “hugely disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence affecting bi+ women”. Another averred that queerness must always be queered, which would require “levelling up from ‘love is love’ to slogans that recognise the complexity and intersectionality of queer struggles”. I suppose he’s right.

But leaving aside the queer, how is love among the normal? Immediately we are interrupted. Did someone say “normal”? Doesn’t he know that normality, the target of the revolution, must not be mentioned? We mustn’t refer to what is being overturned in case it sounds as if we think there’s something to be said for it. Rather, we must look on with approval as every norm is replaced by its opposite: not just heterosexuality by homosexuality or “queerness” but reproduction by willed self-extinction, for White people, that is, if they care about the planet; meat-eating by veganism or at least vegetarianism, although this doesn’t apply to Muslims; and Christianity by “wokeness”. We must think it only right for the disabled to have priority over the able-bodied, the mentally ill to be found more interesting than the sane, and for disorders to be celebrated as ideals. Above all, we want there to be women wherever there used to be men, and Black people wherever there used to be White people.

But to return to the subject, love is not exactly thriving among the majority. It was once found mainly in families, flowing between husbands and wives, parents and children, but not much of this remains. The husband is the ex-husband, living in a bedsit while his ex-wife and her boyfriend share the house. She hopes that the children are being well looked after by whoever has the job while she does more important things. The children for their part aren’t as safe as children used to be, especially at school, where they might be being taught how to masturbate or asked if they’re sure they’re boys or girls.

But things haven’t gone far enough. Every attempt is made to persuade women in particular to do whatever will destroy the last of love. Breakfast television steers them away from the necessary and good towards the freakish and transgressive, with topics such as “I’m selling my virginity to the highest bidder” or one about a gold-digger and her sugar-daddy, where the girl didn’t even need to sleep with the shrivelled old millionaire she’d paired up with, who presumably expected her to find her sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

Men bad, women good or men dumb, women smart was the idea that governed all the clips I saw. This was in 2018, when other topics were “My husband cheated on me with our daughter’s friend”, proving that men are bastards, and “I sleep with men to save their marriages”, which showed that if a woman has sex with your husband, she’s doing it to be helpful. Come to that, why not invite her to join the marriage? “We have the perfect polygamous relationship” was another topic.

The assault continues. The idea of women being loved in return for loving others, devoting themselves to them, making sacrifices for them, is very much in the past. It’s in women’s nature to be like that, and nature must be inverted, so they must be induced to behave in the opposite way. It is themselves they should love now, according to the media, and so Vogue says: “I love myself. Why is that so hard to say?”, Darling asks what self-love truly means, and a feminist interviewed on television holds up a book called I Love Myself.[3]

But the media’s latest product, which they are apparently selling hand over fist, is female infidelity. It’s empowering, they say.[4] Cosmopolitan has told women what to do after they cheat: first and foremost, don’t tell him. Women’s Health has explained why women shouldn’t regret having an affair. The Times has suggested that cheating might put a spring in their step. Call Her Daddy, a podcast produced by women for women, is selling a tee-shirt saying “Cheat on him”. It’s amazing, really, how quickly the media can ruin a society. It only seems a couple of decades since women’s magazines were telling their readers how to keep their marriages in good shape. Now, appealing to the radical selfishness they have instilled, they’re inciting them to wreck them.

*   *   *

Turning from love to hate, this word has replaced “hatred” for the same reason as “racist” has replaced “racialist”: it makes what it refers to sound worse and itself sounds more aggressive. “Racialist” sounded almost soft; call someone a racist and you’re hissing at them. “Hatred” sounds about as sharp as “grapefruit”; “hate” sounds like a stab.

The way people use the word today is an absurdity. To be accused of hating someone, or more commonly a group, you only need to disagree with your accuser. Unfortunately, as activists and the media present unfavoured opinions as malicious, half the population follows them and shuns anyone with such views, which usually have more going for them than ones that are approved.

As for hatred itself, as soon as you start to think about it you realise there’s nothing wrong with it. Some people hate cauliflower; some people hate the opera; some people hate the French. Some hate Mondays or their neighbours or Tony Blair. So what? No one’s going to get hurt.

Oh, but they might do, people will say. If you hate your neighbour, you might attack him. They needn’t worry. I can contain myself. Yes, but imagine if you did! It would be a hate crime! Can someone tell me why hate crimes are supposed to be so bad? Would it be better if I attacked my neighbour out of boredom?

Anyway, even if I did attack him out of hatred it wouldn’t be a hate crime because he is White and heterosexual and so am I. I can only commit a hate crime against someone of a different race, religion or sexual orientation or someone who’s disabled or transgender. Those are the protected classes.[5] I can attack able-bodied, straight White Christians all I like.

Not that I’d have to hate a protected person to make them the victim of a hate crime. I’d only have to target them wholly or partly because I felt hostile to their group, where hostility can take the form of any negative state of mind including unfriendliness or dislike.[6]

But in fact I could make them the victim of a hate crime regardless of my motive. The police aren’t interested in my motive; they’re interested in accumulating hate-crime statistics. That is why they don’t seek evidence, only allegations. If someone — it doesn’t matter who — alleges, or “perceives”, as they put it, that I attacked my victim because they were Black, say, that’s good enough for them. The person making the allegation “does not have to justify or provide evidence of their perception that the crime was motivated by hostility”, where the hostility — the dislike or whatever — would have arisen from the victim’s possession of a protected characteristic.[7] “Officers and staff should not challenge this initial perception”. Finding out the facts is the last thing the police want to do. It could cost them a hate crime.

I wonder why these classes of people ever received their special protection. Was it to suggest that they were especially at risk, like the way someone might shield their face to suggest that someone was about to hit them? But we had to have hate crimes, I suppose, or White people wouldn’t have been able to be punished any more than anybody else, and we’d still have equality before the law.[8]

Going back to my advisors, who think I need to watch my hatred, it’s nice of them to take an interest in my emotions. With so many other people in the world whose inner lives they could be probing and evaluating, I’m gratified that they found time for me.

Hatred is not just usually innocent; if you don’t feel it in certain circumstances there’s something wrong with you, the circumstances being when someone attacks or threatens something that you love. What are you going to feel for someone who mugs your mother? Affection? Unless you feel a degree of hatred, your limbic system is out of order; either that or you don’t love your mother. It’s the basic logic of the emotions: if you love, you can hate; if you can’t hate, you don’t love. This could be why we’re encouraged to see hatred as the worst of feelings. Take it out of us and they’ll have disarmed us and eroded our attachments into the bargain.

I suspect that the people behind today’s anti-hate campaigns want us all to be like the parents of Amy Biehl, an American woman who was murdered in South Africa by a mob of young Black men shouting racial slurs. When in 1998 the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission released the four who were convicted after they’d been in prison just four years, her parents flew over to show their support for the move.[9] Her father shook the killers by the hand. They don’t even seem to have shown any remorse.[10] Anti-hate propaganda promotes our self-destruction. If we’re going to pal up with people who kill our daughters, surely we might as well kill them ourselves and save the howling mobs the trouble.

What anti-hate movements largely do in promoting our self-destruction is promote hatred, specifically of all that’s good, like free speech, your people and your country. There needs to be a movement promoting hatred of all that’s bad.

[1] David Horowitz, 2000 (1998), The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, New York: Touchstone-Simon and Schuster. Chapter 5, “A Radical Holocaust”, mentions a study from 1978.

[2] Mashable Middle East, June 30th 2023, “The problem with the ‘Love Is Love’ slogan”, https://me.mashable.com/sex-dating-relationships/29732/the-problem-with-the-love-is-love-slogan.

[3] (1) Vogue, Feb. 13th 2021, “I Love Myself. Why Is That So Hard to Say Out Loud?”, https://www.vogue.com/article/i-love-myself-why-is-that-so-hard-to-say-out-loud; (2) Darling, Feb. 14th 2018, “We Asked Real Women What Self-Love Truly Means and This Is What They Said”, https://blog.darlingmagazine.org/real-women-define-self-love/; (3) Fox News, Dec. 16th 2017, “Professor argues eating meat promotes toxic masculinity. Jesse Watters, Anne DeLessio-Parso”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir4Ltgj4o84. Anne DeLessio-Parso was a brainless, inarticulate feminist, who loved herself nonetheless.

[4] This was according to a young journalist, Freya India, on The New Culture Forum, Aug. 24th 2023, “How Feminism Exploits Young Women”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P165MCUVGOY.

[5] College of Policing, 2023, Responding to hate, https://www.college.police.uk/app/major-investigation-and-public-protection/hate-crime/responding-hate.

[6] Ibid.

[7] This is the College of Policing’s current subjective concept of a hate crime, from the “Hostility” section of the cited document (ibid.), which says that a crime “should be recorded and flagged as a hate crime” if the victim or any other person “perceives that they have been targeted because of hate or hostility …”. The “Hate crime” section of the same document also employs a subjective concept in defining a hate crime by reference to someone’s perception of the offender’s motive, making no reference to their actual motive. But the document also has an objective concept of a hate crime. The “Hate motivation” section defines hate crimes by reference to the part played by the hostility or prejudice felt by the offender for an identifiable group in determining who is targeted, which implies that the offender’s feelings are known and taken account of. It makes no reference to what anyone else might think the motive was. The “Hostility” section, as well as employing a subjective concept, employs an objective one in requiring the offender either to demonstrate hostility or prejudice in his actions or be motivated wholly or partially by hostility or prejudice, where again his feelings or attitude would need to be known.

[8] At the behest of the Home Secretary Jack Straw, hate crimes were brought into UK law as “racially aggravated offences” by the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998.

[9] Occidental Observer, Aug. 23rd 2023, “Amy Biehl, Forgiveness, And the Nature of ‘Hate’” by RockaBoatus, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/08/23/amy-biehl-forgiveness-and-the-nature-of-hate/.

[10] At least, reports gave no indication that they had expressed remorse. Certainly the crime didn’t upset their friends, who when it was described in court reportedly burst out laughing (ibid.).

We generally think that major wars are accelerators of technical progress, and the Second World War is often cited in this respect. But what happens if a major technological breakthrough that everyone knows, hopes or fears is imminent, a breakthrough that would lead to an absolute weapon capable of completely overturning the geopolitical balances in place?

What if, to put it bluntly, it was the atomic bomb that had started the Second World War, rather than simply bringing it to a close?

A reading of Rainer Karlsch’s book Hitler’s Bombe, the French translation of which was published in 2007 by Calmann-Lévy, highlights the following important points.

I – Discovering the principles of nuclear energy

1931 – Discovery of heavy water (D₂O) by the American Harold C. Urey. p.59

1932 – First nuclear fusion experiment in Cambridge, led by Ernest Rutherford, assisted by Paul Harteck (Austrian) and Mark Oliphant (Australian). P.39

1938 – Shortly before Christmas, Otto Hahn and Frtitz Strassmann achieved the first fission of the uranium atom. They had wanted to create radium by bombarding uranium with neutrons, but instead of detaching a few particles of uranium, they had split the atoms into two parts. Otto Hahn was considered the best radiochemist of his time, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 for his discovery of fission. p.38

1939 – On 6 January, Hahn and Strassmann published the results of their series of tests. Their sensational findings spread throughout the world community of physicists. The most fascinating aspect of this new kind of nuclear reaction was the large amount of energy it released, 200 million electron volts – a gigantic figure, that is to say part of the mass of the nucleus that was released as heat and light. P.32.

1939 – 22 April, Jean-Frédéric Joliot Curie confirmed the chain reaction in the journal Nature: several fast neutrons are emitted when the nucleus of the uranium atom is fissioned by a slow neutron. p.32

II – Political and military awareness

1939 – Wilhelm Hanle held a lecture on “the creation of energy from a uranium fission machine“. He explained that it had to be built from a combination of uranium and heavy water or graphite. [heavy water or graphite must slow down the fast neutrons released by the fission of the uranium nucleus to increase the probability that they will in turn encounter a uranium nucleus for further fission]. Hanle and his mentor Georg Joos wrote a letter to the Reich Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust, in which they outlined the possible consequences of atomic energy. This included the idea of a nuclear explosive. p.33

1939 – On 24 April, just two days after Joliot-Curie’s publication, Professor Paul Harteck of Hamburg University and his assistant Wilhelm Groth reported to the War Ministry that the development of nuclear explosives was possible: “The first country to make use of fission of the nucleus will possess an irrecoverable superiority over the others“. p.33

1939 – 2 August, USA, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner write to President Roosevelt, pointing out that uranium bombs could destroy entire cities. p.69

1940 – March, in Great Britain, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls draft two brief memoranda to the government authorities on the construction of a superbomb.p.69

1940 – In the USSR, Georgi Flerov and Konstantin Petrzak, two students of Igor Kourtchatov, established that spontaneous fission of uranium exists in nature. Curious to see how his colleagues in the West would react to this discovery, Flerov published an article on the subject in Physical Review. To his astonishment, there was no response. Having a good sense of the imminent danger, he correctly interpreted the silence of his colleagues: uranium research had become a top-secret military affair. p.69

It is also worth noting that Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a Communist, a member of the PCF whose links with Moscow are well known.

III – A new look at the logic behind the Reich’s first territorial conquests

1938 – 12 March, Anschluss, the scientific community in Vienna arrived as reinforcements, for the German effort, leading in 1942 to the foundation of the Neutron Institute under the direction of Georg Stetter. It was one of the best-staffed and best-equipped nuclear physics centres in the entire German zone of influence. p.42

1938 – 29 September, Munich Agreement and annexation of the Sudetenland. The Joachimstahl mines, Europe’s oldest and largest uranium mines, came under German control. From then on, they supplied only German producers. p.59

1940 – 9 April, invasion of Norway. Since 1934, heavy water had been produced by the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro; it was a by-product of the manufacture of hydrogen by electrolysis. To obtain one gram of heavy water, 1000 kWh of energy had to be used. Such an expensive method could only be used as a secondary process, but in Norway, water power was cheap. No other country in the world had a comparable facility before the war. p.60

1940 – 10 May Invasion of Belgium.  The Brussels Mining Union, one of the largest uranium producers in the world, was integrated into the German uranium project. p.59

1940 – 22 June, armistice in France. The Paris cyclotron came under German control. It remained in Paris, but was used every other week by the Germans and every other week by the French. The cyclotron is an extremely important particle accelerator for fundamental research in nuclear physics. In the United States there were already around thirty before the war, but none in Germany. The Paris cyclotron was by far the most powerful source of neutrons available to the Reich. p.62

Erich Schumann and Kurt Diebner, at the head of the German atomic project, had visited the installation and studied the research documents confiscated from the French army and secret services. The war had forced the French to halt their reactor experiments, without which they would probably have been the first to build a self-igniting reactor. Their patent contained the idea of using uranium in a reactor in the shape of a sphere or cob. Diebner took up this idea only good two years later. p.63.

Diebner also took up Joliot-Curie’s idea of uranium in dice-shaped structures rather than in plates, so that the uranium in the reactor was surrounded by heavy water in all three dimensions. p.107

Of course, Germany didn’t conquer France because of a cyclotron, but if that cyclotron had been installed in Lyon or Marseille, it would no doubt have changed the demarcation line.

IV – Germany’s path to the bomb

Germany had three options: the uranium fission bomb, the plutonium fission bomb and the fusion (hydrogen) bomb. As early as 1940, there was also the concept of a reactor bomb—or dirty bomb, but there was no question of the army detonating a reactor, and the idea was immediately rejected. p.272

The uranium fission bomb was totally out of Germany’s reach, but enriching uranium to a military level requires Pharaonic industrial facilities and phenomenal energy consumption.

The advantage of the plutonium fission bomb is that the plutonium is produced in a reactor using low-enriched uranium. During the chain reaction, natural uranium 238U (non-fissile) can capture a neutron released by the fission of a 235U. The new uranium isotope decays into neptunium, which in turn can capture a neutron and decay into plutonium.

On 17 July 1940, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker wrote a report that stopped short at neptunium. p.74.

In August 1941, Fritz Houtermans wrote a second report that went as far as plutonium. p.78

In addition, Houtermans understood the role of fast neutrons in an uncontrolled chain reaction (in other words, in an atomic explosion).

In February 1945, at Gottow, Werner Heisenberg and his group came within a few metres of the goal. Their instruments showed a multiplication of neutrons that was almost tenfold, but this was not enough to fuel a chain reaction.  The experiment would have had to be carried out in a shape that was not cylindrical but spherical, or additional material would have had to be used, but this was available at Stadtilm. p.150.

The fusion bomb: this is the one that went as far as the test, which was successful, but not transformed to military use.

At the beginning of March 1945, the SS organised the world’s first explosion of a nuclear weapon at Ohrdruf in Thuringia, and it was a fusion bomb rather than a fission bomb. Using the shaped charge principle, the Germans had succeeded in creating a tactical H-bomb that did not require atomic ignition. A sphere containing hydrogen was placed in a cylinder, with a conventional (chemical) explosive charge at each end of the cylinder. The two charges were activated simultaneously and, according to the principle of the shaped charge, the energy of the explosions was spontaneously directed in the direction of least resistance, towards the hydrogen sphere, the shock wave creating sufficient pressure and temperature at the centre for fusion. p. 253.

The author undertook on-site measurements to trace the explosion:

Having taken note of all the clues and results of the measurements—the increased activity of caesium 137 and cobalt 60, the presence of ²³⁸U and ²³⁵U, particles resulting from a high-temperature fusion process—the scientists we consulted concluded that there were traces of a nuclear event at Ohrdruf. p. 270.

There is also the report from the GRU, the Red Army’s intelligence service, which duly reported these results to Stalin: the GRU of course had a double agent on the spot. p. 261

In fact, this test was probably not the first. We also have the testimony of Luigi Romersa, a journalist from the Corriere della Serra, who was Mussolini’s emissary and reported an experiment that took place on 10 October 1944 at Peenmünde, von Braun’s rocket island. p. 209.

Germany was well and truly on the way to a miracle weapon, and a nuclear warhead fitted to a V2 could have constituted this Wunderwaffe. Wernher von Braun denied having thought of it, but it was in the order of things: when intercontinental rockets are designed, it is not to send grenades. Moreover, as early as 1946, von Braun presented his American hosts, having just arrived at Fort Bliss, with the project for a very long-range rocket equipped with a nuclear warhead, the “Comet” p. 349.

V – Lessons learned for international technical cooperation

Without war, the world’s various powers were all likely to break through in the field of nuclear weapons, even in Japan there was talk of these miracle weapons, the danger of an irreversible upset in the balance was serious, hence perhaps the escalation towards war.

Perhaps we’ve learned our lesson nowadays, and it’s probably not for nothing that the ITER project is international.

In our opinion, this is not so much for reasons of funding or the need for a wide range of skills, but because a project like ITER can also lead to a technological breakthrough that will upset the balance of power: with international cooperation, we know that this breakthrough will be shared by everyone.