to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

What Is Peenemünde?
tor using graphite and uranium, in other words, the same type of reactor as
the first operating reactor in the world, which the Americans created two
years later . . .
As far as one can tell from the published research, neither Russian nor American
postwar researchers have fully appreciated how the Peenemünde rocketeers’
invention of graphite control surfaces saved humankind.The Germans were forced
to use up their extremely limited stores of pure graphite.
in august 1945, when we were in Thuringia, we heard on the radio about the
dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We first of all tried to
understand what they were talking about.
There were no Soviet specialists among us at that time who had the slightest
involvement in atomic research. Nevertheless, our knowledge of physics helped
us, in a group discussion, to assume that the Americans had succeeded in creating
a bomb by converting part of the mass of a substance into energy, in accordance
with Einstein’s famous formula: E = mc 2 .There and then, we started to question
Helmut Gröttrup about what had been known in Peenemünde regarding
German work on the creation of an atomic bomb. To what extent were the
German directors of the long-range missile program—in particular Dornberger,
von Braun, or their closest assistants—familiar with the possibilities of creating an
atomic bomb? Long conversations with Gröttrup enabled us to understand that
work on some sort of super-powerful explosive had been conducted in Germany.
Gröttrup was well acquainted with the names Heisenberg and von Ardenne,
which I mentioned as possible scientists who could have been working on an
atomic bomb. Moreover, he said that in the summer of 1943 the Peenemünde
directors had, under great secrecy, talked about some new powerful explosive. For
the specialists at Peenemünde this was very important.They understood that the
ordinary TNT used in A-4 warheads—in quantities of 700–800 kilograms per
warhead—would produce an effect no greater than a conventional 1,000 kilogram
bomb dropped from an airplane.
British and American aviation had already dropped countless such bombs on
German cities. Nevertheless, Germany had continued to fight and had even
expanded its development of new weapons. Gröttrup recalled that he had heard
about the new explosive when von Braun had been sent to Berlin to consult
with the infantry command about the prospects of increasing the power of
missile warheads.
Upon his return, von Braun did not say with whom he had met in Berlin.
Gröttrup, smiling, recalled that it had been nice to hear from his boss that the theoretical
physicists, despite the very interesting problem they were working on, had
absolutely no engineering experience—in contrast to the missile specialists, they
could not imagine how they needed to organize their work in order to transition
from naked theory to “living” objects.
249