There is a now a new threat, namely that warmongers in unruly states may release nuclear weapons for terrorists to detonate. There is much money floating around in the impenetrable strata of the terrorist world, and the price of a nuclear bomb, purchased illicitly from a state that no longer needs them — or from agents of a state that doesn’t know they are being offered for sale — would be affordable by many terrorist groups. So, although the global warfare foreseen by the signatories of the Szilard petition has not come to pass, the threat of an atomic weapon is still the greatest terrorist threat of all. The ramifications of the secret weapons of World War II remain in most of our minds for much of the time.
CHAPTER 7
DOOMED TO FAIL
There is no limit to the crazy ideas dreamt up by the wartime scientists and inventors. Hitler was the target of plans to change his sex, by secretly dosing his vegetable garden with female hormones, or to blind him with toxic vapours smuggled aboard his train in a vase of flowers. There were schemes to drop bombs containing molasses in front of the advancing German troops, to trap their boots in a sticky mass that prevented them from moving forward, or to smother them in coils of barbed wire dropped from aircraft. From South Africa came the idea of emptying millions of poisonous snakes on the heads of enemy troops. Once Italy joined the war, there was even a proposal to drop huge amounts of bombs into the mouth of Vesuvius, causing it release a flood of molten lava across southern Italy. There was a plan to poison thousands of tons of cabbages, and drop them in enemy fields to wipe out their farm animals, with the idea that starvation would soon bring Germany to its knees. There was also a scheme to light up the whole of southern England with tens of thousands of searchlights, so that enemy bombers could be easily seen at night — heedless of the fact that, in Britain, more than half the days are cloudy. Another abortive idea was to cover the innumerable rivers and lakes in Britain with a coating of oil and coal dust, to prevent reflections from water at night giving the German pilots valuable navigational clues. The first trials failed to dull down the water, and instead covered the technicians with a thick layer of sticky black oil. Proposals were then put forward to equip fighter aircraft with long, sharp blades that could be used to sever the cords of parachutes, causing troops to plunge to their deaths; it was even planned to release a cloud of chloroform or ether from Allied bombers, so that pursuing enemy fighter pilots would become unconscious and crash.
German saboteurs came up with equally bizarre proposals. They designed detonators that fitted inside a pen and pencil set, a shaving brush, a tin of talc, torch batteries and a bar of toilet soap. Bombs were designed to be smuggled inside a can of motor oil, a Thermos flask, lumps of coal, car batteries and the heel of a boot. A bomb disguised as a tin of Smedley’s brand English Red Dessert Plums went into production. They even designed a hand grenade the size and shape of a bar of chocolate, and planned that this should be presented to the Royal Family. Another bomb was designed to be smuggled inside a stuffed dog. An MI5 file entitled: ‘Camouflages for sabotage equipment used by the German sabotage services’ listed many such secret weapons, and was kept top secret for over 50 years after the war (it is now in the National Archives). The SS and the Hitler Youth set up a series guerrilla teams, code named Werewolf Units, who would carry out sabotage operations when Germany was under Allied occupation. They trained in assassination and how to poison the food and water needed by the civilian population. As many as 6,000 recruits were signed up by early 1945, and German inventors were asked to provide examples of secret weapons with which Germany could overcome her enemies.
The most controversial of all these inventors was probably Viktor Schauberger, who had unconventional views on water and fluid flow (‘Water is alive!’ he used to say). He became known to Adolf Hitler because the two men were Austrian, and Hitler felt this gave them a sense of connection. Schauberger came up with a variety of ideas for motors to power submarines and even flying saucers. For a time he was imprisoned in a mental institution, and at the end of the war he was secretly confined for nine months by the Americans who interrogated him in the hope of obtaining some crucial information. His most famous design was for the Repulsin weapon, a kind of flying saucer, and rumours have persisted that the Nazis flew his design and that the Americans stole the idea and kept it secret. The United States is the most enterprising and entrepreneurial nation in the world, and it can safely be assumed that — if there was anything in these ideas — they’d be mass-producing the device and marketing it all over the world. The Nazi flying saucer is, I fear, just a legend.
One of the most enduring myths of the saga of secret weapons is the death ray. The story has its roots in the tales from antiquity of mirrors being massed against an enemy fleet, the concentrated sun’s rays setting fire to raiders’ wooden ships. Indeed, Archimedes was reported to have set fire to the Roman fleet at Syracuse this way in 212 BC. An American inventor named Edwin R. Scott claimed to have perfected a death ray in 1924, and the same year Harry Grindell-Matthews asked for money from the Air Ministry in London to reveal how a death ray worked. Most interesting of all were the claims in the 1930s by the distinguished nuclear pioneer Nikola Tesla who regularly said that he could make a death ray gun; the boasts were echoed by a Spanish physicist, Antonio Longoria, who claimed that he could kill small animals over a long distance.
In military history, tales abound of secret teams of scientists perfecting this ultimate weapon of war — or, if not perfecting it, coming close. There is no doubt that the Imperial Japanese General Headquarters investigated whether Ku-go (Death Rays) would be feasible. There had been claims that a German ‘electric wave’ had been developed during World War I, and later American reports of the 1930s used to speculate on claims that a death ray could bring down aircraft — in large numbers — hundreds of miles away. It is easy to dismiss this as scientific nonsense, but to the non-scientific mind there is always the consciousness that science once suggested that powered flight was impossible, and that motorized transportation faster than a galloping horse would prove to be fatal … and so the realism of science was quickly countered with a demand to press on with research and achieve the impossible.
An article on death rays from the United States, which was picked up by the Japanese authorities, led to research into methods of producing beams of microwaves. The work began in 1939 at laboratories in Noborito with a group of fewer than 30 scientists. Later Shimada City was a site of scientific research into secret weapons, and in 1943 their research teams had developed a high-powered magnetron that could generate a beam of the radiation. To the scientists, this was a necessary step in studying microwaves and infrared radiation. The Japanese developed heat-seeking technology which is used today in order to have a missile home in on the engines of a plane, and microwaves are widely used in many present-day applications including communication systems, medical treatment, radio astronomy and navigation (so not only to warm your pie).