SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (49 page)

At this point, “George”

Was getting into his stride, disclosing that red mercury, in the form that was leaking on to the black market, perished after several months and became useless – unless buyers had the facility to refresh it. When it was delivered from the production plant, it was in the form of a dark-red honey-like liquid, but as it deteriorated it turned into a powdery sludge.
²⁸

Presumably “refreshing” means to re-insert the substance into a reactor core, and this may explain the reason that the Soviet military developed a series of small, portable reactors capable of being transported, presumably for battlefield use.

All of the claims put forward by the Russians in the immediate post-Communist era about “doubling yields” with a “hundredfold reduction in weight,” about “red mercury” and new semiconductors and cheaper energy, led British nuclear physicist Frank Barnaby to come independently to the same conclusions as did Dr. Sam Cohen; all these claims “must mean that Russia is using a new technology unreported in Western scientific literature,” since “such a tiny type of nuclear warhead would be impossible to construct using fissile materials such as plutonium-239 and uranium-235.”
²⁹

b. The Recipe and “Xerum 525”

Then, even more strangely, as stories about the strange substance began to appear in the western press, the Russians themselves appeared to be mystified about its properties, for according to a top secret KGB report obtained by British journalist Gwynne Roberts – a report prepared by the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, Technical Branch for Boris Yeltsin himself – a few Western companies were also conducting their own very secret research into the substance, including Rockwell, General Dynamics, British Aerospace, and – perhaps with its own dark significance – the German armaments and aerospace firm Messerschmidt-Bölkow-Blohm, and the giant German electrical company, Siemens.
³⁰
The same memorandum also noted that the compound was “a mercury salt of antimony with the formula Hg
₂
Sb
₂
O
₇
”
³¹
and that it was first produced in the Soviet Union near the high energy physics research institute in Dubna in 1968,
³²
which possessed a reactor “
suited to implanting
the material with strontium, caesium and other isotopes.”
³³
The reactor was suitable, in other words, for
“salting”
or
“doping”
the Red Mercury with other highly radioactive material. At this point, the resemblance of the substance – heavy liquid, high radioactivity, deep wine colour to the Bell’s mysterious “Xerum 525” should be obvious.
³⁴

Whatever “Red Mercury” may be chemically, certain conclusions about its confection, about it “recipe”, may now be drawn:

(1) Mercury itself was most likely involved in whatever compound was actually made – whether that compound was mercury antimony oxide or not – since as a high density liquid metal which can exist in its own radioactive isotope forms, it is an ideal vehicle for “salting” or “doping” with other more radioactive materials;

(2) Mercury also has its own peculiar stability properties which manifest themselves when it is highly stressed, as pointed out by Gerlach’s article, and as claimed in ancient texts relating to “mercury vortex engines”;

(3) With such a highly “salted” compound, as “Xerum 525” appears to have been, utilized in a device such as the Bell, any number of strange properties may have been discovered by the Germans; and finally and most importantly,

(4) It appears that the essential step in its confection is to subject whatever compound “Red Mercury” represents to exposure in a reactor core. More about this crucial point in a moment.

British physicist Frank Barnaby, on the basis of classified reports recovered from Russia, learned that the chemical composition of the substance prior to its immersion in a reactor core was also important, for the compound mercury antimony oxide was purportedly then “dissolved in ordinary mercury metal, the type used in thermometers. It was then put in containers which were placed in the heart of a nuclear reactor for about twenty days. Under intense neutron bombardment, and perhaps with the addition of catalysts, the material was transformed and became a very thick and heavy cherry-red liquid.”
³⁵
Authors Hounam and McQuillan add an interesting comment:

Apparently the procedure was quite complicated and entailed mixing the powder with ordinary mercury in roughly equal molar weights, then adding other chemicals whose recipe was a closely guarded secret. After irradiation, the mixture was heated to evaporate the remaining mercury metal, leaving behind the gel.
³⁶

One may guess that perhaps the “secret ingredients” were hafnium or tantalum isomers, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment.

Note again the crucial requirement of immersion in a
reactor
for the precise purpose of subjecting the compound to high intensity neutron bombardment. We are now in a position to speculate why the material has such a high alleged density, and why it seems to “decay” after a few months, requiring “refreshing” by re-immersion in a reactor, for the chemical composition may be such that it allows the compound to absorb an excessively high and abnormal number of neutrons, which then slowly decays again. This would explain its extreme density. Likewise readers of my previous book on Nazi secret weapons,
Reich of the Black Sun
, will also recall mention of the Japanese intercept detailing German research in extremely high density materials such as obtained in certain types of
stars
, an allusion, perhaps, to precisely such German work with high density radioactive compounds immersed in nuclear reactors.

Finally, if the “recipe” for the confection of Red Mercury sounds a bit familiar, it should, for after all, it was Gerlach who hinted at what the possible inspiration may have been: alchemy.

c. Nuclear Isomers, Spin, GRASERS, and Gerlach

But why isotopes of hafnium and tantalum as the “secret ingredient(s)”? These substances are a strange form of radioactive isotope known as nuclear
isomers
, and isomers have some very strange properties indeed. Discovered in 1921, isomers are simply metastable or “extremely stable” forms of atoms that are brought about by a state of excitation of protons or neutrons in their nucleus, such that they require a
change in their spin
before they can release their pent-up energy. We are now a step closer to understanding the Bell, since it now appears that the device, due to the presence of “Xerum 525” was much
more
than a high-voltage, counterrotating plasma trap as conjectured by Witkowski. It certainly
was
that, but it was also a kind of reactor as well, designed to release nuclear energy by extremely high stresses brought about by high speed rotation and, in my own speculative reconstruction, by abrupt high voltage direct current pulsations.

Most isomers have unusually short half-lives, but in the case of tantalum-180m, its half life is an extremely long 10
¹⁵
years, or ten
quadrillion
years. And oddly enough, tantalum-180m is thought to have some connection to exploding stars, to supernovas.

Hafnium-178-2m is yet another metastable isomer, with a half life of a modest 31 years, but also apparently the isomer with the highest excitation energy, giving for one kilogram approximately a quarter megaton of yield of energy, mostly in the form of gamma rays. As such, it is one substance being investigated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a possible
ballotechnic
explosive, capable not only for use in “pure fusion” bombs but also as a means for pumping a gamma-ray laser, or GRASER, recalling the Mossbauer Effect outlined in the previous chapter.

Note now what we have:

(1) Isomers release their energy through changes in their spin;

(2) Nuclear magnetic spin resonance and gravity are the specialized fields of Prof. Dr. Walther Gerlach, project head of the Bell;

(3) The Bell employed a heavy liquid substance called “Xerum 525”, probably a “salted” compound based in part on mercury;

(4) This compound, since it was “salted”, depended for its creation on immersion over a period of time in a reactor core to subject the material to neutron bombardment, creating a substance of abnormally high density;

(5) World War Two Japanese intercepts refer to Nazi research in extremely high density materials for fusion research;

(6) Descriptions of Red Mercury are eerily similar to “Xerum 525, and Red Mercury is purportedly a “ballotechnic” chemical explosive capable of generating fusion bombs without the need for an atom bomb;

(7) “Xerum 525” was subjected to high velocity counterrotation or stress inside the Bell;

(8) “Xerum 525” may also have been subjected to repeated abrupt extremely high voltage direct current pulses inside the Bell;

(9) Gerlach wrote, nine years before the Nazis took power, of the need for a large scale project to investigate the phenomenon of mercury transmutation when mercury was subjected to precisely such stressing;

(10) Other “occult” and “esoteric” sources have long alleged that some similar such project was conducted in secret, by various secret societies in Germany prior to the Nazi era.

All these things combined tend to corroborate the notion that not only does the Bell represent a project most likely carried out over a long period of time, a project that the Nazis
inherited
from Weimar Germany and not one that they
initiated
, but it also corroborates the notion that at least
some
of this technology, probably in rudimentary form, made its way into the Soviet Union after the war, where it became the basis for the Russians’ own research into ballotechnics and their peculiar properties.

C. Back to the Nazi Atom Bomb: The Implications of the Ohrdruf
Test Reconsidered

But all these things not only suggest but
require
the use of a reactor in the confection of the compound, and this is problematic, since, after all, the Nazis were not supposed to have been successful in building a reactor. After all, even on the most radical reconstruction of their nuclear program, one that would allow them the achievement of a
uranium
fueled atom bomb, they never had a plutonium bomb because they were unable to synthesize that element in a reactor. No reactor, no plutonium bomb. No reactor, no “ballotechnic”, no ability to “salt” a compound like “Xerum 525” by neutron bombardment – and neutron bombardment and absorption is the only conceivably effective way to achieve anomalously high density materials, highly speculative though these thoughts may be.

All these considerations lead inevitably back to the alleged German test of a small critical mass, high yield atom bomb at or near the Ohrdruf troop parade ground on March 4, 1945.
³⁷

In order to appreciate the significance of the Ohrdruf atomic bomb test for the story of the Bell being developed here, it is necessary to reprise some of the remarks I made in my previous book on Nazi secret weapons,
Reich of the Black Sun,
for readers who may not have read that book, or who may not be familiar with the Ohrdruf story. The test was first brought to the attention of the German researchers Edgar Meyer and Thomas Mehner by an elderly German expatriate in Argentina by the name of Adolf Bernd Freier, who shortly before his death, told of the test of an atom bomb on the troop parade ground near the village of Ohrdruf on March 4, 1945. At this point, it is necessary to cite my remarks from
Reich of the Black Sun
rather extensively, in order to highlight the problems it poses:

In any case, the most problematical aspect of the alleged test of an atom bomb by the Nazis in the Orhdruf-Three Corners region of Thuringia comes from a rather specific, and rather startling, assertion. According to Freier, the test took place on March 4, 1945 at the old troop parade ground at Ohrdruf. There, a small scaffold about 6 meters high had been erected, at the top of which a small “atomic weapon”
³⁸
was placed. The weapon, according to Freier, was “
100 g
”, a mere one hundred grams!

This is one of the most significant, and highly problematical, allegations regarding the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project, made by someone supposedly involved in it, for as will be immediately obvious, 100 grams is
far
short of the 50 or so
kilo
grams of critical mass needed for a uranium-based atom bomb, as has been seen, and it is still well below the amount needed for the critical mass for a typical plutonium bomb. Yet, Freier is insistent upon this point, and moreover alleges that all the “slaves”, the luckless concentration camp victims that were forced to take part in the test, within a circle of 500-600 meters from ground zero were killed.
³⁹
This would give an area of approximately 1 to 1.2 kilometers of blast damage, roughly the effect of a modern tactical nuclear bomb. Such a blast radius would require an
enormous
amount of the then available conventional explosives, and that amount would far exceed the mere 100 grams Freier alleges for the device. These points indicate that the “A-Waffe: or “atomic weapon” was in fact a fully fledged atom bomb. So how does one explain the
extraordinarily small critical mass
, especially since the Manhattan Project was aiming for a uranium critical mass of around 50 kilograms?

The question deserves serious consideration, for it affords yet another possible clue – if the allegation is to be credited with accuracy – into the real nature of the Nazi atom bomb project. We have seen already that the project was developed under several different and discreet groups for reasons partly due to security, and for reasons partly due to the
practical
nature of the German program…..The
real
atom bomb development occurred far from the prying eyes of Allied intelligence, under the auspices of the Reichspost and more importantly, under the direct auspices of the SS.