Sam Goudsmit and the Hunt for Hitler's Atom Bomb by Martijn van Calmthout

Author:Martijn van Calmthout
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633884519
Publisher: Prometheus Books

On Friday afternoon, October 14, 1960, the Dutch Communist daily newspaper De Waarheid kicks off what turns out to be one of the most high-profile controversies in the post-war Netherlands. “Amsterdam laboratory cooperates in the preparation of German A-bomb,” is the headline above the article, which continues on page 4. The account simultaneously touches all the exposed nerves inside and outside the Communist movement. Fifteen years after the war, the development of a new German army is still not widely accepted. The newspaper still has daily accounts of the convictions of war criminals. A German atom bomb is too much. Moreover, the nuclear weapons under discussion will, of course, ultimately be aimed at the Soviet Union and the Communist brothers and sisters in East Germany. The Dutch Communists are furious.

Other stories in the same newspaper report massive worker demonstrations in Tokyo, and a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, made in the United Nations on October 12, in support of a resolution to extend independence to colonial countries, which was greeted with loud applause. “Even the Spanish Franco delegation had to clap their hands,” according to the newspaper's correspondent at the UN meeting in New York. The resolution, De Waarheid claims, is a serious defeat for the Americans, although the US representative to the UN, James Wadsworth, will eventually claim to have applauded.

The article about the Amsterdam laboratory is written by “a reporter,” who later turns out to be the journalist Wim Klinkenberg. He reveals that the Laboratory for Mass-Spectrography “under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Kistemaker” has already been actively cooperating for two years in the preparation of nuclear weapons for a new Wehrmacht in Germany.

The run-up to the news story in De Waarheid begins on Wednesday, October 12, with reports in the American press about West Germany's efforts to produce nuclear weapons. The Germans, the story goes, are working on a purification technology for uranium. In this way, the type of uranium that can be used in a nuclear reactor, uranium-235, can be separated from natural uranium in ultrafast centrifuges.

In the meantime, US President Eisenhower has confirmed the reports and hinted that he has no objection to the development, even though it contravenes agreements made soon after the war to allow Germany no military capability.

In the lab on the eastern outskirts of Amsterdam, property of the Municipal University of Amsterdam, work is taking place on the same technology to purify uranium on which the Germans are said to be working, the so-called ultracentrifuge. Jacob Kistemaker heads the new lab, which has been located on Kruislaan since 1959. Kistemaker, born in 1917, is a striking, taciturn man, a farmer's son from Kolhorn, near Den Helder, who had a talent for mathematics and studied physics in Leiden. His laboratory is located in an open polder and surrounded by a high fence.

For years he has worked on so-called isotope separation. Atoms of the same chemical element can have a somewhat different mass and thus different nuclear characteristics. In the case of uranium, uranium-235 is easily fissionable and uranium-238 is not or barely so.

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