Horten flying wing (H.XVIII)

[KurtGodel7]

The Horten flying wing came about as the result of the Amerika Bomber project. As the name of that project implies, the objective was to build a bomber capable of flying from Europe to the east coast of America and back, without refueling. To achieve this, the Horten brothers developed a flying wing with six jet engines.

Due to the stealthy characteristics of the plane and its high speed, radar detection would not have occurred until it was only about 10 minutes from its intended target. That would have made interception difficult if not impossible. It is also worth bearing in mind that the would-be interceptors would have had a slower speed than the plane they were supposed to intercept. The one downside to this aircraft is that its payload was only 700 kg (1500 lbs). (As compared to 2000 kg/4500 lbs for the Flying Fortress on long range missions.) Bearing this weight restriction in mind, the Horten H.XVIII would have been unsuited to repaying American strategic bombing efforts in any kind of tit-for-tat way.

According to a documentary I saw on this aircraft, Goering assured the Horten brothers that, by 1946, Germany would have a nuclear bomb. By “nuclear bomb” he did not necessarily mean a nuclear bomb of the type used at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It’s far more likely that in this case, “nuclear bomb” meant a dirty bomb. A dirty bomb would not have been as powerful as the weapons used at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but would have been far more powerful than a conventional (non-nuclear) weapon.

The Horten H.XVIII was a larger version of a two engine flying wing also designed by the Horten brothers.

[CWO Marc]

@KurtGodel7:

A dirty bomb would not have been as powerful as the weapons used at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but would have been far more powerful than a conventional (non-nuclear) weapon.

Not in any explosive sense.  A dirty bomb, also known as a radiological weapon, is simply a conventional explosive charge (potentially quite modest in size) which is used to scatter radioactive materials over a target area.  It doesn’t destroy buildings (unless it happens to hit one directly) and it doesn’t produce any kind of nuclear explosion.  Conceptually, radiological weapons resemble poison gas weapons more than anything else, and they’re much slower-acting than poison gases (some of which are lethal in a matter or seconds or minutes).  The basic aim of a dirty bomb is to contaminate a target area and, in principle, make it uninhabitable (in the same way that certain liquid chemical weapons can linger on the ground for a long time and make the area remain hazardous).  In the case of both dirty bombs and chemical poisons, however, there’s the practical problem of balancing concentration with dispersion.  If you detonate a radiological weapon or a chemical weapon close to the ground, you can achieve a concentrated (and thus potentially lethal) dosage, but at the price of having the effect limited to a very small area that can easily be evacuated.  Conversely, if you detonate one at a higher altitude, you can contaminate a larger area, but at the price of achieving a lower dosage per square meter because the agent is spread out more thinly – potentially to the point where it’s ineffective.  So either way, the practicality is limited unless you have large enough quantities of the lethal agent (and the means to deliver it accurately) to bomb a city on a very large scale.

[KurtGodel7]

Thanks for the informative post. You prompted me to do a little reading. At least according to what I just read, you are correct: a dirty bomb does not have a more powerful explosion than a conventional bomb. That reading contradicts the impression made by a documentary I watched; in which the explosion from a dirty bomb was portrayed as more powerful than a conventional weapon, less powerful than a nuclear blast.

There were some reports of what appeared to be nuclear weapons tests in Germany toward the end of the war. The documentaries in question treated those reports as evidence of dirty bombs being tested. But given that the explosions themselves were very powerful and produced a lot of light, the reports in question were either false (which is most likely) or else may have represented testing of actual nuclear weapons (less likely).

But not necessarily impossible, given the fact that a Nazi nuclear weapons complex has recently been discovered in Austria.

This brings me back to the aforementioned statement by Goering that Germany would have a nuclear bomb by 1946. If a dirty bomb was as unimpressive as your post and my recent reading leads me to believe, it’s quite possible that by “nuclear bomb” he meant an actual nuclear bomb.

However, it’s worth mentioning that Goering is the same guy who promised that the British Expeditionary Force near Dunkirk could be wiped out by the air, with no need for a German land offensive. Goering was also the one who promised that the German pocket at Stalingrad could be adequately supplied by air; and that there was no need for it to attempt to retreat westward. Goering had a track record of over-promising and under-delivering; so his promises of a nuclear weapon in 1946 should be taken with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, Germany was easily ten years ahead of the Allies in chemical weapons research. Perhaps more. If the German nuclear program did not result in a usable weapon until, say, 1947, Germany could in the meantime have retaliated against Allied nuclear attacks with chemical weapons attacks against Allied cities. Imagine this scenario: the United States has just dropped a nuclear bomb on Berlin. Germany has chosen to retaliate by sending a group of Horten H. XVIII planes to deliver a chemical payload to New York City. Allied leaders recognize that even though Germany has not yet developed nuclear weapons, it still has the capacity to respond tit-for-tat to the Allied destruction of German cities.