Science: V-3?

The terrible novelty of V-2 had by no means worn off yet, but London last week was already abuzz with speculation about V-3—supposedly an atomic bomb. Allied bombers renewed their attentions to Rjukan, Norway, the site of a heavy-water plant which the Nazis have recently rebuilt after its destruction by the R.A.F. and Norwegian patriots last year. Meanwhile, British censors passed a London dispatch giving the most circumstantial account to date of atomic bomb possibilities.

According to this account, the Nazis may have discovered an entirely new approach to atomic explosives. Before wartime censorship blacked out all talk of atomic experiments, it was known that most scientists put their atom-smashing hopes mainly in cyclotronic bombardment of atoms with deuterons—the heavy hydrogen nuclei derived from heavy water. Individual atoms have been smashed, but in a bomb atoms must explode in quantity, each disintegrating atom setting off others. The new Nazi experiments are said to be along lines suggested by the composition of the "White Dwarf," companion of Sirius, which is the densest known star.

The White Dwarf is so dense (specific gravity: 61,000) that a cubic inch of its substance weighs about one ton. Physicists believe that ordinary atoms could not be compressed to such density, and they suppose that the tremendous pressures and high temperature of the White Dwarf have broken up its atoms, letting their space-hungry electrons escape and leaving only the much more compact atomic nuclei.

The speculative London report suggested that the Nazis are using the same pressure principle to crush atoms. The crusher: A "Neuman" demolition charge, which explodes inward instead of outward. Used in a sphere, the Neuman charge might develop pressures of tens of thousands of tons per square inch at the center, perhaps enough to disintegrate an unstable atom such as uranium and release its explosive atomic energy. British scientists believe that such an explosion, though not far-reaching in area, would develop unheard-of violence at the point of impact.

What Is V2? Last week V-2 was still almost as great a mystery as V-3. If the British had recovered any duds for examination, they were keeping mum about it. Some Hollanders claimed they had seen V-2 launched from bare ground; others, from 80-ft. concrete pits. Some experts thought it could have been launched from barges off the Dutch coast. V-2 was variously reported to be guided by radio, by gyro compass, by fins, by spinning. But on one thing experts agreed: V-2 is a self-contained rocket, carrying its own oxygen and traveling at such speed (1,000 to 3,500 m.p.h.) that ordinary antiaircraft defenses are useless against it.