Die Atombomben der Bundesrepublik: An Oral History of Germany's Nuclear Weapons Program

I rarely post, too lazy tbh, but I gotta say this is quite interesting.

I don't know if it's entirely plausible or not and I don't really care, it's quite entertaining and I'm liking it so far.
I never heard before about the Apollo Affair, quite interesting as well.

This nuclear stealing plans reminded me about "The man with the iron heart", when the Nazi guerrillas plan to "rescue" the nuclear scientists and recover the nuclear materials.
Anyways, keep up.

Really enjoying it.

 

Interesting TL. Keep it up.

 

Atombomben will resume tomorrow night. Until then....Trabant jokes......

What's the best feature of a Trabant? There's a heater at the back to keep your hands warm when you're pushing it.

What is the longest car on the market? The Trabant, at 12 meters length. 2 meters of car, plus ten meters of smoke.

A man driving a Trabant suddenly breaks his windshield wiper. Pulling into a service station, he hails a mechanic. "Wipers for a Trabi?" he asks.
The mechanic thinks about it for a few seconds and replies, "Yes, sounds like a fair trade."

Why has the new Trabi been launched with two exhaust pipes? So you can use it as a wheelbarrow.

Why are there no bank robberies in the GDR? Because you have to wait 12 years for a get-away car!

 

How quick can a Trabant go? 170 km/h...provided it's falling over a cliff (In the best sprit of ruining the joke, I ended up calculating the terminal velocity of this)

What does the 601 stand for in the Trabant? 600 orders, one has been delivered

What does the 602 stand for in the Trabant? 600 cars on the lot and two customers.

Did you hear that the new Trabant has Zweikreisbremsen (Dual-circuit brakes)? That's an improvement. The old ones took three or four Kreise (counties) to stop.

How do you double a Trabant's value? Buy a fuel cap.

How do you triple the value? Fill up the tank.

How do you quadruple the value? Place a banana on the back seat.

How do you measure the lap time of a Trabant? With a calendar.

 

The Trabant drove up to a toll plaza. The attendant said, "10 pfenig."
The driver says, "Sold," and hands him the keys.

 

Can one safely assume one might hazard a guess at the delivery system the DDR proposed to use?

 

Actually, the leftover carcasses of these things are a nightmare on an environmental level to get rid of-they can't be recycled and they don't break down.

 

A interesting aspect of a nuclear program could be if East German changed to make the Trabant a electric car as a excuse to make more nuclear plants, playing the self sufficient card to fool Moscow. It would give them two decades to improve the electric storage. The Trabant as a very light car would also be the perfect car to make this early shift.

 

A lightweight Trabant will become significantly heavier once you've crammed it with East Bloc batteries. Much much heavier.

 

NATO nuclear artillery basically came in three sizes: 155mm (W48, W82), 203mm (W33 and W79), and the big 280mm/11-inch "Atomic Annie" (W9, W19, and a variant sleeved up to 16" called the W23 for the Iowa-class battleship).

Where it gets a bit strange is the yields. The W9 280mm was about as big as you'd expect from something of that size, 15-20kt in a shell weighing 600-800lbs. Everything else went from ~72 tons (W48) up to 1-2Kt (the W79 and cancelled W82) with regular and enhanced-radiation options. And then you look at the W33 and things go completely mental. Those could apparently be set to four yields: ~1Kt, two in the 5-15Kt range, and the W33Y2 that somehow packed 40 kilotons of boom into a 250-pound 8" shell. How exactly that one was achieved nobody quite knows.

 

Old Soviet underwear impregnated with phenolic themoset resit is imperious to rust or UV degradation, means that until chopped up or burned in a high temp furnace, those bodies would be around for a long long time

 

Tritium.
with a gun assembly weapon, its presence makes up for the normal terrible conversion rate. Still not as efficient as implosion, but the tritium boosting ups it greatly, and gun assembly devices have a lot of HEU that wouldn't convert.

Boosting the early Mk5 (and other design tricks) that had roughly the same pit size as Fatman got its yield from 15kt to 120kt

More HEU could be packed in, as it used lightweight Titanium, and tritium boosting let more of that HEU fission

 

The lower yields in later weapons weren't because they couldn't do more, but because they realised that anything you'd be shooting at with nuclear artillery wasn't big enough to justify more than a few kilotons.

 

you don’t necessary need to go with a very heavy battery and even if you go with heavy ones, you wouldn’t use the 500 kilo battery used in a forklift, with the weight of the Trabant plus passengers a relative small lead battery at 50 kilo would be more than enough, and that pretty much using 19th century battery technology. East Germany have some benefit in using batteries, as they could build the infrastructure to simply change spend batteries on long trip, and it’s not like people will travel abroad.

 

It could be done - a battery-electric vehicle using 1960s/1970s technology would be good for a range of about 50 miles (80 km) and a speed of about 50 mph (80 kph), give or take 20%. That's more than enough for a general runabout - even today, it would be enough for most cars most of the time. It's not enough for long journeys but I think the Communist Party would see that as an advantage.

 

TO PUT IT MILDLY LMAO

this TL is absolutely nuts and i'm here for every bit of it

 

That's sort of the point of the story.

 

Agreed, you can't run from workers paradise DDR if your car can only drive 80 km and there's no recharging stations in Poland or Czechoslovakia...

 

Through much depend whether @politicalnomad want this to be hidden history (alternate history which on surface level looks like OTL), in which case a electric Trabant is no go. But it could be ironic if DDR became the pioneer in electric cars and Trabant was still around as a cheap but somewhat slow electric car.

 

There is also a Trabbi sportscar....

.. it comes with a pair of running shoes in the trunk.


How many people do you need to construct a Trabbi?
2, one folds, one glues.