Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

But one detail stood out among the others—at least as far as the Nazi scientists and engineers were concerned. Oberth’s space station design included the specs for a hundred-meter-wide [14] Three hundred and twenty-eight feet. The whole world is on the metric system. C’mon, America. concave mirror, which would be used to redirect sunlight into a specific, concentrated point on Earth. Amazingly, Oberth thought his space mirror concept would only cost around three million marks—about $200 million today—and would take only fifteen years to build. Oberth was not an economist, nor was he a construction manager, so who knows if these numbers are anything but wishful thinking.

But he did know space. And rockets. And he understood better than most anyone what might be possible with just a little elbow grease and a can-do-attitude.

And slave labor.

Hermann Oberth’s original idea for the space mirror/sun gun was completely peaceful. He wanted to help the world, to provide the people of Earth with sunshine on demand, anywhere and everywhere on the globe. You need extra sunlight to help you out of famine? Zap. Instant sun. You need to instantly dry out a flooded marshland or city? Zippity zap. Everything is water-free. You need an immediate tan for your big date tonight? You probably shouldn’t use the sun gun for that, but if you could… peeeew. Gloriously (and almost definitely cancerous) bronze skin. The uses were virtually limitless. It could change the world for the better.

Yet Oberth wasn’t completely naïve to the possible ramifications of his concept. He understood the inherent truth of what is known as “dual use” technologies, those that can be used for both civilian and military purposes, like nuclear power. He saw the writing on the wall: “My space mirror is like the hand mirrors that schoolboys use to flash circles of sunlight on the ceiling of the classroom. A sudden beam flashed on the teacher’s face may bring unpleasant reactions.”

First, apparently German schoolboys were little bastards. [15] Well, I guess one of them did turn into Hitler. Second, the Nazis were without peer when it came to producing “unpleasant reactions.”

And so they tried to build it. The German scientists and engineers at Hillersleben decided to soup up Oberth’s original concept. It would be the Oberth Sonnengewehr on steroids. Nazi scientists wanted to build a mirror of at least one square mile in area, or about eleven times the size of the U.S. Capitol building. Some German documents claimed the mirror might have to be as large as three and a half square miles in area, or a little more than two and a half times the size of Central Park.

Inside the station itself, Nazi scientists envisioned an environment in which electricity would be provided by solar power, but not what we would think of as “solar power” today. There wouldn’t be photovoltaic cells hanging from the sides of the station. Instead, heat from the sun would warm water to drive a steam generator, much in the same way a coal or nuclear power plant works here on Earth. The Germans decided to nix Oberth’s idea of centrifugal force to provide artificial gravity. The Nazi-tronauts would wear magnetic shoes to goose-step their way around the weightless station.

Oxygen production would be an issue for the German crew. No matter how large the space station might be, you couldn’t provide enough bottled oxygen for the entirety of the mission. You’d have to manufacture it yourself. The solution: greenhouses filled with hydroponic gardens of thousands of pumpkin plants. [16] How many of you saw “hydroponic” and thought of something else? Liars. The massive leaves of the pumpkin plant suck up huge quantities of carbon dioxide, and pump back out plenty of life-sustaining oxygen.

When the Fatherland decided it was time to use their new toy, the German leadership would send a message to the station’s crew through encoded radio or wireless telegraph. On command, the crew would use the station’s rocket thrusters to maneuver the mirror into attack position. Once ready, the reflective surface and its special concave curvature would collect the sun’s energy and blast a single ray to a particular focal point on the Earth’s surface. The massive size of the mirror and the extraordinary power of the sun would converge to create a beam that could theoretically [17] According to God only knows what math. boil ocean water, burn a city to the ground, flambé fields of crops, vaporize water reserves, and melt unlucky soldiers and civilians like the Ark melted evil Nazi Toht at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark . [18] Yes, I don’t know why the Nazis would zap one of their own. But work with me.

Sounds too good to be true. Or maybe too awful to be true. Either way, the Germans were not expecting this space station to be ready anytime soon. According to captured documents, they were playing the long game—which makes sense, considering they were expecting to be the vanguard of a thousand-year Reich. They had time to get this right, to wait for the necessary technology and scientific development to catch up. The physicists and engineers from Hillersleben were thinking fifty years, a hundred maybe. One day, the world would cower under the might of the Nazi sun gun.

Or not.

The Germans were only off by 988 years. Close, but no schnitzel.

The Nazis suspended the sun gun project in the spring of 1945 as the Allied armies closed in on both sides. The top German scientists became prime targets for Allied intelligence agencies. Not to kill, but to sweep off the battlefield for use in the impending Cold War. Because Hillersleben was west of Berlin, the Nazi scientists and engineers of the proving ground became guests of the U.S. and UK governments.

AND THEN WHAT?

After the war, Hermann Oberth continued to promote his sun gun concept to anyone willing to listen. Of course, he wasn’t advocating for the military use of the system, just its originally intended peaceful applications. He was joined in this advocacy by his former student turned boss Wernher von Braun. But von Braun didn’t seem to care all that much about the touchy-feely, save-the-world aspects of Oberth’s idea. He wanted to kill Russians. During the height of the Cold War, he lobbied the U.S. military to consider finishing what the Nazis had started, and build a sun gun to fry some commies.

Our two famous Germans would reunite in 1955 when Oberth moved to the United States to join his former colleague von Braun working for the U.S. Army. Together they helped the fledgling American space program produce a series of rockets capable of reaching outer space. Their collaboration led to the development of the Saturn V rocket, which would eventually bring the crew of Apollo 11 to the moon.

Hermann Oberth stayed in the United States for three years before returning to West Germany in 1958. In his retirement, he continued to work on the theoretical and mathematical side of rocketry and astronautics. He lived just long enough to see the fall of the Berlin Wall, dying a little more than a month later in Nuremberg.

So that’s the story of the Nazi sun—

Just kidding. I know that some of you out there are yelling at this book right now. [19] It’s okay. Only some of the people around you think you’re crazy. “How can you possibly talk about using mirrors as a weapon to reflect the sun without bringing up Archimedes?! He’s the one who invented the damn thing, all the way back in 212 BCE.”

First of all, nice job using BCE instead of BC. We’ll make a historian of you yet.

But yes, you make a valid point. According to legend, during the siege of Syracuse, famous Greek scientist/inventor/physicist/astronomer/Eureka! exclaimer Archimedes constructed a burning glass to set Roman warships on fire. Lucian of Samosata and Galen of Pergamon, both of the second century CE, are often given as sources of Archimedes’ burning mirror. But both simply state, in passing, that Archimedes set fire to the Roman fleet without precisely describing how.