When University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth received a mysterious heavy metal cube from a friend as a birthday gift several years ago, he instantly recognized it as one of the uranium cubes used by German scientists during World War II in their unsuccessful attempt to build a working nuclear reactor there was an accompanying note on a piece of paper wrapped around the cube: "Taken from Germany from the nuclear reactor Hitler tried to build Thus began Koeth's six-year quest to track down the cube's origins, as well as several other similar cubes that had somehow found their way across the Atlantic. Koeth and his partner in the quest, graduate student Miriam "Mimi" Hiebert, reported on their progress to date in the May issue of Physics Today replete with top-secret scientific intrigue and even black market dealers keen to hold the US hostage over uranium cubes in their possession Small wonder Hollywood has expressed interest in adapting the story for the screen Koeth ran the nuclear reactor program at UMD Hiebert is completing a PhD in materials science and engineering specializing in the study of historical materials in museum collections (glass in particular) and the methods used to preserve them using the reactor facility for neutron imaging of a few samples Koeth told her about his research into his cube's origins and she started collaborating with him as a side project They tracked a third cube to Harvard University where it regularly gets passed around to students in introductory physics classes as a curiosity (The cubes are only slightly radioactive and don't pose a health concern "The radiation you measure from it is only coming from the surface.") Underpinning the Manhattan Project in the US was the fear that German scientists under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime would beat the Allies to a nuclear bomb. The Germans had a two-year head-start and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction German nuclear scientists were separated into three isolated groups based in Berlin (B) Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum That's where the group built the B-VIII reactor It resembled an "ominous chandelier," per Koeth because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure the poor physicist who had to dig those out.) Heisenberg himself escaped by bicycle Koeth has been interested in physics in general, and nuclear physics in particular, since he was a young boy. "My parents will tell you they tried taking me to Toys R Us at age four and I just cried until we went to Radio Shack," he said. When he was eight, an uncle gave him a copy of Richard Rhodes' seminal history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb So he knew a little about the history of the cubes and his first question when he received one as a gift was He initially assumed all the uranium cubes would have been confiscated after the Nazi defeat and sent to the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge in the US But a historian told him that by April 1945 the US had plenty of feedstock material and wouldn't have needed the extra uranium So he wondered if someone might have handed them out as souvenirs There is no record of the cubes entering the US but Koeth and Hiebert reasoned they might be able to determine if there was a common source for all the recipients of the cubes they've tracked so far—a "patient zero" responsible for distributing them Koeth's cube had come with that note as a clue Now he just had to figure out who "Ninninger" had been It turned out the last name had an extra "N." Koeth found a War Department memo dated February 24 has been appointed Accountability Property Officer for the Murray Hill area." That area was part of the feed materials network for the Manhattan Project That meant he was in charge of all uranium for that part of the network Nininger turned out to be a geologist by training and had even written a book on minerals for atomic energy As Heisenberg himself reported, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out showing that the group would only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes to get the design to work Koeth and Hiebert uncovered a box of declassified documents about German uranium in the National Archives and discovered there were about 400 other uranium cubes from a separate reactor experiment by the Gottow group "The combined inventory would have been more than enough to have achieved criticality in the B-VIII reactor," the authors concluded isolationist approach actually hampered their nuclear program because the two groups weren't sharing information or resources it still might not have changed the course of the war in favor of the Axis powers since the US Manhattan Project was fairly well advanced by then "Many contributing factors were likely involved in the resulting sequence of events," the authors write "Yet the revelation of the existence of the additional cubes makes it clear that if the Germans had pooled rather than divided their resources they would have been significantly closer to creating a working reactor before the end of the war." the cubes "represent a bygone era in science" and supply crucial context to this vital period in physics history the story of the cubes is a lesson in scientific failure albeit a failure worth celebrating," they wrote DOI: Physics Today, 2019. 10.1063/PT.3.4202  (About DOIs) an associate research professor at the University of Maryland received a rather extraordinary birthday gift: a little cloth lunch pouch containing a small object wrapped in brown paper towels Inside he found a heavy metal cube and a crumpled message a provocative note wrapped around a stone that came crashing through the window of history picked up the 5-pound block of uranium metal and handed it to him Koeth accepted the cube and its note as an invitation to the adventure of a lifetime a doctoral candidate working with him on this project at UMD's A describe what they've discovered while exploring the German quest and failure to build a working nuclear reactor during World War II and this particular cube measures about 2 inches on each side and it's always a lot of fun to watch people's reaction when they pick it up for the first time," said Hiebert This cube represents one of 664 uranium metal components that were strung together in a form reminiscent of a chandelier to comprise the core of a nuclear reactor experiment that a team of German scientists attempted to build toward the end of the World War II including Werner Heisenberg -- a theoretical physicist and one of the key visionaries of quantum mechanics The chandelier was submerged in heavy water to regulate the rate of fission The Germans' experimental lab was small and located underground in the town of Haigerloch -- it's now the Atomkeller Museum "This experiment was their final and closest attempt to create a self-sustaining nuclear reactor but there wasn't enough uranium present in the core to achieve this goal," said Koeth One of the most surprising things Koeth and Hiebert have discovered so far is that while the 664 uranium cubes at Haigerloch weren't enough to build a self-sustaining reactor an additional 400 cubes were located within Germany at the time "If the Germans had pooled their resources rather than keeping them divided among separate they may have been able to build a working nuclear reactor," said Hiebert "This highlights perhaps the biggest difference between the German and American nuclear research programs The German program was divided and competitive; whereas under the leadership of General Leslie Groves the American Manhattan Project was centralized and collaborative." How close did the Germans get to a working nuclear reactor but "it's been calculated that the reactor experiment in Haigerloch would have needed about 50% more uranium to run," said Koeth "Even if the 400 additional cubes had been brought to Haigerloch to use within that reactor experiment the German scientists would have still needed more heavy water to make the reactor work Despite being the birthplace of nuclear physics and having nearly a two-year head start on American efforts there was no imminent threat of a nuclear Germany by the end of the war." Another important aspect of Koeth and Hiebert's work is an effort to track down the cubes recovered from Haigerloch that ended up being shipped to the U.S "Cubes were distributed to various individuals around the country," Hiebert explained "We don't know how many were handed out or what happened to the rest but there are likely more cubes hiding in basements and offices around the country Many questions remain unanswered, and chief among them are: How many of these cubes still exist, and what has happened to them? Physics Today helped track down a few "We hope to speak to as many people as possible who’ve had contact with these cubes,” said Hiebert “As much as we’ve learned about our cube and others like it we still don’t have an answer about how exactly it ended up in Maryland 70 years after being captured by Allied forces in southern Germany." Koeth and Hiebert are also trying to learn more about the fate of the other 400 cubes that ended up on the black market in Europe after the war The article, "Tracking the journey of a uranium cube," by Timothy Koeth and Miriam Hiebert, appears in the May 2019 issue of Physics Today. See https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4202 Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics, is the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world. See https://physicstoday.scitation.org/journal/pto are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system Copyright © 2025 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898 A cube of uranium from Nazi Germany | Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard physics professors have shared a small block of uranium with their students It is a strange object: although the cube is only 5 centimeters per side it feels unbelievably heavy and is cold to the touch its sinister origin story was not emphasized Wheatland curator emerita of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) the Nazi government secretly initiated a nuclear program the Germans never managed to sustain or control a nuclear fission chain reaction a group of German nuclear physicists working for the Nazi government moved their laboratory to a cave beneath a castle in the small town of Haigerloch was the closest the Nazis came to unlocking the secrets of nuclear energy According to a history of the cubes by University of Maryland physicists 664 of these nearly identical uranium cubes were arranged into the shape of a chandelier and dipped into a tank of heavy water As German resistance collapsed in April 1945 and stashing the documentation in a latrine a group of American and British soldiers and scientists—including professor of physics Edwin C apprehending their German counterparts and gathering physical evidence managed to keep this block of uranium for himself nor whether he saw it “as a personal souvenir” or “as evidence.” Nonetheless it “stands in silent testimony” to “a project that the Nazis long denied.” The cube was transferred to the collection before CHSI’s formal incorporation in 1968 Professional practice at the time enabled a long-term loan to a physics instructor who frequently used the item in the classroom the cube was returned to CHSI’s safekeeping after changes within the physics department meant it would no longer be used regularly for instruction the object can now serve as more than “a hunk of an element,” says Schechner It can teach about the process of scientific thinking She noted the significance of the cubes’ standardization Instead of just tossing uranium chunks into a pile the German scientists “were making these cubes that are roughly the same size and shape,” demonstrating “the role of measurable units in science.” The cube can also teach about Nazi science perhaps in conversation with other experiments from that era given the Nazi regime’s aims and the unlimited nature of that global war Rather than documenting a toll of potentially millions more lives lost the small cube of uranium now resides in Harvard’s collection signs of a rough casting process common in early uranium.. Two physicists are hunting more than 600 uranium cubes from Nazi Germany’s failed WWII nuclear program some of the uranium cubes ended up on the black market and still others simply scattered to the winds One of them found its way to University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth’s desk in 2013 kicking off a search for its origins and an international hunt for the rest Germany’s World War II nuclear program sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie In a secret lab in a cave beneath a medieval church and castle physicist Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues strung 664 small cubes of uranium together with aircraft cable into “an ominous uranium chandelier” which they submerged in heavy water and tried to kick off a fission reaction The Germans had a two-year head start on the American nuclear program but by 1945 they were still a long way from a working reactor Uranium is so dense that each one-inch (2.54 cm) cube weighed five pounds – hence the sturdy aircraft cable But even with over a ton and a half of uranium the reactor didn’t have enough mass to actually work This replica of the "ominous uranium chandelier" hangs in the Atomskeller museum in Haigerloch If you fire a neutron into the nucleus of a uranium atom it will cause the unstable nucleus to break apart splitting the atom into two lighter elements the splitting atom spits out 2 or 3 of its former neutrons and a tremendous amount of energy they’ll trigger more fission reactions until all the uranium is gone you need a big enough pile of uranium in the right shape which is what the German scientists were trying to figure out “The apparatus was still a little too small to sustain a fission reaction independently but a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production,” wrote Heisenberg shortly after the war Recent modelling suggests that the Haigerloch lab needed about 50% more uranium – 332 more cubes – than they had because there were 400 other cubes at other labs in Germany in the hands of rival physicists engaged in fierce and sometimes deeply personal competition with the lab at Haigerloch “This highlights perhaps the biggest difference between the German and American nuclear research programs,” said Miriam Hiebert a doctoral candidate in engineering at the University of Maryland “The German program was divided and competitive the American Manhattan Project was centralized and collaborative.” As the Allies closed in on southern Germany in early 1945 Heisenberg fled into the night on a bicycle (perhaps not yet realizing that a precise enough calculation of his velocity would have rendered him impossible to find) with five uranium cubes in a backpack Staff at the Haigerloch lab buried the other 659 in a nearby field and hid important documents in a latrine At other nuclear research sites across Germany a total of 400 cubes got packed into wooden boxes and loaded into military trucks hoping to find food or something entertaining to play with All they found were a bunch of dull dark gray cubes about 2 inches on a side – but those cubes threw bright trails of sparks for 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) when they hit the ground The boys spent an afternoon tossing the sparking cubes into the Loisach River with no idea that they were part of a secret Nazi weapons research program (and dangerously radioactive) Another group of kids found one of the cubes on the riverbank years later and a concerned parent took the cube to a doctor who spoiled all the fun by identifying it as uranium it found its way to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection in Berlin Most of those other 400 cubes found their way to the Soviet Union via Eastern Europe’s black market and there they fell out of the reach of history But an Allied mission in 1945 retrieved the ton and a half of uranium cubes hastily buried in a field outside Haigerloch along with the papers hidden in the latrine and many of the lab’s scientists Manhattan Project commander General Leslie Groves sent a team of scientists and military personnel to the front lines alongside Allied forces moving into Germany to gather as much information as they could about German science The nuclear project was top priority – which is clear from the team’s willingness to rummage through an abandoned latrine which is Greek for “groves.” They shipped most of the cubes back to Paris both to bolster the American nuclear program and to keep the uranium out of the hands of the Soviet Union the ALSOS cubes also mostly dropped out of sight Several probably ended up as raw material for the postwar American weapons enrichment program based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee “Perhaps after arriving in New York, some cubes found their way into the hands of one or more Manhattan Project officials as paperweight spoils of war,” Koeth and Hiebert wrote in a recent paper remain unknown – and that’s what Koeth and Hiebert hope to change “We don’t know how many were handed out or what happened to the rest and we’d like to find them,” said Hiebert in a press statement “We hope to speak to as many people as possible who’ve had contact with these cubes.” Teaching Tools And Paperweight Spoils Of War instructors use another cube to demonstrate Geiger counters; that one was a more-or-less officially sanctioned wartime souvenir of former Physics Department head Edwin Kemble who also served as the deputy science director of ALSOS during the war And it wasn’t the only souvenir uranium cube; Atomic Energy Commission official Merril Eisenbud salvaged one from a scrap pile in 1954 and put it back in inventory; he received it as a retirement gift five years later and donated it to the National Museum of American History in 1983 but visitors to the Atomskeller Museum in the old lab at Haigerloch The first break in the case came out of the blue “In a bizarre stroke of luck almost too good for scientific minds to believe Koeth was poking around a used book store days after receiving the cube when he came across Minerals for Atomic Energy by Robert D published in 1954,” wrote Koeth and Hiebert it was no coincidence; Koeth spoke with Nininger’s widow her husband had been interim properties manager at the Manhattan Project’s Murray Hill Area the New York City facility responsible for uranium procurement The cube must have arrived at Murray Hill from Europe because cubes of uranium are so well known as excellent gifts we still don’t have an answer about how exactly it ended up in Maryland 70 years after being captured by Allied forces in southern Germany,” said Hiebert in a press statement Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed This cube of uranium metal came from a reactor that was built by the Nazis during World War II Hundreds of others like it are now missing Timothy Koeth's office is crammed with radioactive relics — old watches with glowing radium dials pieces of melted glass from beneath the test of the world's first nuclear weapon But there is one artifact that stands apart from the rest: a dense It was forged more than 70 years ago by the Nazis and it tells the little-known story of Germany's nuclear efforts during World War II New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines — all in about 10 minutes, every weekday. Short Wave is science for everyone, using a lot of creativity and a little humor. Subscribe to the podcast and follow @NPRScience on Twitter "From a historical perspective this cube weighs a lot more than 5 pounds," Koeth The cube entered Koeth's life on a hot August day in 2013 He was out for a jog when a friend called him on his phone 'I need to meet you as soon as possible,' " Koeth says Koeth told his friend to drive to a nearby parking lot he found himself staring at a small satchel in the trunk of the car 'Do you know what that is?' " Koeth recalls It turned out they didn't need to guess because wrapped around the cube was a piece of paper with the words piece of uranium from the reactor Hitler tried to build." Germany was actually at the cutting edge of nuclear technology "Nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin in late 1938," says Alex Wellerstein a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken "They were the first team of people who figured out how to split the atom and figured out that when you split the atom a lot of energy was going to be released." That basic idea of splitting atoms to release energy is what's at the heart of all of today's nuclear power plants and all the world's nuclear weapons the Germans devised strange looking experiment Scientists strung together 664 cubes of uranium with aircraft cables and suspended them The result looked "kind of like a very strange modernist chandelier of cubes," Wellerstein says The chandelier was dipped into a cylindrical tank of heavy water which contains special isotopes of hydrogen that make it more conducive to nuclear reactions The Germans were experimenting with it inside a cave in the southern town of Haigerloch They were still trying to get it to work when the Allied invasion began the German scientists disassembled the reactor and buried the cubes in a field The first wave of Allied troops to arrive included a task force known as Alsos which was seeking to seize as much of the Nazi program as they could The Nazi scientists quickly disclosed the location of the buried cubes to the Allies but what happened after that is not entirely clear An undated photo shows members of the Alsos mission with a stack of the buried uranium cubes "The records on this kind of stuff are less good than you might expect government has misplaced over 600 cubes of Nazi uranium might seem highly alarming which is not particularly radioactive or valuable And Wellerstein points out that the Nazi program never even got close to building a bomb It's really a footnote in the history books But Timothy Koeth doesn't see it as a footnote the Americans thought the Nazis were racing toward a bomb and that's a big part of why they rushed ahead with the Manhattan Project to build the world's first nuclear weapon From a historical perspective this cube weighs a lot more than 5 pounds it was the fear of the little black cubes like the one on his desk that launched the nuclear age this nuclear hostage that the planet is held in — it's all motivated by this effort that produced just these 600-and-some cubes," Koeth says Which is why Koeth is determined to find out what happened to them Starting with the one from the trunk of the car And a big clue was in that note wrapped around the cube "Literally just a few weeks later I was at a flea market and was looking through a box of science books and came across this book called Minerals for Atomic Energy by Robert D It turns out Robert Nininger was in charge of inventory for part of the Manhattan Project It's likely that he oversaw the arrival of the Nazi cubes from Europe a post-doctoral researcher working with Koeth says it's possible Nininger or one of his colleagues handed out a few cubes as souvenirs it wouldn't have been quite as alarming," she says with a laugh Koeth and Hiebert were able to verify that Nininger did have a cube which he kept in his possession until he died One was donated to Harvard by a physicist who worked on the original Alsos mission to recover the uranium The Smithsonian has one that was found in the back of a drawer in New Jersey And another one in Germany was recovered from a creek It was reportedly tossed away by the famous physicist Werner Heisenberg as he fled ahead of the approaching Allied forces There are still around 650 cubes completely unaccounted for It's possible that many were fed into the U.S government's nuclear complex after the war and eventually manufactured into American atomic weapons "It genuinely would not shock me at all if they're sitting in a box somewhere and nobody has wanted to move this really heavy box for the past 70 years," Hiebert says She and Koeth are hoping someone will stumble across the missing uranium and give them a call Read more about the cubes in Physics Today Become an NPR sponsor Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker .st1{fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;fill:#2a2a2a}By James Crepea | The Oregonian/OregonLivePhoto - Wiest oak tree at Toomer's Corner in Auburn on fire Information is coming to light about Jochen Wiest, the man accused of setting the fire to the W. Magnolia Ave. oak tree at Toomer's Corner in Auburn following Saturday's game between Auburn and LSU On Monday, Wiest was charged with first-degree criminal mischief, a felony, in addition to the prior misdemeanor charges of desecration of a venerable object and public intoxication. The felony charge resulted in a change in jurisdictions for the case against Wiest which will now be tried in Lee County Circuit Court where he is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on Oct Here's what we know so far and AL.com will update this story as more information is gathered Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, (updated 8/1/2024) and acknowledgement of our Privacy Policy, and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (updated 1/1/2025) © 2025 Advance Local Media LLC. All rights reserved (About Us) The material on this site may not be reproduced except with the prior written permission of Advance Local Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site YouTube's privacy policy is available here and YouTube's terms of service is available here Ad Choices the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been home to an unusual artifact from World War II: a small cube of solid uranium metal measuring about two inches on each side and weighing just under 2.5 kilograms Lab lore holds that the cube was confiscated from Nazi Germany's failed nuclear reactor experiments in the 1940s but that has never been experimentally verified University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth is among the outsider collaborators in this ongoing research He has spent over seven years tracking down these rare artifacts of Nazi Germany's nuclear research program had tracked down 10 cubes in the US: one at the Smithsonian a handful in private collections—and of course What makes these cubes so special is their historical significance. As we reported previously: As Heisenberg himself acknowledged, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out The Alsos team purportedly brought the cubes confiscated from Berlin to the United States for use in the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge the US didn't need additional feedstock material And there is no official record of any cubes entering the country so most of them have never been accounted for Ditto for the 400 or so uranium cubes that had been in use by the Gottow group According to PNNL lore their cube was stored at DOE headquarters until 1989 That's when it was brought to the laboratory as a radiation training tool for RadCAD a set of hands-on courses on the detection and interception of illicit trafficking in radioactive materials The cubes are only slightly radioactive and don't pose a health concern Any measured radiation comes from the surface the PNNL cube is kept in a double-plexiglass container to prevent exposure to radiation during handling and contamination of the cube from oxidization The PNNL scientists were pretty confident they had a "Heisenberg cube"; among other evidence the better to hang on the cables used in the German reactor efforts The cube was analyzed back in 2002 via high-resolution gamma spectroscopy to get an estimate of its age "That's typically not sensitive enough to provide an accurate age for the cube," said Schwantes Schwantes and a colleague shaved a few small samples off the metal for analysis They hoped to confirm once and for all that it is one of the Heisenberg cubes—or possibly a "Diebner cube." Robertson's work—part of her doctoral thesis research—is to study those samples using her own modified analytic techniques in conjunction with PNNL's standard nuclear forensic methods For instance, radiochronometry is a popular method with geologists. It's commonly used to determine the age of a uranium-rich material by measuring the byproducts of the uranium's decay, namely the radioactive isotope thorium-230 and protactinium Robertson's modified approach involves simultaneously separating the thorium and protactinium in the hope that the materials' relative concentrations will give some indication of when the cube was made analyzing the rare-earth-element impurities could help PNNL scientists determine where the original uranium was mined initial findings have confirmed that at least one of the three cubes being tested at PNNL is natural uranium There are also preliminary results from Robertson's analysis of the coatings the Germans applied to the cubes to keep oxidation in check Cyanide-based coatings were used by the Berlin group while Diebner's Gottow group used styrene-based coatings If one could accurately measure the relevant signatures it would enable the team to tell whether a given cube came from the Berlin or Gottow group no one else has performed this measurement," said Robertson I didn't think an organic would last sitting next to uranium metal for this many decades and still be detectable." revealing a styrene coating—a bit of a surprise given that Koeth's historic sleuthing tracked the cube to the Berlin group it turns out that Diebner sent some of his group's cubes to Heisenberg in Berlin when the latter sought more fuel for his reactor So Koeth's cube may possibly have been used by both groups was develop nuclear power — although it wasn’t for lack of trying and the cubes that came from their experiment still exist Hitler wanted his scientists to harness nuclear energy they came very close during an experiment with hundreds of cubes fashioned into a kind of chandelier a leading Nazi physicist who was captured by the Allies when the war ended in 1945 It was Heisenberg who is credited with discovering and naming the discipline of quantum mechanics The Germans had a well-hidden lab beneath a castle’s church in the southwestern town of Haigerloch Today it is called the Atomkeller (Atom Cellar) Museum It is open for tours by the public and is visited by those who are curious about Germany’s efforts to develop nuclear technology during the Second World War The original reactor core was comprised of 664 uranium cubes tied together with cord used in airplane manufacture Because of the hierarchy of the Nazi nuclear research division there weren’t enough cubes in one location to build a working nuclear reactor researchers have realized that there may be hundreds of cubes still floating around the globe on the black market In a mystery worthy of a John le Carre spy novel an American scientist received one of them anonymously six years ago Timothy Koeth is a researcher at the University of Maryland a cube arrived at his office with an unsigned note that read “Taken from the nuclear reactor Hitler tried to build Gift of Ninninger.” This led Koeth and his team to documents proving that there were indeed enough Nazi nuclear cubes to complete the reactor during the war but they were scattered all around Germany Most experts now believe that the remaining cubes likely have not survived the decades following the war; nevertheless “This experiment was their final and closest attempt to create a self-sustaining nuclear reactor but there wasn’t enough uranium present in the core to achieve this goal.” He explains that several factors impeded their progress including not having enough heavy water to make a working reactor even if the remaining 400 cubes had been delivered The reactor’s core was placed within a graphite shell which was then placed in a concrete-lined tank of water The water was to help regulate the rate of the nuclear reaction Their miscalculations were not the only problem they faced infighting and unproductive competition were also to blame for the Nazis stalled project Hiebert told the American institute of Physics “If the Germans had pooled their resources they may have been able to build a working Related Video: ‘Operation Cue’ was a nuclear test on houses and dummies in the Nevada Test Site in 1955 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxJsFZY8bOI was used by the Americans on the Manhattan Project to great success “The German program was divided and competitive,” she explained the Manhattan Project was centralized and collaborative.” It was ultimately this inability to work together that cost Germany so dearly in the race to build a nuclear reactor although Germany was where nuclear physics began and it was a couple of years before the United States actively pursued the idea there was little chance the Germans would succeed Related Article: Explosive Accidents: The Lost Nuclear Arsenal at the Bottom of the Sea Of course this is the outcome the Allies wanted and it is to the benefit of the entire world that the Nazis did not acquire nuclear energy it’s impossible to guess what the outcome of the war might have been Ian Harvey is one of the authors writing for The Vintage News Join 1000s of subscribers and receive the best Vintage News in your mailbox for FREE