Summary of Neal Bascomb's The Winter Fortress

By IRB Media

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#1 In 1940, the French spy Jacques Allier was sent to bring back heavy water from Norway, which the Germans were also interested in. He needed to secure the stock before the Germans did.

#2 Allier traveled to Amsterdam, where he met with three French intelligence agents. He gave them the letter of credit and authority to recruit any French agents needed in smuggling out the heavy water.

#3 The American chemist Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize for his 1931 discovery of heavy water. While most hydrogen atoms consist of a single electron orbiting a single proton in the atom’s nucleus, Urey showed that there was a variant, or isotope, of hydrogen that carried a neutron in its nucleus.

#4 In 1933, Norwegian professor Leif Tronstad and his former college classmate Jomar Brun, who ran the hydrogen plant at Vemork, proposed the idea of a heavy water industrial facility to Norsk Hydro. They didn’t exactly know what the substance would be used for in the end, but they knew that Vemork, with its inexhaustible supply of cheap power and water, provided the perfect setup for such a facility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822529403

IRB Media

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Insights on Neal Bascomb's The Winter Fortress

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1940, the French spy Jacques Allier was sent to bring back heavy water from Norway, which the Germans were also interested in. He needed to secure the stock before the Germans did.

#2

Allier traveled to Amsterdam, where he met with three French intelligence agents. He gave them the letter of credit and authority to recruit any French agents needed in smuggling out the heavy water.

#3

The American chemist Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize for his 1931 discovery of heavy water. While most hydrogen atoms consist of a single electron orbiting a single proton in the atom’s nucleus, Urey showed that there was a variant, or isotope, of hydrogen that carried a neutron in its nucleus.

#4

In 1933, Norwegian professor Leif Tronstad and his former college classmate Jomar Brun, who ran the hydrogen plant at Vemork, proposed the idea of a heavy water industrial facility to Norsk Hydro. They didn’t exactly know what the substance would be used for in the end, but they knew that Vemork, with its inexhaustible supply of cheap power and water, provided the perfect setup for such a facility.

#5

In the field of atomic physics, things changed quickly just as they did with heavy water. In 1939, Norsk Hydro audited the company and found it to be a loser. Nobody wanted heavy water, at least not enough to make it worth the investment, and the company abandoned the venture.

#6

The English physicist Ernest Rutherford observed that heavy, unstable elements such as uranium would break down naturally into lighter ones such as argon. When he calculated the huge amount of energy emitted during this process, he realized what was at stake.

#7

The potential energy released by the uranium atom’s nucleus when it was split was great enough to create a chain reaction that could be used to generate enormous quantities of energy.

#8

On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The German Blitzkrieg had begun and bombs would be met with bombs.

#9

The German scientists who were brought in to discuss the possibility of harnessing the atom’s energy for the production of weapons or electricity, known as the Uranium Club,