Paperclip continued to deliver German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States for years past the end of WWII. One of the most important of

Paperclip continued to deliver German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States for years past the end of WWII. One of the most important of these was Friedwardt Winterberg, who was brought to America before the ink was dry on his PhD in 1955. Winterberg is important because his doctoral supervisors were the wartime nuclear physicists Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, the latter of whom was much more important than the former. Winterberg's career looks respectable if not particularly noteworthy at first glance; he spent his working years at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas as a physics professor. But it is in his writing that you get major clues as to what wartime German nuclear science was really up to. Winterberg's books explore various means of provoking nuclear detonations, often with an emphasis on prompt fusion, or fusion in synergy with fission, rather than fission alone. Most modern nuclear weapons incorporate this concept, broadly speaking, but what I am getting at here is a particular concept known as a "Prandtl - Meyer hydrogen bomb". This bomb design utilizes shock waves as described in earlier investigations of how those behave in water (hydrodynamics). It appears very likely that wartime SS scientists, most of them Austrian, attempted to build a megaton class hydrogen bomb based on Prandtl - Meyer principles rather than the Soviet "sloika" or the later US Teller - Ulam configuration. There is fragmentary but consistent information about this in the most recently discovered archival documents.