Like many Americans, I well remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.
I was home, sick, and watching television, sipping an endless stream of the chicken noodle soup that my mother always made for me when I was ill.
Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the two post-war Germanies raced toward reunification.Our long talks about World War Two had convinced us that there was much about the war that did not make sense, Hitler's and Stalin's genocidal paranoia notwithstanding.Gradually, and one must say, predictably, the Germans themselves raced to uncover what lay hidden in the formerly inaccessible archival vaults of East Germany and the Soviet Union.And I would like to thank the many people-too numerous to mention -who listened, read, and critiqued the book along the way. Farrell Tulsa, Oklahoma PART ONE: GOTTERDAMMERUNG "A comprehensive February 1942 (German) Army Ordnance report on the German uranium enrichment program includes the statement that the critical mass of a nuclear weapon lay between 10 and 100 kilograms of either uranium 235 or element 94....In fact the German estimate of critical mass of 10 to 100 kilograms was comparable to the contemporary Allied estimate of 2 to 100....