Nothing conclusive yet but the librarian at the Austin Campus of the
University of Texas has no record of any talks by the man.

My message "Sometime during the late 1950's or early 1960s Werner Von Braun
allegedly gave a talk to a group at the University of Texas in Austin.

It may or may not have been part of a class and it may or may not have been
sponsored by the physics department.

If you have the time and if it is possible I would like to know if this was
true and what the subject was. Thanks.

Response:

We have searched our holdings and the University's web site, but have been
unable to uncover any details about the talk. You may want to contact the
Center for American History on the UT campus. They are the University's
archive. You may also want to contact the physics department.

I've sent an email to both the archive and the physics department.

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:04:58 -0800, "Mike Painter"
<md.pain...@sbcglobal.net> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

Thanks for making the effort Mike.

From my searches I cannot find any record of him lecturing on anything
other than rockets. Face it, he was a famous person who could lecture
on rockets - which were, of course, a VERY hot subject at the time. So
why would anyone ask him to lecture on a subject that he would have
been fairly ignorant of. I say ignorant because he was excluded form
any American nuclear research and had no real contact with anyone
doing such research. Although the cyclotron was invented in 1929 I
doubt he would have really known much about them - certainly not
enough to have warranted a lecture on them. Then we have the claimed
subject "The Half Life Of U235 In A Cyclotron", how much more
ridiculous can it get?

--
Bob.

Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't
make an exception for the last one.

On Nov 16, 5:03 pm, Ye Old One <use...@mcsuk.net> wrote:

And, a Google search on the phrase "The Half Life Of U235 In A
Cyclotron"
gets NOTHING BUT this thread. Ditto for "U235 In A Cyclotron".

Suzanne, as usual, is a willful idiot *and* a shameless liar.

Andre

Agreed. Famous man with a hot subject. That's why I have contacted UT, they
will almost certainly have a record of it if it happened.

Don't get your hopes up.  Universities are notorious for keeping
bad records.  There may indeed be no record and the event might
well have happened.

Your best bet is either the university archives or the archives
of the Austin paper(s).

--
   --- Paul J. Gans

In article <tnhMm.16609$gi1.4...@newsfe19.iad>,
 "Mike Painter" <md.pain...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

*
In the same sense that Suzanne took a class from Von Braun, I once took
a class at Stanford from J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It went like this:  The word came around in our lab, which was a mile or
so off campus in Menlo Park, that Oppenheimer was on campus and giving a
lecture at 2:00 in the big lecture room in the Physics Hall.  A bunch of
us biked over and found the place teeming with the curious.  We could
barely stand in the back door and see the stage.  The room seated about
150 and there were at least 300 people there.

Oppenheimer was introduced (by Felix Bloch*, as I recall).  He seemed
very appreciative of the crowd as he opened his remarks, "There are
probably about a dozen people here who will have any idea of what I am
talking about."

We hung around for about ten minutes and then went back to work.

earle
*
PS:  Felix Bloch shared a Nobel Prize with Edward Purcell (Harvard) for
the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.  I did take a class in
Nuclear Physics from Purcell -- a one-quarter lecture class when he was
a visiting prof at Stanford -- I made an A.

ej
*

 > And, a Google search on the phrase "The Half Life
 > Of U235 In A Cyclotron" gets NOTHING BUT this
 > thread. Ditto for "U235 In A Cyclotron".

Well, knowing how to use your tools is sort of a
pre-requisite for attempting to prove a negative
using those tools.

For instance, a google search for

          u235 cyclotron half-life von-braun

gets around 1400 hits, lots of them false positives,
but at least one of which informs us that von Braun
was student to a professor well known for using the
half-life of uranium to do useful mineral dating to
estimate the age of the earth, and several of which
place cyclotrons in Germany well before WW-II.

It's pretty much impossible to study under a
professor and learn nothing about that professor's
particular hobby horse subject.

It's thus unlikely that von Braun, as a member of
the German scientific community, would have
absolutely nothing, ever, to say either about
uranium half lives, or about cyclotrons.

Cyclotrons would have been useful research
instruments, for example, in Germany's putative
war-time atomic bomb research, so von Braun could
have been called in to talk bomb program scientists
and staff about, oh, say, missile throw weights
versus atomic bomb design weights, or whatever.

 > Suzanne, as usual, is a willful idiot *and* a
 > shameless liar.

Well, yes, she is, in the general case, but you've
come nowhere close to exercising the due diligence
needed to prove your case against her in this
particular discussion.

FWIW

xanthian.

Sort of as an aside, for conspiracy theorists, this
piece of "speculative" history might suggest a whole
lot more that scientists in the German war effort
would have had on their plates for consideration and
gossip.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/ylzc6hy

The sanity of the author is a bit unweighed, but he
tells a good story for scaring the kids in the dark.

On Nov 16, 11:57 pm, Kent Paul Dolan <xanth...@well.com> wrote:

Starts with the first two results being this thread. It
provides NO articles or citations that connect VB
with either U235 work, or cyclotrons, never mind
BOTH...

The fifth result listed a "Braun U", rather than Wehrner.
And, the tenth was on the half life of Am241...

Try ALL of them being false positives, aside from two
for this thread.

If you wish to suggest that there was a true positive,
please post it.

Otherwise, you're trying a Fallacy of Proving a Negative.

But, with nary a connection between the two topics.

Sure. But, it is not logical to state that someone like
VB would speak on such a fast moving topic, when his
ONLY possible qualification would then be at least 20
years *out of date*.

No, on the basis of being able to speak about either
topic by the late 50s, it is highly unlikely, because his
possible knowledge on either topic, never mind on a
combination of the topics, would have then been at
least 20 years out of date, in a field where the state
of the art was moving amazingly fast.

One might as well expect a designer of the prop
fighter ME-109 to give a talk to designers of the
supersonic jet fighter F-104... Ain't gonna happen.

That's also greatly unlikely, as his only expertise in
that area would have been for the V-2 (Then, 15 plus
years out of date.), or the tactical Redstone missile.
VB had zilch to do with ANY US ICBM or IRBM project
at that time. So, he had the same qualification, zilch,
to speak about ICBM and/or IRBM capabilities. Never
mind zilch quals to speak of the buckets of instant
sunshine nuke payloads...

As I have explained above, yes, I have.

Further, there is simply NO record of ANYONE having
given a talk on the half life of uranium *in a cyclotron*,
period.

As Suzanne is the positive claimant about that, The Burden
Of Proof is all HERS.

The ONLY thing that this links to is your post.

Suzanne can't even claim to tell any good stories...

Andre

On Nov 16, 7:58 pm, Paul J Gans <gan...@panix.com> wrote:

Or they could forget about it.  There's no conclusive way to prove
this negative.  As it is they're merely disputing the ancillary views
of a war criminal.

Mitchell

 > Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
 >> Andre Lieven wrote:

 >>> And, a Google search on the phrase "The Half
 >>> Life Of U235 In A Cyclotron" gets NOTHING BUT
 >>> this thread. Ditto for "U235 In A Cyclotron".

 >> Well, knowing how to use your tools is sort of a
 >> pre-requisite for attempting to prove a negative
 >> using those tools.

 >> For instance, a google search for

 >>           u235 cyclotron half-life von-braun

 > Starts with the first two results being this
 > thread. It provides NO articles or citations that
 > connect VB with either U235 work, or cyclotrons,
 > never mind BOTH...

 > The fifth result listed a "Braun U", rather than
 > Wehrner.  And, the tenth was on the half life of
 > Am241...

 >> gets around 1400 hits, lots of them false
 >> positives,

 > Try ALL of them being false positives, aside from
 > two for this thread.

 > If you wish to suggest that there was a true
 > positive, please post it.

 > Otherwise, you're trying a Fallacy of Proving a
 > Negative.

 >> but at least one of which informs us that von
 >> Braun was student to a professor well known for
 >> using the half-life of uranium to do useful
 >> mineral dating to estimate the age of the earth,
 >> and several of which place cyclotrons in Germany
 >> well before WW-II.

 > But, with nary a connection between the two
 > topics.

 >> It's pretty much impossible to study under a
 >> professor and learn nothing about that
 >> professor's particular hobby horse subject.

 > Sure. But, it is not logical to state that someone
 > like VB would speak on such a fast moving topic,
 > when his ONLY possible qualification would then be
 > at least 20 years *out of date*.

 >> It's thus unlikely that von Braun, as a member of
 >> the German scientific community, would have
 >> absolutely nothing, ever, to say either about
 >> uranium half lives, or about cyclotrons.

 > No, on the basis of being able to speak about
 > either topic by the late 50s, it is highly
 > unlikely, because his possible knowledge on either
 > topic, never mind on a combination of the topics,
 > would have then been at least 20 years out of
 > date, in a field where the state of the art was
 > moving amazingly fast.

 > One might as well expect a designer of the prop
 > fighter ME-109 to give a talk to designers of the
 > supersonic jet fighter F-104... Ain't gonna
 > happen.

 >> Cyclotrons would have been useful research
 >> instruments, for example, in Germany's putative
 >> war-time atomic bomb research, so von Braun could
 >> have been called in to talk bomb program
 >> scientists and staff about, oh, say, missile
 >> throw weights versus atomic bomb design weights,
 >> or whatever.

 > That's also greatly unlikely, as his only
 > expertise in that area would have been for the V-2
 > (Then, 15 plus years out of date.), or the
 > tactical Redstone missile.  VB had zilch to do
 > with ANY US ICBM or IRBM project at that time. So,
 > he had the same qualification, zilch, to speak
 > about ICBM and/or IRBM capabilities. Never mind
 > zilch quals to speak of the buckets of instant
 > sunshine nuke payloads...

 >>> Suzanne, as usual, is a willful idiot *and* a
 >>> shameless liar.

 >> Well, yes, she is, in the general case, but
 >> you've come nowhere close to exercising the due
 >> diligence needed to prove your case against her
 >> in this particular discussion.

 > As I have explained above, yes, I have.

 > Further, there is simply NO record of ANYONE
 > having given a talk on the half life of uranium
 > *in a cyclotron*, period.

 > As Suzanne is the positive claimant about that,
 > The Burden Of Proof is all HERS.

 >> FWIW

 >> xanthian.

 >> Sort of as an aside, for conspiracy theorists,
 >> this piece of "speculative" history might suggest
 >> a whole lot more that scientists in the German
 >> war effort would have had on their plates for
 >> consideration and gossip.

 >> http://preview.tinyurl.com/ylzc6hy

 > The ONLY thing that this links to is your post.

If you think about it, that would be physically
impossible, as the posting would have to exist
somewhere in a news spool and have a URI before a
tinyURL pointer to it could be constructed, and yet
that pointer was already _in_ the post.

Of course, when I just checked that preview tinyURL
again, it points exactly where it was supposed to
point.

As I said earlier, you need to learn to use your
tools, not just let them mislead you into making a
public fool of yourself.

 >> The sanity of the author is a bit unweighed, but
 >> he tells a good story for scaring the kids in the
 >> dark.

 > Suzanne can't even claim to tell any good
 > stories...

 > Andre

I'm not going to justify that swill you posted with
a point by point rebuttal. If you insist on
remaining deliberately ignorant, are so mind-blind
that you introduce conditions into events that had
no reason to be affecting those events, and are not
literate enough to read what I wrote intelligently,
nor literate enough to review search results
intelligently

     [Of _course_ the most precise hits the search
     found are to this thread. Do you ever bother to
     _think_ before you type?]

which your responses confirm to be the case, me
writing more is a waste of my time. YOU read what
you wrote above (including several deliberate lies)
and see all the places you have (again, if I recall)
made a public laughingstock of yourself.

Then again, if you can't read what I wrote, why
should you be able to read what you wrote?

xanthian.

Oh, and just to give your unjustified smugness that
you _must_ be correct a bit of a nudge, remember
that isotope decay rates slow as radioactive
particles approach the speed of light, and then read
the "Plasma Separations" paragraph here:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/ya8n4ff

So "u235 half-life in a cyclotron" is a perfectly
valid concept.

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:57:30 -0700, Kent Paul Dolan

The cyclotron having been invented by Lawrence around 1929-30,
that's not too surprising. Once Lawrence built one, everyone
would have wanted one.

That doesn't explain Suzanne's muddled mention of the half-life
of uranium in a cyclotron. If it all generally happened as she
says (and I think the argument over whether it was a class or a
lecture is pretty pointless) it would appear she may not have
understood it and it has now been passed through the defective
memory filter of things not well understood. Perhaps Braun had
some reason to mention cyclotrons and some reason to mention
uranium, but I simply don't believe he talked about half-life in
cyclotrons.

--
   ************* DAVE HATUNEN (hatu...@cox.net) *************
   *       Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow         *
   * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

On Nov 17, 7:02 pm, Kent Paul Dolan <xanth...@well.com> wrote:

Well, no. A calutron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron) is a form
of mass spectrometer used to separate out U isotopes. The beam of
atoms travels at well below the speed of light in the plasma gas; if
the beam approached the speed of light (something that would take an
extraordinary amount of energy given the quantities of plasma
involved), the trick of bending the ions in a magnetic field just
wouldn't work. And given that the half life of U235 is 700M years, I
really don't understand how you might be able to measure the
difference. Given U235 at just subluminal for a *year*, the difference
in half-life would be a vanishingly small number of the order of 1 in
10^-8. The path length in the average calutron would be measured in
micro seconds.

Doesn't wash, sorry.

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:57:30 -0700, Kent Paul Dolan
<xanth...@well.com> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

Both fact are very true. However, the use of uranium in dating has
nothing whatsoever to do with a cyclotron.

WvB would not have had anything to do with nuclear matters once he
started working on the military rocket programme.

True.

Why would he?

Possible, but in reality it would have been the other way round if
there had been contact, which there wasn't, they would have been
telling him how big a rocket they needed.

Rubbish, case proven long ago.

One of my main points being that once in the USA WvB would not have
been allowed within a mile of any nuclear secrets.

--
Bob.

On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:51:42 -0800 (PST), alextangent

I covered that in my original response in another thread..

And I see little reason von Braun might have talked about such an
arcane factoid. One wonders if vB had even heard of a calutron...

--
   ************* DAVE HATUNEN (hatu...@cox.net) *************
   *       Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow         *
   * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

  It is absolutely possible that Suzanne heard such a lecture.
Why someone would talk about it is another question since the half life of
U235 is rather high and near light velocities would have to be obtained to
make any significant difference in or out.

In general however Suzanne is always wrong, especially when talking about
science.
Light does not slow down so you can hear it. (Part of a longer equally bad
explanation)
Ripples from a stone toss into water move in a radial pattern, not orbital.
These are only the ones I remember but there are a large number of them.
When she started she often would post references. Reading those references
always showed that her conclusions were not that of the writer.
Given two conclusions drawn from the same data by the same person, she will
deny one and accept the other with no other reason than "because". She needs
nothing other than what she would like to be right.
"I don't know what others think, but I can tell you that
 I feel an inner confirmation that it is the truth, so I
 don't need outside archaeological evidence to prove to
 me that it is true."

Suzanne does this all to "prove" the bible is absolutely correct.

Her statements have reached the point where truth is an extraordinary event
and demands extraordinary evidence to support it.

Good timing., this just came in."I looked in our subject file for the
University of Texas Department of Physics, which consists mostly of clipped
newspaper articles from throughout the 20th century that feature the
Department, but I did not find mention of the von Braun talk there."

He is going to work on it more Friday.

Who needs  "not well undstood"

I spent at least 40 years with secure knowledge of something I remember
learning in an excellent high school physics class in the 57/58 school year.
I was wrong when I looked into the subject a few years ago.
Interesting the wrong part of it was probably there by the early 60's at
least. (And the 60's didn't start in the early 60's.)

 >

True but if they provide evidence that he was there in that time period and
talked about rockets, it would imply that she was wrong again.

On Nov 17, 2:02 pm, Kent Paul Dolan <xanth...@well.com> wrote:

<yawn>

Your total concession is noted and appreciated.

"Ad Hominem Alone, the last refuge of the *whipped*
scoudrel". Thanks for so clearly outing yourself.

<projection>

Ibid "whipped scoudrel".

Ibid "whipped scoundrel".

Now, try to make the case that a rocket engineer
of the 50s would be in any position to speak on that.

Sheesh. What are you, trying to get Suzanne to go
out with you ?

Andre

On Nov 18, 6:56 pm, "Mike Painter" <md.pain...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Sure, but isn't that beating a long-deceased and decayed horse?  it's
you own business, but why bother?  She's just pathetic.  I suppose,
though, that could go for any individual creationist.

Mitchell Coffey

 > Perhaps Braun had some reason to mention
 > cyclotrons and some reason to mention uranium, but
 > I simply don't believe he talked about half-life
 > in cyclotrons.

Well, as I noted elsewhere, spinning U235 in
cyclotrons was a well known technology to separate
concentrations of it from U238, so he could have
talked about U235 in cyclotrons.

Spinning U235 in a cyclotron has two effects on its
half-life.

1) It lengthens the half life by slowing down time
for the U235 from the viewpoint of the external
observer. This is probably a trivial effect, what
with the half-life of U235 in isolation being around
700,000 years, if I recall correctly, and its time
in the cylotron probably being less than a minute.

2) It shortens the half life by concentrating U235
so that "in isolation" is no longer the case.

This is a non-trivial effect.

A critical mass of U235 has a half-life measured in
fractions of a second plus a very big boom.

Other, smaller size concentrations, such as might
occur in cyclotrons at the target location for
acquiring the concentrated U235, would range in half
life from that short one to the long half life in
isolation.

Therefore, considering the half-life of U235 in a
cyclotron is in fact a valid engineering concern.

You don't want too much of it in any one place, or
you increase your radioactive contamination due to
fissioning U235, and decrease your product yield.

There is therefore no particular reason von Braun
either would be unaware of that concern, or that it
would be surprising for him to mention it, in an
off-handed way in passing, in a public lecture,
long after the basic science was declassified.

Insisting that such an event _could not_ have
occurred shows an ignorance both of history and of
basic science.

For what that's worth.

xanthian.

 > Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
 >> Andre Lieven wrote:

 >>> And, a Google search on the phrase "The Half
 >>> Life Of U235 In A Cyclotron" gets NOTHING BUT
 >>> this thread. Ditto for "U235 In A Cyclotron".

 >> Well, knowing how to use your tools is sort of a
 >> pre-requisite for attempting to prove a negative
 >> using those tools.

 >> For instance, a google search for

 >>          u235 cyclotron half-life von-braun

 >> gets around 1400 hits, lots of them false
 >> positives, but at least one of which informs us
 >> that von Braun was student to a professor well
 >> known for using the half-life of uranium to do
 >> useful mineral dating to estimate the age of the
 >> earth, and several of which place cyclotrons in
 >> Germany well before WW-II.

 > Both fact are very true. However, the use of
 > uranium in dating has nothing whatsoever to do
 > with a cyclotron.

That has no affect on whether von Braun might have
mentioned U235 in a cyclotron and its half life,
though.

 > WvB would not have had anything to do with nuclear
 > matters once he started working on the military
 > rocket programme.

That certainly would not have been the case in
Germany, may well not have been the case in the US
if he were working on ICBMs.

 >> It's pretty much impossible to study under a
 >> professor and learn nothing about that
 >> professor's particular hobby horse subject.

 > True.

 >> It's thus unlikely that von Braun, as a member of
 >> the German scientific community, would have
 >> absolutely nothing, ever, to say either about
 >> uranium half lives, or about cyclotrons.

 > Why would he?

We can't read his mind, nor make his decisions for
him; personal whim, showing off, making a point in
his lecture are a few of uncountable possibilities.

"Why would he" is a useless argument and a useless
rebuttal.

 >> Cyclotrons would have been useful research
 >> instruments, for example, in Germany's putative
 >> war-time atomic bomb research, so von Braun could
 >> have been called in to talk bomb program
 >> scientists and staff about, oh, say, missile
 >> throw weights versus atomic bomb design weights,
 >> or whatever.

 > Possible, but in reality it would have been the
 > other way round if there had been contact, which
 > there wasn't, they would have been telling him how
 > big a rocket they needed.

Well, no. He could just as easily have been being
consulted on the issue "how small a bomb do we have
to build". Designing a new, bigger throw weight
rocket is a non-trivial time consumer also (initial
V2s had a horrific failure rate), and Germany was in
a time crunch to get a weapon of mass destruction to
prevent their homeland from being overrun.

Later, in the US, if he were working on ICBMs,
exactly the same reasons for the bomb designers
consulting him would have held sway.

 >>> Suzanne, as usual, is a willful idiot *and* a
 >>> shameless liar.

 >> Well, yes, she is, in the general case, but
 >> you've come nowhere close to exercising the due
 >> diligence needed to prove your case against her
 >> in this particular discussion.

 > Rubbish, case proven long ago.

Not so far, IN THIS PARTICULAR DISCUSSION.

Merely declaring a win is nowhere nearly so
convincing as is winning.

You've got a long way to go to convince _me_, for
example, because as a former nuclear weapons handler
and maintainer, I got a rather excellent general
education in all things "nuclear weapon".

So far, most of the arguments against the
possibility of WvB having made the statements
Suzanne recalls hearing have been of the null
quality of your "why would he" above -- people
arguing from gut feelings rather than from facts.

To disprove that he _could_ have made such a
statement, you have to give the widest latitude to
reasons he _might_ have been able to make the
statement.

So far, that hasn't been the case at all.

Arguments that a leading respected scientist _could
not have known_ some basic cyclotron science facts
are garbage, for example.

So far, most of the arguments against the
possibility of WvB having made the statements
Suzanne recalls hearing have been of the null
quality of your "why would he" above -- people
arguing from gut feelings rather than from facts.

To disprove that he _could_ have made such a
statement, you have to give the widest latitude to
reasons why he _might_ have been able to make the
statement.

So far, that hasn't been the case at all. That kind
of response has been dismissed out of hand,
invalidly.

Arguments that a leading respected scientist _could
not have known_ some basic cyclotron science facts
are garbage, for example.

 > One of my main points being that once in the USA
 > WvB would not have been allowed within a mile of
 > any nuclear secrets.

What he learned doesn't much have to have been
secrets, it's just basic science, known around the
world before WW-II began, and also doesn't have to
have been learned in the US; the information was
there to learn while he was working in Germany.

xanthian.

Notice that I'm not arguing that Suzanne _did_
hear any such thing from WvB under _any_
circumstances. Suzanne is far past senile, and she
has long ago suffered a severe disconnect from
reality that affects everything she says.

On Nov 16, 11:04 am, "Mike Painter" <md.pain...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

A final response
After having done searching to try to answer your question, I’m sorry
to say that it appears I cannot offer a confirmation of von Braun
having spoken here in the 1950s or 1960s at this time.

I checked our physics and engineering departments’ subject files, and
did not find mention of his speaking on campus. I did find one article
from the engineering department file that described the opening of the
1966 school year’s lecture series in the department, which was to
feature space scientists, but it did not mention von Braun
specifically and no follow-up articles were included.

I called the physics department office and its library, and neither
could confirm a record of such a talk.  The email response I later
received from the physics librarian did note that it is certainly
plausible that he spoke here, and she included a link to a scanned
page in Google books that mentions a 1950s speaking tour through Texas
in which he especially focused on college students who might be
recruited to his program.  You can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/yg5rkta
She also gave me the name of an aerospace engineering professor who
joined the department in 1960 and who is still here, and I emailed him
to ask if he might know anything about the talk, but I have not yet
received a reply.  I will let you know if he writes back.

I searched through our UT Student Publications negatives and
photograph proofs collection to see if there might be photos from the
event, if it was covered in our yearbook or student newspaper, but did
not find any.

My best guess for additional resources here on campus would be issues
of the student newspaper, the Daily Texan, where there might have been
a write-up.  Unfortunately, we do not have digitized archival issues
of the paper, so I cannot run any kind of search for the event.  All
back issues are on microfilm, and due to staff constraints, I cannot
look through all of the coverage for that time period to find a
mention of von Braun speaking on campus.  There are proxy researchers
that you could hire to do it for you, since you are located distantly
(see http://www.cah.utexas.edu/services/proxy_researcher.php).

On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:03:40 GMT, Ye Old One <use...@mcsuk.net> wrote:

Since Von Braun worked on the American ICBM program before joining
NASA, I don't think that dog will hunt.

Besides, between 1950 and 1956, von Braun led the Army's rocket
development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone
rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile
tests conducted by the United States.

On Nov 20, 4:33 pm, heekster <heeks...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:

VB never worked on any ICBMs. The Redstone was not even an IRBM,
rather it was a battlefield weapon, with a range barely greater than
that
of the V-2.

Further, given the great secrecy over matters of nuclear technology,
just because a guy worked on one small delivery system for such
payloads, in no way indicates that said guy would be allowed any
information about the payload, other than basic size and mass.

Andre