Confederacy Was Building Atomic Bomb... 80 Years Before WW2

Weekly World News ^ | today | some dude

[Brilliant]

I don't think there is much likelihood that a bomb based on uranium ore would trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

[SamAdams76]

Good think the Union was able to come up with the flux capacitor first. This allowed special troops from Grant's Army to journey into the future and to their horror, they discovered that the Confederate Army had indeed won the Civil War due to their nuking of Washington D.C. back in 1864. Armed with this knowledge, the Union troops immediately returned to warn President Lincoln. Lincoln then made an urgent push to win the war at all costs before the Confederates could get their nuclear program off the ground. This is why General Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground. It was generally thought that the nuclear weapons were being developed there.

All records pertaining to this matter have been permanently sealed. However, I have a few connections at the highest levels of government, and I was able to procure this classified photo from 1864 - exclusive to Free Republic - that clearly shows that the Union did indeed have the flux capacitor during the Civil War. In this stunning photo, you can see Union troops trying once again to get back into the future with a 20th century automobile that they made their return journey in from the first trip. (They initially got into the future with a railcar pushed down the side of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire but they wanted to return in style.) In this photo, they are attempting to get back into the future by having their car pushed by a Union supply train at an undisclosed, secret location in captured Confederate territory in Texas. Unfortunately, tragedy struck just after this photo was taken (with a 35mm camera brought back from the future on the first trip) when the automobile "derailed" off the track and slammed into a large rock, causing a massive explosion which destroyed the car - and the flux capacitor.

Compounding the tragedy, the inventor of the flux capacitor was killed by a Confederate sniper just days later. It is believed that a Union spy tipped off Jefferson Davis about the flux capacitor and the trip to the future and Davis ordered the assassination because he was pissed to find out that the slaves were not only free but getting rich playing basketball and rap music.

And now you know the REST of the story...

[editor-surveyor]

Just think how close we came to legitimate restraint of the federal behemouth!

No income tax

No IRS

Hmmmmmm.......

[Freedom of Speech Wins]

Weeks away . . . what stopped him?

[Conservababe]

Actually, in the Confederate constitution were many things that conservatives are still fighting for in congress. LOL

[lizma]

Thank you Paul. LOL!!!!!!!

[Mark Turbo]

In Burke Davis' book, The Civil War: Strange & Fascinating Facts, there's a story in the folklore section about a Confederate attempt to fire a two-stage rocket from Richmond towards Washington.

A tale even more challenging to the imagination was offered Southern newspaper readers in 1958, by a Vienna correspondent signing himself simply as "C.R. Johnson." Late in the war, by this story, the Confederacy launched a two-stage rocket from near Richmond, aiming at Washington, about one hundred miles away.

This extraordinary missile was made possible by the work of a secret agent in England, who persuaded Lord Kelvin to liquefy oxygen (in advance of its accepted date of development), and enlisted the aid of the great German physicist, Ernst Mach, who contributed a small turbine and a gyroscopic stabilizer. With British-built machinery for liquefying oxygen and Mach's turbine, Confederate experts went to work in a shed on the banks of the James River.

A deep hole in the riverbank was fitted with a tube made of dismembered barrels of naval guns. The celebrated Matthew Fontaine Maury, father of modern navigation, calculated the trajectory.

The rocket itself was to get its original thrust from gun-cotton fired at the bottom of the tube, and was made at the huge Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. The missile was trundled through Richmond's streets to the launching site in early March, 1865. Men from the Torpedo Bureau worked around the clock to prepare the rocket; a steam pipe was fed into the launching tube to provide power for the stabilizing vanes.

The missile arrived with the letters CSA cut in its nose cone, and President Davis and other officials added their names before the firing.

A network of scouts was spread in the country between Richmond and Washington as crude tracking station outposts, and when the rocket was fired by an electrical switch, men with telescopes saw it roar skyward, lose its first stage, and disappear from sight. The first stage, by this account, was recovered and returned to the torpedo shed.

A mystery developed: No eye saw the rocket come down, and since record books were destroyed with the fall of Richmond, the rocket's fate was unknown. The son of the Confederate agent in England, according to this folklorist or prankster, is now in his nineties, and does not wish to be disturbed by publicity which would attend his producing the authentic records of this event. His will, it is said, provides that these be made public.

Meanwhile, a fascinated audience ponders the fantastic prospect: Is there, somewhere in space, a veteran of almost one hundred years as an orbiting satellite, a missile bearing the outmoded initials: CSA?

--p. 245-246, The Civil War: Strange & Fascinating Facts, Burke Davis, Copyright 1960.

Like I said, this is in the book's folklore section, so I take it with the same grain of salt I would with this Weekly World News story.

[Barnacle]

I've just returned from the past to report to you here in the present that -

This story is true!

[75thOVI]

Are you saying the rumor is true? The C.S.S. Hunley
had a "Strom for Senate" bumper sticker on her propeller
guard!

[mhking]

Where's Harry Turtledove when you need him?

[Constitution Day]

Bump for tomorrow's reading...

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

Doesn't pass the smell test. There is no way 1860's America had the technology to design and manufacture a trigger to explode a fissionable device. I don't buy it.

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

[Vince Ferrer]

Actually, in the Confederate constitution were many things that conservatives are still fighting for in congress. LOL

Like what?

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

“I showed McMullen’s writings to physicists familiar with nuclear fission and they were stunned,” Remarsh states. “His bomb was crude, with maybe a tenth of the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but it would have worked.

I suppose it would have made up for what the Union did to Atlanta...

[Husker24]

Well if it wasnt for that damn slavery, id think youd have an excellent chance of winning a second time around.

[meisterbrewer]

What a joke. Anyone with even a passing understanding of the technology needed to create a nuclear weapon can see through this. But, the danger is, there are many who don't understand the underlying technology and will be led astray by the article.

It does serve to illustrate an interesting dilemma concerning the creation and use of technology. It is not enough that a brilliant person can come up with a revolutionary thought, as Einstein did. There must also exist a wide variety of technologies to support the implementation of the idea.

As an example, consider what would happen if an an aerospace engineer were magically transported to the times of the civil war. Do you think there would be fighter aircraft developed? Not a chance. The metalurgy, machining, testing, fueling and many more technologies would not be in existence. Even if this expert knew how to create all the technologies, he couldn't do it with the tools existing at that time. No precision lathes, etc.

The same is true here. Let's say some "genius" not only predated Einstein and the Manhattan project on the concept of a nuclear weapon. So what? Where is he going to get the triggers? Enriched uranium? Plutonium?

Oh, one last one. How would they set it off? No radio transmitters. No planes to drop it. No missiles to deliver it. Perhaps a really, really long fuse?! That would be funny to watch!

[socal_parrot]

Confederate scientist was just weeks away from perfecting a crude atomic bomb

And of course he pronounced the word noo-kew-lur.

[toenail]

"That said, this report is suspicious based on the type of "serious reporting" that goes on at the Weekly World News."

Take it back, or Bat Boy will get you.

[SamBees]

Fried Yankee, anyone?