15. The Nazi Scheme to Shower New York City With Radioactive Sand
Hitler inexplicably declared war against America on December 11th, 1941. Soon after the US was thus brought into the war in Europe, American heavy bombers joined Britain’s RAF to rain devastation upon the Third Reich. The Germans wanted to return the favor, but lacked the aerial superiority necessary to go on the offensive. Not to mention that America, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Nazi-occupied Europe, was too far away for German planes then in service. German scientists set about to solve that problem, and came up with a scheme to make New York City uninhabitable by sprinkling radioactive sand all over the Big Apple.
To reach America, German scientist Eugen Sanger proposed a Racketenflugzeug – a rocket airplane. Known as Silbervogel, or Silver Bird, the proposed aircraft was to be propelled at 1200 miles per hour off railroad tracks from a rocket-powered sled, then fly to a height of ninety miles. There, at the edge of space, the Silbervogel would use a series of roller-coaster-like “skips”, entering and exiting the upper atmosphere en route to the Big Apple. Once it reached its destination, the Silbervogel would detonate a bomb packed with radioactive sand, to devastate NYC with a radiation cloud. It sounds cartoonish, but the theory was actually sound, and the plan just might have worked. Luckily for the Big Apple, the Nazis were defeated before either the space plane or the villainous scheme became realities.
