17. The Nazis Wanted to Use Space Planes to Dump Radioactive Sand on New York
On December 11th, 1941, Hitler inexplicably declared war on the US – a decision discussed in an entry below. It did not take long after America was thus brought into the war in Europe for American heavy bombers to join the RAF in raining devastation upon the Third Reich. The Germans wanted to return the favor, but aside from lacking aerial superiority to go on the offensive, the US homeland, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Nazi-occupied Europe, was too far away. So German scientists set about trying to solve that problem.
One of them, 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 off railroad tracks from a rocket-powered sled, then fly to a height of 90 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 New York City. Upon reaching its destination, it would detonate a bomb packed with radioactive sand, to devastate the Big Apple with a radiation cloud. It sounds cartoonish, but the theory was sound, and it might actually have worked. Luckily for NYC, the Nazis were defeated before either the space plane or the villainous plan became a reality.
