The Hunt

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It can be revealed today that for five years British and German scientists fought their own war-within-a-war. They fought to perfect the atom bomb, which, with the most explosive force in the world, would have given either side walkover superiority.

But it was no war of theorists only. British and Norwegian paratroopers fought it out too, with Wehrmacht men and their quisling supporters, in the white hell of the storm-swept Hardanger Plateau in Norway.

The Germans opened the fight in the summer of 1940. A few weeks after moving into Norway, they seized the vast hydroelectrical works at Rjukan. These works, fed by the famous ‘smoking-cascade’ waterfall, supply electricity plentifully. And plentiful electricity was essential to the German plan and to the arms plant they intended to set up at Rjukan.

Their plan was to split the atom.

At Rjukan the Norwegians produced large quantities of a substance known as ‘heavy water’.

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