|One of the most important books I have ever read tells the story about Operation Paperclip following WW II when the US smuggled 1,500 former Nazi's into the country to work in the military industrial complex - Hitlers former rocket team was used to create the US space program. This story must be told and retold so we do not forget.|
The Hunt for Zero Point
The Atlantic Monthly, September 5,
Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes
his foray into a hidden ''black world'' where powerful technologies of warfare
To those who spend their time scanning reams of
dry defense-spending documents, the black budget is a well-known bit of
excitement. It is the discrepancy that's left when all the known weapons
procurements, research programs, and technical developments are added up. It's
also where groundbreaking technologies, such as stealth, are developed under
code names like ''Black Light,'' ''Classic Wizard,'' and ''Link Plumeria.''
These technologies are kept secret during their gestation because to even hint
at the ideas behind them would be to reveal too much. This year, according to
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the
U.S. military's black budget will rise to levels not seen
since the 1980s, from $16.2 billion last year to $20.3 billion.
There is no way to know exactly what that money is
being spent on, but Nick Cook has some ideas. For fifteen years Cook has been a
defense and aerospace reporter for Jane's Defence Weekly, which some
consider the bible of the international defense community. During his career
Cook has often brushed up against the ''black world'' and has even delved into
it, both in reporting for Jane's on advances like the B-2 bomber, and in working
on a documentary, Billion Dollar Secret, that probed the U.S.
military's classified (or black) weapons programs.
This last project was something of a prelude to
Cook's new book, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of
Antigravity Technology, which documents his ten-year search for a mythical
technology that all the brightest minds in aerospace were gushing about in the
early 1950s. Strangely, just a few years later the aerospace world was suddenly
silent on the subject. After about 1956, anyone who mentioned antigravity, or
the once-imminent ''G-engines,'' was given a wide berth. It was an odd switch
that left Cook with questions: Had there been anything to these rumors and
reports? If not, why the hype? If so, what had happened? So he set out to look
for answers, and what he found was surprising. Cook traced a long succession of
both military and civilian scientists and engineers working to develop a branch
of applied physics for which we still have no vocabulary, but which seems to
involve manipulating the little-understood quantum-level ''zero-point field'' to
achieve peculiar effects, like shielding objects from gravity. If this were
developed and incorporated into flight vehicles, the implications could hardly
be understated: antigravity would forever alter the world's economy, make global
transport systems obsolete, and, of course, change the face of warfare. Some
also felt that the zero-point field could be an enormous source of energy, if
only people could learn how to tap it.
Against the advice of his colleagues and friends, and
against his own better judgment and career interests, Cook felt he couldn't
ignore the leads he uncovered, which drew him through the black labyrinth back
to an unexpected place: Nazi territory around the end of World War II. That is
where, Cook claims, some of these technologies were first developed and then
acquired by American and Russian forces, who raced to pillage the underground
facilities around Pilsen in the Czech Republic and around Breslau (now Wroclaw)
in Poland. There an SS general named Hans Kammler operated the ''wonder
weapons'' program, which the Nazis were convinced would propel them ahead of the
Allies to win the war. At the war's end Kammler disappeared. Though he had been
one of the main planners of the death camps, his name was never mentioned at the
war-crimes trials in Nuremberg.
One conclusion Cook reaches in The Hunt for Zero
Point is that some of the ''Foo Fighters''
that World War II pilots reported seeing over Axis territories may have been
German prototypes of new flying machines that used antigravity technology. He
also posits that somewhere in the black world, work has likely continued along
these lines, and that much of the wackiness surrounding sightings of ''UFOs''
has been deliberately spun to ward off investigations of new technologies in
Since the book's publication in
Britain, Cook has uncovered documents detailing Boeing's
antigravity research program at the top-secret Phantom Works, where the company
is striving to develop ''propellantless propulsion'' ahead of its competitors.
Writing in Jane's Defence Weekly, Cook quoted the documents as saying
that along with Boeing's own program, other ''classified activities in gravity
modification may exist''—suggesting that antigravity may, in fact, have been
more than a 1950's fantasy.
For his work at Jane's, Nick Cook has received the
Royal Aeronautical Society's Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award four times,
in the Defence, Business, Technology, and Propulsion categories. He also writes
for The Financial Times, The London Times
and often comments on defense and security for the BBC and CNN. I
spoke to him at his home in London.
QUESTION : One of the most gripping parts of your
book is the description of ''Operation
Paperclip''—the dismantling and retrieval of all known German technology,
science, and related expertise at the end of World War II. You write that this
''state within a state had been transported four thousand miles to the west''—to
When learning about today's black world, why is it important to go back and
study Operation Paperclip?
COOK : Two things. First of all, we know the size and
scope of Operation Paperclip, which was huge. And we know that the
U.S. operates a very deeply secret defense architecture
for secret-weapons programs that we know as the black world. It is a highly
compartmentalized system and one of the things that's intrigued me over the
years is, How did they develop that? What model did they base it on?
It is remarkably similar to the system that was
operated by the Germans—specifically the SS—for their top-secret weapons
programs during the Second World War. Now, did someone, Hans Kammler or anyone
else, provide that model lock, stock, and barrel to the
U.S. government at the end of the war? I don't know the
answer to that, but given the massive recruitment that went on under Paperclip,
and given what we see in the black world, it might not be unreasonable to ask
QUESTION : You also write that the black world in
America is a ''low-grade reflection'' of the system Kammler
built to protect Nazi weapons research.
COOK : I'm not for a second saying that there is
direct linkage there. What I do mean is that if you follow the trail of Nazi
scientists and engineers who were recruited by
America at the end of the Second World War, the unfortunate
corollary is that by taking on the science, you take on—unwittingly—some of the
ideology. The science comes over tainted with something else. And that something
else you have to be very careful of. It carries unpleasant side effects with it,
in that if you're not careful, you lose sight of what it is you're protecting.
What you're ultimately trying to protect is
U.S. national interest and
U.S. security. But not at any cost. I think that's the
point that many people make who've brushed up against the black world and found
their human rights violated by it. Not many have, but certainly some have. Those
people question whether that unswerving loyalty to protecting high technology
was worth it. What do you lose along the way? You lose some democracy,
QUESTION : For those who haven't read the book, can
you say briefly who Hans Kammler is?
COOK : He was an SS general who, by the end of the
Second World War, was in charge of all of the Nazis' secret-weapons programs. He
was an extremely powerful man. He was up to his neck in the Holocaust as well,
and amongst his earlier responsibilities he had been one of the main architects
of the death camps. Now, at the end of the Second World War, he disappeared. And
from what little documentary history he left behind, we know that he was
thinking of trading his war crimes for technology, which he wanted to give to
the Americans in order to buy himself immunity. But his crimes were so heinous
that immunity for someone like Kammler wouldn't be enough. He'd actually have to
buy disappearance. So Kammler disappeared, and no one knows where he went.
What is remarkable about Kammler is that so few
people know his name. And yet at the end of the Second World War, he was one of
the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He should have been tried in absentia at
the Nuremberg war-crimes trials. But his name didn't even surface
there, even though others who couldn't be found were tried in absentia.