Summary of Neal Bascomb's The Winter Fortress

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In 1940, the French spy Jacques Allier was sent to bring back heavy water from Norway, which the Germans were also interested in. He needed to secure the stock before the Germans did.

#2 Allier traveled to Amsterdam, where he met with three French intelligence agents. He gave them the letter of credit and authority to recruit any French agents needed in smuggling out the heavy water.

#3 The American chemist Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize for his 1931 discovery of heavy water. While most hydrogen atoms consist of a single electron orbiting a single proton in the atom’s nucleus, Urey showed that there was a variant, or isotope, of hydrogen that carried a neutron in its nucleus.

#4 In 1933, Norwegian professor Leif Tronstad and his former college classmate Jomar Brun, who ran the hydrogen plant at Vemork, proposed the idea of a heavy water industrial facility to Norsk Hydro. They didn’t exactly know what the substance would be used for in the end, but they knew that Vemork, with its inexhaustible supply of cheap power and water, provided the perfect setup for such a facility.

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