Authors

Frank Dittmann¹;  ¹ Deutsches Museum, Germany

Discussion

In the mid-1950s, most of the specialists returned from the Soviet Union, including in 1956 Gernot Zippe to Westgermany as well as Max Steenbeck, Manfred von Ardenne and Peter Adolf Thießen to the GDR. For over 10 years she had developed with Soviet scientists the centrifuge to separate the uranium isotopes U-235 and U-238.

A year after his return, Gernot Zippe realized at a conference in Amsterdam that the West was behind in developing this process for isotope separation. From now on he worked to applying his specialist knowledge and built a replica of the centrifuge developed in Sukhumi at the University of Virginia between 1958 and 1960. In the USA, the centrifuge technology was immediately classified and Zippe was invited to get involved. However, because he refused to accept American citizenship, he had to leave the USA.

Zippe returned to the FRG and become involved throughout his life for the very efficient separation of isotopes using gas centrifuges and thus transferred an important basic technology of the atomic age in the east-west direction. After his return from the USSR, he patented the "Zippe machine" together with Rudolf Scheffel and, in a contract with Steenbeck, who worked in the GDR, divided the exploitation rights of those involved between the respective sides of the Iron Curtain. In Russian post-reunification publications, however, Zippe was accused of plagiarizing the invention known in the USSR as the Kamenev centrifuge.

The paper examines the development and spread of uranium centrifuges as an example of technology transfer in the east-west direction, which is viewed as rather unusual, and take into account also the relations of various protagonists in East and West during the Cold War.