[Animats]

Those "Nazi tunnels" shown are clean, dry, and equipped with modern fluorescent lights. Those are not recently discovered tunnels.

The "Nazi atomic bomb program" never went anywhere. There was one. It was never very big or very successful. The US effort to find out about the Nazi atomic bomb program was bigger than the Nazi atomic bomb program. After the war, the big-name physicists were kept in a mansion called Farm Hall, which was bugged to listen in on them. The recordings were released in the 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon

Even after they hear about the Hiroshima bomb, they can't figure out how it was done. "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you are all second-raters.", says Otto Hahn.

[spacefight]

" Those "Nazi tunnels" shown are clean, dry, and equipped with modern fluorescent lights. Those are not recently discovered tunnels."

That picture is from a site nearby. The newly discoverd site is connected to the one depicted in the image. This is well written within the article:

"The underground complex is connected to the B8 Bergkristall underground factory, where Germans produced the first jet fighters, the Messerschmitt Me 262."

[tjradcliffe]

The NAZIs had some nuclear research, but its a stretch to call it a bomb program, as they hadn't even done the most basic back-of-the-envelope calculations as to the size of assembly required for criticality. Thus Heisenberg's initial estimate at Farm Hall was wildly wrong, but he refined it to something more-or-less correct in about a week.

If anyone at Farm Hall had been working on a bomb program of any kind they would have done that basic diffusion equation calculation the very first thing, before they even started, to get an idea if the whole thing was practical. No one did. Ergo, no one was working on a bomb, or if they were they were spectacularly incompetent.

[Houshalter]

A nuclear bomb was only one of the possibilities listed:

>“aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction,” historian Rainer Karlsch, who has long researched Hitler’s pursuit of an atomic bomb and worked with Sulzer on the project, told the Sunday Times. “They wanted to equip [a V-2] missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads.”