"Joachim Ronneberg, the Norwegian resistance fighter who sabotaged Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons ambitions during World War Two, has died aged 99. In 1943, he led a top-secret raid on a heavily-guarded plant in Norway's southern region of Telemark. The operation was immortalised in the 1965 Hollywood film Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas. Ronneberg later worked as a radio journalist and helped raise awareness of the dangers of war among the young. He told the BBC in 2013 that he only realised the importance of the mission after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. "He is one of our great heroes," Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg told NTB news agency. "Ronneberg is probably the last of the best known resistance fighters to pass away." Born in 1919 in the town of Aalesund, Joachim Ronneberg fled Norway after the Nazis invaded in 1940. The then 21-year-old escaped with eight friends by boat to Scotland, but was determined to return and fight." Man who halted Nazi nuclear plan dies at 99
Obviously, a very brave and resourceful man. RIP Actually, I visited that site last June. The plant that was making deuterium was being excavated and the machinery for making it was still relatively intact-just buried. A question that I've been thinking about since then is: Just how active was the Norge resistance and what did they accomplish?
It's a quite an ambitious statement, nobody is saying that Ronneberg wasn't a hero, but Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons ambitions were just several people (some say up to seventy) on a tiny budget (ten thousand marks in 1942). For this reason, the Nazi bomb was not going to happen and wasn't even possible. In 1941 the Germans estimated (correctly) they needed at least five years to produce the bomb. That was too long, so no serious resources were allocated to the project, and it was basically terminated. The Allies more or less knew that, because the enormous plants needed to produce weapons-grade uranium couldn't be found anywhere in Germany.
