It was the morning of 21st April 1945. Soviet shells were beginning to fall on Berlin and, trapped in his bunker in the grounds of the Reichschancellery, Adolf Hitler ranted and strategized and awaited the end. Everywhere his armies were routed and his troops surrendering and all about the Nazi dream of conquest was sliding into dust.
Through the farmlands of Swabia in southern Germany, a heavily-armed American military convoy raced for a small rural hamlet named Haigerloch. It operated far ahead of Allied forces, had orders not to stop and a remit to shoot any who opposed. And it was on a very special tasking. In a few months hence an atomic bomb would be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, would usher in the nuclear age and forever change the global military balance. Yet there was no telling how advanced the Nazis were in their nuclear ambitions, no other way to ensure the retrieval of their priceless atomic secrets than by sending in a force of scientists and soldiers to unearth the hiding places and ferret out the truth. Washington was worried. The result was this speeding column of trucks and the codename it was given - the Alsos Mission. So you see, the search for weapons of mass destruction and fears of their proliferation go back a long way.
There was no time to waste. Reaching the village, the Alsos men quickly found the heavy door set into the base of a cliff, shot away its lock and - moving carefully in case of booby-traps - descended to a dark cavern down a narrow flight of stone steps. By torchlight they discovered what they had long sought, the unholiest of grails, a nuclear reactor vessel gleaming from the shadows. Here was the summation of German nuclear research: a small and insignificant device no larger than a tea urn, basic in its construction, a minnow in relation to the giant reactor piles used by the United States to power and produce its bomb. The Nazi nuclear threat had been a dread illusion all along, perhaps the greatest practical joke in history. Had they not been so relieved, the intrepid Alsos team might have laughed. For German scientists had failed entirely in achieving a sustained nuclear chain reaction, let alone in constructing a weapon.
Today, we are still searching for such things, still assessing the proliferating threat posed by rogue states, still peering into the shadows and employing special measures to expose and counteract the danger. This year alone, several Iranian nuclear physicists have been targeted - and two reportedly killed - with magnetic bombs attached to their cars by unknown assailants. Add to that the Stuxnet computer virus apparently unleashed with devastating effect by Israel against Tehran's nuclear programme, and it is clear the spirit and patterns of the Alsos Mission survive. We should be thankful.
Many remain mystified at how backward the Nazis proved when it came to developing the bomb. After all, German scientists were the first to split the atom; German science led the world; German nuclear research was ahead of America in 1941 and guided by the Nobel prizewinner Werner Heisenberg. And despite his postwar protestations that he was concerned solely with power generation and peaceful applications, the brilliant professor was very much aware of the devastating strategic potential afforded by his science. Indeed, his Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin - the nerve centre for German nuclear development - expended a great deal of effort in this direction.
Germany could have got there first. Fortunately, there were several factors that ensured the nightmare never matured to reality. Anti-semitism was the key. Not only did Hitler deride the science as 'Jewish' on account of Albert Einstein, but his policies forced many of the leading theoretical physicists of the day to flee to Britain and America where they soon found employment building the reactors and designing the bomb for the Manhattan Project. Then there was the German military obsession with Blitzkrieg and its emphasis on using lightning tank and air strikes to overwhelm and defeat their enemies across Europe. They simply thought the war would be over in the blink of an eye. When it became bogged down in the horrors of the Eastern Front, there was no Plan B and definitely no bomb. So while America planned for the long-term and invested in a massive nuclear weaponisation plan, Germany continued to produce aircraft and armoured vehicles. By the time Hitler comprehended things were not going well, it was far too late.
The moral for current political leaders and their nuclear and biological weapons sleuths should be clear: things are not always as they seem or turn out as expected.