INVENTOR'S CLAIM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 168, 3 June 1940, Page 6

INVENTOR'S CLAIM

GRIM AND TERRIBLE WAR WEAPON A new secret aerial mine-bomb, said to be similar to, but more powerful, than Hitler's much-vaunted "secret weapon," has been offered to the United States Government in Washington by its inventor, an aerial engineer named Leslcr Barlow. A cruder form of the same weapon, used by German airmen in an experimental attack on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, destroyed all living beings in a Barcelona square without tearing the tissues and shattered buildings without touching them, the inventor declares. A resolution to create a special joint military and Senate commission and appropriate funds to conduct experiments with the weapon has been introduced into the U.S. Senate. The details of the weapon are being kept a strict military sccret, but, according to claims made by the inventor, its main advantages are that it is a super-liigh-explosive is economical to produce, can be controlled and does not have to hit its objective to destroy it. So powerful is it, in fact, the inventor says, that it can sink warships up to about 10,000 tons, completely destroy life on the decks of a battleship, and annihilate its AA guns, or leave a battleship crip pled and helpless. Liquid Oxygen. The shape of the mine-bomb is secret. It is a thin metal'shell, containing liquid oxygen under great pressure, mixed with specially-pre-pared carbon substances. Detonation of these by a secret method produces an enormous gas expansion which kills human life, destroying the human tissues, without tearing them with metal, the inventor claims „ It could be dropped,, for instance, on a warship from 20,000 feet without the pilot having to see the objective. Bombers would be able to carry six at a time. The explosive in the weapon could be manufactured for about one-fifth of the cost of T.N.T. Demonstrating the force and "con trollability" of the weapon recently, Mr Barlow gave journalists a small-scale exhibition. He subjected the explosive to flames, concussion from a rifle bullet, and finally by firing it : 500 feet into the air from a trench mortar. Nothing happened. But when he detonated an eightounce sample by electrical means, twelve-pound chunks of timber from a nearby log were hurled 150 feet into the air. Another charge, set off inside a sandbagged dugout, ripped and scattered the sandbags. Having offered first rights of the invention to the United States Government. Mr Barlow went before a sccret session of the Senate Military Affairs Committee to explain it. When he told the committee that no revelation of the details of the invention had been made outside. the committee burnt their own records to prevent the information leaking out. It is learned, however, that MiBarlow told the committee that "military experts all believed that the aerial muic-bomb was Hitler's secret weapon, although Hitler's is crudely constructed and cannot be controlled." The inventor also asked the committee to appoint a joint commission of eight members of the Senate House Committee, the Army and the Navy to conduct experiments with .the weapon, using lOOOlbs of the explosive, to be, exploded at 30 feet from the ground. The effect would be noted on five goats or similar animals tethered up to several thousand yards away, Tests so far, he said, wills only five pounds of the explosive, had cracked pTaster in Avails two miles away, After the sccret session of the committee, one of the members, Ivlr Ohurch, said: "Personally, I think that these aircraft engineers and their scientific colleagues are making nwfoJ fools out of the makers of war, who now stand before the people of the whole world as unable to pro See' their own lirerides from air nLiae' • delivered at long disLap.ee."