OPINION/Kevin MyersRegardless of whether or not Iraq has nuclear weapons, most of us would agree that the fewer states have nuclear weapons in the world the better, especially if those states are run by psychopathic lunatics. Mankind has known that for a long time - almost as long as we have known about the evil potential of the atom. Imagine how the world would have been if Hitler had mastered the technology of the nuclear bomb.
At times it seemed he was very close. In 1941, before the Americans had even entered the war, and with German arms triumphant everywhere, the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg told the Danish physicist Niels Bohr that the Nazis had a nuclear programme. British intelligence soon discovered that the heart of the German programme was the Vemork heavy-water production plant at Rjukan, in southern Norway.
Just 61 years ago this month, agents loyal to the Norwegian government-in-exile in London discovered that the Germans were drastically increasing their production of heavy water, or deuterium oxide. Deuterium - an rare isotope of hydrogen - is one vital step in the creation of an atom bomb. The Norway plant was central to Hitler's nuclear plans.
An agent named Einar Skinnerland smuggled detailed drawings and microfilm of the plant in a tube of toothpaste to Sweden, and thence to London. The anxiety aroused by the level of German advances in nuclear science led to immediate and desperate measures. "Operation Freshman" was the code name for a hastily organised assault by airborne army engineers in two gliders. They were to land on the Hardanger Plateau near Vemork, and the soldiers were then to storm the plant and destroy it with explosives.
Two of that assault party were Irish. Lance Corporal Trevor Masters of 9 Airborne Company, Royal Engineers, was from Cobh. He was the husband of Theresa Jane Masters, and the son of Harry and Lucinda Masters. His fellow Irishman was Driver Peter Paul Farrell, son of Michael and Elizabeth Farrell, and wife of Bridget Farrell, then living in Marylebone in London.
But the British had never before tried gliders operationally anywhere, never mind after a trip of several hundred miles over the North Sea just as the stormy season had begun. We know nothing for certain about the conditions in the "Operation Freshman" gliders: but we know that virtually all troops in later gliders, even during short journeys, became violently ill. What conditions were like in the gliders as they bucketed around the sky on the end of their tow-ropes, yawing to and fro in the cross-winds, repeatedly yanked backwards and forwards, up and down, as the powered tow-planes and the powerless gliders tried to part company, must have been beyond description.
The journey to Norway - 60 years ago last November - took about six hours. Everyone involved was totally inexperienced, which probably accounted for what happened next: one of the tow-planes and both of the gliders crashed as they reached Norway.
Ski parties of German soldiers found the three aircraft with their inhabitants, most still alive. Some wounded were shot where they lay; others were later killed in their hospital beds. The uninjured were taken away by the Gestapo for interrogation; and we may only imagine what happened to them there. Then they were all shot by firing squad, even though they were in uniform. Their bodies were disposed of, in no known graves. In all, about 40 men were so murdered.
We know nothing of the fate of particular individuals because the Gestapo destroyed the records of their deeds. But somewhere in that small slaughter, two Irishmen, Peter Farrell, aged 26, and Trevor Masters, aged 25, went to their invisible ends.
The rest of the story of how the Allies finally destroyed the heavy water supplies can be seen in the tolerably accurate film The Heroes of Telemark, which is often seen on television. But it doesn't tell the whole truth. It doesn't speak of the scores of Norwegian civilians killed when American bombers bombed the plant a year later in 1943. Nor does it tell of the 26 innocent Norwegians killed when Norwegian resistance fighters sank the ferry containing the entire production of heavy water as it was being withdrawn to the safety of Germany across a fjord in 1944.
The resistance was prepared to make that unbearable sacrifice in order to prevent weapons of mass destruction from getting into Hitler's hands, just as the Gestapo was prepared to murder all those Allied prisoners in order to protect Germany's nuclear secrets.
That's one reason for this Diary: to serve as a reminder within our US-supplied cocoon that with weapons of mass murder, this is a game of high stakes; and it is no game. There are many countries not so favourably placed as we are. They have neighbours who will happily use such weapons on them, but no friends - as we have - to protect them.
There's another reason for this column. The names of Peter Farrell and Trevor Masters have probably never before been mentioned in an Irish newspaper. Irish censorship laws forbade even death notices from mentioning that Irishmen had been killed on wartime active service. Soon those men were forgotten and vanished.
So, Peter Farrell, and Trevor Masters, we know your sacrifice did not shorten the second World War by a single second, but we also know that without hundreds of thousands of people like you 60 years ago, the Nazi cause would have been triumphant across Europe. Sleep easy boys, in your unmarked graves: you are now remembered.