Les armes secrètes allemandes

Late-1947 survey of the Third Reich's secret weapons as revealed by Allied investigations after the regime's collapse. Ducrocq, a twenty-six-year-old French science journalist, walks through the V-1, the V-2 (examined component by component), the planned A-9/A-10 intercontinental two-stage rocket, the Rheintochter and Wasserfall radio-guided missiles, the German atomic programme, and (more unexpectedly) a Peenemünde study for a geostationary station at 36,000 km.

The closing chapter looks past the war: the V-2's legacy for spaceflight, multi-stage rockets to the Moon (a Tsiolkovsky-style analysis of mass coefficients), nuclear propulsion as the only realistic path to the planets, atmospheric re-entry by gliding flight from an A-9 derivative. Twenty-three technical diagrams support the text.