Stranger Than We Can Imagine (22 page)

For Hitler, the V-2 was a weapon that would break the spirit of British resistance in a way that his previous bombing blitzes had not. It probably would have done if it had been deployed earlier in the war, rather than during the European endgame when the Russians were approaching Berlin as the Allies advanced from the west. The V-2s that were used against England took a psychological toll on the war-weary population, which was noticeably greater than the impact of the 1940 and 1941 Blitz. There had been a ritual pattern to life under the Luftwaffe bombing campaigns against cities such as Coventry, Belfast and London. They began with the wail of the air-raid sirens, which heralded the increasing drone of the approaching bombers and the journey to the air-raid shelters until, finally, the all-clear was sounded. The British people had proved remarkably able to adjust to life under this ritual. The V-2s, in contrast, fell silently. They were undetectable in flight and impossible to shoot down. They could hit anywhere at any time, leaving the populations of target cities permanently unnerved and scared.

Bill Holman, a child survivor of the V-2 attacks, later remembered one of the 1,115 V-2 bombs which fell on or around London. ‘On 24 November I was at junior school when all of a sudden it was rocked by a tremendous explosion. Rushing home, I met my friend Billy emerging from his front door, dazed yet calm, and announcing, “Mum and dad are dead.” A clock tower had stood near our home. Now, hit by a V-2, it was replaced by a vast crater … Mr and Mrs Russell ran a vegetable barrow in the street; he was dead, she’d had her legs blown off. Mrs Popplewell, a friend of my mum’s, was lifeless without a scratch on her. She had been walking when the
blast from the rocket entered her lungs and she couldn’t breathe. Over the road, a young soldier was on leave with his wife and mother. The wife had popped out to the shops and lived. Mother and son were killed.’

For von Braun, this was all incidental to the pursuit of his childhood dream. Like Jack Parsons, von Braun’s goal was space flight. As a boy growing up in a wealthy Berlin family he had studied the moon through a telescope and strapped rockets to his go-kart. But space flight was as much a crank’s dream in pre-war Germany as it was in pre-war America. The establishment did not take it seriously and it was certainly not something they funded. His only option was to keep that dream hidden while attempting to advance it through the only means possible: weapons research.

Von Braun did not show signs of being unduly troubled by the morality of this path. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1940. He was promoted every year until he reached the SS rank of
Sturmbannführer
. Following his successful appeal to Hitler, he oversaw production of his V-2 rocket at Mittelwerk, a factory built underground in order to protect it from Allied bombers. Mittelwerk consisted of 42 miles of tunnels hewn out of the rock by slave labour, and the descriptions of the state of the slaves when they were liberated by American forces in 1945 are harrowing. Over twenty thousand slaves died constructing the factory and the V-2. Mass slave hangings were common, and it was mandatory for all the workforce to witness them. Typically twelve workers would be arbitrarily selected and hung by their necks from a crane, their bodies left dangling for days. Starvation of slave workers was deliberate, and in the absence of drinking water they were expected to drink from puddles. Dysentery and gangrene were common causes of death. There are records of the liberating forces’ failed attempts at removing the stench of death from the tunnels with strong disinfectant.

Von Braun himself was personally involved in acquiring slave labour from concentration camps such as Buchenwald. Ten years later he was in America presenting children’s programmes on the Disney Channel, in an effort to increase public support for space
research. Whatever he had to do in order to advance his dream, von Braun did it.

Von Braun’s journey from the SS to the Disney Channel was fraught with difficulties. As one of the most gifted rocket scientists in history, he was regarded as something of a prize by Russian, British and American armed forces. But with the Third Reich collapsing around him in the final weeks of the European war, this did not mean that he or his team would not be killed by mistake, or that their work would survive the chaos of regime change. Hitler’s infamous ‘Nero Decree’ of 19 March 1945 complicated matters further, for it demanded that ‘anything … of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.’ Von Braun and his men were clearly of value and were placed under armed guard by the SD, the security service of the SS. Their SD guards were under orders to shoot all the rocket scientists the moment they were in danger of being captured by either of the oncoming armies. Fortunately, von Braun’s colleague General Walter Dornberger was able to persuade the SD major that he and his men would be hanged as war criminals if they complied with this order, and that their only hope of surviving the war was to burn their black uniforms and disguise themselves as regular German troops.

Von Braun had already decided that he wanted to surrender to the Americans. His argument was that America was the only country not decimated by the war, and hence the only country financially able to support a space programme, but it is also clear that his aristocratic background would not have been well suited to life in the Soviet Union. America, in turn, wanted von Braun primarily because they didn’t want anybody else to have him. Arrangements were quickly made to bring von Braun to America, along with his designs, his rockets and about a thousand other Germans (members of his team, along with their family members). An operation to whitewash the files of von Braun and other prominent Nazis in the team began. Jack Parsons’s old mentor von Kármán was part of this
process. It was known as Operation Paperclip after the paperclips which were used to attach fake biographies, listing false political affiliations and employment histories, to their files. Following Operation Paperclip, even Nazis who were guilty of war crimes were eligible for life in the US.

Von Braun settled into an army research facility in El Paso, Texas, together with his team and their families. His hopes of commencing research into a space programme, however, soon faltered. The US did not expect another international war to erupt and saw no reason to develop weapons for one. It would be over a decade before von Braun’s talents were put to use. Yet the chain of events which led to this started with the end of the Pacific War. Man’s conquest of space owes much to a destructive force on a par with that sought by Jack Parsons at his most insane. This appeared in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The first nuclear weapon used against an enemy country was an A-Bomb called Little Boy. The United States Air Force dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It killed an estimated 66,000 people immediately, and 69,000 as a result of injuries and fallout. The second and last nuclear weapon ever used in warfare fell on Nagasaki three days later. It was called Fat Man, and it killed a total of 64,000 people. Both bombs were carried across the Pacific in the belly of a B-29 ‘Superfortress’, an enormous four-engine bomber with a combat range of over 3,000 miles. The B-29 was developed when the Americans feared all of Europe was going to fall to the Third Reich, meaning that any air strikes against Germany would have to have been launched from Canada or the US. The B-29’s development, with hindsight, can be seen as a significant moment in American history. It has come to symbolise the rejection of the United States’ historic isolationist policies.

The invention of nuclear bombs, as well as nuclear energy, was another of the unforeseen implications of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein had been playing around with the mathematics of his work when a beautifully simple equation popped out,
as if from nowhere. This equation was E=mc
²
. ‘E’ represented an amount of energy, but curiously the ‘m’ represented mass and so referred to physical matter, rather than energy. ‘C’ was a constant which stood for the speed of light. This was a big number, and once it was squared it became massive. The equation, therefore, said that a small amount of mass was equivalent to a really huge amount of energy. The question then became how to free and utilise that energy, and splitting up heavier, unstable elements such as plutonium or uranium seemed to be the way to go.

The decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan is still controversial. Some see it as a war crime and argue that, as President Eisenhower wrote in his memoir, ‘Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.’ Others point to the Japanese ancient warrior tradition of
bushido
as evidence that the country would never have surrendered, and to the fact that the bombing prevented a land invasion and hence saved the lives of many thousands of Allied troops. More recently historians have argued that the bomb was used as a show of strength towards the Soviet Union, rather than as a means to defeat Japan.

But presenting Stalin with a show of strength might not have been the smartest move on the board. To those with an understanding of Stalin’s character it was clear that, after the Americans had demonstrated their power at Hiroshima, nothing on earth was going to stop him from obtaining a nuclear weapon of his own. He achieved this goal with impressive speed, relying as much on the skills of Russian intelligence agents, who stole Western nuclear secrets, as he did on the talents of Russian engineers. Russia detonated its first successful nuclear test in August 1949.

It is, perhaps, fortunate for the world that Russia caught up so quickly. A leading member of the US Atomic Energy Commission after the war was a Hungarian mathematician called John von Neumann. Von Neumann had been a child prodigy, able to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of eight and who simultaneously took degrees at three different universities at the age of eighteen. Von Neumann was a genius, and he became one of the
President’s most respected advisers. His advice was this: Eisenhower had no choice but to immediately launch a massive unprovoked nuclear strike against Russia, and to nuke the Soviets back to the Stone Age before they developed a nuclear bomb of their own.

This wasn’t just a whim, von Neumann explained. He had hard, cold, logical proof to back up his words. He had developed game theory, which we previously mentioned in
Chapter 4
. This is a field of mathematics, further developed by mathematicians such as John Nash, which models the actions of two self-interested parties. Game theory deals with situations where the moves of your opponents cannot be accurately predicted, where there is an absence of trust, and where damage limitation is a more rational goal than outright victory. Game theory fitted the Cold War stand-off perfectly, and its unarguable logic was that the only rational move was to immediately murder hundreds of millions of innocent Russian civilians. Certainly Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles was convinced, and he pressured the President to send the bombs flying straight away. Eisenhower couldn’t refute the logic, but he still felt that maybe this wasn’t a good idea. He prevaricated long enough for Stalin to announce that he too had the bomb, at which point von Neumann’s logic collapsed.

Having nuclear bombs was one thing, but they were not weapons you would use locally. The immediate solution to this problem was to use giant flying fortresses such as the B-29 or its successor, the uncomfortably named B-36 Peacemaker, to drop those bombs on countries far away. But long-range transport planes are slow, noisy, and relatively easy to shoot down. What if rockets such as von Braun’s V-2s could be fitted with nuclear warheads? If those rockets could become reliable enough to travel thousands of miles and still accurately hit targets such as Moscow, Beijing or New York, then those cities would be as defenceless as London had been in the dying days of the Second World War.

For America in particular, this was psychologically very difficult. The United States had never really regarded itself as being at risk before. It had fought bravely in two world wars, but the only damage
it had suffered on the home front was the Japanese bombing of the navy base at Pearl Harbor. This occurred on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, nearly four thousand miles from the North American mainland, so it impacted on the typical American in a different manner to the bombardment and destruction that many European populations had come to terms with. But suddenly the United States could be destroyed, with weapons it had itself developed, by a powerful dictator on the other side of the world. The arrival of the mushroom cloud rewrote the existing geopolitical game. The United States was a free, functioning democracy and yet the President could still be advised by someone as crazy as von Neumann. No one wanted to imagine what sort of advice a sociopath such as Stalin might be receiving.

As fate would have it, key engineers in both the American and Russian rocket programmes still privately regarded their weapons work as a front for their boyhood dream of space travel. Persuading their respective governments to commit the tremendous amount of cash needed to achieve this dream was unrealistic in the immediate postwar era. But building a rocket of sufficient power, reliability and accuracy to nuke the other side of the globe was, as it turned out, an identical engineering problem to that of building a rocket that could leave earth’s gravity and enter space.

Vast expenditure on weapons technology didn’t generate the sort of public image that leaders wanted to project. Declaring your futuristic-sounding achievements in peaceful space flight was much more attractive. Having such a rocket was one thing, but it would only work as a deterrent if the other side knew that you had it. Announcing the development of the technology necessary to enter space was a coded way of saying that you were able to nuke every corner of the planet.

They came for Sergei Korolev at 9 p.m. on 27 June 1938. He was with his three-year-old daughter in their sixth-floor Moscow apartment when his wife rushed in, panicking. She had been downstairs and seen a number of NKVD officers entering the building. She
knew instinctively that they were coming for her husband. Korolev worked as a rocket scientist, and military research was as riddled with fear and paranoia as the rest of the Soviet system. His friend and colleague Valentin Glushko had recently been taken. It had to be assumed that he would have denounced anyone his torturers suggested. Such was the way of life under Stalin’s Great Purge.