The Age of Radiance (32 page)

The NKVD maintained a global network of spies operating out of Soviet embassies, and one field of great expertise was industrial espionage, stealing patents, processes, and formulas so the Russians wouldn’t have to pay licensing fees. American chemist Harry Gold, the Soviet handler for both Fuchs and Greenglass, became an agent for the Soviets in 1935 by providing the formulas for anesthetics and lacquer solvents. During the 1940s, Moscow’s American network was so extensive it seemed to be omnipresent. Kitty Oppenheimer’s first husband, Joe Dallet, was killed while volunteering for the Spanish Civil War; one of his good friends in Spain, Steve Nelson, became an agent in Berkeley, gathering information on Lawrence’s cyclotrons, isotope separation, and other technologies that would become significant in producing nuclear weapons. Canadian Alan Nunn May had been recruited by Donald Maclean in Cambridge; he worked with Tube Alloys; Chicago’s Met Lab; and the heavy-water reactor in Canada’s Chalk River. The Russian network was so good that, when the KGB’s files were opened after the fall of the USSR, it was revealed that the Russians had known quite a bit about Fermi’s first nuclear reactor in Chicago, but they had translated the reactor’s location—squash court—as “pumpkin patch.”

Since 1938, the NKVD—which oversaw the civil police, the secret police, and domestic and foreign espionage, as well as managing the Great Terror—had been run by the brutal, sadistic, and perverted Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, who was described by a diplomat as “somewhat plump, greenish pale, and with soft damp hands . . . a square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez . . . a certain self-satisfaction and irony mingled with a clerk’s obsequiousness and solicitude,” and by a Russian as “placed in control for the precise purpose of inspiring deadly fear. I often asked myself—as others assuredly did in their secret hearts—why Stalin had decided to take this step. I could find only one plausible answer. It was that he lacked faith in the patriotism and national honor of the Russian people and was therefore compelled to rely primarily on the whip. Beria was his whip.”

On February 16, 1945, Harry Gold told his superiors that Klaus Fuchs had determined what was needed for the Soviet atomic program to succeed, and by June the diminutive agent submitted “a description of the plutonium bomb, which had been designed and was soon planned to be tested at Alamogordo; a sketch of the bomb and its components with important
dimensions indicated; the type of core; a description of the initiator; details as to the tamper”; and “the names of the types of explosives to be used in the bomb [information important to the design of high-explosive lenses]; the fact that the Trinity test explosion was to be made, with the approximate site indicated, soon, in July, 1945, and that this test was expected to establish that the atom bomb would produce an explosion vastly greater than TNT and the comparative estimated force of this explosion was indicated in detail with relation to TNT.” On Sunday morning, June 3, 1945, Gold went to the Greenglasses to pick up sketches of Kisty’s various implosive lenses, including schematic views of their layers and detonators. It was the first meeting between agent and handler, one that Gold remembered well: “Greenglass was not only young, but at once impressed me as being frighteningly naive, particularly in his eager volunteering of the idea of approaching other people at Los Alamos as potential sources of data. I was horrified at his total inexperience in espionage, especially considering what we were after.”

O
n January 25, 1943, Niels Bohr was given a key in Copenhagen. Inside was a microdot, which revealed a letter from James Chadwick, asking Bohr to join the Anglo-American fission project. Bohr said that he still thought nuclear weapons were implausible because of the difficulty of producing U-235, but that he might change his mind in the future. This reply was also converted into a microdot and carried back to England, inside the filling of a courier’s tooth.

At that time, Bohr’s Denmark was under German control, but in a very different manner from the rest of occupied Europe. The Nazis so depended on Danish butter, meat, and other foodstuffs that they allowed the country to govern itself and left their eight thousand Jews alone. But after the shocking German defeat at Stalingrad revealed the Fascists as less than omnipotent, Danes began organizing regular labor strikes and acts of sabotage. The Germans retaliated by taking control of the royal palace and arresting Jews. A friend of the Bohr family’s was working as a clerk for the Gestapo in Copenhagen and came across the warrants for Niels and his brother, Harald. In the middle of the night of September 29, 1943, under cloud cover that rendered the darkness visible, around a dozen people, including the two Bohr brothers, Niels’s wife, Margrethe, and Harald’s son Ole, rode a fishing boat to cross the sound and find safe harbor in Malmö, Sweden. Simultaneously, two German freighters arrived in Denmark to begin ferrying Danish Jews to concentration camps.

Bohr went to Stockholm, where he soon learned that Sweden was overrun with Gestapo agents whose careers would be made if they caught or killed him. Though he needed to leave for England as soon as possible, the great Bohr instead went to the palace to beg King Gustav V to give refuge to Denmark’s Jews, saying he had learned that the Nazis planned to arrest all of them the following day. The Swedish government questioned the Germans, who insisted nothing of the sort was happening. This was a lie, but the Danes had been so well informed ahead of time that they hid nearly eight thousand Jews, and the countrywide Nazi anti-Semitic campaign resulted in 284 men and women being taken from a nursing home. On October 2, Sweden announced that it would grant refuge, accepting 7,220 Danish Jews over the next two months. At the same time, rumors began circulating that Niels Bohr was going to be assassinated.

Diplomatic pouches were flown between Stockholm and Westminster in a two-engine plywood Mosquito that cruised above the twenty-thousand-foot ceiling of German antiaircraft cannon on the shores of Norway. On October 6, the fifty-eight-year-old Bohr was suited up, given a stick of flares and a parachute, and strapped into the plane’s bomb bay. If the plane went down, he could use the flares to help rescuers find him in the North Sea. Bohr’s son Aage (pronounced
Awa
):
“The Mosquito flew at a great height and it was necessary to use an oxygen mask; the pilot gave word on the intercom that the supply of oxygen should be turned on, but as the helmet with the earphones did not fit my father’s head, he did not hear the order and soon fainted because of lack of oxygen. The pilot realized that something was wrong when he received no answer to his inquiries, and as soon as they passed over Norway, he came down and flew low over the North Sea. When the plane landed in Scotland, my father was conscious again.”

At the Savoy in London, Chadwick told Bohr about the progress made with Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project. The physicist was speechless. Then in New York, an entire contingent of FBI agents escorted Niels and his son and future Nobel laureate Aage from the docks to their hotel and were so pleased in getting Niels across town incognito. Then they noticed his suitcase, which had huge black letters on its side:
NIELS BOHR
.

Bohr was such a terrible jaywalker—a habit shared by Ernest Lawrence—that when Groves had a security team follow Niels and Aage in Washington, one reported,
“Both the father and the son appear to be extremely absentminded individuals, engrossed in themselves, and go about paying little attention to any external influences. As they did a great deal of walking, this Agent had occasion to spend considerable time behind them
and observe that it was rare when either of them paid much attention to stop lights or signs, but proceeded on their way much the same as if they were walking in the woods. On one occasion, subjects proceeded across a busy intersection against the red light in a diagonal fashion, taking the longest route possible and one of greatest danger. The resourceful work of Agent Maiers in blocking out one-half of the stream of automobile traffic with his car prevented their possibly incurring serious injury.” The physicist met with British ambassador Lord Halifax and Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and insisted that, unless the Russians were told and involved with the atomic weapons program, a terrifying postwar arms race would ignite. Groves, at first leery of having the voluble and famous
Bohr at Los Alamos, now wanted him there as soon as possible to keep him isolated, and quiet. Groves was so alarmed that he personally escorted Bohr on the train to New Mexico.

Using the name Nicholas Baker and called by everyone Uncle Nick, Bohr arrived at the mesa on December 30, 1943. He fell in love with the American Southwest, especially remembering his first encounter with a skunk, and listening, at dusk, to the hissing tails of rattlesnakes as they scissored through the brush. After learning of the immensities of the Oak Ridge and Hanford operations, Uncle Nick insisted to Edward Teller that he’d been right all along in doubting the prospect of nuclear weapons:
“You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.”

Bohr was so used to having wife Margrethe taking care of his day-to-day needs that his life at Los Alamos alternated between the inspired and the comic. One day he came to work wearing a rope to hold up his pants since he’d forgotten where he’d put his belts. He returned from one party with a hugely oversize coat, saying he must have taken it by mistake since there were keys in the pockets, and he didn’t have any keys.

Emilio Segrè:
“When Niels and Aage Bohr arrived, one night in Oppenheimer’s house he told a few European scientists of the conditions prevailing in Denmark and his escape. For many of us this was the first eyewitness account of what was really happening in a Nazi-occupied country. Although conditions in Denmark at that time were relatively tolerable and the worst horrors of Nazism were unknown to Bohr, the account left us depressed and worried, and more determined than ever that the bomb should be ready at the earliest date possible.” Bohr’s meeting with Heisenberg had frightened him—Bohr showed everyone Heisenberg’s sketches of a heavy-water reactor that the German had brought with him to a meeting in Copenhagen—and
Bohr told Oppenheimer that Germany planned to end the war with an atomic bomb.

While the Los Alamos refugees fretted almost continuously over Hitler’s taking control of nuclear weapons, Vannevar Bush and Franklin Roosevelt, however, left no trace to history that they thought about it whatsoever, beyond the initial meeting over Einstein’s letter between Alexander Sachs and the president. Neither made much effort to uncover information on the Nazi program. One officer involved at the time, Major Francis Smith, believed that
“the Nazis’ work was held in such poor esteem by our military authorities that certain German laboratories whose locations we knew were left unbombed to enable Hitler’s experts to continue their failures.”

The German effort to produce atomic weapons centered on Werner Heisenberg, whose role was equivocal, peculiar, and damning. Nazi physicist Johannes Stark had published an article in the July 15, 1937, SS journal
Das Schwarze Korps
, “ ‘Weisse Juden’ in der Wissenschaft” (White Jews in Science). Its
“main theme was that it was not sufficient to exclude all Jews from sharing in the political, cultural and economic life of the nation, but to exterminate the Jewish spirit, which is stated to be most clearly recognizable in the field of physics, and its most significant representative Professor Einstein. . . . Several men of science of international reputation were named in the article as followers of Judaism in German intellectual life, and it was remarked that ‘They must be gotten rid of as much as the Jews themselves.’ ” Stark called Heisenberg a “Jew lover” and a “Jewish pawn.” Heisenberg wrote a letter to Himmler—which his mother gave to Himmler’s mother, as they were good friends—asking that Himmler publicly approve or disapprove of these attacks. Himmler launched an SS investigation that lasted eight months and included interrogations of Heisenberg, recording devices in his home, and spies in his classroom. Himmler then cleared him.

When Heisenberg toured America in the summer of 1939, he repeatedly defended remaining in Germany, even though Columbia had offered him a post, telling Ed Teller,
“Even if my brother steals a silver spoon, he is still my brother,” and Laura Fermi,
“People must learn to prevent catastrophes, not to run away from them.” When on September 26 he was then called to join the Uranverein in Berlin, he thought that he could use the Reich’s interest in physics for the purposes of science and eagerly agreed. In December 1939 he gave the Nazi War Office a report, “The Possibility of Technical Energy Production from Uranium Fission,” which called reactors “uranium burners” and calculated a successful burner of a ton of uranium and a ton of heavy water in a spherical container producing 800°C (1,472°F).

In January 1940, the Nazis replaced Peter Debye as head of KWI Physics with Werner Heisenberg; by October 1940, the Virus House construction was finished, and the Uranverein experimented with paraffin as a moderator, which did not work. Neither did graphite since, due to Szilard’s silence campaign, they didn’t know that the reason was its impurities. They then tried heavy water, which did work, but they could only now get eight liters of it from Norway’s Vemork. They needed fifteen tons.