The Age of Radiance (43 page)

A few days later, Beria came to see his new miracle. Stalin’s whip was disappointed that the only sign of magical weaponry was the clicks and flashes of a Geiger-like counter. When Kurchatov told his boss he couldn’t go into the room with a burning reactor since it was too dangerous, Beria became suspicious that he was being tricked, that this whole nuclear operation was some kind of fraud.

Two and a half years later in the summer of 1949, a coal-powered locomotive carried First Lightning, its scientists, its technicians, and its soldiers across two thousand miles to the northeast of Kazakhstan, to an isolated desert steppe swept in feather grass and wormwood. A hundred-foot tower had been built for the test and, beside it, a concrete hull for assembling the first Soviet atomic bomb. Nearby were recently built tunnels, bridges, train cars, brick and wooden houses, tanks, and livestock—targets to test the weapon’s destructive power.

The blast was scheduled for 6:00 a.m. on August 29, 1949, but, as at Trinity, desert thunderstorms delayed history. At the countdown, Beria told
Kurchatov he was certain it wouldn’t work; the scientist tried to appear confident. Then, after witnessing the explosion of ten suns, Kurchatov merely said, exactly as Oppenheimer had, that it worked. A technician later insisted that if it had been a fizzle, everyone there would have been shot.

In New Mexico, the bomb had fused the sand into a green glass; here, a scientist reported the array field as a glass plate “sparkling bluish black.” The still-suspicious Beria was attended by two “journalists” who had witnessed an American Pacific test, so they could confirm that Kurchatov’s explosion was authentic, that the Kremlin indeed had her own nuclear device. Beria hugged Kurchatov and then immediately called his confirmation eyewitnesses: “Did it look like the American one? How much? Haven’t we slipped up? Did Kurchatov humbug us? Quite the same? Good! Good! So may I report [to] Stalin that the experiment was a success? Good! Good!”

Beria insisted that Stalin be woken up to hear this great news. But the dictator was angry: “What do you want? Why are you calling?”

“Everything went right.”

“I know already.” Stalin hung up.

L
ewis Strauss, the financier who’d worked with Leo Szilard in the Hungarian’s first years in America, was now an AEC commissioner who firmly believed that America needed a detection system to discover if any other country detonated a nuclear weapon. Private company Tracerlab believed that a test’s atmospheric fallout would agglomerate into particles that could be detected in some manner, but at a meeting with Oppenheimer and Teller, the physicists insisted that such a thing was impossible, that only sonic and seismic detection would work. With Strauss’s encouragement Tracerlab technicians set up an experiment to test their thesis anyway at a series of American detonations called Sandstone on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, where sniffer planes with fuselage ducts lined with paper filters flew across the jet stream, collecting atomic fallout. By measuring isotopes captured in the filters, Tracerlab could use half-life calculations to determine when the isotopes had been born. If all the birthdays were the same, than they must have been released in the aftermath of a nuclear device. The test results were so spectacular that in July 1948 the air force told the AEC that it had the technology and could detect nuclear detonations.

Outfitted with Tracerlab’s sniffer technology, the 375th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, three teams of B-29s based in Alaska, regularly patrolled from their home base across the Arctic and down to Japan in an
arc downwind from the coastal mass of the USSR. On September 3, 1949, a member of the 375th was flying east of Kamchatka and came home with paper filters registering three hundred times normal. The analysis was so clear that, combined with rainwater tests by the navy, a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy staffer could track First Lightning’s fallout cloud drifting across the Pacific, then splitting over the midwestern United States and Canada, with the southern half floating to Washington, where it hovered for two or three days, showering the district with rain and radioactive debris. Named Joe One in honor of Stalin by officials in the United States, Tracerlab calculated that the explosion had taken place at 6:00 a.m. on August 29 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. They were off by an hour. The Americans were shocked at how quickly they had lost their nuclear monopoly—Truman just couldn’t believe “those Asiatics” had built a nuclear weapon—and Stalin in turn was flabbergasted that Washington could detect his Bomb set off in the middle of nowhere.

After a meeting on October 29, 1949, with the Joint Chiefs, where General Omar Bradley said he was unimpressed with the military potential of Teller’s thermonuclear warheads as such an enormous weapon would have only “psychological” value, the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee voted, again, against the Super. At the start of the meetings that ended in this decision, Fermi and Rabi were in favor of supporting Teller as an interim step, but both changed their minds, writing that Truman should
“invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge” never to build thermonuclear arms and continued, “Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. . . . It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Oppenheimer at an AEC meeting on January 30, 1950, insisted of hydrogen bombs,
“If the Russians have the weapon and we don’t, we will be badly off. And if the Russians have the weapon and we do, we will still be badly off. . . . Going down this path ourselves, we are doing the one thing that will accelerate and ensure their [thermonuclear] development.” In the middle of the terrifying discovery of Joe One and Russian nuclear power, though, Harry Truman was shocked to learn he could have an even bigger threat in his arsenal but had never been told about it. On January 31, Lilienthal tried to explain the AEC’s antifusion thinking to Truman, and the president asked, “Can the Russians do it?” Lilienthal had to admit they could. Truman: “In that case, we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” He rationalized, “We’re going to use
this for peace and never use it for war—I’ve always said this, and you’ll see. It’ll be like poison gas [never used again].”

On September 23, 1949, Truman announced to the American public that the Soviets had the Bomb, and at the end of January 1950 that America would develop thermonuclear weapons. Isidor Rabi: “I never forgave Truman. . . . For him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn’t even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done.” An added wrinkle to this policy was that any scientist working with the government was told he or she should not make any public comments about the nation’s nuclear strategies, as these would be “contrary to the national interest.”

In a meeting at Cornell, Edward Teller was able to convince Hans Bethe, the Los Alamos boss he had spurned, to return to New Mexico to work on the Super. But after that meeting, Bethe took a walk with a colleague, theoretician Victor Weisskopf, and remembered how
“Weisskopf vividly described to me a war with hydrogen bombs—what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb, and how hydrogen bombs would change the military balance by making the attack still more powerful and the defense still less powerful. . . . We both had to agree that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be . . . like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both of us.” A few days later, Bethe told Teller he’d changed his mind and wouldn’t come back to the mesa. When Teller then tried to enlist Emilio Segrè at Berkeley, Teller’s aggressive enthusiasm was countereffective. Segrè: “I soon realized . . . that he was dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect.” Segrè, too, passed. But Teller’s “irresistible passions” and fears of foreign menace would spread across Washington. Physicist Herbert York:
“You have to recall that in 1948 was the Berlin blockade, in 1948 was the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the expansion that these things represented seemed quite real. And then there was the fall of China, as reported, to the Communists, the creation of the Sino-Soviet bloc, the Korean War in the early fifties. So looking back in the late fifties, what we saw was a lot of successes or what seemed to be successes on the part of the Russians, including territorial expansion. That was the high-water mark, but we didn’t know it at the time.”

Facing an ever-growing global Communist menace, Washington now reversed course. Those at the AEC long committed to arms control became a peculiar and disdained minority, while instead of Bradley’s “psychological”
dismissal, the January 13, 1950, Joint Chiefs’ report decided that it was
“necessary to have within the arsenal of the United States a weapon of the greatest capability, in this case the super bomb. Such a weapon would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces. [It was better] that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than of an enemy.” White House assistant press secretary Eben Ayers said that three weeks later, on February 4, Truman told him
“that we had to do it—make the [H-]bomb—though no one wants to use it. But, he said, we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.”

As historian Richard Rhodes pointed out, “When the GAC argued that building the Super might unleash unlimited destruction . . . it unwittingly enlarged the scope of its opponents’ fears and encouraged them to pursue the project with even greater urgency, because they immediately translated the weapon’s destructive potential into a threat and imagined the consequences if the enemy should acquire it first. An arms race is a hall of mirrors.” The same confused strategic thinking that had led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki would now produce a weapon suitable only for genocide.

In 1948, Beria had insisted Kurchatov and his team faithfully reproduce America’s Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb from the designs provided by Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall to create First Lightning–Joe One. They knew that Trinity had worked, and they had no time to waste on fundamental research. But there was one significant exception to Beria’s command. Andrei Sakharov had twice turned down offers to join the Soviet nuclear program,
“but the third time, nobody bothered to ask my consent,” and he was ordered to become part of the team. But then, just as Teller had worked on fusion while everyone else in Los Alamos was developing fission, in a few months at Arzamas-16, Sakharov created a thermonuclear design known as Layer Cake—
sloika
—a fission bomb surrounded by alternating layers of uranium and deuterium so that, when the fission ignited, it would in turn ignite fusion, becoming a hydrogen bomb. The Soviets had their Oppenheimer in Kurchatov, and now they would have their Teller in Sakharov. After Truman’s announcement that America would build the Super, Beria immediately went forward with
sloika
, and the following day, on February 1, 1950, those frightened by the knowledge of vast Communist conspiracies running clandestine operations throughout the government of the United States had their paranoia confirmed when it was made public that Klaus Fuchs had been captured, and that he had confessed to being an atomic spy.

T
he revelation that America had been infested by a nest of Communist agents was the result of backbreaking intelligence work by two cryptanalysts, the FBI’s Robert Lamphere and the Army Security Agency’s Meredith Gardner, who spent twenty-seven years at Virginia’s Arlington Hall clawing through Venona, an archive of World War II–era cables sent from the Soviet consulate in New York to Moscow Center. On December 20, 1946, Mr. Gardner broke a 1944 cable, which contained the name of every significant Manhattan Project scientist. The pair’s next decrypt was
“that someone (designated by the code name LIBERAL) had approached a man named Max Elitcher and had requested that Elitcher provide information to him on his current work at the Navy’s Department of Ordnance,” as Lamphere later said. Then they uncovered LIBERAL’s wife, ETHEL, who “acted as an intermediary between [a] person or persons who were working on wartime nuclear fission research and for KGB agents” (LIBERAL and ETHEL would in time be revealed as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). “Then, in mid-September [1949],” Lamphere continued, “still before the President’s announcement [that the Russians had the Bomb], I found a startling bit of information in a newly deciphered 1944 KGB message.” The cable was a summary of Harold Urey’s gaseous diffusion process, and it meant that a Soviet agent, part of the British mission, had been a member of both the US and Canadian atomic programs. Within two weeks, the AEC pinpointed the author: Klaus Fuchs.