The First War of Physics (53 page)

¹
Diebner’s fears were of course well-founded. Ardenne, Riehl and many other German scientists were by this time already in Moscow.

²
This was an overstatement. The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was only 12,500 tons of TNT equivalent.

³
Equivalent to $2 billion based on the prevailing exchange rate.

⁴
The Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima actually contained about 56 kilos of uranium, enriched to about 90 per cent U-235.

⁵
Not true, of course. At this stage the German physicists did not know that the Allies had built a working reactor as early as December 1942.

⁶
Heisenberg had almost failed to secure his doctorate at the University of Munich because he had been unable to derive the simple mathematical expressions for the resolving power of a microscope.

⁷
This characterisation is derived from recent conclusions by historian Mark Walker, who takes some pains to remind us of the formal definition of ambivalence: contradictory emotional or psychological attitudes toward a particular person or object, often with one attitude inhibiting the expression of another. See Walker, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Reactor Research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics’.

⁸
‘Detained since more than half a year/Are Hahn and we in Farm Hall here./If you ask who bears the blame/Otto Hahn’s the culprit’s name.’

⁹
Fritz Strassman’s role had also been overlooked, although the Swedish Academy tends to recognise and reward only the leaders of notable scientific endeavours, not their research assistants, students or subordinates.

PART IV

PROLIFERATION

Chapter 18

August 1945–February 1946

B
ut another, very different kind of war was about to begin.

The Allies had argued that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been necessary in order to end the war quickly and save potentially hundreds of thousands of lives. Stalin saw it somewhat differently. The Soviet Union had been poised to strengthen its position in the Far East, not only in Manchuria but also in Japan itself. Stalin had written to Truman on 16 August 1945 requesting that Soviet forces be allowed to occupy Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s home islands, and accept the surrender of Japanese forces on that island. Truman refused, insisting that Japanese forces on all the home islands surrender to the United States.

Despite Truman’s objections, on 19 August the order was given for Soviet forces to occupy the northern half of Hokkaido. The order was rescinded three days later. Stalin had thought better of the move. He decided that it would risk a major political row with the United States, and possibly even precipitate direct conflict. ‘To avoid the creation of conflicts and misunderstanding with respect to the Allies,’ the order of 22 August stated, ‘it is categorically forbidden to send any ships or planes at all in the direction of the island of Hokkaido.’

Stalin recognised that the use of atomic bombs against Japan had been as much about limiting Soviet ambitions in the region as ending the war. He did not fear that America would use the atomic bomb directly against his country, but he was nevertheless shaken by the weapon’s destructiveness. He recognised that the balance of power had shifted. ‘Hiroshima has shaken the whole world’, he is reported to have said. ‘The balance has been destroyed.’ He anticipated that America would use the veiled threat of the bomb as a bargaining tool in post-war negotiations with the Soviet Union. This he could not accept.

The bombing of Hiroshima was given a muted fanfare in the Soviet press. The young physicist Andrei Sakharov was on his way to the bakery on the morning of the announcement. He stopped to glance at the newspaper headline. ‘I was so stunned that my legs practically gave way’, he later wrote. ‘There could be no doubt that my fate and the fate of many others, perhaps of the entire world, had changed overnight. Something new and awesome had entered our lives, a product of the greatest of the sciences, of the discipline I revered.’

Even before the formal Japanese surrender, Stalin had decided that the Soviet Union must have atomic weapons in its arsenal. No amount of openness of the kind advocated by Bohr and Oppenheimer would have changed the simple fact that Stalin wanted a bomb of his own.

On 20 August the State Defence Committee issued an edict establishing a Special State Committee on Problem Number One charged with, among other tasks, ‘the construction of atomic energy facilities, and the development and production of an atomic bomb’. The committee was to be chaired by Beria, Stalin’s ‘whip’. It reported initially to the State Defence Committee, and when this organisation was disbanded on 4 September it reported instead to the USSR Council of People’s Commissars.

The appointment of Stalin’s notoriously brutal henchman to chair the Special State Committee was probably not universally applauded by the Soviet physicists at the time. Beria was no scientist or engineer and he was immensely distrustful of intellectuals. Yet he also brought some strong, positive characteristics to the leadership of the Soviet atomic programme,
as Pavel Sudoplatov, responsible for the administration of NKVD ‘special tasks’ (including sabotage and assassination),
¹
noted:

Beria was harsh and rude to his subordinates but at the same time attentive and supportive in every way to the people doing the real work. He protected them from the intrigues of the local NKVD and party bosses. Beria always warned every manager about his total responsibility for the fulfilment of his assignment. Beria had the singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm.

Kurchatov had struggled under Molotov’s leadership and had made no secret of his dissatisfaction. Despite their reservations, the physicists found that Beria was someone they could deal with, as Yuli Khariton and Yuli Smirnov acknowledged many years later:

Beria understood the necessary scope and dynamics of the research. This man, who was the personification of evil in modern Russian history, also possessed great energy and capacity for work. The scientists who met him could not fail to recognise his intelligence, his will power, and his purposefulness. They found him a first-class administrator who could carry a job through to completion.

The committee included Georgei Malenkov, a member of the State Defence Committee and a rising star in the Politburo, Nikolai Voznesensky, head of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), Boris Vannikov, People’s Commissar of Munitions, Zavenyagin, who in May of that year had led the Soviet Union’s equivalent of Alsos, the chemical industry commissar Mikhail Pervukhin, NKVD General Vitaly Makhnev, and the physicists Kapitza and Kurchatov. Perhaps surprisingly, there were to be no military members of the committee.

Kurchatov was to continue as scientific director of the programme. The decree also established an eleven-man Technical Council, chaired by Vannikov and consisting of distinguished Soviet physicists such as Kapitza, Kurchatov, Abram Ioffe, Khariton, Alikhanov and Kikoin.

Stalin’s immediate reaction to the news of the bombing of Hiroshima had been to blame his scientists for failing where the Americans had succeeded. He lost his temper, banging his fists on the table and stamping his feet. He accused Kurchatov of not being demanding enough. Kurchatov simply pointed out that their country had been devastated by war, a war that had killed between 25 and 26 million Soviet citizens and laid waste to much of the country’s infrastructure. Irritated, Stalin muttered: ‘If a child doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs. Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.’

Kurchatov was told to build a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible and not to count the cost.

Department S

Pavel Sudoplatov was appointed as head of a new autonomous intelligence department – called Department S – dedicated to atomic espionage and combining the efforts of the GRU and NKVD. The Soviet foreign intelligence services were now told to redouble their efforts to acquire documentary materials on the atomic bomb. Towards the end of August, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin in Ottawa received the following urgent message from the GRU in Moscow: ‘Take measures to organise acquisition of documentary materials on the atomic bomb! The technical process, drawings, calculations.’ Zabotin had laboured for some time to establish contacts with scientists working on the Canadian atomic research project at Montreal, only to be told in early 1945 that a British GRU spy had been quietly working there for over two years.

On Zabotin’s instructions, in May 1945 Alan Nunn May had been approached at his home on Swail Avenue in Montreal by GRU agent Pavel Angelov. May had been worried that he was under surveillance by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and had initially expressed no
wish to re-establish contact with Soviet intelligence. Angelov insisted and eventually, although reluctantly, May agreed to be reactivated. Through the late spring and early summer of 1945 May had provided the Soviets with reports on the Montreal project. He had made a total of four trips to Chicago in 1944 to liaise with the Met Lab physicists before Groves had become concerned about how much information the British physicist was gaining. Groves had no reason to be suspicious of May, but his obsession for compartmentalisation meant that a request for a further visit in the spring of 1945 was declined.

The spent fuel rods that had been sent to Montreal in July 1944 contained plutonium and traces of another radioactive isotope of uranium, U-233, produced by neutron bombardment of an isotope of thorium, Th-232. U-233 was being investigated as a potential alternative bomb material, and earlier in August 1945 May had provided small samples of both U-233 and enriched uranium which were eagerly despatched to Moscow. Unaware of the dangers from these radioactive materials, the courier who had delivered the samples to Moscow suffered painful lesions and was obliged to have regular blood transfusions for the rest of his life.

But Moscow had been largely unimpressed. May’s espionage materials told them nothing particularly new. Now Zabotin faced even more urgent pressure to gather information on the bomb, and his principal source was about to leave Canada and return to Britain. May was to return in September to take up a lectureship in physics at King’s College London. On 22 August Zabotin was given detailed instructions to pass on to May, specifying the time and place of his rendezvous with a London espionage contact, including the code phrase ‘Best regards from Mikel’. May was scheduled to meet his new contact on 7 October, in front of the British Museum.

A complete picture

Although there would be no further breakthrough from Ottawa, Soviet spies much closer to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos were about to deliver the goods. Just as the Special State Committee was being formed
and Stalin was giving his instructions to Kurchatov, Lona Cohen was busy doing her bit for the cause.

In early August she had taken lodgings in the quiet, unassuming spa town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, in preparation for her first clandestine meeting with Hall. By this time the news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki had taken the lid off the secrecy surrounding Los Alamos. Now everyone knew what had been going on up on the Hill and security had been even further tightened. Hall and Cohen had arranged to meet on a Sunday in early or mid-August on the campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Cohen had made the 120-mile trip from Las Vegas to Albuquerque on three consecutive Sundays, but Hall had not made an appearance. She decided to make the trip one last time.

She found a young man who didn’t appear to be doing very much on a campus that was largely deserted. She figured this was her man. They spoke for about half an hour as they wandered aimlessly around the campus. Hall knew Cohen only as ‘Helen’, and was rather disconcerted by her frank physicality. As they walked past a pretty woman Cohen nodded in her direction and wondered aloud how much the young spy would enjoy spending time with her. Cohen explained that the spy network operated by the Soviets had ways to protect them if things got too ‘hot’. She told him that they could look forward to a new life in Moscow should they be compromised. Hall didn’t share Cohen’s eagerness to embrace life in the Soviet Union. He told her he found the prospect grim.