The First War of Physics (59 page)

The question of international control was, in the final analysis, neither here nor there. All Anglo-American collaboration on atomic energy was soon to be scuppered by
domestic
legislation sponsored by US Democrat Senator Brien McMahon. The McMahon Bill was a draft ‘atomic energy act’ for the development and control of atomic energy through the offices of a new civilian US Atomic Energy Commission.
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It was submitted to Congress in December 1945. On the surface, the draft bill did not appear to pose a threat. It called for ‘the dissemination of related technical information with the utmost liberality as freely as may be consistent with the foreign and domestic policies established by the President’.

But the bill that would eventually be enacted would not be quite so liberal with atomic information.

The Baruch plan

Byrnes penned a foreword to the Acheson–Lilienthal report ready for its official release on 28 March 1946, but he didn’t much like what the report said. On his recommendation, Truman appointed financier Bernard Baruch to lead the American delegation to the newly-formed UN Atomic Energy Commission. The 75-year-old Baruch had served as a behind-the-scenes adviser to American presidents since Woodrow Wilson in the First World War. He had amassed a fortune speculating in the sugar market, and his refusal to join a brokerage firm had earned him the nickname ‘Lone Wolf on Wall Street’. He was also one of Byrnes’ business partners. Both were board members of Newmont Mining Corporation, a company with considerable investments in uranium mines.

It was not hard to guess what the arch-conservative Baruch would make of the Acheson–Lilienthal proposals, or how the Soviets would interpret his appointment. Lilienthal recorded in his diary that: ‘We need a man who is young, vigorous, not vain, and who the Russians would feel isn’t out simply to put them in a hole, not really caring about international co-operation. Baruch has none of these qualities.’ Oppenheimer later said that the day Baruch was appointed ‘was the day I gave up hope’.

As expected, Baruch took an instant dislike to the Acheson–Lilienthal report, and insisted that he be allowed to formulate a plan of his own. As he explained to Acheson, he was too old to play ‘messenger boy’. He tried to recruit Oppenheimer as a consultant, and Oppenheimer agreed to meet him and three other consultants he had selected – two bankers and the CEO of Newmont. It was unlikely that Oppenheimer would find common ground with Baruch’s business cronies. There was no meeting of minds. Though he later regretted it, Oppenheimer refused to co-operate.

Matters came to a head, and a meeting was called for 17 May 1946 at Blair House, the President’s official state guest house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. At the meeting, Baruch argued for what would become the main pillars of the Baruch plan. There would be no attempt to nationalise or internationalise uranium mines. There would be no unilateral disarmament. Surely, he argued, it was necessary to retain a stockpile of atomic weapons as a deterrent against any nation found to be in violation of the agreement. If the agreement was to be effective, there could be no Security Council veto. When he stated flatly that there was no provision at all in the Acheson–Lilienthal report for punishment of those in violation, the meeting erupted in fireworks.

Oppenheimer expressed his deep reservations about the Baruch plan to his wife Kitty and to Lilienthal. But Hoover had by now authorised extensive FBI surveillance of Oppenheimer, including phone taps, convinced
that he was about to defect to the Soviet Union. Transcripts of his phone conversations were sent to Byrnes.

Baruch delivered his plan to a meeting of the UN Atomic Energy Commission on 14 June. His opening statement was melodramatic: ‘We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead’, he said. The plan called for: ‘Managerial control or ownership of all atomic energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.’

The manufacture of atomic weapons would stop and existing stockpiles would be dismantled only when ‘an adequate system for control of atomic energy, including the renunciation of the bomb as a weapon, has been agreed upon and put into effective operation and condign punishments set up for violations of the rules of control which are to be stigmatized as international crimes’. Nations in violation would suffer ‘penalties of as serious a nature as the nations may wish and as immediate and certain in their execution as possible’, and for which: ‘There must be no veto to protect those who violate their solemn agreements not to develop or use atomic energy for destructive purposes.’

The Soviets simply saw the Baruch plan as an attempt by America to maintain its monopoly on atomic weapons indefinitely. The plan required the Soviet Union to forgo any atomic bomb programme of its own, submit to a powerful international authority (with no right of veto) that could be expected to be strongly influenced if not controlled by America, and yield up whatever uranium deposits could be found beneath Soviet soil. Not surprisingly, it was unacceptable.

Five days later, the Soviets countered with a proposal from Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative on the UN Security Council. The Soviet approach was in many ways similar to the convention that had been adopted in 1925 to prohibit the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. According to the Soviet proposal, atomic weapons would be banned by international convention. All existing stockpiles would be destroyed within three months of ratification. Signatory states would enact legislation within six months providing for punishment of those in violation. A committee would be established to discuss the
exchange of scientific information. A second committee would discuss ways to ensure compliance.

There was no all-powerful international authority in the Soviet proposal. There was no formal provision for inspection and control. Nation-states were expected to fall in line and police themselves. And, most importantly of all, America would be forced to give up its monopoly. It is doubtful that the Soviet policy-makers ever really thought this would be acceptable to the United States. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t.

The opportunity to halt what would soon become a madness of atomic weapons proliferation quietly slipped away. The simple truth was that international control appeared to suit nobody.

A somewhat squalid case

Alan Nunn May went on trial at the Old Bailey in London on 1 May 1946, charged with communicating information contrary to the Official Secrets Act. The Attorney General, Hartley Shawcross, opened the case for the prosecution by declaring it: ‘quite serious but a somewhat squalid case of a man who having been for some years in the employment of the British Crown in connection with researches which were being made into the problems of atomic energy thought right apparently for reward to communicate to some person whose identity he has refused to divulge information as to the progress which had been made …’

May had been confronted with the evidence and chose to plead guilty. At stake, therefore, was the magnitude of the punishment.

In his defence, Gerald Gardiner KC sought to downplay the importance of the information that May had transmitted, emphasising that much of this had now been made public in the Smyth report, and argued that the Soviet Union was an ally in the war, not an enemy. Shawcross countered by arguing that the Official Secrets Act is designed to prevent the communication of information to unauthorised persons: ‘it might be to your Lordship [Justice Oliver, presiding], it might be to me or to anyone, information which if it eventually got into the hands of persons who were or might become enemies would be useful to them.’

The trial was short. Summing up, Justice Oliver said:

How any man in your position could have had the crass conceit, let alone the wickedness, to arrogate to himself the decision of a matter of this sort, when you yourself had given your written undertaking not to do it and knew it was one of the country’s most precious secrets, when you yourself had drawn and were drawing pay for years to keep your own bargain with your country – that you could have done this is a dreadful thing.

May was sentenced to ten years in prison.

A prima facie proof

Fuchs had expected to return to England with the rest of the British mission towards the end of 1945. As a way of saying goodbye to Peierls and his wife, he joined them and Mici Teller on a two-week trip to Mexico City in December 1945 (Teller himself stayed at Los Alamos, pleading a heavy work schedule). Fuchs’ Buick broke down on the way.

Feynman had suggested he try to find an academic position in America but, without a hint of irony, Fuchs explained that he owed it to Britain to return. As the independent British atomic programme got under way, there followed a scramble to recruit scientists leaving the Manhattan Project. Both Chadwick and Cockcroft recommended Fuchs for a position. Fuchs was subsequently interviewed in Montreal by British government representatives and offered the position of Head of Theoretical Physics at Harwell. Fuchs was initially cautious, but eventually accepted. Frisch was appointed Head of Nuclear Physics.

With his future thus assured, Fuchs was asked by Norris Bradbury, who had taken over from Oppenheimer as scientific director of the Los Alamos laboratory, if he would be prepared to stay on for a few months more. With so many physicists leaving Los Alamos, and with further atomic bomb tests to prepare for, Bradbury had run out of resources. When 31 scientists reconvened at Los Alamos on 18 April 1946 for a three-day conference on
the Super, only seven were on the Los Alamos staff. Teller himself had left Los Alamos for Chicago on 1 February.

Teller and his team had nagged away at the theory of the thermonuclear bomb all through the winter of 1945–46. The problems they encountered were on an altogether different scale from those posed by the theory of the fission bomb. Though the effort was greatly aided by access to the first general purpose electronic computer, ENIAC,
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the results were still all rather preliminary.

In preparation for the Super conference, the team produced a report entitled
A Prima Facie Proof of the Feasibility of the Super.
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Teller took an optimistic view. According to him the prima facie evidence, or the evidence to hand, confirmed that the Super was possible and should be pursued. Fuchs was present throughout the conference and made several contributions, including the suggestion that radiation-induced compression of a deuterium–tritium mixture might increase the chances of initiating fusion. Fuchs would go on to patent this idea with John von Neumann.

A report of the conference was drafted and circulated in May. It concluded:

It is likely that a super-bomb can be constructed and will work … The detailed design submitted to the conference was judged on the whole workable. In a few points doubts have arisen concerning certain components of this design … In each case, it was seen that should the doubts prove well-founded, simple modifications of the design will render the model feasible.

Not everyone was persuaded by Teller’s enthusiasm, however. Serber worked with Teller to tone down some of the report’s overly-optimistic pronouncements. ‘I still thought it was very optimistic,’ Serber later wrote, ‘but I had no objection to that – I had no desire to throw cold water on Edward’s project and was all in favour of his proceeding with it as best he could, though I really didn’t think there was any chance that the weapon would work as it was envisaged.’ It made no difference. When a copy of the report arrived at Berkeley, Serber noticed that all the changes he had agreed with Teller had been left out.

The attentions of the Los Alamos physicists were in any case taken up with preparations for further American atomic bomb tests, codenamed Crossroads, in the Pacific at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. These tests were designed to study the effects of standard Fat Man-type atomic bombs on specific targets, such as ships at sea. A full elucidation of the properties of the basic weapon design was a necessary step towards design improvement. And improvement was a necessary step ahead of any attempt to develop a fusion weapon. Nevertheless, when no immediate action was taken to establish a large-scale project on the Super, Teller was greatly disappointed. He blamed Bradbury.

Fuchs had been party to discussions concerning the Super, work on development of levitated implosion and the composite core, and discussions on plutonium production and processing. Much of this was information that would have been valuable to the Soviets, but Gouzenko’s defection and the subsequent arrests in Canada and Britain had resulted in the temporary suspension of espionage activities in America, although it is quite possible that Fuchs passed information to Yatskov via Lona Cohen between October 1945 and June 1946.

On 21 May, physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating the critical assembly apparatus to a number of colleagues at the Los Alamos laboratory in Parajito canyon, using the same plutonium core that had killed Daghlian. While working on the experiment, Slotin had used the tip of a screwdriver to hold apart two hemispheres of beryllium reflector. This was not normal experimental procedure and Slotin, who had assembled the plutonium core for the Trinity test, was an experienced researcher and should have known better. The screwdriver slipped and the assembly went critical. Slotin received a fatal dose of radiation. He managed to remove the upper hemisphere from the assembly, thereby sparing his colleagues similar fates. Slotin died nine days later, on 30 May.

Fuchs was now asked, together with Philip Morrison, to carry out an investigation into the accident. It was to be his final task at Los Alamos. He left the Hill in June, breaking the security regulations one last time by carrying out a confidential report on deuterium-tritium reactions that he had been asked to take to Chadwick in Washington. He paid a further visit to his sister in Cambridge, where he received an urgent cable from Cockcroft calling him to a meeting of the Harwell Steering Committee scheduled for 1 July. Fuchs flew to Britain from Montreal on 27 June.