The First War of Physics (63 page)

We worked without heed for ourselves, with huge enthusiasm, mobilising all our spiritual and physical strength. The working day for senior researchers lasted from twelve to fourteen hours. Zernov and Khariton worked even longer hours. There were practically no days off, nor was there any leave; permission to travel on business was granted comparatively rarely.

The scientists and their families would entertain themselves with ancient gramophones. Tsukerman, slowly going blind from a rare form of pigmentary retinitis, would play foxtrots, tangos and waltzes on a mahogany piano that he had brought with him from Moscow. There were competitions, and parties, and picnics, skiing trips and practical jokes. Yakov Zeldovich and Vitaly Alexandrovich clubbed together to buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle and sidecar. Zeldovich would always drive it. Alexandrovich would always repair it.

The summer of 1947 was hot. Tsukerman felt the heat, both literally and figuratively, as the scientific divisions at Arzamas-16 grew and came up to full strength.

Codenames

By July 1947 the ASA was becoming increasingly alarmed at the information that was being revealed by Soviet message traffic decrypted by the
code-breakers at Arlington Hall. The messages contained countless codenames, many clearly referring to Soviet agents.

The codenames used by the Soviet cipher clerks were not necessarily intended as a security measure to disguise the identity of the agents, locations or sources of information, but were used rather to reduce the amount of coding that would be required.
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This much was clear from the information that Gouzenko had been able to provide. An agent’s codename would often be given in a message shortly after recruitment and assigned to his or her real name. Sometimes a certain tongue-in-cheek logic would be used in the selection. A Communist was referred to as a FELLOWCOUNTRYMAN. Trotskyists and Zionists were referred to as POLECATS and RATS. The FBI was referred to disparagingly as KHATA, or ‘the Hut’. San Francisco was BABYLON. Washington was CARTHAGE.

Among the messages now being partially deciphered were many references to an agent with the codename ANTENNA, which had subsequently been changed to LIBERAL. A message from New York to VIKTOR (Pavel Fitin) in Moscow dated 27 November 1944 had revealed the following:

Your No. 5356. Information on LIBERAL’S wife. Surname that of her husband, first name ETHEL, 29 years old. Married five years. Finished secondary school. A FELLOWCOUNTRYMAN since 1938. Sufficiently well developed politically. Knows about her husband’s work and the role of METR and NIL. In view of delicate health does not work. Is characterised positively and as a devoted person.

The cryptanalysts were starting to reveal information that required proper investigation if the identities of the agents were to be discovered. The ASA was not equipped to undertake such detective work, so in September 1947 Carter Clarke, now a general in the army’s intelligence organisation G-2, made contact with S. Wesley Reynolds, G-2’s FBI liaison. Clarke briefed the FBI on the breakthroughs that had been achieved in cracking the Soviet messages. Over the years the project would go by many names: Jade, Bride, Drug and, finally, Venona.

FBI special agent Robert Lamphere was assigned to the project in October and made the first of what would become regular pilgrimages to Arlington Hall every two or three weeks. He found Gardner to be distant and reserved at first, but as they worked together they started to become friends.

Gardner warmed enough to ask Lamphere in early 1948 if he could obtain the plain texts (that is, the uncoded and unenciphered texts) of some Soviet trade messages from 1944. Lamphere was not optimistic, but by return post received from the FBI’s New York field office a mass of material, stacked seven or eight inches high, most of it in Russian. Some commentators have speculated that the material was the result of a ‘black bag’ job, an authorised FBI burglary of Soviet premises involving the photography of sensitive documents.

Lamphere immediately took the material to Gardner. When he returned on his next pilgrimage, two weeks later, he found Gardner in a highly excited state: ‘In his shy way he explained that we’d hit the jackpot. He now had the plain texts of some very important material.’
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Shortly afterwards, Gardner began giving Lamphere some messages that had been completely decoded. Lamphere remembered Gardner’s slight smiles of pleasure as he would reach for his own steadily growing version of the codebook, and write a word in Russian alongside one of the code groups.

Grand jury

The spy networks that had been stitched together in America with such impunity by Soviet agents were now starting slowly to unravel.

Elizabeth Bentley secretly testified before a federal grand jury in New York in the spring of 1947. The grand jury investigation started as a wide-ranging inquiry into Soviet espionage, particularly in US government agencies such as the State Department, the Treasury Department and the OSS. The investigation would eventually focus on the case against Alger Hiss, a former official in the State Department.

Bentley described how someone she knew only as ‘Julius’ had approached her Soviet contact and lover Jacob Golos with the offer of industrial secrets from a group of Communist engineers he had assembled. She identified other Americans who had acted as spies and couriers, including industrial chemist Abraham Brothman. When Brothman was interviewed by the FBI, he named Harry Gold.

Gold had obtained a job at Brothman’s small commercial chemical laboratory on Long Island in May 1946. They had first met five years previously, Gold acting as courier to Brothman’s industrial spy. Both were obviously aware of the other’s espionage activities, although Brothman was unaware that Gold had also couriered atomic secrets for the Soviets.

Yatskov knew that Brothman was under surveillance, and had warned Gold to cut the link. When at his last meeting with Gold towards the end of 1946 he discovered that Gold was now working for Brothman, he accused Gold of ruining eleven years of espionage work. Yatskov left the meeting hurriedly. His cover had been blown by Gouzenko, and shortly after this last meeting with Gold he left America for a new posting at the Soviet embassy in Paris.

Both Brothman and Gold were called before the grand jury towards the end of July 1947. Together they had concocted a detailed cover story. Gold was able to persuade the jury that they were both innocent bystanders, and with no corroboration of Bentley’s testimony, neither Brothman nor Gold were called to face charges.

A relieved Gold walked free. But he had now acquired a thick FBI file which identified him as a suspected Soviet courier.

Annushka

With F-1 up and running satisfactorily, Kurchatov turned his attention to the industrial-scale reactor being constructed at Cheliabinsk-40. It was an area of great beauty, nestled among mountains, forests and lakes. By the end of 1947 Cheliabinsk-40 was already a large city built by the forced labour of as many as 70,000 prisoners, drawn from twelve different camps. The prisoners worked in stages, one group starting construction work, others continuing, and yet others completing. When the prisoners were discharged, none could say precisely what it was they had been helping to build.

Kurchatov now travelled to the site with Vannikov to oversee the final preparations. Both stayed in a railway carriage parked next to the site and settled in for the long, harsh mountain winter.

The plutonium production reactor was called Installation-A or Annushka, meaning Little Anna. It was assembled in a pit blasted 60 feet deep, over which a large building had been constructed. Work began on the reactor assembly in March 1948. In a speech to his engineers, Kurchatov quoted from Pushkin’s
The Bronze Horseman
, in which Peter the Great founds a great city on the banks of the Neva ‘to spite our arrogant neighbour’. The neighbour in question was Sweden. ‘We still have enough arrogant neighbours’, Kurchatov said.

MVD
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General Zavenyagin, Pervukhin and other senior officials would visit often, entering the reactor room through a special manhole that workers called ‘the General’s manhole’. By May, the reactor assembly was complete.

Kurchatov supervised the first run to ‘dry’ criticality on 8 June 1948. Over the next few days the Soviet scientists introduced water cooling, cautiously added more uranium and ran the reactor up to higher and higher power outputs. The reactor reached its designed output of 100,000 kilowatts on 19 June.

The scientists soon discovered for themselves some of the technical problems associated with nuclear reactors. When the cans containing the uranium fuel swelled and became lodged in their channels, Beria’s watchful representatives claimed sabotage. Kurchatov was able to explain that with this technology the scientists were in largely unexplored territory. Some changes to the reactor design were made and the problems were solved.
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Eniwetok

The United States initiated further atmospheric atom bomb tests in April and May 1948, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. These tests, designated Sandstone, were developed to investigate the levitated core and composite plutonium/enriched uranium core designs. Sandstone was the first test series to be managed by the new US Atomic Energy Commission, with the military providing a supporting role. Their purpose was scientific, rather than military.

Little Boy and Fat Man had exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki with efficiencies of 1.4 per cent and 14 per cent respectively, and the Los Alamos scientists were now bent on raising this efficiency and perfecting the technology. This was not so much about perfecting the bomb’s ability to kill people (although this would become a preoccupation of later generations of bomb designers), it was about developing more efficient bombs that required smaller cores, thereby extending the US stockpile simply through the ability to make more weapons using the same amount of fissile material.

The first test – X-ray – was held at 6:17am local time on 15 April. It was, like the Trinity test, a ‘tower shot’, with the bomb mounted at the top of a 200-foot tower on Engebi Island. The new design yielded about 37,000 tons of TNT equivalent, with a utilisation efficiency of 35 per cent for the plutonium in the composite core and 25 per cent for the enriched uranium. Another tower shot, Yoke, followed at 6:09am on 1 May on Aomon Island. This was another levitated, composite core probably containing more fissile material. Although this produced an explosive force of 49,000 tons, almost four times the size of the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima, it was regarded as less efficient. At 6:04am on 15 May on Runit Island a final tower shot, Zebra, with a levitated, enriched uranium core, yielded 18,000 tons. Although of lower total yield, the Zebra device was more efficient than that used for Yoke.

The tests demonstrated conclusively the efficiency of levitated implosion over the solid core compression that had been used in the Fat Man design. They also demonstrated the efficiency of implosion compared to the gun method that had been used in Little Boy. The results enabled a 75 per cent improvement in efficiency: bombs could now be made with less than half the amount of plutonium used in Fat Man and a tenth of the enriched uranium used in Little Boy. At a stroke, the US stockpile of atomic weapons had been extended by 63 per cent.

The Soviets, uninvited this time, watched from a warship stationed some twenty miles away.

Acknowledging the failure of the first, faltering steps towards international control of atomic weapons, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was wound up on 17 May 1948.

The Berlin blockade

The democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia had bid for Marshall Plan aid in July 1947. In post-war Eastern Europe, this was the region’s only democracy, a coalition government led by Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, who was also leader of the Czech Communist Party. The government consisted in part of Communist representatives but was not dominated by them.

But Stalin was having none of this. Sensing an attempt to push Western democracy into the Soviet sphere of influence, he leaned on Gottwald and the bid for aid was withdrawn. By 25 February 1948, with the Red Army waiting on the country’s borders, a Soviet-supported coup had displaced all but one of the non-Communist ministers from important posts in the Czech government. The last was Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. On 10 March Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. Czech President Edvard Beneš refused to sign the new, post-coup constitution of 9 May and resigned in June, He was replaced by Gottwald. Beneš died three months later.

The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, so recently liberated from Nazi dictatorship, sent Shockwaves around the West. The opinions of advisers who had only recently anticipated that there would be no war with the Soviet Union for years to come were dramatically re-evaluated. The American military lobbied for more funding and a reinstatement of the draft. Britain signed the Treaty of Brussels, aligning the country with France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and, in September 1948, creating the Western Union Defence Organisation, a military alliance designed to confront the forces of the Eastern European bloc. Negotiations were begun that were eventually to result in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in April 1949.

To many, another war now seemed inevitable. And then the Cold War took an even more ominous turn.

Occupied Berlin had been organised into four zones, city-wide echoes of the American, British, French and Soviet occupation zones of Germany itself. But the city was buried deep in the heart of the Soviet zone, 100 miles from the nearest border (with the British zone), and therefore extremely vulnerable to a Soviet threat.

In February, the Americans and the British had proposed to create a new German currency, to replace the greatly devalued Reichsmark, and to be backed by Marshall Plan aid. Their aim was to stifle a new threatened wave of hyperinflation and undermine a black market in which American cigarettes were the principal currency. Not surprisingly, the Soviets refused to co-operate. Stalin preferred to see Germany remain economically weak. The Americans, British and French continued with the currency plan in secret.