The First War of Physics (67 page)

The decision had been made, and the world had now been advised. The Super would be built. But the scientists at Los Alamos didn’t really have the first idea how to do it.

Confession at the War Office

Lamphere had a problem. Neither the FBI nor British intelligence knew if Fuchs was still actively spying for the Soviet Union. Using the evidence of the Venona decrypts would betray the existence of the project and the extent to which American counter-intelligence had managed to decode the Soviet spies’ secret messages. And yet Fuchs could not be interrogated without a good reason.

Fuchs supplied the reason himself. His father had now moved to Leipzig, in East Germany, and Fuchs had asked his good friend Henry Arnold if this compromised him in any way. It may have been that Fuchs was looking for an excuse to leave Harwell and start a new life away from atomic secrets and espionage. But Arnold saw it as an opportunity to question him.

Arnold advised Fuchs that someone from the security service wanted to talk to him about his father’s move and its implications for the work that Fuchs was doing at Harwell. William Skardon, an experienced and skilful MI5 interrogator, drove to Harwell on 21 December 1949. Lamphere likened Skardon to the fictional television detective Columbo: ‘complete with dishevelled appearance and an intellect that was sometimes hidden until the moment came to use it to point out incongruities in a suspect’s story.’ Arnold took Skardon along to Fuchs’ office, then left them to it.

Skardon got Fuchs to talk about himself and his career. Fuchs’ own paroxysms of doubt meant that he was now less reserved in talking about his student politics. But after an hour and a quarter of gentle, rambling
discussion, Skardon made his move. Fuchs was describing his work on gaseous diffusion as part of the British mission in New York when Skardon interrupted. ‘Were you not in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York?’ he asked. ‘And did you not pass on information to that person about your work?’

Fuchs mumbled that he didn’t think so, but his lack of reaction convinced Skardon of his guilt. The interrogation proceeded through the afternoon. On his return to MI5 headquarters, Skardon reported that he believed Fuchs was guilty, but that if left to think it over he would likely confess voluntarily.

Fuchs travelled to Birmingham for Christmas with Peierls and his wife. Skardon interrogated him again on his return to Harwell on 30 December, and again two weeks later.

On 22 January 1950 Fuchs asked Arnold to meet him for lunch at a local pub, and they agreed to meet the next day. Unusually, Fuchs talked openly about his politics and claimed to Arnold that he now disagreed with Communism as practised in the Soviet Union. He told Arnold that there was something further he needed to tell Skardon. Arnold asked him directly if he had passed information to the Soviets. Fuchs confessed that he had.

Skardon was back at Harwell the next morning, but Fuchs was still unwilling to make a full confession. They drove out to the Crown and Thistle, a hotel on the river near Abingdon, where they had lunch. By the time they returned, Fuchs had come to a decision. ‘What do you want to know?’ Fuchs asked. Skardon wanted to know when Fuchs had started passing atomic secrets and how long it had been going on. ‘I started in 1942 and had my last meeting last year’, Fuchs replied. Skardon was shocked. He had thought this was all about a single instance of espionage in New York. He now began to realise that this was much, much more serious than anybody had realised.

Fuchs travelled to London on 27 January and wrote out a full confession at the War Office. When Skardon asked him to be more specific about the information he had passed on to the Soviets, Fuchs refused. He claimed that Skardon didn’t have the appropriate security clearance.

In subsequent discussions with Michael Perrin, who had been deputy director of the Tube Alloys project and was security cleared, Fuchs admitted to passing on basic information about the design of the Super.

MI5 does not have the powers to make arrests. On 2 February, Commander Leonard Burt, head of the Special Branch and by now entirely familiar with the business of arresting atomic spies, took Fuchs into custody at Perrin’s office in Shell-Mex House on the Strand. Fuchs was charged with communicating information that might be useful to an enemy in violation of the Official Secrets Act.

Fuchs had been in denial, thinking that his confession would have no further repercussions and that he would be left to continue his work at Harwell. Now his world caved in.

Oppenheimer was sitting at an oyster bar in New York’s Grand Central Station when he found out about Fuchs’ betrayal two days later from the
New York Times.
His face crumpled as he read the lurid headlines.

The pattern of nuclear escalation

A new chapter in the arms race had begun, with a certain crushing inevitability. The tragedy of the time is that, to a large extent, Truman’s assessment of the Soviet position was correct. If the Soviets could do it, they would.

‘The Soviet government,’ wrote Sakharov years later, ‘already understood the potential of the new weapon, and nothing could have dissuaded them from going forward with its development. Any US move toward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful manoeuvre or as evidence of stupidity or weakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap, and to exploit the adversary’s folly at the earliest opportunity.’

In America, atomic and thermonuclear weapons would consume $5.5 trillion. They would also consume countless roubles, pounds sterling, yuan, francs and possibly rupees.

All for weapons that were simply too dreadful to use.

¹
In fact, both the First and Second Ideas had been anticipated by Teller. During a period of consultancy work at Los Alamos in the summer of 1946, Teller had worked with the head of the Theoretical Division, Robert Richtmyer, and had developed a very similar design which they had called the ‘Alarm Clock’ (thereby hoping to ‘re-awaken’ interest in the Super at Los Alamos). The design was not pursued.

²
Though possibly apocryphal, the story that Beria handed out honours to his atomic scientists in inverse proportion to their likely fate in the event of failure reflects the mood. Those who would have been shot were awarded the highest honour: they became Heroes of Socialist Labour. Those who would have received maximum prison sentences were awarded the Order of Lenin.

³
In his 1986 book
The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story
, Lamphere is not specific about the dates or content of decrypted messages. However, the decrypts were made public by the NSA between July 1995 and September 1997, and it is therefore now possible to identify them.

⁴
A number of the code groups in this message remained unrecovered or unrecoverable (i.e. they could not be read or decoded).

Epilogue

MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION

Despite the vision and the far-seeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

These were Oppenheimer’s words, delivered during a lecture at MIT in November 1947. His message seems clear but what, precisely, was the nature of the sin that the physicists had come to know?

The scientific path to Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be traced directly back to Frisch and Meitner, sitting on a tree trunk in the snow-covered woods in Kungälv, scrambling for pieces of paper on which to scribble their calculations. Was the very discovery of nuclear fission a sin? The Frisch–Peierls memorandum on critical mass? The discovery of plutonium? The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction?

No. By its very nature, a scientific fact is amoral: it is not right or wrong in a moral sense; not good or evil. Like a stone or a tree, it just
is.
This goes
for the scientific fact of an explosive nuclear chain reaction. Obviously, it is
people
who are right or wrong in a moral sense, people who are good or evil. And yet, while it is true that many of the greatest physicists of a generation had found themselves drawn inexorably into a project to build the world’s most dreadful weapon of war, it requires a gross twist of logic to describe their discoveries and their participation as sinful.

This was a weapon which Frisch and Peierls had rightly judged in 1940 to be ‘practically irresistible’ at a time when the world was threatened by the darkest evil. This confluence of historical events meant that there was a startling inevitability about the chain that led from the discovery of fission to the development of the bomb, to the use of the bomb against Japan, to the development of a Soviet weapon.

The scientific fact of nuclear fission set the physicists firmly on the stage of world events. As C.P. Snow put it: ‘With the discovery of fission, physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nation-state could call upon.’ The physicists became contaminated with the political and military decision-making process at the end of a long and profoundly immoral war, a war marked by its relentless, unparalleled barbarity. By virtue of their scientific expertise, the physicists became ravelled in decisions about who was to live, and who was to die. These were people more used to sitting in quiet judgement on the results of laboratory experiments and the veracity of abstract scientific theories. The physicists had acquired, as Oppenheimer proclaimed, a ‘peculiarly intimate responsibility’ for making or at least participating in fateful decisions against a background of determinedly ambiguous political and military facts. These were decisions for which they were poorly prepared.

Today, we look back on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the comfort of more than 60 years of relative peace, a peace if not free from war then at least free from conflagration on the scale of world war. Many look back with horror, or with a sense of deep shame. Of course, the bombings were a tragedy. But at the time the evidence of Nazi and Japanese brutality made more palatable ‘lesser’ evils, such as the firebombing and atomic bombing of German and Japanese cities. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just one more catastrophe on top of a long
list of utter catastrophes, one that brought the war to an end with such a powerful exclamation that it burned into the consciousness of all who lived then, and all who have lived since.

If we want to understand what this particular catastrophe meant to ordinary citizens who had survived nearly six years of mechanised slaughter, we could, perhaps, do worse than ask an innocent young girl. In April 1945 she was just eight years old. There she sits, the glimmer of a Pathé newsreel flickering across her face in a dark, smoke-filled cinema:
¹

Our greatest fear finally materialised in mid-April 1945, when Allied troops entered Buchenwald and Belsen concentration camps. And this was only the beginning of the nightmare. Here was man’s inhumanity to man exposed as never before. To young eyes the mounds of pale, twisted corpses seemed like mountains. They had once been beautiful people.

With Victory in Europe we had a few days of jubilation and that was that. It was victory but it wasn’t the end. The rationing and shortages remained. Too many of our servicemen were still prisoners of the Japanese. We saw their pictures – they reminded us of the horrors of Belsen; the difference was that they were still walking, still being beaten and starved. On 6 August 1945 the Americans dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t glad. Three days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On the 14 August the war was over.