The First War of Physics (71 page)

A cable sent to Moscow on 21 June 1943 revealed that QUANTUM (KVANT in the decrypts) had visited the Soviet embassy in Washington carrying with him secret documents:

On 14 June a meeting took place with ‘KVANT’ in CARTHAGE … KVANT declared that he is convinced of the value of the materials and therefore expects from us a similar recompense for his labour – in the form of a financial reward.

QUANTUM had clearly established contact before the 14 June meeting. He had already been assigned a codename and was able to gain an audience with a high-ranking Soviet diplomat, most probably Andrei Gromyko. Whoever he was, he handed over information about gaseous diffusion, for which he received $300. The FBI was never able to identify him.

Peierls, whose wife Genia was Russian and an admitted former Communist, was also a suspect. After Fuchs’ arrest, Peierls was able to figure this much out for himself: ‘I later learned that, in the course of tracing
the source of leaks from Los Alamos, the evidence indicated at one stage that a theoretician in the British Group was responsible, which pointed to Fuchs and me. I must therefore have been under great suspicion for a time, but at no stage was I made to feel it.’

But Peierls did experience problems with his security clearance in the early 1950s. When his clearance was eventually withdrawn in 1957 he resigned from his post as consultant to the AERE. Whatever suspicions about him prevailed, these did not prevent him from receiving a knighthood in 1968.

In 1999, after the release of the Venona decrypts,
Spectator
journalist Nicholas Farrell quoted ‘British security service sources’ to accuse Peierls of being the Soviet agent VOGEL/PERS. This seems certain to be an accusation without much foundation
⁷
but may reflect the degree of suspicion that led to Peierls’ loss of clearance.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s
glasnost
and the subsequent formal ending of the Cold War had former Soviet spymasters scrambling to tell their stories. For those who had been involved in atomic espionage, it was an opportunity to gain recognition for the contribution they had made to the Soviet programme. Howevever, Pavel and Anatoly Sudoplatov’s
Special Tasks
, first published in 1994, muddied the waters considerably by hurling fantastic accusations against leading Manhattan Project physicists. I will not dignify these accusations by repeating them here. Suffice to say that many of these have since been refuted by Russian historians.

The apologetic thesis

In 1956, Berlin-born writer and journalist Robert Jungk published
Brighter than a Thousand Suns
, the first comprehensive popular history of the development of atomic and thermonuclear weapons. It was written as a
‘personal’ history, based on interviews with many of the physicists who had been directly involved up to that time.

Jungk’s thesis regarding the German atomic programme was clear. Drawing on his interviews particularly with Weizsäcker and Heisenberg, he painted a stark contrast between the behaviour of German physicists under Nazi rule and that of Allied physicists working in the relative peace and freedom of New Mexico:

It seems paradoxical that the German nuclear physicists, living under a sabre-rattling dictatorship, obeyed the voice of conscience and attempted to prevent the construction of atom bombs, while their professional colleagues in the democracies, who had no coercion to fear, with very few exceptions concentrated their whole energies on production of the new weapon.

Jungk’s words echo those of Weizsäcker at Farm Hall, rationalising the reasons for the German physicists’ failure to build even a working nuclear reactor. Weizsäcker had sown the seeds of the
Lesart
that claimed the German physicists could have built atomic weapons if they had really wanted to, but deliberately refrained from doing so on moral grounds. By the time of publication of Jungk’s book, Heisenberg too had bought into the
Lesart.
He had published articles in the scientific press which argued along similar lines.

It was a thesis which contrasted sharply with Goudsmit’s, set out in his memoir of his wartime involvement in the Alsos mission, which had been published nearly ten years previously in 1947. In
Alsos
, Goudsmit argued that the German physicists had failed largely because they were incompetent, and claimed that ‘science under fascism was not, and in all probability could never be, the equal of science in a democracy’.

Historian Mark Walker has called these opposing interpretations the ‘apologetic’ and ‘polemic’ theses. The apologetic thesis is framed in the Farm Hall
Lesart
, expounded by Jungk, elaborated by journalist Thomas Powers in his more recent book
Heisenberg’s War
into a story implying conscious sabotage by the German physicists, and treated sympathetically
in Michael Frayn’s award-winning play
Copenhagen.
It asserts that the German physicists did what they had to do to prevent Hitler from gaining the ultimate weapon. It is an apologetic thesis because, as Walker explains, it is an ‘apologia for being willing to work on the economic and military applications of nuclear fission for the National Socialist government during World War II, in other words, for being apolitical, irresponsible, and, some might add, amoral’.

Jungk’s book provoked Bohr to draft the unsent letters recalling the circumstances and substance of Heisenberg’s visit to Copenhagen in September 1941, quoted in Chapter 4. Controversy has raged ever since and, despite the release of the Farm Hall transcripts in 1993, the Bohr letters in 2001 and Heisenberg’s correspondence with his wife Elisabeth in 2003, it seems likely to continue in the absence of further compelling historical documentation that could settle the matter one way or the other. It is doubtful that such documentation exists. In seeking a conclusion to this story, I believe Walker is the clearest guide:

Why were myths and legends of active resistance against Hitler created and propagated after the war? Obviously because something is being repressed. Scientific work, exactly like any other occupation, can be politicized. Scientists in general are morally neither superior nor inferior to the general public. Finally sometimes – for example under National Socialism during World War II – there are neither simple answers nor simple questions.

Jungk eventually came to understand that he had been misled, even betrayed, by the German physicists whom he had interviewed. He felt that he had been used to promulgate ‘eine Legende’.

Thirteen days

By 1962, the American arsenal of over 27,000 strategic and non-strategic nuclear warheads outnumbered the Soviet arsenal by more than eight to one. American foreign policy remained resolutely belligerent, with
politicians now wearing the bloated arsenal even more ostentatiously on their hips. The Soviet test of RDS-220, the
Tsar Bomba
, in October 1961 had demonstrated a capability to build thermonuclear weapons with ever-greater yields (at 50 million tons, the three-stage
Tsar Bomba
was the largest nuclear weapon ever tested),
⁸
but it did not address the imbalance in numbers.

This superiority was understood by America’s military leaders, but it did not engender any real sense of security. Still dissatisfied, the new American administration under recently-elected President John F. Kennedy turned its attention from size to proximity. In 1961 America deployed fifteen Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles at a base in Izmir in Turkey, close to the Soviet Union’s southern border and targeted at western Soviet cities, including Moscow. If these had been launched, Muscovites would have had sixteen minutes’ warning of impending doom.

So, when Cuba’s Fidel Castro sought support from the Soviet Union to defend against what he perceived to be an imminent American invasion of his new socialist republic, Nikita Khrushchev saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. By installing missiles on Cuba, Khrushchev reasoned that he could forestall any hasty American intervention against the fledgling revolutionary socialist regime and at the same time restore the nuclear balance, at least in terms of proximity. From Cuba, the Soviet Union could strike all the major cities in the eastern US, including Washington, New York and Philadelphia, with virtually no warning.

The Soviets constructed nine missile sites, with about 40 launchers. Medium-range R-12 (known to NATO forces as SS-4) missiles arrived in September 1962. Despite growing evidence of the presence of missiles on Cuba, the Kennedy administration was in denial. Years later, LeMay explained what happened next: ‘The administration would come back and say, “there is no evidence that there are missiles in Cuba”. Finally they gave the mission to SAC to overfly Cuba with our U-2s, and they found the
missiles.’ Photographic evidence of the construction of a base for mediumrange missiles was gathered on 14 October and presented to Kennedy two days later.

Kennedy assembled an Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) to determine the response. The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Kennedy to sanction an invasion. LeMay, now Air Force Chief of Staff, believed that this was an opportunity to eliminate the missile threat and drive the Communists out of Cuba. He felt certain that American nuclear superiority would prevent the Soviets from retaliating. Kennedy was not so sure. He believed that if the Soviets didn’t strike back in Cuba, they would strike in West Berlin.

The ExComm agreed to a naval blockade against offensive weapons – a quarantine. Kennedy made a televised announcement on 22 October and the US armed forces defence readiness condition (DEFCON) was moved from 5 to 3, a state of high alert. Khrushchev declared the quarantine an act of piracy and stated that the Soviet Union would take measures to protect its rights. Work on the Cuban missile sites continued around the clock. Cuban forces prepared to repel an invasion, to be supported if necessary by Soviet troops stationed on the island.

When the quarantine came into effect on 24 October, SAC was moved to DEFCON 2. The number of American nuclear weapons now made ready for use by planes already in the air or submarines already at sea reached nearly 3,000, and included many thermonuclear weapons. They promised a total destructive force of
7,000 million tons
of TNT. If they had been used, conservative estimates put the total likely death toll at 100 million people. SAC commander Thomas Power made sure the Soviets knew what was coming. He broadcast the new state of readiness to all SAC pilots in plain English, rather than in code.

During these tense moments, accidents were perhaps inevitable. Unauthorised missile launches, erroneous signals for planes to scramble, unauthorised U-2 flyovers and a ‘phantom’ missile launch from Cuba which turned out to be a computer test tape all contributed to the general fraying of nerves.

Meanwhile, negotiations continued. Via Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Attorney General Robert Kennedy secretly signalled his brother’s willingness to consider a trade. If the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba, then America would remove its missiles from Turkey. When Khrushchev formalised this offer the next day, 27 October, the ExComm judged it unacceptable, as removal of the missiles from Turkey would undermine NATO, the Turkish government (which wanted to keep the missiles) and Kennedy’s presidency. The ExComm decided to respond instead to an earlier proposal, to link withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba with American assurances of non-aggression against Castro’s republic.

Robert Kennedy’s secret offer of a trade was shared with a trusted inner circle of ExComm members. It was recognised that this was a real opportunity – possibly the only opportunity – to resolve the crisis and avert disaster. The inner circle agreed that Robert Kennedy should go back to Dobrynin with the proposal for a separate, and secret, agreement to withdraw missiles from Turkey. Messages went back and forth, some through the ‘back channels’, via ABC News reporter John Scali and Alexander Fomin, a cover name for Alexander Feklisov, the former spymaster of the Rosenberg network and of Fuchs in England, now promoted to the position of Soviet
rezident
in Washington.

Meanwhile, the tension had continued to grow. Kennedy had promised instant retribution if any American plane was shot down over Cuban airspace by Soviet forces (the Cubans did not possess surface-to-air missiles of their own). When a U-2 spy-plane was shot down, Kennedy assumed it had been a mistake and held back from a military response. He remained patient when a further four reconnaissance planes were fired upon.

Khrushchev’s response to the public and the private offer was received in Washington at 9:00am on 28 October. He acknowledged the previous message and expressed his gratitude. He explained that he had ordered the missile bases to be dismantled. There hadn’t been time to advise Castro of the decision. He heard about it on the radio and was absolutely furious.

The world, which had been collectively holding its breath for thirteen days, breathed a great sigh of relief. A few months later the Jupiter missiles were quietly withdrawn from Turkey.

Trading on fear

The Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of disaster. It was a salutary lesson. Nuclear war was unthinkable, yet, somehow, the posturing and brinkmanship of the world’s superpowers had not only made it thinkable, they had very nearly made it happen. Fortunately for the world, Kennedy and Khrushchev stepped back from the brink. American forces were never again placed at DEFCON 2. Soviet forces were never placed on a comparable level of nuclear alert.

Some have argued that these insane weapons not only kept the peace, but they also contributed to the eventual economic collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, creating an opportunity for at least some form of democracy to emerge. This may be so, but at what risk?

Deterrence was already in place and working quite effectively with weapons capable of Hiroshima-scale devastation. Despite growing paranoia bordering on hysteria concerning Soviet weapons capabilities, the Soviet Union was
never
ahead in the arms race. Perhaps the arms race afforded just too good an opportunity to build careers and profits for those – scientists, technologists, businessmen, politicians, generals – involved in sponsoring and perpetuating the endless cycle of nuclear escalation.