The First War of Physics (54 page)

At the end of their discussion Hall passed to Cohen about half a dozen sheets covered with writing and diagrams. He was somewhat concerned that there was little more information in them than he had already passed to the Soviets via his friend Saville Sax.

Cohen headed back to Las Vegas, and placed Hall’s papers at the bottom of a Kleenex box, hidden beneath a pad of tissues. At the railway station, she was surprised and perturbed to discover that security was now considerably tighter. Each rail carriage was being checked by two plainclothes agents, presumably FBI, asking questions and conducting searches. Cohen had to think fast.

She decided to play the dumb blonde. She stood on the platform and rummaged through her belongings, as though looking for her ticket, a task hindered by the Kleenex box she was holding in her hand. She pulled at the zip on one of her bags. It stuck. Seeing her desperation, a conductor came over to help. She handed him the Kleenex box, freeing up both hands to search through her bags, and eventually found the ticket. She answered the agents’ questions and the conductor directed her towards her rail carriage. She acted as though she had forgotten all about the box of Kleenex tissues. But the conductor had not forgotten. Without paying it the slightest attention, he handed the box back to her once she was on the train.

She told the story to Yatskov when she met him in New York to hand over Hall’s materials. Yatskov told her that the material in the Kleenex box could have meant a trip to the electric chair if it had been discovered. She joked that it ‘had been in the hands of the police’.
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This episode, and Cohen’s quick thinking, was to enter into Soviet intelligence legend, to be discussed and elaborated by Soviet spies for the next 60 years.

In September, Greenglass received an early furlough and headed for New York with his wife, Ruth. The day after their arrival they received a visit from Julius Rosenberg. No doubt under pressure to step up intelligence-gathering by Feklisov, his Soviet controller, he was keen to get whatever further information Greenglass could give him about the atomic bomb. He offered Greenglass $200. Now that she understood what this was all about, Ruth privately protested to her husband, but Greenglass was by now in too deep. ‘I have gone this far and I will do the rest of it, too’, he told her.

He wrote out a report containing as many details of the Fat Man bomb design as he had been able to glean from his work on the moulds for the explosive lenses, and by keeping his eyes and ears open. His account was wrong on several points, but it contained a description of the polonium-beryllium initiator and new information about improved implosion designs that would require less plutonium. These were based on ideas developed at Los Alamos towards the end of the war: hollow shell designs with an outer layer of plutonium or U-235 which was to be compressed by implosion onto a solid core of plutonium suspended or ‘levitated’ at the centre. If the Fat Man solid core implosion design was the equivalent of pushing a nail home, the levitated core design was the equivalent of hitting it home with a hammer.

Back at Los Alamos, the British delegation planned to hold a party to celebrate the end of the war, the birth of the atomic era and the physicists’ impending return to Britain. Peierls had been awarded an OBE. Oppenheimer was to receive a Medal of Merit from Truman. There was much to celebrate. A performance of
Babes in the Wood
was rehearsed, with the physicists as the babes and a security officer as the wicked witch. Frisch was to play an Indian maiden. James Tuck was to play the devil, with a luminous red tail and impressive moustaches. Steak and kidney pie was to be served, followed by trifle – a dish unknown to the Americans. Engraved invitations were sent out.

Fuchs had not auditioned for a part, but he did offer to drive to Santa Fe to fetch beer a few days before the party. He set out on 19 September, the day he had arranged to meet Gold. Now wary of the tightened security at Los Alamos, he had not prepared notes for Gold beforehand. Instead he parked his dilapidated Buick at a quiet spot in the empty scrublands between Los Alamos and Santa Fe and wrote out his report in the car.

When he met Gold late in the afternoon on the outskirts of Santa Fe he told him that he had been appalled by the destruction and death that the atomic bombs had wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also explained that there was no longer a free exchange of information between American and British scientists at Los Alamos. The British were being frozen out. He anticipated returning to Britain to continue working on atomic energy before the end of the year or in early 1946. Yatskov had himself already anticipated this, and had given Gold a protocol for Fuchs to use to establish a new Soviet espionage contact in London.

Aware that the Soviet Union was being increasingly considered as the enemy in place of Germany and Japan, Fuchs was more determined than ever to find ways to help the country to which he had given his allegiance.
He figured that the Soviets needed to know what they were up against, and had worked out how quickly America could build its arsenal of atomic weapons based on the prevailing rates of U-235 and plutonium production. He provided Gold with some further bomb design details, and information about the composite bomb design now being considered by the Los Alamos physicists.

Fuchs drove Gold back to Santa Fe. He handed over the report he had written and they parted company, never to meet again. Fuchs still didn’t know Gold’s real name.

Although the reports from Hall, Greenglass and Fuchs differed in their details, they provided essential corroboration. Had there been only one spy working at Los Alamos, there would always have been doubts about the veracity of the information he provided (and Beria was never anything less than deeply suspicious). Three spies independently reporting similar design details helped reassure the Soviets that they were not being fed disinformation.

When combined with the report on the development of the bomb by Princeton physicist Henry D. Smyth, entitled
Atomic Energy for Military Purposes
, which was openly published on 12 August, the espionage materials painted a believable picture.
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The reports were consolidated and distilled into a summary that was sent to Beria on 18 October 1945. The authors of this seven-page document had taken care to weed out erroneous or contradictory information from the Los Alamos spies. The report was so consistent that Sudoplatov thought it represented a chapter of the Smyth report that had been omitted from publication for security reasons. It hardly mattered whether this was true or not. The deliberate omissions in the Smyth report were filled in by espionage. To all intents and purposes, the Soviets now had a complete picture.

Gunslinger

The first test of post-war atomic diplomacy between America and the Soviet Union came at the first session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London, which started on 11 September 1945. The council, which included the American, Soviet, British, French and Chinese foreign ministers, had been established at Potsdam to draw up treaties, develop a peace settlement for post-war Germany, and settle outstanding territorial disputes.

Disagreements within the Truman administration had already surfaced a week earlier.

Byrnes was minded to play ‘power politics’ at the council meeting, to use the fact of the American atomic bomb to leverage concessions from the Soviets who, based on what he had seen at Potsdam, couldn’t be trusted to keep any promises they made. Stimson disagreed. He had been working on a memorandum concerning the effects of the bomb on post-war American–Soviet relations in which he warned against taking this line. In this memorandum, which was delivered to Truman on 11 September, he argued that the future development of relations was not merely connected with the bomb, but virtually dominated by it:

Those relations may be perhaps irretrievably embittered by the way in which we approach the solution of the bomb with Russia. For if we fail to approach them now and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase.

Stimson was thinking of Byrnes in the role of the ostentatious gunslinger. Rather than foster an atmosphere of deepening mutual distrust, Stimson proposed to enter an arrangement with the Soviets on the control and limitation of the atomic bomb as an instrument of war. This might mean ceasing all work on the further refinement of the bomb and impounding the bombs already stockpiled, provided the Soviets and the British agreed to do likewise. If they could get this far, Stimson suggested, then France
and China could be brought into the agreement which could then be taken over by the United Nations.

At a meeting with Stimson the next day, Truman nodded his agreement in principle, but there appears to have been little appetite for Stimson’s proposals in Truman’s cabinet. By this time, Stimson had submitted his resignation on health grounds.
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Truman had regretfully accepted.

The Soviets had anticipated that Byrnes might be belligerent, and had decided to counter by visibly playing down the significance of the bomb. Though the bomb was not on the agenda for the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, it was on everybody’s minds. Molotov decided to provoke Byrnes into making his position clear.

At a reception on the third day of the meeting, Byrnes asked Molotov when he was going to stop sightseeing and get down to business. Molotov asked why, did Byrnes have an atomic bomb in his pocket? ‘You don’t know southerners,’ Byrnes replied, ‘we carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.’ It was no doubt meant as a light-hearted aside, but it was not very subtle and confirmed Molotov’s suspicions.

If Byrnes thought the Soviets could be intimidated by the bomb, Molotov was determined to prove him wrong. The London meeting ended on 2 October without agreement on any of its key subjects. Molotov was accused in the British press of recklessly squandering the Allied nations’ good will. Journalists referred to him as ‘Mr Nyet’.

Duplicate or invent?

The next critical decision for the Soviet atomic scientists was one of strategy. There was obviously no doubt that a Soviet atomic bomb could be built and would be devastatingly effective. Soviet spies right at the heart of the Manhattan Project had provided intimate details of the Fat Man plutonium bomb design. The question that remained was this: should the Soviet scientists simply follow in the footsteps of their counterparts on the Manhattan Project and duplicate the Fat Man design? Or should they develop their own approach to the weapon?

Kurchatov and Khariton reviewed the espionage materials that had been summarised for Beria in October, and concluded that the first Soviet bomb should be a copy of the Fat Man design. ‘Given the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States at the time, and the scientists’ need to achieve a successful first test,’ Khariton and Smirnov later wrote, ‘any other decision would have been unacceptable and simply frivolous.’

Not everybody agreed, however. Peter Kapitza had earned the respect of his political masters through his distinguished work as a physicist and his wartime contributions to the development of new methods for producing liquid oxygen. He had received several Stalin prizes and the Order of Lenin. In May 1945 he had been made a Hero of Socialist Labour. Of all the nation’s scientists, it was he who had been able to establish the closest rapport with its political leaders, including Stalin himself.

Although Kapitza was not a nuclear physicist, he developed the view that it was wrong for the Soviet programme to attempt simply to copy the Fat Man design. He believed that it was both time-consuming and unnecessary for Soviet scientists to repeat the work that had already been done in America.

Kapitza’s relationship with Kurchatov was uneasy. Sudoplatov recalled that Kapitza was ‘ a marvellous tactician’. He would comment on reports with jokes and anecdotes, and once interrupted a meeting of the Special State Committee to listen to a radio broadcast of a football game.
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Though the committee members were somewhat startled by the suggestion, the game ended positively and everybody returned to the meeting in a good mood. As the meeting resumed, Kapitza suggested that, to save time, Kurchatov should first consult with him before reporting his results, allowing time for reflection and the development of their joint recommendations which could then be reported to the committee. It was a move designed to position Kapitza clearly as the scientific head of the project.

Beria and Voznesensky disagreed. Beria, ever distrustful of his scientists, was keen to encourage rivalry between them. He suggested that Kapitza and Kurchatov put forward their separate, possibly contradictory, proposals for review by the committee. Kapitza was incensed. He had already complained about Beria’s lack of respect for scientists in a letter he had written to Stalin on 3 October. He now decided to write to Stalin once more, setting out his fundamental concerns about the way that Beria was leading the programme:

The main deficiencies of our present approach are that it fails to make use of our organisational possibilities and that it is unoriginal. We are trying to repeat everything done by the Americans rather than trying to find our own path. We forget that to follow the American path is not within our means and would take too long … Comrades Beria, Malenkov and Voznesensky behave in the Special Committee as if they were supermen, particularly Comrade Beria. It is true he has the conductor’s baton in his hand. This is fine, but after him, a scientist should play the first violin, for it is the violin that sets the tone of the whole orchestra. Comrade Beria’s basic weakness is that as a conductor, he should not only wave the baton, but also understand the score.

Kapitza concluded his letter with a plea. If there was to be no change to the way the Soviet programme was being managed, then he saw no value in his continued participation. If Stalin wasn’t prepared to step in and accede to his wishes, then Stalin should release him from the programme. Presumably, Kapitza believed that his past contributions and his position made him relatively invulnerable and provided a sound platform from which he could voice his complaints. But the political game he was playing was very dangerous, as he would soon discover.