The First War of Physics (64 page)

On 12 June 1948, the Soviets announced that the main autobahn linking Berlin to the border was to be temporarily closed for repairs. All road traffic into and out of Berlin was halted three days later. On 21 June, the day that the new Deutsche Mark was introduced in the American, British and French occupation zones, all barge traffic into the city was stopped. Three days later, on 24 June, all rail traffic was stopped due to ‘technical difficulties’.

Access to the Western zones in Berlin had never been a right, governed by a formal agreement between the former Allies. The Soviets argued that the Western powers had no legal claims to such access, and on 25 June declared that they would not provide food to the Western sectors of the city. General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the US occupation zone, declared it: ‘one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political purposes.’

The population of the Western sectors of Berlin numbered two and a half million. It was estimated that there was food to last about 35 days and coal to last 45 days. Clay argued that it was important for the Western powers to remain in Berlin at all costs, using force if necessary. Yet, as the Soviets tightened the screw by cutting the supply of electricity, Truman became increasingly concerned that the wrong response could precipitate all-out war.

One of the Truman’s advisers urged that the AEC hand over its arsenal of atomic weapons to the military. But, despite the fact that the Soviet Union did not have atomic weapons of its own, Truman appreciated that any decision to use the weapon was one that could not be taken lightly:

I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something like that, that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon … It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses … This is no time to be juggling an atom bomb around.

Right of access to Berlin by road, barge or rail may not have been agreed with the Soviet Union, but a written agreement of 30 November 1945 did provide for three twenty-mile-wide air corridors between Berlin and the borders with the British and American zones. It was estimated that to keep the population of Berlin alive, they would need at least 1,700 calories a day, which translated into an airlift of over 1,500 tons of foodstuffs a day. The population would also need nearly 3,500 tons of coal and gasoline a day.

The Berlin airlift, Operation Vittles, began on 25 June, modestly at first as more and more transport planes were drafted. By the second week, cargoes were averaging 1,000 tons per day.

The world stood by and watched anxiously.

¹
However, it is worth noting that some of the problems and their potential solutions had been identified – at least in outline – by Soviet physicists before the espionage materials were available.

²
Each secret atomic facility was assigned a codename based on the name of a nearby city and the last digits of a post office box number.

³
The Army Security Agency was the 1945 successor to the Army Signals Intelligence Service.

⁴
It was introduced primarily to force the pace of negotiations with America regarding Marshall Plan aid and food for the British occupation zone of Germany. Rationing bread demonstrated the dire financial circumstances with which post-war Britain was struggling.

⁵
These codenames should not be confused with the agents’ cover names. For example, Harry Gold’s cover name was Raymond, and this was the only name by which Fuchs knew him during the time of their meetings in New York and New Mexico. Gold’s codenames as used by Soviet cipher clerks were later revealed to be GOOSE and ARNO. Gold probably never knew his codenames.

⁶
Note that the official NSA history of the Venona project makes no reference to this material, though Lamphere distinctly remembered passing it to Gardner.

⁷
The People’s Commisariats were redesignated as Ministries in March 1946. The NKVD became the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (MVD), the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. The subordinate NKGB became the MGB.

⁸
The Soviet reactor programme may have been aided by intelligence passed by Melita Norwood, an NKVD spy recruited in Britain in 1934. Norwood, the ‘Bolshevik of Bexleyheath’, was exposed in 1999 and died in 2005. However, recent claims that her espionage accelerated the Soviet bomb programme by five years are a gross exaggeration. See the
Sunday Telegraph
, 31 August 2008.

Chapter 22

JOE-1

June 1948–January 1950

S
talin was taking a gamble, one he had judged to be of low risk. He did not believe that the Berlin blockade would provoke a military reaction from the United States, despite that nation’s atomic monopoly. He could not envisage the Truman administration sanctioning the use of the bomb against Soviet targets just to resolve a dispute over the fate of a single city.

In one sense at least, the threat of atomic weapons was largely empty, at least for the time being. The bomb might be an effective deterrent against large-scale acts of aggression, but against small-scale acts of political confrontation or limited, local wars it offered no deterrent at all. No nation, least of all one that perceived itself as leader of the world for the common welfare, would countenance such massive retaliation, out of all proportion to the act of provocation.

Stalin fully expected the Berlin airlift to fail, leaving the Americans, British and French with no alternative but to withdraw from a city deep in the heart of Soviet-occupied East Germany.

The blockade tested the American government’s nerve. As the airlift got under way, attention turned to what the blockade might presage. If, as many senior
military figures now expected, a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe was only a matter of time, then America had to prepare itself properly for such an eventuality.

But America had quickly demobilised after the war, scaling back conventional armed forces and relying on the threat of atomic weapons as the ultimate deterrent against foreign aggression. Five months after Japan’s surrender, about three million Army Air Force personnel had returned to civilian status, with the air force inevitably losing its most experienced air and ground crews. The Soviet Union, in contrast, had not demobilised. Intelligence assessments for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that the Red Army and allied Eastern European forces could quickly overrun most of continental Europe. The only thing holding them back, it was believed, was the threat of retaliation with atomic weapons. America therefore had to ensure that its strategic atomic strike force was combat-ready.

The strike force was far from combat-ready, however. The air force faced three substantial problems. First, atomic weapons were owned by the civilian AEC, not the military: ‘[T]he military services didn’t own a single one’, LeMay remarked years later. ‘These bombs were too horrible and too dangerous to entrust to the military. They were under lock and key of the Atomic Energy Commission. I didn’t have them, and that worried me a little bit to start with.’

It was estimated that if it became necessary to launch an attack on invading Soviet forces in Europe, then atomic weapons-capable B-29s of the 509th Composite Group, now part of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), would need five to six days to prepare and depart from their base at Roswell, New Mexico, fly to an AEC location to load the weapons, and then fly on to a forward base in readiness to attack. By the time the B-29s had crossed the Atlantic, a war in Europe might already be over, with Soviet territories already well defended against unescorted bombers.

The second problem was the size of the atomic arsenal. The successful Sandstone tests had shown that it would be possible for the stockpile to be built up quite quickly. An estimated stockpile of thirteen bombs in 1947 had grown, and towards the end of 1948 the AEC possessed about 50. SAC had 60 bombers that had been modified to carry them. Many senior military figures believed this was far from sufficient to provide an effective deterrent.

But perhaps the overwhelming problem was not how many bombs America possessed or who owned them. What worried America’s military leaders was the question of whether, in time of war, the bombs could be delivered accurately to their targets. Any atomic bombing mission over Soviet cities would likely involve targeting by radar, at night, from altitudes above 25,000 feet. It was clear that under these circumstances SAC personnel could not guarantee delivery of an atom bomb within one or two miles of the designated target.

Before the Berlin airlift began, the SAC bombing crews were encouraged to improve their navigational and bombing accuracies through an annual competition. Each crew had to drop six bombs from 25,000 feet – three visually and three by radar. The results were greatly disappointing, with circular-error averages ranging from over 1,000 feet to almost 3,000 feet.

LeMay took command of SAC on 19 October 1948 and ordered a major shake-up. He organised a combat exercise against an American practice target – Dayton, Ohio – designed to be as realistic as possible. Crews were issued with photographs of the target that were ten years old, on the basis that reconnaissance photographs of Soviet cities were of a similar vintage. Neither the crews nor the aircraft were used to flying at high altitude. The crews were insufficiently trained to target using radar. And the weather was bad. The results were disastrous. Of the 150 crews that flew the mission, none completed it as directed. Few crews even managed to find Dayton, let alone target the city accurately. LeMay called it the ‘darkest night in American military aviation history’.

Fortunately for LeMay, SAC was not required to go to war just yet. The Berlin airlift was a humanitarian operation of massive proportions, and it was successful. American, British and French civilian and military aircraft were used to airlift cargoes ranging from containers of coal to small packets of sweets dropped with tiny, individual parachutes for the children.

By January 1949 Stalin realised that he would be unable to starve and freeze the Berlin population into submission and force the Western powers
out of the city. Economic sanctions that had been imposed on Soviet East Germany had reduced imports into the country by almost half, and were starting to take their toll. Secret negotiations to end the crisis began in February. On 12 May the blockade was lifted and rail traffic once more flowed into Berlin.

The airlift nevertheless continued until September to build up supplies in case the Soviets blocked the routes again. By the time the airlift ended, nearly 280,000 flights had been made and over two million tons of coal, food and other essential supplies had been delivered.

Sloika

Although the decision had been taken to base RDS-1 on the Fat Man design, experimental work on a specifically Soviet atom bomb design had begun in the spring of 1948. The work was carried out by a small group of physicists at the Institute for Chemical Physics in Moscow under the guidance of Yakov Zeldovich, who spent most of his time at Arzamas-16. The Soviet physicists believed the resulting design to be much more progressive than the American original, half the size but twice as powerful, to a large extent vindicating the position that Kapitza had argued.

But Zeldovich was soon to become caught up with another problem. At their second meeting in Golders Green in London on 13 March 1948, Fuchs had passed to Feklisov a detailed report about the latest work on what was to become known as the ‘classical’ Super, the original Teller design for the hydrogen bomb. Although the report still lacked many of the calculations that could have confirmed the feasibility of the weapon, it nevertheless electrified the Soviets.

A translation was sent to Stalin, Molotov and Beria on 20 April. Three days later Beria ordered Kurchatov, Khariton and Vannikov to undertake a thorough study of the espionage materials and develop proposals for a parallel effort on a ‘Soviet Super’. A resolution to supplement the working plan of KB-11 to include the Super – codenamed RDS-6 – was adopted by the Special State Committee on 10 June.