The First War of Physics (72 page)

The opportunists certainly knew how to trade on fear. When Viktor Berlenko, a Soviet pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, defected with his MiG 25 Foxbat on 6 September 1976, the aircraft was examined in detail by the Foreign Technology Division of the US Air Force. The investigators were astonished to discover that it was full of obsolete valve technology. This simply didn’t fit the natural presumption that the Soviets were far ahead in terms of technology development.

The answer was quickly forthcoming. In an exchange of battlefield nuclear weapons, the electromagnetic pulse resulting from a nuclear explosion would completely disable aircraft filled with more sophisticated transistor technology. Indeed, the Soviets
were
ahead of the game. Better double the research budget…

The Spanish philosopher, poet and novelist George Santayana once wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The threat of global annihilation may have diminished, but the lessons of history are indeed too easily forgotten as we continue to live in the shadow of the fear inspired by The Bomb.

In his book
Doomsday Men
, Peter Smith describes his experiences at an anti-nuclear protest demonstration gathering in Trafalgar Square, London, in April 2004, ready to march to Britain’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. Damon Albarn, front-man of the Brit-pop band Blur, railed at the fact that fewer than 1,000 protesters had turned up. But it is not hard to understand this apathy. In 1987, America began to dismantle its stockpile of 24,000 nuclear warheads. By the end of 2007 America had passed the half-way point towards its commitment under the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (also known as the Moscow Treaty), signed five years earlier by President George W. Bush and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. As of January 2008, the US stockpile contained an estimated 5,400 nuclear weapons, of which about 4,000 were operational. At the same time, the Russian Federation arsenal consisted of about 9,000 weapons, with about 5,200 operational. The prospect of Armageddon is considerably less that it was at the height of the Cold War, so why protest?

And yet the danger is far from past. The Moscow Treaty will reduce, but not eliminate, the American and Russian arsenals. Even if the Treaty objectives are met at the end of December 2012, the combined American and Russian arsenals will still likely represent an explosive potential in excess of one billion tons, or 80,000 Hiroshimas. Proliferation continues, inexorably. On 9 October 2006 North Korea – the last bastion of Stalinism – joined the world’s elite nuclear club. In January 2007 the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
advanced its ‘Doomsday Clock’ by two minutes. It remains at five minutes to midnight, the closest it has been to midnight since 1984. In August 2007 an accidental breach of protocols left six nuclear warheads sitting unattended in a B-52 bomber parked on the tarmac at an American Air Force base in Louisiana. In 2008, for the first time in sixteen years, America resumed small-scale production of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos.

The fear remains. If the time for protest has ended, the time for vigilance has not.

¹
A British Pathé newsreel dated 30 April 1945 features Mavis Tate, MP, visiting Buchenwald. The newsreel shows the corpses piled at Buchenwald and Belsen, and ranks of German civilians digging mass graves to bury them. See
www.britishpathe.com

²
The Venona decryptions implicate both Hiss and White as espionage agents, although the evidence against Hiss is somewhat less conclusive.

³
There is no recording of McCarthy’s speech and the figure of 205 was soon amended to 57. In John Frankenheimer’s 1962 movie
The Manchurian Candidate
, McCarthy’s lack of precision was parodied through the fictional character Senator John Iselin (played by James Gregory), who latched onto Heinz’s ‘57 varieties’ as a number he could more easily remember.

⁴
It should be noted that this simple description of the discovery process was disputed by Teller, who, in his memoirs, did not credit Ulam with any kind of breakthrough. Norris Bradbury later argued that the invention of the H-bomb was a team effort, with no single individual deserving right of paternity.

⁵
The JCAE was a congressional committee formed in 1946 which, among other duties, oversaw the activities of the AEC.

⁶
The Cohens were exchanged in 1969 for Gerald Brooke, a British teacher who had been arrested in Moscow for anti-Soviet activity. They had served just nine years of their twenty-year prison sentence. They returned to teach spycraft to a new generation of Soviet intelligence agents.

⁷
In their detailed study of the Venona decrypts, Haynes and Klehr associate VOGEL with CAMP-1 (Oak Ridge) and declare: ‘All that can be said about [VOGEL] with certainty is that he had access to technical information about the atomic bomb project; very probably he was an engineer or scientist of some sort, but even that is a guess.’ See Haynes and Klehr, p. 314.

⁸
Its theoretical yield was 100 megatons, but had been limited to half this to reduce fallout. The
Tsar Bomba
was developed for demonstration purposes only – it was never ‘weaponised’.

1. When Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (pictured right) was forced to flee Nazi Germany, her long-term collaborator, German chemist Otto Hahn, continued to write to her from Berlin about his experiments on uranium. The results described in Hahn’s letters were ‘startling’. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Britde Books Collection)

2. Austrian physicist Otto Frisch joined his aunt, Lise Meitner, in the Swedish seaside village of Kungälv for Christmas 1938. It was to prove the most momentous visit of his whole life. When he returned to Copenhagen, he and Mejtner had discovered nuclear fission. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection)

3. Both Danish Nobel laureate Niels Bohr (pictured right) and German Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg visited America in 1939. Working with American physicist John Wheeler at Princeton, Bohr identified the role of U-235 in nuclear fission. Heisenberg faced intense interrogation from his colleagues about his reasons for returning to do physics in Nazi Germany. (Photograph by Paul Ehrenfest, Jr, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Weisskopf Collection)

4. Persuaded by the ‘Hungarian conspiracy’ – Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner – Albert Einstein agreed to sign a letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter warned of ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’. In this picture, taken in the late 1940s, Einstein and Szilard recreate the moment. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

5. The faculty of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, gathered beneath the magnet of the unfinished 60-inch cyclotron. J. Robert Oppenheimer is in the back row, fifth from the left. Robert Serber and Ernest Lawrence are in the front row, second and fifth from the left, respectively. Edwin McMillan is in the second row, fourth from the left. Philip Abelson is on the extreme right of the front row. McMillan and Abelson published early work on neptunium, work that was eventually to lead to the discovery of plutonium. (Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Fermi Film Collection)