“This is a big story,” says Steve Sheinkin at the start of Bomb: A Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Brook Press, 2012). Indeed.
For those, like me, who came of age in the late seventies and early eighties, when Olympic rivalries with the Soviet Union were fraught events and nightly international news items were tinged with Cold War confrontation, but who were too young to understand the origin of those fears and whose historical education, when it didn’t stop in June at the Second World War, by necessity smoothed over thorny details, Sheinkin’s big story provided long overdue answers to gnawing questions, stated and otherwise; to wit: Whence came the anti-communist paranoia that fueled the McCarthy era? The short answer: Fuchs, Gold, Hall, and, yes, the Rosenbergs. The longer answer: Read Sheinkin’s book.
It is not a book solely about espionage, though the subtitle accurately indicates its prominence as more than just a subplot. It is also a book about the science of the atomic bomb (and the scientists who made it), a book about heroic action in the face of tyranny (as well as cowardly and ethically questionable behavior).
First, the Science:
Sheinkin writes, “Sherber drew a rough sketch of what became known as the ‘gun assembly’ method. Surrounding the uranium would be a tamper–a shield of very dense metal. The tamper would prevent flying neutrons from escaping, bouncing instead back into the uranium. This would cause more fission, and a bigger explosion.” A simple diagram accompanies Sheinkin’s words. Even I understood the process. Mostly.
With limited uranium, the team turned to devising a plutonium bomb: “Since firing two pieces of plutonium together inside a gun was too slow, the only solution…was to blast the pieces of plutonium together with explosives–a process known as ‘implosion.’ Basically the idea was to take several pieces of plutonium, about the size of a grapefruit all together. Explosives would be arranged around the plutonium, like a very thick skin around a fruit. The explosives would blast the plutonium together at a tremendous speed, creating a critical mass and setting off a chain reaction–an atomic explosion.” Sheinkin explains complicated phenomena well.
The Scientists:
Robert J. Oppenheimer: Rail-thin, chain-smoking, a walking bundle of nerves, the director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos was key to its ultimate success. Enrico Fermi: His ability to induce a fission chain reaction gave the Americans the edge in the development of a bomb. George Kistiakowsky: A chemist, Kisty was assigned the most difficult task of creating a perfectly symmetrical implosion for the plutonium bomb. Richard Feynman: The twenty-six-year-old Princeton wunderkind kept the team on its toes with both his brilliance and his practical jokes.
The Heroes:
Knut Haukelid and his Operation Gunnerside team were able to drop into occupied Norway, descend a ravine, scale a cliff, penetrate a heavy water manufacturing plant, and blow up its equipment. Before leaving on the mission, they were reminded of the fate of two that preceded them: a total of thirty-four British agents had been killed. “You have a fifty-fifty chance of doing the job, and only a fair chance of escaping,” they were told. Each was issued a cyanide pill in the event of capture. What kind of a man can proceed in such an action? One driven by love of country, yes, but perhaps even more by hatred of a malevolent invader. The eight accomplished their mission, setting the Nazis back significantly in their quest for the bomb, and escaped with their lives.
The Spies:
How does one make a decision to betray one’s country? It’s not quite the right question. These men and women (there were plenty of the latter) did not wish to bring about the destruction of the United States. They did not wish to see, necessarily, the triumph of the Soviet Union. They seemed, in general, to want to give the USSR a leg up. They seemed to have a historical sense that communism–social and economic equality–was the wave of the future. But their motivations were varied and unique to each.
Klaus Fuchs had been a Communist in Germany and paid for it with beatings at the hands of Nazis. After escaping to Britain, he was recruited to work on the development of an atomic bomb. He began passing on information to the Soviets through another German-born Communist, Ruth Werner. His information didn’t amount to much until he was recruited to join the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. Fuchs was the first spy to be nailed by counter-intelligence agents after the war.
Harry Gold became a Soviet agent because he needed a job during the Depression. Out of an odd sense of obligation to the man who found him work, Gold began funneling information from his chemical plant to a Soviet handler. A few years later, Gold thought his debt was paid and wanted out. He discovered that choice was no longer his to make. Not if he didn’t want his handlers to rat him out to his employer and get sent up the river. He was stuck with another ten years of double life and constantly watching his back
At eighteen, Ted Hall was the youngest member of the Manhattan Project team and “a natural-born rebel,” according to one of his Los Alamos colleagues. But he didn’t spy for the Soviets out of rebellion. “It seemed to me,” he said, “that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.” In other words, he anticipated the need for deterrence in a post-nuclear world. “My decision about contacting the Soviets was a gradual one, and it was entirely my own.” But it is also true that the seed of the idea was planted by his roommate, “dedicated Communist” Saville Sax.
The Rosenbergs don’t feature in this book, but Sheinkin explains how an eleventh hour act of desperation, in which Soviet handlers breached normal espionage protocol, led to the pair’s downfall. Gold’s assignment in New Mexico in June 1945 “cross-contaminated” two separate spy rings, leading to the exposure of the second after his interrogation in 1950.
American agents of the Soviet Union really had been (almost) as common crows. More common, at least, than one would have imagined. Paranoia in the 1950s, while irrational both by definition and by risk assessment, was nevertheless not unfounded. It was based on factual events.
So much is explained by Sheinkin’s book that I will be forever grateful to him for it. Yet it is just a single book. Questions remain. Why were so many willing to risk their names, their livelihoods, their residence in the United States, their lives, for the possibility of social and economic equality, the possibility of peace through nuclear deterrence? I am drawn to look further back, to the 1930s and 1920s–and beyond?–to connect a chain that could lead to such decision-making. History remains a series of questions in infinite regress.
Yeah, this is a big story.
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