9
That Kurchatov was still ignorant in July 1943 of CP-l's successful operation is clear proof that NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov is lying when he claims he showed Kurchatov “a full report on the first nuclear chain reaction… in Chicago” in February. Kurchatov's ignorance also confirms that neither Fermi nor Bruno Pontecorvo had passed word of the pile's completion to the Soviets the previous January, as Sudoplatov further alleges (Pontecorvo in any case was working at that time for an oil drilling company in Oklahoma and had no access to US secret research). Cf. Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov (1994), p. 182.
10
In 1965 Gold would remember an even earlier incident: “One evening in New York City, about October- November 1942, Semenov asked me if I had heard anything of a military weapon involving a 'pressure wave' of hitherto unknown power. I was puzzled. Pressure wave? (I had a mental picture of some kind of advancing front, [such] as a storm formation.) So Semenov asked me to watch the technical literature very closely and also to see if any even small bit of information was let drop at scientific meetings or by one of my professional acquaintances.” Gold (1965b), p. 47. — RR
11
To Gold's disgust, Brothman later bragged to his friends that it was
12
Robert Lamphere, the FBI agent who pursued Soviet espionage during and after the Second World War, is “dubious” that Hiss's name appeared on the files Jordan saw. It would have been a remarkable coincidence. Robert Lamphere, personal communication, vi.94.
13
The Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy slyly corroborated Jordan's story in a 1950 report, noting that the results of an assay of the metal “were considerably at variance with assays of uranium metal used by the Manhattan Engineer District…” JCAE (1951), p. 188.
14
Sonia had also, on instruction, passed Fuchs over from GRU military intelligence to Beria's NKVD, although Fuchs never knew the difference and perhaps never cared. Beria was maneuvering to control the most important source of information then available about the Anglo-American atomic-bomb program.
15
Fuchs denied making such a call without explaining how otherwise Gold would have known he was in Cambridge, but he was always careful during interrogations to deny contacts that had not yet been identified; he avoided identifying Gold until he surmised that Gold had confessed, and he only identified Sonia after he was in prison and she had left England for East Germany.
16
As it turned out, U233 was not good bomb material. Reactor transmutation of thorium breeds another rare uranium isotope, U232, along with the U233. U232 emits copious alpha particles, which knock unwanted stray neutrons from impurities in the material that encourage predetonation. The United States eventually tested a number of U233 bombs, however.
17
In a series of testimonies at various times, in 1950 and after, which I compile here into one coherent statement; for sources, cf. Notes.
18
Fuchs later claimed that he only passed documents to Gold in Boston, but he was obviously lying to protect his sister, who independently confirmed Gold's version of events.
19
In the brief Soviet-Japanese conflict, eighty thousand Japanese combatants died and 594,000 were taken prisoner. Official Soviet casualties totaled eight thousand dead and twenty thousand wounded (the real figures were probably higher). Soviet forces found the Japanese only lightly armed, primarily with rifles. Werth (1964), p. 1040. More than the US atomic bombings, the Soviet declaration of war influenced the Japanese decision to accept unconditional surrender; the Japanese leadership understood that without a neutral Soviet Union it no longer had an influential intermediary through which to negotiate surrender conditions.
