atomic bombs would be needed to destroy each city — six each for Moscow and Leningrad. A map centered on the North Pole accompanied the chart; around the world from bases in Nome; Adak, in the Aleutians; Stavanger, Norway; Bremen, Germany; Foggia, Italy; Crete; Lahore, India; and Okinawa, B-29 flight paths had been overlaid darkly like segments of radar sweeps to cover the USSR.
The plan was something of a wish list. LeMay, Giles and O'Donnell had flown one way intercontinentally and then only by loading their bomb bays with fuel tanks. The realistic range of a B-29 with a bomb load was three thousand miles. Nor were all those convenient bases available. Before the US would have a force capable realistically of striking the Soviet Union, it would need forward bases, aerial refueling or a longer-range bomber. In the autumn of 1945 none of those capabilities yet existed.
If the Soviet Union had been the United States's Second World War ally, it was also the only possible enemy to survive the general destruction with sufficient military power to challenge American hegemony. Its army occupied the eastern half of Europe. The United States believed it had a trump card in the atomic bomb, but even that advantage was a wasting asset. On September 19, while Curtis LeMay and his colleagues were en route from Hokkaido to Washington proving that atomic bombs could be delivered great distances by plane, physicist Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British Mission at Los Alamos, was finishing up delivering information about the atomic bomb by hand to Harry Gold, an American industrial chemist who was a courier for Soviet intelligence. Fuchs had been passing information on the atomic-bomb project to Soviet agents since 1941. In June he had delivered to Gold a complete description of the Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb, including detailed cross-sectional drawings, which had been sent along immediately to Moscow. Now, driving Gold up into the Santa Fe hills overlooking the New Mexican capital in the early evening, Fuchs reported on the rate of US production of U235 and plutonium and on advanced concepts for improved bomb designs. In October 1945, with Fuchs's information and information from other US and British spies, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence in Moscow was able to send to the commissar for state security newly appointed to direct the Soviet atomic-bomb program, Lavrenti Beria, a detailed plan of the plutonium implosion bomb for Soviet scientists to duplicate. The war was over. The atomic arms race had begun.
PART ONE
A Choice Between Worlds
His decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth.
1
‘A Smell of Nuclear Powder’
Early in January 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, a letter from Paris alerted physicists in the Soviet Union to the startling news that German radiochemists had discovered a fundamental new nuclear reaction. Bombarding uranium with neutrons, French physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie wrote his Leningrad colleague Abram Fedorovich loffe, caused that heaviest of natural elements to disintegrate into two or more fragments that repelled each other with prodigious energy. It was fitting that the first report of a discovery that would challenge the dominant political system of the world should reach the Soviet Union from France, a nation to which Czarist Russia had looked for culture and technology. Joliot-Curie's letter to the grand old man of Russian physics “got a frenzied going-over” in a seminar at Ioffe's institute in Leningrad, a protege of one of the participants reports. “The first communications about the discovery of fission… astounded us,” Soviet physicist Georgi Flerov remembered in old age. “… There was a smell of nuclear powder in the air.”
Reports in the British scientific journal
There were only about a thousand physicists in the world in 1895. Work in the new scientific discipline was centered in Western Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. A number of Russian scientists studied there. Abram loffe's career preparation included research in Germany with Nobel laureate Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of X rays; Vernadski worked at the Curie Institute in Paris. The outstanding Viennese theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest taught in St. Petersburg for five years before the First World War. In 1918, in the midst of the Russian Revolution, loffe founded a new Institute of Physics and Technology in Petrograd.[2] Despite difficult conditions — the chemist N. N. Semenov describes “hunger and ruin everywhere, no instruments or equipment” as late as 1921 — “Fiztekh” quickly became a national center for physics research. “The Institute was the most attractive place of employment for all the young scientists looking to contribute to the new physics,” Soviet physicist Sergei E. Frish recalls. “… loffe was known for his up-to-date ideas and tolerant views. He willingly took on, as staff members, beginning physicists whom he judged talented… Dedication to science was all that mattered to him.” The crew loffe assembled was so young and eager that older hands nicknamed Fiztekh “the kindergarten.”
During its first decade, Fiztekh specialized in the study of high-voltage electrical effects, practical research to support the new Communist state's drive for national electrification — the success of socialism, Lenin had proclaimed more than once, would come through electrical power. After 1928, having ousted his rivals and consolidated his rule, Josef Stalin promulgated the first of a brutal series of Five-Year Plans that set ragged peasants on short rations building monumental hydroelectric dams to harness Russia's wild rivers. “Stalin's realism was harsh and unillusioned,” comments C. P. Snow. “He said, after the first two years of industrialization, when people were pleading with him to go slower because the country couldn't stand it:
To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don't want to be. Old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by Turkish beys, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all — for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: “Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty and thou art helpless, Mother Russia.”
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good the lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.
Soviet scientists felt a special burden of responsibility in the midst of such desperate struggle; the heat and light that radioactive materials such as radium generate for centuries without stint mocked their positions of privilege. Vernadski, who founded the State Radium Institute in Petrograd in 1922, wrote hopefully that year that “it
