practically speechless.” Sarytchev, whom Gold concluded must have been a trained interrogator, left him soaked but not cold; he discovered when the man walked away that he was sweating.
The two men met once more at the Bronx Park IRT station on the night of October 23, 1949. Sarytchev told Gold to “lay low,” which Gold took to be an order, not a request. They arranged a bimonthly schedule of regular meetings for the months ahead and an emergency system of contact. “Such meetings were desired on the part of the Soviets,” the FBI reports Gold explaining, “… in order that they might be able to observe that he was still at large and had not been arrested.”
In an effort to limit British intelligence access to the cable intercepts, Lamphere had passed them a sensational decode late in 1948. “Several fragments of deciphered KGB messages,” Lamphere writes, “indicated that someone in the British embassy in Washington in 1944-45 had been providing the KGB with high-level cable traffic between the United States and Great Britain.” The agent's code name was “Homer.” (Homer, not yet identified, was Donald Maclean.) Immediately thereafter, in February, the Soviets had broken off contact with Fuchs, a disconnection he later claimed to have initiated after a crisis of conscience. Evidently there was a Soviet mole within British intelligence, someone other than Kim Philby, since Philby did not become privy to British cryptanalysis information until after his appointment in August as liaison at the British Embassy in Washington between MI5, the FBI and the CIA. The Soviet July contact with Harry Gold probably followed from the earlier British breakthrough, but the late-September and October contacts evidently connected to Lamphere's unmasking of Fuchs and concomitant implication of Abe Brothman. Fuchs was probably also warned. In mid-October, he dropped by the office of Harwell security officer Henry Arnold to report that his father was moving into the Soviet zone of Germany that month to take up a professorship in theology at the University of Leipzig; he wondered if he ought to resign. Instead of giving Fuchs an answer, the security officer asked him what he would do if Soviet agents tried to contact him. Fuchs told Arnold he did not know. He spent the next several months thinking about leaving Harwell, but ego held him back — he imagined, as he later confessed, that his departure would “deal a grave blow to Harwell,” as if his espionage had not already done enough.
Evidently British intelligence had not yet reported the FBI discovery to the Ministry of Supply, which administered the British atomic-bomb program; at the end of October the Bureau heard from what its records call “the British Authorities” that “they felt bound to advise the appropriate authorities in England that the continued employment of Fuchs in the Atomic Research Station at Harwell, England, represented a grave risk to security and that Fuchs should be consequently removed.” They were concerned not to “jeopardize the Bureau's original informant” — that is, the fact of the cryptanalysis breakthrough. The FBI advised them “that they should feel free to take any action with respect to an interview with Fuchs that they might desire” but that “there was the necessity of protecting at all costs, the original informant.” Hoping to allay his suspicions while they pondered what to do, the British gave Fuchs a promotion and a salary increase that autumn and one of the few and much-coveted detached houses at Harwell.
News of Truman's Joe 1 announcement on September 23 reached the General Advisory Committee that day in the midst of its first meeting since the AFOAT-1 detection. “I happened to be sitting next to Oppie on the day this information came in,” metallurgist and GAC member Cyril Stanley Smith reminisced long afterward, “on his left in the room where we were meeting. He was called out and he asked me, because I was next to him, just to act as chairman for a few minutes while he was away. A few moments later, the [release] came in and I had the job of reading it to the committee. I very much remember my embarrassment, my general tension, almost my inability to read it clearly because of the emotional impact.” Smith, who had prepared the plutonium core for the Trinity shot, knew what terrible news it was. So did I. I. Rabi, another GAC member in attendance that day, who worried immediately, the GAC minutes report, “that the Russian achievement brought the prospect of war much closer and therefore prompted the question as to what courses of action should be taken.” Oppenheimer had returned to the room by then; he “mentioned some of the matters which had been discussed in this connection, but expressed the opinion that it is too early to attempt to reach conclusions until there is a better developed public reaction to the announcement.”
That was also what Oppenheimer had told Teller when Teller had called him after hearing the news at the Pentagon upon his return from England: “Keep your shirt on.” “My mind did not immediately turn in the direction of working on the thermonuclear bomb,” Teller would testify. “I had by that time quite thoroughly accepted the idea that with the reduced personnel [at Los Alamos] it was much too difficult an undertaking.”
In Italy on a long summer leave, William Golden had a different response:
I was in Florence… I was able to read enough Italian in the headlines of the paper to see that President Truman announced that the Russians had exploded a nuclear device, and I stayed up all night, I was so struck with that, I stayed up… writing a letter to Lewis Strauss…
I set forth some observations… I thought they were probably superfluous… But one thing I wrote him was, “We, the USA, should intensify our efforts toward development of superweapons. This is much more important than an increase in production rate of existing weapons. A quantum jump in intensity is called for as a matter of urgency comparable in every way to the wartime Manhattan Project… This I regard as urgent and of supreme importance. I can conceive of, though I hope unwarrantedly, one or more of your fellow Commissioners wishing to go slow, awaiting some international-control arrangement with Russia. You must strive for concurrent development work with wartime urgency.”… I stayed up till three a.m. and I delivered [the letter] to the Consul-General in Florence in the morning and said, “Will you please send this in the [diplomatic] pouch?”
Strauss liked the phrase “quantum jump” and the idea of a new Manhattan Project. He began to compose a memorandum.
The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy started a series of urgent meetings on September 23 that extended through the following week. William Borden and his staff cobbled together a list of twenty-three “possible methods to increase or augment the production of atomic weapons” that included increasing the staff at Los Alamos, bringing DuPont back into the program and launching what the memorandum termed an “all-out” effort to build a hydrogen bomb. The JCAE took testimony on the possibility of pursuing a thermonuclear on September 29. (By then, Tass had belatedly announced that the Soviet Union had “the atomic weapon at its disposal” but asserted that bombs had been on hand since 1947.) Carroll Wilson, the AEC's general manager, an MIT-trained science administrator, pointed out that Los Alamos was working toward a 1951 test of an implosion bomb boosted with deuterium and tritium, “a step toward a possible thermonuclear bomb” that would take “all of the energy and efforts that can be expended on it between now and the test… ” The test series had just been named
General McCormack confirmed the AEC general manager's timetable:
I think that is true. We reviewed about a year ago… the program leading toward a… thermonuclear weapon and as best as anyone could see then, the first and necessary step would be… the booster… and that would take two or three years to do. The thermonuclear weapon itself, according to our best scientific advice, is a really major endeavor and can certainly spread over a period of a number of years… We have to achieve temperatures greater than we have achieved in any atomic explosion thus far even to trigger the thing if it can be triggered. This is a fact that we are trying to determine in the next test — can it be triggered? Because if it can, then there is a huge development program ahead of us.
Brien McMahon asked McCormack how destructive a true thermonuclear weapon would be. McCormack told him, “If all of the theory turned out, you can have it any size up to the sun or thereabouts that you wanted. I think one talks in terms of the super weapon as being one million tons or more of the TNT equivalent.” It would be “a huge thing,” the general observed. “Delivery by railroad train or perhaps boat seems to be in order.” One Super design Los Alamos had reviewed early in 1949, notes historian Chuck Hansen, included “a fission trigger that in itself weighed 30,000 pounds; the overall length of the bomb was estimated at approximately 30 feet, with a diameter in excess of 162 feet. Under these circumstances, the scientists at Los Alamos preferred not even to estimate the gross weight… ”
AEC commissioner Sumner Pike, a tough-minded self-made millionaire from Maine (“Sardines?” he would be
