yet understood the revolutionary nature of the potential new explosive:
Given production of 36 bombs per year by such a plant, the cost of one bomb would be ?236,000 compared to the cost of 1,500 tons of TNT at ?326,000.
Beria concluded that the British leadership considered the military application of uranium solved in principle and that the War Office was laying plans to produce uranium bombs. He recommended: (1) forming a special scientific committee attached to the State Defense Committee to coordinate Soviet work on atomic energy and (2) passing the espionage documents along to “prominent specialists and scientists” for assessment and use.
Coincidentally, the timing of Beria's report to Stalin matched within a few days a report US science czar Vannevar Bush sent to Franklin Roosevelt describing an American program that was then in the process of expanding from laboratory research to industrial development. “If every effort is made to expedite [research and production],” Bush concluded, an American bomb could be delivered in 1944. On March 11,1942, Roosevelt responded enthusiastically, “I think the whole thing should be pushed… Time is of the essence.” In contrast, Stalin moved cautiously. He acted on Beria's second recommendation but not yet his first. The Soviet leader sent the file of espionage documents to Molotov with instructions to pass it for evaluation in turn to Mikhail Georgievich Pervukhin, the newly appointed People's Commissar of the Chemical Industry.
Molotov called him in, Pervukhin later told an interviewer, and expressed concern that other countries “might have achieved a major advance in the field, so that if we didn't restart our work we might seriously lag behind… Then he said: ‘You should talk to the scientists who know the field and then report on it.’ That's what I did.”
April 1942 brought further confirmation that the giant of nuclear fission was stirring. A Red Army colonel who commanded partisan detachments behind the German lines sent a captured document to Sergei Kaftanov, the State Defense Committee deputy for science. “Ukrainian partisans had brought him the notebook of a dead German officer,” Kaftanov recalls. “… The notebook contained certain chemical formulae… [which] appeared to concern the nuclear transformations of uranium. The notes in general showed that the officer had a professional interest in nuclear energy. It seemed he'd come to the occupied territories specifically to look for uranium.” Kaftanov gave a Russian translation of the German officer's notes to A. I. Leipunski, a senior Ukrainian physicist on the staff of the ill-fated institute at Kharkov. Leipunski responded with the safe and standard litany, says Kaftanov: “In three days the answer came. Leipunski believed that in the coming fifteen to twenty years the problem of developing nuclear energy would hardly be solved and that it wasn't worth spending money on it in the midst of war.” Pervukhin heard much the same message.
Georgi Flerov had lost patience with timid Academicians and stodgy bureaucrats. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force now, assigned to a reconnaissance squadron in Voronezh, near the confluence of the Voronezh River and the Don some five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, but he was still strafing the government with letters and telegrams — no fewer than five telegrams to Kaftanov in recent months, with no response. Nor was official indifference to the cause of uranium research his only resentment. Although he and Konstantin Petrzhak had been nominated for a Stalin Prize for their 1940 discovery of spontaneous fission — an honor that customarily included tangible gifts — the nomination had not been confirmed because scientists in other countries had not welcomed the discovery in print or cited it in their publications. The university at Voronezh had been evacuated eastward, leaving behind its library. Flerov decided to check the scientific journals there to see if any new citations had turned up.
He found more missing from the foreign journals he consulted than merely references to his own work. Nuclear physics itself was missing; all the leading American nuclear physicists had stopped publishing. Flerov immediately understood that their work must have been classified. To Flerov that meant that the United States must be developing an atomic bomb. Twenty-nine years old and a mere lieutenant, but a physicist who understood the energy that matter might release if it were properly arranged, he notched his sights up then from assaulting the bureaucracy and in April 1942 appealed directly to Stalin:
Dear Josef Vassarionovich:
Ten months have already elapsed since the beginning of the war, and all the time I have felt like a man trying to break through a stone wall with his head.
Where did I go wrong?
Am I overestimating the significance of the “uranium problem”? No, I am not. What makes the uranium projects fantastic are the enormous prospects that will open up if a successful solution to the problem is found… A veritable revolution will occur in military hardware. It may take place without our participation — due simply to the fact that now, as before, the scientific world is governed by sluggishness.
Do you know, Josef Vassarionovich, what main argument has been advanced against uranium? “It would be too good if the problem could be solved. Nature seldom proves favorable to man.”
Perhaps, being at the front, I have lost all perspective… I think we are making a big mistake…
Flerov went on to propose a conference where he might state his case, with Stalin and a jury of ranking physicists present — he asked for Ioffe, V. G. Khlopin, Kapitza, Leipunski, Landau, Kurchatov, Khariton, Zeldovich and others. “I see this as the only means to prove that I am right,” he argued,
“… because other means… are simply being passed over in silence…
That is the wall of silence which I hope you will help me break through.
Stalin enjoyed springing traps. “To choose one's victim,” he mused once, “to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed… there is nothing sweeter in the world.” After he received Flerov's letter and consulted with Kaftanov he called in four of his Academicians — Ioffe, Kapitza, Khlopin and Vladimir I. Vernandski — and berated them, indignant that a young tyro like Flerov had recognized a danger to the country that they had ignored. Golovin says he “asked them bluntly how serious the information he had was concerning the possibility of developing the atom bomb in the next few years… His guests unanimously confirmed the importance of this work.”
The expense of building a new industry in the midst of war mobilization worried the Soviet dictator. Two of his advisers predicted that a bomb would cost as much again as the entire war effort. Kaftanov defended the expense:
I said that of course a degree of risk was involved. We would risk tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of rubles. In the first place, we would have to spend money on science anyway, and investment in a new field of science is always fruitful. But if we did not take the risk, a much greater risk would then emerge: that we might one day face an enemy possessing nuclear weapons while we ourselves were unarmed.
After some hesitation, adds Kaftanov, “Stalin said: ‘We should do it.’”
It was then May 1942 and the Wehrmacht was still smashing its way across the western USSR. The possibility that Germany might develop an atomic bomb had strongly influenced the Anglo-American decision to go forward. The possibility that Germany was working on an atomic bomb and the certainty, confirmed by espionage, that England and the United States were, had now catalyzed the Soviet decision as well.
Deciding was one thing. Embodying the decision in difficult research and fantastic, extravagant technology would be quite another. “The Stalingrad victory was far ahead,” write Golovin and Russian physicist Yuri Smirnov of the desperate spring and summer of 1942. “… Moscow was the front line and nearly depopulated. Anti-aircraft batteries stood on alert, the Kremlin stars had been covered with canvas, barrage balloons guarded the approaches, German and Soviet planes were dogfighting over the city. A curfew began at dusk and the streetlights had been shut off; automobiles found their way with headlights dimmed and narrowed to blue beams… Food and goods were rationed. Many ministries and departments were still in evacuation.” On a train ride from Murmansk to Moscow during the first week in June, Alexander Werth observed the results of wartime shortages and German successes:
Civilians were badly underfed, and many suffered from scurvy; old women especially were tearful and pessimistic, and thought the Germans were terribly strong… Morale among soldiers and officers was rather better… All the same, they were far from underrating the power of the Germans, and in their game of dominoes, they called
