and helped invent. He claimed he was too busy starting the new weapons laboratory at Livermore, but no one doubted that bitterness and hostility, perhaps also jealousy, kept him away. He had not expected Los Alamos to do the job. When he understood that Mike would probably work, he and his colleagues devised a way to observe the explosion from California. Herbert York at Livermore monitored the radio frequency of the Mike firing-signal telemetry on a shortwave radio; Teller in Berkeley with Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez monitored a seismograph. The physicists had calculated the time a seismic wave from a successful shot would need to travel under the Pacific basin to northern California and had calibrated seismic magnitude with yield. When York heard the Mike firing signal, he called Teller. Teller got busy:
I went down into the basement of the University of California geology building in Berkeley, to a seismograph that had a little light-point marking on photographic film. A tremor of that point would show when the shock wave, generated thousands of miles away on Eniwetok Island, reached Berkeley. I watched the light point but it would not stand still. Try to look at a point of light in the dark; it will dance before your eyes because your eyes are moving. I took a pencil and steadied it against the side of the apparatus; then I could see that the point of light, relative to the pencil tip, was steady.
At exactly the scheduled time I saw the light point move. It moved so slightly that I was not sure whether I just thought it moved or whether it actually had moved. So I stayed around for another ten minutes, lest I miss the real event; then I took the whole film and had it developed. There was the signal, just as predicted… The sound waves took twenty minutes to carry the message under the Pacific and arrive in Berkeley.
The seismic record indicated a big explosion. Teller passed the news to York at Livermore. York says he called Los Alamos. Marshall Rosenbluth, who had returned to Los Alamos before the test, remembers a telegram from Teller dropping into the frustrating silence after H-hour; he and a dozen others had collected in Norris Bradbury's office and were waiting impatiently for the Eniwetok security officers to clear a first report. However the good news traveled, Teller's message claimed paternity: “It's a boy.”
The first successful test of a staged thermonuclear, York understood immediately, marked “a moment when the course of the world suddenly shifted, from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one. Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of [as] being limited in power. Now, it seemed, we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless.” Stanislaw Ulam had been right, that day at the turn of the year when his wife had found him staring out into their garden with a strange expression on his face. The totally different scheme that Ulam had first conceived, that Edward Teller had improved, that Carson Mark and Marshall Holloway's Panda Committee had elaborated into inspired mechanism, would change the course of history — but not in the direction of decisive US advantage that the H-bomb enthusiasts had fantasized.
25
Powers of Retaliation
Lavrenti Beria's nuclear archipelago was thriving. With success had come a measure of indulgence for physicists, who were evidently a valuable commodity worth humoring. At Sarov, Igor Tamm was listening to forbidden BBC programs and reporting them to Andrei Sakharov over breakfast. Yakov Zeldovich had begun a love affair with a
Victor Adamsky, then a thoughtful young experimental physicist, was assigned to Sarov in 1950 after he graduated from Moscow University. “I didn't know what the place was,” he recalls, “but there were rumors it was a good place to work. I understood that I would go there to work on the hydrogen bomb. There was a good hotel. We would share rooms, two to a room. I came in January, and in March an apartment was finished and allocated to me. Then Igor Tamm, Yuri Romanov, Sakharov — my friends — were given cottages. They took me in. So in our part of the cottage lived Tamm, Romanov and I. Since Sakharov came with a family, he got his own cottage.” Adamsky found a collegial spirit at the secret installation. “There was enthusiasm. We worked well. We felt we were doing our duty. It was very interesting physics.” The Sarov library had a subscription to the
When theoretician V. I. Ritus arrived at Sarov in 1951, Sakharov was there to greet him. “Andrei Dmitrievich came out of his office with a wide grin and energetically shook my hand… [He] led me to a blackboard, took a piece of chalk into his left hand, and drew a large circle around the words ‘The facility is organized in the following manner.’ He is an original, I thought. He wants to familiarize me with the layout of the town, and for economy's sake he is drawing his diagram centro-symmetrically, even though I knew that it was not that way in reality — I had already walked the streets. Andrei Dmitrievich drew a smaller circle concentric with the first and uttered a few more phrases… Only after awhile did I finally begin to understand that he was talking about something else entirely: the hydrogen bomb.”
Although they were still using electronics salvaged from Second World War radio sets, experimentalist Alexander I. Pavlovsky reports, and it was difficult to get permission to leave Sarov for vacation, “we were young, and life seemed full of wonders… We managed to read a lot, go out with friends, study, go in for sports and do many other things although we worked twelve hours a day and sometimes even round the clock… On summer Sundays, when we had time, most of us went to the stadium, where we held [sports] competitions between departments.” “We skied and went hiking,” Sakharov recalled, “and in the summertime we swam.” Sarov, the young theoretician concluded, “was a big village.”
Eastward at Chelyabinsk, the conscript soldier was allowed access to Techa now — “the academic compound,” the conscripts called it. “I got acquainted with the local youth,” the soldier reminisces, “mostly with young women. Age is age.” He was also allowed access to the neighboring civil settlement in the zone, where there was a cinema. Beria motivated his nuclear
Beria's humoring had its limits. Zeldovich's love, the muralist Shiryaeva, was shipped off to the east for resettlement in internal exile and gave birth to Zeldovich's daughter in a building with an inch of ice on the floor. A commission arrived in Sarov one day to make sure everyone agreed with Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko's Marxian notions of heredity, which Stalin had endorsed. Sakharov expressed his belief in Mendelian genetics instead. The commission let the heresy pass, he writes, because of his “position and reputation at the Installation,” but the outspoken experimentalist Lev Altshuler, who similarly repudiated Lysenko, did not fare so well. Sakharov and a colleague had to intercede on Altshuler's behalf with Boris Vannikov's deputy Avrami Zavenyagin — “a man of great intelligence,” writes Sakharov, “and an uncompromising Stalinist.” Zavenyagin attached a second political
