Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

assistants left behind in the reception area. Well into the meeting, Khrushchev sprung his trap: the officers burst into Malenkov's office, Moskalenko announced Beria's arrest and Zhukov searched him. They held him in a nearby room until midnight to evade the MVD forces that guarded the Kremlin — removed and crushed his pince-nez, cut the buttons off his pants so that he would have to hold them up if he tried to run — then slipped him out in a convoy of cars and delivered him to the garrison guardhouse at Lefortovo Prison.

Tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled guns and motorcycles patrolled the streets of Moscow for the next two days. Khrushchev's people swept through the MVD making arrests. The leadership moved Beria from Lefortovo to a little-known bunker under an apple orchard near the Moscow River. He was interrogated there, with how much Berian brutality no one has yet revealed. (One Soviet source claims he staged an eleven-day hunger strike, commenting that “This did not do him much harm, given his health and his build.”) The Presidium organized a summer of Central Committee hearings and denunciations in preparation for a December trial.

The new collective leadership was shocked to discover that Beria's nuclear archipelago was working on a hydrogen bomb. When Beria was arrested, Malenkov had appointed Vyacheslav Malyshev head of the atomic-bomb program, renaming it the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Malyshev — “a short, ruddy-faced man,” Sakharov describes him — had been a senior arms-production administrator during the war. “We began to dig into the archives,” the new minister told the Central Committee that summer, “and we found that [Beria] had signed a whole number of important decisions without the knowledge of the Central Committee or the government.” Zavenyagin confirmed Malyshev's account before the several hundred Central Committee members gathered to hear Beria's crimes:

I was witness to this story. [After Stalin's death] we prepared a draft decision for the government [authorizing a hydrogen bomb]. For some time it lay on Beria's desk, then he took it with him to read. We had the idea that perhaps he wanted to speak with comrade Malenkov. About two weeks later, he asked us to come by and he began to look at the document. He read it, entered a number of corrections. He got to the end. The signature [block] was [labeled] Chairman of the Council of Ministers G. Malenkov. He crosses it out and says — ‘This isn't necessary.’ And he signs his own name… The hydrogen bomb… would be a most important event in worldwide policy. And that scoundrel Beria allowed himself to make this decision outside of the Central Committee.

Evidently Beria had been confident enough of his ascent to power to assume that he would command sole authority by the time the thermonuclear design was ready to be tested, in August 1953.

* * *

If there was turmoil in the Soviet Union that spring and summer, there was turmoil in the United States as well as the scheduled day of execution approached of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. From a first mass meeting of supporters at the Pythian Temple in New York City in March 1952, protests had multiplied in the US and in Europe until the Rosenberg case became an international cause celebre. The couple had begun to believe that their fellow citizens would save them. “We must soberly realize that our only hope rests with the people,” Julius had written Ethel that March. A series of articles in an influential left-wing weekly, the National Guardian, arguing their innocence had brought them to public attention and furnished a rallying cry: that they were “the first victims of American fascism.” (The American Communist Party, preoccupied with its own trials at that time, took a different view; CP officials privately told a writer who was organizing support for the Rosenbergs, “They're expendable.”) The Rosenbergs began writing public letters to encourage their supporters, letters curious in their claims to martyrdom since the couple had denied political activism at their trial. “Like others we spoke for peace,” they wrote from Sing Sing, where they were both separately incarcerated, “because we did not want our two little sons to live in the shadow of war and death… That is why we are in the death house today, as warning to all ordinary men and women.” Ethel, more stridently, sometimes preached retribution:

Wait, wait and tremble, yet mad masters, this barbarism, this infamy you practice upon us, and with which you regale yourselves presently, will not go unanswered, unavenged, forever! The whirlwind gathers, before which you must fly like the chaff!

As the case moved through the superior courts to the Supreme Court, Judge Kaufman shifted the Rosenbergs’ execution date forward until it settled on June 19, 1953. The Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari; other late appeals failed as well. A great swell of Soviet-orchestrated protest in Western Europe — Jean-Paul Sartre declared the approaching executions “a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation” — drowned a wave of anti-Semitic purges in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, including the Doctors’ Plot, in that last year of Stalin's life. Europeans argued that Klaus Fuchs, clearly the more serious offender, had received only fourteen years, to which J. Edgar Hoover responded that the US had better business than emulating the “weaknesses” of British security.

Pickets at the White House did not prevent Dwight Eisenhower from refusing to grant the Rosenbergs clemency. The statement he released on February 11, 1953, noted that the couple had been tried by jury and convicted and that their appeals had been rejected. “The nature of the crime for which [the Rosenbergs] have been found guilty,” the new President concluded, “… involves the betrayal of the whole nation — By their act these two individuals have in fact betrayed the cause of freedom for which free men are fighting and dying at this very hour.” Privately, Eisenhower saw the Rosenberg capital sentence less as punishment than as a way of communicating US Cold War resolve. Just three days before the scheduled execution, he explained his position at length in a letter to his son John, then on active duty in Korea:

The Rosenberg case continues to cause a very considerable amount of furor. Involved in the effort to have the sentence commuted are not only Communists. In addition there are people who honestly believe that there is a doubt as to the Rosenbergs’ guilt; others who have conscientious scruples against capital punishment…

I must say that it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment. [But]… if there would be any commuting of the woman's sentence without the man's, then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women…

We know that the Rosenbergs were part of [a spy] ring. If the Soviets can convince prospective recruits that the worst possible penalty they would ever have to pay for exposure as spies would be a relatively short term in prison, then their blandishments and bribes would be much more effective…

If it were possible to assure that these people would be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives, there would be no question that the vast bulk of the argument would rest on the side of commutation. But the fact is that, if they do not go to the chair, they will be released in fifteen years under federal law.

The White House received tens of thousands of letters in the final weeks before the scheduled execution. Even David Greenglass protested from prison. “I have to live with it,” he wrote. “I was never told that my sister would be killed. Or I might not have testified.”

Responding clandestinely to the protest, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., sent Bureau of Prisons Director John V. Bennett to Sing Sing early in June to convince the Rosenbergs to cooperate. Bennett spoke to Julius first, then separately to Ethel, then to both of them together. He offered to see their sentences commuted in exchange for information. He told them that Gordon Dean would appeal to Eisenhower on their behalf if they told the government what they knew. To Julius, the prisons director seemed desperate: “You mean to tell me, Mr. Bennett,” he recreated their conversation afterward, “that a great government like ours is coming to two insignificant people like us and saying ‘cooperate or die'? It isn't necessary to beat me with clubs, but such a proposal is like what took place during the Middle Ages. It is equivalent to the screw and rack.” Ethel, reporting the conversation to their lawyer, offered a rare glimpse of how she may have felt about her share of responsibility for her husband's espionage work, quoting Julius telling Bennett: “Just imagine! Even if it were true, and it is not, my wife is awaiting a horrible end for having typed a few notes! A heinous crime, ‘worse than murder,’ no doubt, and deserving of the supreme penalty…,” The Rosenbergs steadfastly refused to cooperate.

At the last moment, June 18, a lawyer with the Rosenberg defense team pointed out to Judge Kaufman that an execution at eleven p.m. the following evening, Friday, would fall on the Jewish Sabbath. The lawyer thought she had bought the Rosenbergs at least another twenty-four hours, but Kaufman coldly moved the executions up to eight o'clock. FBI agents had to track down the executioner, a Cairo, New York, electrician, and speed him to his