task.
The FBI hoped that one or both of the Rosenbergs might decide at the last moment to recant and set up a room on the second floor of the death house to which they might be taken for questioning, with an open line to Washington. Robert Lamphere waited among the FBI officials at the Washington end of the line. “I wanted very much for the Rosenbergs to confess,” he writes — “we all did — but I was fairly well convinced by this time that they wished to become martyrs, and that the KGB knew damned well that the USSR would be better off if their lips were sealed tight.”
Julius Rosenberg died at 8:06 p.m. Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg, serene enough as she took her place in the electric chair to unnerve the three press-pool reporters on hand to watch her electrocution, withstood a first round of three shocks and had to be shocked twice more. She needed four minutes and fifty seconds to die; a doctor pronounced her dead at 8:15. The double execution was broadcast over the radio like a sporting event. Alger Hiss, in prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was not listening to the radio but walking outdoors in the yard:
The June evening of the executions was calm and cloudless. We were all aware that… the executions had been scheduled for just before sunset. As the sun sank, silence spread over the recreation yard. Men stopped their games of baseball, boccie, handball, their exercises with weights, their trotting about the cinder track, their endless conversation. We sat or stood in an eerie quiet until after the sun had disappeared…
We felt we were honoring the very moments of death… We had all been aware of the worldwide demonstrations and protests, which at those moments were proved to be futile. In all the months I spent at Lewisburg this occasion was unique — the inmates transcending their own unhappi-ness and self-involvement and joining in a mood of universal sadness at an act of inhumanity.
There were mass demonstrations in Paris and Rome, a mournful crowd in Manhattan's Union Square. Lamphere says that though he knew the Rosenbergs were guilty, he felt “not satisfaction, but defeat,” at their deaths; he thought that the controversy that surrounded and has continued to surround their case represented a major “propaganda victory for the KGB.”
Confirmation from the former Soviet Union that Klaus Fuchs was an important Soviet agent, Fuchs's positive identification of Harry Gold as his courier, Gold's early reports of contact with an enlisted man at Los Alamos and subsequent positive identification of David Greenglass, David and Ruth Greenglass's independent testimony to Julius Rosenberg's recruiting, the defections to the Soviet Union of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, all add weight to the abundance of evidence in FBI records that Julius Rosenberg was an active Soviet agent. Ethel Rosenberg was convicted of complicity solely on the testimony of the Greenglasses, and they themselves could cite no specific criminal acts. Ruth Greenglass addressed that discrepancy in the interview she and her husband gave Ronald Radosh in 1979- The Rosenbergs’ deaths left their sons orphaned, she pointed out: “They had two children. Do you mean that she was going to… die for something she knew nothing about, that she had no involvement [in]? That's impossible.”
Ethel Rosenberg had framed her choice more starkly: to betray her husband and live or to maintain their mutual innocence and die. “So now, my life is to be bargained off against my husband's,” she had written when hints reached her that she might be spared. She could not imagine living with such betrayal, leaving Julius “to drown without a backward glance,” nor bequeathing such a legacy to her sons: “And what of our children, noble testament to our sacred union, fruit of our deep and enduring love; what manner of ‘mercy’ is it that would slay their adored father, and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness? Know then, you warped, gross, eaters of dust, you abominations upon this beauteous earth, I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon your execrable bounty.”
(Lavrenti Beria was accorded a more private execution. After his trial before a special judicial body of the Soviet Supreme Court late in December 1953, he was found guilty and returned to the underground bunker where he had been incarcerated since the previous summer. A Soviet general, Pavel Batitsky, carried out the sentence of death in Beria's cell. Batitsky's widow reports that the great man who had enjoyed personally torturing his victims crawled on his knees and begged for mercy. A bullet ended Beria's brutal life; they burned his body where it lay.)
When the scientists arrived at the Semipalatinsk test site in July 1953 to prepare to test the layer-cake thermonuclear, Andrei Sakharov recalls, they “were confronted by an unexpected complication.” The device would be tested on a tower, but no one had given a thought to local fallout. “An explosion of the power we anticipated would spread fallout far beyond the test site,” Sakharov explains, “and jeopardize the health and lives of thousands of innocent people.” With the help of what they called the Black Book, which seems to have been a copy of the US government publication
Before then, on August 8, Georgi Malenkov announced in a major speech before the Supreme Soviet that “the United States of America has long since ceased to have a monopoly in the matter of the production of atomic bombs” and added spectacularly, “The United States has no monopoly in the production of the hydrogen bomb either.”
“The announcement caught Washington flatfooted,” Gordon Arneson writes. “Our detection system… had picked up nothing. We were baffled. Was it a propaganda hoax?” Eisenhower had recently appointed Lewis Strauss to the chairmanship of the AEC. Strauss, noting that it had been two years since the Soviets had tested even an atomic weapon, had written the President the day before Malenkov's speech suggesting that the Communists might be leapfrogging to a thermonuclear.
Sakharov lay on the slope of a hill overlooking the test site in the predawn darkness on the morning of August 12, 1953; the scientist who lay beside him, writes Yuri Smirnov, “heard his friend's heart beating fast a few seconds before the explosion. Later, after the explosion, when its success was obvious, the two of them walked to the place where I. V. Kurchatov was standing surrounded by civil and army officials. As he saw Andrei Dmitrievich, Igor Vasilievich bowed to him from the waist, saying, ‘Thanks to you, the savior of Russia!’” The layer-cake design, a device of about the same diameter as a Fat Man, had yielded four hundred kilotons, ten times the yield of the previous Soviet fission test.
Joe 4 might have encouraged H-bomb enthusiasts in the United States to believe that the accelerated US effort to build a thermonuclear which they had championed had saved the nation from disaster. The yield of the Soviet device, boosted with scarce tritium, was less than the yield of the
“The first thing the Russians did,” says Cowan, “the first thing the British did, the first thing the French did were all quite similar and they were the way that people thought at that time. They were HE-initiated, and in a sense they were all failures.” “We never tried it,” Herbert York adds — “never tried the [HE-initiated] Alarm Clock — because it was a dead end.” The crucial difference between Joe 4 and Mike was not the presence in both of thermonuclear fuel or even the fact that both derived about the same percentage of yield from thermonuclear reactions.[49] The crucial difference was their different methods of compression — Joe 4 with high explosives, Mike with radiation. Only radiation compression made high-megaton
