the double-six “Hitler” — “because it's the most frightening of them all.”
As of June 22, official Soviet combat casualties, probably underestimated, totaled 4.5 million; German totals approached 1.6 million. On July 28, Stalin issued his notorious Order No. 227 acknowledging the loss of the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltics to the German advance. “We now have fewer people and industrial plants, less bread and metal,” Stalin declared. “… Any further retreat will be fatal for us and for the Motherland… Not a step backward! At any cost, we must stop the enemy, push him back and defeat him!”
One tried, effective way to save time and expense was industrial espionage. A coded radio message went out from Moscow Center on June 14, 1942, to NKVD
Top secret.
Reportedly the White House has decided to allocate a large sum to a secret atomic bomb development project. Relevant research and development is already in progress in Great Britain and Germany. In view of the above, please take whatever measures you think fit to obtain information on:
— the theoretical and practical aspects of the atomic bomb projects, on the design of the atomic bomb, nuclear fuel components, and the trigger mechanism;
— various methods of uranium isotope separation, with emphasis on the preferable ones;
— transuranium elements, neutron physics, and nuclear physics;
— the likely changes in the future policies of the USA, Britain, and Germany in connection with the development of the atomic bomb;
— which government departments have been made responsible for co-ordinating the atomic bomb development efforts, where this work is being done, and under whose leadership.
Morris Cohen was drafted into the US Army in July and left New York for basic training and service in Europe. It took Anatoli Yatzkov two months clandestinely to reestablish contact with Morris's wife Lona, but she agreed to replace her husband as a courier.
Fuchs's arrangements also changed that summer. Traveling to London was awkward in wartime; to deceive Genia Peierls, Fuchs had to fake illnesses and pretend to be visiting a physician. At his third meeting with “Alexander,” the Russian proposed a more convenient link. Fuchs would not quite remember if Alexander also told him he was leaving England; in any case the new arrangement would give Fuchs a contact closer to Birmingham.
Fuchs's courier would be a woman this time. Her code name was “Sonia.” He knew her as Ruth Kuczynski, the sister of the man whom he had first approached to propose espionage. She was living in Oxford under the name Ruth Brewer with her children and her English husband Len, a fellow spy, clandestinely broadcasting coded espionage information to Moscow using a shortwave radio she had built herself. She was tall, slender and attractive, and at their meetings in Banbury and in the countryside near Birmingham — Fuchs rode out on a bicycle — she offered Fuchs a welcome change from what he would later call the “controlled schizophrenia” of his double life. “It was a great relief for him to have someone he could talk to openly,” she told an interviewer many years afterward. “He never met any comrades in Britain with whom he could talk about things.” He was, she thought, “a good, decent man.” For his part, Fuchs confessed, he had “no hesitation in giving all the information I had.”
In Moscow, the search went forward for someone to direct the new project. According to Golovin, Stalin consulted with Beria. Beria suggested Ioffe or Kapitza. Stalin disagreed; they were world-famous scientists, he argued, they were already burdened and their disappearance into secret work would be noticed. “He said that it was necessary to promote a young, not well-known scientist,” writes Golovin, “for whom such a post would be… his life work.” Kaftanov describes a different, or perhaps a complementary, sequence:
I got the job of finding people, finding a place and organizing the necessary institutions. I began with Ioffe. The most important issue was who would head this extraordinary project. I suggested that he himself should head it. He said that he was already too old (he was then sixty-three), and that we needed a young, energetic scientist. He proposed a choice of two [physicists]: thirty-nine-year-old [Abram] Alikhanov and forty-year-old Kurchatov.
Yuli Khariton's wife Maria Nikolaevna encountered Kurchatov in Kazan that summer. “After the epic events in Sevastopol I saw Kurchatov with a beard. I asked him, ‘Igor Vasilievich, what are you doing with that pre-Petrine ornamentation on your face?’[6] He answered with two lines of a popular song: ‘First we're gonna beat back Fritz, then, when there's time, we'll all shave.'… The beard suited that tall and imposing man very well.” Bearded Kurchatov traveled to Moscow for consultations. So, presumably, did Alikhanov.
“Alikhanov,” Kaftanov explains, “was by that time quite famous. He was already a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and winner of a Stalin Prize. He was known for his discovery of positron-electron pairs and his work in the field of cosmic rays. Kurchatov was less well-known.” But Kurchatov, Kaftanov continues, had worked with uranium and with nuclear fission. He had not only participated in this work but directed it. “It was also in his favor that he had joined the Navy, which showed that he was willing to work where he was most needed.”
The government chose its man sometime in September 1942. A Kaftanov senior aide, S. A. Balezin, recalls Kurchatov's final interview:
We invited Kurchatov to Moscow simply to meet him before rejecting his candidacy. But he entered the room and immediately impressed everyone with his modesty and charm: he had a very good smile. He also appeared to be a thorough man. I had shown him translations of the German officer's notebook and he had read them through. I didn't tell him that the decision to restart uranium work had already been made. I only asked him: if such work should start, would he accept the leadership? He became thoughtful for a while, smiled, patted his beard — it was a short one then — and said, “Yes.”
Apparently the interview made the difference. “The outcome of any enterprise,” says Kaftanov, “is finally determined by competence, energy, organizing skills and devotion to the cause.” He offered Kurchatov the job. Kurchatov asked for a day to think it over. “On the next day he came and said, ‘If it is necessary, I'm ready. This is a tremendously difficult task. But I hope that the government will help, and of course that you will help too.’”
One other version of how Kurchatov was chosen has surfaced. Molotov, who notes that he “was in charge” of atomic-bomb research, says he picked Kurchatov:
I had to find a scientist who would be able to create an A-bomb. The [NKVD] gave me a list of names of trustworthy physicists… I summoned Kapitsa, an Academician. He said we were not ready, that it was a matter for the future. We asked Ioffe. He too showed no clear interest. To make a long story short, I was left with the youngest and least-known scientist of the lot, Kurchatov; they had been holding him back. I summoned him, we chatted, and he impressed me.
Kurchatov returned to Kazan and told Alexandrov. “The work on nuclear physics will continue. There's information that the Americans and the Germans are making nuclear weapons.” “How is it possible for us to develop a thing like that in wartime?” Alexandrov asked. “They said don't be shy,” Kurchatov told him. “Order what you need and begin work immediately.”
3
‘Material of Immense Value’
Vyacheslav Molotov — “Stalin's shadow,” says Dmitri Volkogonov, “a harsh man” — assumed overall direction of the Soviet atomic bomb program at its inception in autumn 1942. Molotov had earned Lenin's contempt
