Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.

The world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons, because they serve so many purposes. But as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.

Glade

February 1990-January 1995

Acknowledgments

My wife, Ginger Rhodes, contributed her time, skill and good sense to this book: planned our extensive travel for research, recorded and supervised Helen Haversat's transcription of interviews, tracked down books and documents, reviewed every chapter along the way.

Charles Till, at Argonne, besides investigating the 305 reactor, connected me with Yuri Orechwa, who connected me with Elena Bonner in Moscow, who introduced me to the Russian physics community and endorsed Alexander Goldin, who proved to be a superb research associate. Victor Adamsky, Lev Altshuler, Susan Eisenhower, Scott Horton, Yuli Khariton, Victor Mikhailov, Evgenii Negin, Tim and Jen Sergay, Tatiana Yakelevich and particularly Yuri Smirnov all helped with interviews, information or advice. Alan Schries-heim at Argonne always contributes.

Chuck Hansen shared his years of research on weapons history and technology. Ronald Radosh shared his unique files on the Greenglasses and Harry Gold. Robert Lamphere was kind enough to read the espionage episodes in the manuscript for accuracy and to sit for an interview.

Jay Wechsler at Los Alamos supplied a unique perspective. Roger Meade guided me through the LANL Archives. Sig Heckler, Kay Manley and Paula Dransfield offered moral support. Edwardo de Los Alamos sent along a helpful document. George Cowan, the late Charles Critchfield, Carson Mark, Nicholas Metropolis and Raemer Schreiber gave valuable interviews. So, at various times and places, did Philip Abelson, Harold Agnew, the late Luis Alvarez, Hans Bethe, Robert Cornog, Rudolf Peierls, Marshall Rosenbluth, Glenn Seaborg, the late Emilio Segre, Robert Serber, Rubby Sherr, the late Cyril Smith, Bill Spindel, Ted Taylor, Edward Teller, Al Weinberg, Victor Weisskopf, John A. Wheeler and Herbert York. Francpise Ulam and William Arnold shared photographs.

Historians contributed documents and insights: Tom Cochran, Bruce Cumings, Stanley Goldberg, Dick Hallion, Gregg Herken, David Holloway, Amy Knight, Arnold Kramish, Priscilla McMillan, Mike Neufeld, Stan Norris, Tom Powers, Jonathan Weisgall, Herman Wolk and Steven Zaloga. My New Haven research associate, Steve Rice, did vital work. Stephen Kim also helped. Personal thanks to Augustus Ballard, Harry Bayne, Louis Brown, Gil Elliot, Dan Ellsberg, Rachel Fermi, Eric Markusen, Esther Samra, Frank Shelton, Jann Wenner and Don Wille.

Libraries and museums made available their collections. Thanks to The Bancroft Library; Fred Bauman in the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress; the St. Petersburg public library; Penny Abel at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library; Ben Zobrist and Liz Safly at the Harry S. Truman Library; Dan Holt and David Haight at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. Thanks also to Jonathan Brent at Yale University Press, Alexander Shlyakhter at Harvard and Rick Ray at the National Atomic Museum.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided significant support. I acknowledge that grant elsewhere. Here I'd like to thank my colleagues on the Sloan Technology Book advisory committee: John Armstrong, Mike Bessie, Vic McElheny, the late Elting Morison, Ralph Gomory, Hirsh Cohen, Sam Gibbon, Jr., Frank Mayadas and especially Art Singer.

Kazunari Fujita, Ryukichi Imai, Sakae Shimizu and Fumihiko Yoshida contributed in Japan.

Michael Korda, best of editors, saw this long work through, and the one before it and the several between. Special thanks at Simon & Schuster to Rebecca Head, Eve and Frank Metz and Victoria Meyer.

Last is also a place of honor: Mort Janklow and Anne Sibbald kept the ship afloat through five expensive years. Bless them.

Sources

The most significant Soviet sources to which I refer are the espionage documents given at Visgin (1992). These were supplied to the Russian Institute for the History of Science and Technology by the KGB, in what was evidently an attempt by that discredited institution to demonstrate to the new Russian government the historic importance of its work. The Institute published the documents in its journal Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki (Problems in the History of Science and Technology). Before that issue had been completely distributed, the Russian government required that it be withdrawn from circulation on the grounds that two of the documents violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Lengthy excerpts from all but those two documents appeared as an appendix in Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov (1994), and David Holloway (1994) notes (p. 372) that all the documents have been quoted in the Russian press. My source is Visgin; I have quoted from the two prohibited documents — Numbers 12 and 13, both descriptions of the Fat Man bomb — only that information which has been declassified in the United States (excluding, for example, the exact dimensions of the components of the Urchin initiator). Internal evidence, particularly discussions of bomb, reactor and isotope-separation physics and engineering, substantiates the authenticity of the Visgin documents.

They make it possible to match up espionage information with the confessions of Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David and Ruth Greenglass and Alan Nunn May. I have done so at length: first, because doing so reveals an important mechanism of technology transfer in this ominous field; second, because Gold, the Greenglasses and the FBI at least have been accused of fabricating testimony and evidence implicating Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in espionage. The matches are extensive and convincing. So is the FBI record, which is far too diverse, detailed and circumstantially corroborated to have been fabricated. I interviewed Robert Lamphere; his revelation of decoded wartime cable intercepts fills important gaps in the chronology of the FBI investigation.

Other Soviet and Russian sources are largely anecdotal; I have relied on eyewitnesses wherever possible. I interviewed Russian atomic scientists and government officials and personally inspected the F-l reactor at the Kurchatov Institute on two visits to Russia in 1992. Another corroboration of the information I collected has been David Holloway's history Stalin and the Bomb, which I reviewed in bound galleys after I had substantially finished drafting my narrative of the Soviet story. I made minor changes based on Holloway's evidence and noticed areas where my sources pointed to conclusions different from his, but our narratives basically agree.

Many Soviet and Russian documents came to me as unpaginated translations via E-mail; hence the absence of page numbers for the corresponding references in the endnotes. Russian readers should have no trouble finding the citations in the original periodicals.

The invaluable daily diary maintained by Curtis LeMay's various aides was only recently declassified; it corroborates LeMay's efforts to gain control of US nuclear weapons and his part in the transfer of nine atomic bombs to the Far East during the Korean War. The other major source for that transfer is Gordon Dean's diary — Anders (1987). Sources for SAC's Cuban missile crisis excesses are sketchier — necessarily, since those excesses were illegal and nearly fatal — but reliable wherever they can be checked. The story of SAC efforts to force a nuclear confrontation from 1950 onward is probably even more frightening than I have been able to document. Nor have likely Soviet (and, in the case of the missile crisis, Cuban) provocations yet seen the light of day.

George Racey Jordan's account of wholesale espionage shipments through Great Falls under cover of Lend- Lease was widely discounted when it first appeared. I discuss its several corroborations in my text; based on those corroborations, it appears to me to be largely credible. Soviet espionage was indeed wholesale, and obviously