extrapolation:
If eka-osmium [94] really possesses properties similar to those of U235, it could be extracted [chemically] from the “uranium pile” and used as material for an “eka-osmium” bomb. The bomb hence would be made of “unearthly” material, material which has disappeared from our planet.
As one can see, given this solution to the entire problem, there is no more necessity to separate uranium isotopes…
But having stated his conclusion at its most optimistic, Kurchatov then qualified it: “These unusual properties… are of course not yet proved in many respects. Their realization is only possible if it is true that eka- osmium-239 is analogous to U235 and also only if a ‘uranium pile’ may be built one way or another… The scheme demands quantitative analysis of every detail.” He had already assigned that work to Zeldovich, he wrote, but it would not be possible to study the properties of element 94 fully “earlier than mid-1944, when our cyclotrons will be restored and operating.” He therefore asked Pervukhin to “request that the organs of intelligence find out what has been done in this direction in America” and appended a list of seven laboratories to be infiltrated, including the University of California's Berkeley Radiation Laboratory where he thought McMillan was working (in fact McMillan had gone off to MIT to work on radar), Yale University, the University of Michigan and Columbia. Kurchatov wanted to know if 94 fissioned under the action of fast or slow neutrons, what the relevant cross sections were and whether 94 fissioned spontaneously, all information of great relevance to determining if 94 — plutonium — could be used in a bomb.
Kurchatov had mentioned the new information about element 94 in the summary to his March 7 report and gave a glowing assessment there of the value to the Soviet Union of the espionage material:
CONCLUSION
The intelligence material… requires us to review many of our established opinions and introduces three directions of work new for Soviet physics:
1. Separation of U235 through [gaseous] diffusion.
2. Realization of nuclear burning in the mixture uranium-heavy water.
3. Exploration of the element eka-osmium 94239.
In conclusion it is necessary to mention that the material as a whole shows that it is technically possible to solve the entire uranium problem in a much shorter period than our scientists believed before they were informed about developments in this field abroad.
Pervukhin, impressed, had underlined this last sentence.
“Don't tell anyone about this letter to you,” Kurchatov closed his March 22 follow-up report cautiously. Long afterward, defending the contribution of Soviet scientists, Yuli Khariton would assert that “one should not overestimate the importance of [the] Soviet intelligence community in setting up the atomic program… ” Based on Kurchatov's own documented responses to the espionage material he reviewed, one should not
In May, to facilitate and reward his work on the Anglo-American atomic bomb, Klaus Fuchs received the gift of British citizenship.
Between Igor Kurchatov's first two espionage reviews, on March 10, 1943, the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences confirmed his appointment as director of the Soviet atomic-bomb program. He was forty years old and not yet even a full member of the academy (that election came six months later, on September 29,1943).
Wisely, Kurchatov did not abandon work on uranium isotope separation because espionage had revealed element 94 to be a possible alternative, any more than the United States had done. Pursuing multiple approaches to a bomb, however redundant and expensive, was the only way to hedge against failure in the days before it was certain which approach would work.
Kurchatov needed a home for his new secret laboratory. He was allowed to commandeer space temporarily in the old Seismological Institute about a kilometer southwest of the Kremlin within a meandering loop of the Moscow River, on Pyzhevski Lane in the Zamoskvorechie district, where Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov had lived in pre-revolutionary days. Kurchatov and his small staff, no more than twenty people, moved into the institute workshop — “a neat small three-story building surrounded by linden trees,” Golovin and Smirnov describe it. Kurchatov named the operation the Laboratory for Thermal Engineering.
His staff grew slowly, paced by the lack of facilities and equipment, but people joined the adventure willingly from their far-flung assignments in the military or in industry, Golovin recalls:
Most of the personnel came to Kurchatov with only the clothes on their backs and what had been thrown together in small suitcases. Their other belongings, including the books and manuscripts so important to scientists, would have been lost in evacuations or during air raids. Kurchatov's first concern was to feed and house the new arrivals. This was a great morale-builder for people who had suffered wartime privations.
“We used to lunch for coupons in the House of Scientists on Kropotkin-skaya Street,” Golovin writes. “We went to lunch with Kurchatov in a covered truck, the entire team. By the standards of that time these lunches were real feasts. We were very happy with the fresh salad which was grown near the House of Scientists during the summer instead of flowers.”
Almost immediately they ran out of laboratory space and took over another evacuated building on Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street that belonged to the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry. “On Kaluzhskaya,” says Golovin, “for the first time armed guards appeared at the entrances… ” Shortages caused delays that made everyone impatient. “We had to find our way through,” Georgi Flerov recalled their embattled mood, “just like the soldiers fighting in the front lines… We were poor at first; fortunately, we were authorized to scavenge voltmeters and other equipment from the army and the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Sometimes, when we discussed what was most important…, it would seem that what was most important was whatever hadn't yet been done. And everything which had already been done might be spoiled if some minor thing went wrong.”
While occupying these first, temporary facilities, Kurchatov began looking for permanent quarters. Kaftanov says his aide S. A. Balezin and Kurchatov “examined many buildings which had belonged to various institutes that had been evacuated from Moscow… We were interested in an appropriate building in a suitable location which could be extended in the future — it was clear from the beginning that extension would be necessary.” Pervukhin also sometimes accompanied Kurchatov on his real-estate rounds. “Igor Vasilievich and I examined the unfinished buildings of the All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine in Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo,” the exclusive suburb of Silver Woods in northwestern Moscow. “We decided to organize the main laboratory for nuclear physics in one of the buildings which already had a roof… Kurchatov's laboratory took over the entire territory of the institute's compound.” Five hectares of pine woods had been enclosed; a creek had been culverted underground. Golovin, who would serve as assistant director of the new laboratory, describes the setting:
Kurchatov… decided on an unfinished three-story brick building beyond the belt-line railroad on the edge of a sprawling potato field a kilometer from the Moscow River. A few hundred meters from the building were two unfinished one-story stone cottages and a couple of warehouses, also roofless, and a half a kilometer farther off stood the two-story building of a small factory that made clinical X-ray machines. A pine grove, a few log cabins, and two railroad spurs across the field completed the picture… Here on the edge of an area once called Khodynskoe Field, for many decades an artillery and machine-gun range, construction began on Laboratory No. 2 of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR…
