Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

had concluded. The uranium gun design had been completed and tested that month as well.

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At about the time that Harry Gold and Anatoli Yatzkov were meeting in New York, a plan General Groves had set in motion in Germany made life harder for Igor Kurchatov. Groves had sent a scientific intelligence mission to Europe to follow immediately behind the advancing western front and determine once and for all if the Germans had been working on the bomb. In Strasbourg, Groves's Alsos Mission had found documents identifying a metal-refining plant in Oranienburg, about fifteen miles north of Berlin in what would be the Soviet zone of postwar Germany, as the source of cubes and plates of uranium metal intended for a German nuclear reactor. The Red Army was then advancing from the east dismantling factories en passant and shipping them back to the USSR. “Since there was not even the remotest possibility that Alsos could seize the [Oranienburg] works,” Groves writes in his memoirs, “I recommended to [Army Chief of Staff] General Marshall that the plant be destroyed by air attack.” The ostensible purpose of the attack was to prevent Nazi Germany from completing an atomic bomb, but Groves knew with some certainty by then that the Germans had not even begun work on nuclear weapons; evidently his purpose was to deny the facility to the Soviets. Groves sent an officer to London to confer with Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, the USAAF general, who commanded the strategic air forces in Europe at that time. “We did not have any target maps,” one of Spaatz's intelligence officers, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., later an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, recalls. “I did obtain a city map of Oranienburg by a hectic flight to London at night and going to the British War Office there.” The mission was laid on for the afternoon of March 15, 1945. “In a period of about thirty minutes,” Groves concludes, “612 Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,506 tons of high explosives and 178 tons of incendiary bombs on the target. Post-strike analysis indicated that all parts of the plant that were above ground had been completely destroyed.” Groves was nothing if not thorough; if the Soviets desired uranium, he wanted them to start from scratch.

Ironically, Stalin at that time still anticipated that the USSR and its allies might come to accommodation postwar. In February 1945, while he was meeting with Winston Churchill and a mortally ill Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, in the Crimea, to further that purpose, his generals had offered him the opportunity of crashing through to Berlin in a matter of days, shortening the war by months. To their fury, Stalin had overruled them, telling them that such an uncoordinated advance would be rash and dangerous. He knew that the Western leaders, Churchill in particular, feared the Red Army might overrun Europe, and held his armies back so as not to alarm them. “It was… a hard decision for Stalin to take,” writes Alexander Werth. “… In the end, it cost the Russians hundreds of thousands of lives. Between February and April, the Germans had time to build powerful fortifications between the Oder and Berlin, and the final Russian victory was incomparably more costly to them than it would have been three months earlier.”

The mood in the Soviet Union in those final months of the European war was a giddy mixture of triumph and tragedy. “Russia was a devastated, almost a ruined, country,” Werth observes, “with a formidable task of economic reconstruction ahead of her. But on the other hand, she was sitting on top of the world, having won the greatest war in her history… Among many of those who now dreamed of… a happy Russia there also existed the idea that the survival of the Big Three alliance after the war would, somehow, tend to liberalize the Soviet regime.” Ilya Ehrenburg, writing for the regime, to the contrary expressed hardline menace:

When the Red Army inflicted a heavy defeat on the Germans in Belorussia last summer some American observers explained the Russian victory by the weakness of the Germans… I hope that the Americans, with the inquisitiveness peculiar to them, will study our country. It is time to drop the kind of talk that says the Russians are winning only because the Russian soldier has always been brave… [or] that the Russians can fight only on their own soil… The sooner Americans learn that we are a strong and completely modern country, that our victories are not accidental gains but the fruit of striving and of toil, the better will it be for us and for America and for the world.

So there were hints at Yalta that the Soviet Union would look kindly on a loan for postwar reconstruction — the figure Molotov had proposed in January in an aide memoir to Harriman was $6 billion — but no offer of a quid pro quo in Poland, which the Soviets were moving to dominate. Roosevelt understood how limited were his Eastern European options. “The Russians had the power in Eastern Europe,” Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson quoted the President as telling a group of senators in January, “and there was little he could do to change this. Economic aid, he argued, did not ‘constitute a bargaining weapon of any strength,’ because the only instrument available was Lend-Lease and to cut it back would hurt the United States as much as it hurt the Russians. He also feared that an attempt to use economic pressure for political ends might jeopardize military cooperation at a time when it was ‘obviously impossible’ to break with the Russians.” The US believed it needed the USSR to achieve victory against the Japanese, who still fielded an army of 700,000 men in Manchuria; Roosevelt's forbearance at Yalta, which would be criticized later as a sellout, followed in part from American efforts to hold the military alliance together long enough to finish the Pacific war.

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Julius Rosenberg lost his job as a civilian inspector for the Signal Corps in February 1945. He feared at first that the government had discovered his espionage work; when he learned he had been fired because of his Communist Party affiliation he fought back, arguing that “I am not now, and never have been a Communist member. I know nothing about Communist branches, divisions, clubs or transfer… Either the case is based on a case of mistaken identity or a complete falsehood.” The Signal Corps did not reinstate him — Army intelligence had collected photostats of his Communist Party membership card and other identifying documents — but the Emerson Radio Corporation almost immediately hired him to work as an engineer on some of the same military projects that he had inspected previously for the Signal Corps.

Before Ruth Greenglass left for Albuquerque in mid-February, Rosenberg dropped by her apartment with arrangements for an espionage contact. At dinner with the Rosenbergs during David's January furlough, the conspirators had discussed Ruth traveling to Denver to rendezvous with Ann Sidorovich. As an alternative, David would recall, they planned to meet “in front of a Safeway store on Central Avenue in Albuquerque.” Rosenberg instructed Ruth to show up for the Safeway rendezvous during the last week in April and the first week in May.

Housing was hard to find in Albuquerque in wartime and for a while Ruth lived in hotels. “I think I stayed at the El Fidel… [for] five days,” she said after the war. “Then I stayed in every hotel [in Albuquerque] until I found a place to live.” David Greenglass worked with a fellow Special Engineering Detachment enlisted man, another New Yorker, William Spindel, whose wife had moved to Albuquerque; Sara Spindel took Ruth in. Eventually, on March 19, Ruth rented a place of her own at 209 North High Street, a second-floor front apartment, and David began driving down on Saturday nights for the one day of rest that the accelerating pace of work at Los Alamos allowed. David was promoted from Tec/5 to Tec/4 — from private to corporal — on April 1. A week later, the Albuquerque branch of the federal Office of Price Administration hired Ruth as a clerk-stenographer.

Ruth befriended an older neighbor, Rosalea Terrell, who found the young New Yorker “a very nice considerate person” and “liked her very much.” Boisterous David was another matter. He “had not been very well liked at the apartment house,” Terrell would report, “because he was rather loud or noisy, slammed doors going in and out of the house and his apartment and made a lot of noise going up or down the stairs no matter what time of day or night it was.” Terrell was curious to learn from Ruth that the Greenglasses had “packages of kosher food” shipped to them from New York. West of the Hudson River was new territory for Ruth; she told Terrell that “she had lived in big apartment houses all of her life, had never seen vegetables or farm produce being grown, and several times mentioned that she would like to quit office work and get some sort of a job on a farm while living in that area… ”

A week after she began work at the OPA, Ruth had a miscarriage — “on the couch in my wife's apartment,” William Spindel recalls. Ruth wrote Ethel Rosenberg that she would not be able to keep her appointment outside the Safeway store. According to Ruth, Ethel replied “that she was sympathetic about my illness and that a member of the family would come out to visit me the last weeks in May, the third and fourth Saturdays.” Ruth kept both appointments, the second time with David, but no one showed up.

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In Moscow, Igor Kurchatov was reviewing the information that Klaus Fuchs had passed to Harry Gold on February 16. On April 7,1945, the leader of the Soviet bomb program reported his preliminary conclusions. “Very valuable material,” Kurchatov began. “The data on spontaneous fission of heavy nuclei are of exceptional