Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

and Pervukhin had written to Stalin two months previously to complain of Molotov's unenthusiastic management, the American news must have made the old Bolshevik uneasy.

Molotov himself claimed to remember no such conflict, although his recollection sounds exculpatory. “Truman didn't say ‘an atomic bomb,’” he contended, “but we got the point at once. We realized they couldn't yet unleash a war, that they had only one or two atomic bombs… But even if they had had some bombs left, [so few bombs] could not have played a significant role.” The more important point in this recollection is that in late July 1945, the Soviet leadership knew approximately how many atomic bombs the US had in its arsenal.

Soviet intelligence continued its work. A telegram from Moscow on July 28 asked Colonel Zabotin in Ottawa to “try to get from [Alan Nunn May] before [his] departure [to return to England] detailed information on the progress of the work on uranium.” The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 — seventy thousand dead from one bomb delivered from one bomber, less than a kilogram of fissioning matter destroying a large city by blast and fire — made that progress brutally clear. Nunn May obliged immediately, reporting that the Trinity test had been conducted in New Mexico, that the bomb dropped on Japan was made of U235, reporting the daily output of U235 and plutonium from Oak Ridge and Hanford. Zabotin noted that the British scientist “handed over to us a platinum [foil] with 162 micrograms of uranium 233 in the form of oxide in a thin lamina.” The foil had been sent to Nunn May at Montreal for research, legally, following up the British physicist's work with Herbert Anderson at Argonne in October 1944. “Herb said he noticed later that about half the U233 was missing,” recalls Anderson's colleague, physicist Alvin M. Weinberg. “He always wondered where it went.”

Igor Gouzenko was on hand to record the excitement in the Soviet Embassy when what he calls Nunn May's “uranium samples” came in:

I was working late in the cipher room the night Angelov brought them from Montreal. Zabotin placed the samples on his desk and excitedly called Lieutenant-Colonel Motinov to see the latest “prize catch.”

There was some discussion on how the samples should be sent safely to Moscow. The diplomatic pouch wasn't regarded as safe enough. Then it was decided to send the samples with Motinov who was due to return to Moscow shortly for reassignment to Washington. Motinov, of course, was delighted because bringing back uranium samples would more or less assure him a good reception.

Zabotin was in high fettle. I heard him say excitedly: “Now that the Americans have invented it, we must steal it!”

Klaus Fuchs already had.

If Stalin knew as much about the bomb as Harry Truman, the Soviet dictator seems nevertheless not to have grasped its full import until word arrived of the destruction of Hiroshima. “I didn't see my father until August,” Svetlana Alliluyeva reports, “when he got back from the Potsdam Conference. The day I was out at his dacha he had the usual visitors. They told him that the Americans had dropped the first atom bomb over Japan. Everyone was busy with that, and my father paid hardly any attention to me.” She had borne him a grandson whom he had not yet seen and had given her son his name, Josef, but he was too preoccupied, or too indifferent to her, to respond. According to NKVD staff physicist Yakov Terletsky, who probably heard the story in the corridors of the Lubyanka, “after the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Stalin had a tremendous blow-up for the first time since the war began, losing his temper, banging his fists on the table and stamping his feet.” Terletsky thought Stalin “had something to be angry about. After all, the dream of extending the socialist revolution throughout Europe had collapsed, the dream that had seemed so close to being realized after Germany's capitulation. Hiroshima seemed to highlight the ‘negligence’ of our atomic scientists headed by Kurchatov.” It would have been entirely consistent with Stalin's character to blame the difficulties Kurcha-tov's underfunded and low-priority bomb project had encountered on Kurchatov himself. According to Anatoli Alexandrov, who worked with Kurchatov and probably heard the story from him, at some time during this immediate postwar period “Stalin summoned Kurchatov and accused him of not demanding enough for maximum acceleration of the work. Kurchatov answered, ‘So much is destroyed, so many people perished. The country is on starvation rations and everything is in shortage.’ Stalin said irritably, ‘If the baby doesn't cry, the mother doesn't know what he needs. Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals.’” August 7, Stalin met promptly with Lavrenti Beria and appointed Beria head of the bomb program. Once again, lacking faith in the patriotism of his scientists, Stalin would rely on his whip.

The Soviet press delayed announcing the Hiroshima bombing until the morning of August 8 and underplayed the story, Pravda publishing only an excerpt from Truman's statement at the bottom of the foreign page. But the event did not go unnoticed. “On my way to the bakery,” Andrei Sakharov remembered, “… I stopped to glance at a newspaper and discovered President Truman's announcement… I was so stunned that my legs practically gave way. There could be no doubt that my fate and the fate of many others, perhaps of the entire world, had changed overnight. Something new and awesome had entered our lives, a product of the greatest of the sciences, of the discipline I revered.”

Just as Truman had feared, Stalin moved up his intervention in the Far East from the mid-August launch he had promised at Potsdam to August 8. “I declared war on Japan,” Molotov bragged. “I called the Japanese ambassador to the Kremlin and handed him the note.” Molotov received the press that night to pass along the text of the Soviet declaration of war without a word about the atomic bomb. A member of the Polish Provisional Government in Moscow at the time, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, asked Molotov at supper if the bomb would affect the international situation. “This is American propaganda,” Molotov snapped. “From a military point of view it has no important meaning whatsoever.” The Soviet people knew better, Alexander Werth reports:

Yet the bomb was the one thing everybody in Russia had talked about that whole day… Although the Russian press played down the Hiroshima bomb, and did not even mention the Nagasaki bomb until much later, the significance of Hiroshima was not lost on the Russian people. The news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realized that this was a New Fact in the world's power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia's desperately hard victory over Germany was now “as good as wasted.”

There had been a great victory parade in Red Square on June 24, hundreds of Nazi flags captured in the march westward to Berlin flung down on the steps of Lenin's tomb at Stalin's feet in a driving rainstorm, and a celebration that night at the Kremlin when Stalin entertained several thousand officers and soldiers of his victorious army. But Ilya Ehrenburg described a harsher reality that month, a nation in ruins:

France recently commemorated by a day of mourning the anniversary of the destruction of Oradour-sur- Glan. In Czechoslovakia President Benes drove out to the ashen ruins of Lidice. I think about our own Oradours and Lidices: how many are there? If you proceed west from Moscow to Minsk, or south to Poltava, or north to Leningrad, you will see everywhere ruins, ashes, graves, and after removing your cap you will not put it back on again. And everywhere the surviving inhabitants will tell how men swung from gallows, how mothers attempted to save babes-in-arms from the executioners, how houses with live people in them were burned to the ground.

One-tenth of the Soviet population — some twenty million human beings — had died in the war; millions more were invalids. The NKVD under Lavrenti Beria had murdered at least another ten million Soviet citizens, a slaughter more extensive than that of the Holocaust. “In the age groups that had borne arms,” writes Werth, “there were at the end of the war only 31 million men left, as against 52 million women.” The Germans had destroyed 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages, 84,000 schools, 40,000 hospitals, 42,000 public libraries. Twenty-five million people were left homeless. Coal production compared to 1941 was down 33 percent; oil down 46 percent; electricity down 33 percent; pig iron down 54 percent; steel down 48 percent; coke down 46 percent; machine-tool production down 35 percent. Thirty-one thousand industrial enterprises had been destroyed; overall, Soviet industry had been razed to one-half its prewar level. “Ninety-eight thousand collective farms and 1,800 state farms were destroyed or looted,” Molotov reported in 1947; “7 million horses, 17 million head of cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats had vanished.” Meat production was down 40 percent; dairy production down 55 percent. The Red Army was the strongest force in Europe, but the Soviet people were exhausted and nearly starving.

And now the battered nation would have to gear up to build the atomic bomb. At the Yalta Conference in