Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

February 1945, Molotov had whispered that the Soviet Union would look with favor upon a US loan of $6 billion for postwar reconstruction. Building the industry necessary to manufacture atomic bombs had cost the United States more than $2 billion. That much would have to be subtracted from the crippled Soviet economy to win a similar capability for the USSR in the years after the war. Ten days after Hiroshima, the Supreme Soviet ordered the State Planning Commission and the Council of People's Commissars to begin work on a new Five-Year Plan. In mid-August, Stalin called together People's Commissar of Munitions Boris Vannikov and his deputies. Kurchatov walked in and they knew why they were summoned. “A single demand of you, comrades,” Stalin told them, “provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time. You know that Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The equilibrium has been destroyed. Provide the bomb — it will remove a great danger from us.”

10 A Pretty Good Description

In August 1945, the most destructive war in history ground to an end, having claimed 55 million human lives. The Japanese armies in Manchuria quickly collapsed before the Soviet advance that began at midnight on August 8.[19] A United States B-29 atomic-bombed Nagasaki on August 9. For the next several days, Japanese military factions maneuvered unsuccessfully to prevent a humiliating surrender. Emperor Hirohito, in an unprecedented broadcast to his people on August 15, announced that surrender, which Japanese officials signed in Tokyo Bay aboard the United States battleship Missouri on September 2 with Curtis LeMay among the officials on hand to watch. Two great powers emerged from the ruins. The United States and the Soviet Union were both young nations forged in revolution, both ethnically diverse, organized on abstract principles rather than historically evolved, both vast in extent and rich in resources. They contested no territory, which led Enrico Fermi to ask dryly once when someone insisted that the two countries would go to war one day, “Where will they fight?” But their physical similarities did not obscure an intractable difference between them. They were opposite experiments in the large organization of people and natural wealth, the one through liberty and competition, the other through terror and centralized control, an open society and a closed — a crystal of quartz and a crystal of onyx, Robert Oppenheimer once contrasted them — and each was convinced that the other side's intentions were malevolent. Astride the ruins of Europe and Asia they were positioned peacefully to organize the world, but they could not agree on how the world should be organized.

Their mutual victories thus became mutual warnings. The Red Army — thousands of tanks, artillery pieces and mobile rocket launchers and ten million foot soldiers — had smashed west across Eastern Europe and Germany; it might as inexorably roll on to the Atlantic in a matter of days and confine all of Europe behind what Winston Churchill had already, before the end of the war, called an “iron curtain.” The much less numerous US forces in Europe would certainly be overwhelmed by such an advance, but America knew how to build atomic bombs, and the Soviet Union understood that its recent ally had developed that capability clandestinely and had not hesitated to use the cruel new weapons of mass destruction against an enemy which had no such weapons of its own.

Yet neither side seems to have wanted — or expected — war, at least not in the short run. Each demobilized rapidly, the Soviet Union reducing the strength of its armies by the end of 1946 from 11.5 million to fewer than three million, the US by mid-1947 from more than twelve million to fewer than 1.6 million. The long run was more problematic. Since the Russian Revolution, the wealthy elite of the United States had feared that the red tide of Communism would flood across the world if it was not resolutely stanched. The Soviet victory over Germany, Stalin's evident determination to dominate Eastern Europe, his reluctance to quit northern Iran, all reinforced Western fears. “‘Give [the Germans] twelve or fifteen years,’” the Soviet dictator had predicted to a delegation of Yugoslavs over dinner in Milovan Djilas's presence in the final winter of the war, “‘and they'll be on their feet again.’” “[Stalin] got up,” Djilas writes, “hitched up his pants as though he was about to wrestle or to box, and cried out almost in a transport, ‘The war shall soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we'll have another go at it.’” But Stalin was nothing if not cautious — “he regarded as sure only whatever he held in his fist,” Djilas adds, “and everyone beyond the control of his police was a potential enemy” — and the Americans had the bomb.

“A lot of urgent long sittings were held,” Igor Golovin reports of those first months after the war. “At one of the first sittings Stalin asked how much time would be necessary to create the bomb. [Isaak] Kikoin answered: ‘five years.’ The first priority in the State was given to the solution of the atomic problem… ” “Until 1945,” Yuli Khariton and Yuri Smirnov note, “this program was carried out by only a few researchers who had scarce resources. The project gained real momentum only after the first American atomic explosions. It was precisely at that time that the Soviet atomic industry and technology could be developed on a broad footing, with large installations and combines.”

The State Defense Committee formally enacted Stalin's decision on August 20, 1945, naming a Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb headed by Lavrenti Beria charged with coordinating all work on nuclear energy. The committee's membership included rising Politburo star Georgi Malenkov; Boris Vannikov; Avrami Zavenyagin, the Red Army general and senior NKVD officer who had led the roundup of uranium ore and scientists in defeated Germany; Mikhail Pervukhin, the chemical industry commissar; Peter Ka-pitza; and Igor Kurchatov. “Stalin's word decided the fate of the project in general,” says Anatoli Alexandrov. “One gesture of Beria was sufficient to make any of us to disappear. But Kurchatov was on the very top of the pyramid. It was our great luck then that he combined competence, accountability and power.”

Beria led the atomic-bomb project more actively than Alexandrov's comment implies, Khariton has insisted:

Once the project passed into Beria's hands, the situation changed completely. Beria understood the necessary scope and dynamics of the research. This man, who was the personification of evil in modern Russian history, also possessed great energy and capacity for work. The scientists who met him could not fail to recognize his intelligence, his will power, and his purposefulness. They found him a first-class administrator who could carry a job through to completion. It may be paradoxical, but Beria — who often displayed great brutishness — could also be courteous, tactful and simple when circumstances demanded it.

The US War Department with Truman's approval released a report on the Manhattan Project on August 12 that supplied the Soviet Union with information on atomic-bomb development nearly equivalent to all the information it had acquired laboriously during the war through espionage. The General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, written by Princeton physicist Henry D. Smyth and quickly nicknamed the Smyth Report, confirmed the validity of that espionage. It discussed the problems the Manhattan Project had encountered in separating uranium isotopes, building reactors, breeding plutonium and designing the bomb and identified the most effective solutions. General Groves had ordered the report written to draw a line of declassified information beyond which Manhattan Project scientists, whom he thought irresponsible, could not trespass, but the result belied his intention. When Alan Nunn May eventually confessed to espionage, he sought to minimize the damage he had done by comparing his indiscretions to the Smyth Report: “I also gave… a written report on atomic research as known to me. This information was mostly of a character which has since been published… ” Smyth's dry, semitechnical study did not mention implosion, but the Soviets already knew about that technology in detail.

On September 5, in Canada, disaster struck Soviet foreign intelligence. Igor Gouzenko, the code clerk who had transferred to Ottawa in June 1943, had barely avoided being sent back to the Soviet Union in September 1944. Since then he had been preparing to defect. In the late summer of 1945, he was twenty-six and married, with a pregnant wife, Svetlana (“Anna”), and a young son, and Canadians who knew him then and later noticed that he was wide-eyed at the freedom and prosperity of the West. When he had first come to Canada, at a stop on the way to Ottawa, he and a fellow clerk had impulsively bought a crate of oranges. Gouzenko had only once before in his life tasted an orange; on the train he gorged on them — oranges spilling in the aisle, an orgy of oranges. “You take your wife to the movie at night,” he told an acquaintance after his defection. “I don't do that. Anna and I go to the