developed through the rest of the year. It concerned an issue on which Harry Gold could have advised Kapitza from his experience supplying industrial espionage: whether, as Beria was proposing, the first Soviet atomic bomb would be a copy of the Fat Man design, or whether, as Kapitza had proposed, the Soviets should proceed to develop a more sophisticated design of their own. “Peter Leonidovich's point of view,” comments Anatoli Alexandrov, “was that if we followed the same road the Americans followed then we would never be ahead of them. It was necessary to find our own way.” Alexandrov explains: “People like Beria could see only the bomb itself. He had no idea of the fundamental and multi-faceted character of the research. For example, Beria forbade development of a nuclear reactor for ships. He wanted the bomb first; everything else later.”
Kapitza was not risking his life opposing Beria merely for a matter of prestige. He had confronted the same issue before, in 1935, when he had been detained in Moscow and denied permission to work abroad. Then he had written to his wife, who was still in England:
All the efforts [of the state] are now directed to the accumulation of the material basis on which the socialist society will be built. This accumulation is going on at a terrific pace, at such a pace that nobody could predict. But it is going so smoothly because its base is imitation; the country spends almost nothing on the creation of new technical forms. Research is all directed to the solution of different secrets and the mastering of different processes of general character which are very well known and mastered in Western Europe. For this work one does not require any special depth of thought or qualification, but the results are very spectacular… How long this phase will continue I cannot say, but it is clear that the position of pure science, if not completely nil, is not far from it…
I am certain [that] when we shall enter in our socialist development into the period of original thought, then all will completely change… Then the inventive mind and creation will have freedom in front of it; originality of mind will then be valued more highly than organizing gifts, as is the present position.
For Kapitza, that is, the shift that he believed must come from what he called “coarse imitation]” to original science would be a movement from dogmatism to intellectual freedom. The bomb must have seemed to him a vital opportunity to demonstrate to the Soviet leadership what a significant contribution science could make. But between the physicist and his dream stood Lavrenti Beria.
“[Comrade Beria], it is true, has the conductor's baton in his hands,” Kapitza wrote Stalin again dangerously in November, pursuing his argument. “That's fine, but all the same a scientist should play first violin. For the violin sets the tone for the whole orchestra. Comrade Beria's basic weakness is that the conductor ought not only to wave the baton, but also to understand the score. In this respect Beria is weak.”
“I told him straight out,” Kapitza added: “‘You don't understand physics. Let us scientists judge these matters.’ And to that he retorted that I knew nothing about people.”
After Kapitza's assault, Beria asked Stalin if he could arrest him, which would certainly have been the physicist's death warrant. Stalin had begun to be wary of Beria's power. “I will remove him for you,” the Soviet dictator responded, “but don't you touch him.” In December, Stalin allowed Kapitza to resign from the Special Committee. Through an intrigue arranged by Beria to which Stalin presumably acquiesced, Kapitza in August 1946 was stripped of his scientific positions, including his directorship of the Institute for Physical Problems, and placed under house arrest, where he languished for the next eight years.
Beria wanted a bomb that would be guaranteed to work, even if less efficiently than his scientists would prefer. He knew the American implosion design would work. It had already been tested, twice. Once it had exploded on a tower in the New Mexican desert and turned night into day. The second time it had destroyed Nagasaki.
The Council of Foreign Ministers met in London in September 1945 to continue the work of postwar settlement that the Allies had begun at Yalta and Potsdam. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes represented the United States; British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, Great Britain; Molotov, the Soviet Union. Byrnes meant to rely on the US atomic-bomb monopoly to lever concessions from the Soviets. To his surprise, Molotov was unmoved. Did Byrnes have “an atomic bomb in his side pocket”? Molotov asked the South Carolinian when Byrnes tried to push him. “You don't know southerners,” Byrnes attempted to joke, “we carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don't cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I'm going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” That night at a cocktail party Molotov let the West have it. “At one point of the occasion,” a US security officer reported afterward, “Mr. Molotov was taking great delight in teasing Mr. Bevin, first on one thing and then on another. During the course of this badinage Mr. Molotov stepped out of the room for a minute and then suddenly reappeared with the statement, ‘You know we have the atomic bomb.’” Whereupon the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain led Molotov from the room. Byrnes took Molotov's remark for evidence at best of interest in acquiring atomic weapons. Beria, Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass or Julius Rosenberg would have recognized that Molotov was not bluffing. The Soviets did not literally have an atomic bomb. But they had the plans; they knew how to make one.
PART TWO
Hew Weapons Added to the Arsenals
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
11
Transitions
Just when the Soviet Union began a crash program to build an atomic bomb, the American program “essentially came to a grinding halt,” Los Alamos experimental physicist Raemer Schreiber remembers. Schreiber, a handsome, confident man with warm blue eyes who grew up on an Oregon farm, had been one of the crew of scientists assigned to Tinian to assemble the first atomic bombs. Los Alamos “was stopped by the time I got back,” he says, “which was early in September [1945]. People were tidying up jobs. A few of the research projects were being finished up. We were about fifty percent staffed by the Special Engineer Detachment [enlisted men] and Navy officers and other military people. And, of course, all they wanted was out. A lot of the civilian staff were just as eager to go out and take their newfound knowledge and go back and start the programs at their universities. So there really wasn't much useful work going on… It was a very severe transition period.”
If the atomic bomb had shocked the Japanese, it had also shocked America. Materializing from secrecy to such conquering effect, it seemed a mysterious and almost supernatural force. It was a new fact dropped into the world — “a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature,” as 1.1. Rabi called the first explosion at Trinity — and no one at first knew quite what to do with it. The discovery of how to release nuclear energy was a technological revolution, most of all a revolution in war; like all revolutions, its meaning would not necessarily accord with hopes or theories or prophecies, but would reveal itself over time as individuals and governments maneuvered to exploit its energies and adapt it to their goals.
The scientists who worked on the bomb also materialized from secrecy and found it necessary to explain themselves. “It kind of felt like you were caught out in the street without any clothes on,” Schreiber recalls. “I mean, we were so accustomed to having this all so hush-hush, to have it all out in public took a little getting used to… That was also the time one realized that it would be impossible to simply say, those are fine gadgets, they
