development of atomic
As a technician, Bradbury was offended by the crudeness of the weapons they had designed. “We had only scratched the surface of atomic bombs,” he would recall. “We had, to put it bluntly, lousy bombs. We had a set of bombs which were totally wrongly matched to the production empire.” They would go to work “engineering… a new weapon whose aims should be… increased reliability, ease of assembly, safety, and performance; in short, a better weapon… Possibly in six months, possibly in a year — maybe in a few years, weaponeering will stop, but our present lead is our chief weapon in procuring a peace — we must not lose it until that peace and that cooperation is established.” In the meantime they would “stockpile the current [Fat Man] up to a number of 15,” but they would “develop internal modifications, possibly in the method of fusing, almost certainly in the method of detonating.” They would also “develop a levitated model.”
Consistent with the recommendations of the Interim Committee scientific panel, but not with the moral qualms Compton had expressed, Bradbury proposed “that the fundamental experiments leading to the answer to the question ‘Is or is not a Super feasible?’ be undertaken. These experiments are of interest in themselves in many cases; but even more, we cannot avoid the responsibility of knowing the facts, no matter how terrifying. The word ‘feasible’ is a weasel word — it covers everything from laboratory experiments up to the possibility of actual building, for only by building something do you actually finally determine
So Los Alamos had a new leader, and a program, and a staff of several thousand younger men and women, about half its wartime complement. They would get busy again, working on improvements. Bradbury set everyone to work writing down what he or she had learned during the war. The resulting multi-volume series of technical reports became a significant historical record of the development of the first atomic bombs. By October 1945, Los Alamos had procured hardware (but not uranium, plutonium or initiators) sufficient for sixty bombs and had begun developing an improved implosion design with a levitated composite core. Maybe the lab would survive.
The “urgent long sittings” in Moscow of September and October gave way to action. “It was necessary to employ more and more people and to choose the staff for work on the nuclear enterprises,” Mikhail Pervukhin recalled. “There was no nuclear industry as such and there were no trained personnel for it. But we had chemists, metallurgists and other specialists. We needed engineers and workers for the nuclear enterprise. We explained to people that we needed them for a new field that was very important to the state. Not everyone understood immediately. It was difficult to negotiate with ministers. ‘You are taking our people from us,’ they would say, ‘while we have our own tasks to do, our own state plans. We will not give away our people!’ In such cases the Central Committee apparatus was very helpful. It was their job to explain everything in the right way and to attract the necessary people.”
On the scientific front as well, Igor Golovin notes, “every institute capable of helping solve the atomic problem was called upon to mobilize its scientific resources and contribute under an integrated scientific plan. New institutes were brought into being to develop research that had not existed before the war (for example, uranium and plutonium metallurgy).”
The task they faced was daunting. “Yesterday I met the physicists and the radiochemists from the Radium Institute,” Boris Vannikov, who was responsible under Beria for the industrial part of the enterprise, told one of his deputies in September. “For the present we are still speaking different languages. Or more precisely, they are speaking while I blink — We engineers are used to touching everything with our hands and seeing everything with our eyes, and in extreme cases a microscope will help. But here it is powerless. It makes no difference, you won't see an atom, and even less will you see what is hidden inside it. And on the basis of this invisible and intangible thing, we have to build factories and organize industrial production.” They pushed ahead. Averell Harriman in Moscow later that autumn reported a Soviet contact with a Westinghouse engineer that offered “possible indications that the USSR is studying equipment for the manufacture of the A-bomb.”
In September, Soviet troops had occupied Japanese mining sites in North Korea and had begun a preliminary survey of the ores found there, which included useful sources of uranium and thorium. On November 19, a reliable source in Czechoslovakia cabled the US State Department that “the Czechoslovakian Government has been officially requested to furnish uranium ore to the Soviet government.” The Soviet Union concluded a secret agreement with Czechoslovakia on November 23 granting it exclusive rights to all uranium mined within the country and began expanding mining around Jachymov, the old site in the Ore Mountains where the ores were dug from which uranium was first isolated in 1789- Marie and Pierre Curie had extracted the first polonium and radium from Jachymov ores (U238 decays to radium and polonium along the way to becoming lead). Czechoslovakia would get part of the radium recovered from the ore in return. Under Soviet supervision, sixty-four German (presumably Nazi) political prisoners first worked the Czech mines in 1946, increasing to nearly twelve thousand in 1953 (by that time all Czech). The Czech government organized some seventeen forced-labor camps at its mines over the years; Czech ore deposits met about 15 percent of Soviet uranium requirements through 1950. Soviet geologists also began extensive exploration throughout the USSR and found additional deposits in southwestern Siberia. By Groves's standards the Siberian ore was of low quality, but the Soviets sorted out the best pieces by hand during mining and concentrated the material to 1 percent or better locally before shipping it to the refinery. Domestic sources met about one-third of Soviet uranium needs through 1950.
Although the small F-l reactor at Kurchatov's Laboratory No. 2 was still in the planning stage, a government commission in October inspected and approved a location east of the Urals for the Soviet Hanford, where the first big plutonium-production reactor and extraction facility would be built. The Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in Chelyabinsk province, Kurchatov's ancestral home, had merged during the war with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant to become a major tank production complex known popularly as Tankograd. To supply the complex and dozens of other armament works in the area, a huge new power station had gone up in 1942 from which electricity could be drawn. Chelyabinsk province, particularly around the small town of Kyshtym, was also a major gulag station, with some twelve labor camps in the area. In November 1945, site studies began for the plutonium-production complex, to be known as Che-lyabinsk-40, some fifteen miles east of Kyshtym, in the area around Lake Kyzyltash in the upper drainage basin of the Techa River. The first buildings for what would become a city — Beria, it was gloomily named — also went up that month. There were four gulags in the immediate area of the site, three for men, one for women. Prisoners started cutting down forests by hand; army tanks fitted with bulldozer blades graded out roads.
In September 1945, Lavrenti Beria appointed Pavel Sudoplatov, an NKVD officer who had previously specialized in organizing assassinations (including Trotsky's) and guerrilla warfare, to head a new Department S (“S for Sudoplatov,” Sudoplatov claims). Beria charged the new department with reviewing, translating and communicating to Soviet scientists the vast information collected on the Anglo-American atomic-bomb program that only Kurchatov and a few select assistants, including Khariton, had been allowed to see before. According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (the successor agency to Soviet intelligence), Sudoplatov's department “had no direct contact with the agents’ network” and Sudoplatov himself “had access to atomic problems during a relatively brief period of time, a mere twelve months [i.e., from September 1945 to September 1946].”
Sudoplatov evidently initiated almost immediately an ad hoc, bungled NKVD attempt to extract technical information from Niels Bohr, who had returned from the United States to his institute in Copenhagen immediately after the end of the war in Europe. The NKVD officer's recollection of the incident, recorded late in life, is garbled, and his co-authors’ attempts to clarify it in the 1994 book
The Smyth Report — the detailed report on the science behind the Manhattan Project — was released to the
