aging, with a skull that narrowed slightly toward the top, with severe features and no shadow of warmth or a smile. Beria did not give the impression I had expected from seeing his portraits before, of a young, energetic member of the intelligentsia wearing a pince-nez. Everyone sat down at the big conference table. In the middle of the table was a large white marble ash tray in the shape of a polar bear with little ruby eyes. That was the only object on the long table… [and] it was obvious that no one used it.
Beria questioned Terletsky about his background. He asked the young physicist and Sudoplatov how they envisioned their assignment. Terletsky says he “was completely unclear as to what I was supposed to ask Bohr.” Sudoplatov professed to have no idea. Then it emerged that Terletsky's English was too poor for conversation with Bohr and that the NKVD officer who would be accompanying him, Lev Vasilevsky, Sudoplatov's deputy, only knew French. Beria assigned a translator. Terletsky got the impression that no one had thought his mission through. To cobble together a list of questions, he writes, Beria summoned Vannikov, Vannikov's deputy Avrami Za-venyagin and “the scientists.” Less then an hour later Kurchatov, Khariton, Kikoin and Artsimovich arrived at the Lubyanka. When Khariton heard that a novice like Terletsky was being sent to question Bohr, he told Beria bluntly that it would be better to send Zeldovich. “He would worm all the fine points of the atomic problem out of Bohr,” Terletsky remembers Khariton explaining. “Beria cut him off,” Terletsky continues, “saying in his harsh Georgian accent, ‘We don't know who would worm more out of whom.’” Beria had no intention of sending someone out of the country who had knowledge of the Soviet program and who might be kidnapped or might defect. He ordered the scientists to prepare a list of questions. They went off to do so. In the hallway, Khariton tried to talk Terletsky out of the mission. Terletsky understood all too well that he had no choice but to go.
Sudoplatov required Terletsky to memorize the questions the scientists had prepared and Beria had approved and charged the naive young operative not to deviate from the list. Since writing down Bohr's answers might make the Dane suspicious, Terletsky was expected to memorize the answers as well.
Off Terletsky, Vasilevsky and the translator went to Copenhagen, Terletsky marveling along the way not at the girls but that “the people on the streets were well-dressed, the stores filled with goods, and all sorts of food, including sweets and fruits… in abundance.” A Communist member of the Danish parliament approached Bohr and asked him to meet with Terletsky, telling him the Soviet physicist carried a letter from Kapitza, Bohr's old colleague at Cambridge University, and wished to deliver it to Bohr in confidence. Bohr's response was blunt: he could not agree to secret arrangements of any kind; if a Soviet scientist wished to speak with him, the meeting would have to be open. Bohr immediately communicated the contact to British intelligence, which notified Groves.
Terletsky in Copenhagen followed up with a letter on November 13 asking for an open meeting. Bohr agreed to meet the next morning. As a precaution, he asked his twenty-four-year-old son Aage, also a physicist, to sit in with him, and stationed another son in an adjoining room with a pistol in case the Soviets had kidnapping in mind. Aage Bohr remembers the encounter:
Terletsky brought with him a letter of introduction (dated October 22, 1945) from Kapitza… Kapitza sent along recent scientific publications from his Institute. The conversation with Terletsky first dealt with Kapitza and other personal acquaintances among Russian physicists. Terletsky then raised some technical questions concerning atomic energy, to which my father answered that he was not acquainted with details and referred Terletsky to the report recently published by the US (Smyth Report)…
According to Terletsky, Niels Bohr talked at length — about Lev Landau, with whose political safety he apparently continued to be concerned, and about preventing nuclear war — and gave the Soviet delegation a tour of his institute. Terletsky remembered vividly, twenty-five years later, Bohr saying “that in his opinion, all countries should have the atomic bomb, and Russia first of all. Only by extending this powerful weapon to other countries could we guarantee that it would not be used in the future.” Bohr never once expressed such a reckless idea anywhere in the West, nor, it seems, did he promote nuclear proliferation to Terletsky. In Terletsky's contemporary notes of his questions and Bohr's answers, he quotes the Danish physicist on just this issue. In response to the question if there were any defenses against the atomic bomb, Bohr told him that “only international cooperation, exchange of scientific discoveries, internationalization of the achievements of science can lead to the elimination of wars and thus to the elimination of the very necessity to use the atomic bomb. This is the only rightful method of defense… All scientists believe that this greatest discovery must belong to all the nations and serve the unprecedented progress of humankind… Atomic energy, once discovered, cannot remain the asset of one nation since a country which does not possess this secret can soon discover it independently.” “Independently,” of course, does not mean giving the bomb away. Terletsky heard what he wanted to hear.
He seems not to have understood the terms Bohr had set for the meeting; only after the group finished the tour did he realize that he would not be allowed to talk to Bohr privately, without Aage present, and hastened to start on his list of questions. His allotted hour ended before he was finished. He was frantic; “I already knew what happened when you didn't obey Beria's orders,” he writes, and Beria's orders were to ask Bohr all the questions on the list. Bohr must have understood the reason for Terletsky's discomfiture; he agreed to meet again on November 16.
Terletsky completed his questioning that Friday — “the Niels Bohr Interrogation,” Sudoplatov christened the black comedy sarcastically. Then, says Terletsky, “at his father's orders, Aage brought us a unique present, the report by Henry Smyth.” Terletsky thought in mid-November that the Smyth Report “had only just been declassified and we were probably the first Soviet people to see it.” Had Terletsky seen it in Moscow, he would have realized that the document answered most of the questions he had been assigned to ask Bohr. Ironically, Bohr had written Robert Oppenheimer on November 9 praising “the decision to publish the account of the pioneer work” but wishing that “further steps as regards release of information about purely scientific matters could soon be taken.”
Buried deep in Terletsky's list was the crucial question about reactor poisoning, placed there, Terletsky's account implies, by one of the scientists who made up the list:
Question 15:
Is there a process of slowing down the reactor due to the accumulation of waste from the fission of the light isotope of uranium?
On the way back to the Soviet Embassy from Bohr's institute, Terletsky conferred with the translator to reconstruct Bohr's answer:
Answer:
Pollution of the reactor with waste as the result of the fission of the light isotope of uranium takes place, but so far as I know, the Americans do not make special stops to clean the reactor. The reactor is cleaned when the [uranium] rods are removed for the extraction of plutonium.
Bohr was no reactor expert. The reactor was never “cleaned” to remove xenon; it was enlarged to override the poisoning effect. Kurchatov got less information than he needed. But at least Bohr (having seen the lithoprint version of the Smyth Report where the information appeared) had confirmed that poisoning took place and that the problem had a solution. Further espionage might reveal the poisonous isotope. Bohr, for his part, promptly reported the episode to Danish, British and US security. Terletsky went back to digging through the vast Lubyanka accumulation, concluding correctly that “Bohr told us nothing new beyond the Smyth Report… ” (When he reported these disappointing results to Beria, the People's Commissar was disgusted; Terletsky says Beria interjected “crude curses addressed to Bohr and Americans.”)
Andrei Sakharov remembered that
