Pariskaya and Sakharov together washed the enormous window at the end of the institute's main corridor and Sakharov was proud of his work. “Now I've learned to wash windows,” he told Pariskaya. “This may come in handy.” Here's a man who will always be himself, Pariskaya decided.)
The Russian translation
“With the discovery of fission,” comments C. P. Snow, “… physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nation-state could call upon.” Stalin still had suspicions about his physicists, but he now arranged for their comforts. Kurchatov met with Stalin, Beria and Molotov at the Kremlin late on the night of January 25, 1946, to discuss the bomb program. Kapitza was on someone's mind that night, probably Beria's; Kurchatov notes chillingly that “a question was asked about Ioffe, Alikhanov, Kapitza and [FIAN director Sergei] Vavilov, and about the utility of Kapitza's work. Misgivings were expressed: who were they working for, and to what were their activities directed — the good of the Motherland or not?” Stalin decisively rejected Kapitza's proposal of an independent Soviet program, which the physicist had argued would be cheaper than the US approach. “In the course of the conversation,” write Khariton and Smirnov, “Stalin advised avoiding side issues or wasting time looking for inexpensive solutions to problems. He stressed that the work should be done ‘on a broad front, on a Russian scale,’ and that he would give it full support. Stalin mentioned that our scientists are modest people and ‘sometimes don't realize that they don't live well enough.’” Kurchatov noted at the meeting that “in respect to scientists, Stalin was concerned to… improve their everyday conditions and to reward them for major achievements — for example, for the solution to our problem… He proposed that we report on the measures necessary to speed our work, to list everything that we need.” Exiled geneticist Zhores Medvedev comments:
Financial resources for science were increased sharply. The average salary for scientists was doubled or tripled, and in a country where food and consumer goods were still rationed, scientists found themselves in the highest privileged group.
Almost half of the western part of the Soviet Union was in ruins, and the farmers of many destroyed villages lived in dugouts… on the sites of their war-burnt homes, but scientists suddenly became the privileged elite of the country, their living standards having been raised much higher than the pre-war level. The new institutes multiplied like cells in a culture, and almost all demobilized soldiers who had a secondary education… were absorbed by the enlarged network of higher technical schools and universities. The number of students, which was 817,000 just before the war, reached more than 1,500,000 in 1948–1949.
“Our state has suffered very much,” Kurchatov paraphrased Stalin in his notes on their January 25 meeting, “yet it is surely possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well, and several thousand people better than very well, with their own dachas, so that they can relax, and with their own cars.” Stalin had a special gift for Igor Kurchatov. The Soviet dictator authorized building the project director a house on the grounds of Laboratory No. 2. An Academician architect designed an elegant eight-room, two-story Italianate structure with a classical pediment, large windows, parquet floors, marble fireplaces, fine wooden paneling and a sweeping central stairway. Building began early in 1946, with Italian craftsmen imported to finish the interior. The Kurchatovs occupied the house the following November. In contrast to the usual shoddy socialist construction, the opulent structure that Kurchatov's staff nicknamed ironically “the forester's cabin” was comparable in the quality of its workmanship to the Kremlin, which was built, of course, for the czars. From his “cabin,” Kurchatov could stroll through a forest aromatic with birch and pine to the site he had chosen nearby for the F-l reactor, which would be shielded below ground in a ten-meter pit dug under tenting, but later fitted with a brick laboratory building of its own, code-named “Assembly Workshops.” Highly purified uranium metal and graphite were still in short supply in 1945; excavation for the F-l reactor had not yet begun at the end of the year.
12
Peculiar Sovereignties
In the months immediately postwar, United States military and intelligence organizations wheeled their attention like heavy artillery around from Germany and Japan to the Soviet Union. Not only did real Soviet forces on the ground in Europe challenge, by their continued presence, the demobilizing Western defense; the Soviet Union was also the only theoretical enemy visible, as far ahead as it was sensible to look. In a first working estimate of the number of atomic bombs the US should stockpile, for example, confined to the years 1945–1955 when conventional bombers would still be the only available means of delivery, US Army Air Forces Major General Lauris Nor-stad pointed out that “during this period Russia and the United States will be the outstanding military powers,” and for that reason the estimate used “the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war… as a basis upon which to predicate the United States atomic bomb requirements.” To General Groves, who continued by default to direct the atomic weapons program, the Soviet Union had always been the ultimate adversary; from the beginning, Groves had guided the Manhattan Project in the direction not of making a few bombs to end a war but of developing a broad industrial capability to turn out atomic weapons in quantity after the war was won. Regardless of political views, responsible contingency planning required military leaders to consider from which direction war might come and what forces and strategy they would need to forestall it or to claim victory. This planning proceeded even as the United States government attempted to negotiate through the United Nations a program of international control of atomic energy. Such cross-wired confusion about the application of nuclear energy to war and international relations would trouble American atomic policy for years to come.
On August 8, 1945, between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, USAAF General Carl Spaatz, anticipating “plans for [a] post-war atomic-bomb program,” stressed in a memorandum that “the atomic bomb is essentially an air weapon” and “there must be a plan for orderly transition from the present to a post-war basis which envisions our ability on short notice to deliver atomic bombs… ” Spaatz proposed that the 509th Composite
Group, which had been organized under Colonel Paul Tibbets to drop the first atomic bombs, “should remain intact as a nucleus for an expanded program.” Spaatz was commander of the Pacific Air Force at the time; in 1946 he became commanding general of the air forces. The 509th, renamed the 509th Bomb Group, which operated the only aircraft equipped to carry atomic bombs, moved to Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, soon after the war.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff met secretly before the atomic bombings of Japan and approved a new policy of “striking the first blow” — surprise attack — in the event of an atomic war. The first-strike policy found embodiment subsequently in a planning document issued on September 20, 1945, which stressed that during a crisis, while diplomacy proceeded, the military should be “making all preparations to strike a first blow if necessary.” Surprise attack went against previous US military policy, which had been formally defensive, as well as national tradition, but the change was not gratuitous. To the Joint Chiefs it seemed to follow logically from a realistic assessment of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons: whoever struck first with such powerful weapons was likely to carry the day. “Offense,” the Joint Chiefs would assert two years later, “recognized in the past as the best means of defense, in atomic warfare will be the only general means of defense.” In that spirit, by October 1945, the JCS Joint Intelligence Committee began drafting a plan for a first strike on the Soviet Union of twenty to thirty atomic bombs, a number based on a realistic assessment of currently available resources of ore and manufacture. The plan foresaw two scenarios that might require such a strike: in retaliation for Soviet aggression or, when the Soviet Union became capable of attacking the United States or of repelling a US attack, as preventive war.
Groves also mulled preventive war in those first heady months of nuclear monopoly. “If we were truly
