the secret of atomic weapons. I would like your laboratory, which has been working on radiography of explosions and detonations, to engage itself fully with the atomic problem. Don't give a thought to the formal side of the matter, all of that will be properly drawn up in due course. All I need from you is your consent.” We requested two or three weeks’ time to think the proposal over, although we did give him our tentative consent.
The following month, January 1946, Zukerman and Lev Altshuler received State Prizes for inventing flash radiography of explosive phenomena — reinventing, actually, since flash radiography had been developed secretly at Los Alamos during the war to observe implosion, the same purpose to which Khariton hoped to apply it. Khariton reappeared in February. “This time,” says Zukerman, “he'd come for a working conference.” In the course of the conference, he told them, “I can't rule out the possibility that certain experiments will be called for in the course of your development work that will be difficult to conduct in Moscow conditions. It could be that you'll have to relocate to different regions of the country for six months, a year. But it's still early to be talking about that.”
It was not too early for Khariton to be doing someuhing about that. While Stalin was complaining to
It was clear that creating the bomb would require colossal pressures to squeeze fissionable materials, and also that pressures of the required magnitudes could be created by large-scale explosions. Moscow was hardly a suitable place for carrying out work of this sort. And finding a suitable, unpopulated area not far from Moscow was not a simple matter. We spent a lot of time surveying the grounds of various munitions factories that had been active during the war. Finally, after long searching, on April 2, 1946, Pavel Mikhailovich Zernov (the future head of the Institute, once it was organized) and I arrived at the small town of Sarov. Here there was a small factory that had produced shells for
Boris Vannikov had recommended the location, Khariton notes. “We immediately took a liking to the place… Looking down from a high riverbank, Pavel Mikhailovich began planning the locations for our production buildings and the future town. I was struck by the ease with which he could do that. Most of the plans he indicated then were eventually realized.”
Sarov, four hundred kilometers due east of Moscow, was the site of a famous monastery. The new Soviet state took over the monastery in the 1920s and used it to house war orphans, a mission celebrated in a popular Soviet motion picture. In the 1930s the monastery became a prison camp. After Khariton and Zernov selected it, a detachment of Beria's troops ringed it with a double fence of barbed wire and it disappeared from the map. The record is silent on the fate of its population of several thousand souls. At various times it would be known as the Volga Office, KB [i.e., Design Bureau]-ll, Installation No. 558, Kremlev, Moscow Center 300, Arzamas-75 and Arzamas-16. To its scientific occupants it was always known simply as Sarov. Khariton and Zernov had found the Soviet Los Alamos.
13
Changing History
Klaus Fuchs did not return to England in December 1945, as he had expected to do. With the decision to stage a test of the effect of atomic bombs on ships at Bikini and with so many American scientists leaving Los Alamos to return to teaching, Norris Bradbury asked the hardworking physicist to stay on into the spring to help with preparations. Harry Gold insisted later that he had no further contact with Fuchs after their September 19 meeting in Santa Fe, but Fuchs himself confessed in 1950 to “several further meetings with [a Russian agent] in Santa Fe in the autumn of 1945 and spring of 1946.” If Gold was telling the truth — and he is unlikely to have lied at a time when he had already revealed espionage episodes of which he was deeply ashamed — then Fuchs must have been in contact with some other courier. He never identified that contact. To the contrary, he maintained that “Raymond” was his sole cut-out during his years in the US. His denial is unconvincing. After his arrest in 1949, he denied recognizing Gold until Gold confessed. He steadfastly denied the telephone contact in New York that allowed Gold to reconnect with him in Cambridge after he moved to Los Alamos. He denied knowing “Sonia's” identity until after her escape to East Germany in 1950. Nor is it credible that Soviet intelligence would ignore Fuchs at the very time when the Soviet bomb program was expanding to full scale under Beria's new authority. If Beria was willing to risk revealing the existence of that program by pursuing Niels Bohr (and, in 1946, the German Nobel laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg[23]), why would his foreign intelligence
The likeliest courier in contact with Fuchs at Los Alamos after September 19, 1945, would have been Lona Cohen. Anatoli Yatzkov has claimed that Lona Cohen visited Albuquerque twice to contact “Perseus,” who supposedly moved to Los Alamos during the war. Cohen herself admitted only to meeting “a physicist.” Perseus may be mythical or a composite, and Cohen's adventures may well concern Klaus Fuchs. Yatzkov had good reason for disconnecting Harry Gold from Fuchs as well as from David Greenglass. Not only had Igor Gouzenko's defection seemed to put them all at great risk of discovery, but Gold, as Yatzkov had warned him during the summer, was dangerously linked to Abe Brothman, whom Yatzkov knew to be under active surveillance. If Yatzkov disconnected Gold from Fuchs after September 1945 because of Gouzenko's defection and the Brothman connection, the Soviet
Before then, Gold had ample occasion to notice Yatzkov/Yakovlev's discomfort. At a meeting between the two men late in 1945, says Gold, “Yakovlev… told me that I should be very careful, much more careful than ever before.[24] He related to me an incident which had taken place [recently]. He said that a very important person who had upon him information on the atom bomb had come to New York… and that he, Yakovlev, had tried to get in touch with that person over a period of time, a period of a few days, but that the man had been trailed by Intelligence men continually, so that Yakovlev had to give up the idea of getting in touch with this source of information.” Who this “very important person” might have been has never been established, although Donald Maclean traveled to New York from time to time to deliver espionage materials and had participated in planning British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's visit to Washington in November to discuss postwar Anglo-American atomic policy. Yatzkov/Yakovlev, in the FBI's paraphrase of Gold's testimony, “was very touchy and very apprehensive… during this meeting [with Gold] — [He] made a couple of other appointments with [Gold] at that time… but… did not keep any of these appointments.”
In February 1946, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested twenty-two Canadian citizens and residents suspected of espionage on the basis of Igor Gouzenko's documents and testimony. Among those arrested was Israel Halperin, in whose address book the Mounties had found Klaus Fuchs's intern-camp and Edinburgh addresses and Kristel Heineman's address in Massachusetts. Learning that Soviet GRU (military intelligence) had given Alan Nunn May a new contact in London, the RCMP allowed him to return to England undisturbed, where British authorities arrested him after several delays on March 4.
For reasons Gold never explained, and in violation of the unwritten regulations to which he was otherwise fastidiously devoted, he decided after missing his meeting with Yatzkov early in 1946 to look up Fuchs at Kristel Heineman's house in Cambridge, as Fuchs had told him he could do. He arrived on another snowy February morning. “On previous trips to Cambridge the only persons I had (variously) encountered there were Kristel Heineman… and her small children, a maid, a housekeeper and Klaus Fuchs himself. But this time, unluckily for me, the husband, Robert Heine-man, was present, and along with him a friend, a Greek… ” The Greek, Konstantin Lafazanos, lived with the Heinemans; he was a professional graduate student, Robert's pal and (according to the FBI) Kristel's lover. The two men were home because of a power failure at Harvard. Gold stayed for lunch; Lafazanos recalled later that
