Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

what Fuchs knew was valuable to them. He thus became a vector for nuclear proliferation to England as well as the Soviet Union. “He is the only physicist I know who truly changed history,” Hans Bethe comments. Fuchs gave his first scientific paper at Harwell (on fast reactors, which were essentially slow bombs and were valuable for critical-mass and chain-reaction studies) in August 1946.

In 1947, Moscow Center connected Fuchs with a London-based Soviet agent, Alexander Semonovich Feklisov, who linked up with the physicist one evening at the Nags Head pub in North London. “At his own initiative,” Feklisov wrote in retirement, “Fuchs brought important materials on the technology of plutonium production [to that first meeting] which he had failed to acquire in the United States.” Fuchs's espionage continued at Harwell throughout the decade. “In 1947–1949,” writes Feklisov, “I met with Fuchs once every three or four months. All the meetings were carefully prepared; Moscow approved each plan.” The questions Feklisov asked Fuchs from quarter to quarter enabled the physicist to estimate the progress of the Soviet bomb program. At one meeting Fuchs turned the tables and queried Feklisov, “Is it true that your ‘baby’ will be born soon?” The nonplussed Soviet agent denied knowing. “I do see that my Soviet colleagues are proceeding,” Feklisov says Fuchs explained. “No one among the American and British scientists expects the Soviet Union to build its gadget for years to come.” Feklisov thought Fuchs sounded joyous.

Abe Brothman operated his commercial chemistry laboratory as a sideline; he hired Harry Gold in May 1946 to supervise the work of the laboratory staff. He was trying to develop commercial processes that he could sell. He and Gold approached the Soviet purchasing agency Amtorg that spring with a legitimate offer to design a synthetic vitamin plant. The two chemists had developed what Gold calls “a scheme of synthesis which would not conflict with any existing patents”; they gave Amtorg estimates on what the plant would cost. “Nothing ever came of it,” Gold says. He should have known nothing would.

Privately, Gold was elaborating his espionage cover story into a fantasy of family. To Brothman's secretary and mistress, Miriam Moskowitz, “he had frequently spoken… of his beautiful wife and twin children, Essie and David. He claimed his wife was a tall, redheaded girl who had formerly been a model for Gimbel's… On one occasion he even pulled out his wallet in order to show Miss Moskowitz a picture of the twins, but then replaced it almost immediately after opening it stating that he must have left the picture at home.” Moskowitz discovered Gold's deception when she asked him how many dependents she should list on his income-tax withholding form. Forgetting his fantasy family, Gold told her he had no dependents. Why wouldn't he list his wife and children? Moskowitz persisted. “Gold thereupon became ‘hysterical,’” the FBI quotes the secretary, “and insisted that she forget his family.” To cover his mistake, Gold embellished his deception further with Brothman: “In 1946, when [Gold] first came to work for [him], Gold told Brothman that his wife had left him and that he was so despondent over it that he wanted to commit suicide. Brothman said that he offered his services to effect a reconciliation and even offered to borrow money and give it to Gold if this would help in any way. Gold, however, rejected both of these offers.”

A detailed report of the Canadian investigation by a Royal Commission, published in Ottawa that June, reproduced many of the documents Gou-zenko had pirated and caused an international scandal. The encroaching Cold War felt apocalyptic to serious men and women on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Just as Richard Feynman in a Manhattan bar had been unable to shake his sense of doom, so also Lev Altshuler, working now with Veniamin Zukerman at Laboratory No. 2, thought his country felt “defenseless and alarmed”:

I remember one day in the summer of 1946 when I was strolling around Moscow with an acquaintance who had commanded an artillery division during the war. It was a clear, sunny day. Looking at the passersby, my companion wiped his face with his hand and said unexpectedly: “I look at these Muscovites and before my eyes they turn into shadows of people who have gone up in smoke in the fire of an atomic explosion.”

Sometime that spring, Yuli Khariton and his scientific team prepared a one-tenth scale model of the Fat Man design — a pear-shaped matrioshka of metal shells about fourteen inches in diameter — and delivered it to Beria for Stalin to see. A statement of the bomb's technical requirements for the Council of Ministers followed on July 25,1946. One of Beria's aides invented a name for the device, RDS-1. The scientists joked ironically that RDS was an acronym for “Russian Made,” but in fact RDS stood for Reaktivnyi dvigatel Stalina, “Stalin's Rocket Engine,” as deliberately meaningless a name as “Fat Man” or “tubealloy.”

Beria sent two observers to the US tests at Bikini that July — a Radium Institute physicist and an MGB geologist, the latter traveling as a Pravda correspondent. The deputy chairman wanted someone nearby who had seen an atomic explosion. The Soviet observers saw two, one an air drop, the second a spectacular underwater detonation that sent a column of radioactive water and steam thicker than a fleet of battleships high into the air and capped it with a polluted mushroom cloud. Nearly a year after the end of the war, the Bikini bombs used two of only three cores in the US stockpile. Nine more Christy cores would go into production at Los Alamos in mid-August 1946 at the rate of two per week, after which the lab planned to switch to producing some forty Mark IV levitated composite cores. All would fit the handmade Fat Man HE assemblies that operated on forty-eight-hour lead-acid batteries, that had to be stored disassembled, that required two days to assemble, for which there was no permanent assembly team available and no regular supply of short-lived polonium for initiators. If Lev Altshuler had known the disarray of the US stockpile, he and his friend might have felt less alarmed.

Bikini, Lewis Strauss's bright idea and Curtis LeMay's albatross, supplied a name for a scandalous new French bathing suit. Otherwise it was a technical disaster. The air drop on July 1 fell a quarter mile from its aiming point, the battleship Nevada. General Joseph W. Stilwell, “Vinegar Joe,” a hard-bitten hero of the war in China, saw the battleship still afloat from his observer plane and swore, “The damned Air Corps has missed the target again.” Radiation monitor David Bradley heard his Navy co-pilot growl, “Well, it looks to me like the atom bomb is just about like the Army Air Force[s] — highly overrated.” The snafu followed in part from interservice rivalry, a taste of things to come. The USAAF, resentful of Navy incursion into the atomic weapons field, had not supported 509th training with significant priority; of six B-29s assigned to Bikini training, no more than two were usually available at a time because of mechanical troubles. But part of the problem was simply that for reasons of safety, shipboard observers, including the media and foreign dignitaries, had been positioned too far away. The MGB geologist, Simon Alexandrov, dismissed the distant spectacle contemptuously: “Not so much.” The second, underwater shot twenty-four days later was more impressive, especially since it polluted the target ships and the entire area with radiation. By then, most of the observers had gone home. The USAAF blamed Los Alamos for the first misdropped bomb, but the morning of the drop Paul Tibbets, the wartime 509th commander, had checked the drop crew's bombsight calibration with his Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombardiers and found “obvious miscalculation.” He had informed the Bikini aircraft commander, who “listened a bit impatiently, thanked me for the advice and then told me politely that they were satisfied with their own results.” Tibbets's people ran the miscalculated numbers and predicted the miss — 1,600 feet short of the Nevada — within two hundred feet.

Bikini also fouled the message of peaceful intentions that Baruch was proclaiming at the United Nations. Pravda called the tests “common blackmail,” sneering that “if the atomic bomb at Bikini did not explode anything wonderful,” it did “explode something more important than a couple of out-of-date warships; it fundamentally undermined the belief in the seriousness of American talk about atomic disarmament.” Former Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes asked publicly if “the Bikini experiment” was “diplomacy by intimidation.” Navy Secretary James Forrestal, who attended the tests, countered lamely that they were “not a gesture of war, aggression or threat.”

One benefit at least that the tests provided was a successful experiment in long-range detection, carried out by the USAAF and Standard Oil's California Research Laboratories. An analyst reported to Groves after the experiment that it was “possible by monitoring the air currents at various points around the world to determine if an atomic bomb has been detonated in the air. By detailed analysis of wind conditions, it may also be possible to determine the direction to the blast and, by additional judicious reasoning, approximately when and where it was detonated… It is… reasonable to expect positive results at ranges of 2000 miles or less.”

However much the missed target may have chagrined Curtis LeMay — and he makes no mention whatsoever of his Bikini responsibilities in his memoirs — the two explosions were the first he had seen. He was impressed. So was the blue-ribbon evaluation board, including Vinegar Joe Stilwell, that the Joint Chiefs had sent out to observe. A year later, the board issued a report that LeMay took pains to summarize with emphasis to Carl Spaatz: