(1) Atomic bombs
(2) In conjunction with other mass destruction weapons
(3) The atomic bomb emphasizes the requirement for the most effective means of delivery.
“Experience, experience,” LeMay writes of what he was learning at this time. “Again I affirm it: no substitute for experience.”
A third test had been planned in the Bikini series, using the third available Mark HI core. Groves proposed calling it off and the Joint Chiefs agreed. More than long telegrams or abandoned food relief, Groves's reason for canceling the third test defines the changing political conditions one year after the end of a war when the US and the USSR had been allies and had defeated every power that might threaten them except each other:
I wish to call to the attention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that even a single atomic bomb can be an extremely important factor in any military emergency. It is imperative that nothing interfere with our concentration of effort on the atomic weapons stockpile which constitutes such an important element in our present national defense.
14
F-1
In July 1946, while Los Alamos was busy at Bikini, Igor Kurchatov, physicist Igor Semenovich Panasyuk and a dedicated crew of scientists and workmen began assembling the first nuclear reactor outside of North America at Laboratory No. 2.
Now Kurchatov's Moscow research center was a thriving enterprise. “The brand-new building housing [the laboratory] was flooded with sunshine and glowed with a whiteness of fresh construction unseen during years of war,” recalls Igor Golovin. The three-story building had a cyclotron on the first floor, busy laboratories and offices, enthusiastic staff. Veniamin Zukerman remembered distinctly the first scientific seminars he attended there:
Usually about twenty people would meet in an empty room; each would bring some sort of chair. The chairs would make up a motley, unmatched lot, but somehow there would always be an old-fashioned upholstered armchair with carved elbow-rests, matching legs, and a high back waiting for Igor Vasilievich [Kurchatov]. The seat and back were upholstered with bright-green plush.
He would arrive for the seminar after a sleepless night, fresh from a shower, his hair still wet. He would listen almost without interrupting, without intruding, although the discussion, as a rule, would be on subjects of interest to him.
When he chaired conferences, they were lively and provocative. He made a point of drawing out a clearly formulated opinion from everyone present. He would survey everyone in turn: “Your opinion? Yours?” If he was pleased with the answer, his encouragement would take the form of his inimitable “Quite right, quite right,” in which he came down especially hard on the prolonged, rolling “r.”… It seems that even now I can hear his powerful voice.
He was very fond of witty sayings and turns of phrase, and often came up with them himself. During one session we were discussing a technical project that was going to require the participation of industry and considerable financial expense. “Let's ring up the adminiboys right now,” said Kurchatov, dialing the phone. I bent to my neighbor at the table and asked quietly, “Who are the adminiboys?” “It's his own little abbreviation, the administrative boys, that's how he dubs everyone starting with the deputy minister.”
Kurchatov's beard was regal now, dark and thick and squared off like a Pharaoh's; the men and women who worked for him called him the Beard. Anatoli Alexandrov gave him a giant straight razor as a joke and regularly pursued him for a date when he would shave off his unique embellishment. “What kind of Beard could I be without a beard?” Kurchatov would counter. He was a heavy smoker who wore old-fashioned spectacles for reading and wrote with a steel-nibbed pen. His wife Marina played the small grand piano in the living room of their elegant house or they listened to the recordings of Russian masters and Mozart that they collected, filling the house with music. “But administrative duties distracted him,” says Golovin sympathetically. The truth was, Kurchatov worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, starting at eleven a.m. and going until early morning as all the Soviet leadership did to accommodate Stalin's vampire office hours. He “was taking enormous personal risks,” Alexandrov notes, “by deciding on the construction of large plants without possessing finished technological solutions or products. The majority of the experiments were carried out with microgram quantities of materials, not even test-tube quantities. The results of these microgram-quantity experiments were scaled up directly to industrial scale, to special equipment which had never been used before and which resembled nothing that already existed.”
Leslie Groves had taken similar risks, as a result of which the special equipment necessary to process uranium and plutonium for atomic bombs did in fact exist in the US. Because Kurchatov had at least partial access, through espionage, to information about that equipment, his task was made somewhat less burdensome, if no less dangerous (the MGB might help with information, but Beria was still looking over his shoulder). An important case in point is the first Soviet reactor itself.
Kurchatov and young Panasyuk had prepared the initial proposal for the reactor they called F-l (“Physics-1”) back in July 1943. “We see the reactor to be designed as a sort of rationally assembled installation,” they wrote, “composed of a uranium-graphite grid, graphite, control rods activated from a distance, with experimental channels and wells, to be installed in a pit dug in the ground for reasons of radiation safety.” For three years, the challenges of producing sufficiently pure graphite and metallic uranium had delayed realizing this proposal.
“We needed graphite a thousand times purer than was available then,” Alexandrov comments. “There were not even methods of measurement for purity of that degree. These methods were developed then; we developed them.” Alexandrov mentions the senior Soviet radiochemist V. G. Khlopin in particular as a leader in developing the technology to produce metallic uranium from ore. “The Germans had solved that problem,” notes Nikolai Ivanov, one of those who built the F-1 reactor, who eventually became its chief engineer. “Because we didn't know the process we had to wait until the war was over to acquire it.” The Auer Gesellschaft's Nikolaus Riehl, captured with his laboratory in Germany at the end of the war, supplied the Soviet scientists with crucial information on German uranium-processing technology. According to Riehl, the Soviets acquired full information on the American technology through espionage[25] at some point after the war and switched over from the less efficient German approach sometime after November 1946. The uranium for F-1 was probably purified by the German process, since the US process yielded extremely high purity, while the batches of F-1 material were irregular.
Calcium of high purity was a crucial ingredient in uranium metallurgy. The Soviets lacked facilities for producing pure calcium; they looked to the Soviet zone of occupied Germany for support. In the autumn of 1945 they began operating a small calcium plant at Bitterfeld; calcium from that pilot operation presumably purified the first supply of refined uranium that arrived at Laboratory No. 2 in January 1946. In April they began processing calcium at full scale at an I. G. Farben plant in Bitterfeld. “The specifications of that date,” notes a 1951 CIA review, “show little real awareness of the required final purity of uranium for use in graphite piles… ”
If the Soviet Union was forced to turn elsewhere for its industrial chemistry, its leaders had only themselves to blame. The Leningrad physicist Sergei Frish comments:
Before the war the Soviet Union had put its main efforts into heavy industry. We lagged behind in precision instrument manufacture. But there were still other negative circumstances [as well]… Due to mistakes committed by ignorant administration, several important branches of physics and chemistry had been abandoned… The director
