that America had a supply of atomic bombs. In fact, Winston Churchill was declaiming that it was our atomic ‘stockpile’ that restrained the Soviet Union from moving in on an otherwise defenseless Europe. What we of the new AEC had just discovered… was that this defense did not exist. There was no stockpile. There was not a single operable atomic bomb in the Vault’ at… Los Alamos… Nor could there be one for many months to come.” “This news was top secret,” Lilienthal adds, “the biggest secret of that time, so secret that I did not commit it to paper.” The AEC chairman whispered the number to the President: zero. The lightning struck Truman then: the eagle's claw was empty of arrows. “He turned to me,” says Lilienthal, “a grim, gray look on his face, the lines from his nose to his mouth visibly deepened. What [did] we propose to do about it? He realized the difficulties.”
“We had lots of capsules — nuclear cores — I guarantee you,” Jacob Wechsler explains. “But we didn't have weapons, we had lots of pieces. The idea was, if there was a threat, you would start putting them together. The fusing systems weren't there, the initiators needed to be changed, the detonators had to be stored in desiccated boxes and you put them in when you needed them and then put them on again. And it went on and on this way. We didn't have any weapons, we had piles of pieces. That's what Lilienthal was going in and saying — ‘We don't have weapons.’” But the President of the United States only knew what his Atomic Energy Commission told him.
15
Lev Altshuler first went out to Sarov in December 1946. He traveled by train with a longtime colleague of Yuli Khariton, a woman named Tatyana Vasilievna Zakharova. “Our future place of work… was several dozen kilometers from the train station,” Altshuler remembers. “We made this leg of the journey by bus, garbed in thoughtfully provided sheepskin coats. Small villages which recalled Russia from before [the] time [of Peter the Great] flashed by the windows… At the designated place we saw monastery churches and farmsteads… and the inescapable companions of the era — ‘zones’ (prison camps)… ” The contrast reminded Altshuler of a poem by
Mikhail Lermontov and he recited a line: “The land of slaves, the land of lords.” Tatyana Vasilievna accused him: “You do not love Russia.” “I did not know what to say,” Altshuler writes. “The question, ‘What does it mean to love Russia?’ is the same as the question in the Gospels, ‘What is truth?’ — there are no answers. Or, in any case, there is more than one answer.” So Altshuler's first tour of the installation where he would make his life for the next two decades introduced him to its essential dissonance. As Los Alamos had been for scientists working in the United States on the atomic bomb during the Second World War, Sarov would be a place of comradeship, of exciting and original work, of patriotic fulfillment. But it was also “one of many islands of the ‘White Archipelago,’” as Altshuler calls it, Beria's chain of installations for making the bomb, and beyond the domes of the old monastery “the harsh reality was the columns of convicts going through the settlement on their way to work in the morning and on their way to the zone at night.”
And in truth the scientists who began streaming out to Sarov in the spring of 1947 were prisoners themselves, even if their cage was gilded. “It was like this,” remembers physicist Victor Adamsky, who joined the staff a few years later: “you come and you don't even communicate. If you are sick and you need a doctor then they will send you somewhere.” Altshuler elaborates:
Leaving the Site for personal, and even for business reasons, was very difficult to arrange. In a gloomy moment one of the local poets wrote a ballad beginning with these words:
The regime of secrecy had an oppressive effect as well. It was not merely a regime, but a way of life, which denned people's behavior, thoughts and spiritual condition. I often dreamt the same dream, from which I would awaken in a cold sweat. I dreamt that I was in Moscow, walking down the street carrying top secret and extremely top secret documents in my briefcase. I was killed because I could not explain why I had them.
Altshuler had worked during the war with his friend Veniamin Zukerman; at Kazan, where so many scientific institutes had been evacuated, they had met Yakov Zeldovich and Yuli Khariton. Zukerman, also a specialist in radiography, had started the war developing a rifle-mounted launcher for batch-manufactured glass Molotov cocktails, a weapon of desperation against German tanks. At a mortar factory near Moscow in the summer of 1942, the factory manager had shown Zukerman a strange new captured German munition with a metal-lined conical cavity shaped into its explosive charge — “an event,” says Zukerman, “… that would shape my own destiny and the destiny of our laboratory for many years to come.” The cavity reduced the volume of explosives in the shell, yet the shell pierced armor three or four times thicker than a conventional shell of the same caliber could penetrate. Zukerman was fascinated. He realized that night, lying awake during an air raid, that he could use flash X-ray radiography to film the explosion of the strange German shell in progress. Back in Moscow he looked up Yuli Khariton, who directed him to officials who sponsored his subsequent work in microsecond radiography for the study of explosion and detonation phenomena. The German shell turned out to be a shaped charge; Zukerman renewed his acquaintance with the Munroe effect. In 1946, Khariton recruited Zukerman and Altshuler to work under Zeldovich on implosion. Before they were through, Altshuler had been nicknamed “Levka the Dynamite Man.”
They moved out to Sarov with their families in May 1947, Zukerman recalls:
Everything we saw came as a surprise to us: the dense woods, the fine hundred-year-old pines, the monastery with its cathedrals and white bell tower on the high river bank, and — in sharp contrast — the gray ranks of strictly-guarded prisoners marching back and forth across the village day and night. The local folklore abounded in stories of innumerable crowds of pilgrims, miraculous cures performed by Saint Serafim of Sarov, a personal visit to the monastery by the Tzar… There was a small factory here, with tracts of dense forest on all sides. The place was well isolated. This made it possible for us to carry out the necessary explosions.
Finnish cottages [i.e., temporary wooden housing] very soon went up in the wooded area. Our family settled in one of them.
A pre-revolutionary three-story red-brick building served as an administrative center and cafeteria. The small factory yielded a smithy, a foundry and a supply of tools. Zukerman and Altshuler set up laboratories in the factory complex. Laborers from the prison zone —
“I came there to Sarov,” Altshuler characterizes the support Khariton arranged for them, “I was given five or six assistants, and that enabled us to conduct experiments.”
I had my own workshop. If I suddenly had an idea, I would make a sketch and take it to the mechanics and they would produce the device. We would go to the forest, to a small test site where there were bunkers — the experimentalists and their equipment within and the tested charges outside. We would explore the results ourselves and we would also show them to Khariton. It was very quick. We would work fourteen hours per day, all of us. There were slogans there addressed to the prisoners.
We would meet often in family settings. We had a slogan then too:
