If the prospect of direct conflict had receded, LeMay nevertheless had prepared a private war plan. “In his mind,” the aide reported, “he envisages that the Western States would decide upon a position such as the Rhine Valley, to which the Allied forces could make an orderly withdrawal in the event of hostilities, and behind which we will have established in advance the necessary air bases, dumps, depots, motor pools, etc. to meet a Russian advance.” LeMay estimated that the combined British, French and American forces in Europe were almost equal to Soviet forces, a much more optimistic estimate of the European situation than the JCS view. The USAFE commander then revealed his little-NATO arrangements to the aide, who passed them on to the President: “He has… secured one base in France and one base in Belgium to which he could fall back, if necessary, and support the ground forces,” although the bases only held a “10-day level of supply.”
The aide had picked up incontrovertible evidence that the Soviets were not preparing to go to war over Berlin:
Because the Russians have assembled a formidable fighting force in Germany, they will require a tremendous logistical effort in order to launch any large-scale and sustained offensive. Lines of communication to the eastward are essential to its success. I was told at the G-2 [intelligence] briefing that the Russians have dismantled hundreds of miles of railroads in Germany and sent the rails and ties back to Russia. There remains, at the present time, so I was told, only a single track railroad running eastward out of the Berlin area and upon which the Russians must largely depend for their logistical support. This same railroad line changes from a standard gauge, going eastward, to a Russian wide gauge in Poland, which further complicates the problem of moving supplies and equipment forward.
“Neither Stalin nor Molotov believed that the airlift could supply Berlin,” writes Walter Bedell Smith. “They must have felt sure that cold and hunger, and the depressingly short, gloomy days of the Berlin winter would destroy the morale of the Berlin population and create such a completely unmanageable situation that the Western Allies would have to capitulate and evacuate the city.” Tunner thought the Luftwaffe's failed airlift to the German armies trapped in the Stalingrad cauldron in 1943 had prejudiced the Soviet leaders. “The Russians had never had an airlift themselves,” he observes, “and they didn't take ours seriously until it was too late.” The airlift commander also believed the Soviets underestimated the significance of instrument flying — of navigating with compass and attitude indicator without ground reference, a skill American military aviators had developed in the 1930s, well before radio or radar guidance systems came along. “The Russians were good pilots, capable of all kinds of stunts, and they flew in the lousiest weather conceivable — but always beneath the clouds, never on instruments. I am convinced that the Russian unfamiliarity with instrument flying led them to take our airlift too lightly… They did not think we could do it.”
James Arthur Hill, a line pilot during the Berlin Airlift who served later as a USAF Vice-Chief of Staff, remembers training in the C-54 at Great Falls, Montana, Racey Jordan's old turf. Hill flew from Rhein/Main to Tempelhof:
Two hours up, two hours back, reload, two up, two back. I never once got out of the airplane. Not one time. I never set foot on the tarmac at Tempelhof in all those months. At Rhein/Main I'd go to an airplane with ten tons of coal in burlap sacks with a Hungarian loading party, displaced people. I'd fly to Tempelhof, up the corridor, land, leave two engines running on the right hand side. A chute would be put down and people would come aboard and start manhandling those burlap sacks onto the chute, onto a flatbed. In about twelve to fifteen minutes, the door would close and I'd fire up the other two engines while I was moving out to takeoff position. Ground time was often less than twenty minutes.
Hill always carried coal. “Some wings carried flour,” he says. “Some carried chocolate or mixed loads of sugar and flour. Staples. Staples or energy.” There was a seven-story apartment building in the final approach at Tempelhof and landings could be hairy:
I went for months and never saw the ground after departure, until I broke out over the apartment building in Berlin. We were landing on about four thousand feet of pierced steel planking, so it was a very steep approach. The building was well marked with strobe lights, the 1948 version of strobe lights. You could see fairly well at about a quarter of a mile, but many, many times, we would come over that apartment building and never see the lights. We would get down to a hundred feet and I never was waved off. You had to haul the power off and jam your nose down, round it out very sharply in order to stick it on the first third of the runway. And then jump on the brakes to get stopped. We had a few cases of overruns, people running into the fence at the far end. No sweat. I was twenty-six years old. I was bulletproof.
Tunner's bulletproof pilots delivered. An anonymous American fired a burst of gallows doggerel at the Gatow air controllers one night that caught the spirit of the operation:
By October 1948, the people of Berlin collected rations of heat, light and food under a continual drone of Allied aircraft.
Igor Kurchatov's team finished assembling the A production reactor at Chel-yabinsk-40 at the end of May 1948. After a week of instrumentation testing, Kurchatov initiated a dry criticality run on June 7 (since the cooling water was a neutron absorber and would lower the system's reactivity, the reactor could be nudged to low-power criticality more simply without it). Sometime after midnight, Kurchatov had the system running at ten kilowatts and shut it down. After additional uranium loading, the reactor achieved full criticality on June 10. “We were all triumphant,” Mikhail Pervukhin recalls, “and we congratulated Kurchatov and his colleagues.”
The A reactor reached its designed power of 100,000 kilowatts on June 22. “At the beginning, our reactors were not powerful,” Georgi Flerov recalled late in life, “… and there was only one. We were afraid to go larger. This one could produce about 100 grams of plutonium in twenty-four hours.” That would be one solid Christy core — about 6.2 kilograms — every sixty days, but in fact the first Soviet bomb core was not ready until the following spring. Espionage had missed a critical physical process that soon shut the Chelyabinsk reactor down — not Wigner's disease, which Kurchatov knew about from Beria's collections, but the swelling of uranium metal slugs in high-flux reactors. Uranium metal swells under intense neutron bombardment because some products of fission — argon and other gases — accumulate within the structural space of the metal and deform it. Twisted, rippled slugs in the Chelyabinsk A reactor stuck in the discharge tubes and blocked them. Beria came running, alleging sabotage. “Kurchatov was able to parry the blow,” reports Golovin, “[by convincing] the necessary people of our approach to the unknown area of natural phenomena, high-power neutron fields, where various surprises could be expected.” They stopped the reactor, drilled out the channels, dissolved the entire loading of uranium slugs, extracted the accumulated plutonium, studied the swelling, redesigned and replaced the slug channels throughout the reactor and manufactured a new loading of uranium. The disaster delayed the operation until the end of the year. The big remote-controlled chemical plant needed to extract the plutonium was still under construction nearby in any case and would not be finished until December.
Earlier in 1948, Kurchatov, Yuli Khariton, Yakov Zeldovich and Khariton's deputy Kirill Shchelkin had met formally and decided that they would use the US Fat Man design that Klaus Fuchs had supplied them for their first bomb, RDS-1, whereupon they temporarily stopped work on a parallel independent design that would be physically smaller and would use less plutonium. “Given the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States at the time,” write Khariton and Yuri Smirnov, “and the scientists’ need to achieve a successful first test, any other decision would have been unacceptable and simply frivolous.” They had delayed a final decision, Smirnov reports, until they “had conducted the research and experiment necessary to confirm that the information provided by intelligence was true and not disinformation. The decision was adopted for political reasons rather than technical.”
