* An utterance attributed to Oppie—“God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within”—surely had Teller in mind. Ironically, the two men were competitive even in “death”: Oppenheimer played the part of the first corpse and Edward the second in the lab’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
* A particularly chilling set of Venona messages concerns the fate of Elizaveta Kuznetsova, a crew member who jumped ship in San Francisco. Despite going into hiding, marrying a cab driver in the city, and finally fleeing to Portland, Oregon, the hapless Kuznetsova was eventually hunted down by the relentless Kharon. Kheifets’s successor sent this message to Moscow late in 1944: “On 4 November this year the traitor to the fatherland Kuznetsova was shipped to Vladivostok on the tanker Belgorod.”
* Near the end of the war, because of Fuchs and other spies at Los Alamos, the Russians had a precise description of the component parts of Fat Man, including such engineering details as the makeup and design of the explosive lenses used to compress the plutonium core, and the exact dimensions of the bomb’s polonium initiator. The device that the Soviets exploded in their first nuclear test, in August 1949, was essentially a copy of Fat Man.
* From a sonnet by John Donne:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
* Apresyan had become the New York rezident after Zubilin was recalled to Moscow. Maj’s brother had been shot during the Stalinist purges, and Apresyan himself had spent time at the NKVD’s infamous Lubyanka prison. A colleague wrote of him: “Our Rezident had been so deeply traumatized by his own experience as a prisoner that the secret meetings with the agents he handled were absolute torture for him. Several days before a rendezvous he would turn into a withdrawn bundle of nerves, barely listening to what was being said and incapable of making any decisions.”
* Apresyan had other pressing, if mundane, concerns. He complained to Moscow in September that he had been unable to meet with two of his agents in Los Angeles (Caen) during a recent visit because he lacked a car. May’s lament would have struck a sympathetic chord with many Angelenos: “In a town like Caen I should be simply walked off my feet.” Nonetheless, his request was denied.
* Oppenheimer carried Wilson’s petition to Washington, where it eventually made its way to Stimson and onto Truman’s desk. Ironically, the Russians may have seen it first. In a rendezvous outside Santa Fe on September 19, 1945, Klaus Fuchs gave Harry Gold a copy. A summary, which arrived in Moscow on October 29, noted that the scientists’ “feelings of distrust toward the government are very strong.”
* Part of the fallout of the so-called Gouzenko spy case was that Moscow Center ordered its agents to temporarily suspend contact with their sources in the West. The subsequent defection of another spy, Elizabeth Bentley, virtually put an end to the existing network of Soviet agents in the United States.
* In 1950, a congressional aide spoke with Teller about international control of the bomb and summarized Edward’s views in a memo: “[Teller] thinks it is foolish to hope for international control while Russia remains under present regime. On the other hand, he does concede that it is important we make all the right moves in the search for international agreement so that we do not lose out to the Russians in the battle for world opinion.”
* Sometime in 1946, Fuchs passed along to the Soviets nine typed pages of notes on a series of lectures that Fermi had given at Los Alamos University on the Super. The notes included detailed calculations on the amount of energy that would be released by the burning of a specific quantity of tritium and deuterium, as initiated by an exploding fission bomb. The problem that had stymied Teller at the Berkeley seminar—the loss of energy through radiation—was noted, along with the importance of shielding the thermonuclear fuel from the intense radiation created by the atomic trigger. “So far all schemes for initiation of the super are rather vague,” the notes concluded. But a simple sketch at the bottom of the last page showed one possible solution.
* Sproul, however, was growing tired of “such arrangements, as they are purely personal and have nothing to do, except very remotely, with University business.” The following year, when Lawrence let it be known that he wished to buy another new car, Sproul urged Berkeley’s comptroller to approve the purchase but thereafter to “have nothing further to do with the transaction.”
* While the Russian H-bomb was not yet under construction, planning for it had already begun. On March 13, 1948, Klaus Fuchs, meeting his Soviet control in a London pub, had passed along a drawing of an advanced design for the Super, based in part upon the idea that Fuchs and von Neumann had prepared on the eve of the 1946 Los Alamos conference. Five weeks later, Beria asked Kurchatov and two other Russian physicists to submit their own plan for thermonuclear research. In early June 1948—three months before Teller wrote “The Russian Atomic Plan”—the USSR’s Council of Ministers approved the scientists’ proposal for a top-secret, high-priority project to build a Soviet Super.
* Manley recalled only one occasion when Oppie’s emotions triumphed over his scientific detachment at a GAC meeting. Following a briefing on nuclear-powered submarines by Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, Oppenheimer went over to the model sub on the dais of the deserted conference room and, putting his hand around the hull, crushed it.
* Despite an exhaustive investigation, bureau agents may have overlooked one hole in Oppenheimer’s alibi. While at the ranch that summer, he and Kitty were negotiating to buy the house at Eagle Hill from its absentee owner, Bertha Damon, who lived in Massachusetts. Complicating the purchase was the fact that the house contained three sets of furniture: Mrs. Damon’s, a previous renter’s, and the current
