Bomb (19 page)

“There is no doubt,” he added, “that the implosion method is of great interest.”

FALLING STARS

ON THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 12, 1945,
Vice President Harry Truman strode through the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., dressed in his usual gray suit and bow tie.

Until about a year before, Truman had been a senator from Missouri. Then President Roosevelt surprised the nation by picking Truman to be his running mate in the 1944 election. They won easily. But Truman soon realized that FDR had wanted him to help win votes in the Midwest—not to help run the country. By April 1945, Truman had been vice president for three months. Roosevelt had invited him to a total of two private talks.

At about five that afternoon, Truman stepped into the office of the Speaker of the House for a scheduled meeting. The secretary looked up from her desk.

“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” she said.

Truman picked up the phone and dialed the number for Roosevelt's press secretary.

“This is the V.P.,” Truman told Early.

“Please come right over.”

Something in the tone of Early's voice caused the blood to drain from Truman's face. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” he said as he hung up.

Truman jumped in a car and told the driver to take him to the White House. “I thought I was going down there to meet the president,” he later said. “I didn't allow myself to think anything else.” But he suspected the worst. Roosevelt had not been looking well. “His eyes were sunken,” Truman remembered. “His magnificent smile was missing from his careworn face. He seemed a spent man.”

Truman hurried into the White House and was taken up to the second floor, to an office used by Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's wife.

Eleanor stepped forward and put her arm around Truman's shoulder.

“Harry,” she said, “the president is dead.”

Truman stood silent for a long moment. He finally managed to ask, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Eleanor smiled sadly at Truman. “Is there anything
we
can do for
you
? For you are the one in trouble now.”

*   *   *

T
RUMAN CALLED
the members of Roosevelt's cabinet, told them the news, and asked them to come right to the White House. Then he called Harlan Fiske Stone, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He asked Stone to come swear him in as president.

After taking the oath of office, Truman met with the cabinet members. He assured them he would continue Roosevelt's policies. “I made it clear, however, that I would be president in my own right,” he said later, “and that I would assume full responsibilities for such decisions as had to be made.”

The meeting lasted just a few minutes. Truman watched everyone get up and silently file out—everyone except Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who walked around the long table and up to the president.

“Stimson told me that he wanted me to know about an immense project that was underway—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable power,” recalled Truman. “It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb.”

Just two years before, Stimson had decided Truman wasn't important enough to know about the Manhattan Project. Now, if an atomic bomb could be built, it would be Truman's job to decide how to use it.

“If you ever pray, pray for me now,” Truman told reporters when they surrounded him the following day. “I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

*   *   *

B
Y
A
PRIL,
H
ITLER'S ARMIES
were in complete collapse. Allied forces were pouring into Germany from east and west. But the question remained: How close was Hitler to getting an atomic bomb?

On April 23, a squad of Alsos mission soldiers led by Lt. Colonel Boris Pash—the same man who had grilled Oppenheimer about his loyalty to America—raced ahead of advancing armies into the town of Haigerloch.

“As we approached,” reported Pash, “pillowcases, sheets, towels and other white articles attached to flagpoles, broomsticks and window shutters flew the message of surrender.”

But Pash wasn't there to take the town—he was there to find Heisenberg's secret lab. The search led to an eighty-foot cliff, where Pash found a doorway carved into the rock. The steel door was padlocked.

Pash's soldiers asked around, found the lab manager, and dragged him to the door. Pash told the man to unlock the lab. The man hesitated.

“Shoot the lock off,” Pash ordered his soldiers. Gesturing to the manager he added, “If he gets in the way, shoot him.”

The manager unlocked the door.

The doorway opened on a dark cave. In the floor, dug into the rock, was a hole about ten feet across, covered by a heavy metal shield. Pash had picked up enough physics to know he was looking at the heart of Germany's atomic research.

“A German prisoner,” reported Pash, “confirmed the fact that we had captured the Nazi uranium ‘machine' as the Germans called it—actually an atomic pile.”

In this cave, Heisenberg had been trying to build an atomic pile, similar to the one made by Enrico Fermi on the squash court in Chicago. He'd been trying to create a chain reaction in uranium—the first step on the road to an atomic bomb. But where Fermi had succeeded, Heisenberg had failed.

The Germans were more than two years behind.

German physicist Kurt Diebner, a leader of Hitler's bomb project, later explained why: “It was the elimination of German heavy-water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended.”

*   *   *

“T
HE PIECES
of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place at last,” said a relieved Leslie Groves. American soldiers found Germany's entire supply of uranium at a nearby farm, freshly plowed under the soil. It was packed into fruit barrels and shipped to the United States.

“The capture of this material,” Groves reported, “would seem to remove definitely any possibility of the Germans making any use of an atomic bomb in this war.”

That race was over—but another was just beginning.

Germany did not have the atomic bomb. Now Groves was determined to keep the Soviet Union from getting it. “Our principle concern,” he explained, “was to keep information and atomic scientists from falling into the hands of the Russians.”

Alsos teams rounded up the top German scientists. Otto Hahn, the man who had discovered fission, was found sitting at a desk in his office, a packed suitcase beside him.

“I have been expecting you,” he said in English.

A few days later, Boris Pash tracked down Werner Heisenberg in a mountainside cabin. When the Americans arrived, Heisenberg was sitting on the porch, waiting. He sighed and stood, feeling, he later said, “like an utterly exhausted swimmer setting foot on firm land.”

“He was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans,” said Groves. “Had he fallen into Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them.”

*   *   *

O
VER THE FOLLOWING FEW WEEKS,
teams of Soviet soldiers sped through Germany on an Alsos-style mission of their own. They were under orders to grab important papers from German labs and capture top German physicists. The Soviets wanted to know how far the German bomb project had gotten, and they wanted German scientists—willing or not—to help them with their own bomb.

As Soviet soldiers ransacked German labs, they realized two things. One, the Germans had not come close to building an atomic bomb.

Two, all the scientists were gone.

LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

HARRY GOLD AND ANATOLY YATZKOV
sat at a small table in the back of Volk's Bar in Manhattan, talking over Gold's upcoming trip to New Mexico to meet with Klaus Fuchs.

“We discussed last-minute arrangements for the transfer of information once I got back from Santa Fe,” Gold said.

In case anything went wrong and either of them was unable to meet, Yatzkov set up an emergency system. If Gold got two tickets to a sporting event in the mail, with nothing else in the envelope, he was to take note of the date on the tickets. Three days after the event, he was to go to a certain bar in Queens between eight and nine at night. He was to show up a little early, check for signs of surveillance, then take a seat. A Soviet agent would join him at the table.

This was all routine to Gold by now. But then Yatzkov hit him with an additional detail.

“He wanted me to take a little side trip,” Gold remembered. “He said there was a man in Albuquerque who also worked at Los Alamos and who was ready to furnish me with information.”

Gold didn't like it. “I complained that it was jeopardizing the whole matter of the information I was getting from Fuchs,” he said. “It represented an additional delay, an additional period or interval in which something could happen, and I just for once got up on my hind legs and almost flatly refused to go to New Mexico.”

He was right to protest. “A basic rule was being broken,” KGB agent Alexander Feklisov later lamented. “Namely, that two secret networks must remain compartmentalized, without communicating between one another. The person having access to both networks becomes a weak link. If that person should stumble, both parts will fall together.”

Yatzkov knew the rules of tradecraft, but his neck was on the line. He could not risk sending disinformation to Moscow—he wanted this second source as a backup to Fuchs's material.

“I have been guiding you idiots every step,” he snapped at Gold. “You don't realize how important this mission to Albuquerque is.”

Yatzkov then gave Gold the name and address of the second source, $500 for the man, a password, and the torn half of a Jell-O box.

*   *   *

A
DOLF
H
ITLER COMMITTED
suicide on April 30. Days later Germany surrendered. The war in Europe was over.

Scientists at Los Alamos celebrated—and for a happy moment thought their job was done. Their work had been driven by the absolute necessity of winning the bomb race with Germany. “For me, Hitler was the personification of evil, and the primary justification for the atomic bomb work,” remembered the physicist Emilio Segrè. “Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose. Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private discussions.”

The discussions were cut short by a memo from Secretary of War Stimson, which Oppenheimer distributed in early May. “The work you are doing is of tremendous importance and must go forward with all possible speed,” Stimson urged. “We still have the war against Japan to win.”

Only weeks before, the U.S. Marines had captured the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in some of the bloodiest fighting in the history of the American military. And the war would only get more ferocious as the Allies battled closer to the Japanese mainland.

Pushing any doubts out of his mind, Oppenheimer worked his scientists harder than ever. The design for the uranium bomb was complete, and the plutonium bomb was nearly done. The next big question: Was it necessary to test the atomic bomb to make sure it actually worked?

The uranium bomb couldn't be tested. By July 1945, Los Alamos would have just enough U-235 for one bomb, and it couldn't be wasted on a test. But plutonium was a little easier to make, and the plutonium bomb design was far more complicated. Oppenheimer was convinced a test was essential. Leslie Groves disagreed.

“To test or not to test the plutonium bomb was a very hot issue,” George Kistiakowsky remembered. “Oppenheimer and I were pleading with General Groves that there
had
to be a test because the whole scheme was so uncertain. But General Groves said he couldn't afford to lose all that plutonium.”

Oppenheimer won the argument by insisting that without a test, “the use of the gadget over enemy territory will have to be done substantially blindly.” He selected a section of flat New Mexico desert near the Alamogordo Air Force Base. He named the site Trinity. The test was set for mid-July.

As temperatures soared over 100 degrees, scientists and soldiers moved into tents at the test site. Each morning they shook tarantulas and scorpions from their boots and tied handkerchiefs over their mouths in a hopeless effort to keep out the flying sand. They worked twenty-hour days, setting up instruments to measure the blast, and building a 100-foot steel tower to hold the bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer's younger brother, Frank, also a physicist, helped prepare for the test at Trinity. “People were feverishly setting up wires all over the desert,” he said, “building the tower, building little huts in which to put cameras and house people at the time of the explosion.”

No one told Dorothy McKibben what was going on, but she was able to figure it out. More trucks than ever were rumbling past her Santa Fe office, more scientists were checking in. And she kept getting calls from top government and military officials in Washington asking about hotel rooms in the area.

“The voices on the telephone showed strain and tautness,” she said. “I sensed we were about to reach some sort of climax.”

*   *   *

H
ARRY
G
OLD GOT
to Santa Fe a little after noon on June 2. With a few hours to kill before his meeting with Fuchs, he strolled through a local history museum. While there he picked up a street map entitled “New Mexico: Land of Enchantment.” He checked the map for the spot he was to meet Fuchs and marked it with a pen. He was glad not to have to ask for directions, making it that much less likely anyone would remember he was ever in town.