Bomb (20 page)

Later that afternoon he walked to the Castillo Street Bridge, a gray arch over the narrow trickle called the Santa Fe River. “Hardly more than a creek,” Gold said to himself as he waited in the bright sun.

He checked the watch on his sweaty wrist. It was 4:05 p.m. Fuchs should have been there five minutes ago. He looked around, feeling conspicuous on the empty bridge. It was, he said, “no place for a stranger to be standing around doing nothing.”

Standard Soviet tradecraft was to wait no more than five minutes at a public meeting spot—any longer could attract attention. But Gold had had to plead with his boss to get time off. He didn't know when he'd be able to make it back to New Mexico. He decided to wait a little longer.

Finally, at 4:20, Fuchs's blue car pulled up. Gold ducked into the passenger seat and Fuchs drove off.

Fuchs apologized, saying he'd gotten a flat tire. Gold glanced over at the physicist. He was looking healthier. His usually pale skin had some color, and he'd put on a little weight.

Fuchs stopped the car at a deserted spot. He gave Gold a quick update on the progress at Los Alamos and the upcoming test. They set their next meeting for September, the soonest Gold thought he could get away from work again. Then Fuchs handed over what Gold described as “a considerable packet of information.”

“I did what I consider to be the worst I have done,” Fuchs would say several years later. “Namely, to give information about the principle of the design of the plutonium bomb.”

*   *   *

G
OLD CLIMBED ONTO A BUS
with the plans for an atomic bomb in his travel bag. His head was pounding, and he wasn't sure if it was from stress or the altitude—Santa Fe is over 7,000 feet above sea level.

When he got to Albuquerque, Gold was told every hotel room in town was booked. He wandered for hours. Near midnight, in desperate need of rest, he asked a passing policeman where he could spend the night. The cop directed him to a rooming house, where he was given a cot in the hall. He couldn't sleep. Every police siren, every drunken hoot—every sound that night triggered the same thought: “They might be coming for me.”

The next morning Gold walked to the address given to him by Anatoly Yatzkov, entered the building, walked up to the second floor apartment, and knocked. The door was opened by a young man wearing army pants and a pajama shirt. He had curly black hair and a goofy grin.

“Mr. Greenglass?” Gold asked.

“Yes.”

“I come from Julius.”

Hearing this phrase, Greenglass turned back into the tiny apartment. He picked up his wife's purse and took out the torn half of a Jell-O box. Gold took out his half of the Jell-O box and handed it to Greenglass. Greenglass held the torn pieces together. They fit perfectly—clearly two halves of the same box.

Gold stepped into the apartment and introduced himself to Greenglass and his wife as “Dave from Pittsburgh.” He asked for the package.

Greenglass said it wasn't ready—he needed a few hours to write up his report. Gold sighed angrily.

“You know,” Greenglass said, still smiling, “there are several men at Los Alamos who might also be willing to furnish information. If you want me to, I can go right ahead and talk to them.”

“The devil you can!” Gold hissed, infuriated by this source's lack of tradecraft training. “You don't approach people like that and say, ‘Say, can you get me information on the atom bomb?'”

Greenglass apologized, said he was just trying to help.

Gold said he'd be back in a few hours. Exhausted and annoyed, he walked down the stairs muttering to himself, “Who in the world ever got this guy into this business? Does this poor baby know what the heck he is fooling with?”

*   *   *

T
HOUGH
G
OLD DIDN'T KNOW THE DETAILS,
David Greenglass was an army sergeant assigned to Los Alamos. He worked in a machine shop on the Hill, helping to build the super-precise explosive molds needed for the implosion bomb. Greenglass wasn't a scientist and didn't know nearly as much about the bomb as Klaus Fuchs or Ted Hall. Still, his knowledge was useful—and the Soviets wanted every scrap of information they could get.

Gold returned to Greenglass's apartment later that afternoon. Greenglass gave him an envelope containing about ten pages of notes and rough sketches, and Gold handed the soldier $500 in cash.

Gold traveled by train to Chicago, caught a plane to Washington, D.C., and jumped on a train up to New York City. From there, he took the subway to Queens and found his way to a deserted area near a cemetery. Anatoly Yatzkov was there.

“We met for a matter of seconds,” Gold recalled. “I turned over the information.”

TRINITY

THE SUN BAKED LOS ALAMOS THAT JUNE,
and no rain fell. The grass turned brown. The wells dried up. “We brushed our teeth with Coca-Cola,” an army nurse remembered.

Oppenheimer's teams were working through the night, grabbing a few hours of sleep in their Tech Area offices. A new crisis erupted nearly every day with at least one of the bomb's five-hundred-plus components.

On July 2, George Kistiakowsky x-rayed his custom-made plastic explosives, just to make sure they were perfect. When he held the films up to the light, the shapes were dotted with tiny dark spots. Air holes.

Oppenheimer got on the phone to Washington. Between coughing fits, he pleaded with Leslie Groves to authorize a delay of the test. Groves refused. President Truman was leaving in a few days for Potsdam, Germany, where he was going to meet with Joseph Stalin to begin talking about post-war plans. It was becoming clear that when the war ended the United States and the Soviet Union would be the only world powers left standing—and that they'd be rivals. Potsdam would be Truman's first meeting with the famously intimidating Soviet leader. Truman wanted to
know
that the United States had a working atomic bomb. He wanted to stun Stalin with the news.

Oppenheimer begged for just a few more days. The chances of a successful test before July 20, he said, were fifty-fifty at best. Groves demanded the test go ahead on July 16.

“Time and time again we had in the technical work almost paralyzing crises,” Oppenheimer later said. “Time and again the laboratory drew itself together and faced the new problems and got on with the work.”

This time the solution came from a steady-nerved George Kistiakowsky. “I got hold of a dental drill,” he said. Kisty knew the explosives were extremely unstable—any sudden jolt could set them off. “Not wishing to ask others to do an untried job, I spent most of one night, a week before the Trinity test, drilling holes in some faulty casings so as to reach the air cavities.”

He mixed a batch of liquid explosives and, drop by drop, gently filled the holes.

“You don't worry about it,” he said. “I mean, if fifty pounds of explosives goes in your lap, you won't know it.”

*   *   *

O
N
J
ULY 3,
several cars drove up to a brick mansion surrounded by gardens, meadows, and woods. The car doors opened and out stepped a few British soldiers, followed by ten of Germany's best scientists. Otto Hahn was there. So was Werner Heisenberg.

The Germans asked the British where exactly they were, and why they'd been brought there. They got no answers.

Instead, they were taken inside and each given a pretty, private room. They were told they could walk in the garden, play volleyball on the lawn, listen to the radio, eat and drink as much as they wanted. They could do anything at all—except leave.

What the Germans learned only later was that they were at an estate called Farm Hall, in the countryside of southeast England. They'd been taken there to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets, but there was more to it. The goal was to isolate the Germans, to keep them from even mentioning the words
atomic bomb
in public. If the Allies were going to use the bomb against Japan, they wanted it to have maximum shock value—they wanted it to come out of nowhere.

The Americans and British were also eager to learn exactly how much these German scientists had figured out about building atomic bombs. Before the Germans arrived, British intelligence officers set up hidden microphones all over Farm Hall. The first conversation the mics picked up was an exchange between Heisenberg and the physicist Kurt Diebner.

“I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?” Diebner asked.

“Microphones installed?” Heisenberg said, laughing. “Oh, no, they're not as cute as all that.”

*   *   *

O
N
J
ULY 5,
Oppenheimer sent a telegram to top Manhattan Project physicists in Berkeley and Chicago: “Any time after the fifteenth would be a good time for our fishing trip.”

This was their prearranged code—the test was on, and anyone who wanted to see it had better get out to New Mexico right away. On July 11 Oppenheimer kissed his wife goodbye and drove out to the desert.

The next day Philip Morrison, one of Oppenheimer's former students, removed the plutonium bomb core from a vault in the Los Alamos Tech Area. He carefully set the pieces into two padded suitcases equipped with thermometers. If a chain reaction began, the rising temperature would be the first clue.

Morrison carried the suitcases outside to a waiting army car. He set them on the back seat and sat down beside them. A driver started the engine and drove through the gates. “I was just thinking about what an extraordinary thing it was to be driving along there in just an ordinary car,” remembered Morrison, “and yet we were carrying the core of the first atomic bomb.”

Five hours later the car arrived at the Trinity site and stopped in front of an abandoned adobe ranch house. Morrison carried the cases past armed guards and into the building. The inside of the house was spotless. The window frames were covered with black tape to keep out flying dust.

Morrison set the plutonium down next to a table by the wall. Then he tried to get some sleep. Final assembly of the bomb would be done in the morning.

*   *   *

A
T ABOUT NOON THE NEXT DAY,
an army truck bumped and bounced very slowly down the dirt road leading to the Trinity site. In the back of the truck were George Kistiakowsky's molded explosives.

The truck backed up to the steel tower that was built to hold the bomb. Kisty jumped down. Using a large crane, soldiers eased the five-foot-wide ball of explosives out of the truck bed and set it down on the sand. Then they began putting up a white tent around the bomb.

At the same time, at the ranch house, the physicist Robert Bacher supervised the assembly of the bomb's plutonium core. Eight scientists dressed in white surgical coats stood around a table putting the pieces together. Outside the door sat four army jeeps, engines running, in case a quick getaway became necessary.

Several times Oppenheimer stuck his head into the room to check on the progress, like an anxious husband whose wife was in labor. Bacher finally asked him to stay away—he was making everyone even more nervous.

The phone in the ranch house rang at about three o'clock. It was Kistiakowsky calling from the tower to say the explosives were ready. Bacher drove the plutonium to the tower.

In the tent by the tower, Philip Morrison used a long pair of pincers to steady the plutonium core as it was lowered on a wire into a metal tamper inside the huge ball of explosives.

It didn't fit.

Several men cursed. Oppenheimer leaned forward and peered into the bomb. “We halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces,” remembered one of the physicists. “Could we have made a mistake?”

No problem, Bacher assured everyone. The plutonium had expanded in the heat of the ranch house. If they left it out for a few minutes it would cool off and contract again.

They waited several minutes in silence. They tried again. The plutonium slid right in.

*   *   *

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
at Los Alamos, Major Robert Furman and Captain James Nolan loaded a three-hundred-pound lead bucket into the back of an army truck. Furman signed a receipt and got into one of the seven cars surrounding the truck.

Inside the bucket was uranium 235. It was on its way to the American air base on the Pacific island of Tinian. The pilot Paul Tibbets and his crew were already there. Whether the plutonium bomb worked or not, the plan was to have one uranium bomb assembled and ready for use by early August.

The convoy drove to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and from there flew to Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco, where the cruiser USS
Indianapolis
was docked, ready to take sail west.

*   *   *

T
HAT MORNING,
at the tower at Trinity, Oppenheimer watched as scientists and army engineers worked together to attach a steel cable to the test bomb. When everything was set, a motor-powered crane lifted the five-ton round metal bomb off the ground. Soldiers ran under the bomb and tossed down a thick pile of cotton mattresses—low-tech protection in case of a potentially disastrous fall.

The bomb swayed and turned in the breeze as it was lifted, just a foot a minute, toward the top of the tower. At the top, two engineers helped ease it down onto a wooden platform and secured it in place. A team of scientists climbed the tower and began attaching wires and detonators all over the bomb's surface.

*   *   *

J
ULY 15
was a day for final checks. At about four that afternoon, after weeks of blue skies, dark clouds rolled over the desert. Lighting flashed above the distant mountains.

Early in the evening, Oppenheimer climbed the steel tower alone. On the top of the wooden platform was a metal shack with three walls, open on the fourth side. Inside the shack was the fully assembled bomb, a huge gray globe held together by bolts, with wires snaking in and out all over its surface. Oppenheimer looked over his work. The test was set for four the next morning. There was nothing more he could do—nothing but imagine last-second problems.