Bomb (25 page)

*   *   *

C
OHEN TOOK THE BUS
back to her boarding house. She pulled the tissues out of a nearly full tissue box, crammed Hall's secret papers into the bottom of the box, replaced the tissues, grabbed her already-packed suitcase, and left.

Minutes later she stepped into the train station. The place was crawling with soldiers and FBI agents. They were searching all passengers coming in and going out.

Since the war ended, newspapers had been free to tell the public that the atomic bomb had been built by scientists at Los Alamos, led by Robert Oppenheimer. The government was determined to protect Oppenheimer and his staff—and their bomb-making secrets.

Cohen's tissue box held Hall's handwritten report, with detailed plans and sketches of an atomic bomb. It was more than enough evidence to get her
and
Hall executed for spying.

She was too well trained to panic. Rushing out of the station would be the surest way to draw attention. Instead, she set down her bag, and, glancing around casually, took a few minutes to focus her mind on the character she'd invented: a friendly, absent-minded tuberculosis patient on her way home from the desert.

When her train was nearly done boarding, Cohen stepped up to the track with her suitcase in one hand, her purse over her shoulder, the box of tissues in her other hand. An FBI agent asked to see her ticket and look in her bags. Another began asking questions about her business in New Mexico.

While answering, Cohen opened her purse and fumbled through the contents. No ticket. She laughed aloud at herself for misplacing it. She kneeled down to open her suitcase, but couldn't work the zipper with the box of tissues in her hand. The train whistle blew. Over the loudspeaker came the “all aboard” announcement—her train was about to leave.

Smiling, she passed the tissues to the government agent.

Her hands free, she opened the suitcase, rummaged, and found the ticket. The agents had a look at the contents of her bag. They nodded and gestured for her to get going.

She zipped up the bag, lifted her purse, and stepped up onto the train—without the tissues. “I felt in my bones that the gentleman himself must remind me about this box,” she later said.

As the train began rolling, Cohen heard the FBI agent call to her. She turned around. He handed her the box of tissues through the open door. It was the one thing he hadn't searched.

*   *   *

H
ARRY
G
OLD RETURNED SAFELY
to New York City with the report from Klaus Fuchs. Lona Cohen came back with the report from Ted Hall. In separate meetings, both delivered their papers to their Soviet contact, Anatoly Yatzkov.

Leonid Kvasnikov, who ran the KGB office in New York City, compared the documents from Fuchs and Hall. Both contained thorough reports on atomic bomb design. “I made a conclusion,” he said, “that I myself, although I was not a very good craftsman, I could have built a bomb with this data—if I had certain materials, of course.”

The best thing about the reports, Kvasnikov knew, was that the bomb plans from both Hall and Fuchs were nearly identical. That convinced the Soviets the information was correct, allowing them to move ahead quickly with bomb building. No need for the kind of costly trial and error that had taken place at Los Alamos.

By October, KGB officers in Moscow were able to produce a complete report on plutonium bomb design, containing detailed descriptions of each component of the weapon and specific materials needed. Using this, Soviet scientists immediately began building their first atomic weapon.

It was an exact copy of the American bomb.

FATHER OF THE BOMB

SOON AFTER JAPAN'S SURRENDER,
Robert Oppenheimer got on a train and headed east. He was “a nervous wreck,” a fellow passenger observed. “Oppenheimer kept looking under the table and all around.”

Everyone knew Oppenheimer now. His name was spread across newspaper headlines, his bony face and intense eyes started out from magazine covers. The press was calling him the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”—a new kind of superhero. Superman relied on his enormous physical strength; Oppenheimer could let loose the energy locked inside atoms.

Oppenheimer was torn by the attention. He relished the fame, but was terrified by the thought of what he had helped create—a world with atomic weapons.

“If you ask, ‘Can we make them more terrible?' the answer is yes,” Oppenheimer told a reporter. “If you ask, ‘Can we make a lot of them?' the answer is yes.”

This is what he was hoping to prevent. Oppenheimer got off the train in Washington, D.C., carrying a report with his recommendations for the future. Physicists could certainly design more powerful atomic bombs, he argued. But would that necessarily make the country safer? No, because other countries could also build bombs—and there would be no way to ensure that those bombs weren't used on Americans.

“The safety of this nation,” he insisted, “cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

The only hope, he believed, was for the United States to stop building bombs and to somehow convince the Soviet Union not to start.

Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes, replied that neither goal was realistic. Byrnes returned Oppenheimer's report, with a message for its author, “Tell Dr. Oppenheimer for the time being his proposal about an international agreement is not practical, and that he and the rest of the gang should pursue their work full force.”

In other words, he wanted Oppenheimer to get back to the lab and build more bombs. That's what Leslie Groves expected, too—if things moved according to schedule, he reported, the U.S. Army would have twenty plutonium bombs by the end of 1945.

*   *   *

O
PPENHEIMER RETURNED TO
L
OS
A
LAMOS,
feeling what he described to a friend as “a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following.”

At the lab Edward Teller showed him a design for a far more powerful atomic weapon. He wanted Oppenheimer to help get government support for the new bomb.

“I neither can nor will do so,” Oppenheimer told Teller.

“It was obvious,” Teller said later, “that Oppenheimer did not want to support further weapons work in any way.”

That was a common feeling among the bomb makers. “We all felt that, like the soldiers, we had done our duty,” said Hans Bethe, “and that we deserved to return to the type of work that we had chosen as our life's career, the pursuit of pure science and teaching.”

On October 16, 1945, Oppenheimer officially resigned as director of Los Alamos. A ceremony was planned, and Dorothy McKibben drove from her office in Santa Fe up to the Hill to attend. It was a sunny fall day. McKibben saw thousands gathering in front of an outdoor stage. Beside the stage she saw Oppenheimer, pacing.

“Hello,” she said.

He walked right by her.

“His eyes were glazed over,” she remembered, “the way they were when he was in deep thought.”

On stage a few minutes later, Leslie Groves handed Oppenheimer a scroll—a certificate of thanks from the government to Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos staff.

“It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride,” Oppenheimer told the crowd. “Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern,” he continued. “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.”

*   *   *

A
WEEK LATER,
Oppenheimer was back in Washington to continue his talks with top officials. Early on the morning of October 24, he walked the streets of the capital with Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce.

“I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer,” Wallace wrote in his diary that night. “He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.”

Oppenheimer complained that Secretary of State Byrnes didn't seem to understand the implications of the bomb. Byrnes seemed to think it could be used like a pistol, to scare the Soviets into behaving a certain way. “Oppenheimer believes that this method will not work,” wrote Wallace. “He says the Russians are a proud people and have good physicists and abundant resources. They may have to lower their standard of living to do it but they will put everything they have got into getting plenty of atomic bombs as soon as possible.”

At that point, the United States and Soviet Union would be in an arms race—each trying to produce weapons fast enough to stay ahead. Oppenheimer believed this race could still be prevented.

“Do you think it would do any good to see the president?” Oppenheimer asked.

“Yes,” said Wallace.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
at ten-thirty, Oppenheimer walked into the Oval Office. President Truman was at his desk. He stood and shook Oppenheimer's hand. This was their first meeting.

They sat and began to talk. The conversation started awkwardly. Truman wanted to discuss how scientists and the military could continue working together to make more atomic bombs, while Oppenheimer tried to steer the conversation to the topic of international cooperation, and the goal of stopping the arms race before it could begin.

Truman brushed this worry aside, asking: “When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?”

“I don't know,” Oppenheimer answered.

“I know.”

“When?”

“Never.”

Oppenheimer was stunned by Truman's confidence—unjustified confidence, Oppenheimer believed. He had planned to lay out his step-by-step strategy for preventing an arms race, backing each step with clearly reasoned arguments. But at this critical moment, he was too emotional to command his powers of persuasion.

He lifted his trembling hands in front of Truman. “Mr. President,” he said, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”

Truman's eyes flashed disgust. “Never mind,” he mumbled, “it'll all come out in the wash.” If Truman had any misgivings about using the atomic bomb, he kept them well buried.

A long silence followed.

Then the president stood. The meeting was over.

“Don't worry,” Truman told Oppenheimer as they shook hands. “We're going to work something out, and you're going to help us.”

Oppenheimer left the room.

“Blood on his hands, dammit,” Truman grumbled as the door shut. “He hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it.” When aides came in to discuss other business, Truman snapped, “I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again!”

Outside the Oval Office, Oppenheimer put on his hat and coat. He walked through the halls and out of the White House and toward the street. He was the father of the atomic bomb. But at that moment he knew his creation was completely—and forever—beyond his control.

FALLOUT

ONE SUMMER DAY,
three years after the end of World War II, Harry Gold fell in love. “It really happened so—just like that,” he said. “Here was the girl I had been searching for all my life.”

The woman was Mary Lanning, a fellow chemist. She and Gold began dating, and Gold became more and more convinced that this was his shot at happiness. Why not grab it? The war was long since over. Klaus Fuchs was back in Britain. Gold was working in a hospital lab in Philadelphia, with no access to valuable secrets and no interest in spying ever again. Why not just live a normal life?

It was wishful thinking, and Gold knew it.

Mary had no idea what was wrong, but she sensed a disturbing coolness in her boyfriend. Here was a man who was kind and generous. He said he loved her. And yet he always seemed distracted. When Gold asked Lanning to marry him, she hesitated. If he really loved her, she wondered, why the lack of passion?

It wasn't lack of passion she was sensing. It was fear. “Fear of exposure,” Gold later admitted. “And fear not for myself, but a horror at the thought that the disastrous revelation might come after we had been married for three or four years, with children at home of our own.”

Gold could confess, tell her everything. She might stick by him. But the basic problem remained. For most of his adult life, Harry Gold had been a spy for the Soviet Union. Was it really possible to get away with something like that?

“Who knew better than I on what a precarious, tottering house of cards my whole life rested?”

*   *   *

O
N A WET
and gray morning on the plains of Kazakhstan, 2,000 miles east of Moscow, Igor Kurchatov paced back and forth in a small concrete bunker.

“Well, well…” muttered the head of the Soviet bomb project. “Well, well…”

It was a few minutes before 6:00 a.m. on August 29, 1949. Outside Kurchatov's bunker, the tall grass bent in the wind. Six miles away a steel tower rose 100 feet above the flat land. On a platform at the top of the tower sat the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb.

“Zero minus ten minutes.”

The countdown echoed off the bunker's concrete walls. Kurchatov continued walking and muttering. Crowded into the bunker were other top Soviet physicists, along with the head of Stalin's secret police, Lavrenti Beria. Beria watched Kurchatov's nervous pacing. He decided to crank up the pressure.

“Nothing will come of it, Igor,” Beria jabbed.

Kurchatov shook his head. “We'll certainly get it,” he insisted.

For weeks the Soviet scientists had been privately discussing what would happen if this bomb test failed. Many expected to be shot.