Bomb (27 page)

After the war, Hall decided to return to school and began working toward his PhD in physics at the University of Chicago. There he met and fell in love with a student named Joan. Hall's approach was different from Gold's. Rather than live with secrets, he took Joan to her bedroom and shut the door. He looked around the small room, nervously.

“You don't have any microphones in here, do you?” he asked.

She assured him she didn't.

They sat on the bed. Ted told her everything. They were married soon after.

Three years later, the army code breakers who had exposed Klaus Fuchs found another curious telegram sent to KGB headquarters during World War II. It had been sent from New York City to Moscow in late 1944. The message described Ted Hall's meeting with the Soviet journalist and agent Sergei Kurnakov at Kurnakov's New York apartment—the meeting at which the nineteen-year-old Hall had first offered himself as a spy.

The information was passed on to the FBI's Chicago office. On March 16, 1951, agent Robert McQueen dropped by Hall's lab at the university. He said he needed Hall's help “with a matter pertaining to the security of the United States.” Hall agreed to come to McQueen's office to answer a few questions.

The moment he began questioning Hall, McQueen knew he'd met his match. “I think he was very bright,” McQueen recalled. “Very, very bright.”

Expecting this day to come, Hall had long ago prepared his story. When McQueen pulled out a photo of Sergei Kurnakov, Hall calmly said he knew of Kurnakov's articles but had never met the man.

Hour after hour the questions grew more intense. McQueen finally came out and accused Hall of spying. Hall seemed confused by the charge, but not greatly upset.

“Quite calm for his age,” McQueen noted. Too calm, the agent thought. “An innocent man usually says, ‘Why are you asking me these questions?'”

Hall never protested. He answered the questions, then got up to leave. McQueen asked if he'd be willing to come back for another interview.

No, said Hall. He had nothing more to say.

The FBI
knew
Hall was guilty. And Hall knew they knew. But all the government had on Hall was the decoded KGB cable, and they didn't want to use that in court. Hall guessed this was the case. He simply refused to talk with the FBI—and they had no legal way to force him.

That didn't stop FBI agents from opening Hall's mail and tapping his home phone and following him everywhere.

“We knew that there was a definite chance that the world was going to collapse around us,” Joan Hall remembered. She and Ted lived in fear for a couple of years—but slowly, over time, the FBI gave up.

In 1962 the Halls, with their three young children, moved to Britain, where Hall went to work in a lab at Cambridge University. It was not until 1995, when the KGB's decoded messages were finally made public, that Hall was exposed. When reporters came to his house to question him, he admitted contact with Soviet agents but declined to discuss details.

“If confronted with the same problem today,” Hall acknowledged, “I would respond quite differently.”

Ted Hall lived another four years, dying at the age of 74.

*   *   *

A
FTER LEAVING
L
OS
A
LAMOS,
Robert Oppenheimer moved east, taking over as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He also continued working in Washington, D.C., where he served as a scientific advisor to the government on atomic energy policy.

That's where he got in trouble.

The Soviet bomb test in 1949 seriously intensified the Cold War—the growing global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that followed World War II. The United States faced a major decision: Now that the Soviets had the atomic bomb, should the Americans try to build an even more devastating weapon?

While working at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer and other top scientists had discussed the possibility of building what they called the “Super.” This would be a new kind of bomb, not based on splitting atoms. The Super would get its energy from fusion, or the
joining
of atoms. At the extreme temperatures and pressures inside the sun and other stars, hydrogen atoms are fused together. This fusion process creates helium atoms—and releases vast amounts of energy. It is fusion that powers the stars.

In theory, scientists realized, it would be possible to re-create this process inside a bomb. Hydrogen could be put inside a fission bomb, like the ones used in Japan. When the fission bomb exploded, the heat and pressure should be great enough to cause the fusion of the hydrogen atoms. The power of such a bomb would have almost no limit. The more hydrogen you add, the bigger the blast.

In October 1949, Oppenheimer and other scientific advisors sat down to discuss the hydrogen bomb. Would the bomb really work? Probably, the scientists agreed. Would building it make Americans safer? No, they argued. The United States already had bombs powerful enough to wipe out Soviet cities. Building even bigger bombs would only heat up the arms race with the Soviets. The Soviets would respond by building bigger bombs themselves, putting Americans in greater danger. Oppenheimer argued that now was the time to step back from the arms race, not to accelerate it.

“We believe a super bomb should never be produced,” Oppenheimer wrote on behalf of the scientists.

Another Los Alamos leader, Hans Bethe, added his own argument. “I believe the most important question is the moral one,” he said. “Can we, who have always insisted on morality and human decency between nations as well as inside our own country, introduce this weapon of total annihilation into the world?”

President Truman saw it differently. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was proving to be ruthless and untrustworthy. It would be dangerous—even irresponsible, Truman figured—to let the Soviets become more powerful than the United States. And, as always, there was a political angle. If the Soviets got the hydrogen bomb first, American voters might blame the president who'd let it happen.

When it came time to make the decision, Truman had one question about the hydrogen bomb: “Can the Russians do it?”

Yes, said his advisors.

“In that case, we have no choice. We'll go ahead.”

On January 31, 1950, Truman announced that the country was moving forward with work on the hydrogen bomb.

“We keep saying, ‘We have no other course,'” lamented Truman's advisor David Lilienthal. “What we should be saying is, ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.'”

Albert Einstein, who had first alerted President Roosevelt to the possibility of building atomic bombs, was deeply disturbed. “If successful,” he said, “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.”

*   *   *

O
N
N
OVEMBER 1, 1952,
on a tiny island in the South Pacific, the United States tested the world's first hydrogen bomb. It exploded with the incredible force of 10 megatons of TNT. That's 10
million
tons of TNT—more than 500 times more powerful than the bomb that flattened Hiroshima.

Less than a year later, in Kazakhstan, the Soviets successfully tested their first hydrogen bomb.

From this point on, there could be no such thing as winning a nuclear war. “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle,” Oppenheimer wrote in a 1953 article, “each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

Quotes like this got Oppenheimer into trouble. They particularly annoyed Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the government agency in charge of the country's atomic energy policy. Strauss argued that Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb was an act of disloyalty to America. He suggested that maybe Oppenheimer had
always
been disloyal. As evidence, he dug up those flimsy charges the army and FBI had investigated ten years before: that Oppenheimer was secretly a Communist and maybe even a Soviet spy.

Strauss devised a plan for taking Oppenheimer down. He'd have the AEC strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. Without this clearance, Oppenheimer would no longer be allowed to see secret information on the latest atomic weapons research. He couldn't advise the government, because he wouldn't know what was going on.

Oppenheimer had two options: demand a hearing, or simply walk away. He knew by now that nothing he did or said could stop the arms race. But there was a principle involved—he couldn't let the charges against him go unchallenged. “This course of action,” he told Strauss, “would mean that I accept and concur in the view that I am not fit to serve this government that I have now served for some twelve years. This I cannot do.”

Oppenheimer got his hearing, but it was bogus from the start. Strauss personally picked the panel of judges. The FBI tapped Oppenheimer's phones and listened in on conversations between him and his attorney. This illegally gathered information was used against Oppenheimer in court.

Strauss and his lead lawyer, Roger Robb, came up with two main lines of attack. First, they argued that Oppenheimer objected to the hydrogen bomb, and therefore was helping to weaken America. Second, that Oppenheimer had never come clean about the so-called Chevalier incident. This was the time in late 1942 when Oppenheimer's friend, Haakon Chevalier, had come to his house and mentioned that a Soviet agent he knew would be interested in any scientific information Oppenheimer might like to share.

Oppenheimer had hashed it all out with army security officers back in 1943. But now Robb suggested that Oppenheimer had never told the
whole
truth about the Chevalier incident. If the incident had really been so innocent, Robb asked, why hadn't Oppenheimer reported it to Leslie Groves right away?

Robb was clearly implying that Oppenheimer had closer contact with the Soviets than he was admitting. The judges were swayed—they voted to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. “Dr. Oppenheimer is not entitled to the continued confidence of the government,” declared the AEC.

*   *   *

O
PPENHEIMER WAS ONLY FIFTY YEARS OLD,
but friends said he suddenly looked older.

“I think it broke his spirit, really,” Robert Serber said of the ruling.

“I think to a certain extent it actually almost killed him, spiritually,” agreed Isidor Rabi. “It achieved what his opponents wanted to achieve; it destroyed him.”

During the hearing a friend mentioned that Oppenheimer, with his scientific reputation, would be welcome at any top university in Europe—why not go?

Tears glazed Oppenheimer's eyes as he said, “Damn it, I happen to love this country.”

Even after the hearing, the FBI continued listening in on Oppenheimer's phone calls. When he and his family flew to the Caribbean island of St. John for a vacation, agents kept watch. “According to the plan,” declared one FBI report, “Oppenheimer will first travel to England, from England he will travel to France, and while in France he will vanish into Soviet hands.”

Actually, Oppenheimer sat on the beach for a few weeks. Then he went home to New Jersey.

He continued working in Princeton until his retirement in 1966. That same year he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. He died in 1967, at the age of 62.

*   *   *

A
LL THE WHILE
the arms race expanded.

In 1954, the United States tested a massive 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on the tiny Pacific island of Bikini Atoll. A cloud of radioactive dust spread over 7,000 square miles of ocean. To this day, the radioactive soil of Bikini Atoll makes the island uninhabitable.

Soviet bomb makers responded with the biggest atomic explosion in history—an incredible 50-megaton monster. The test knocked down brick buildings 25 miles from the blast. The shock wave cracked windows 500 miles away.

Other countries decided they needed the bomb as well. Great Britain tested its first atomic bomb in 1952. France followed with its first bomb test in 1960. Then came China in 1964, and India in 1974.

The United States and Soviet Union continued racing. The race was no longer to build bigger bombs—the bombs were already too big for any possible target. The race was to build more bombs, and faster and more accurate ways to deliver them by airplane, submarine, and missile. By the mid-1980s the two sides had a total of 65,000 nuclear bombs. Each side could now destroy the other's cities within minutes of the start of war. The rivals had enough bombs to destroy all human life—many times over.

The world has since stepped back a bit from this cliff.

In the late 1980s, the United States and U.S.S.R. began negotiating treaties to reduce the number of atomic weapons. The reductions have continued since the end of the Cold War. Together, the United States and Russia now have about 22,000 atomic weapons.

But other countries have joined the nuclear club. Pakistan tested a uranium fission bomb in 1998. North Korea has had the bomb since 2006. Israel may have about eighty atomic bombs, though it will not officially confirm or deny its bomb program. In 2011, United Nations inspectors announced that they had found evidence that Iran was very likely working, in secret, to build its own atomic arsenal.

The big question is: Will any of these bombs ever be used?

Most of the world's atomic bombs are still in the hands of the United States and Russia. And while our two countries are not exactly friendly, tensions are far lower than they were during the Cold War. For now, at least, it's hard to imagine a realistic series of events that could lead to a massive exchange of atomic bombs.

But other dangers exist. One is the nightmare scenario of a terrorist group getting hold of an atomic weapon. Another is that an actual government—like the secretive rulers of North Korea—might just be crazy enough to lash out with atomic bombs. Or long-time enemies India and Pakistan could go to war, as they have several times, and this time the shooting could escalate into a nuclear battle.