“If you really do form two such fragments,” she said, “they would be pushed apart with great energy.”
An atom splitting was incredible enough. But what made this a world-changing discovery was that if atoms really could be split, they would release energy as they broke in two. How much energy? Just enough, Meitner and Frisch calculated, to make a grain of sand jump. That doesn’t sound like much—but keep in mind how tiny atoms are. With 238 protons and neutrons, uranium is the largest atom in nature. Still, each atom is incredibly small. A single ounce of uranium has about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.
What if you had a twenty-pound lump of uranium? A fifty-pound lump? What if you were able to get all those atoms to split and release energy at the same moment? You’d have by far the most powerful bomb ever built.
“I feel as if I had caught an elephant by its tail, without meaning to,” Frisch wrote to his mother. “And now I don’t know what to do with it.”
*
NEWS OF THE DISCOVERY SPREAD QUICKLY within the small world of theoretical physicists. Otto Frisch rushed to Copenhagen, Denmark, catching up with Niels Bohr just as Bohr was boarding a ship for America. Frisch began telling Bohr that uranium atoms could split in two and was halfway through his explanation when Bohr slapped himself on the forehead.
“Oh, what idiots we have all been!” shouted Bohr. “Oh, but it is wonderful. This is just as it must be!”
Bohr was so excited, he ran home to get a blackboard. He set it up in his cabin on the ship and spent most of the two-week Atlantic crossing exploring this new discovery. By the time he reached New York City in January 1939, he was convinced—uranium atoms really could split in two. He took the news to a physics conference in Washington, D.C., where it leaped from one physicist to another.
“Bohr has just come in,” one scientist announced. “He has gone crazy. He says a neutron can split uranium!”
A newspaper reporter attending the conference described the news in a short article, which was picked up by papers across the country. The next morning a young physicist named Luis Alvarez was sitting in a barber shop in Berkeley, California. While the barber snipped his hair, Alvarez grabbed the San Francisco Chronicle from a pile of papers beside the chair. “In the second section,” he remembered, “buried away some place, was an announcement that some German chemists had found that the uranium atom split into two pieces.”
Alvarez put down the paper.
“I got right out of that barber chair and ran as fast as I could.” He sprinted to the campus of the University of California, where he taught, and ran from lab to lab with the news, soon bumping into one his fellow professors, Robert Oppenheimer. Alvarez told Oppenheimer that uranium atoms split in two—scientists were calling it fission.
“That’s impossible,” Oppenheimer said.
Alvarez explained what little he’d read about fission. Oppenheimer quickly agreed it must be true. “It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked,” said Alvarez.
“The U business is unbelievable,” Oppenheimer told a friend a few days later—U is the chemical symbol for uranium. Like all the scientists involved in the discovery, Oppenheimer was fired up by new ideas in physics, deeper glimpses into the weird inner world of atoms. The thought of making weapons of mass destruction had never occurred to him.
But now, suddenly, he couldn’t shake it from his mind: fission might make it possible to build a whole new type of explosive.
“Within perhaps a week,” recalled a student, “there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.”
*
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER realized something else right away. If it was obvious to him that an atomic bomb might be possible, it was also obvious to everyone else in the global community of top physicists. This would not usually be a problem. In normal times, scientists from around the world freely shared new ideas and theories. But in 1939, normal times were rapidly coming to an end.
Adolf Hitler was demanding a big piece of Poland, claiming it rightfully belonged to Germans. Britain and France finally faced the fact that Germany would continue gobbling up territory until stopped by force. At Poland they drew the line. A German attack on Poland, they warned, would mean war with Britain and France.
Hitler waved his fists and raged, “I’ll cook them in a stew they’ll choke on!”
Calling his military chiefs to Berlin, Hitler announced: “Further successes can no longer be obtained without the shedding of blood.” He ordered the German military to prepare an all-out invasion of Poland. Hitler knew this might ignite a much wider war, but he was not worried about taking the blame.
“In starting and waging a war,” he told his generals, “it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity! Act brutally! The stronger man is right!”
FINDING EINSTEIN
ON THE HOT SUNNY MORNING of July 16, 1939, a Dodge coupe pulled to the sandy side of the road in the oceanfront town of Patchogue, New York. Out of the car climbed two sweat-soaked men.
The men looked around, then began walking down the town’s main street. Speaking with European accents that locals couldn’t quite identify, the visitors asked for directions to “the cottage of Dr. Moore.” No one in town knew of such a place. The men went into stores and gas stations. No luck. They hiked back to their car and collapsed into their seats.
“Perhaps I misunderstood the name ‘Patchogue’ on the telephone,” the driver said. “Let’s see if we can find some similar name on the map.”
Visibly irritated, the man in the passenger seat unfolded a map of Long Island. He ran his finger along town names in tiny print.
“Could it be Peconic?”
“Yes, that was it,” the driver exclaimed. “Now I remember!”
He started the engine. They got back on the road.
*
DRIVING THE CAR WAS EUGENE WIGNER; in the passenger seat sat Leo Szilard. Both were Hungarian-born physicists, both about forty, both Jews who had fled from Europe as Adolf Hitler rose to power. Both were tormented by the same question: What had German scientists told Hitler about the possibility of building atomic bombs?
They had no way of knowing. But this much was clear: fission had been discovered in Berlin. Probably, German physicists were already working on an atomic bomb. This was a terrifying thought. Especially since six months had already passed since Hahn’s discovery, and the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, still had no idea that such a thing as fission even existed.
Szilard and Wigner were determined to tell him. Step one of their plan was to find Albert Einstein, the world’s most famous scientist. If Einstein sounded the alarm about the danger of a German atomic bomb, President Roosevelt might just listen.
Wigner had called Einstein’s office that morning. He was told the great man was on vacation, staying at a beach house he rented from someone named Dr. Moore, in Patchogue. Or was it Peconic? Something with a P.
About an hour after leaving Patchogue, Wigner and Szilard pulled into Peconic. Once again they asked around for the home of Dr. Moore. Again, no one knew.
“Let’s give it up and go home,” Szilard sighed. “Perhaps fate never intended it.”
Wigner shook his head. “But it’s our duty to take this step,” he insisted. “It must be our contribution to the prevention of a terrible calamity.”
So they drove slowly on, passing dunes and cottages.
Szilard had an idea. “How would it be if we simply asked where around here Einstein lives?”
Wigner spotted a young boy, about seven, walking along the side of the road holding a fishing rod. He pulled over. Szilard leaned his sweaty head out the car window.
“Say,” he began, “do you by any chance know where Einstein lives?”
The boy looked up, and said, “Of course.”
*
ALBERT EINSTEIN stood on the porch of his rented cottage, looking cool, tan, and relaxed in loose pants,
a T-shirt, and slippers. His famous mane of white hair was windswept from a morning of sailing on Long Island Sound. He welcomed the weary Hungarians, inviting them to sit down and have some iced tea.
After a few minutes of small talk, Szilard and Wigner brought up the subject they’d come to discuss. They told Einstein about the newest discoveries in fission and explained how uranium might be used to build devastating bombs.
Einstein hadn’t been following the fission research. He took a minute to process the science. Then he said, “I hadn’t thought of that at all.”
Einstein quickly realized that with atomic bombs, Adolf Hitler would be absolutely unstoppable. “And Einstein was just as horrified as I was by that prospect,” Wigner recalled. “He volunteered to do whatever he could to prevent it.”
Wigner got out a pen and a piece of paper. He took notes as Szilard and Einstein worked out the text of a letter to President Roosevelt.
*
SIX WEEKS LATER, on September 1, 1939, Germany launched a massive invasion of Poland. Using a new style of attack known as blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war,” Hitler’s planes, tanks, and soldiers slashed deep into Polish territory. Britain and France had promised to protect Poland—they had no choice but to declare war on Germany. They did, but it had no effect on the German charge. Hitler’s troops poured into Warsaw, Poland’s capital, in late September.
On October 11, in Washington, D.C., an economist named Alexander Sachs showed his ID to security guards outside the White House. He walked into the building with Albert Einstein’s letter in his briefcase.
Sachs was a former aide to President Roosevelt, and a personal friend. He also knew Leo Szilard, and he’d told Szilard he could get Einstein’s letter directly into Roosevelt’s hands. The start of World War II had made it tough to get an appointment with the president, but he’d finally made it.
Sachs was ushered into the Oval Office, where the president was seated behind his desk.
“Alex,” Roosevelt said, flashing his famously big smile, “what are you up to?”
Sachs sat down. He asked Roosevelt to listen very carefully to what he had to say. Roosevelt poured two glasses of brandy, got comfortable in his chair, and motioned for Sachs to begin.
Sachs explained the warning in Einstein’s letter. “The element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” Einstein had written. “One day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next-door neighbor.”
Einstein urged the government to start working closely with physicists to explore the possibilities of building atomic bombs. The letter ended with one last piece of information: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over.”
This was a chilling clue—the Germans were grabbing all the uranium they could get. Why? Were they already working on a bomb?
Roosevelt thought for a moment. “Alex,” he began, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”
“Precisely.”
Roosevelt nodded. He banged his desk, and said, “This requires action!”
TRADECRAFT
WITHIN WEEKS of getting Einstein’s letter, President Roosevelt formed the Uranium Committee, a group of military leaders and scientists. Their goal was to figure out the basics of how an atomic bomb might work, and what materials would be needed.
The project got off to a slow start. Sixteen different teams were spread out around the country. They began with a budget of just $6,000. An alarmed Einstein sent a second letter to President Roosevelt.
“Since the outbreak of the war, interest in uranium has intensified in Germany,” Einstein warned. “I have now learned that research there is being carried out in great secrecy.”
The race to build the atomic bomb was on.
*
JUST ABOUT THE LAST PERSON anyone would expect to be involved was Harry Gold.
When World War II began, Gold was a twenty-eight-year-old chemist, living with his parents and younger brother in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood. He stood five foot six, with thick black hair and a soft, round face. Friends described him as shy, smart, and always ready to help anyone who asked. He was the kind of guy who seemed to blend in with the background, who could come and go from a room without being noticed. “You’d never in a million years believe this guy was a spy,” one neighbor later said.
And yet Harry Gold was about to become a major player in what FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would call “the crime of the century.”
It all began one snowy night in February 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression. Like millions of Americans, Gold had been laid off from his job. His family was way behind on rent and facing eviction from their apartment. One night, after another hopeless job search, Gold was resting at home when a friend came racing through the door. The friend explained that a guy he knew, Tom Black, was leaving his job at a soap factory in Jersey City. Black could arrange to get Gold the job, if Gold was willing to move to New Jersey.
Gold’s mother leaped up and started stuffing her son’s clothes into a cardboard suitcase. Gold borrowed a few dollars and hurried to the bus station. Arriving in Jersey City after midnight, he walked down slushy sidewalks to Tom Black’s apartment.
“Black was waiting for me downstairs,” Gold remembered. “I can still see that huge, friendly, freckled face, the grin, and the feel of the bearlike grip of his hand.”
The first thing Black said was: “I am a Communist. And I am going to make a Communist out of you.”
*
GOLD EARNED $30 A WEEK at the soap factory, and sent $20 home to his parents. He was proud to be supporting his family and didn’t mind the hard work. “I was grateful to Tom Black,” he later said, “very much so.”
That was exactly what Black was counting on. Black dropped by Gold’s rented room often to lecture his new friend about Communism and the Soviet Union. Gold knew only the basics: Communists had taken over Russia in a recent revolution and renamed the country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union. Black told Gold that the Soviet government had abolished private property and was making all the decisions about what the economy should produce, and how goods should be distributed. In this way, Black said, the Soviets would soon wipe out the greed and poverty plaguing countries like the United States.
Black pressured Gold to officially join the Communist Party. “I just kept stalling,” Gold explained. “I had no interest in the matter whatsoever.”
Then came some good news. Gold’s former employer, a chemical plant called the Pennsylvania Sugar Company, was hiring again. Gold was offered his old job back. He jumped at the chance to move back to Philadelphia.
But Tom Black didn’t give up that easily. In early 1934, he came to visit Gold in Philadelphia.
“Harry, you’ve been stalling me,” Black said. “You’ve been trying to get out of joining the Communist Party. And possibly I don’t blame you.”
This last line got Gold’s attention.
“But, there is something you can do,” Black continued. “There is something that would be very helpful to the Soviet Union, and something in which you can take pride.”
The plant where Gold worked, Black explained, used cutting-edge processes to produce many useful chemicals. “The people of the Soviet Union need these processes,” said Black. “If you will obtain as many of them as you can in complete detail and give them to me, I will see to it that those processes are turned over to the Soviet Union.”
Gold took a long moment before saying, “I’ll think it over.”
“But actually,” he later explained, “I had already formed my judgment. Yes, I would.”
Some spies do it for the money; others are trying to change the world. Gold’s reasons were a lot less dramatic. He was thankful to Black for getting him a job and wanted to re
pay the debt. Also, Gold had what he described as “an almost puppy-like eagerness to please.” Here was a chance to do something nice for Black and help the Soviet people. The chemical processes Black wanted didn’t seem so secret, and if the information could really help the Soviets build a better society, why not share it? Who would it hurt?
“And that,” said Gold, “is how I began.”
*
GOLD STARTED SNEAKING DOCUMENTS OUT OF HIS LAB, plans and formulas for making industrial chemicals. Every few weeks he’d travel to New York City to meet with a Soviet contact—Gold knew these men only by fake first names. He’d hand over his stash of stolen documents, then hang around a coffee shop while the papers were copied. He got the papers back, rode back to Philadelphia, and returned the documents before anyone noticed they were missing.
By the time World War II began, Gold had given the Soviets every bit of useful information the Pennsylvania Sugar Company had in its files. He was tired of the long trips to New York, the constant lies to his family. Besides, Gold was starting to realize that the Soviet Union was hardly the workers’ paradise Tom Black had described. In fact, it was a police state ruthlessly run by Joseph Stalin, a dictator who arrested and executed his political rivals, just like Hitler. Equally disturbing to Gold was the news that just days before the war started, Stalin and Hitler had signed a special pact, agreeing not to fight each other. Why would Stalin make a deal with the devil? Gold wondered. He was convinced—it was time to leave his secret life behind.
The Soviets had different ideas.
Gold’s Soviet contact, known to Gold only as “Fred,” told Gold to get a job at a weapons factory—someplace with technology worth stealing. And Fred wanted Gold to start recruiting other spies with technical knowledge.
“I’m giving you orders!” Fred shouted.
When Gold hesitated, Fred went further. Should Gold ever get the idea of walking away from the Soviets, Fred assured Gold that his boss would get an anonymous note all about Gold’s illegal activities.
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