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.”
*
“THE 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.”
*
OVER 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.
*
ADOLF HITLER 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.
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p; 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.”
*
HARRY GOLD 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.
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.”
*
GOLD 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?”
*
THOUGH GOLD 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.”
*
ON JULY 3, several cars drove up to a brick mansion surr
ounded 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.”
*
ON JULY 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.
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