Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

* Haakon had recently received a letter from the dean, warning that his son was spending too much time on campus promoting political causes. Yet the admonitory letter that Haakon sent to Jacques may have said more about the father than the son: “There is nothing more pitiful than a left-wing campus intellectual who can’t make the grade. He carries no authority and inspires nothing but contempt.”

  * Copies of the cables were, of course, passed to U.S. Army cryptanalysts, who, beginning in late 1946, were able to partially decipher them in a secret code-breaking project named Venona. The Venona decrypts were subsequently used to identify Soviet agents operating in the United States. They are the primary source for the code names and cables cited in this section.

  * According to Sacred Secrets, a book by Jerrold Schecter and Leona Schecter, and based in part upon Soviet sources, Kheifets first met Oppenheimer during this reception at Bransten’s house, and thereafter had lunch with the physicist. The book claims that Oppenheimer ultimately informed Kheifets of the Einstein-Szilard letter and of Oppie’s own concern that the United States was moving too slowly on the atomic project—information that Kheifets passed along in a coded telegram to Moscow. Reproduced in the book’s appendix is a top-secret cable that the head of the wartime NKVD reportedly sent to Beria in October 1944, which includes this passage: “In 1942 one of the leaders of the scientific work on uranium in the USA, professor Oppenheimer (unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder) informed us about the beginning of work. At the request of Comrade Kheifets, confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to the research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder.”

  Lacking additional documentation from former Soviet archives, it is difficult to know whether this cable is evidence of Oppenheimer’s complicity in espionage or reflects the (understandable) desire of Kheifets and other NKVD operatives to curry favor with their boss.

  * An utterance attributed to Oppie—“God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within”—surely had Teller in mind. Ironically, the two men were competitive even in “death”: Oppenheimer played the part of the first corpse and Edward the second in the lab’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace.

  * A particularly chilling set of Venona messages concerns the fate of Elizaveta Kuznetsova, a crew member who jumped ship in San Francisco. Despite going into hiding, marrying a cab driver in the city, and finally fleeing to Portland, Oregon, the hapless Kuznetsova was eventually hunted down by the relentless Kharon. Kheifets’s successor sent this message to Moscow late in 1944: “On 4 November this year the traitor to the fatherland Kuznetsova was shipped to Vladivostok on the tanker Belgorod.”

  * Near the end of the war, because of Fuchs and other spies at Los Alamos, the Russians had a precise description of the component parts of Fat Man, including such engineering details as the makeup and design of the explosive lenses used to compress the plutonium core, and the exact dimensions of the bomb’s polonium initiator. The device that the Soviets exploded in their first nuclear test, in August 1949, was essentially a copy of Fat Man.

  * From a sonnet by John Donne:

  Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

  * Apresyan had become the New York rezident after Zubilin was recalled to Moscow. Maj’s brother had been shot during the Stalinist purges, and Apresyan himself had spent time at the NKVD’s infamous Lubyanka prison. A colleague wrote of him: “Our Rezident had been so deeply traumatized by his own experience as a prisoner that the secret meetings with the agents he handled were absolute torture for him. Several days before a rendezvous he would turn into a withdrawn bundle of nerves, barely listening to what was being said and incapable of making any decisions.”

  * Apresyan had other pressing, if mundane, concerns. He complained to Moscow in September that he had been unable to meet with two of his agents in Los Angeles (Caen) during a recent visit because he lacked a car. May’s lament would have struck a sympathetic chord with many Angelenos: “In a town like Caen I should be simply walked off my feet.” Nonetheless, his request was denied.

  * Oppenheimer carried Wilson’s petition to Washington, where it eventually made its way to Stimson and onto Truman’s desk. Ironically, the Russians may have seen it first. In a rendezvous outside Santa Fe on September 19, 1945, Klaus Fuchs gave Harry Gold a copy. A summary, which arrived in Moscow on October 29, noted that the scientists’ “feelings of distrust toward the government are very strong.”

  * Part of the fallout of the so-called Gouzenko spy case was that Moscow Center ordered its agents to temporarily suspend contact with their sources in the West. The subsequent defection of another spy, Elizabeth Bentley, virtually put an end to the existing network of Soviet agents in the United States.

  * In 1950, a congressional aide spoke with Teller about international control of the bomb and summarized Edward’s views in a memo: “[Teller] thinks it is foolish to hope for international control while Russia remains under present regime. On the other hand, he does concede that it is important we make all the right moves in the search for international agreement so that we do not lose out to the Russians in the battle for world opinion.”

  * Sometime in 1946, Fuchs passed along to the Soviets nine typed pages of notes on a series of lectures that Fermi had given at Los Alamos University on the Super. The notes included detailed calculations on the amount of energy that would be released by the burning of a specific quantity of tritium and deuterium, as initiated by an exploding fission bomb. The problem that had stymied Teller at the Berkeley seminar—the loss of energy through radiation—was noted, along with the importance of shielding the thermonuclear fuel from the intense radiation created by the atomic trigger. “So far all schemes for initiation of the super are rather vague,” the notes concluded. But a simple sketch at the bottom of the last page showed one possible solution.

  * Sproul, however, was growing tired of “such arrangements, as they are purely personal and have nothing to do, except very remotely, with University business.” The following year, when Lawrence let it be known that he wished to buy another new car, Sproul urged Berkeley’s comptroller to approve the purchase but thereafter to “have nothing further to do with the transaction.”

  * While the Russian H-bomb was not yet under construction, planning for it had already begun. On March 13, 1948, Klaus Fuchs, meeting his Soviet control in a London pub, had passed along a drawing of an advanced design for the Super, based in part upon the idea that Fuchs and von Neumann had prepared on the eve of the 1946 Los Alamos conference. Five weeks later, Beria asked Kurchatov and two other Russian physicists to submit their own plan for thermonuclear research. In early June 1948—three months before Teller wrote “The Russian Atomic Plan”—the USSR’s Council of Ministers approved the scientists’ proposal for a top-secret, high-priority project to build a Soviet Super.

  * Manley recalled only one occasion when Oppie’s emotions triumphed over his scientific detachment at a GAC meeting. Following a briefing on nuclear-powered submarines by Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, Oppenheimer went over to the model sub on the dais of the deserted conference room and, putting his hand around the hull, crushed it.

  * Despite an exhaustive investigation, bureau agents may have overlooked one hole in Oppenheimer’s alibi. While at the ranch that summer, he and Kitty were negotiating to buy the house at Eagle Hill from its absentee owner, Bertha Damon, who lived in Massachusetts. Complicating the purchase was the fact that the house contained three sets of furniture: Mrs. Damon’s, a previous renter’s, and the current tenant’s. Rather than buy new furniture, the Oppenheimers wished to select pieces that Damon offered for sale. On Tuesday, July 21, 1941, Damon sent this cable to Oppie’s real estate agent: “Accepted. Please request Oppenheimers meet me Saturday Sunday dispose furnitur
e.” When Mrs. Damon later attempted to contact the Oppenheimers directly, the real estate agent informed her that the couple was “traveling.”

  Between Friday morning, July 25, when Oppie—who had been kicked by a horse the day before—was x-rayed at a Santa Fe hospital, and late Monday afternoon, July 28, when the couple’s Packard (with Kitty at the wheel) collided with a New Mexico Fish and Game truck on the road leading to Pecos, the Oppenheimers’ whereabouts are unaccounted for. Interviewed by the FBI in 1952, Mrs. Damon recalled meeting with the Oppenheimers to discuss the furniture about a week after she accepted their terms.

  Whether—and how—the Oppenheimers made the 2,200-mile round-trip journey in less than eighty hours remains a matter of speculation, however.

  * Strauss’s interest in wiretaps and black-bag operations dated from a bizarre, Watergate-like incident in 1930. Believing Democratic Party officials were in possession of damaging information about his administration, President Herbert Hoover requested that Strauss, formerly his private secretary, secretly retrieve the file, authorizing him “to utilize the services of any one of our various government secret services.” Strauss, in turn, approached Paul Foster, the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence in New York City, who assigned an agent to the task. While no incriminating documents were found, Strauss was evidently impressed with the potential of such clandestine—and illegal—operations.

  * Section 80, Title 18 of the U.S. Code specified that any individual who “knowingly or willfully falsifie[d] or conceal[ed] … a material fact … in any matter within the jurisdiction or agency of the United States” was guilty of a felony. In 1943, Groves had lied to Nichols by repeating Oppenheimer’s original story that Chevalier had approached three scientists.

  * Having meanwhile abandoned his original vocation for another branch of physics—optics—Weinberg was seeking a job at Spero’s House of Vision in New York.

  The political climate had another of Oppenheimer’s former students in more desperate straits. Late in December 1953, the personnel director of an oil company in Ponca City, Oklahoma, informed Oppie that Rossi Lomanitz had given his name as a job reference: “Quite frankly, we could use a man having his technical background; but because of his past public record, I find it hard to believe that his loyalty is all that it should be.… For your information, he has been living in a hovel on the edge of a swamp for the past three years. He has worked as a day laborer since Jan. 1950.”

  * Ironically, the focus of Joint Committee investigators upon Oppenheimer as the “second Fuchs” caused them to miss another real spy at Los Alamos: Harvard-trained physicist Ted Hall. In September 1954, security officials at the lab told Frank Cotter that Hall—who left the lab in spring 1946—was probably the Soviets’ other source for secret documents obtained from Los Alamos.

  * At one point in this testimony, Oppenheimer seemed about to tell the story of Groves’s December 1943 visit, but Robb quickly intervened to get the questioning back on track:

  ROBB: “Then you were interviewed in 1946; is that right?”

  OPPENHEIMER: “In between I think came Groves.”

  ROBB: “Yes. But you were interviewed in 1946; is that right?”

  * Shortly before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer recited a passage from Hindu scripture, which had so impressed Bush that he wrote it down on a slip of paper and kept it in his wallet throughout the war: “In the forest, in battle, in the midst of arrows, javelins, fire / Out on the great sea, at the precipice’s edge in the mountains / In sleep, in delirium, in deep trouble / The good deeds a man has done before defend him.”

  * There was also a new and personal element to Lawrence’s animosity. A week or so earlier, at a cocktail party in Balboa, he learned from a friend of the Tolmans that Oppenheimer had carried on an affair with Ruth while her husband, Richard, was still alive. Molly remembered her husband returning to their house in a rage. Ernest evidently passed the story along to Strauss, who would write to Teller, years after the hearing: “Did Ernest Lawrence ever tell you what [Oppenheimer] did in the Tolman household?”

  * In his memoirs, published in 2001, Teller claimed that his reservations concerning Oppenheimer’s “judgment” referred not to the latter’s advice on the H-bomb but to a proposal Oppie had supposedly made to Eisenhower, shortly after the Mike test, urging that consideration be given to using the H-bomb in Korea. While no corroborating evidence could be found for Teller’s claim, Rabi did confirm, during the Oppenheimer hearings, that his friend had at one time in the early 1950s entertained the notion of preventive war.

  * Several weeks after the hearings, William Borden wrote Teller a confidential letter containing words of encouragement. In it, Borden offered this explanation for why he had sent his famous missive to Hoover: “In weighing the danger of having a probable subversive continue to orient our national policies against the danger of ‘alienating our scientists,’ it struck me that someone had to take the first unequivocal step toward belling this cat and that I was the logical nominee, not only because I knew more about the cat than others … but because I am outside the scientific fraternity.”

  * For Lawrence at least. The Sony corporation would later develop and market the three-gun picture tube under its “Trinitron” trademark.