by Close, Frank
So thanks to:
Joseph Albright
Ugo Amaldi
Christopher Andrew
Lorna Arnold
Marlene Baldauf
Alessandro Bettini
Samoil Bilenky
Benny Birnberg
Tania Blokhintseva
Mark Bretscher
Paul Broda
Franco Buccella
Frances Cairncross
Duncan Campbell
Rino Castaldi
Diana Cobban May
Chris Collins
Gordon Corera
Tam Dalyell
Thelma Druett
Sven-Olof Ekman
Graham Farmelo
Giuseppe Fidecaro
Maria Fidecaro
Anthony Gardner
Paul Gardner
Michael Goodman
Oleg Gordievsky
Jeremy Grange
Vladimir Gribov
Tom Griffin
Joan Hall
David Hanna
Roger Hanna
Joe Hatton
Peter Hennessy
Peter Higgs
Gregory Hutchinson
Boris Ioffe
David Jackson
George Kalmus
Valery Khoze
Jasper and Rita Kirkby
Peter Knight
Anneke Lawrence-Jones
David Lees
Luigi di Lella
Lev Lipatov
Harry Lipkin
Fedele Lizzi
John Maddicott
Miriam Mafai
Luciano Maiani
Neil Maroni
Victor Matveev
Art McDonald
Hamish McRae
Matt Melvin
Charles Miller
Peter Minkowski
Giorgio Panini
Rudolf and Genia Peierls
Don Perkins
Michel Pinault
Chapman Pincher
Anna Pontecorvo (Newton), Antonio Pontecorvo, Barbara Pontecorvo, David Pontecorvo, Gil Pontecorvo, Gregory Pontecorvo, Ludo Pontecorvo, Simone Pontecorvo
Kate Pyne
Nicholas Reed
Richard Rhodes
Stella Rimington
John Rowlinson
Yves Sacquin
John Sandalls
David Saxon
Gino Segrè
Brian Smith
Godfrey Stafford
Jack Steinberger
Kellogg Stelle
Eugenio Tabet
Stan Taylor
I. Todorov
Simone Turchetti
William Tyrer
David Wark
Forbes Wastie
Peter Watson
Nigel West
Christine Wootton
Nino Zichichi
Sarah Wearne, Michael Triff, and the archives at Abingdon School
Allen Packwood and the staff at the Churchill College archives, Cambridge
Carlo Dionisi and the organizers of the Bruno Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome
Claire Daniel, Martin Hendry, Lesley Richmond, and David Saxon for research at the University of Glasgow archives
Jens Vigen and Tullio Basaglia at the CERN library and their liaison with Dubna
Giuseppe Mussardo and Luisa Bonolis for video interviews in Russia, and the research and evaluation of material from historical archives in France, Italy, and Russia
Three anonymous sources in the former Soviet Union, and two in the United Kingdom
Finally, Half-Life owes much to editorial advice from T. J. Kelleher, John Searcy, and Sandra Beris at Basic, and Robin Dennis and Sam Carter at Oneworld, as well as Michael Marten, who read my first draft in full and encouraged me to rewrite it, and my agent, Patrick Walsh, who helped this project come to life.
Acronyms
AIP: American Institute of Physics oral history archive (online)
BPSSW: Bruno Pontecorvo: Selected Scientific Works
CAC: Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge University
TNA: The National Archives, London
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. Guy Liddell diary, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.
2. Recounted in Chapman Pincher, Treachery, chap. 59.
3. John Rowlinson interview, November 6, 2012.
4. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, p. 257.
5. This is my memory of Alexei’s remarks from four decades past. The quotes are his own words, taken from a memorial for Bruno. Sadly, Alexei Norairovich Sissakian himself died in 2010 and so was unable to develop his memories with me further. The quote as written is excerpted from the memorial. It is consistent with my memory of his remarks to me.
6. Thelma Druett interview, February 2012.
7. Alan Moorehead’s book The Traitors was first published in 1952 and cast Fuchs, Nunn May, and Pontecorvo as the three “traitors.” It is now clear that Moorehead was given free rein by MI5 to include Pontecorvo as an atomic spy without any hard evidence. Nonetheless, his book established the perception that Pontecorvo escaped to the USSR as the net was about to close around him. In any event, none of the trio was a traitor to the United Kingdom as the Soviet Union was its ally at the time when Fuchs and Nunn May passed information. As neither Moorehead nor MI5 ever specified what Pontecorvo was supposed to have done, or when, there is no basis for classifying him as a traitor either. Furthermore, he was not a British citizen until 1948.
8. N. Reed, My Father, the Man Who Never Was. On page 117 Ronnie Reed recalls being “put in charge of counter-espionage against the Russians in 1951.” This seems to be a false memory; TNA archives show he was in place in 1950, and Reed himself recalled that this meant he was in “charge of cases like Klaus Fuchs,” which straddled the end of 1949 and beginning of 1950. My understanding of Reed’s role is also based on e-mails and phone conversations with Nicholas Reed on December 17, 2012, March 12, 2013, and March 20, 2013.
CHAPTER 1
1. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
2. Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair, p. 16
3. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes; Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
4. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
5. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
6. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
7. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, September 12, 2013. The accuracy of this memory is unclear. Bruno’s younger brother Gillo was indeed an international competitor, who took part in the tournament at London’s Queen’s Club in 1939. Bruno could play a good game, by all accounts, and was the winner of several tournaments at the club level, but never reached the same stratospheric heights as his brother.
8. Gil Pontecorvo interview, January 25, 2014. Maria’s family belonged to the Chiesa Evangelica Valdese, an evangelical Protestant group that had broken from the Catholic Church.
9. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
10. Neil Maroni interview, December 23, 2013. A remark by an unnamed family member, as quoted by Neil Maroni, son of Giovanni Pontecorvo.
11. Another cousin, Eugenio Coloni, joined the antifascist group Justice and Liberty. He was later arrested and eventually killed by fascist militants in 1944. His significance for Bruno’s life was limited.
12. These were Lev and Xenia Zilberberg. See Chaliand and Blin, The History of Terrorism, or Smadar Sinai, “Manya Shochat and Xenia Pampilova’s Experience of Immigration to Eretz Yisrael: A New Identity or a New Garment?,” accessible at www.aisisraelstudies.org/papers/AIS2007_SinaiSmadar.pdf, which states, “In 1926, [Xenia’s] daughter Xenichka married Emilio Sereni . . . who became one of the leaders of the communist party in Italy.”
13. Guido Pontecorvo, as quoted in TNA KV 2/1888.
14. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, p. 97.
15. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
16. The discovery of the neutron in 1932 was
key. See Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb for a description of the discovery and its implications.
17. This is essentially the atomic model proposed in 1803 by English chemist John Dalton. His model explained the laws of chemical combination and inspired quantitative experiments. This led scientists to measure the relative weights of the atoms of different elements, which range from hydrogen, the lightest element, to uranium, the heaviest normally found on earth.
18. Dig uranium from the ground and, in 993 out of every 1,000 atoms, the nucleus will have 146 neutrons, making 238 “nucleons” in total—the isotope U-238. The remaining seven atoms will most probably contain only 143 neutrons, making U-235. Even the most common form of uranium, U-238, is radioactive. Half of a sample of the stuff will decay in 4 billion years—we call this its half-life, which means that about half of the uranium found in the rocks of the newborn Earth, 5 billion years ago, has now decayed. The isotope U-235, by contrast, has a half-life of about 700 million years. This time span, which is very long on a human scale, is nonetheless relatively short compared to the age of the earth and the half-life of its sibling, U-238. Thus, over the eons, much more U-235 than U-238 has disappeared from primeval rocks. This explains the dominance of U-238 in natural ores today. This U-238 also acts as a blanket that impedes the fission of U-235, making a succession of fissions rare, and the chance of a chain reaction negligible in uranium ores. Uranium first has to be “enriched” by increasing the percentage of U-235 before it can be used as a practical source of energy.
19. The half-life is the time after which half of the atoms of a sample will have decayed.
20. There is an exception, however. When more than 1058 neutrons come together, the assembly can be held together by the force of gravity. This is a neutron star.
21. Hans Bethe, quoted in Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 165.
CHAPTER 2
1. Pauli originally called it a “neutron,” but when the constituent of the nucleus was discovered and given that name in 1932, Enrico Fermi proposed the name neutrino for the particle emitted in beta decay.
2. Close, Neutrino, pp. 22–24.
3. Half a century later, the editors admitted that this was their greatest blunder.
4. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, p. 84.
5. Frédéric Joliot, Nobel Prize address, 1935. See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1935/joliot-fred-lecture.pdf.
6. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Laboratorio di Sanità Pubblica, headed by Trabacchi, was located in the same building on the Via Panisperna and kept one gram of uranium on hand for medical purposes.
7. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Amaldi recalled that, during this vacation, Fermi explained his theory of beta decay to the “Boys.”
8. The idea seems to have originated with Ettore Majorana, a brilliant theorist on Fermi’s team. Majorana disappeared in 1938 and was presumed dead. See Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair, p. 24.
9. The positron is the antimatter sibling of the negatively charged electron. It has the same mass as an electron but is positively charged.
10. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
11. Edoardo Amaldi as told to Ugo Amaldi; Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.
12. Fermi’s memory of events as told to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. See Fermi, Note e memorie, p. 927; quoted in Robotti and Guerra, “Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy.”
13. Not October 22, contrary to popular wisdom. See later comments about this.
14. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. This seems to be a leitmotif for Fermi, as eight years later in Chicago, when his nuclear reactor was about to reach criticality, he said, “And now we go for lunch.”
15. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Ugo recalls his father, Edoardo, saying that Fermi reached an understanding of the phenomenon during lunch, and that on the way back to the laboratory he explained the idea of slow neutrons to them.
16. Edoardo Amaldi interview, AIP, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4485_1.html. Amaldi describes this episode and also considers whether Fermi’s insight was inspired by his earlier analysis of electrons bouncing from atoms, which he had made following the measurements of atomic spectra by Amaldi, Segrè, and Pontecorvo.
17. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, chap. 11. See also note 20 below, which casts doubt on her version.
18. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. Ugo Amaldi confirms this. These papers were drafted in the Amaldi apartment when Ugo was asleep, at the age of two months. On more than one occasion his mother later told him that there was so much excitement she was afraid he would be woken.
19. L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family, p. 101.
20. Historian Alberto De Gregorio studied Enrico Fermi’s logbooks, which give October 20 as the date. See his “Chance and Necessity in Fermi’s Discovery of the Properties of the Slow Neutrons” (http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0201/0201028.pdf) for a detailed history and analysis of different memories of these events. I am grateful to Ugo Amaldi for bringing this document to light. Ugo also doubts the goldfish pond episode: his father, Edoardo, never mentioned it, and Emilio Segrè claimed to Ugo that it never happened.
21. Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014. The history of the water bucket is confused. The variable results of Amaldi and Pontecorvo, which started the saga, were at one point blamed upon a bucket of water, which the cleaner would leave “now under one table and another time under another.”
22. In November he repeated some of the tests and found the same results as “those of October 21 [sic].”
23. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 11, 2013; Ugo Amaldi e-mail, January 12, 2014.
24. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 11, 2013.
25. Robotti, “The Beginning of a Great Adventure.”
26. Bruno Pontecorvo, “On the Properties of Slow Neutrons” [in Italian], Il nuovo cimento 12, no. 4 (April 1935): 211–222.
27. Graphite is carbon, which is light enough to slow neutrons efficiently, and also cheap. Heavy water, however, is expensive and not readily available.
28. Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair, chap. 1, note 54.
29. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
30. Frisch, What Little I Remember, quoted in Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 227.
31. In 1932 Dmitri Ivanenko, a theoretician in Moscow, invented a model of the atomic nucleus consisting of neutrons and protons, independently of Bohr, but no one seems to have been aware of this. Ivanenko’s lack of recognition made him bitter, and in 1949 his morbid obsession led him to attack Soviet physicists who were acknowledging Western ideas.
32. Maurice Goldhaber, interview by Gloria Lubkin and Charles Weiner, January 10, 1966, transcript, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, New York, p. 27.
33. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 39.
CHAPTER 3
1. Quote from FBI memorandum, November 9, 1949, TNA KV 2/1888.
2. Date stamp in Italian passport 467675, TNA KV 2/1888.
3. Irène served in Blum’s government from June to September 1936, when she gave up the position due to ill health, as she continued to suffer from tuberculosis.
4. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 78. As Malraux had left his wife, and at that time lived with Josette Clotis, with whom he later had two children, this would indeed seem to be a classic example of meeting one’s mistress in the hour between leaving work and going home.
5. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
6. Robotti and Guerra, “Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy”; Luisa Bonolis e-mail, January 19, 2014.
7. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 85.
8. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 84.
9. Ronnie Reed report paper 206A, dated January 16, 1951, TNA KV 2/1890: “Gilberto told Guido that Bruno was a very ardent communist and had in fact been responsible for converting both Gilberto and Giuliana to communism in 1940.”
10. Bruno Pontecorvo, Autobiographical notes.
11. Ernest H
emingway, quoted by his biographer A. E. Hotchner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Moveable_Feast.
12. Bruno Pontecorvo papers, CAC; Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011: “She worked for a family of rich Swedes, babysitting.”
13. Marianne Nordblom passport, CAC.
14. Diary in Bruno Pontecorvo papers, CAC.
15. Until 1984 Paris had a mail service consisting of a network of tubes powered by compressed air. See John Vincour, “Paris Pneumatique Is Now a Dead Letter,” New York Times, March 31, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/31/style/paris-pneumatique-is-now-a-dead-letter.html.
16. The phrase “pile ou face” (heads or tails) in Marianne’s diary appears to refer to a game of tossing coins.
17. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 93.
18. Emling, Marie Curie and Her Daughters, p. 34.
19. Quoted in Emling, Marie Curie and Her Daughters, p. 93.
20. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_1.html.
21. Luisa Bonolis interview, January 19, 2014; see also Robotti and Guerra, “Bruno Pontecorvo in Italy.”
22. Isomerism had been observed long before, but it was Kurchatov who first convincingly demonstrated the phenomenon in the new era of induced radioactivity and inspired a new field of inquiry.
23. Close, The Infinity Puzzle, p. 21.
24. A photon in the green part of the visible spectrum has an energy of about two electron volts. An electron volt (eV) is the energy that an electron gains when accelerated by a potential of one volt. Thousands and millions of eV are denoted keV and MeV, respectively.
25. Emling, Marie Curie and Her Daughters, p. 151.
26. His family had fled after the revolution. He joined Joliot-Curie’s group in 1934, and became a French citizen on November 16, 1939.
27. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_2.html. The von moniker was much loved by Hans von Halban, but we shall use the basic surname Halban from here on.
28. Lew Kowarski interview, AIP, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4717_2.html. Another colleague, quoted in Broda, Scientist Spies, p. 115, described Halban as “a playboy, rich from his father and from marrying a banker’s daughter.”
29. CAC. The certificat de domicile issued on February 8, 1940, shows that she lived there from January 4 to September 10, 1938, when her French visa was about to expire, and returned on August 28, 1939.
