Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012) details this. As she sums up in an interview:
“The Soviet Union literally occupied, packed up, and shipped out of Eastern Germany, out of much of Hungary and indeed much of Poland, which was not well known at the time, factories, train tracks, horses, and cattle. All kinds of material goods were taken out of those countries and sent to the Soviet Union. . . . One of the reasons for the postwar success of the Soviet Union was that it occupied and took over the industrial production of these countries. It itself was very weak and there were even famines in the Soviet Union after the war.”
So keeping the Soviets out of eastern Europe, as depicted here, would have saved millions and shifted the balance of economic power considerably as well. The resulting world might well have meant one with more compromise between the West and the weak Soviets, and a better history all round. So the end of this novel argues.
Alternative histories are ways of thinking. The entire history of nuclear weapons is interlaced with scientists considering the future, using science fiction as a prompt. H. G. Wells’s “atomic bombs” and the Robert Heinlein and Cleve Cartmill stories in Astounding Science Fiction were indeed broadly discussed at Los Alamos (as told to me by Edward Teller). The investigation into the Astounding stories now seems odd, because the writers had no classified information at all, just good guesses. Still, this possibility of a leak was viewed as very important by the security agencies, including the FBI. As Robert Silverberg has wryly remarked, “Turning war secrets into second-rate SF stories might seem, to the dispassionate eye, a very odd way indeed of betraying one’s country.” (See Asimov’s Magazine Reflections, “The Cleve Cartmill Affair, Parts One and Two,” September 2003, October/November 2003.)
Moe Berg
In our world, Moe Berg turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his many espionage feats during his lifetime, including spotting the Norwegian heavy water factory and much else. The Medal of Freedom was awarded to him again after his death, with his sister accepting on his behalf, and now appears in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In early 1945 Berg did go to Switzerland, as depicted here a bit earlier, to kill Heisenberg if necessary. Sitting in the front row of Heisenberg’s seminar, he determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech about field theory and walked him back to his hotel. Moe Berg’s report was distributed to Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and key figures in the team developing the atomic bomb. Roosevelt responded: “Give my regards to the catcher.”
Werner Heisenberg
The verdict of history is that Heisenberg, as opposed to people like Fermi, was simply not especially competent at engineering physics. The theory that he blocked the Nazis from acquiring an atomic bomb has lost credibility.
As depicted here, he could have had a radical change in attitude if Berlin had been A-bombed. His men had gathered over 120 tons of uranium from Czech mines. Sam Goudsmit’s Alsos team snatched this up from what was to be Soviet territory in southern Germany at the very end of the war. This large stash could have been used for “death dust” warfare. Indeed, some Germans thought it should have been.
In our world the Allies held the major German physicists at Farm Hall in England after their capture. Intelligence agents eavesdropped on them and find out their true beliefs. A consistent theme in the Farm Hall transcripts and in Alsos investigations is that the Germans seem to have honestly thought that their work on the “uranium problem” was well beyond what anyone else might have been doing. They thought the Allies would be desperate to “buy” their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: “If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you’re all second-raters.”
The night after Hiroshima, the German scientists in captivity at Farm Hall were astonished that their enemies had made a bomb. As two physicists put it:
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter of 1944–45.
Karl Wirtz: The result would have been that we would have obliterated London but would still not have conquered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us.
Then they tried to imagine how they could’ve gotten enough uranium to build their bomb:
Weizsäcker: We would have had to equip long distance aircraft with uranium engines to carry out airborne landings in the Congo or Northwest Canada. We would have had to have held these areas by military force and produce the stuff from mines. That would have been impossible.
So they were not without imagination, at least. But it was hard for them to imagine that the Americans had bested them by a long margin. Then:
Heisenberg: Yes. (Pause) About a year ago I heard from . . . the Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if we didn’t surrender soon. At that time I was asked whether I thought it was possible, and, with complete conviction, I replied: “No.”
Wirtz: I think it characteristic that the Germans made the discovery and didn’t use it, whereas the Americans have used it. I must say I didn’t think the Americans would dare to use it.
A bit later Hahn said: Are you upset because we did not make the uranium bomb? I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make a uranium bomb. Or are you depressed because the Americans could do it better than we could?
Walther Gerlach: Yes.
Considerable irony abounds here. The “Americans” who made the bomb included refugees Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, Rudolf Peierls, Niels Bohr, and Edward Teller, along with a small army of lesser-known refugees from Hitler’s Europe. This fact never seemed to occur to any of the German physicists at Farm Hall.
In 1930 the Germans were the leading scientific nation, and knew it. The Allies agreed. Their fear of a German bomb led to American invention of the bomb. Such forces still work today.
Samuel Goudsmit
He was selected as the scientific leader of the Alsos mission in part because he did not know anything about our programs. He often said that if he had been captured by the Germans, he could not have told them anything. Since he did not know about our plutonium program, he did not look for the German program and made the erroneous assertion that there was none.
In fact, it took the resources of three countries to produce the bomb: the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. But there was more to it than that. In some sense it took some of the most valuable scientific talent of all Europe to do it. Consider this partial list: the Hungarians John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller; the Germans Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls; the Poles Stanislaw Ulam and Joseph Rotblat; the Austrians Victor Weisskopf and Otto Frisch; the Italians Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segrè; Felix Bloch from Switzerland; and, from Denmark, the Bohrs, Niels and his son Aage.
This talent, the B-29 heavy bomber program that could deliver the bombs, plus Manhattan Project efforts—all together cost more than fifty billion in today’s dollars.
Wilhelm Canaris
This admiral heading the Abwehr was executed in the last days of the war by Hitler’s SS. He stated at his hanging, “I die for my fatherland. I have a clear conscience. I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler.”
Indeed, he was the great protector of the German opposition and led several assassination plots against Hitler, starting in 1943. He persuaded Hitler not to invade Switzerland and make it part of the Reich’s Greater Europe. Switzerland became a major site for his operations for German army intelligence. Canaris approached William Donovan of the Office of Specia
l Services, the American intelligence operation, with an offer for a truce on Germany’s western fronts. Roosevelt turned this down in 1943, saying he wouldn’t negotiate with “these East German Junkers.” Canaris also reached Churchill, in the manner I’ve described in 1943, who rejected such a deal.
Leo Szilard and Edward Teller
I knew Szilard while I was a graduate student at UCSD. We often talked about science fiction and Szilard’s own stories, especially “The Voice of the Dolphins.” His scholar’s conscientiousness could not smother his novelist’s wit and respect for the plain, bare facts of history. Introduced by Freeman Dyson, I discussed the bomb and the war years with him often. He encouraged me to write “fiction about scientific thinking” and I did so, selling my first story while there in 1964, leading to a successful sideline as I became a professor at UC Irvine. He and I had similar influences (physics, mathematics, fiction, philosophy), and his ideas are still afoot in our world.
Szilard encouraged me to apply for a postdoc position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, though he knew I might work on nuclear weapons eventually. My job interview with Teller was both stimulating and unnerving; at the end of it, I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. It was also terrifying; I had no warning who would interview me. Teller thought well of Szilard and to my surprise hired me immediately. Many of the small nuggets of history in this novel I learned from him.
Many Manhattan Project scientists supported a nuclear weapons ban after the war: Oppenheimer, Szilard, even Teller. They were split during the war, and in my view, they assumed they had more power over the decision to use the bomb than they did. The decision was rightfully political. The scientists overestimated their influence and were ignored. Indeed, in retrospect, the prospect of a group of physicists determining the use of the bombs seems as likely as a unicorn leading a twenty-mule team.
As Freeman Dyson noted:
“Oppenheimer was driven to build atomic bombs by fear that if he did not seize this power, Hitler would seize it first. Teller was driven to build hydrogen bombs by the fear that Stalin would use this power to rule the world. Oppenheimer, being Jewish, had good reason to fear Hitler. Teller, being Hungarian, had good reason to fear Stalin. But each of them, having achieved his technical objective, wanted more. Each of them became convinced that he must have the political power to ensure that the direction of the enterprise he had created should not fall into hands that he considered irresponsible.”
During World War II the controversy, petitions, and the like reflected a deep anxiety among the largely leftist, largely pacifist scientists. None considered that the bomb might usher in an era when the immense, destructive warfare that grew through Word Wars I and II was no longer really possible among the great powers.
We live in such an era. There are plenty of wars but none like World War II, which killed twenty-nine million Soviets alone, and more than sixty million in total, about 3 percent of the world population (more than 80 percent of them among the Allies, especially the Soviets and the Chinese). The prevailing postwar view of many of the nuclear scientists, and many intellectuals including Einstein, was simple: the United Nations should hold all nuclear weapons and prevent anyone else from getting them.
This view shows how distant we are from that time. No one knowing today’s UN would think such a body could govern, much less use, such weaponry, or that such weapons could be somehow uniquely confined to the UN. The huge reduction in the death rate from nation-state warfare since 1945 did not come about through diplomacy alone; nuclear physics played a role too. So did the sobering lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of World War II is that these terrifying weapons made large-scale nation-state warfare impossible. (World War II’s rate of battle deaths was around 300 per 100,000 each year. It has now declined to a historic low, about one per 100,000. See http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ourworldindata_wars-after-1946-state-based-battle-death-rate-by-type.png.)
It is worth recalling that J. Robert Oppenheimer told his recruits at Los Alamos that these weapons might end all major war. The idea was afoot even then.
Karl Paley Cohen
He started playing the piano when he was eight and at one point considered becoming a professional concert musician. His role in the Manhattan Project moved from isotope separation when the centrifugal method lost favor.
Karl Cohen at age eighty-six
As Alvin Weinberg says in The Second Fifty Years of Nuclear Fission:
Karl Cohen occupied an all-but-unique position in those early days since he was probably the only person at the time who possessed an intimate knowledge of both gaseous diffusion and nuclear reactors. He had participated in the development of the original theory of the diffusion cascade at Columbia in 1942 and, when Harold Urey was banished to Chicago by General Groves in 1943, Cohen also came to Chicago to work with Wigner on the design of heavy water reactors. Cohen therefore was the first to command a detailed understanding of both reactors and diffusion plants.
After the war, he moved into nuclear power for the rest of his life. From 1952 to 1955 he was a consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission, then a senior science adviser at Columbia University. He published The Theory of Isotope Separation as Applied to the Large Scale Production of U235 in 1951. Karl was manager of the advanced engineering atomic power equipment department at General Electric, 1955–1965, then general manager of their breeder reactor development department, 1965–1971, then manager of strategic planning, nuclear energy division, 1971–1973. He became chief scientist of the nuclear energy group, 1973–1978. The Krupp Prize for his reactor work came in the 1970s. He retired to become a consultant professor at Stanford University, 1978–1981.
Karl cofounded and in 1968–1969 was president of the American Nuclear Society. In retirement he relished being the patriarch of his extended family, and especially sitting at the head of the table at holidays surrounded by his family—a doting grandfather and great-grandfather. In 2000 he was voted to be among the fifty most prominent American chemists of the twentieth century. He died in 2012 at age ninety-nine, rather distressed that he “could not last into three digits.”
History is mostly about winners. It is also useful to consider those who did not win, but should have. Karl Cohen and the centrifugal method should have prevailed. As I argue here, that could have well have yielded a better world.
Marthe, Eugene, and Madeleine Malartre (top row, left to right); Elisabeth and Martine Cohen (below), 1946
Colonel Eugene and Madeleine Malartre
This colonel in the French army did indeed join his wife and hide on a farm in southern France from 1941 to 1945, as depicted here. I used Madeleine’s diary for details of their lives, including the German soldier attack. They later moved back to Paris and in 1946 voyaged to visit the Cohens in New York, as shown here on deck as they arrived.
Some technical issues deserve discussion:
Centrifuges
To quote Karl Cohen in his contribution to the National Academy of Sciences biography of Harold Urey:
In the summer of 1942 the reported experimental results on flow-through centrifuges were disappointing, showing only 36 percent of theoretical efficiency. Urey’s protestations that countercurrent centrifuges would be easier to build and were more efficient were to no avail. Centrifuge work remained at a low level. It is an irony of history that subsequent experiments in 1943 and 1944 proved that countercurrent machines could operate close to theoretical efficiency. At least six nations have at the present time [1981] operated countercurrent centrifuges with uranium hexafluoride, and it is the uranium isotope separation method of choice for five of them.
In November and December of 1942 there was a commitment to a full-scale diffusion plant, a smaller electromagnetic plant convertible later to full size, and heavy water plants.
The electromagnetic Oak Ridge Calutron plant supplied nearly all the U-235 in the Hiroshima b
omb. The “full-scale diffusion plant” that cost so much and that General Groves chose over the centrifuge program gave only a few percent.
The purpose of building the reactors at Hanford, Washington, during the war was to produce plutonium, which had first been created in a UC Berkeley cyclotron. Because uranium was proving difficult to separate in the Oak Ridge diffusion plant, the Manhattan Project created Los Alamos, devoted to figuring out how to implode plutonium for a bomb. If there had been enough uranium, they need not have resorted to plutonium, which is far more difficult to implode to ignite a fission bomb.
Three engineering details, belatedly discovered in the early 1950s, made centrifuges work far better than gaseous diffusion:
A “point” bearing that allowed the centrifuge rotor to spin on the tip of a needle (like a toy top) with almost no friction.
The application of loose bearings and weak damping, which allowed the centrifuge to adjust itself so that it spun quietly on its center-of-mass axis without vibration, instead of trying to force the axis of rotation.
Driving the rotation using electromagnetic fields only, just as the armature of an electric motor drives its internal rotating shaft.
These points emerged from the work of Gernot Zippe, an Austrian physicist, who figured out with others how to fix the problems Jesse Beams had with his centrifuges. Zippe did this while being a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union! This led the USSR to drop their cumbersome gaseous plants (the USA used them, right?—so that must be the right path; until Zippe’s light dawned).
The Zippe centrifuges came from working out the above engineering details that made the devices reliable and stable. There was no “secret,” per se, no special materials, as historian Alex Wellerstein has pointed out. They just involved new features implemented by Zippe.
The Berlin Project Page 43
