Atomic Spy

by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

  They were back at Christel’s by 1:00. After lunch, the two men went upstairs to Klaus’s room, where he described Los Alamos and the setup for developing the bomb. They agreed on plans for Raymond to visit Santa Fe on the first Saturday in June. Klaus had already thought through how they should proceed, telling Raymond to set his watch by the large clock on San Francisco Street, handing him a map and a bus schedule, and detailing the passwords and signs if a substitute had to come. He then gave Raymond several pages of notes he had written from memory while at Christel’s: principles of the A-bomb construction, dimensions of the bomb, and the possibility of a plutonium bomb. That information centered on the trigger for the plutonium bomb, implosion—the types of explosives, their timed sequencing, and the properties of plutonium, all still being worked out.

  On orders from Moscow Center, Raymond delicately tried to offer Fuchs fifteen hundred dollars. The gesture met with a cold response. Fuchs said he made all the money he needed. He did have a request, though. When Russian soldiers entered Kiel and Berlin, he wanted them to go through the Gestapo files and destroy any information on him. They must stay out of the hands of the British. The only reason he could do this research was that the British didn’t know about his communist past.

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  For many, Fuchs remained an enigma, or a cipher. One of the wives admitted not recalling what he looked like each time she met him; another said that he faded into the background. Colleagues noted his reserve, but also his generosity with his time. As Edward Teller wrote,

  He was willing to help with any project, whether it was to discuss a colleague’s problem and suggest possible new approaches or to act as a chauffeur for wives whose husbands had no time for that. His services earned him a fond spot in many hearts.

  Teller’s wife, Mici, was one of those wives. She and Fuchs enjoyed each other’s company. Fuchs was everyone’s favorite babysitter. Even animals seemed to love him.

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  The detonation of a bomb using U-235 was sufficiently straightforward not to require testing. With the complex plutonium bomb, only a test would prove it viable, although there were constraints on testing either bomb. Sufficient U-235 existed for only one bomb, and only enough plutonium for two. In the spring of 1945, Oppenheimer set July 16 as the test date for the plutonium bomb, nicknamed the Gadget. But then the pace of events began to accelerate, bringing radical change.

  In April, German strength began to collapse, the concentration camps were liberated, and Hitler and Mussolini died. On May 7, Germany surrendered unconditionally, and the next day, V-E Day—for Victory in Europe—jubilation overtook every street corner in America and Britain.

  For many scientists, the end of the war suggested that the creation of an atomic bomb should end as well. Given the horrific devastation, most of them had rationalized their participation in creating it only because of the urgent need to rid the world of Hitler and the Nazis. That goal had now prevailed, but the government wanted to press on as eagerly as before. As early as September 1944, with the tide of war in Europe turning sharply in the Allies’ favor, Churchill and Roosevelt had secretly agreed that “when a ‘bomb’ is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese.”

  But also in April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died, altering the equation even more. Fuchs later wrote that he experienced the shock of FDR’s death deeply. Fuchs, along with many other physicists, viewed Roosevelt as a moral voice who would make just decisions. Whether Roosevelt would have ordered the bombing of Japan with atomic weapons can never be known. But there is compelling evidence that his attitude toward Russia was less bellicose than that of others in power, including Churchill. He was also willing to consider international control of atomic weapons.

  Not so his successor, Harry S. Truman. Thirty years after Truman approved dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and obliterating two cities, Fuchs, in a lecture to students, condemned him as “ruthless.”

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  On June 2, 1945, Fuchs used a shopping day for a trip into Santa Fe. This was the day for his meeting with Raymond, arranged a few months before in Cambridge. At the center of the trove of documents Fuchs had brought with him were plans for the plutonium bomb that was to be tested on July 16. These were meaningless without a high level of precise detail, so before this rendezvous Klaus had copied specifications including a sketch with all the important dimensions. Leaving Los Alamos, he stopped at the security gate per protocol, climbed out of the car, and waited while the guards searched the vehicle, then waved him on. The plans for the atomic bomb were in his pocket.

  He arrived in Santa Fe two to three minutes after the appointed time of 4:00 p.m., picked up Raymond on Alameda, a graveled street next to the Castillo Street Bridge, then drove on a little farther to a side road where they parked. As they talked, Klaus made clear that even though everyone at Los Alamos was working without a break, he himself putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day, he thought the bomb would not be ready to use against the Japanese. At the very last moment, when dropping Raymond off in Santa Fe, Fuchs handed over “a considerable packet of information.” Making the transfer at the last minute was a precaution against being stopped by security personnel.

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  Monday, July 16, at 2:00 a.m. was zero hour for testing the Gadget. The site chosen was about 230 miles due south of Los Alamos, in the flat, scorching desert near the small town of Alamogordo. The conquistadors had named it Jornada del Muerto, “journey of the dead.” The U.S. government used it as a bombing range. In the spring of 1945, crews had constructed a hundred-foot steel tower to hold the bomb, a base camp, and observation bunkers 5.6 miles away. Oppenheimer, who had a mystical streak, called the test Trinity.

  Key scientists went to the site a few days before the test to assemble the bomb. On Sunday, the fifteenth, late in the afternoon, buses left the Los Alamos mesa carrying other senior scientists south, some to the site and some to a hill twenty miles away. Peierls and Fuchs were in the second group. They all received welders’ goggles to protect their eyes from the flash, and they were instructed not to look directly at it. Unofficial groups drove to various mountain ranges east and south of Albuquerque with sleeping bags and food. Most who stayed behind knew what was about to happen. Everyone was anxious and distracted. For a time, there had been concern that the nuclear detonation would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet. Certainly, they were entering unknown territory.

  As darkness fell, Don Hornig, the young physical chemist who had designed the ignition switches for the lenses, sat alone on a platform at the top of the hundred-foot tower, on hand to babysit and to make last-minute adjustments if needed. The fully armed Gadget hung just below him, its plutonium core inserted along with the detonators. Then, shortly after midnight, a violent storm moved in, and the wind, rain, and lightning whipped around him. Those at the base camp and the few on the ground at the tower wondered if they should go ahead. Hornig agonized over a lightning bolt striking the tower.

  As the storm raged unabated, the detonation time was rolled back to 4:00 a.m., then later to 5:30, the last possible minute before the sky would brighten. The scientists wanted to capture the explosion on film, and the appropriate photographs required darkness.

  The countdown started at 5:10. Quite unintentionally, there was Russian radio interference. The base camp used the frequency of a radio station that was off the air at night. It picked up a close frequency, and in the background a Tchaikovsky waltz accompanied the countdown.

  At 5:29:45, for all those watching from the north on crests near Albuquerque, it was as if the sun had risen in the south. Dorothy McKibbin, the guardian of the gate in Santa Fe, experienced “an unholy light like no one has ever seen before.” She also remembered the solemnity. “There was no celebration at the Test site or on the
Hill. The men had done the job their government had asked them to do. They were relieved that it had been successful. They were not elated. It had been too terrible a sight for that emotion.” According to the wife of the physicist Martin Deutsch, those returning from Alamogordo were “bedraggled and depressed; they had been through hell.” This appraisal might have reflected her husband’s condition especially. He had hoped from the start that the task would prove impossible. One exception to the funereal mood was the irrepressible Richard Feynman, who played the bongos as he sat on the hood of a jeep.

  The government explained to the public, who obviously noticed the weird phenomenon, that an ammunition dump had exploded in that area of Alamogordo.

  The next day a petition circulated at Los Alamos requesting that President Truman not approve “the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender.” They didn’t know that Truman and Churchill had already settled questions about Japan soon after Germany’s defeat. It was to be Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Whatever warning the Japanese people received was too little and too late. In July, the U.S. Army Air Forces did drop leaflets warning of bombings and devastation. Those concerned firebombings, not atomic bombs. Leaflets did rain down on Nagasaki to warn of an atomic bomb. They fell on scorched earth. The army had dropped the plutonium bomb on the city the day before.

  The military argued that dropping the bomb on Japan was the only way to avoid having to invade the Japanese homeland, and thus it would save hundreds of thousands of American lives and end the war in the Pacific quickly. There was another factor. At a dinner party in Los Alamos some time earlier, the physicist Joseph Rotblat, a Polish émigré who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, supposedly heard General Groves say that for the United States to become militarily dominant, it was necessary to intimidate the Russians, and the atomic bomb would do that.

  President Truman was to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, Germany, the day after Trinity. He wanted to dangle “the new weapon” in front of Stalin, and with the successful test he could and did. Stalin had little reaction. Of course, neither Truman nor anyone else there appreciated that Stalin knew almost as much about the bomb and the Trinity test as they did. Scanning the documents that Fuchs handed to Raymond in Santa Fe two months earlier, he would have seen the detailed drawing of the plutonium bomb.

  According to an agreement with the Allies, three months after the fighting in Europe was over, the Russians were to launch a new offensive against Japan, which they did against Japanese forces in Manchuria on August 9. The Russians had additional plans to invade Hokkaido, the second-largest island in the Japanese archipelago, but Stalin aborted them. It is thought that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Stalin not to risk a confrontation with the United States.

  After learning of the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the U-235 bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, scientists now intensely and openly debated the control of the atomic bomb, their ambivalence long dammed up by the need for secrecy and for simply getting the job done. Military or civilian? National or international? For some time, many had debated among themselves. A consensus arose that effective international control required the Russians to have full information. Some argued that if Washington didn’t see this, they, the scientists, had their own obligation to provide it. Fuchs was one of the few scientists who didn’t join in this discussion.

  To shape the answer to the question on national control, the U.S. Congress proposed a bill, May-Johnson, that allowed the potential for military control. At congressional hearings, heated testimony by dismayed scientists stymied a vote. An alternative bill proposed by Senator Brien McMahon called for greater civilian control. At the same time, it included stringent restrictions on the release of nuclear information, even to the British. With a Russian defector having exposed a network of spies in Canada only a couple of months before, the already vigilant American security apparatus became even more restrictive.

  Scientists gravely cautioned their governments about the potential devastation of an arms race if the Russians weren’t full partners in developing and enforcing restrictions on nuclear weapons, which meant that first they had to be partners in sharing information. The British scientists at Los Alamos wrote a memorandum to their government stating, “We have recently had many discussions with our American colleagues, and practically all of us, Americans and British, are in agreement as to the gravity of the problems involved in controlling the use of atomic bombs.” They reasoned that in wartime “belligerents” wouldn’t keep any treaty against the use of atomic weapons. The scientists’ advice to obstruct an arms race or a full-out nuclear war was to enforce “1) international supervision of materials and facilities, and 2) free movement of scientific information and personnel among all countries.”

  Fuchs was a signatory. He revealed no other opinions at the time. He had earnestly engaged in the development of the bomb for the purpose of stopping the Nazis, as had many if not most of the British and American scientists. He had advised Raymond that it probably wouldn’t be ready to use against the Japanese. With preparations for the test advancing, it was an opinion seemingly based more on hope than reality. His father’s stance on pacifism and his own early disgust with killing animals and so becoming a vegetarian argue for a turn to pacifism, but it wasn’t an issue he discussed.

  Scientists at the California Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer had taught, signed “An Open Letter to the President and the Congress of the United States of America” that echoed the proposals in the British memo. Oppenheimer was one of ninety-five signatories. Hans Bethe drafted a separate declaration that began, “We, a group of the scientists who have proposed and developed the atomic bomb, feel that we cannot escape the responsibility for its consequences.” He argued that military bases could no longer protect the United States. The solution was either for the U.S. populace to disperse from large cities or for a world authority to control atomic weapons.

  The national versus international discussion was ultimately decided at the newly formed United Nations. In 1946, the United States proposed that an international authority control all aspects of nuclear energy. Once such an authority was established, the United States agreed to destroy its nuclear weapons. The Russians wanted the United States to destroy its weapons before international control was established. Issues over inspection also arose. There was no agreement.

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  With the formal signing of Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945, World War II was completely over, and the British mission in Los Alamos was ready to go home.

  On September 19, Fuchs drove down to Santa Fe to pick up a carload of alcohol for a farewell party. This coincided perfectly with the arrangement he and Raymond had worked out. Never meeting at the same place twice, they rendezvoused on the outskirts of Santa Fe, near a church on Bishops Lodge Road. This time, Fuchs was very late, and Raymond became extremely nervous.

  He showed up after twenty minutes. His first remark was “Well, were you impressed?” Raymond responded that he was both impressed and horrified. Klaus told him that the “test shot had far exceeded expectations but that these had been purposely toned down because the results of the calculations showed them to be so incredible.” Explaining his tardiness, he described driving more slowly than usual because of all the glass bottles of liquor he’d purchased in Santa Fe. There had also been friends there with him, and it had taken time to break away.

  Fuchs later related that he gave Raymond documents he had written on the side of the road, stopping in the desert on his way from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, a distance of about forty miles. In a curious mix of realities, he added that the spot where he pulled over was twenty miles from Alamogordo, the Trinity site, and that he could see the results of
the test. Alamogordo is approximately two hundred miles due south of Santa Fe. More confusing, Raymond later said that Fuchs “dropped off” people in Santa Fe. If so, how did he stop on his way to write down his notes? Did lapses in both their memories account for the twists in the stories?

  Whatever the incongruities, what Fuchs provided was another mother lode for Raymond. What had been theory in June was reality in September. He now knew the construction details and the results, the blast waves, the rates of U.S. production of U-235 and plutonium and the size of the bombs (allowing calculations of the production of bombs), and where errors might occur. He also had some early information about a hydrogen bomb.

  Before parting, they set up two other meetings. Fuchs, expecting to be transferred to England at the end of the year, said he would probably visit his sister in November or December. Raymond would keep in touch with her to know when. They also set up contact in London: Mornington Crescent tube station at 8:00 p.m. every first Saturday of the month after his return until someone managed to connect with him.

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  On Saturday, the twenty-second, the members of the British mission pooled their ration books and hosted a lavish farewell celebration at Fuller Lodge, with dinner and dancing. The British “stiff upper lip” gave way to skits and frivolity. Fuchs danced the night away.

  A few members of the British mission were to stay on, Fuchs among them. Before the Peierlses left in December, Klaus took a trip to Mexico with them and Mici Teller, as a stand-in for Edward, who was busy consulting on Senator McMahon’s bill for the control of atomic energy. Other than the earlier visit to his sister in Cambridge in February, and a conference in Montreal, this was Fuchs’s only time away from New Mexico that year. The foursome had a relaxed trip, seeing a bullfight and viewing decorative arts in Mexico City, their only difficulties being episodic car problems and convincing hotels that they needed three rooms rather than one with two double beds.