The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  After a meeting on October 29, 1949, with the Joint Chiefs, where General Omar Bradley said he was unimpressed with the military potential of Teller’s thermonuclear warheads as such an enormous weapon would have only “psychological” value, the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee voted, again, against the Super. At the start of the meetings that ended in this decision, Fermi and Rabi were in favor of supporting Teller as an interim step, but both changed their minds, writing that Truman should “invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge” never to build thermonuclear arms and continued, “Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. . . . It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Oppenheimer at an AEC meeting on January 30, 1950, insisted of hydrogen bombs, “If the Russians have the weapon and we don’t, we will be badly off. And if the Russians have the weapon and we do, we will still be badly off. . . . Going down this path ourselves, we are doing the one thing that will accelerate and ensure their [thermonuclear] development.” In the middle of the terrifying discovery of Joe One and Russian nuclear power, though, Harry Truman was shocked to learn he could have an even bigger threat in his arsenal but had never been told about it. On January 31, Lilienthal tried to explain the AEC’s antifusion thinking to Truman, and the president asked, “Can the Russians do it?” Lilienthal had to admit they could. Truman: “In that case, we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” He rationalized, “We’re going to use this for peace and never use it for war—I’ve always said this, and you’ll see. It’ll be like poison gas [never used again].”

  On September 23, 1949, Truman announced to the American public that the Soviets had the Bomb, and at the end of January 1950 that America would develop thermonuclear weapons. Isidor Rabi: “I never forgave Truman. . . . For him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn’t even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done.” An added wrinkle to this policy was that any scientist working with the government was told he or she should not make any public comments about the nation’s nuclear strategies, as these would be “contrary to the national interest.”

  In a meeting at Cornell, Edward Teller was able to convince Hans Bethe, the Los Alamos boss he had spurned, to return to New Mexico to work on the Super. But after that meeting, Bethe took a walk with a colleague, theoretician Victor Weisskopf, and remembered how “Weisskopf vividly described to me a war with hydrogen bombs—what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb, and how hydrogen bombs would change the military balance by making the attack still more powerful and the defense still less powerful. . . . We both had to agree that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be . . . like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both of us.” A few days later, Bethe told Teller he’d changed his mind and wouldn’t come back to the mesa. When Teller then tried to enlist Emilio Segrè at Berkeley, Teller’s aggressive enthusiasm was countereffective. Segrè: “I soon realized . . . that he was dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect.” Segrè, too, passed. But Teller’s “irresistible passions” and fears of foreign menace would spread across Washington. Physicist Herbert York: “You have to recall that in 1948 was the Berlin blockade, in 1948 was the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the expansion that these things represented seemed quite real. And then there was the fall of China, as reported, to the Communists, the creation of the Sino-Soviet bloc, the Korean War in the early fifties. So looking back in the late fifties, what we saw was a lot of successes or what seemed to be successes on the part of the Russians, including territorial expansion. That was the high-water mark, but we didn’t know it at the time.”

  Facing an ever-growing global Communist menace, Washington now reversed course. Those at the AEC long committed to arms control became a peculiar and disdained minority, while instead of Bradley’s “psychological” dismissal, the January 13, 1950, Joint Chiefs’ report decided that it was “necessary to have within the arsenal of the United States a weapon of the greatest capability, in this case the super bomb. Such a weapon would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces. [It was better] that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than of an enemy.” White House assistant press secretary Eben Ayers said that three weeks later, on February 4, Truman told him “that we had to do it—make the [H-]bomb—though no one wants to use it. But, he said, we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.”

  As historian Richard Rhodes pointed out, “When the GAC argued that building the Super might unleash unlimited destruction . . . it unwittingly enlarged the scope of its opponents’ fears and encouraged them to pursue the project with even greater urgency, because they immediately translated the weapon’s destructive potential into a threat and imagined the consequences if the enemy should acquire it first. An arms race is a hall of mirrors.” The same confused strategic thinking that had led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki would now produce a weapon suitable only for genocide.

  In 1948, Beria had insisted Kurchatov and his team faithfully reproduce America’s Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb from the designs provided by Fuchs, Greenglass, and Hall to create First Lightning–Joe One. They knew that Trinity had worked, and they had no time to waste on fundamental research. But there was one significant exception to Beria’s command. Andrei Sakharov had twice turned down offers to join the Soviet nuclear program, “but the third time, nobody bothered to ask my consent,” and he was ordered to become part of the team. But then, just as Teller had worked on fusion while everyone else in Los Alamos was developing fission, in a few months at Arzamas-16, Sakharov created a thermonuclear design known as Layer Cake—sloika—a fission bomb surrounded by alternating layers of uranium and deuterium so that, when the fission ignited, it would in turn ignite fusion, becoming a hydrogen bomb. The Soviets had their Oppenheimer in Kurchatov, and now they would have their Teller in Sakharov. After Truman’s announcement that America would build the Super, Beria immediately went forward with sloika, and the following day, on February 1, 1950, those frightened by the knowledge of vast Communist conspiracies running clandestine operations throughout the government of the United States had their paranoia confirmed when it was made public that Klaus Fuchs had been captured, and that he had confessed to being an atomic spy.

  The revelation that America had been infested by a nest of Communist agents was the result of backbreaking intelligence work by two cryptanalysts, the FBI’s Robert Lamphere and the Army Security Agency’s Meredith Gardner, who spent twenty-seven years at Virginia’s Arlington Hall clawing through Venona, an archive of World War II–era cables sent from the Soviet consulate in New York to Moscow Center. On December 20, 1946, Mr. Gardner broke a 1944 cable, which contained the name of every significant Manhattan Project scientist. The pair’s next decrypt was “that someone (designated by the code name LIBERAL) had approached a man named Max Elitcher and had requested that Elitcher provide information to him on his current work at the Navy’s Department of Ordnance,” as Lamphere later said. Then they uncovered LIBERAL’s wife, ETHEL, who “acted as an intermediary between [a] person or persons who were working on wartime nuclear fission research and for KGB agents” (LIBERAL and ETHEL would in time be revealed as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). “Then, in mid-September [1949],” Lamphere continued, “still before the President’s announcement [that the Russians had the Bomb], I found a startling bit of information in a newly deciphered 1944 KGB message.” The cable was a summary of Harold Urey’s gaseous diffusion pr
ocess, and it meant that a Soviet agent, part of the British mission, had been a member of both the US and Canadian atomic programs. Within two weeks, the AEC pinpointed the author: Klaus Fuchs.

  Fuchs had left Los Alamos on June 14, 1946, to begin his next assignment, developing nuclear weapons for the United Kingdom at Harwell, a former air force base just to the south of Oxford, where he was still currently employed. Lamphere informed his FBI higher-ups as well as British intelligence, MI5, with whom he’d had a strong professional relationship, since he had discovered in 1948 “that someone in the British embassy in Washington in 1944–45 had been providing the KGB with high-level cable traffic between the United States and Great Britain.” That someone was Donald Maclean, who turned out to be key to the most humiliating espionage betrayal in British history, and now the same Robert Lamphere would present MI5 with the second-most humiliating betrayal in its history. The British, however, were not the only ones to feel the sting of embarrassment, for Maclean’s colleague Kim Philby regularly received copies of Venona decrypts, while KGB agent Bill Weisband had worked within Arlington Hall (the signal intelligence unit’s operation in what was once a Virginia girls’ school) for five years.

  Since the FBI had originally stolen the Russian cables decrypted by the Americans, under English law these could not be used by the prosecution as evidence at trial, and as the Soviets were allies during Fuchs’s years of betrayal, his acts could not be called treason. The harshest sentence he could get would be fourteen years. Additionally, without the FBI documents, MI5 would have to get Fuchs to confess, a job assigned to traitor specialist William Skardon, who was, according to Lamphere, “sort of a British Columbo character, complete with disheveled appearance and an intellect that was sometimes hidden until the moment came to use it to point to incongruities in a suspect’s story.”

  On December 21, Skardon began his interrogation with a friendly conversation about Fuchs’s childhood. Then he asked, “Were you not in touch with a Soviet official or a Soviet representative while you were in New York?” Fuchs replied vaguely, “I don’t think so,” and when Skardon announced that they had “precise information which shows that you have been guilty of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union,” Fuchs again said, “I don’t think so.” The conversation continued, with Skardon edging Fuchs further and further away from ambiguity, until, on January 24, 1950, Fuchs admitted what he had done. The trial then lasted less than two months, since the government avoided using many witnesses needed to convict as they would in turn reveal the incompetence that had allowed so much to slip to the Kremlin, and that those who knew the technical details of Fuchs’s work were seriously alarmed. That he was spying for Moscow wasn’t just a revelation of how the Soviets had created First Lightning so quickly—Fuchs and von Neumann’s thermonuclear patent of 1944 included much of Teller’s Super design. Klaus Fuchs had done so much to help the Russians with fission, and now, through him, they could be well on their way to fusion.

  It was a turning point in American history. Though the United States “came out of World War II the most powerful nation on earth—perhaps, briefly, the paramount nation of all time,” as Richard Barnet, founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, remarked in 1985, “it has not won a decisive military victory since 1945 despite the trillions spent on the military and the frequent engagement of its military forces. What the United States got instead of victory was a national-security state with a permanent war economy maintained by a military-industrial complex—much like the Soviet Union in those departments, but with a far greater reserve of resources to squander. . . . It is one of history’s great ironies that, at the very moment when the United States has a monopoly on nuclear weapons, possessed most of the world’s gold, produced half the world’s goods on its own territory, and laid down the rules for allies and adversaries alike, it was afraid.” Almost seven decades on . . . and we are still afraid, and it all began with the concomitant revelations of Soviet bombs and atomic spies.

  Six days after Fuchs’s arraignment, on February 9, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy announced from Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 Communists employed by the State Department, and two weeks after McCarthy’s announcement, Robert Lamphere deciphered another 1944 Soviet cable that gave “reason to believe that someone in a lower-level position at Los Alamos, who had had furlough plans in late 1944 and early 1945, was a KGB agent.” Lamphere informed the FBI in Albuquerque, who determined that the “most logical suspect for [another] Soviet agent” was none other than Edward Teller, as he was a “close associate of . . . Fuchs at Los Alamos [and] Dr. Teller had considerable contact with Fuchs in England in the summer of 1949,” and he “made frequent trips away from the Los Alamos Project and could have furnished information to the Russians on a regular basis.” The level of absurdity was institutional. An NKVD officer familiar with the FBI’s operations in World War II said that the Bureau’s agents were “like children lost in the woods.”

  With information from Klaus Fuchs’s confession, Philadelphia FBI agents visited Harry Gold in March 1950 and found, hidden behind a bookcase, a Chamber of Commerce map of Santa Fe. They told him the “jig was up,” and one reported, “After about one minute and at 10:15 a.m., Gold stated, ‘I am the man to whom Klaus Fuchs gave his information.’ ” Fuchs was given a photograph of Gold on May 24 and admitted, “Yes, that is my American contact.”

  The unveiling of Klaus Fuchs then led to the Rosenbergs. At the end of 1949, Julius Rosenberg told his wife’s brother, David Greenglass, that he was “hot . . . something is happening which will cause you to leave the United States.” David’s immediate reaction: “I’ll never be able to read Li’l Abner again.” Greenglass had been honorably discharged from the army in February of 1946 and had returned to live in New York City, where he was regularly extorting his brother-in-law: “Julius had money. I went to Julius, ‘Look, I need money,’ and he would give me money . . . about a thousand dollars all told.” After Fuchs’s arrest, Julius “said to me I would have to get out of the country with my family. . . . You remember that man out in Albuquerque. . . . This man knew me and that when Fuchs was taken . . . he would tell about Gold and he would lead them to me. . . . He wanted me to go with my whole family: pouf, disappear! . . . I figured I might [really disappear], so I better not go.”

  On the morning of February 14, 1950, Ruth Greenglass’s nightgown caught fire from the open-gas heater in their Lower East Side apartment, and she spent nearly a month at Gouverneur Hospital getting skin grafts. They could not flee, as Julius was planning, to Czechoslovakia. David Greenglass: “The day after my wife came home from the hospital [Julius arrived with] the Herald Tribune or Times. Anyway, there was a picture of Gold on the front page. And he said, ‘That’s your man, look at the picture.’ I said, ‘You’re silly, that’s not the fellow; my wife said it was not him.’ He said, ‘That’s the man.’ . . . He feared he would be arrested; they would pick me up, I would lead them to him. . . . [I] said, we can’t go anywhere, we have an infant here; we can’t just up and leave. . . . He said your baby won’t die; babies are born in the air and on trains, and she will survive.”

  On June 2, Harry Gold said his other contact in New Mexico was in the “US Army . . . twenty-five years of age, perhaps even younger [whose wife] may have been Ruth.” On June 15, two FBI agents visited David and Ruth Greenglass at 265 Rivington Street, found a picture of the couple back in Albuquerque, took it to Philadelphia, had it verified by Gold, and confronted Greenglass. David immediately confessed, taking Julius down with him, but not Ruth, later saying, “I told . . . the FBI right from the start that if my wife was indicted, I would not testify. I told [them] I would commit suicide and [they] would have no case. . . . I got two children. If the choice was between [Ruth] and my sister, I’ll take [Ruth] any day. That was the choice that I thought I had.” When Ruth was interrogated, she then implicated Ethel. Julius was arrested on July 17, Ethel on August 11, and Ruth was never indicted.

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bsp; David Greenglass pled guilty on October 18, 1950, then testified at the Rosenbergs’ trial in March 1951, as did Ruth Greenglass and Harry Gold. The Rosenbergs insisted, throughout, that they were innocent, and many in the global audience transfixed by this dramatic story of atomic spies believed them. Even though both Hoover and his Justice Department colleagues did not want to pursue the death penalty—especially against Ethel, a mother of two young children—Judge Irving Kaufman believed his trial could “make people realize that this country is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a completely different system.” At their sentencing on April 5, he told the Rosenbergs, “I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb, years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb, has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand, and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.”