Fallout

by Steve Sheinkin

  Perfect spots to hide a coin with a coded message inside.

  He worked out a signaling system. After loading a dead-drop, he’d put a chalk mark on the wall of a certain subway station, indicating the particular drop that held a message. It would be a great system—if he had anyone to share secret letters with.

  Abel moved to Brooklyn and rented an art studio on the fifth floor of a downtown building, a little room with soot-stained walls and large windows looking out at a federal courthouse. He was retired, he told people in the building. He’d saved some money and wanted to take up painting.

  It was a fine cover story, and Abel really was interested in painting. He bought paints and brushes and threw himself into the work. Striking up friendships with other artists in the building, Abel became known as an amusing eccentric. He did crossword puzzles in a flash and was a wonderful classical guitarist. He could fix any kind of electronic equipment—must be the field he’d retired from, people figured.

  He stayed late in his studio many nights, which was not unusual for painters. But Abel’s nighttime work was art of a different kind. He’d hang a copper wire out the window facing the courthouse, connect the homemade antenna to his shortwave radio, and exchange coded messages with Moscow. There was good news—Abel’s bosses had finally decided to send him a new agent, someone who could help rebuild the Soviet spy network in America.

  Rudolf Abel had no way of knowing his new partner was going to be just about the worst spy of the entire Cold War.

  A stocky man in his early thirties crossed Central Park West and entered Manhattan’s famous Central Park. He looked for the Tavern on the Green restaurant, and it was there, just like on the map he’d studied. Behind the restaurant he found the dirt bridle path. The white sign was there, right where it should be:

  BE CAREFUL, HORSE RIDING

  The man glanced left. He looked right. The coast was clear.

  He pulled a white thumbtack from his pocket and stuck it in the white paint of the sign.

  Mission accomplished, he turned and ambled farther into the park.

  This was Reino Hayhanen, New York’s newest Soviet spy. The thumbtack was a signal to his new boss, Rudolf Abel: he’d arrived safely and was ready to work.

  Back in his studio, Abel prepared a coded message for the new agent. He hid it inside the hollow nickel he’d made, put the coin in one of his dead-drop locations, and marked the subway station wall with chalk.

  Reino Hayhanen saw the signal. He found the coin.

  Somewhere in Brooklyn, he spent it.

  * * *

  The coin made its way to two retired teachers and then to the paperboy, Jimmy Bozart. Bozart gave it to the New York City police, who passed it on to the FBI.

  A blowup of the film found inside the coin arrived at the desk of Robert Lamphere, an FBI counterintelligence agent in Washington, D.C. Lamphere was a spy catcher. He’d helped track down the spies who’d stolen American atomic bomb secrets during World War II. This new piece of film reminded him of that operation. The message had a three-digit number at the top: 207. Beneath that were twenty-one lines of five-digit numbers. The first line read:

  14546 36056 64211 08919 18710 71187 71215 02906 66036 10922

  Lamphere recognized the hallmarks of a message coded by Soviet spies using what’s called a one-time pad.

  The system was simple but highly secure. Soviet agents used a well-guarded codebook, a kind of secret dictionary, with thousands of words. Each word was assigned a five-digit number. To encode a message, you first convert the message from words to the corresponding five-digit numbers from the codebook. Next, you take a sheet from a one-time pad. The sheet has rows and rows of random five-digit numbers. Add the first five-digit number from the sheet to the first five digits of the message, the second five-digit number from the sheet to the second five digits of the message, and so on. Note that this is a modified form of addition, with no carryover. You don’t want to add extra digits, so four plus six equals zero, not ten. Eight plus seven equals five.

  You also need to indicate which one-time pad sheet you used—that’s why Abel added 207 to the top of his message. The message can then be sent by radio, telegraph, messenger—or hidden inside a hollow nickel.

  To decode the message, the receiver finds the correct one-time sheet. The five-digit numbers from the sheet are subtracted from the five-digit numbers of the coded message. What remains is the original group of numbers. The receiver looks these numbers up in the codebook, and the message is turned back into plain language.

  Sender and receiver both destroy the one-time sheet so it can never be used again.

  This is time-consuming, but if done correctly, it is absolutely unbreakable. Even a modern computer cannot crack a message sent by the one-time pad system.

  For a spy catcher like Lamphere, it was maddening. In his hand was proof that the Soviet Union had active spies here in the United States.

  But until they made a mistake, they’d be impossible to find.

  * * *

  Rudolf Abel had no idea the nickel was missing.

  Using another dead-drop message, Abel directed his agent to meet him in person in the men’s room of a movie theater in Queens. Hayhanen put on a blue tie with red stripes, stuck a pipe in his mouth, and headed for the theater.

  Abel had been told by Moscow to watch for the tie and pipe as recognition signals. He got to the theater first and hung back, observing. And there was his new man in an ill-fitting suit and gaudy tie, puffing on a pipe like a kid with a theater prop.

  Hayhanen ducked into the men’s room. Abel waited for a group of teenagers to leave, then slipped in. The two agents looked each other over. Hayhanen was trained not to speak to anyone until the pre-arranged password was given. Abel knew this, but was suddenly in no mood for spy games.

  “Never mind about the passwords,” he said. “I know you are the right man.”

  This was poor tradecraft. Rude, too. Right away, Hayhanen knew his new boss did not respect him.

  “Let’s go outside,” Abel said.

  They walked out of the theater and down the street. As they began to talk, Abel was horrified by Hayhanen’s poor English. Everything about the man stood out. Rudolf Abel had a bad feeling about his new partner.

  THE TURTLE AND THE DRAGON

  IT WAS MAYBE THE WORLD’S first reality television show.

  And quite possibly the creepiest.

  Picture this: You turn on the TV and see families in average suburban homes. Parents and children sit at a kitchen table. Kids have a game set up in a living room. An older couple relaxes in comfortable chairs, holding magazines.

  But something’s off. The lighting’s too bright. Everything’s too posed. No one’s moving.

  And you realize—these are mannequins.

  We cut to an exterior shot. Quiet little houses in the desert, just before sunrise.

  And then everything blows up.

  With cameras rolling, a “small” atomic bomb—fifteen kilotons—detonates in the distance. There’s a blinding flash of light, and almost instantly the sides of the buildings facing the blast char and smoke. Then comes the blast wave—a wall of compressed air expanding out from the explosion faster than the speed of sound—and the houses shatter.

  The sun comes up and cameras show the carnage. A house 3,500 feet from the bomb is gone. Pieces of mannequin lay scattered in the rubble.

  A house 7,500 feet from the bomb is scorched and slanting. Mannequins are tilted over on couches and chairs, grinning open-eyed at the ruins of their home.

  In case you haven’t learned your lesson, a deep-voiced narrator delivers the message the U.S. government wants you to hear. In this new age of Cold War and massive bombs, Americans had better start building shelters in their basements and backyards.

  “Prepare now against the threat of atomic warfare,” a government spokesman tells viewers. “Or will you, like a mannequin, just sit and wait?”

  * * *

  Kids
had their own special Cold War programs, including the government-made instructional film Duck and Cover.

  We open with an animated turtle in a bow tie ambling upright along a pleasant country lane. A catchy little song begins:

  There was a turtle by the name of Bert.

  And Bert the Turtle was very alert.

  As Bert walks up, a monkey in a tree lowers a stick of dynamite on a string. The fuse is burning.

  When danger threatened him, he never got hurt.

  He knew just what to do.

  Bert hits the ground and pulls his legs and head into his shell just before the dynamite explodes, making a smoking ruin of the tree. No sign of the monkey.

  He’d duck and cover, duck and cover.

  He did what we all must learn to do,

  you and you and you and you.

  Duck and cover!

  That’s how American kids learned what to do in case the Soviets attacked. At “duck and cover” drills in school, students crouched under their desks with their hands over their heads. What if you didn’t happen to be in class when the bombs fell? The film covered that in a series of short scenes, each a little black-and-white nightmare.

  A boy rides his bike through a park.

  “Here’s Tony going to his Cub Scouts meeting,” says the friendly narrator. “Tony knows the bomb can explode at any time of the year, day or night. He’s ready for it.”

  There’s a bright flash.

  “Duck and cover!”

  The boy jumps off his bike, dives to the curb, and lies facedown.

  “Attaboy, Tony! That flash means act fast!”

  Another scene shows a family picnic: two teenage kids, a mother laying out plates on a blanket, a father fanning campfire flames with a newspaper.

  “Sundays, holidays, vacation time,” says the narrator, “we must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes.”

  Bright flash.

  “Duck and cover!”

  The kids and mom get under the picnic blanket.

  The dad shields his head with his newspaper.

  * * *

  There was no hiding from the real thing.

  Before dawn on March 1, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat named Lucky Dragon drifted in calm South Pacific waters. There were twenty-three crew members aboard, a few on deck but most still asleep in their bunks.

  In an instant, the sky far to the west switched from black to yellowish white, as if someone had flipped on a light in a dark room. The men on deck watched, mouths hanging open.

  Others scrambled up to the deck. A fiery orange glow spread above the horizon.

  Someone shouted, “The sun rises in the west!”

  The light faded as silently as it had come. The sky was black again. The boat swayed gently on calm water.

  Seven minutes later the men heard a sound like a rumble of thunder, and the boat rocked. Clouds drifted in from the west. Pale gray flakes started falling from the sky. The sticky clumps coated the ship and the men. It stung their eyes and felt gritty in their mouths.

  Aikichi Kuboyama, the boat’s radioman, did some rough calculations. Whatever had happened, the light would have reached them almost instantly, but sound travels much slower. Seven minutes from flash to boom. Four hundred and twenty seconds. Sound takes about five seconds to travel a mile, so whatever happened was a bit over eighty miles away.

  Kuboyama found a chart of nearby islands. To the west, about eighty miles, was Bikini Atoll, a group of small coral islands. The Americans had tested bombs there before.

  By that evening, many of the crewmen had begun to suffer from classic symptoms of radiation poisoning: weakness, headaches, fevers, and nausea. As they headed home, sores blistered the men’s skin. Their hair fell out in clumps. The Lucky Dragon reached Japan two weeks later.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened,” Aikichi Kuboyama told his wife, “but on our way home we encountered something—an atom bomb, I think.”

  * * *

  A hydrogen bomb, to be precise. The Super. A fifteen-megaton beast, 750 times the explosive force of the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima.

  The explosion obliterated a coral island in Bikini Atoll, sucking millions of tons of coral dust into the sky. The blast also created radioactive atoms—atoms with unstable nuclei that break apart, ejecting particles and rays as they decay. Radioactive atoms stuck to the coral dust, drifted in the wind, and dropped from the sky as deadly fallout on the Lucky Dragon. Radiation penetrated the men’s bodies, damaging cells and weakening their immune systems.

  From his hospital bed, Aikichi Kuboyama offered a plea to the world: “Please make sure that I am the last victim of the bomb.”

  Kuboyama died of liver failure at the age of forty, six months after coming home. The other crew members survived but would suffer lifelong health problems.

  * * *

  Moved by the terrifying reality that humans must now live alongside the Super, a Japanese filmmaker named Ishiro Honda reworked his script for a new monster movie. In this revised version, a hydrogen bomb test awakens a giant fire-breathing mutant, which then rises out of the sea and marches into Tokyo.

  Godzilla was a whole new kind of story—for a whole new kind of world.

  EARLY WARNING

  “ATTENTION! THE PLANE IS OVER the target. Five minutes to the drop!”

  November 22, 1955—a cold, clear day in the dry grasslands two thousand miles southeast of Moscow. A thirty-four-year-old physicist named Andrei Sakharov stood with scientists and Soviet officials on an outdoor platform about forty miles from ground zero.

  “The bomb has dropped!” roared a voice over the loudspeaker. “The parachute has opened! One minute!”

  The Soviets had stolen the secret of the fission bomb from the Americans. This time, for the Super, Sakharov and his team figured it out on their own. This test would be the proof.

  The observers turned their backs to the falling bomb.

  “Five, four, three, two, one, zero!”

  A silent flash filled the sky.

  After the flash, it was safe to turn and look. Sakharov felt heat on his face. He watched a huge yellow fireball rise and grow, turning orange, then red, kicking up towering swirls of dust, boiling itself into the shape of a giant mushroom.

  The bomb’s blast wave cut a visible path in the steppe, flattening the tall grass as it sped toward the platform.

  “Jump!” Sakharov shouted.

  Everyone leaped off the platform—except for one bodyguard, who was knocked over as the wave barreled past.

  “It worked!” cried Yakov Zeldovich, Sakharov’s colleague. “It worked! Everything worked!”

  Sakharov’s own reaction was remarkably similar to what Robert Oppenheimer had experienced when he watched the world’s first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert ten years before. A mix of pride, patriotism, relief, and horror.

  The Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb was even more powerful than expected. A young soldier watching from a trench was killed. A two-year-old girl died in a collapsed bomb shelter that should have been well out of the danger zone.

  At the government’s celebratory banquet that night Sakharov was the man of the hour, the young genius who’d matched the arrogant Americans. When a top military official gave him the honor of making the first toast, Sakharov stood and raised his glass of brandy.

  “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s,” he said, “but always over test sites and never over cities.”

  The room went silent. The generals scowled.

  Sakharov understood. He had stepped out of line.

  “We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history,” he would recall realizing at this moment. “But its use would lie entirely outside our control.”

  * * *

  The U.S. government continued pouring money into both fission bombs and hydrogen bombs, expanding its nuclear arsenal
from 2,400 weapons in 1955 to 3,700 in 1956. And from this point on, Americans were on the lookout for Soviet bombs. Every second, day and night.

  If Soviet bombers ever headed for America, they wouldn’t fly west over the Atlantic or east over the Pacific. They’d come from the north, cutting over the Arctic, taking the shortest route to American cities. With this in mind, the U.S. military built early-warning radar stations in Alaska and Canada. At a command center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, radar technicians constantly monitored screens for any signs of enemy invaders.

  Late in 1955, just after the Soviet hydrogen bomb test, the phone in the command center began to ring.

  Colonel Harry Shoup picked up. “Colonel Shoup.”

  A young boy, hesitation in his voice, asked, “Is this … Santa Claus?”

  “Is this a joke?” Shoup snapped. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Silence on the line. Then quiet sniffling.

  It turned out the boy had seen a Sears newspaper ad with a picture of Santa Claus saying, “Hey, kiddies! Call me direct on my telephone!” He’d misdialed. The poor kid had just wanted to talk to Santa. Instead, he got an alarming lesson in current events.

  “There may be a guy called Santa Claus at the North Pole,” Shoup told the boy, “but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.”

  * * *

  In case of war, Francis Gary Powers would be crossing the Arctic in the opposite direction.

  A twenty-six-year-old pilot stationed at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia, Powers was trained to deliver atomic bombs behind the iron curtain. A job he hoped he’d never be called on to do.

  One afternoon in January 1956, after an uneventful practice flight in his F-84F Thunderstreak, Powers was surprised to see his name on a list stuck to the squadron bulletin board. What had he done wrong? What sort of extra duty was he about to be assigned?