Fallout

by Steve Sheinkin

  Nikita Khrushchev was pleased with the way things were working out.

  Kennedy had sent fifteen hundred more U.S. troops into West Berlin, but the Soviet leader saw that for what it was, a symbolic show of support for the West. The Soviets moved in more troops and tanks—and nothing happened. For all his big talk about supporting freedom, Kennedy did not seem eager to fight in Berlin.

  “To use the language of chess,” Khrushchev said of these maneuvers, “the Americans had advanced a pawn, so we protected our position by moving a knight.”

  The Soviet position, Khrushchev concluded, was stronger than ever. And he saw an important lesson here. The American president, in times of crisis, could be forced to back down.

  * * *

  But almost immediately, the Berlin Wall began to backfire on Khrushchev. Thanks to people like Harry Seidel.

  A few nights after the wall went up, Seidel found an unlit spot along the banks of the Spree. He pulled in a deep breath and dove in. The river here was two hundred yards wide. He swam silently beneath the surface, coming up for air halfway across.

  And nearly hitting his head on an East German police boat.

  The boat’s searchlight swept across the empty black water. Over the sound of the boat’s chugging motor, Seidel heard one of the officers say, “Let’s go. Nothing to see here.”

  Seidel slipped under the water and made it across to the West.

  He’d promised Rotraut he’d find a way to get her and their baby across. He got right to work, watching the East German guards, learning their schedules and routines, looking for soft spots.

  The border around West Berlin was nearly a hundred miles long. The East Germans were building walls across the most heavily populated areas but stuck with fences in other places. Two fences, usually, with a wide patch of empty ground between the two. The death strip, as it became known. Anyone caught in this no-man’s-land would be shot on sight.

  Seidel picked a remote section of fencing. He waited for guards to take a dinner break, then crept forward and clipped the first wire, crawled across the death strip, clipped the bottom of the second fence, and wriggled back into East Berlin. He hurried down a dark road to a nearby café, hoping to use the pay phone to call his wife.

  A bunch of off-duty East German police were drinking beer at the bar.

  “Hello, comrade,” one called to Seidel, “been digging a ditch?”

  Harry looked down at his muddy clothes. An obvious flaw in his plan.

  “Been stuck under my truck for the past two hours,” he improvised.

  “Where’s the truck now? I didn’t hear you arrive.”

  “Still there, stuck,” he said, pointing down the road. “Two hours and I can’t get a squeak out of it.”

  “What’ll you do, then?”

  Have a schnapps, Harry said. Then call a tow truck.

  “Best of luck,” a policeman said.

  Harry bought the drink, went to the phone, and dialed. His wife picked up.

  “Get ready quick,” he said. “I’m coming for you.”

  Rotraut crushed up a sleeping pill, put some of the powder into a bottle, and fed it to her baby son, Andre. She pulled on black pants and a black sweater and tied a black scarf over her blond hair.

  Harry met Rotraut at their apartment building. He led the way back to the spot where he’d cut the barbed wire. Hearing the sound of motorcycles approaching, they flattened themselves against the wall of an abandoned cottage. Andre’s eyes were wide open, but he was fast asleep.

  The police drove slowly past.

  “Let’s go,” Harry whispered.

  They sprinted to the wire. Rotraut crawled through. Harry handed her the baby, then followed. They dashed across the death strip, under the second wire, and ran a hundred yards into West Berlin before daring to stop.

  * * *

  On August 30, Nikita Khrushchev announced to the world that the Soviet government had decided, “with a heavy heart,” to resume nuclear tests.

  Khrushchev, as always, blamed the Americans.

  “The United States and its allies are spinning the flywheel of their military machine ever faster,” charged the official Soviet statement, “fanning up the arms race to unprecedented scope, increasing the strength of armies, making the tension of the international situation red-hot.”

  The Soviets had been caught unprepared by Hitler in World War II. “Like twenty years ago,” the statement continued, “ominous clouds of war are once again overhanging the approaches to our motherland.”

  This time the Soviet Union was ready. Soviet scientists were designing new superbombs, more powerful than anything ever tested. And they had rockets—as Yuri Gagarin’s flight showed the world—to deliver these bombs to any spot on the globe.

  * * *

  “F***ed again,” John Kennedy said to his brother when he heard the news. Hadn’t Khrushchev promised in Vienna that the Soviets would not be the first to restart nuclear testing?

  “I want to get off,” Bobby Kennedy said.

  “Get off what?”

  “Get off the planet,” Bobby said.

  * * *

  In a secret lab in the Ural Mountains, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov and his team devised a new kind of hydrogen bomb. They named it Big Ivan. Its yield, they calculated, would be in the range of one hundred megatons.

  A one-hundred-megaton bomb would create a fireball larger than the state of Maryland.

  HUMAN RACE

  JOHN KENNEDY WAS TAP-TAP-TAPPING HIS front teeth with the back of his thumb. Close aides recognized the habit. It meant he was either bored or angry.

  He was not bored.

  At Kennedy’s request, U.S. Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had come to the Cabinet Room to give a briefing on the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and how it might be used in time of war. Lemnitzer set up thirty-eight charts on easels and brought the president up to speed.

  Pentagon planners had selected more than a thousand priority targets in the Soviet Union, as well as Eastern Europe and communist China, mainly military bases and cities. In case of war, explained Lemnitzer, the goal was to hit every single target multiple times. In one highly coordinated operation, the United States would launch weapons from bombers, submarines, and missile bases in America and Western Europe. The attack would kill an estimated 285 million people—not counting deaths from radioactive fallout. Those figures would depend a lot on the wind.

  This was when Kennedy started tapping his teeth.

  Of course, Lemnitzer pointed out, the Soviets were sure to respond. American cities would suffer as well. “Under any circumstances,” he said, “it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States.”

  Kennedy asked how many Americans would die in this all-out superbomb exchange scenario.

  Seventy million was the guess. About half the country.

  On his way out of the meeting Kennedy muttered, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

  * * *

  Harry Seidel cycled the long wall around West Berlin. It was a great way to stay in shape—and study the enemy. Back in the bedroom he shared with Rotraut and Andre, he made notes on a big map of Berlin taped to the wall.

  “Their Achilles’ heels,” he liked to say.

  Seidel was free, but it wasn’t enough. More than a million people were still separated from their families by the Berlin Wall. The East German government cracked down on what little freedom citizens had, offering rewards to people for spying on their neighbors, for reporting any criticism of the government, any escape plans. Children were given cash for informing on friends and family. Police won medals for shooting escapers. Seidel’s own mother had been thrown in jail as punishment for his escape. He’d get her out one day, he vowed. Meanwhile, he continued finding weak spots in the border and leading people under the wire.

  Escape got harder as East Germany replaced the barbed-wire fences with solid walls
and tall watchtowers. East Berliners responded creatively—some took a newfound interest in scuba diving and mapped out underwater routes to freedom. Students calling themselves the Travel Bureau guided escapers from East to West through the city’s maze of sewer pipes. A train driver named Harry Deterling picked up twenty-four friends and relatives along the train’s usual route through East Berlin. As the train neared the border, where it normally stopped, Deterling accelerated. East German guards jumped out of the way as the train tore into the West at fifty miles per hour.

  These escapes put the Berlin Wall at the heart of the Cold War. And not in a good way, from Nikita Khrushchev’s perspective. In the center of Europe were two cities, one free and one imprisoned. East German authorities could claim that the wall was meant to protect their citizens from “terrorists” in the West, but no one believed it. Khrushchev had hoped the Berlin Wall would be a symbol of Soviet strength. Instead, it became a stark symbol of what was at stake in the Cold War. When communists take over, they lock you behind a wall.

  Harry Seidel did his part to keep the pressure on. On one of his scouting rides through Berlin, he saw a young man in the West talking across the death strip to a young woman in the East. He watched East German guards hit the woman and drag her away.

  “Bastards!” the man howled, grabbing the barbed wire with his bare hands.

  Seidel jumped off his bike.

  The man turned to him, tears running down his face. “We were going to be married in October.”

  “You will be married in October,” Seidel said. “I’ll be your best man if you like.”

  “But how can we?”

  “Give me your address. I’ll be in touch.”

  Seidel went home and put on two layers of clothes, a track suit over a dress suit. After dark, he crawled under the fences into East Berlin, took off the top layer, stashed it for later, and walked down the street in the clean suit. He picked flowers and carried them in a bouquet, as if on his way to visit relatives.

  After a successful night’s work, he got back to his apartment in West Berlin early the next morning. He pulled off his muddy track suit and told his wife, “I’m going to be best man at a wedding.”

  * * *

  Janet Chisholm wore a Russian fur hat and carried a shopping bag, blending in with the crowd on the sidewalks of Arbat Street in central Moscow.

  She opened the door to a secondhand shop. A bell on the door jingled as she stepped inside. She began browsing shelves filled with silverware, pottery, clocks, paintings.

  This was Chisholm’s system for contact with her Soviet source. She would be at specific spots in the city at particular times on certain days of the week. When he had material to drop off, he knew where to find her.

  Oleg Penkovsky came into the shop. He looked around a bit, then left.

  Chisholm followed him to a small side street. He turned into the doorway of an apartment house. She held back, making sure he wasn’t followed, then entered. As they exchanged a few pleasantries in Russian, sounding like acquaintances but not close friends, he handed her an envelope.

  She rode the trolley to her apartment. Her husband came home for lunch. They spoke of everyday things as they ate. He took the envelope back to his office at the British embassy and put it in a diplomatic pouch—a sealed bag that, by international agreement, all embassies can use to ship confidential material back home. Penkovsky’s envelope was soon on its way to London.

  A week later, while Chisholm and Penkovsky chatted in an apartment house lobby, an old woman came slowly down the stairs. The two spies grabbed each other in a romantic embrace, hiding their faces. The woman looked away. Oleg slipped a pack of cigarettes, with three film cartridges inside, into Janet’s shopping bag.

  * * *

  One miniature roll of film at a time, Soviet military secrets leaked out of Moscow and made their way to London and Washington. At the White House, CIA officials kept President Kennedy informed of the intelligence—the product, as spies call it. Kennedy was never told the spy’s real name; that would be an unnecessary security risk. The important thing was the product. Frank Powers and the other U-2 pilots had given the government a view from above the Soviet Union. This new source was offering a view from inside.

  The president knew the information was useful. In fact, it would turn out to be even more vital than he could have guessed.

  * * *

  On October 30, 1961, a Soviet long-range bomber flew to 34,000 feet and released Big Ivan over an island in the Barents Sea. A huge parachute opened, giving the bomber time to escape. The bomb detonated, as planned, at just over 13,000 feet.

  Concerned about the fallout from such a massive blast, Sakharov’s team had removed some of the nuclear fuel, lowering the bomb’s yield to fifty megatons—still, by far, the largest human-made explosion in history. Ivan’s initial flash was visible for six hundred miles. The blast wave knocked over buildings one hundred miles away, broke windows in Finland and Norway.

  No target was big enough for such a weapon. This was a tool not of war, but of terror.

  * * *

  Big Ivan’s message was heard in America, loud and clear.

  “There is no escaping the fact that nuclear conflict would leave a tragic world,” declared the opening pages of Fallout Protection, a U.S. government booklet published by the millions in late 1961. “The experience would be terrible beyond imagination and description.”

  But not to worry! If you happened to survive the burst of heat and the shock wave, there was plenty you could do! Remove clothing that may have been contaminated by radiation, the booklet suggested. Wash your skin and hair. Fill sinks and tubs with clean water.

  Then get into your shelter—you did prepare a shelter, right? A well-stocked shelter must have first aid supplies, a radio, flashlights, extra batteries, and cases of canned food. “Select familiar foods,” the booklet advised. “They are more heartening and acceptable during times of stress.”

  And don’t forget a can opener.

  What about the problem of human waste? “The most elemental device is a metal pail with a tight cover.”

  The goal is to stay alive for two weeks. After two weeks, the worst of the radioactive fallout will have settled back to the ground. Check your radio often. The government, if it exists, will let you know when it’s safe to come out.

  * * *

  In public, President Kennedy encouraged Americans to take this stuff seriously.

  When Life magazine published a special issue with designs for fallout shelters, Kennedy added a note saying, “I urge you to read and consider seriously the contents of this issue.”

  In private, he was already losing enthusiasm for civil defense. With the destructive power of the weapons the Soviets were now building, the whole idea of planning for life after nuclear war seemed like a cruel joke.

  On a rainy afternoon in Washington, Kennedy met with Jerome Wiesner, his top science adviser. Kennedy had ordered the resumption of underground testing of H-bombs in September, and he wanted a better understanding of the dangers of fallout. How, he asked, would the fallout impact Americans? How would it impact children all over the world?

  “It comes down in rain,” Wiesner said.

  Kennedy pointed to the Oval Office window. “You mean there might be radioactive contamination in that rain out there right now?”

  “Possibly.”

  The president stared out at the Rose Garden. Aides said they’d never seen him look so depressed.

  OUT OF THE EAST

  HARRY SEIDEL SAW IT RIGHT away—in Berlin, escape tunnels would have to run backward.

  Throughout history, people have tried to dig their way out of prisons. In East Berlin, Seidel realized, you’d have to dig your way in. The dreaded Stasi, the German secret police, had agents and informers everywhere. No tunnel that started in the East could stay secret for long. Start in a basement in the West, though, and you’d have a chance to break through.

  For his first attempt, Har
ry Seidel picked a spot where the Berlin Wall ran down the center of a narrow road. The buildings on either side of the wall were less than a hundred feet apart. Seidel took sick leave from his newspaper delivery job, packed tools and a week’s worth of bread and cheese, and moved into the cellar of a building on the western side of the wall.

  A few carefully selected men and women slipped in and out to help. Seidel quickly developed a system. Flashlight in hand, one worker at a time crawled to the front of the narrow tunnel, loosened earth with a small shovel, and piled it into large metal bowls one of the diggers had brought from his butcher shop. Another volunteer pulled the full bowls back on a rope, dumping the dirt into a corner of the cellar.

  The space was damp and freezing. Everyone caught colds. As they worked their way forward, diggers passed out from lack of oxygen and had to be dragged back by their heels. Harry Seidel worked twelve hours at a time. His strengths as a cyclist—strong muscles, pain tolerance, and massive lung capacity—made him the ideal tunneler.

  Harry knew he’d passed under the Berlin Wall when he began to hear East German police talking on the street above. After four days of digging, his spade hit brick.

  He poured a little sulfuric acid on the mortar between two bricks. Fifteen minutes later, he was able to work the tip of a screwdriver through the softened mortar. He peered into a cellar in the East, not knowing who was on the other side.

  One of the team had slipped into the East to gather people for the escape—but they easily could have been caught or followed. Seidel was relieved to see his friend and a group of passengers, as he began to call them, waiting in the cellar.

  He removed enough bricks to open a small hole. Fifty-six men, women, and children wriggled into the tunnel and crawled to the West.