Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy
Page 43
9. Not entirely. There are subtle problems that remain. The full solution of “the Infinity Puzzle” is outlined in my book of that name.
10. Half a century later, the limit is about one in a trillion.
11. Published in Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 37 (1959): 1751.
12. S. Oneda and J. C. Pati, “V-A Four-Fermion Interaction and the Intermediate Charged Vector Meson,” Physical Review Letters 2 (February 1, 1959): 125.
13. This is true for pions that carry electric charge. There is an uncharged variety, which decays into two photons.
14. Quotes in this page come from Igor Zheleznykh, “Early Years of High-Energy Neutrino Physics in Cosmic Rays and Neutrino Astronomy (1957–1962),” Proceedings of the ARENA workshop, May 2005.
15. Bruno Pontecorvo, “Electron and Muon Neutrinos,” in BPSSW, p. 167.
16. Dubna report P-376. Gil Pontecorvo was one of the interpreters at the conference, where he provided simultaneous translation from Russian to English. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011.
17. The switch from antineutrino to neutrino might appear trivial, but in practice electrons arising from neutrino interactions are more difficult to isolate. This is because of their ubiquitous presence in matter, which increases background noise. We live in a world of matter; this makes antimatter signals easier to identify.
18. Melvin Schwartz, Nobel Address, 1988.
19. M. Schwartz, “Feasibility of Using High-Energy Neutrinos to Study the Weak Interactions,” Physical Review Letters 4 (1960): 306.
20. Melvin Schwartz, Nobel Address, 1988.
21. Leon Lederman noted that “Bruno Pontecorvo addressed the right question but with a hopeless approach.” Namely, Bruno made “an interesting error” by assuming that the low number of neutrinos would be fatal—and therefore assumed that he would need an accelerator of huge intensity.
22. Where did Kurchatov obtain the crucial helium-3? It is notable that Pontecorvo’s paper gave all the necessary details except one: it did not reveal how much helium-3 he had used. This fact had been declared a state secret. The reason, as everyone realized, was that the precious helium-3 was the “waste” from the production of tritium—the key ingredient of the hydrogen bomb. Therefore the amount was not revealed, although experimental nuclear physicists could probably have deduced it from the details of the experiment.
23. The inspiration here was an American theorist, John Bahcall, who in 1962 pointed out that these higher-energy neutrinos might be detectable. Davis learned of Bahcall’s observation and made use of the chlorine-detector idea. This story is told in detail in Close, Neutrino, p. 69.
24. Ray Davis recollection, date unknown.
25. B. Pontecorvo and V. Gribov, Physics Letters B 28 (1969): 493 and B. Pontecorvo, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 26 (1968): 984.
26. I first used this analogy in my book Neutrino, which tells the story of Ray Davis.
27. 1 followed by 58 zeroes, which is ten billion trillion trillion trillion trillion, or ten octodecillion.
28. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, April 18, 2013.
29. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of roughly 100,000 light-years. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite of the Milky Way, located about 160,000 light-years away. It is visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.
30. When the electron-neutrinos convert the neutron in deuterium to an easily visible proton, a direct measurement is possible.
31. Art McDonald interview, August 30, 2011, and e-mail, December 17, 2011.
CHAPTER 18
1. Gil Pontecorvo interview, September 22, 2011.
2. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 200.
3. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 216.
4. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 277.
5. Interview with former colleague from Canada, name withheld, 2013.
6. Jackson, “Snapshots of a Physicist’s Life,” p. 23.
7. Jackson, “Snapshots of a Physicist’s Life,” p. 23, and J. David Jackson e-mail, August 28, 2012.
8. Gillo Pontecorvo, quoted in Mafai, Il lungo freddo.
9. Rodam Amiredzhibi, quoted in Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 218.
10. Giuseppe Longo, presentation at Bruno Pontecorvo centenary conference, Rome, September 12, 2013. At this same conference, various former colleagues confirmed the intensity of Bruno’s relationship with Rodam.
11. Contrary to a common misconception, they never married. (The Wikipedia biography of Bruno Pontecorvo repeated this misconception, until corrected by me in 2014.)
12. Bruno stayed married to Marianne, even late in life. He eventually became concerned that he had no documentary proof of their marriage—the certificate was yet another item they had failed to bring on their flight. Remark by anonymous colleague.
13. Interview with Russian colleague, name withheld, 2012.
14. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 218.
15. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 223.
16. Gillo Pontecorvo, as related to the author by an anonymous colleague of Bruno Pontecorvo, 2013. This is consistent with Bruno’s own statement to Charles Richards, The Independent, August 2, 1992.
17. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 256.
18. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.
19. Interview with Charles Richards, The Independent, August 2, 1992.
20. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.
21. This is memory of a remark Gribov made to me around 1990; it was corroborated by Valery Khoze on December 6, 2012.
22. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 193.
23. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 26, 2013.
24. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
25. Tito Pontecorvo, quoted in Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 280.
26. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 281.
27. A list of Politburo members according to Wikipedia can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Politburo_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union_in_the_1970s.
28. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 282; Miriam Mafai interview, March 2012.
29. Tito bred Akhal-Teke stallions, and became outstandingly successful at it, as this video shows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaae5M3NgaI.
30. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 271.
31. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.
32. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 284.
33. Eugenio Tabet interview, September 12, 2013; Eugenio Tabet e-mail correspondence, October 2013.
34. Ugo Amaldi interview, September 12, 2013.
35. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.
36. Gil Pontecorvo interview, August 26, 2013. The visit was during New Year’s 1975, and the events described took place in the first week of January.
37. J. Laberrigue-Frolow in BPSSW, p. 466.
38. Peter Minkowski interview, around July 1, 2013. The visitor from the Energy Department was the late Peter Rosen, a physicist who had been the head of the theoretical physics division at Los Alamos.
39. Photo in BPSSW, p. 467.
40. A recording of Pontecorvo’s talk at CERN is available at http://cds.cern.ch/record/1002188?ln=it.
41. I was able to talk with Miriam Mafai shortly before she died in 2012 to verify that her narrative came verbatim from Bruno Pontecorvo, and discuss the extent to which it reflected her own vision. In her opinion the comments about life in the Soviet Union reflected Bruno’s philosophy, adding enigmatically, “There are things you cannot understand, sauf si vous étiez communiste.” Miriam Mafai interview and e-mails, March 1, 2012.
42. Interview with Charles Richards, The Independent, August 2, 1992.
43. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
44. Lev Okun in BPSSW, p. 501.
45. Tania Blokhintseva interview, August 24, 2012.
46. Irina Pokrovskaya in BPSSW, p. 508.
47. Tania Blokhintseva in BPSSW, p. 494.
48. Ludo Pontecorvo interview, April 18, 2013.
49. Irina
Pokrovskaya in BPSSW, p. 508. Marianne Pontecorvo died in 1995.
50. The full story involves experiments conducted in Japan, which detected neutrinos produced by cosmic rays, as well as solar neutrinos. This is covered in more detail in Close, Neutrino.
51. J. Bahcall and R. Davis, “The Evolution of Neutrino Astronomy,” Essays in Nuclear Astrophysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 243–285.
CHAPTER 19
1. TNA KV 2/1888.
2. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 295. Luisa Bonolis, an Italian historian of science, tried to obtain original tapes or transcripts of Mafai’s interviews, but was unsuccessful. Bonolis assessed Bruno’s responses to Mafai, as reported in the original Italian, and found them to be ambiguous, as if he did not want to face the reasons for his flight. Luisa Bonolis interview, December 13, 2012.
3. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 293.
4. Quote originates with Franz Kafka.
5. Ugo Amaldi interview, April 18, 2013.
6. Jack Steinberger interview, September 13, 2011. At the Rome conference in September 2013, following a presentation by Bilenky, Steinberger publicly attacked the claims that Pontecorvo had demonstrated that the muon does not decay into an electron and a photon, calling them “inventions of Mr Pontecorvo” made “later in life as he remembered [events]. Their work was published a few months after mine, which found the electron spectrum to be continuous [i.e., incompatible with decay into an electron and a photon] and there is no statement in Hincks and Pontecorvo that muon does not decay to electron and photon, which I did later with an Italian student.” A written version of Steinberger’s critique can be found in CERN Courier, February 24, 2014, available at http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/56229.
7. Semen Gershtein in BPSSW.
8. While the H-bomb was still in the future at the time of Pontecorvo’s defection, its awful potential was already recognized. Yet there is no mention in any of the available British documents of any expertise that Pontecorvo had that would be relevant to the weapon. President Truman had publicly announced the decision to develop the H-bomb in January 1950, months before the Pontecorvo affair erupted. By the time of his defection, the United Kingdom was already aware of a number of technical details, including the advantage that heavy-water reactors could have in breeding tritium, which is the key ingredient of the bomb. In 1950, Pontecorvo had been working on such a reactor for six years, and was one of the world’s leading experts in the field. When he arrived in the USSR, he had already performed experiments involving tritium, and, we now know, he subsequently advised the Soviets on the details of heavy-water reactors. Yet there is not a whiff of concern about these facts in the documents from 1950 that the British have released. It is hard to believe that informed government scientists would have overlooked such a link.
This peculiar silence contrasts with the very vocal concerns about cosmic rays that were expressed in the media at the time. The discovery of strange forms of matter with weird properties in cosmic rays led to speculation that they might be a route to even-more-devastating weapons. If these unfamiliar particles held such power, and if the Soviets mastered them first, it was possible that the West could be held hostage and subjugated. This very subject was Bruno’s latest passion when he defected—which could be seen as quite alarming. Fortunately, cosmic rays are of no use in building weapons of mass destruction, but no one knew that in 1950. This was therefore another aspect of Bruno Pontecorvo’s expertise that the British government downplayed at the time.
9. Enrico Fermi as quoted by Herbert Skinner, TNA KV 2/1888.
10. Remark by Arnold Kramish to Michael Goodman, Michael Goodman interview, October 7, 2013.
11. One possible scenario is that during 1945 Bruno had planned to move to Harwell, but that his plans were disrupted by Nunn May’s exposure at the end of that year, and arrest in 1946. With Nunn May out of the picture, Moscow no longer had an expert intimately involved within the Canadian project. Around this same time, Klaus Fuchs, who had been actively spying for Moscow at Los Alamos, was transferred to Harwell. Almost at once, Pontecorvo decided to postpone his own move to the British laboratory. Instead, he announced his desire to remain in Canada. This placed Bruno Pontecorvo at the heart of the Canadian reactor project, during the period when it was producing the novel forms of uranium and other elements essential for atomic weapons and power. During this period, it appears that the Soviets’ courier, Lona Cohen, was secretly given uranium for transmission to Moscow. In the meantime Klaus Fuchs continued to pass information to his Soviet contacts from his new post at Harwell. By 1949, Pontecorvo’s work in Canada was completed, after which he also moved to Harwell as planned. There, he was confronted with the catastrophe of Fuchs’s exposure, in 1950.
12. KGB documents that were declassified during Yeltsin’s presidency. Albright and Kunstel, Bombshell, pp. 133–134 describes Cohen’s Canadian visits. Lona Cohen also described them to a Russian historian in 1992 (confirmed to author in an e-mail from that Russian historian, an anonymous source, March 12, 2014). Bruno’s travels are confirmed in TNA KV 2/1888.
13. Comment by Stella Rimington, June 14, 2013.
14. Herbert Skinner remark to MI5, TNA KV 2/1888: “The circumstantial evidence for him having handed over information to an agent while in Canada is extremely strong.”
15. Lona Cohen died on December 23, 1992.
16. Yatskov could have been the “man of about forty” who first met the Pontecorvos in Leningrad on or around September 3, 1950. Yatskov’s claim that he served as an aide-de-camp to Bruno also fits with Bruno’s descriptions of the KGB employee who helped him in 1975, and whose identity Bruno refused to reveal.
17. Yatskov’s career is described in Albright and Kunstel, Bombshell.
18. William Tyrer e-mails, February 28, 2014; e-mail from anonymous source, March 2, 2014.
AFTERWORD
1. Guy Liddell diary, June 2, 1950, TNA KV 4/472.
2. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p. 153.
3. Mafai, Il lungo freddo, p 205.
4. Oleg Gordievsky e-mail correspondence, April 30, 2012.
5. Conversation with Pontecorvo family members, Rome, September 22, 2013.
6. As recalled by Gillo’s son, Ludo Pontecorvo, interview April 18, 2013.
7. Guido Pontecorvo remarks to MI5, TNA KV 2/1888.
8. Anna Pontecorvo interview, November 11, 2011.
9. Ben MacIntyre, remark in lecture about his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury 2014).
10. Unnamed Harwell scientist, quoted by Godfrey Stafford, interview December 20, 2012.
11. Interview with Charles Richards, The Independent, August 2, 1992.
12. Quoted in Guy Liddell diary, September 18, 1945, TNA KV 4/466.
13. Joan Hall interview, May 1, 2013.
Bibliography
Albright, Joseph and Marcia Kunstel. Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy. New York: Times Books, 1997.
Andrew, Christopher. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
Andrew, Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story. London: HarperCollins, 1990.
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Penguin, 2000.
Arnold, Lorna. My Short Century: Memoirs of an Accidental Nuclear Historian. Palo Alto, CA: Cumnor Hill Books, 2012.
Bickel, Lennard. The Deadly Element: The Men and Women Behind the Story of Uranium. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Bonolis, Luisa. “Bruno Pontecorvo: From Slow Neutrons to Oscillating Neutrinos.” American Journal of Physics 73 (2005): 487–499.
Broda, Paul. Scientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb. Leicester, UK: Matador, 2011.
Burke, David. The Spy Who Came In from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009.
Chaliand, Gerard and Arnaud
Blin. The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Close, Frank. The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Close, Frank. Neutrino. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Close, Frank, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton. The Particle Odyssey: A Journey to the Heart of Matter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Emling, Shelley. Marie Curie and her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science’s First Family. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Farmelo, Graham. Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.
Fermi, Enrico. Note e Memorie (Collected Papers), Vol. 1, Italy 1921–1938. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Fermi, Laura. Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi, Architect of the Atomic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
Frisch, Otto. What Little I Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Gibbs, Timothy. “British and American Counter-Intelligence and the Atom Spies 1941–50.” PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007.
Goldschmidt, Bertrand. Les rivalités atomiques, 1919–1966. Paris: Fayard, 1967.
Goodman, M. Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Gowing, Margaret. Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964.
Haynes, John Earl, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Ioffe, Boris. “A Top Secret Assignment.” In At the Frontier of Particle Physics: Handbook of QCD: Boris Ioffe Festschrift, edited by M. Shifman. Singapore: World Scientific, 2002.
Jackson, J. D. “Snapshots of a Physicist’s Life.” Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science 49 (1999): 1–33.
Jeffery, Keith. MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.