“Is time!” a voice called. Game over, he gathered. The clock had run out, leaving Karl dripping with sweat. He turned to see Marthe waving, their daughter standing with a wobbly grace beside her.
Anton came pounding up, hardly panting at all, and clapped Karl on the back. “Head shot, first game! You a natural.”
Karl decided to bask in this approval as they walked toward Marthe. He had simply reacted instantly, without thinking. “We won!” Anton called.
Marthe bent over and whispered to the tiny little girl, who then clapped her hands, grinning. More men hailed him, and Karl realized his sudden move had led to their score. He was an utterly accidental hero.
“Meet Yusov.” Anton gestured. “Scored point.”
The Hungarian shook Karl’s hand. “Engineer, I.”
“Just off boat,” Anton added. “Needs job.”
Karl was getting used to this by now. “I’ll put you in touch with hiring at Columbia.”
“Ah, thanks!” A clap on the back from his fellow soccer buddy. Maybe Anton felt that was the real point of this game? There actually was a steadily growing demand for technical people, and Columbia did pass on applicants to other places that were hiring. Refugees would fit in.
As they walked away, Anton said, “Yusov got out, go through Turkey. Family was taken away but he was on trip, so slipped across border.”
Another story getting familiar. “Was everybody on our team Jewish?”
“Yes, is so. Also other team.” A shy glance. “Just off boat, some of team. Need jobs too.”
So it had been something of a setup. Not a bad one either. He now had enough contacts in the growing nuclear effort to help them, and somehow they knew that. Karl slapped Anton on the back and laughed at the sky.
May 23, 1941
Karl had heard Fermi refer to Leo Szilard as an “intellectual bumblebee,” for nurturing and enriching science freely and broadly. Quite right—Fermi and Szilard were opposites. Fermi was conservative, careful, methodical. Szilard was imaginative, flamboyant. Fermi seldom said anything he could not demonstrate. Szilard seldom said anything not startling and new. Fermi was humble and self-effacing. Szilard could not talk without giving orders. Urey remarked that they were “antiparticles” of each other, in the sense of Paul Dirac’s theory of electrons and antielectrons.
“They need a mediating particle, Karl. Why don’t you take the job?”
“I’m not qualified.”
“You’ll learn. More important, nobody else wants it.”
Fair enough. Szilard had pushed through Einstein’s letter to the president, after all—a brilliant move. So he spent more time trying to mediate between the two. The most effective way was to simply keep them apart. But Karl was unprepared for Szilard’s bursting into his office, brandishing a rather lurid cover on a science fiction magazine, saying, “This is important!”
It was Astounding Science Fiction, the May 1941 issue, featuring a garish painting showing a man with two heads. Szilard quickly turned to a story by Anson MacDonald, “Solution Unsatisfactory.” Karl eyed the illustration and grimaced. “I didn’t know you read fiction at all. I don’t.”
“Is full of ideas, like me. I find in this story prediction of just such a nuclear program as we are in. Then works out that each side will have them, so stalemate follows. Only difference is, the weapon is spreading radioactive dust. To pollute, make use of a territory impossible—not using as explosive.”
“Wow.” Karl read the first few paragraphs. “Can I borrow this?”
“Do. I went and bought five copies after I read it last night.”
“What do you think we should do about it?”
Szilard paced, face skeptical. “I do not treasure the intelligence services of any government. So just discuss this among ourselves.”
“I never thought of just contaminating an area, to deny it to an enemy.”
“I either.” Szilard rolled his eyes and screwed his mouth around with distaste. “Horrible, this idea. Cities, countryside. This could be quicker way to use radioactive substances.”
“Nasty. Do you think we or anyone would do that? The poisoning would last for years. Until it got washed away.”
“I know some Germans get this magazine.”
“Jeez.”
• • •
A day later Karl attended a small meeting of everyone Szilard had given copies of Astounding Science Fiction. He felt out of place, not a fiction reader at all. He had spent an unpleasant half hour reading the story, in which “atomic” bombs—a strange term, since the energy came from not the atom, but its nucleus—get developed by the United States and the quasi-Soviet “Eurasian Union.” A brief atomic war breaks out that the United States wins. America thereafter has to impose a military dictatorship over the rest of the world to prevent future nuclear warfare. But the Eurasian Union has the weapons, too, so this stalemate is a disagreeable equilibrium. That was a solution to the nation-state warfare problem, but unsatisfactory, since the free nations did not win out.
It was an unsettling idea. By now the brutal grind of the war had shown them that targeting civilians was no longer a despicable crime in the eyes of the world. Everybody bombed civilians. Millions had died, many in their own homes. Using radioactives to pollute a broad area seemed somehow worse than just blowing up a city.
“This is why we need more secrecy,” Szilard said as an opener. “This new idea should not be in a magazine.”
“Cat’s out of the bag,” Urey observed wryly.
Szilard saw he was losing his audience. He responded by citing his own experience. He had met H. G. Wells in London in 1929, and in 1932 read Wells’s The World Set Free, written in 1913 about a worldwide atomic war in the 1950s.
“I went to see Wells. He feared such a war. He speculated that the only way for humans to escape Earth to visit other planets was if they were powered by ‘atomic’ energy, he called it. I said was really nuclear, since would not come from the electron orbits that make atoms work. He ignored that, liked atomic better. Arh!—novelists!”
“He did have the idea first, though,” Karl added.
“Yes! But how to do this atomic bomb? And now, how to use that to win a war before the Germans?”
Fermi said, “This-a war will use such weapons—probably to end it.”
Edward Teller nodded furiously. “The Germans are ahead of us. When they read this story—ah!” He shook his head, face dark.
Szilard paced anxiously. “Even the possibility of such weapons means we need a new set of holy commandments. Instead of ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ we need ‘Do not destroy what you cannot create.’ Such bombs are too big in impact to use against civilization. They will destroy everything! So I think we need international control of such weapons.”
Karl saw where this was going. These were brilliant men, fast thinkers, quite sure they were right—an occupational disease of physicists, he had learned. He felt humble among them but stood taller and made himself say, “By whom? The nations that are fighting? That’s over a dozen already.”
Szilard’s face relaxed. “You all know I tried, by sending cables—ah, so many!—to get Joliot-Curie in Paris not to publish his estimate of how many neutrons come from a uranium fission. I failed. Frenchmen! Damn! Joliot published, as did”—a nod—“Fermi’s group.”
Fermi smiled wryly. “So it became a matter of general knowledge. We research, we publish—that is science.” An expressive shrug. “That made the possibility of a chain reaction appear plausible to most physicists. Everywhere. We are not politicians.”
Karl said, “The Soviets, the Germans—hell, even the Japanese—all know now how many neutrons shoot out of a fissioning nucleus.”
“So we need complete secrecy now,” Szilard said, stamping his foot.
“Secrecy will slow down our work,” Teller said firmly. “I oppose it. The Germans are the best scientists in the world—and probably well ahead of us.”
Urey said, “The army’s get
ting assigned the management. So we’re gonna get all the hush-hush rigmarole.”
The faces around the room told Karl this was not good news to anyone except Szilard.
• • •
A few days later, Harold Urey looked vexed. “There’s an Englishman who wants to talk to you.”
Karl nodded and put down the distillation glassware he was assembling. He was refining the hex the centrifuges needed, and it was tedious work. “He’s here?”
“No, they want you to meet him at LaGuardia.”
Karl frowned in disbelief. “He’s flying in, with the Germans keeping their cap on England’s airspace?”
“They think it’s important enough, so this guy has hitched a ride.” Urey sniffed the air in the crowded basement lab. “What’s that?”
“Some fluorine escaped. Who is this guy?” He thought it better not to ask who the mysterious “they” might be.
“Funny name for a Brit—Rudolf Peierls. Used to be German. Turns out he was at Cambridge University when Hitler came to power, and he switched citizenship. He got a gander at your calculation of the countercurrent rate, says it’s wrong. And the method is unstable.”
“I saw that, sure.” Karl went over to a bookshelf and picked out a thin typed paper. “Irving and I got his paper and we wrote this.” He held up their paper so Urey could read the title: “The Correct Equilibrium Time of a Cascade.”
Urey laughed, slapping his knee. “Right, saw that, haven’t read it yet. He says he wants to talk it over.”
“For that they fly him through the German air cover?”
“We have planes coming back anyway, part of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program somehow. He got a lift. Lands at LaGuardia in an hour.”
“I’d better go. Say, who’s the ‘they’ who wants this?”
“People in Washington. The Uranium Committee has people from the War Department sitting in with us now.”
Karl didn’t much like the sound of that. “So it’s like that now.”
“Red tape comes with the money. No blank checks.”
• • •
Rudolf Peierls looked, as Karl’s mother used to say, like something the cat dragged in. His wife looked worse. She had a set, aggrieved frown and pursed lips, gazing around at the airport as if inspecting it for rats.
Peierls shook Karl’s hand, and so did his wife. They both gratefully sank into their chairs in the LaGuardia restaurant. “Ah! Soft. The seats coming over, they were buckets,” Peierls said.
His wife, Genia, who had been silent, spoke in a German accent similar to her husband’s but overlaid with Russian notes. “Unheated. Horrible WCs. In fact, from Newfoundland, no water left at all. Was hole in floor.” She gulped down the large glass of water as soon as the waitress arrived. “Worst thing for health is to be idiot.”
Karl saw that since the definite and indefinite articles did not exist in Russian, she considered it was also superfluous in English. He was feeling flushed, successful, and these ragged two looked as if the war was taking a heavy toll. “Order the steak.”
“We cannot afford—”
“I’m paying. Beef is lots cheaper here anyway. Might as well get some protein into you.” Both the Peierlses were drawn and pale, hands jittering. “Lay off the coffee, though.”
“It was all they had to drink aboard,” Rudolf said. He bit off some of a dinner roll and glanced at it. Karl preferred European bread and figured that probably Rudolf was startled by the quality difference. “I had time to go over your calculations, the ones with Irving Kaplan. I came because I thought they were in error.”
“The error was in your earlier paper. You were off the separation rate by a factor of five.”
Peierls seemed startled at how quickly the shrimp cocktail salad arrived. Karl had ordered three when they came into the restaurant. He had heard that the English were low on vegetables, and he was certain they couldn’t bring in lettuce.
Rudolf stopped eating and said carefully, “It was a long flight. We stopped in Ireland to refuel, then Newfoundland. Terrible food. So I had time to review my calculations . . . and I found an error. Mine. Ironic, isn’t it? The MAUD Committee sent me to straighten you Americans out.” A shrug, a sigh. “And I found it was we who needed straightening out.”
“You found the factor of five.”
A rueful smile, arched eyebrows. “Indeed. And I was wrong in saying that the method is unstable.”
The perfect moment for the steaks to arrive, medium rare. The Peierlses gazed at the big, thick rib eyes, Karl thought, with something resembling religious awe. Rudolf and Genia dug in eagerly, and after a few moments Karl ordered a bottle of a decent red wine to go with the steak. He might learn more if they were lubricated a bit.
“What’s this MAUD thing?” Karl hated the rising use of acronyms.
“It stands for Military Application of Uranium Detonation. Our report includes cost estimates and technical specifications for a large uranium enrichment plant. James Chadwick read it and said he realized that a nuclear bomb was not only possible, it was inevitable. He had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy.”
His wife spoke up, about enduring the Blitz and how air raid sirens kept them up nearly every night. They were in Birmingham now, an industrial city pounded daily, but there were air raid shelters. The wine arrived, a decent red vin ordinaire. Karl had been surprised that an airport restaurant had a wine list at all, even though it was just two, red or white. It was barely midday but Karl could see they all needed it, and he wanted to celebrate. A British physicist had been wrong about a calculation by an American chemist. Hooray, indeed.
Genia had two quick glasses and then began to talk about the war, not as it was for them, but for the Soviet Union. “You Americans must come in, you must open second front with British.”
Karl recognized this as the new party line. The Germans had launched their blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union on June 22, blowing open the treaty that had let Hitler and Stalin divide up Poland. The Soviets had gobbled up Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well. Now their 1939 ally was their 1941 enemy. This latest news had taught Karl that dictators were all alike, in the end. But not so Mrs. Peierls. “Your soldiers, they have to get”—she struggled to find something ridiculous, he could anticipate—“a grapefruit every morning, to fight at all!”
“I doubt—”
“The Soviet people can fight with empty bellies”—her voice rose—“and they are!”
“The sentiment here,” Karl said, “even among my friends of the collectivist persuasion, is to let these dragons fight it out.”
“But a second front would help England, too,” Rudolf said.
“Help them die faster, yes. I favor letting Stalin take a beating for a while, not more for Churchill. Or for you.”
This put a pall on the conversation. Karl reflected that he had never learned to mute his views, and plainly was never going to. Genia, whose blouse sported a hammer-and-sickle pin, gave him a glare as she cut farther into her steak. Karl wondered how much Rudolf had told her about the nuclear work. He had learned not to challenge hard-line Communists, and instead said softly to Rudolf, “I heard you have calculated with Otto Frisch the minimum mass for an . . . explosive.”
This was neutral ground, so Rudolf gratefully took it up. “Yes, he got out of Europe. Here, I have our memorandum.”
Karl looked at the carbon copy and scanned its abstract and raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You estimate just a single kilogram of U-235?”
“Perhaps a bit more.” A shrug. “But not much more.”
“That makes it a lot easier. We’ve been thinking it’s many tons.”
“How to get the U-235, that is the question.”
“Centrifuges look good.”
“Our MAUD Report dismissed all but one method, including the centrifuge. We recommend gaseous diffusion of uranium 235 on a massive scale.”
“I think we can change your mind about centrifuges.” Karl spoke
carefully because he was surprised that Peierls was so openly discussing this with his wife present. Karl had chosen a table far from others so he could be open, but the wife worried him. “And that diffusion method—found a membrane that can stand up to uranium hexafluoride—the hex, we call it—yet?”
“Um, no. That is an engineering detail.” Peierls sniffed disdainfully and leaned forward. “More important, since spring 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin has been set aside for uranium research. Our agents are tracking that.”
“So your MAUD Committee wants to work with us?”
“Yes. Soon. We may have to move our physicists here for that. The bombing is flattening much of our industrial base.”
“You should go to Washington, DC, for that.”
“So I will. You think this work could move so quickly as to change the outcome of this war?” Rudolf asked intently.
“If we focus, yes.”
“On what?”
“Getting something that works. Fast.”
“Quickly enough to open second front?” Genia leaned forward.
I wonder if she’ll keep the Soviets informed about this, Karl thought. Better tell Urey . . .
“There might not even need to be one,” he said.
• • •
Later that day Karl went to a seminar that proved to be a John Dunning sales pitch. He had to admire the verve and showmanship that went into the slides that paraded on as Dunning detailed how his group had heroically grappled with the problem of diffusing the hex through a membrane of various metals. Hex was highly toxic and reacted violently with water. It was corrosive to most metals, so they had to replace membranes often. But Dunning strode through these problems with jaunty self-confidence.
At the seminar’s end Karl noticed Dunning introducing several men at the front of the room to Urey. Minutes later Urey appeared in his office. “Those guys up front, they were from Washington. They’re part of the Uranium Committee, on the engineering end. Dunning wants all the development money the committee has to go to him.”
The Berlin Project Page 10