The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Benford drawled, “I’d say it was no more than a hundred yards up, maybe less. Loud as hell. Screams. And fast.”

  Groves peered at Benford, puzzled. “I heard about that fast plane at a briefing just two days ago. They call it a ‘jet.’ Sucks in air, mixes fuel with it, ignites, heats the air, pushes it out the back. Same idea as that V-1 of theirs, but better managed.”

  “Fast and low, then gone. Best way to dump it on us, hard to shoot down,” Karl said.

  Groves spat out, “What’d you mean just now, tell us something?”

  “They dropped tons on us. That means they have plenty of uranium. Guess why?”

  5.

  That evening Karl saw a London newspaper with a cartoon on the front page. Unnoticed in the blitz of news about the Normandy invasion plus the Berlin A-bomb, the Allies had taken Rome. Now they had moved up the coast, nearing Pisa. The simple line drawing showed the tower of Pisa, leaning over. In the next panel an airplane dropped a bomb in the sea beside it. Big blast. Next panel, the tower is upright. A neat, hopeful way to say something good could come of this war, he supposed. He wondered.

  The war news was all about Normandy, otherwise. But not a whisper about the dust. That was classified. Nobody mentioned it in the mess hall, which meant that security was actually working.

  Freeman had a simple cot in the Quonset next to Karl’s. He was one of twenty in the long half cylinder of a room, not a private room. Karl found him lying on the cot, reading a book by some author named Lovecraft—which he assumed meant it was some kind of romance novel. Freeman looked up and grinned. “Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: ‘The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.’ Superb nonsense.”

  Karl snorted. “Why are you reading such stuff?”

  “It’s a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow.”

  Karl realized that he shared a language with the English but would never quite fathom them.

  • • •

  The next morning his brief report on the dust weapon had a diagnosis, but no cure.

  Inhaling the dust brings uranium into direct contact with lungs. Dust on skin is also effective. The natural U-235 fission puts alpha particles—two neutrons, two protons, that rip through cells easily—into the bloodstream. The health effects of alpha particles depend heavily upon how exposure takes place. External exposure (external to the body) is of far less concern than internal exposure, because alpha particles lack the energy to penetrate the outer dead layer of skin.

  However, if alpha emitters have been inhaled, ingested (swallowed), or absorbed into the bloodstream, sensitive living tissue can be exposed to alpha radiation. The resulting biological damage increases the risk of cancer; in particular, alpha radiation is known to cause lung cancer in humans when alpha emitters are inhaled.

  Respirators with suitable air filters, or completely self-contained suits with their own air supply, can mitigate these dangers. Gas masks can keep dust from the lungs but cannot be worn for long periods; they annoy people.

  Washing is useful, of course. Evacuating the immediate contaminated area—which seems to be highways so far—is essential. Rain can bury the dust a bit and so limit the impact of the alpha radiation, which is short.

  Geiger counters cannot detect alpha radiation through even a thin layer of water, blood, dust, paper, or other material, because alpha radiation is not penetrating. Alpha radiation travels a very short distance through air. It is not able to penetrate gear, clothing, or a cover on a probe. Dry clothing can keep alpha emitters off the skin.

  The consequences of low-level radiation are often more psychological and radiological. Because damage from very low-level radiation cannot be detected, experience in laboratories in the 1930s shows that people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty about what will happen to them. This is a terror weapon. Some may believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life.

  Aftermath of the Berlin Bomb

  The bomb was already dirty because of its inefficient gun design (1.5 percent).

  Very little of the uranium fissioned, so most of it dispersed as radioactive waste. That reduced the bomb’s explosive yield but increased its long-term lethality and terror quotient. Little Boy’s blast and fireball excavated many thousands of tons of soil. Radiation contaminated soil and dust and rock. Most of the contaminated soil rose up far into the sky and slowly returned as radioactive fallout, some as muddy black rain.

  Groves slapped the report down on his desk. “So what do we do?”

  “Don’t drive on those roads. Tell troops to take baths. Get light dust filters—cloth will do—for them to wear in contaminated areas.” It was easy to rattle off answers, but Karl knew doing it would be hard, in the middle of a war.

  “Troops shouldn’t have to worry about breathing, for Chrissake!”

  “The Germans want to stop us using the roads to Paris, any way they can.”

  “You bet they do, and this is perfect for that. Your note about the Berlin bomb—you think the Germans got the idea from looking at fallout?”

  “They have good physicists, like Heisenberg. He would get a Geiger counter to the site. Plus, check the fallout. Von Braun must’ve recalled that magazine story, way back in 1940.”

  Groves got up, paced. “You physicists can’t find a fix for this?”

  Karl shook his head. “Cat’s out of the bag.”

  Groves consulted the maps of France on his wall. “You said ‘guess why’ the Germans have uranium to throw around. Meaning?”

  “They have uranium, so they have a bomb program. That’s for sure. So, two choices. Either they have a lot of it because they haven’t gotten the isotopes separated, or they have plenty to spare, or—”

  “They’re damned close to having enough U-235. The dust is a stall to keep us out of Germany, while they get their warhead together.”

  Karl didn’t like the way this was going. “Um, maybe.”

  “Well, I need you to deal with this. And the Los Alamos guys, even that Dyson. The Krauts will use this damned dust a lot.”

  “Wait, I’m going home. Remember?”

  “Not now you aren’t. Sorry, Karl. This is a war.”

  And I’ve somehow become a soldier, Karl thought.

  • • •

  He recalled the dream of two nights before, of endless gray corridors he trudged down to pry open doors, finding only brick walls. It had been convincing, but only in the way that dreams are, as long as you are still asleep. Now it seemed like a prediction.

  The death dust didn’t stay secret for long, of course. The London Times proclaimed it in red ink: RADIOACTIVE POISON FROM THE SKY!

  “That will make every trooper in France anxious,” Luis said. “The psychological impact will be bigger than the contamination.”

  Worse, Feynman came into their working offices with a report from a little chemical operation he and Luis had set up. “That dust, it’s cleaned uranium, all right. We should get the London chem guys to use a mass spec on it. I’ll bet it’s just purified U-235 and U-238 in the same ratios as natural ore.”

  So it really was as everyone had guessed. Karl walked them through the options. If the Germans had enough uranium to throw it around, did a bomb look likely, soon?

  “No way to tell,” Luis said. “They could be just messing with our heads.”

  “They’ve got their backs to the wall,” Feynman said, his voice carrying a touch of wonderment, as if part of his mind was figuring out how he could have gotten himself into this. “And now . . . so do we.”

  Luis looked puzzled. “How so?”

  Feynman got up and paced, just as Groves had before. “If they have a lot of uranium, our ground attack stops. They have time to work on a bomb. They’ve no doubt sampled the fallout from Berlin and guessed what we put in it.” He turned and jabbed a finger. “And now they know even a simple bomb wor
ks.”

  “So what can we do?” Karl asked them all around the table. Shrugs and embarrassed looks blossomed from them: Luis, Feynman, Serber, Freeman.

  “All our bright minds,” Feynman said sardonically, “and we can’t figure how to stop the enemy from dumping dirt on us.”

  Freeman said with delicate precision, “We are hothouse flowers, really. Not made for the blunt edge of war.”

  Nods all around. Feynman sighed. “Right, Freeman. If I were a lizard, I’d be a belt by now.”

  • • •

  “See what you think of this.” Groves tossed a letter on his desk. “It’s from Teller to Fermi.”

  First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Cohen was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we scientists should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb very high over German territory and submit that information to the president.

  “So?” The rest was about physics gossip. Karl tossed it back. “Everybody’s a Monday morning quarterback.” He had learned this sports analogy just recently, since military men spoke that way constantly.

  Groves toyed with a chocolate bar, as if tempting himself with it. “Security sent it to me; they read everything coming out of Los Alamos. But Teller’s no kind of weak-kneed sort, y’know. If he says this, he’s speaking for a big fraction of the scientists.”

  “I did say I don’t think we know the political situation, so we should just shut up.”

  “Damn right! It’s up to us, the commanders, to decide—”

  “More like Roosevelt, I’d say.”

  Groves gave him a sliding, sideways look. “Well, yeah. I never thought the response to our bomb would get us in trouble. Long-noses in the papers are saying we shouldn’t have introduced radioactives into weapons. Look at what little Adolf says—”

  Another sheet, a translation:

  This abomination, this horrific bomb that blinds and maims and poisons our lands, is a violation of the Geneva Convention! The Reich shall not be restrained any longer by this Convention. In our reply to our enemies, we shall treat them as they treat us. Expect the apocalypse!

  “Cheerful fellow.” Karl was tempted to shred it but restrained himself. “Nonsense—the convention says nothing about radioactives, Freeman tells me.”

  “Right, but everybody’s scared of radioactives. Most people don’t read the fine print, y’know.”

  “We have to end this damned war. Hitler’s slaughtering Jews every day.”

  Groves made a sour face and stood. “I see that in my classified briefings. Stories from people who got out of Europe. Trainloads of Jews, Gypsies, prisoners, all going to awful camps that even have incinerators. Plus, plenty of troops die on the eastern and western fronts.”

  Karl struggled to keep calm. He wanted to know more and yet he didn’t. “Everywhere, the casualty count goes up constantly. The war’s reached a meat-grinder phase.”

  A frustrated silence fell. A knock at the door. Luis Alvarez came in, using a cane. “Here’s the telex on the Teller idea.”

  Groves took it, tossed it on a pile of similar sheets. “Y’know, Teller’s working on another kind of bomb—uses hydrogen, fuses it together. Opposite of fission. Says it will be much better than our uranium ones.” Groves beamed with pride. “So the project will continue on, after the war.”

  Luis chuckled. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about possibilities; this means they probably will fail.”

  Karl knew Teller’s style. That led to a joke, well circulated, that a new unit of unfounded optimism was designated as the teller; one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in microtellers.

  Karl saw it might be smart to ask when Groves was in a good mood. “General, I was wondering if I could again—”

  “Nope, Karl. I need you here. Things are happening fast.”

  • • •

  Though he spent time with army teams who wanted to talk about handling radioactivity, it all bored him. The Army Air Forces were making some dent in the German program, though. Vague stories appeared in the newspapers; Groves got the details.

  The air force had kept close watch for dust-dropping planes. An American, Chuck Yeager of the 357th Fighter Group, shot down the jet Messerschmitt 262, which he caught during its landing approach. Karl had been learning German, for something to do, and he remarked to Feynman, “Appropriate. ‘Yeager’ is an English version of the German Jäger, which means ‘hunter.’ ”

  Other downed jets followed. But the Germans were turning out several a day, and “death dust” flights came whenever there were suitable roads or intersections to block with it.

  Then came the V-2 rockets. They were ballistic missiles, nothing like the sputtering V-1 semi-jets that pilots could shoot down, or flip with their wings. They fell in July, straight down on London, from high altitudes. The first ones had high explosives and blew down houses, offices, in a fairly well-grouped distribution, charted by Freeman. “Half are within a five-mile circle,” he said. “Remarkably good aiming, for a rocket that climbs to about fifty-five miles high—which we can see on radar.”

  Groves became more and more bad-tempered in their meetings. Karl could see the man was a sort of caged bear, wanting to have a greater role, now that he was in the fight. “We can’t do anything about the damn dust, even though uranium is our, well, our weapon.”

  Then one V-2 burst about two hundred meters above central London into a dark plume—a “death dust” warhead. Wind blew it down a seven-mile streamer, driving tens of thousands from the streets into the countryside. Uranium was not a battlefield issue anymore, but a civilian one.

  “I need you guys to find a way around this stuff,” Groves told them. “I’m not a scientist, but there’s got to be something we can do.”

  Feynman said forlornly, “I agree with the first part of that sentence, at least.”

  Groves sent Bob Serber to the city to retrieve samples of the dust, following a suggestion Karl and the others made: see if the U-235 content of the dust was rising, showing that the Germans had an isotope separation plant going.

  Tests showed there was no enrichment. “They’re just slinging purified uranium at us, straight from the mines,” Bob said.

  But the next week Bob fell ill. A red rash spread from his face all over his body. The bumps were as big as marbles and itched “like the bejesus,” he said in a feverish daze. He died two days later of smallpox.

  • • •

  “So this is how the Nazis take the moral high ground?” Groves demanded.

  Freeman said quietly, head bowed, “It has been argued that rational people would never use biological weapons offensively. Their point is that biological weapons cannot be controlled: the weapon could backfire and harm the army on the offensive, perhaps having even worse effects than on the target. Agents like smallpox and other airborne viruses would almost certainly spread widely, and ultimately infect the user’s home country.”

  Groves wasn’t interested in theory. “Just got a message from London. Another V-2, just across the river from the House of Commons. This one had no radioactives. But it did have anthrax.”

  Gasps.

  “Exactly, gentlemen. I wonder if they have more tricks to come.”

  “How are the V-2s launched?” Feynman asked, leaning against the wall, since there were not enough seats in Groves’s office. He managed to make his leisurely slouch seem like a sardonic signal.

  Groves checked his stack of reports. “From portable carriers.”

  “Not a fixed launchpad, then,” Feynman said. “Maybe the flyboys can hunt them down on the roads.”

  Groves nodded. “I’m sure they’re doing that now—instead of supporting our troops.”

  Karl got up and tapped the map of France on the wall. “Which slows our advance, gives them more time to work on their bomb—if th
ey have one.”

  Around the crowded room, faces displayed geometries of despair.

  “Oh, by the way, Karl,” Groves said with an offhand wave. “I got an order to send you into London to meet with Moe Berg. Dunno why.”

  6.

  Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair was a bit pricey, even for Moe Berg. It turned out that he wasn’t paying, though. This fact enhanced Moe’s smoothness, for Karl.

  “This is Brigadier General William Donovan,” Moe said with a deft bow and hand salute. “Our host.”

  “I’ve heard so much about you Manhattan guys, good to meet one who was in at the beginning,” Donovan said. Karl knew him as the head of the Office of Strategic Services, so his military posture fit. So did the smile, cut off and stored away as soon as it had done its job.

  They ordered dinner in the hotel restaurant, all three getting roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. As the waiter departed, Donovan said, “We’ve got a job for you. Moe recommended you as a good expert on this atomic business, with experience traveling in Europe.”

  Karl started to object, but a glance from Moe told him not to. Smoothly Moe said, “I got sent to Italy, Karl, to find out what they were doing in rockets. We managed to get some of their experts out to the USA. Pretty tough, but damn good food. Now I’m going back to see what’s up with atomic stuff.”

  “Italy?” Karl knew the Allies were slugging their way up toward the Alps.

  “No,” Donovan said. “Switzerland. To judge some physics.”

  “Or physicists,” Moe added.

  “Look, I’m an expert only in the sense that I’ve made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

  Karl noticed that the waiters did not sit anyone within hearing range. Donovan was not bothered about being overheard when he leaned forward. “The Brits got intel in 1943 that the Kaiser Wilhelm people were building a reactor. We know they imported tons of uranium ore from the Czechs, the stuff they’re dropping on us now. This guy, Werner Heisenberg, has moved from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Plus Otto Hahn himself, the guy who found fission. There’s a program at Hamburg under Harteck, some other places too.”