The Berlin Project
Page 44
I estimate that another six months of work by Beams, maybe with a bit of insight from others and a bigger budget, would have done the trick by early 1943. These are clever engineering moves, that’s all. These changes “solved essentially all the mechanical problems that had plagued Manhattan Project centrifuges,” Scott Kemp of MIT writes. He argues correctly that it wasn’t that fast centrifuges weren’t possible in 1942. Jesse Beams just never figured out the right tricks. He never had enough time or funding.
The crucial turning points in this alternative history are the events early in the Manhattan Project, when the Urey group at Columbia could not get funding for centrifuge development. We forget the style of science in that era, when government did little research and corporations gave small sums for specific developments, all to acquire technologies useful in the short term. The entire style of Big Science came into being for the first time in the Manhattan Project’s large laboratories and intricate coordination, invented chiefly by Groves, Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Lawrence. Karl Cohen once remarked to me that in 1939 he and Urey estimated that to develop fast centrifuges might take as much as $100,000—“so then we knew it was impossible!” At that time Karl was earning less than $2,000 a year.
Death Dust
In 1943 several American scientists proposed use of radioactive dust against Germany—Fermi, Oppenheimer, Teller, and others. They reasoned that the Germans could well be ahead in using the idea already. The documents quoted here about this are authentic. Strontium 90 seemed the best choice. Oppenheimer thought it was worth trying if it could poison the food of at least half a million.
They thought German battlefield use was possible. The USA Operation Peppermint to detect use of radiological weapons was widely dispersed among troops in the Normandy invasion. (My own father, who appears in this novel, was among such troops as a forward observer in artillery.) The army sent teams with Geiger counters and film to be fogged, to see if the Germans were using radiological dust as a weapon. Germany wasn’t, of course. The German program never got the push Einstein gave the American program, in the way I’ve depicted. (Einstein did no work in the Manhattan Project, though he did some analysis of conventional explosives’ effects.)
Werner von Braun had a continuous subscription to the magazine Astounding from the 1930s onward, having his copies delivered in wartime Germany via diplomatic pouch through Sweden. He knew of the radiological weapons idea invented by Heinlein, and so did the physicists in the German program. Taking the advice of Albert Speer, Hitler decided to drive ahead with the V-1, V-2, and jet airplanes, while the nuclear program hobbled along, accumulating uranium, without clearly understanding how to build a bomb or a reactor. The USA captured all their gear and scientists.
I have depicted John W. Campbell using his own words and those of the agents who interviewed him. He was well aware of the many possible uses of radioactive elements and encouraged his writers to explore them. I’ve also used the articles he wrote on the subject. He did say after the war that the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like “a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers,” anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely.
Tolstoy famously thought that history in the large was not the fruit of individuals. Rather, he saw history as the outcome of innumerable, interconnected events, and so a product of its era and the work of millions. Certainly this describes much of World War II. But in the technical maze of the early Manhattan Project, the work of a few, and the judgment of even fewer (particularly General Groves) had great leverage. This novel argues that history has its pivotal fulcrums too.
Acknowledgments
For their contributions to the backgrounds of this novel thanks are due to the daughters of Karl and Marthe: Martine, Beatrix, Elisabeth; Ethel Paley; Karl Cohen. Photos of Karl Cohen are courtesy of Patrick Cashmore. Harry Turtledove added many useful historical points to my research and advised on an early manuscript.
For comments on the manuscript I thank Bart Kosko, Sheila Finch, Rick Wilber, Gordon Eklund, James Benford, Oak Ridge historian D. Ray Smith, John Rather, David Truesdale, Jon Lomberg, and the Cohen sisters. The sisters gave me many details about Karl and Marthe Cohen I have used in part, including much family correspondence and many memos. (Whenever possible I have quoted directly from these.)
I wish to thank for help and insights many who brought useful information about the era. On physics and historical matters, Garang Yodh was of great use. Michael Dobson contributed many useful insights and plot points. Albert Berger provided historical documents on the Astounding stories and the government investigation of those. Lydia Fletcher found documents galore. The late Bill Patterson advised on historical detail, plus the Heinlein and Cartmill stories. Alex Wellerstein provided through his site much useful insight.
I have used photos from the war era to show the look of the times. Most come from open online sources. ID badges are authentic Manhattan Project, including errors such as the typo in Groves’s ID. Thanks to Alex Wellerstein for these.
I used many sources for this novel, including discussions with several of its principals. I read the biographies and autobiographies of them as well. In addition, these were especially useful:
Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. New York: Anchor, 2012.
Bernstein, Jeremy. Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, 2nd ed. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2001.
———. Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Cohen, Karl. The Theory of Isotope Separation as Applied to the Large Scale Production of U235. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.
Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994.
de la Bruhèze, A. A. Albert. “Radiological Weapons and Radioactive Waste in the United States: Insiders and Outsiders Views, 1941–1955.” The British Journal for the History of Science, no. 25 (June 1992): 207–227. See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiological_weapon.
Kiernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Smith, P. D. Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
Walker, Mark. German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Weart, S. R., and G. W. Szilard, eds. Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected Recollections and Correspondence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978.
I believe the best overall history of the Manhattan Project is Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon & Schuster, 1986.
A useful website with much obscure background on this subject is blog.nuclearsecrecy.com. I thank Dr. Alex Wellerstein for many links.
About the Author
For The Berlin Project, author GREGORY BENFORD gathered firsthand accounts from his father-in-law, renowned scientist and engineer Karl P. Cohen, whose shared stories from his time working with General Leslie Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Harold Urey, John Dunning, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman, along with Benford’s meticulous research, form the core of this alternate history thriller.
Gregory Benford is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and has served as an adviser to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House’s National Space Policy.
Benford is also the bestselling and beloved author of more than thirty novels, including Timescape; the Galactic Center saga of novels; and his recent New York Times bestsellers, Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar, cowritten with Larry Niven.
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Also by Gregory Benford
Bowl of Heaven (with Larry Niven)
Bowl of Heaven
Shipstar
Foundation Universe: Second Foundation Trilogy
Foundation’s Fear
Galactic Center
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
A Hunger for the Infinite
Adventures of Viktor & Julia
The Martian Race
The Sunborn
Tales of Known Space: Man-Kzin Wars (with Mark O. Martin)
The Trojan Cat
A Darker Geometry
Jupiter Project
The Stars in Shroud
Shiva Descending (with William Rotsler)
Timescape
Find the Changeling (with Gordon Eklund)
Against the Fall of Night/Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Against Infinity
Artifact
Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)
Chiller (also as by Sterling Blake)
Cosm
Eater
Beyond Infinity
Collections
The Galactic Center Companion, 2nd Edition
The Best of Gregory Benford
Mammoth Dawn (with Kevin J. Anderson)
Anthologies
Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon (with James Benford)
The Mars Girl/As Big as the Ritz (with Joe Haldeman)
Nonfiction
The Wonderful Future That Never Was (with the editors of Popular Mechanics)
The Amazing Weapons That Never Were (with the editors of Popular Mechanics)
Deep Time
Beyond Human (with Elisabeth Malartre)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Gregory Benford
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benford, Gregory, 1941– author.
Title: The Berlin Project / Gregory Benford.
Description: First edition. | New York : Saga Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016040114 (print) | ISBN 9781481487641 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781481487665 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. | Manhattan Project (U.S.)—Fiction. | Atomic bomb—United States—History—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Alternative History. | FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Suspense fiction. | Science fiction. | War stories.
Classification: LCC PS3552.E542 B47 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040114