by Peter Watson
Years later Watson wrote an entertaining and revealing book about the whole saga, on which this account is partly based. Some of his success as an author lay in his openness about the scientific process, which made him and his colleagues seem far more human than had hitherto been the case. For most people up until then, science books were textbooks, thick as bricks and just as dry. Partly this was a tradition, a convention that what counted in science was the results, not how the participants achieved them. Another reason, of course, in the case of certain sciences at least, was the Cold War, which kept many crucial advances secret, at least for a while. In fact the Cold War, which succeeded in making scientists into faceless bureaucrats, along the lines Orwell had laid into in Nineteen Eighty-Four, also sparked a bitter rivalry between scientists on either side of the divide, very different from the cooperative international mood in physics in the early part of the century. The most secret discipline was in fact physics itself and its penumbra of activities. And it was here that the rivalry was keenest. Archival research carried out in Russia since perestroika has, for example, identified one great scientist who, owing to secrecy, was virtually unknown hitherto, not only in the West but in his own country, and who was almost entirely obsessed with rivalry. He was more or less single-handedly responsible for Soviet Russia’s greatest scientific success, but his strengths were also his weaknesses, and his competitiveness led to his crucial failures.49
On Friday, 4 October 1957, the world was astounded to learn that Soviet Russia had launched an orbiting satellite. Sputnik I measured only twenty-three inches across and didn’t do much as it circled the earth at three hundred miles a minute. But that wasn’t the point: its very existence up there, overflying America four times during the first day, was a symbol of the Cold War rivalry that so preoccupied the postwar world and in which, for a time at least, the Russians seemed to be ahead.50 Receiving the story in the late afternoon, next morning the New York Times took the unusual step of printing a three-decker headline, in half-inch capitals, running the whole way across the front page:
SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE;
IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 MPH;
SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U. S.51
Only then did Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader, realise what an opportunity Sputnik’s launch provided for some Cold War propaganda. The next day’s Pravda was quite different from the day before, which had recorded the launch of Sputnik in just half a column. ‘World’s First Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Nation,’ ran the headline, and it too stretched all the way across page one. The paper also published the congratulations that poured in, not only from what would soon come to be called satellite states of the USSR, but from scientists and engineers in the West.52
Sputnik was news partly because it showed that space travel was possible, and that Russia might win the race to colonise the heavens – with all the psychological and material advantages that implied – but also because, in order to reach orbit, the satellite must have been launched at a speed of at least 8,000 metres per second and with an accuracy which meant the Russians had solved several technological problems associated with rocket technology. And it was rocket technology that lay at the heart of the Cold War arms race; both Russia and the United States were then trying their hardest to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could carry nuclear warheads vast distances between continents. The launch of Sputnik meant the Russians had a rocket with enough power and accuracy to deliver hydrogen bombs on to American soil.53
After dropping behind in the arms race during World War II, the Soviet Union quickly caught up between 1945 and 1949, thanks to a small coterie of ‘atomic spies,’ including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, David Greenglass, Harvey Gold, and Klaus Fuchs. But the delivery of atomic weapons was a different matter, and here, since the advent of perestroika, several investigations have been made of what was going on behind the scenes in the Russian scientific community. By far the most interesting is James Harford’s biography of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.54 Korolev, who led an extraordinary life, may fairly be described as the father of both Russia’s ICBM system and its space program.55 Born in 1907 near Kiev, in Ukraine, into an old Cossack family, Sergei Pavlovich grew up obsessed with manmade flight. This led to an interest in rocket and jet propulsion in the 1930s. (It has also become clear since perestroika that the USSR had a spy in Wernher von Braun’s team, and that Korolev and his colleagues – not to mention Stalin, Beria, and Molotov – were kept up-to-date with German progress.) But Korolev’s smooth ride up the Soviet system came to an abrupt end in June 1937, when he was arrested in the purges and deported to the gulag, accused of ‘subversion in a new field of technology.’ He was given no trial but beaten until he ‘confessed.’56 He spent some of his time at the notorious camp in the Kolyma area of far-eastern Siberia, later made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.57 Robert Conquest, in The Great Terror, says that Kolyma ‘had a death rate of up to 30 per cent [per year],’ but Korolev survived, and because so many people interceded on his behalf, he was eventually moved to a sharashka, a penal institution not as severe as the gulag, where scientists and engineers were made to work on practical projects for the good of the state.58 Korolev was employed in a sharashka run by Andrei Tupolev, another famous aircraft designer.59 During the early 1940s the Tu-2 light bomber and the Ilyushin-2 attack aircraft were designed in the Tupolev sharashka, and had notable records later in the war. Korolev was released in the summer of 1944, but it was not until 1957 – the year Sputnik was launched – that he obtained complete exoneration for his alleged ‘subversion.’60
Photographs of Korolev show a tough, round-faced bear of a man, and do nothing to dispel the idea that he was a force of nature, with a temper that terrified even senior colleagues. After the war he adroitly picked the brains of Germany’s rocket scientists, whom Russia had captured, and it was the same story after the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and the leaking of atomic secrets to the Russians. It was Korolev who spotted that the delivery of weapons of mass destruction was every bit as important as the weapons themselves. Rockets were needed that could travel thousands of miles with great accuracy. Korolev also realised that this was an area where two birds could be killed with one stone. A rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead all the way from Moscow to Washington would need enough power to send a satellite into orbit.
There were sound scientific reasons for exploring space, but from the information recently published about Korolev, it is clear that a major ingredient in his motivation was to beat the Americans.61 This was very popular with Stalin, who met Korolev several times, especially in 1947. Here was another field, like genetics, where Soviet science could be different from, and better than, its Western counterpart.62 It was a climate where the idea of science as a cool, rational, reflective, disinterested activity went out the window. By the early 1950s Korolev was the single most important driving force behind the Russian rocket/space program, and according to James Harford his moods fluctuated wildly depending on progress. He had a German trophy car commandeered after the war, which he drove at high speeds around Moscow and the surrounding countryside to get the aggression out of his system. He took all failures of the project personally and obsessively combed the open American technical literature for clues as to how the Americans might be progressing/63 In the rush to be first, mistakes were made, and the first five tests of what was called in Russia the R-7 rocket were complete failures. But at last, on 21 August 1957, an R-7 flew the 7,000 kilometres to the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia.64
In July 1955 the Eisenhower administration had announced that the United States intended to launch a satellite called Vanguard as part of the International Geophysical Year, which was due to run from 1957 to 1958. Following this announcement, Korolev recruited several new scientists and began to build his own satellite. Recent accounts make it clear that Korolev was intensely aware of how impor
tant the project was historically – he just had to be first – and once R-7 had proved itself, he turned up the heat. Within a month of the first R-7 reaching Kamchatka, Sputnik lifted off its launchpad in Baikonur. The launch not only made headline news in the world’s media but gave a severe jolt to aeronautical professionals in the West.65 The Americans responded almost immediately, bringing forward by several months the launch of their own satellite, to December 1957. This too was scarcely the mark of cool, rational scientists – and it showed. In the full glare of the television cameras, the American satellite got only a few feet off the ground before it fell back to earth and exploded in flames. ‘OH, WHAT A FLOPNIK!’ crowed Pravda. ‘KAPUTNIK!’ said another newspaper; ‘STAYPUTNIK,’ a third.66
Realising the coup Korolev had produced, Khrushchev called him to the Kremlin and instructed him to provide something even more spectacular to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the revolution.67 Korolev’s response was Sputnik 2, launched a month after Sputnik 1 — with Laika, a mongrel dog, aboard. As a piece of theatre it could not be faulted, but as science it left a lot to be desired. After refusing to separate from its booster, Sputnik 2’s thermal control system failed, the satellite overheated – and Laika was roasted. Animal rights groups protested, but the Russians dismissed the complaints, arguing that Laika had been ‘a martyr to a noble cause.’68 And in any case, Sputnik 2 was soon followed by Sputnik 3.69 This was intended as the most sophisticated and productive of all the satellites, equipped with sensitive measuring devices to assess a whole range of atmospheric and cosmological phenomena. Korolev’s immediate motive was to heap further humiliation on the United States – but he came another cropper. During tests for the satellite, a crucial tape recorder failed to work. To have rectified it thoroughly would have delayed the launch, and the man responsible, Alexei Bogomolov, ‘did not want to be considered a loser in the company of winners.’ He argued that the failure was due to electrical interference in the test room and that such interference wouldn’t exist in space. No one else was taken in – except the one man who counted, Korolev.70 The tape recorder duly failed in flight. Nothing sensational occurred – there was no spectacular explosion – but crucial information was not recorded. As a result, it was the Americans, whose Explorer 3 had finally been launched on 26 March 1958, who observed a belt of massive radiation around the earth that became known as the Van Allen belts, after James Van Allen, who designed the instruments that did record the phenomenon.71 And so, after the initial space flight, with all that implied, the first major scientific discovery was made not by Korolev but by the late-arriving Americans. Korolev’s personality was responsible for both his successes and his failures.72
Nineteenth-fifty-eight was the first full year of the space age, with twenty-two launch attempts, though only five were successful. Korolev went on securing ‘firsts,’ including unmanned landings on the moon and Venus, and in April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth. When Korolev died, in January 1966, he was buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a supreme honour. But his identity was always kept secret while he was alive; it is only recently he has received his full due.
Character was certainly crucial to the fifth great scientific advance that took place in the 1950s. Neither can one rule out the role of luck. For the fact is that Mary and Louis Leakey, archaeologists and palaeontologists, had been excavating in Africa, in Kenya and Tanganyika (later Tanzania) since the 1930s without finding anything especially significant. In particular, they had dug at Olduvai Gorge, a 300-foot-deep, thirty-mile-long chasm cut into the Serengeti Plain, part of the so-called Rift Valley that runs north-south through the eastern half of Africa and is generally held to be the border between two massive tectonic plates.73 For scientists, the Olduvai Gorge had been of interest ever since it had first been discovered in 1911, when a German entomologist named Wilhelm Kattwinkel almost fell into it as he chased butterflies.74 Climbing down into the gorge, which cuts through many layers of sediments, he discovered innumerable fossil bones lying around, and these caused a stir when he got them back to Germany because they included parts of an extinct horse. Later expeditions found sections of a modern human skeleton, and this led some scientists to the conclusion that Olduvai was a perfect place for the study of extinct forms of life, including – perhaps – ancestors of mankind.
It says a lot for the Leakeys’ strength of character that they dug at Olduvai from the early 1930s until 1959 without making the earth-shattering discovery they always hoped for.75 Until that time, as was mentioned in earlier chapters, it was believed early man originated in Asia. Born in Kenya to a missionary family, Louis had found his first fossils at the age of twelve and had never stopped from then on. His quixotic character involved to begin with a somewhat lackadaisical approach to scientific evidence, which ensured that he was never offered a formal academic position.76 In the prewar moral climate Leakey’s career was not helped either by an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, which put paid to his chances of an academic position in straitlaced Cambridge.77 Another factor was his activity as a British spy at the time of Kenya’s independence movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, culminating in his appearance to give evidence in court against Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the independence party, and later the country’s first president.78 (Kenyatta never seems to have borne a grudge.) Finally, there was Leakey’s fondness for a succession of young women. There was nothing one-dimensional about Leakey, and his character was central to his discoveries and to what he made of them.
During the 1930s, until most excavation was halted because of the war, the Leakeys had dug at Olduvai more years than not. Their most notable achievement was to find a massive collection of early manmade tools. Louis and his second wife Mary were the first to realise that dint tools were not going to be found in that part of Africa, as they had been found all over Europe, say, because in East Africa generally, flint is lacking. They did, however, find ‘pebble tools’ – basalt and quartzite especially – in abundance.79 This convinced Leakey that he had found a ‘living floor,’ a sort of prehistoric living room where early man made tools in order to eat the carcasses of the several extinct species that by now had been discovered in or near Olduvai. After the war, neither he nor Mary revisited Olduvai until 1951, in the wake of the Kenyatta trial, but they dug there through most of the 1950s. Throughout the decade they found thousands of hand axes and, associated with them, fossilised bones of many extinct mammals: pigs, buffalos, antelopes, several of them much bigger than today’s varieties, evoking a romantic image of an Africa inhabited by huge, primitive animals. They renamed this living floor ‘the Slaughter House.’80 At that stage, according to Virginia Morrell, the Leakeys’ biographer, they thought that the lowest bed in the gorge dated to about 400,000 years ago and that the highest bed was 15,000 years old. Louis had lost none of his enthusiasm, despite having reached middle age without finding any humans in more than twenty years of searching. In 1953 he got so carried away by his digging that he spent too long in the African sun and suffered such a severe case of sunstroke that his hair ‘turned from brown to white, literally overnight.’81 The Leakeys were kept going by the occasional find of hominid teeth (being so hard, teeth tend to survive better than other parts of the human body), so Louis remained convinced that one day the all-important skull would turn up.
On the morning of 17 July 1959, Louis awoke with a slight fever. Mary insisted he stay in camp. They had recently discovered the skull of an extinct giraffe, so there was plenty to do.82 Mary drove off in the Land Rover, alone except for her two dogs, Sally and Victoria. That morning she searched a site in Bed I, the lowest and oldest, known as FLK (for Frieda Leakey’s Korongo, Frieda Leakey being Louis’s first wife and korongo being Swahili for gully). Around eleven o’clock, with the heat becoming uncomfortable, Mary chanced on a sliver of bone that ‘was not lying loose on the surface but projecting from beneath. It seemed to be part of a skull…. It had a hominid look, but the bones seemed
enormously thick – too thick, surely,’ as she wrote later in her autobiography.83 Dusting off the topsoil, she observed ‘two large teeth set in the curve of a jaw.’ At last, after decades. There could be no doubt: it was a hominid skull.84 She jumped back into the Land Rover with the two dogs and rushed back to camp, shouting ‘I’ve got him! I’ve got him!’ as she arrived. Excitedly, she explained her find to Louis. He, as he put it later, became ‘magically well’ in moments.85
When Louis saw the skull, he could immediately see from the teeth that it wasn’t an early form of Homo but probably australopithecine, that is, more apelike. But as they cleared away the surrounding sod, the skull revealed itself as enormous, with a strong jaw, a flat face, and huge zygomatic arches – or cheekbones – to which great chewing muscles would have been attached. More important, it was the third australopithecine skull the Leakeys had found in association with a hoard of tools. Louis had always explained this by assuming that the australopithecines were the victims of Homo killers, who then feasted on the more primitive form of ancestor. But now Louis began to change his mind – and to ask himself if it wasn’t the australopithecines who had made the tools. Tool making had always been regarded as the hallmark of humanity – and now, perhaps, humanity should stretch back to the australopithecines.