Then Joseph Stalin got his atomic bomb, although Kurchatov
and Khariton and their colleagues were not able to hold to their
two-and-a-half-year timetable. Problems with the plutonium production reactor
delayed the test for eighteen months. Nevertheless, they moved with a speed
unexpected in Washington. At 6:00 A.M. on August 29, 1949, four years and nine
days from the date Stalin had signed the order setting the postwar nuclear arms
race in motion, they exploded a device identical to the Nagasaki bomb at a spot
on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia northwest of the city of
Semipalatinsk. The device was subsequently code-named Joe One by American
intelligence. Beria, who came to observe this Soviet version of Trinity, and
personally report to Stalin on the phone line to Moscow, embraced Kurchatov and
Khariton and kissed them on the forehead as the mushroom cloud rose. There were
indications later that Beria had been worried about his own fate if the
enterprise had been a fiasco.
At the end of October, Stalin signed a secret decree, drawn
up by Beria, passing out the rewards. In deciding who received what, Beria is
reported to have followed the principle that the highest awards went to those
who would have been shot first in case of a fizzle. David Holloway in Stalin
and the Bomb says that the story may have been apocryphal, but that it
accurately reflected the feeling of the scientists involved. Kurchatov and
Khariton received the highest honors possible, Hero of Socialist Labor and
Stalin Prize Laureate of the first degree; large amounts of cash; ZIS-110 cars,
the best the Soviet automotive industry was making at the time; dachas; free
education for their children in any establishment; and free public
transportation for themselves and their families. In an enticement of what the
future could hold, Stalin had already, back in 1946 when tens of thousands of
rural families were living in dugouts under the rubble of their homes, built a
fancy eight-room house for Kurchatov at his laboratory near Moscow, importing
Italian craftsmen to furnish it with parquet floors, marble fireplaces, and
elegant wood paneling. A number of the other leading physicists, engineers, and
managers were similarly rewarded with the honor of Hero of Socialist Labor and
with money, cars, and sundry other privileges in lesser degrees. Khariton was
eventually also to be awarded his own private railway car.
In time, through the remaining years of Stalin and during
the rule of his successors, Arzamas-16, its sister sites in the atomic industry
network, and research centers for other branches of the Soviet
military-industrial complex were to grow into self-contained cities, with their
own schools, concert halls, hospitals, and, by Russian standards, first-class
shops for food and clothing. Although officially secret, they became known as
the “white archipelago,” and their privileged inhabitants, the scientists and
engineers and their families, were referred to as chocolatniki by less
fortunate Russians. Already by 1953, one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Politburo,
Lazar Kaganovich, complained that the atomic cities had become like “health
resorts.”
It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that these
Soviet physicists lent their ingenuity to the building of the bomb because a
life of privilege was held out before them if they succeeded. On the contrary,
their motives were complicated. Imprisonment in a labor camp or execution were
ever-present threats in Stalin’s Russia for failure to succeed or unwillingness
to cooperate. On the other hand, David Holloway discovered in questioning them
that they were also motivated forcefully by love of country, by the defense of
their motherland. Many of them might not have liked Stalin’s system, but they
could not change it. The Soviet Union was their country, the only one they had,
a conviction ingrained all the more keenly by the war of survival, the Great
Patriotic War, as Russians called it, that they had just emerged from with Nazi
Germany. The atomic bomb project was, in an emotional way, a continuation of
that primeval conflict. Andrei Sakharov was to become a world-renowned figure
and to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 because of the persecution and
internal exile he suffered in the cause of promoting civil liberties in the
Soviet Union. In 1948, however, he was an imaginative twenty-seven-year-old
physicist beginning the research that led to Russia’s hydrogen bomb. “I
regarded myself as a soldier in this new scientific war,” he subsequently
remarked of those years. “We … believed that our work was absolutely necessary
as a means of achieving a balance in the world.”
Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall did not hand Stalin’s Russia
the bomb, as most of the American public thought that the Rosenbergs and David
Greenglass and other Soviet spies unknown and unnamed had done. Kurchatov and
those with whom he chose to collaborate were notably competent physicists who,
given time, would have created a bomb on their own without any intelligence
input. In 1951, they detonated a much improved version of the Nagasaki bomb
that weighed only half as much and yielded twice the force, forty kilotons,
with a mixed core of U-235 and plutonium. The real secret of the atomic bomb
was whether such a hellish device could be devised at all. That secret was
exposed in the dawn of the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with Trinity and
then dramatized to the world when its monstrous power was unleashed on the
inhabitants of Hiroshima.
What Fuchs and Hall did accomplish was to save the Soviet
Union time, probably a year to two years, in the race to achieve strategic
parity with the United States after the explosion of Trinity a bit more than
four years prior to Joe One. Ironically, Stalin initially kept the achievement
of his physicists secret for some unknown reason and it was Truman who
announced that the Soviets had the bomb. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, set
up in 1946 to take charge of all things nuclear, had not been unwatchful under
its first chairman, David Lilienthal, despite the illusions at the top. It had
persuaded the Air Force to cooperate in the Long Range Detection Program, which
involved high-altitude flights off the Soviet Union by aircraft equipped with
filters to capture nuclear residue from the air. A B-29 flying at 18,000 feet
over the North Pacific on September 3, 1949, collected a slightly higher count
of radioactive material than would normally be found in the air. Further checks
as the high-level winds continued in their stream over the United States, the
Atlantic, and Europe confirmed that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb in
the last few days of August.
The Soviet Union still lacked adequate means of striking the
United States with atomic bombs. Even the hundreds of copies of the B-29,
called Tu-4s (more than a thousand were to be built), that the Soviet aircraft
industry was turning out on Stalin’s instructions lacked the range to reach
most American cities and as propeller-driven aircraft were also vulnerable to
the new American jet fighters in daylight bombing.
The practicalities of how the Soviet Union might drop an
atomic bomb on the United States did not matter for the moment. The broken
monopoly had been replaced by a balance of terror; the threat of nuclear
devastation thrust into the minds and emotions of the American public and its
leaders. The Berlin Blockade, while a defensive move by Stalin, had been
interpreted yet again in the United States as evidence of aggressive intent. In
Asia, a new Communist danger was rising as the armies of Mao Tse-tung neared
their conquest of all of mainland China. Now the news that Russia had the bomb
created a tangible sense of danger, a keener sense of insecurity in a nation
already suffering from that malady.
The first response was to end the debate that had been going
on over whether to build the hydrogen, i.e., thermonuclear, bomb. Truman
reacted to his own apprehension and the clamor from the recently independent
U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and their allies in Congress by
issuing an order on January 31, 1950, to begin developing this weapon,
thousands of times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb. It was created and
detonated within less than two years, on November 1, 1952.
Niels Bohr and other idealistic physicists who had lobbied
to place international controls on atomic weaponry and thereby avoid a nuclear
arms race after the Second World War were, it has become clear, scholarly Don
Quixotes. All the control plans put forward by the Truman administration, such
as the Baruch Plan promoted by the financier Bernard Baruch on the administration’s
behalf in the United Nations, preserved an American monopoly, and Stalin would
never have settled for second place. To have satisfied Stalin, Truman would
have had to share the atomic bomb with him, a political impossibility.
Similarly quixotic was the attempt earlier in 1949 by Robert
Oppenheimer and other physicists who had been involved in the Manhattan Project
to stop development of the hydrogen bomb on the grounds that it was “in a
totally different category from an atomic bomb” and might become a “weapon of
genocide” with “extreme dangers to mankind.” (They also argued that technical
problems stood in the way and higher-yield atomic weapons would serve any
military needs, but it is clear that moral objections most concerned them.) As
is now known, Kurchatov, undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin and Beria, had
organized serious theoretical and design studies for a hydrogen bomb in 1948.
By the end of that year, long before they had broken the American atomic
monopoly, the Soviets had a basic design for an intermediate hydrogen weapon,
Sakharov’s “Layer Cake,” which combined fission (atomic) and fusion
(thermonuclear) elements. (“Nuclear fission” is the term for the explosive
reaction that occurs in an ordinary atomic bomb, while “nuclear fusion” is the term
used to describe the vastly more powerful release of energy that occurs when a
hydrogen, or thermonuclear, device detonates.) Advanced design and experimental
work got under way at Arzamas-16 in 1950, along with the creation of
manufacturing facilities to produce the thermonuclear fuel, lithium deuteride,
and other materials. The Layer Cake device was detonated at the test site on
the Kazakhstan steppes on August 12, 1953, and yielded 400 kilotons, twenty
times the power of the Nagasaki bomb. A bit over two years later, on November
22, 1955, just three years after the United States had detonated its first
hydrogen bomb, a full-scale Soviet hydrogen weapon was exploded at the same
Kazakhstan site. Kurchatov, Sakharov, and other Soviet physicists felt none of
the moral qualms of their American counterparts. They saw the development of
thermonuclear weapons as a logical second step to keep pace with the United
States. Years later in his memoirs, Sakharov was certain that Stalin would not
have reciprocated any American restraint in creating the hydrogen bomb. He
would have seen it as either a trick not to be fooled by or as stupidity of
which he should take advantage.
