Atomic E-Book

Jim Baggott

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 975

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Spanning ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to 'Joe-1', the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949, Atomic is the first fully realised popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, Britain, America and the Soviet Union to build atomic weapons. Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, Jim Baggott's book tells an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding.

Leseprobe

ATOMIC

THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ATOM BOMB, 1939-49

JIM BAGGOTT

This edition published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Originally published in the UK in 2009 by Icon Books Ltd

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-184831-992-9

Text copyright © 2009, 2015 Jim Baggott

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Minion by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Praise for Atomic

‘I [have] read everything on [the atomic bomb] that I could lay my hands on but I never read such a good, comprehensive account as Jim Baggott’s … Highly recommended.’

A.N. Wilson, Reader’s Digest

‘[A]n excellent introduction to a vast and complicated topic.’

Michael Dobbs, The New York Times

‘The best popular science book of the year to date by far, this is an epic journey through the development of atomic power and the atom bomb during the Second World War … Highly recommended.’

Popularscience.co.uk

‘Thorough and accessible … Drawing on declassified material from MI6 and coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers, [Baggott] leads us into the lives of the scientists who turned – or were turned – from seeking answers to the origins of the universe to become the destroyers of worlds. In grimly compelling chapters, Baggott looks at the chain of events that led an international community of “other-worldly eggheads” into what Oppenheimer would later call “sin”.’

Daily Telegraph

‘Baggott’s investigation is an accessible account of the race to build the world’s first atomic weapons. Compelling.’

Good Book Guide

‘This is an excellent example of popular science, explaining a series of difficult concepts clearly and coherently, but without sacrificing accuracy. When combined with the personal stories of the scientists the result is an excellent study of the development of the first atomic bomb.’

History of War

‘High drama … fascinating reading.’

BBC Focus

For Jini, My soulmate

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Foreword by Jeremy Bernstein

Preface

Prologue: Letter from Berlin

PART I: MOBILISATION

Chapter 1     The Uranverein

Chapter 2     Element

Chapter 3     Critical Mass

Chapter 4     A Visit to Copenhagen

Chapter 5     Tube Alloys

PART II: WEAPON

Chapter 6     A Modest Request

Chapter 7     The Italian Navigator

Chapter 8     Los Alamos Ranch School

Chapter 9     ЭНОРМОЗ

Chapter 10   Escape from Copenhagen

PART III: WAR

Chapter 11   Uncle Nick

Chapter 12   Mortal Crimes

Chapter 13   Alsos and AZUSA

Chapter 14   The Final Push

Chapter 15   Trinity

Chapter 16   Hypocentre

Chapter 17   Operation Epsilon

PART IV: PROLIFERATION

Chapter 18   ДОГНАТЬ И ПЕРЕГНАТЬ!

Chapter 19   Iron Curtain

Chapter 20   Crossroads

Chapter 21   Arzamas-16

Chapter 22   Joe-1

Epilogue: Mutual Assured Destruction

Timeline

List of Key Characters

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.      Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn

2.      Otto Frisch

3.      Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg

4.      Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard

5.      The faculty of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory

6.      Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia

7.      James Chadwick

8.      Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant, Karl Compton and Alfred Loomis

9.      J. Robert Oppenheimer

10.    Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi

11.    The world’s first nuclear reactor

12.    Leslie Groves

13.    Leif Tronstad

14.    Damage to the heavy water concentration cells at Vemork

15.    The Norsk Hydro Vemork facility

16.    The Los Alamos laboratory

17.    Klaus Fuchs

18.    Theodore Hall

19.    David Greenglass

20.    Igor Kurchatov

21.    The second Alsos mission ‘council of war’

22.    A spherical reactor captured by the Alsos mission

23.    The last German experimental nuclear reactor, B-VIII

24.    The first ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb

25.    Oppenheimer and Groves inspect the damage following the Trinity test explosion

26.    The mushroom cloud above the ruins of Nagasaki

27.    Alan Nunn May

28.    Andrei Sakharov

About the author

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic scientist, he now works as an independent business consultant but maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy and history, and continues to write on these subjects in his spare time. His previous books have been widely acclaimed and include Farewell to Reality: How Fairy-tale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth (Constable, 2013), Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ (Oxford University Press, 2012), and The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (Oxford University Press, 2011).

FOREWORD

by Jeremy Bernstein

In the 70 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nine countries, excluding the United States, have produced nuclear weapons. In this list I include South Africa, which produced a half-dozen bombs but, with the impending release of Nelson Mandela from prison, turned them over to the International Atomic Energy Agency. I do not include Libya. Colonel Gaddafi in the late 1990s arranged the purchase from the Pakistani nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan of both the prototypes of centrifuges and the detailed plans of a Chinese nuclear device. But in 2003 he abandoned the programme. The same package was incidentally sold to Iran. I do include the Israelis, who probably have something of the order of 100 undeclared devices. The Indians and Pakistanis have about the same. The North Koreans have perhaps six, the Chinese 250, France about 300 and the United Kingdom about 225. The Russians are the champions with about 8,000 and the United States has about 7,300.

The world’s nuclear states may no longer be engaged in an arms race, but we live with the legacy of the proliferation which began 70 years ago. To understand how we got here we need to be familiar with our nuclear history. Jim Baggott’s Atomic tells the dramatic story of the development of the first atomic weapons, their use against Japan in August 1945, and the espionage activities of a few scientists during and after the war which helped the Soviet Union develop its own weapon just four years later. It is an extraordinary story.

As Jim recounts in this book, until early 1945 the scientists working on the Manhattan Project thought that they were in an existential race with Nazi Germany. This was especially true of the many German refugees who knew what a German victory would mean. Hence the almost paranoid level of security that had been imposed on them by General Leslie Groves, who commanded the project, was accepted. First Groves had the idea of putting all the scientists in uniform. Oppenheimer was agreeable but was talked out of it. But other controls were put in place. Visitors were given code names. Niels Bohr was called Nicholas Baker. Of course everyone knew it was Bohr and he often forgot his code name. Plutonium, which is element 94 in the periodic table, was called ‘49’ which also was sometimes forgotten. Incoming and outgoing mail was censored. Groves did not want the scientists communicating with each other except on specific business. Oppenheimer persuaded him that colloquia were essential. Meanwhile unknown to everyone – even each other – three Soviet spies were hard at work.

David Greenglass was a machinist. He worked on shaping the high explosives that were used to compress the plutonium sphere. This increased the density and lowered the critical mass. He gave the Soviets fairly crude drawings of these explosives. Theodore Hall was nineteen when he came to Los Alamos from Harvard. He turned over more substantial information but, most importantly, he provided independent confirmation of some of the material which was supplied by the most important spy, Klaus Fuchs.

Fuchs was born in 1911 in Germany. His father was a Lutheran pastor and a professor at the University of Leipzig, which Fuchs attended. As the Nazis attained power Fuchs turned more and more radical, finally joining the Communist Party in 1932. He was forced to leave Germany for England. After taking his PhD at the University of Bristol he went to Edinburgh, where he became an assistant to the great German physicist Max Born.

In 1941 he returned to England and joined Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham and began working on nuclear weapons. He boarded with Peierls and his wife Genia, who complained that he never said anything. He was like a juke box that only played a tune when you fed it a coin. He and Peierls wrote a fundamental paper on isotope separation and he began transmitting information to the Soviets. In 1943 Peierls left for the United States and with great reluctance Fuchs went along. He joined the Los Alamos laboratory in August 1944 and became a very valuable member of the Theory Division. He also continued transmitting information to the Soviet Union.

Fuchs had a courier named Harry Gold whom he used to meet in Albuquerque. How exactly he brought his reports out of Los Alamos is a puzzle since the place was so secure. He had a photographic memory so perhaps he wrote them after leaving the lab. I will describe three reports which the Russians have since released so that one can read them on the web. These allow us to judge the importance of Fuchs’ espionage to the later Soviet effort. The first report was written prior to the 16 July 1945 test at Alamogordo and gives details of the plutonium device that was tested. I will focus on one revelation.

Plutonium is a very complex element. It comes in several ‘allotropic’ forms – different physical phases of the same element. Diamond and graphite are two allotropes of carbon. Plutonium has several. The one that is stable at room temperature is more of a chalk than a metal. The one that is metallic is not stable at room temperature. The brilliant British-born metallurgist Cyril Smith discovered that if plutonium is alloyed with gallium, the metallic phase can be stabilised. This Fuchs reported to the Soviets. One can only imagine how much time this must have saved them. The other two conveyances to the Russians had to do with the hydrogen bomb.

The hydrogen bomb produces its energy by the fusion of light elements while the ‘atomic’ bomb produces its energy by the fission of heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium. All during the war Edward Teller devoted himself to trying to design a hydrogen bomb which came to be known as the ‘classical Super’. Crudely, you take an atomic bomb and put it in a container which holds isotopes of hydrogen and then set it off. A temperature of millions of degrees is produced. This ignites the fusion process but then it does not propagate. It cools off. It is like trying to set a log on fire with a match. In early September 1945 Enrico Fermi gave lectures which summarised the situation. Fuchs transmitted these to Gold on 19 September. The important thing that the Soviets learned was that using the fusion of heavy hydrogen and super heavy hydrogen was energetically advantageous.

The second thing that Fuchs transmitted was in 1947, after returning to England. This was a different method of igniting hydrogen which he had invented with the mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann was a fanatical anti-communist who had proposed bombing the Soviets with nuclear weapons. Fuchs was arrested in 1950 and von Neumann lived until 1957 so he must have known that he had collaborated with a Soviet spy.

One can trace at least some of the proliferation of the last 70 years to Fuchs. We cannot turn the clock back but it is good to remind ourselves what is at stake when other countries try to enter the nuclear ‘club’.

PREFACE

From the very moment of their conception, atomic weapons have been synonymous with fear. Fear that Hitler’s Nazi Germany might be first to build an atomic bomb drove Anglo-American efforts during the Second World War. Fear that America might threaten a first nuclear strike drove the Soviet Union’s own bomb programme. This programme had commenced rather tentatively in 1943 and was aided through the last years of the war and the early Cold War by an extensive network of spies that had penetrated the British and American projects at many levels, as Jeremy Bernstein explains in his Foreword.

I was born in 1957, and grew up in the shadow of the fear inspired by Cold War rhetoric and the concept of mutual assured destruction. I was just five years old when, during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the US Strategic Air Command carried aloft thermonuclear weapons with a total explosive potential of more than half a million Hiroshimas. As Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay urged President John F. Kennedy to hit the Soviet Union with everything in the US nuclear arsenal, the world held its breath.

Just how did this happen? How did the world’s greatest physicists, many of them Nobel laureates, come to build this awful instrument of fear? These were physicists who, only a few years before, had been leading a series of revolutions in theoretical science and shaking the very foundations of our understanding of physical reality. How did these men become such profoundly important military resources in a war that was to redefine the very meaning of barbarity, a war that was to recalibrate what it means to be inhuman? How did these other-worldly ‘eggheads’ find themselves centre-stage in such a drama of heroic endeavour, sabotage, espionage, counter-espionage, assassination and terrible destruction that it now seems barely credible as fiction? How did they come, in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, to know sin?

These were men such as Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, Klaus Fuchs, Werner Heisenberg, Yuli Khariton, Igor Kurchatov, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and many, many more. Diverted from their academic preoccupations by the biggest military conflict in human history, they became deeply embroiled in the biggest of human dramas. They found themselves drawn inexorably into a project to build the world’s most dreadful weapon of war, a weapon judged to be ‘practically irresistible’ at a time when the world was threatened by the darkest evil.

Confronted with bare historical facts, our questions tumble out. The devastation that could be wrought with atomic weapons was obvious to the physicists right from the start, so why did they persist in developing these weapons, without hesitation? Why, despite having a clear lead in nuclear physics at the beginning of the Second World War, did German physicists fail to develop an atomic bomb? Did the Allies really plot to have Heisenberg kidnapped or assassinated? Why, when it became clear that there was no threat of a Nazi weapon, did the Allies use the atomic bomb, without warning, against Japan? To what extent did the Soviet atomic programme rely on intelligence gathered by spies such as Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs? Could the Soviets have developed the bomb without them? What was the full extent of Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project?

Were the physicists merely instruments in a political game-plan to establish supremacy in a post-war world? Or did they knowingly inspire the arms race? What, if any, lessons can be drawn from this history to inform our perspective on nuclear energy and the proliferation of weapons technology today?

This book is my attempt to answer these and many other questions through a popular, accessible account of the race to build the first atomic bombs, centred on the individual stories of the physicists directly involved. The book spans ten historic years, beginning with the discovery of nuclear fission in early 1939 and closing shortly after ‘Joe-1’, the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949.

Now, parts of this story have already been told, and told very well. But there are important strands of the story that have emerged only within the last decade or so, relating specifically to aspects of the German and Soviet atomic programmes and penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet spies. These new materials allow a single-volume popular history of the Anglo-American, German and Soviet programmes to be assembled for the first time.

The book is organised in four parts. Part I covers the mobilisation of nuclear physicists around the world following the outbreak of war in September 1939 and early work on atom bomb and reactor physics. Part II recounts the early frustrations and progress in weapon design, the development of bomb and reactor materials in Germany, Britain and America, the spectacular sabotage of the heavy water plant at Vemork by Norwegian commandos and the establishment of the Soviet espionage operation codenamed ENORMOZ.

In Part III the book addresses the direct involvement of Allied scientists in the hunt for their German counterparts in war-torn Europe following the D-Day landings, the successful Trinity test at Alamogordo in New Mexico, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the reactions of the captured German scientists on hearing of the Allied success.

Finally, Part IV describes the origins of the Cold War, the acceleration of the Soviet atomic programme, proliferation of weapons technology, the Venona project, the unmasking of Soviet spies and the first successful Soviet test in August 1949. The book concludes with an extended epilogue which attempts to tie up many of the loose ends, describing the American and Soviet H-bomb programmes and the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the very edge of disaster.

This book was first published in March 2009, and is now being re-issued in time for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this time, further revelations have emerged concerning the activities of Soviet atomic spies. In a three-year period starting in 1993, Alexander Vasiliev was involved in an abortive attempt to document Soviet espionage in America and was given access to KGB (by then SVR) files, from which he made extensive notes. With the political tide in Moscow turning once again, in 1996 Vasiliev immigrated to Britain. He reacquired his notebooks in 2001, and these are now available to study online. They provided source materials for the book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Jaynes, Harvey Klehr and Vasiliev, which was published in 2009, just a few months after this book.

From Vasiliev’s notebooks we learn the identities of spies previously known only by their codenames. I was astonished to learn that the spy codenamed QUANTUM (see the Epilogue) was Boris Podolsky, co-author with Einstein of one of the most famous papers in the history of quantum theory. The spy codenamed VOGEL/PERS (once speculated to be German émigré physicist Rudolf Peierls) was, in fact, Russell McNutt, a civil engineer working at Oak Ridge and part of Julius Rosenberg’s spy network.

Austrian physicist Englebert Broda had been imprisoned for his Communist activities in Germany and Austria before escaping to Britain in 1938. He worked on nuclear reactors with Hans Halban in Cambridge in 1942, and transmitted secrets to the Soviets. It seems he also recruited Alan Nunn May to the cause. When May was released from prison in 1953 he married Broda’s ex-wife, Hilde. In Scientist Spies, published in 2011, Paul Broda writes of the activities of his father and stepfather, both atomic spies.

At the time of its first publication, this book represented the end of a long journey. I can trace its beginning all the way back to my first classes in quantum mechanics, as an undergraduate student in Manchester, England, during the cold, damp winter of 1975–76. I probably didn’t fully realise it back then, but I was completely captivated. To anyone tutored in the language and the logic of classical physics, quantum mechanics is at once mathematically challenging, maddeningly bizarre and breathtakingly beautiful. I have spent a lifetime trying to understand it.

The physicists who forged this outrageous new theory left their fingerprints all over it, in the form of new laws, physical constants, principles and approximations. It is impossible to study quantum mechanics without tripping over their names. To study quantum mechanics, therefore, is to study the physicists who made it. Many of these same physicists also played crucial roles in the development of the world’s first atomic bombs, and this juxtaposition has always fascinated me. To understand them is to understand the various roles they played in this development: the things that drove them, and the things that scared them.

I have drawn extensively on the published works of noted scholars and sources of historical documents that can be found online. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, authors of American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer; Margaret Gowing, author of Britain and Atomic Energy and Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, David Holloway, author of Stalin and the Bomb; Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun; and Mark Walker, author of German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949 and Nazi Science: Myth, Truth and the German Atomic Bomb. I have happily climbed on the shoulders of their scholarship.

I owe a debt of thanks to Jeremy Bernstein, John Fricker, Martin Sherwin, Peter Tallack, Jon Turney and Mark Walker, who read and provided many comments on the first draft manuscript. I am, of course, more than happy to accept full responsibility for all the errors that remain. My thanks must also go to Simon Flynn and Duncan Heath, my editors at Icon, for being indulgent when the project ran on longer than anticipated, and for being ready to accept an ‘epilogue’ that surely does violence to the meaning of this term.