The First War of Physics (61 page)

This gave Lilienthal some cause for concern. When, as chairman of the AEC, he had taken control of Los Alamos in January 1947 he had found that there were far fewer atomic bombs in the American arsenal than Truman had been led to believe. In fact, the number of actual bombs was zero. While there were many bomb cores, these hadn’t been assembled into bombs that could be deployed at short notice. ‘I was shocked when I found out’, Lilienthal commented. ‘Actually we had one [bomb] that was probably operable when I first went off to Los Alamos; one that had a good chance of being operable.’ Building a stockpile meant assembling all the pieces that existed, and procuring sufficient raw materials for additional bombs. Lilienthal and his commissioners calculated that America needed the entire free world supply of uranium ore. They could not afford to share materials with the British.

But then a solution offered itself. Post-war Britain had almost run out of money. If British citizens thought that the VE Day celebrations signalled the beginning of the end of wartime austerity, they were soon to be disappointed. Rationing actually bit deeper in the months and years after the war as Britain, though victorious, sank slowly to its knees.

Byrnes had resigned from Truman’s cabinet in early 1947. His relationship with Truman had become inevitably strained by what Truman perceived as Byrnes’ tendency to set foreign policy without consultation. Byrnes’ successor as Secretary of State was General George C. Marshall. In a Harvard commencement address on 5 June, Marshall had outlined an aid package designed to restore the shattered post-war economies of Europe:
⁷

It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

It was now suggested that Attlee might be willing to give up his claims to the uranium ore or at least sell Britain’s share to America in exchange for Marshall Plan aid. This, of course, was little short of blackmail, and the strategy was passionately debated in meetings at the Pentagon through September and November 1947. Eventually a cable went to the American ambassador in London spelling out the terms: ‘further aid to Britain … should be conditioned on Britain’s meeting our terms with respect to the allocation of atomic raw materials.’

The British government had little choice but to comply. After some tough negotiations Britain agreed to relinquish both its veto on American use of atomic weapons and its rights to the uranium ore for at least the next two years. Britain further agreed to supply two-thirds of the country’s stockpile of ore to America. Britain had, in effect, delayed its own atomic bomb programme by several years.

The agreement, a modus vivendi, was signed at a rather muted ceremony on 7 January 1948. It contravened the US Atomic Energy Act and Article 102 of the UN Charter. It was consequently kept secret, even from Congress.

Donald Maclean, appointed co-secretary of the Combined Policy Committee in Washington in February 1947, had participated fully in the negotiations.

¹
The Hyde Park aide-memoire had been misfiled. Groves thought that because the paper referred to ‘tube alloys’, the clerk who filed it assumed it had something to do with boiler tubes for ships. See Groves, p. 402.

²
The Combined Development Trust was not a legal entity and was therefore not obliged to make public details of its transactions. It consisted of three American, one Canadian and two British trustees and was set up at the behest of the Americans, possibly to pre-empt any attempt by the Belgian government to play American and British interests off against each other. See Gowing,
Britain and Atomic Energy
, pp. 299–300.

³
It replaced the May–Johnson Bill, which proposed to keep atomic energy matters firmly under military control, and which was slowed by opposition particularly from Met Lab and Oak Ridge scientists. It eventually fell out of favour.

⁴
Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator, built principally to calculate artillery firing tables. It weighed 30 tons and occupied 680 square feet.

⁵
Report LA-551. Access to this report remains restricted to Los Alamos staff.

⁶
The reminiscences of US atomic veterans of the Crossroads tests can be viewed at
www.aracnet.com

⁷
The Marshall Plan involved loans and technical assistance to the European allies totalling some $13 billion over four years (equivalent to roughly $130 billion in 2006).

Chapter 21

ARZAMAS-16

April 1946–June 1948

T
he espionage materials provided by Hall, Greenglass and especially Fuchs undoubtedly delivered an enormous advantage to the Soviet programme. They held solutions to many of the scientific and technical problems that the Manhattan Project physicists had encountered.
¹
But these solutions still had to be checked by Soviet physicists through meticulous experiments and calculations. Knowing that it could be done was one thing. Knowing how it could be done was another. Actually doing it was something else entirely. No Soviet physicist was going to risk testing a weapon without first gaining the practical experience needed to be certain that the test would be a success.

Yuli Khariton had adopted a motto: ‘We have to know ten times more than we are doing.’

An entire atomic industry had to be built. Isotope separation facilities, nuclear reactors, plutonium production facilities and their associated laboratories had to be constructed, as well as a weapons laboratory for
assembling and testing the bomb. There could be no doubt that the Soviet programme would be a major undertaking.

Before anything else could be done the Soviet scientists desperately needed to find sources of uranium. The uranium liberated from occupied Germany was critical in helping to kick-start the Soviet programme, but a lot more would be needed if Russia was to become a sustainable atomic power. Between them, Britain and the United States had cornered about 97 per cent of the world market for uranium and about 65 per cent of the market for thorium, a source of the fissionable isotope U-233. Large-scale exploration in Central Asia was immediately begun and ore production got under way at several mines, including one in Taboshary, near Tashkent, where uranium deposits had been discovered before the war. In the meantime, operations were restarted at mines in the Soviet zone of occupation in eastern Germany.

Work on an experimental nuclear reactor had begun in 1943 but had been constrained by shortages of uranium and purified graphite. By the end of 1945 quantities of purified graphite were becoming available from the Elektrostal plant which lay some 45 miles to the south-east of Moscow. The equipment that had been salvaged from the Auer company’s Oranienburg plant was reassembled at the Elekrostal plant and Nikolaus Riehl now supervised uranium production and processing there. Progress was slow but, aided by information in the Smyth report, by the summer of 1946 Riehl’s group was providing its first few tons of uranium metal.

Work on the construction of isotope separation facilities began early in 1946. A gaseous diffusion plant was to be built in the central Ural mountains, near Neviansk about 30 miles north of Sverdlovsk. An electromagnetic separation plant was to be built close by, in the northern Urals at Severnaia Tura. The facilities were given the codenames Sverdlovsk-44 and Sverdlovsk-45, respectively.
²
Kikoin and Artsimovich were appointed as scientific directors, and work on separation methods was supported by research teams led by German émigrés, including Ardenne.

Certain aspects of the Soviet programme were reorganised on 9 April 1946. It was recognised that work on the high explosives required for implosion could not be safely accommodated at a laboratory situated so near to Moscow. Kurchatov proposed setting up a weapons laboratory in a more remote area – the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos.

Beria agreed. Sector No. 6 of Laboratory No. 2 subsequently became a distinct entity, Design Bureau No. 11 (konstruktorskoe biuro-11, or KB-11), assigned the task of designing and manufacturing prototype atomic weapons. Beria appointed General Pavel Zernov, Deputy People’s Commissar of the Tank Industry, to head it. Yuli Khariton was appointed chief designer and scientific director. Just as Groves and Oppenheimer had searched for a location for Site Y towards the end of 1942, so Zernov and Khariton now sought a location for their new weapons laboratory. Khariton described what they found:

Finally, after a long search, on 2 April 1946 Pavel Mikhailovich Zernov and I arrived in the small town of Sarov, where St Seraphim had once worshipped. Here there was a small factory which, during the war, had produced munitions, including shells for ‘Katiusha’ rocket-launchers. All around were impenetrable woodlands. There was plenty of space and a lack of population, and we were thus able to carry out the necessary explosions.

Sarov is located about 250 miles east of Moscow, on the border between Gorky Oblast and the former Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mordovia. At the time it had a population of a few thousand. In the centre of the town were the remains of an Orthodox monastery which had been closed down in 1927. The first nuclear laboratories were set up in the former monks’ quarters. The facility was known by several codenames – KB-11, Base 112, Site 550,
Privolzhskaya Kontora
(the ‘Volga Office’), Installation No. 558, Kremlev, Moscow, Centre 300, and Arzamas-75. However, its most enduring codename was to be Arzamas-16, after the town of Arzamas some 40 miles to the north of Sarov. It was known colloquially as ‘Los Arzamas’.

The laboratory was given some tight deadlines. The ‘technical assignment’ – a summary of the technical requirements for RDS-1, the Soviet version of the Fat Man plutonium bomb, and RDS-2, a U-235 weapon based on the gun method – was to be ready by 1 July 1946. The acronym RDS was invented by Makhnev. It stood for
Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina
, or ‘Stalin’s Rocket Engine’. The designs for both RDS-1 and RDS-2 were to be complete by 1 July 1947. RDS-1 had to be ready for testing by 1 January 1948, RDS-2 by 1 June 1948.

Khariton and his team developed a scale model of the RDS-1 implosion bomb – a structure of nested metal shells fourteen inches in diameter – and sent it to Beria and Stalin for them to examine. Khariton provided the technical assignment shortly afterwards, on 25 July.

The will of Soviet man

Work on
Fizicheskii-
1 (F-l), the Soviet Union’s first pilot nuclear reactor, was now accelerated. The reactor was constructed at Laboratory No. 2 on the outskirts of Moscow, in a special building which housed a pit about twenty feet in depth. Details of the first Chicago reactor had been published in an appendix to the Smyth report, but the dimensions of F-1 were subsequently identified to be very close to those of the experimental reactor Hanford 305, suggesting that design details might have been obtained by espionage at Hanford or the Met Lab in Chicago, where the design was developed.

Preparations for the construction of F-2, an industrial-scale plutonium production reactor, had already begun at Cheliabinsk-40, about ten miles east of Kyshtym and 50 miles north-west of Cheliabinsk in the Urals. Herbert Hoover had helped to establish copper mining and smelting at Kyshtym before the October Revolution.

Kurchatov supervised the reactor programme through the months August to October. As the Met Lab physicists had done, he constructed small-scale sub-critical assemblies to test the extent of neutron multiplication and make the measurements necessary to predict the amounts of uranium and graphite that would be required to reach criticality. Assembly of
F-1 subsequently began on 15 November, one layer at a time. Kurchatov had estimated that the reactor would reach criticality with 76 layers, and pressed every last ounce of available uranium into service.