The Trinity Paradox (22 page)

The uranium that had been cooking in the core of the reactor would be chemically treated to extract the small amount of plutonium created by the nuclear reactions. The rest of the uranium could then be reprocessed and returned to the reactor. Many of the other fission by-products were deadly poison and extremely radioactive, which posed a problem for storage.

Esau considered every concern to be secondary to producing the new element plutonium. The tiny grains slowly added up. Soon Esau’s researchers at the Virus House would have enough to perform macroscopic measurements, a major step in the progress toward a German atomic weapon. It was only a matter of time.

“If it is so radioactive in there, how do you get them to work so willingly? This is a precision installation, Herr Major. Sloppiness could ruin everything.” Esau looked at the reactor building, but he too avoided going closer. Let Diebner take the chance from now on, he decided.

Stadt peeled down his black glove and glanced at his wristwatch. “Almost noon. You’ll see in a moment. We are conscious of the radiation risk to our own guards too. All crews get rotated out after three weeks in the vicinity. Only a few of us know the real reason why.”

“What about the commandant? Doesn’t he remain here?” Esau asked.

Stadt frowned. “He has fallen out of favor for some private remarks he made about Himmler and the Fuhrer. He doesn’t even know it himself. We consider him expendable, and if he dies in the line of his duty here, then it avoids a messy court-martial, and saves us time and effort.”

Over by the reactor building many of the skeletal prisoners clung to the fences in their corrals, making unintelligible noises. They didn’t appear human anymore, naked and filthy, with wild eyes. But they seemed excited about something. The tall doors to the reactor building opened.

“Ah, here we are. Look how happy the rest of them get. It keeps a spark of hope burning, lets us squeeze a little more work out of them.”

Five men shuffled out of the reactor building doors. White steam continued to pour from the smokestacks, so the pile was continuing to function. Esau frowned. The men could barely walk, but they wore tattered overcoats and carried a single valise each. He realized they were prisoners too, near starving and very sick, but they appeared determined. They proceeded along the main thoroughfare with a drunken, stumbling gait, intent only on making their way to the barbed-wire entrance.

“Any man who volunteers for a week of work in the reactor building is set free afterward. We give him an overcoat and a valise with a change of clothes and official release papers. We let them walk out of the camp.” Stadt crossed his arms over his chest.

Esau looked around at the carnage and couldn’t believe Stadt would do such a thing. “You actually set them free?”

The men had reached the front gate. Two guards opened the gate and stood out of the way as the skeletal men moved more rapidly. One prisoner tried to run, but he fell, then crawled his way to his feet. Up in the watchtowers the man with the machine gun aimed at one, then another, then another of the freed prisoners, but the gun remained silent.

“Why not?” Stadt answered. “They are dead already. They receive a lethal dose of radiation within a few days. Many sicken inside and need to be replaced. The hardiest ones who do survive a full week in the reactor building barely last another day or so out of here.’’ He put a gloved finger on his lips. “I suppose we could have teams out of sight down the road to shoot them, but why should we trouble ourselves? Wastes bullets and effort, so we settle for shooting only the nonvolunteers.”

Esau shook his head, scowling. “Why would anyone volunteer for a job like that?”

Stadt narrowed his eyes and looked at him. “Look at them all, Professor. What other chance do they have? We have enough volunteers to keep us going for twelve years already.” His voice picked up a thick layer of sarcasm. “But I trust you will have your bomb finished before then?”

Esau began to respond, but the SS major turned to a guard approaching them. The uniformed man hurried and kept shoving his rifle back to its position on his back. Steam came from his mouth in spurts as he panted. “I am looking for Professor Esau!” He glanced from Stadt to Esau. “Are you the professor?”

“I am.”

The guard spoke, but he found himself out of breath and had to begin again. “Reichminister Speer has just arrived in his car. He requests that you meet him outside the camp. His driver is waiting for you.”

Esau frowned in confusion. Major Stadt let out a snort. “Speer refuses to come inside any of the camps. He doesn’t want to see what’s inside, although he knows as well as anybody does. He’s afraid. I bet he’d puke out everything he’d eaten in the past month.”

The guard shifted from one foot to the other, looking at Esau. “I can escort you right now, sir.”

Major Stadt waved at Esau. “Go on. I’ve told you about the reactor operations here. You can see everything’s going well. If you’d like to meet with Dr. Diebner or if you’d like to take a tour inside the reactor building itself, I can arrange that.”

Esau swallowed. “That won’t be necessary.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

Esau hurried off behind the guard, anxious to be leaving the camp. He heard another line of distant shots in the trench. Major Stadt stood staring at the prisoners, then at the reactor building with its gushing smokestacks.

The guard stopped at the gate, and Esau walked under the towers with their machine guns. The practice-shooting man swiveled the barrel toward them, but then seemed to realize Esau was not another one of the Jews released from the reactor building. He tilted the gun up and directed a quick salute at the professor.

Reichminister Speer’s long black car waited in the gravel road that led from the town of Dachau to the camp. Esau could see a dim form in the backseat, silhouetted from the light of the grayish winter sky. A driver sat behind the wheel.

Esau approached the car and opened the back door, then climbed in beside Speer. The Reichminister said “Go” to the driver, who turned the car around, driving up on the packed snow beside the road. As the car picked up speed away from Dachau, Esau noticed the long gash of tire marks on the white ground.

Speer sat in silence. He had kept all the windows rolled tightly shut, making their edges fogged with steam. He had smoked several cigarettes.

“You stink,” Speer said, finally cracking open his window as they moved farther from the camp. A narrow stream of chilly air slid into the car.

“It’s that place,” Esau said. “No wonder you advised against going there if I didn’t have to.”

“I just want you to accomplish your task.” He lowered his voice even further, as if he were terribly weary. “That is the only important thing.”

Esau brightened, talking to distract himself from what he had seen in the camp. “I am happy to report much progress, Herr Reichminister. The large-scale pile is completely constructed and functioning. After the uranium components have been irradiated in the reactor, we can chemically separate out small amounts of element 94. We have samples to send back to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, where our teams can perform experiments to determine its physical properties. Already we have confirmed that it is indeed fissile.”

“What does this mean?”

“It means that we can use it to make our weapon. As soon as we get enough of it. It is only a matter of time now.”

Speer fell silent and stared out the window. The driver took them down a narrow road bordered by snow-clad pine trees on both sides. Small lanes branched out, most showing only a few tracings of tire tracks in the snow. The driver continued aimlessly, letting the staff car take up most of the road. They passed an old tractor abandoned near a clearing. Esau could see no other people around.

“Time is no longer a luxury for us.”

Esau felt some of his enthusiasm wane upon hearing the flat tone in Speer’s voice. “But we are making such good progress—”

“I know you are working very hard, Herr Professor. But let me remind you about the rest of the world. You do remember the war? Two months ago Italy declared war on Germany. The Russians have retaken Kiev and now they are launching a tremendous offensive. The winter looks bad for us again, and our soldiers are not well-supplied. I don’t have months and months to wait.” He turned toward Esau. His pale eyes looked watery and bloodshot. “I need your weapon now! Or, at the very latest, within two months.”

“Two months! That is impossible. Everything is progressing without problems, but we cannot possibly have enough plutonium by then.”

“Have your men work harder. What else do you need?”

“I need time! It is not a question of working harder. We have only so much processed uranium. That uranium needs to be exposed in the reactor for a long period of time before we can extract any plutonium at all, and each time we get only a tiny amount. The plutonium will add up, to be sure, but certainly not enough in two months.”

Reichminister Speer sagged back against the leather-covered seat in the car. The spark of hope had gone out of him. “Then it is lost. We have few supplies. We cannot continue this war much longer. If we strike soon with a superior weapon, while we can still convince ourselves we are winning, then we can press the advantage. If we wait longer, it will be too late.”

He continued to stare out the window at the snow and slush. “The Fuhrer will have my head for this.”

Esau felt his mind spinning. His project had progressed so nicely. He didn’t want this to cast a long shadow over his accomplishments, not now when he had success in his hand. And if the failure ousted Speer, would not the repercussions trickle down to himself as well?

“I knew it was too much to hope for,” Speer continued. “I had no choice but to gamble on fairy tales. Magic bombs and secret weapons. Why do I allow myself to be fooled so easily?”

“Excuse me, Herr Reichminister ...” Speer glared at him. Esau continued. “I may know another way. Not as spectacular as our atomic bomb idea, but it will certainly be deadly, like nothing else the Allies have ever seen.” When he smiled, the scar on his lip tingled. “And we can do it right now.”

Speer sat up straight in his seat. “What? What is it?” The driver continued along the slippery road, but Esau noticed the other man’s head cocked sideways to eavesdrop.

Esau folded his fingers together and stared over the seat ahead of him to watch the road stretch out between the trees. “When we process the uranium from the reactor, we extract the element 94, but we also end up with a great deal of other fission products. They are highly radioactive and deadly poisonous. We have them stored very carefully—they are quite dangerous.”

“And?” Speer said.

“Let us say this radioactive waste were loaded into bombs. Conventional bombs. I believe we have succeeded in developing proximity fuses that are somewhat accurate? Well, if bombs were to be detonated in the air over a large Allied city, the explosions would spread this deadly dust over an extended area, killing many of the enemy.”

Speer looked hard at Esau. “So it is just a poison? Like a poison gas?”

“Much more than that. A poison gas kills people initially, then blows away on the winds. This radioactive dust would settle around the target and it would be spread around by the winds. Our measurements of some of these fission by-products suggest half-lives of dozens of years. That means the target would remain poisonous perhaps into the next century. Lower levels of the radioactivity would drift away and contaminate farmlands, destroy crops. It is a poison that continues to work long after the bomb has been dropped. Far more devastating than a simple gas canister.”

Seconds passed as Speer digested the implications. His eyes widened, then he struck his fist into the flat of his other hand. ‘ ‘This dovetails with another one of our secret weapon projects! It could make both research groups practical immediately!”

Speer slapped the seat behind the driver’s head. “Driver! Take us to the Munich rail station. Professor Esau, I want you to take a trip. You will go immediately up north to a place on the Pomeranian coast. I have another research station at Peenemtinde.”

Esau blinked and thought of the enormous trip. “Pomerania? That will require a full day or two on the train! Shouldn’t I take time to plan? What will happen in my absence?”

“That’s why I want you to leave on the very next train. While you get your ticket, I will write you a letter of introduction.” Speer’s eyes glittered with relief. “You will be interested in their work, I believe.

“I want you to meet General Dornberger. And a man named Wernher von Braun.”

12

Los Alamos December 1943

“We may be engaged in a race toward realization.”

—
Vannevar Bush

“One can no longer cling to the belief that intellectual labor will be only to the benefit of mankind. Must everything that benefits mankind now result also in its destruction?”

—
Professor Walther Gerlach