Authors: David Halberstam
But that summer, American cryptographers cracked the code used by the Soviets in wartime, and among other things they found a complete report on the Manhattan Project written by Klaus Fuchs and transmitted by the Soviet mission in New York to Moscow in 1944. While that did not necessarily mean that Fuchs was an agent, subsequent discoveries showed that there
was
a Communist agent at Los Alamos, he
was
a scientist, and his sister had attended an American university, as Fuchs’s had. That put him under very close scrutiny. On September 22, the FBI opened a special case on Fuchs; the code name was Foocase. The authorities had to move cautiously, for they did not want to tip off the Russians that their code had been broken. So it was important that Fuchs be made to volunteer a confession. For William Skardon, the British counterintelligence agent who worked the case, it was like playing a huge fish on a light tackle.
Strangely enough, the first step in getting Fuchs to come forward came from Fuchs himself. On October 12, he spoke to Henry Arnold, chief of security at Harwell. Fuchs said that his father was moving from West Germany to East Germany to teach, which, he suggested, might place him in a compromising position and make him a security risk. What drove Fuchs to take that first step is unclear—whether disillusionment with postwar Soviet policy in Europe, exhaustion at leading a double life, or perhaps the vain hope of heading off an investigation by volunteering such news. He asked Arnold if he should resign. Arnold told Skardon of the odd conversation.
Harry Truman had no knowledge that British authorities, aided by the FBI, were closing in on Fuchs. Events in America nonetheless were assuming a fearful dynamic of their own. In late October, Oppenheimer wrote of the Super: “What concerns me is really not the technical problem. I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by oxcart. It seems likely
to me even further to worsen the unbalance of our warplans. What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the congressional and military people as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance. It would be folly to oppose the exploitation of this weapon. We have always known it had to be done; and it does have to be done, though it is singular proof against any form of experimental approach. But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of danger.”
As the deadline for a recommendation to the AEC on the Super pressed closer, the scientists in the GAC convened a series of meetings. This formidable group included not merely Oppenheimer, its chair, but also I. I. Rabi; Fermi; Conant, of Harvard; and Lee DuBridge, of Caltech; among others. Conant, hardly a radical figure, was a particularly powerful voice within the GAC against proceeding with the Super. He had earlier written Oppenheimer that work would go ahead on the H bomb “over my dead body.” When GAC member Oliver Buckley, the head of Bell Lab, mentioned at one meeting that he did not see any moral difference between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, Conant strongly disagreed: “There are grades of morality.” The entire discussion, Conant said, “makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for the second time.” As Conant and most of the others saw it, they were already committed to producing a giant fission bomb with a force of 500,000 tons of TNT. How much more power did you need?
Various witnesses were called before the GAC, including the nation’s top generals. General Omar Bradley testified that there was no longer any recourse but to go ahead. At that point Oppenheimer asked Bradley about the increasing power of the fission bombs, for half-megaton bombs were now in design. Given that kind of force, he asked, what was the military advantage of the Super? “Only psychological,” Bradley answered. Clearly, the issue had moved outside considerations of mere science or even logic. Conant wrote the majority decision, with Oppenheimer, DuBridge, and several others concurring; they called it potentially a weapon of genocide. The minority report, written by Fermi and Rabi, said that the U.S. should not be the first to build the bomb, but that we should reserve the right in case the Soviets proceeded. It suggested we seek some kind of agreement with the Soviets and others and mutually renounce the development of the bomb.
Teller, of course, was furious with both GAC reports. What the GAC was saying, he noted, was, “as long as you people work very
hard and diligently to make a better bomb you are doing a fine job, but if you succeed in making progress toward another kind of nuclear explosion, you are doing something immoral. To this the scientists at Los Alamos reacted psychologically. They got mad and their attention was turned towards the thermonuclear bomb, not away from it.”
What the scientists felt no longer mattered. In the opinion of the State Department’s Gordon Arneson, they seemed so spiritually depleted by the consequences of Hiroshima that the politicians were now reluctant to trust their judgment. Acheson later summed up the mood among the creators of the atomic bomb: “Enough evil had been brought into human life, it was argued by men of the highest standing in science, education and government.... If the United States with its vast resources proved that such an explosion was possible, others would be bound to press on to find the way for themselves. If no one knew that a way existed, research would be less stimulated. Those who shared this view were, I believed, not so much moved by the power of its logic (which I had never been able to perceive—neither the maintenance of ignorance, nor the reliance upon perpetual goodwill seemed to me a tenable policy) as an immense distaste for what one of them, the purity of whose motives could not be doubted, described as ‘the whole rotten business.’”
Acheson understood the politics of the situation. He believed that it was important to keep the decision on the Super and the secret debate out of the newspapers, and he believed that if the issue went to the Congress, the President would be caught, in his words, in a buzz saw. Referring to an idea suggested by the GAC minority—that America could set an example by disarming—he asked, “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm by example?”
In November and December of 1949 the pressure on Truman increased. Sensing the power shifting to the conservative side, Lilienthal warned the president to watch out for a blitz on the part of the Congress and others on the Super. “I don’t blitz easily,” Truman answered. Nonetheless there was a need, Truman’s closest aides thought, to make a decision as quickly as possible, before the issue became public. If anything, the need to keep the decision secret signaled that the decision was a fait accompli. Fearing the inevitable, Lilienthal noted in his diary: “We keep saying ‘We have no other course’; what we should say is ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’”
In late November the Joint Chiefs, led by Omar Bradley, an officer Truman greatly admired, weighed in. It would be “intolerable”
for us to let the Russians get the weapon first. Nor would American restraint stop them, the Chiefs said. Meanwhile in London, Skardon was beginning to close in on Klaus Fuchs. On December 21, 1949, the two men met for the first time. Skardon asked Fuchs to review his personal history, and over a long session, Fuchs complied. When he was finished, Skardon told Fuchs he was suspected of having passed secret information to the Russians. “I don’t think so,” Fuchs said. They continued to talk at length and Fuchs maintained his innocence, but his belief in his invulnerability was shaken. Skardon continued to press, lightly at first.
On December 30, Skardon visited Fuchs again and told him that in all likelihood he would lose his position at Harwell because of his father’s move to East Germany. Since Fuchs had no life other than his work, Skardon was making the case that he might as well confess, since his professional life was over, to all intents and purposes. Clearly, he would feel better having unburdened himself, Skardon was suggesting. On January 10, 1950, John Cockcroft, who was the director at Harwell, told Fuchs that it would be better if he resigned. Three days later, on January 13, Fuchs finally admitted that he had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets. At this point Skardon backed off and let Fuchs stew for a time. Nine days later, Fuchs called up Arnold, the Harwell security officer, and said he was willing to talk. They had lunch the next day, and Fuchs spoke of his unhappiness with current Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, which had turned out to be far more brutal than Fuchs had expected. He also said he wanted to see Skardon again. On January 24, Fuchs admitted to Skardon that for eight years he had spied for the Soviet Union. Gradually, in subsequent meetings, it all came out: how many times he had passed information, what the technical nature of it was. On January 27, Fuchs walked with Skardon to the War Office and dictated a long confession. On February 2, he was arrested and charged.
On January 27, 1950, an atomic expert in the British embassy informed Robert Murphy, the undersecretary of state, of Fuchs’s confession. The members of the GAC learned of it on January 30. On January 31, a National Security subcommittee heard rumors of it. Truman apparently heard of it on February 1.
Even before the President learned of Fuchs’s arrest, there were signs that the President had made up his mind to go forward with the Super and that Omar Bradley’s recommendation had removed any lingering doubts. Truman had formed a special three-man committee, of Acheson, Lilienthal, and Louis Johnson, secretary of defense,
to make a final recommendation. January 31 had been set as the date for their report. Truman asked that their recommendations be unanimous, which was, in a way, a signal to Lilienthal to keep his personal doubts within the confines of the group and not to make a dissent. Lilienthal spoke of his fears of an arms race. Acheson countered by pointing out the growing public and political pressures on Truman. Lilienthal again spoke of his own “grave reservations.” Truman cut him short. He did not, the President said, believe that an H bomb would ever be used, but because of the way the Russians were behaving, he had no other course. The meeting lasted only seven minutes. “Can the Russians do it?” Truman asked. All three men nodded yes. “In that case,” Truman said, “we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” It was Truman’s first major decision of the decade.
At almost the same time the news broke about Klaus Fuchs. To those who had opposed the Super, it was devastating. On February 2 Lilienthal noted in his diary, “the roof fell in today.” Years later someone asked Edward Teller who had been powerful enough to overrule men as influential as the GAC majority. Three men, Teller answered, “Senator Brien McMahon, Lewis Strauss, and Klaus Fuchs.” Strauss had understood immediately that the Fuchs case was a lever to be used domestically, and he seized on it to bring the more dovish scientists in on the Super. In particular he tried to bring Hans Bethe back into the fold by showing him some of the memos that the British had sent back about the extent of Fuchs’s spying.
Fuchs pleaded guilty at a trial that lasted only an hour and a half. Whereas American authorities in comparable cases tended to magnify the importance of the proceedings, the British minimized publicity, not only because Fuchs’s earlier security clearance was an embarrassment, as Robert Williams has noted, but because the very fact that the British were building a bomb might have raised questions publicly.
Fuchs, the most important spy of the atomic era, seemed without remorse or contrition, although he was concerned that his arrest (not his betrayal) might damage the future of the Harwell lab. His arrogance was remarkable. He was unwilling to give a complete confession to Skardon because, he claimed, Skardon did not have a high enough security clearance. His naïveté was equally astonishing. At one point after his arrest, he told Rudolph Peierls, a onetime superior, that “it was always my intention, when I had helped the Russians to take over everything, to get up and tell them what is wrong with their own system.”
He was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He seemed surprised
that virtually no one visited him in prison. His name was withdrawn from the Royal Society. He spent nine years sewing mailbags with his fellow prisoners, after which he was released for good behavior. He was smuggled out of England in 1959 and flown to East Berlin. There, he told reporters that he bore no resentment toward England.
In the Soviet Union, as well, the race was on for the thermonuclear bomb. If Fuchs had not been able to supply the Soviets with the exact details for the Super, as he had for the fission bomb, he had nonetheless given them a general road map. The great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had turned down two earlier opportunities to work on the Soviet nuclear project. In 1948 he and his colleague Igor Tamm were summoned to the office of Boris Vannikov, the top apparatchik in the nuclear department. At first Tamm argued against their transferral. Then, as Sakharov recounts in his memoirs, the direct-line telephone from the Kremlin rang. Vannikov picked it up and told the caller that yes, Tamm and Sakharov were in his office at that very moment, arguing against going to the Installation, the secret city in Russia where nuclear research was taking place. There was a pause while Vannikov listened to someone at the other end. “Yes, sir, I’ll tell them,” he answered, and hung up. “I have just been talking with Lavrenti Pavlovich [Beria, the head of the KGB]. He is
asking
you to accept our request.”
Sakharov would later wonder whether it was possible to have greater reservations than he himself had had as he worked on the Soviet project. Among the American scientists, his sympathies, he later noted, were with
both
Teller and Oppenheimer. In the end he, like Oppenheimer, was punished by his own government for political doubts. Yet he could sympathize with Teller on two counts: First, Sakharov felt that when Teller had initially pushed for the Super, his had been a lonely cause, and he was therefore a scientist following his own conscience at the expense of peer approval; second, he believed that Teller’s suspicions of Soviet nuclear intentions were absolutely justified: “The Soviet Government (or more properly those in power: Stalin, Beria and company) already understood the potential of the new weapon and nothing could have dissuaded them from going ahead with its development. Any U.S. move towards abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuver, or as evidence of weakness and stupidity. In any case the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a possible trap and to exploit the adversary’s folly at the earliest opportunity.”