Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [150]
As Kurchatov’s excitement over the British material in March 1943 indicates, the Soviets did learn by espionage important information about nuclear physics and bomb building in the West. The Russians gave the codename ‘Enormoz’ to their ‘nuclear research’ project in the United States, Britain, and Canada. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, a general in the KGB and by his own account a Soviet ‘spymaster’ during the war, the Russians had twenty-nine agents inside the Manhattan Project. That is probably an exaggeration—and, even if there were that many, most were of negligible influence—but Enormoz plainly bore some attractive fruit. Quiet Klaus Fuchs, a communist driven from Germany by the Brownshirts, had found physics work alongside Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham; the two men began in earnest to work on the bomb in the spring of 1941. ‘When I learned the purpose of the work,’ Fuchs would say, ‘I decided to inform Russia’—a matter of ideological necessity and strategic duty, he thought. The Soviets, as noted, learned of the MAUD Report, engineering work at the great American plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee (this courtesy of Fuchs), and evidently something of the composition of Enrico Fermi’s University of Chicago squash court reactor. Fuchs went to Los Alamos, part of the British scientific team there, in August 1944. Already in place was a precocious Harvard physics student named Theodore Hall. An expert on the properties of uranium, Hall had been assigned Room T-236. ‘Oh, that’s just next door to U-235,’ he quipped, but no one found it funny. Ted Hall thought the only way to ensure world peace over time was to make sure that the Russians knew what the Americans knew about atomic bombs. Also at Los Alamos, having arrived nine days before Fuchs, was David Greenglass. Not a physicist but a machinist, Greenglass was, along with his wife, Ruth, a member of the Young Communist League, though not of the Communist Party itself. He thought the Soviets were fighting a magnificent battle against Fascism and that Stalin and other Soviet leaders were ‘geniuses’ who used force against their own people only ‘with pain in their hearts’. Greenglass’s brother-in-law and recruiter was Julius Rosenberg, an inspection engineer for the Army Signal Corps and a Soviet agent since 1942.19
Through couriers and contacts, these men dispatched to Moscow a good deal of information about the atomic bomb. Fuchs and Hall, both well placed at Los Alamos, contributed material on the implosion core of the plutonium bomb. (None of the scientists underwent body searches when they left The Hill for time in town.) Fuchs provided, in early 1945, ‘a quite considerable packet of information’, according to his courier Harry Gold, which included an account ‘summarizing the whole problem of making an atomic bomb as he then saw it’. Hall offered much the same, telling his Soviet contact that ‘all the outstanding physicists of the US, England, Italy and Germany (immigrants), and Denmark are working on this thing’, and that he did not want to see the Soviet Union ‘blackmailed’ by some nuclear fraternity at the war’s end. David Greenglass gave Julius Rosenberg a list of Los Alamos scientists and several rough sketches of lens molds that would be used to make devices critical to the plutonium bomb’s implosion core. Rosenberg himself, excluded from life on The Hill but a true believer,