Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [151]
Some analysts have concluded that the information passed to the Soviets, especially by Fuchs, was critical to their ability to produce a plutonium-based bomb by August 1949. There is something oddly comforting in this belief, in the idea that Soviet knowledge came by proliferation: the American scientists are accorded a monopoly on perceptiveness, American officials a monopoly on problem solving, and only through underhanded means did the Russians (and ultimately others) gain the information they needed to make a bomb. Soviet intelligence officials, who have an interest in proving the importance of espionage, and some Soviet scientists, who do not, have claimed that they succeeded in building a bomb because ofsecrets stolen from the Manhattan Project. Kurchatov, who had found the British material of ‘inestimable significance’ in early 1943, two years later rated intelligence from Theodore Hall ‘of great interest’, then Fuchs’s 1945 report as having ‘great value’. (Fuchs provided more details of the plutonium bomb’s design in reports in June and September 1945.) Kurchatov later said that the first Soviet bomb, tested on 29 August 1949, was a replica of the one the Americans had dropped on Nagasaki, the design of which had been secured from Fuchs and others. The KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov argued that the Soviets rejected all American attempts to limit atomic energy starting in late 1945 because they ‘had already stolen the information they needed from the United States to build their own bomb’. ‘The United States would later accuse the USSR of having stolen their atomic secrets,’ wrote Feklisov, the case officer for Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg. ‘This is true. I was in a position to know that Soviet nuclear weapons were very closely based on American prototypes,’ indeed that the first three Soviet test bombs were ‘replicas’ of American weapons.21
But there are several reasons to think that information purloined from the Americans was not, in itself, the critical factor explaining why the Soviets got the bomb when they did. In the first place, intelligence gained by espionage had to be crosschecked for accuracy. Stalin and Lavrenti Beria, the fearsome KGB chief whom Stalin put in charge of the Russian nuclear-bomb program in August 1945 (‘dealing with Beria was no joke’, recalled Yuli Khariton), worried that their intelligence was incomplete, or subject to disinformation by the Americans, whom they suspected were on to them. (There is a Soviet myth that, at one point, Kurchatov brought Stalin a plutonium sphere, coated with nickel, to reassure the dictator that the physicists knew what they were doing. ‘And how do we know that this is plutonium, not a sparkling piece of iron?’ Stalin allegedly asked.) Second, while Fuchs provided sound and specific data on the design of a plutonium bomb, he was not asked to describe the workings ofa plutonium-producing reactor, including how to ‘can’ the uranium (as at Hanford) or how to prepare graphite for use as a moderator. Either the Soviets did not know enough to ask Fuchs about these processes, or their scientists already knew what was needed to make them work. And Americans like Groves underestimated the ability of the Soviet Union’s centralized economy to gear up quickly for the production of nuclear weapons. What had been for the Americans an extraordinary wartime effort to mobilize production facilities, knowledge, and resources was for the Soviets, after August 1945, a matter of Stalin readjusting his economy’s priorities with a virtual stroke of the pen.22
Above all, the claim that the Soviet bomb succeeded primarily because of information passed by spies ignores substantial evidence that the Russians had deep nuclear knowledge and a sophisticated research program of their own, both before and during the war. Despite the decision taken to depri-oritize