The First War of Physics (55 page)

On Kapitza’s request, Beria was shown the letter. Beria tried to build bridges, but their differences were irreconcilable. Kapitza left the programme on 21 December 1945.

Fishing trip

Kapitza had also been concerned about the effect of the atomic bomb on science and scientists. On 22 October he had written to Bohr, who had now returned to Copenhagen: ‘[T]he danger exists that scientific discoveries, held in secret, may serve not humanity as a whole, but could be used in the egoistical interests of individual political and national groups.’

He wondered what position scientists should take, and expressed the desire to talk directly with Bohr on the matter. In fact, Bohr had just a few days earlier written to Kapitza expressing very similar sentiments. Their letters had crossed. Bohr remained firm in his conviction that atomic power could not be controlled by political process and had argued in the press for an open exchange of scientific information in an attempt to avoid nuclear proliferation.

So, when Bohr was approached by a former minister in the Danish government, now professor at Copenhagen University, with a request that he meet a Soviet physicist bearing a letter from Kapitza, Bohr agreed. The request had been for a secret meeting, but Bohr said that any meeting with a representative of the Soviet Union should be open, and he asked his son Aage to attend. Bohr also alerted Danish, British and American intelligence. He was calling for an open world, but he was under no illusions.

The visit could, perhaps, be best described as a ‘fishing trip’. Mindful of Bohr’s open and very visible encouragement of international scientific exchange, Beria had agreed to send a Soviet physicist to visit him in Copenhagen bearing a long list of questions. As Beria explained it to Stalin:

Niels BOHR is famous as a progressive-minded scientist and as a staunch supporter of the international exchange of scientific achievements. This gave us grounds to send to Denmark a group of employees,
under the pretence of searching for equipment which the Germans had taken from Soviet scientific establishments, who were to establish contact with Niels BOHR and obtain from him information about the problem of the atomic bomb.

Beria selected Yakov Terletsky for the mission. Terletsky was working as the scientific adviser to Sudoplatov’s Department S. He would be joined by Sudoplatov’s deputy, Colonel Lev Vasilevsky, and, as Terletsky’s English was poor and Vasilevsky spoke only French, an interpreter. Kapitza was obliged to write a letter of introduction for Terletsky, whom he introduced as a ‘capable professor of Moscow University’ who would ‘explain to you the goals of his foreign tour’. Kurchatov and his team compiled a series of questions.

In the event, two meetings took place at Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, on 14 and 16 November 1945. Bohr was at pains to explain that he had not taken part in the construction of the bomb and had not visited a single nuclear installation during his time in America. He provided answers to 22 questions which were carefully recorded and carried back to Kurchatov for evaluation. Nowhere did he provide information that was not already publicly available in the Smyth report.

When Terletsky asked: ‘Do you know of any methods of protection from atomic bombs? Does a real possibility of defence from atomic bombs exist?’ Bohr replied:

I am sure there is no real method of protection from [the] atomic bomb. Tell me, how can you stop the fission process which has already begun in the bomb which has been dropped from a plane? … All mankind must understand that with the discovery of atomic energy the fates of all nations have become very closely intertwined. Only international co-operation, the exchange of scientific discoveries, and the internationalisation of scientific achievements, can lead to the elimination of wars, which means the elimination of the very necessity to use the atomic bomb.

Kurchatov’s evaluation of Bohr’s responses was brusque. Bohr had answered the questions but there was no really new information to be gleaned. Copies of a Russian translation of the Smyth report were already being printed. Thirty thousand copies of the report would be available by the end of January 1946. Kurchatov identified a remark that Bohr had made regarding separation of uranium isotopes and suggested that this be subject to some further study.

On a Russian scale

At 7:30pm on 25 January 1946, Stalin summoned Kurchatov to a meeting. Also present were Beria and Molotov. Kapitza was no longer a member of the Special Committee or its Technical Council, and Stalin wanted once more to impress upon Kurchatov the urgency of his mission and the extent of the support that the Soviet state was prepared to provide. Kurchatov recorded his impressions of their conversation in his diary:

Viewing the future development of the work Comrade Stalin said that it is not worth spending time and effort on small-scale work, rather, it is necessary to conduct the work broadly, on a Russian scale, and that in this regard the broadest, utmost assistance will be provided.

Stalin stressed that it was unnecessary for Kurchatov to seek out the cheapest paths, and offered to improve the material well-being of the scientists involved with dachas and the promise of prizes for great deeds. They briefly discussed Kapitza, and the utility of Kapitza’s work. Kurchatov noted that misgivings were expressed.

One of Stalin’s favourite slogans was
, ‘dognat i peregnat’, meaning ‘to catch up and to surpass’. This was a slogan that had been popular since the late 1920s, when Stalin had used it to argue that to ensure survival of the dictatorship of the proletariat it was necessary to catch up with advanced countries and overtake them economically. The slogan now found a new resonance.

At an election speech delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow a few days later on 9 February 1946, Stalin proclaimed, to prolonged applause:

I have no doubt that if we give our scientists proper assistance they will be able in the very near future not only to overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country.

Stalin made no direct reference in his speech to atomic weapons. But thanks to the espionage activities of Hall, Greenglass and particularly Fuchs, the Soviet Union now had an opportunity to catch up with American nuclear technology and then surpass this with the support of Soviet science.

¹
While deputy director of the NKVD’s Foreign Department, Sudoplatov had been responsible for overseeing the assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1941.

²
Yatskov later recalled that he had received a ‘thick pile’ of documents from Cohen, yet Hall recalled handing over only a few pages. It seems unlikely that Cohen could have hidden a thick pile of papers in a Kleenex box without this being noticed.

³
The Smyth report can be viewed at
www.atomicarchive.com.
Szilard thought the publication of this report was a big mistake. He believed it gave away the general ideas on which the bomb was based and would make post-war international control all the more difficult. He refused to approve the report’s release.

⁴
Stimson was 78 on 21 September 1945 and suffered a heart attack the following month. He died in October 1950.

⁵
Presumably this was one of the matches played by Moscow Dynamo during their goodwill tour of Britain in November 1945. Moscow Dynamo played a total of four games, drawing with Chelsea 3–3, beating Cardiff City 10–1, beating Arsenal 4–3 and drawing with Glasgow Rangers 2–2.

Chapter 19

IRON CURTAIN

September 1945–March 1946

I
n late August or early September 1945, Hall told Lona Cohen that he did not share her enthusiasm for life in the Soviet Union. He told her that he thought this was a grim prospect. Although he did not know it, this was an opinion he shared with Igor Gouzenko.

The GRU cipher clerk had arrived in Ottawa for a three-year assignment in June 1943, together with his boss Nikolai Zabotin. On the flight from Moscow, Zabotin told him of his exploits as an artillery officer in the Red Army, mentioning the names of his commanders who, he would then go on to explain, were later shot during the purge. After many such comments, Zabotin exclaimed: ‘When I come to think of it, why wasn’t I shot, too?’ They laughed, and toasted his survival with vodka.

Gouzenko’s pregnant wife Svetlana (whom he always called Anna) arrived in October and they had settled into an apartment at 511 Somerset Street. Their son, Andrei, was born shortly afterwards and the family had quickly adjusted to their new life in Canada. This, they discovered, was much more pleasant than their previous austere existence in wartorn totalitarian Russia. ‘Candidly, everything about this democratic living seemed good’, he later wrote. ‘I had been in Canada long enough to
appreciate that the free elections were really free, that the press was really free, that the worker was not only free to speak but to strike.’

Their sense of political freedom was coupled with a sense of material well-being. ‘The unbelievable supplies of food,’ he observed, ‘the restaurants, the movies, the wide open stores, the absolute freedom of the people, combined to create the impression of a dream from which I must surely awaken.’

The awakening was to be rude. In September 1944 he was summoned to Zabotin’s office and told that he was being recalled to Moscow. This not only threatened to change the Gouzenkos’ lives for the worse, but might also mask a darker threat. No reason was given for the recall, less than halfway through his assignment, but if Gouzenko had fallen foul of his superiors in Moscow then his very life might well be at stake.
¹

Zabotin chose to defend him. He sent a message back to Moscow advising that Gouzenko’s talents as a cipher clerk were irreplaceable. Moscow agreed to delay the recall. Gouzenko hastened to tell Anna the good news, but she saw that this was only a temporary reprieve. Deep within Gouzenko’s mind, a dam burst. ‘We won’t go back, Anna’, he said. ‘Andrei deserves his opportunities in this country. You are entitled to live like these Canadian wives. We will pack up and disappear somewhere in Canada or even in the United States. We will change our names. I will take other work. I will …’

Anna burst into tears. ‘I am so glad, so glad, Igor’, she sobbed.

‘There was no use pointing out the dangers,’ Gouzenko later wrote, ‘she knew them full well. There was no necessity of stressing absolute secrecy. She knew certain death lay ahead if the least hint of my intended desertion got about.’

When he heard in the spring of 1945 that his replacement would be available within the next few months, he started to put his plan into action. He did not intend to defect empty-handed. He began taking home copies of confidential documents.
²

At around 8:00pm on 5 September 1945 he left his office at the Soviet embassy on Charlotte Street for the last time. His replacement was due to arrive the next day, and his recall to Moscow was imminent. He was petrified with fear. He made his way first to the offices of the
Ottawa Journal
, the local newspaper, but lost his nerve and hastily retreated. Back home, Anna urged him to return.