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Thornton frowned at her slightly; he didn’t seem to approve of the handout, and he didn’t seem to like the edgy comment, either. “It might have helped speed the Manhattan Project, but it also helped speed the Soviets,” he said. “One of the Los Alamos physicists, Klaus Fuchs, gave a copy of the primer, or the key details from it, to a Soviet intelligence agent in June of 1945. It was like handing over a set of blueprints for the bomb. The guy betrayed us for five hundred bucks.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Five hundred dollars? The Soviets got America’s atomic secrets for five hundred dollars?”
He nodded. “I like Oak Ridge,” he said. “Oak Ridge was way bigger than Los Alamos, but a lot tighter-lipped. A lot more compartmentalized, too. Most people didn’t know what they were working on. They tended not to talk about it or speculate about it. And if they did, they got escorted out the gate, because anybody they talked to could have been a snitch.”
“A snitch?” Miranda sounded offended by the word. “What makes you say snitch?”
“Only word for it,” he said. “Security was a huge priority in Oak Ridge. There were hundreds of military intelligence officers in Oak Ridge. Some in uniform, some not. Some had cover jobs — they went around testing batteries and changing lightbulbs, menial work that let them watch and listen to workers all over the place. But the serious snitching was the Acme Credit Corporation.”
Miranda snorted. “Acme? How corny is that? Sounds like something from a Road Runner cartoon.”
Thornton smiled slightly. “It does sound corny these days, doesn’t it? It might not have sounded so corny back then — back before Road Runner. Back in the middle of a struggle for world domination.”
Miranda flushed slightly. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get all cynical and ironic on you. What was the Acme Credit Corporation?”
“A bogus name and a post-office box in Knoxville,” said Thornton. “If the military intelligence people decided you were trustworthy — from your background check or their eavesdropping or whatever — they’d ask you to keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything that seemed suspicious. If you agreed, they’d give you these preaddressed ACME CREDIT CORPORATION envelopes and blank cards, and if you thought something or somebody seemed fishy, all you had to do was jot down their name and what they said or did on the card, then drop it in the mail. If you didn’t see anything, you sent in a blank card. Every tip got investigated.”
Miranda leaned back in her chair and bit her lower lip slightly. In my experience, anytime she did that, an argument was about to ensue. “What kind of fishiness? ‘So-and-so is making bombs in his basement’ fishiness? Or ‘so-and-so likes to wear his wife’s underwear’ fishiness?”
“Probably some of each,” he said. “One episode I heard about involved a fellow who was spouting off at lunch one day about the Soviet system of government being better than the American system. A day or two later, Acme got a note, and the guy was gone — given his walking papers and told not to come back.”
“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” Miranda was shaking her head. “Sounds a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War, the way people ratted out their friends and neighbors to the Stasi.”
“Oh, come on,” said Thornton. “We were in the midst of a horrific war. Global, apocalyptic war. Secret codes, spies, sabotage — those were real things, legitimate concerns. A slight erosion of civil liberties in a top secret military installation seems pretty far down on the list of World War II evils, if you ask me.”
“Children, childen,” I said. “Let’s not bicker.” I heard Miranda draw a deep breath, and saw her relax, which meant Thornton and I could relax, too. “Does the army have a card that could tell us why Leonard Novak was reading books on espionage when he was killed?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ve got people combing the Venona transcripts to see if they can find anything that might connect with Novak.”
Miranda looked puzzled. “Venona was the code name for a massive counterespionage operation,” Thornton explained. “Between 1944 and 1948, the agency that’s now called the NSA — the National Security Agency — intercepted and decoded thousands of telegram cables sent to Moscow from Soviet consulates around the world. Most of them were boring, bureaucratic stuff. But some, especially the ones from New York to Moscow, were spy reports. They used code names for people and places — the messages were in code, so the names were codes within codes — but the code-breakers eventually managed to decipher most of them. Amazing feat, really, because the Soviets were using complicated codes that changed every day. Cryptanalysists have extra gears in their minds — like physicists — that help them grasp things we mere mortals can’t make sense of. Anyhow, one of the interesting intercepts was telegram 940—”
“Telegram 940? I like it,” Miranda interrupted. “It even sounds like something from a spy thriller.” She was leaning forward on the table, rapt with attention now. Thornton smiled, pleased to have won her over, or relieved that she was off her civil-liberties high horse.
“Telegram 940 was sent in December 1944,” he said. “It listed seventeen scientists who were working on what it called ‘the problem.’ The names included Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Nils Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Arthur Compton — some of the top brains of the Manhattan Project.”
I held up a hand, which I practically had to wave directly between Thornton and Miranda to catch his attention. “I know some of those names,” I said, “but not all. Fermi was the guy who cobbled together the little reactor under the stadium in Chicago. But Bethe and Bohr — remind me. Physicists?”
“Right,” he said. “They were in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. Bohr was a Nobel laureate — so were Lawrence and Fermi, of course. Bohr escaped from Denmark under the noses of the Nazis, who were hoping to recruit him. He made it to London, then he and his son were flown to the States in an army transport plane.”
“Edward Teller,” said Miranda. “I’m not a fan of his.”
“No, I wouldn’t expect you to be,” he said. “Teller’s big claim to fame came in the late forties and fifties, of course, when he pushed for the hydrogen bomb — the ‘super,’ he called it — over the objections of Oppenheimer. Back during the Manhattan Project, Teller and von Neumann helped develop the implosion trigger for the plutonium bomb, the one used on Nagasaki.” I saw Miranda’s eyes cloud at the mention of Nagasaki; I’d noticed that anytime a discussion turned from the herculean labors of the Manhattan Project to the explosive fruits of those labors, it troubled her.
I tossed in another question, hoping to lead us away from Nagasaki. “How about Kistiakowsky? I never heard of him.”
“Interesting guy,” said Thornton. “Explosives expert. He cleared the first ski slope in Los Alamos by using rings of explosives to cut down trees.”
“Cool dude,” said Miranda. “See, that’s a use of explosives I can really get behind.” I was just congratulating myself on asking about Kistiakowsky when Thornton dropped the other, unfortunate s
hoe.
“Kistiakowsky was one of the unsung heroes of the project, if you ask me,” he said. “He was the bridge between the pie-in-the-sky theoretical physics and the nuts-and-bolts realities of building the bomb — the ‘Gadget,’ they called it in Los Alamos — and making it actually explode. Kistiakowsky came up with what’s called the implosion lenses for the plutonium.”
“Lenses?” I hadn’t known the atomic bomb involved optics.
“Not really lenses,” he said. “That was the term they used for wedges they formed out of conventional high explosives. The lenses surrounded the spherical core of plutonium. The theory was, when the lenses exploded, they’d create a very focused shock wave, which would compress the plutonium enough to cause critical mass.”
“And kablooey?” The edge on Miranda’s question was so fine as to be nearly invisible. I noticed it, but Thornton didn’t.
“Kablooey,” he said, with unfortunate cheerfulness. “But the wedges, the lenses, had to be machined with incredible precision — like, accurate to zillionths of an inch. Nobody thought Kistiakowsky could do it, including Oppenheimer. In fact,” he went on, warming to the story, “one reason they did the Trinity test with a plutonium bomb was because they were confident the uranium bomb would work but afraid the plutonium bomb would be a dud. Poor Kistiakowsky was already being set up as the scapegoat for failure. He finally got so fed up with the skepticism that he bet Oppenheimer a whole month’s pay — against just ten bucks from Oppenheimer — that it would work. And of course it did.”
“So Kistiakowsky got his ten bucks,” said Miranda, “and Nagasaki got vaporized.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “A real win-win.”
“Could’ve been worse,” said Thornton, finally punching back. “Fermi could’ve won his bet.”
Oh hell, I thought, here we go.
“And what was Fermi betting,” she snapped, “that maybe we’d come to our senses and not use the damn thing on innocent civilians?”
