The First War of Physics by Jim Baggott

Author:Jim Baggott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2012-02-13T06:50:24+00:00

Special task force

It seems likely that Kurchatov first learned of the implosion principle from Theodore Hall. The young spy had used a simple cipher based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to arrange a rendezvous in Albuquerque with his Harvard friend Sax in December 1944. At that meeting Hall had passed to Sax a couple of pages of handwritten notes describing the first results of the Ra-La experiments and a theoretical summary of the implosion principle. Kurchatov declared the material to be of great interest. In a report dated 16 March 1945, he wrote:

It is difficult to give such a conclusion a final assessment, but the implosion method is undoubtedly of immense interest, is fundamentally correct, and should be subjected to close scrutiny both theoretically and experimentally.2

Sax had not long delivered this information to his Soviet contact when Hall was drafted into the US Army, a victim of the pressure to recruit as many young men as possible for active service. Qualified scientists were exempted from the draft, but Hall had not completed his doctorate, and was not therefore sufficiently qualified. In Santa Fe, Hall protested to the recruiting officer, who discovered that Hall was needed back in Los Alamos. A compromise was reached: Hall was sent to Fort Bliss in Texas for his army induction and then returned to Los Alamos, in uniform, as a private in the army’s Special Engineering Detachment. Hall later put his experience down to the result of horse-trading between Oppenheimer and Groves. ‘Oppenheimer was agitating to get sidewalks’, Hall said. ‘And Groves was agitating to have people drafted. They reached a consensus: I was drafted and the sidewalks appeared.’

Fuchs arrived at his sister’s home in Cambridge in February 1945. She immediately informed him of Gold’s visit the previous November, and gave him the contact telephone number that he had left in her possession. Fuchs thus called Yatskov, who dropped everything to get to Philadelphia and ask Gold to go at once to Massachusetts. Yatskov gave Gold an envelope containing $1,500, payment to Fuchs for services rendered thus far, but insisted that Gold should not push Fuchs to accept the money.

After more than six rather nervous months, Gold met once more with Fuchs in the Heinemans’ spare bedroom. Fuchs briefly summarised the activities at Los Alamos and gave Gold a street map of Santa Fe. He suggested a future rendezvous in Alameda Street, on 2 June. In the meantime, he proposed to write a short report on everything he knew and pass this to Gold in a couple of days’ time at a pre-arranged meeting in Boston. Gold offered him the money, sealed in an envelope, but when he understood what it was he refused to accept it. Gold returned the envelope, unopened, to Yatskov.

Gold and Fuchs met again a few days later. In his report Fuchs had summarised information on the high spontaneous fission rate in reactor-bred plutonium, various aspects of implosion bomb design, including multipoint detonation and explosive lenses, the critical mass of plutonium compared with that of U-235, and current thinking on the design of the initiator.

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