Fallout Page 2

  Finally, Frisch came up with something: place eight queens on a chessboard so that no one queen can capture another. It’s a tricky puzzle. The most powerful piece on a chessboard, the queen can move horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

  Also, they had no chessboard.

  Teller was quiet for twenty minutes. Then he called out the solution, naming each square on which a queen could safely be placed.

  Then he said, “Do you have another problem for me?”

  * * *

  Another problem. A harder problem. Like food and water, scientists need a steady supply.

  Along with many other Jewish scientists in Europe, Edward Teller fled from Germany as Adolf Hitler began stripping Jews of their rights. Teller found a new home in the United States. During World War II, he was among the elite scientists recruited to a secret lab called Los Alamos, in the mountains of New Mexico. Their job was to beat Hitler in the race to make the world’s first atomic bomb.

  When the work at Los Alamos began in 1943, scientists understood the basic structure of atoms, the tiny particles that make up the matter all around us. They knew that atoms, in turn, are made up of even smaller particles. In the nucleus, the center of the atom, protons and neutrons are packed tightly. Electrons spin in orbits around the nucleus.

  Scientists realized that if they could break apart an atom’s nucleus, it would release energy as it split, a process they named fission. If they could cause enough atoms to split rapidly enough, they’d have a new kind of bomb, one far more powerful than conventional explosives such as TNT. Led by a physicist named Robert Oppenheimer, the team succeeded, testing the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. The bomb exploded with the awesome force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Three weeks later, the United States dropped two of these bombs on Japan.

  Those bombs—just two bombs, each small enough to fit in a plane—destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people.

  World War II was over. But the story does not end there.

  Because when a bunch of geniuses are stuck together on a remote mountaintop for a few years, they’re going to toss around ideas. At Los Alamos, even as they figured out how to make bombs by splitting atoms, scientists began to wonder if they could make bigger bombs by fusing atoms together.

  Another problem. A harder problem.

  Again, the basic science was well understood. In the process of nuclear fusion, the nuclei of small atoms combine to form larger ones. This happens in the center of the sun and other stars.

  Let’s start with this fact: the sun is big. It’s not just the largest object in our solar system—it contains 99.8 percent of all the matter in the solar system. More massive objects have more gravity. The sun’s gravity compresses its core into an area of enormous pressure and temperature. In these extreme conditions, atoms of hydrogen, the lightest element, smash together and combine, forming a new element, helium. The process releases vast amounts of energy—it’s the energy from fusion that gives the sun its light and heat.

  Edward Teller knew all this. So the question was unavoidable: If the goal is to make a powerful bomb, why not try to harness the power of fusion? The main obstacle was that the overwhelming pressure and heat needed to cause atoms to fuse simply did not exist on earth.

  Until, for a fraction of a second, they did exist—inside an exploding atomic bomb.

  When the scientists tested their fission bomb in the New Mexico desert, a key part of the problem was solved. A fission bomb could create the heat and pressure needed to fuse hydrogen atoms. In theory, a fission bomb could ignite a fusion bomb.

  Even before the weapon existed, people started naming it. The hydrogen bomb. The H-bomb. The superbomb. The Super.

  * * *

  The Super made for fascinating theoretical discussions. But when World War II ended, most of the scientists at Los Alamos wanted to go back to what they loved—research and teaching, not making bombs. Many wrestled with regret over having used the laws of physics, which they revered, to devise a weapon of mass destruction. Robert Oppenheimer argued against pursuing the Super. He wasn’t sure hydrogen bombs could be made, but if they could, they’d simply be too destructive, too much of a threat to the entire human species.

  Edward Teller disagreed. There was genuine evil in the world, he argued. Look at Hitler, who had murdered six million European Jews during the war, including hundreds of thousands from Teller’s native country, Hungary. Look at Stalin, who used his secret police to imprison and murder millions in the Soviet Union—and was expanding his power into Eastern Europe.

  Evil like that must be confronted, Teller insisted. Ideally, with superior firepower.

  Teller stayed at Los Alamos and aimed his relentless brain at the challenge of the Super. There was one part of the riddle he couldn’t crack. To create the type of thermonuclear burning that occurs inside stars would require tremendous heat and pressure. A fission bomb could provide this—but too slowly. The massive power of the fission bomb would blow everything apart before the fusion could begin. Teller’s team tried different designs, using some of the world’s first computers to churn through calculations of what would happen in each millionth of a second inside a hydrogen bomb. The results were discouraging, infuriating. Fighting back tears of frustration, Teller hit one dead end after another.

  Many scientists breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

  * * *

  She would never forget the look on her husband’s face that day.

  One afternoon in late January 1951, nearly a year after President Truman announced that the United States was going to develop a hydrogen bomb, Françoise Ulam walked into the living room of the Los Alamos home she shared with her husband, Stanislaw. She found him gazing out the window to the garden, but not at the plants, not at the sky. Stan was a brilliant mathematician. Françoise was used to seeing him lost in thought, his mind wandering through some abstract idea maybe ten people on earth might understand.

  This was different. There was something oddly unsettled about the look on his face.

  “I found a way to make it work,” he said.

  “What work?” she asked.

  He was still staring out the window.

  “The Super,” he said. “It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.”

  * * *

  Ulam told Teller his idea. They batted it back and forth, debating, refining, and quickly working out what would come to be known as the Teller-Ulam configuration.

  The physics gets complicated, and some of it’s still classified, but the key point is that they figured out a way to ignite a fusion bomb using the X-rays produced by a fission blast. Both bombs would be housed inside the casing of a single warhead. The fission bomb would spark thermonuclear burning in the fusion bomb, and you would get the combined power of both explosions.

  The design was still only sketches and numbers and symbols. Lots of difficult engineering work remained, but the fundamental problem had been solved. From this point on, the scientists at Los Alamos knew the Super was going to work.

  Meanwhile, the Cold War was turning violent. Backed by Joseph Stalin and the communist government of China, the forces of communist North Korea poured across the border into South Korea. The United States sent troops to help South Koreans fight back the invasion, and opposing armies battled to a bloody stalemate. Nearly forty thousand Americans died preventing the communists from taking over South Korea. In November 1952, Dwight Eisenhower won the U.S. presidential election, promising to bring the Korean War to an end.

  Just two weeks after the election, news of the Super hit American newspapers.

  Only rumors at first. There had been some sort of colossal explosion on a coral island in the South Pacific. The U.S. government was evasive about exactly what had happened, saying only that “the test program included experiments contributing to thermonuclear weapons research.”

  Vivid details trickled in as letters
from American sailors who’d witnessed the test began arriving back in the States. Even facing away from the blast, on ships thirty miles from the test site, the men had seen a flash of light much brighter than the sun. Then came the heat of the explosion, like an open oven on their backs.

  “You would swear,” wrote one sailor, “that the whole world was on fire.”

  A New York Daily News editorial guessed that this was a hydrogen bomb, perhaps five to ten times as powerful as the fission bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

  The newspaper was right about the bomb, but wrong about its power.

  The world’s first hydrogen bomb was five hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It exploded with a force of 10.4 megatons—the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT. It was more powerful than all the explosives used in World War II put together.

  This was a major turning point in human history. For the first time, human beings held in their hands the power to wipe all life from the face of the earth. Of course, a species that is smart enough to pack the power of the stars inside a bomb is also smart enough to avoid fighting a war with such weapons.

  Right?

  THE LONG GAME

  THE MONSTER WAS IN THE mood for a dance.

  It was many hours into a boozy New Year’s Eve party, just two months after the American hydrogen bomb test. All the top Soviet officials were gathered at Joseph Stalin’s sprawling dacha, a country home, in the woods near Moscow.

  Stalin stumbled to the record player and put on a Russian folk song. The leader wanted people to dance, so they danced. But not Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter. She was leaning against a wall, ready for sleep.

  Stalin shuffled to her. “Well, go,” he said, slurring his words, “dance!”

  “I’ve already danced, Papa,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  Stalin grabbed his daughter by the hair and yanked her onto the dance floor. Then the dictator himself, a man who had spent the past two decades terrorizing his own people, spread out his arms and began lurching to the music.

  A fifty-eight-year-old Soviet official named Nikita Khrushchev watched the whole scene. He saw Svetlana’s face flush, her eyes fill with tears. He felt sorry for her.

  But he’d come too far to turn back now.

  Khrushchev moved his short, round body onto the dance floor. With the grace of a cow on a frozen pond, he swayed back and forth alongside his leader.

  * * *

  This was Nikita Khrushchev’s life. He and the other members of Stalin’s inner circle would be summoned to Stalin’s home. They’d sit through endless dinners, laugh at Stalin’s stupid jokes, listen to his drunken rants until five in the morning. If he said dance, they danced.

  It was the price they paid to be near the center of power.

  After one typically torturous evening in early 1953, Khrushchev spent a quiet Sunday with his family at his own dacha, pleasantly surprised not to have heard from Stalin all day. He was in pajamas, getting ready for bed, when the telephone rang.

  “They think something has happened to him,” Georgy Malenkov, another top Soviet official, told Khrushchev. “We’d better get over there.”

  Khrushchev pulled on a suit and rushed to Stalin’s dacha. The guards standing outside Stalin’s bedroom door explained that the leader had been in his room all day. They’d wondered why he hadn’t come out, but were too terrified of his wrath to open the door and check on him. Finally, they’d convinced a maid to go in. She found Stalin lying on the floor in a pool of cold urine.

  He had suffered a massive stroke. As he lingered near death, unable to speak, the inevitable power struggle began. No one thought Nikita Khrushchev would come out on top.

  Lavrenty Beria, the ruthless head of Stalin’s secret police and the dictator’s most fawning sidekick, fully expected to take the reins. He stood hour after hour at Stalin’s bedside. Anytime Stalin showed the slightest sign of life, Beria would fall to his knees and kiss his dear leader’s hand. Then, when Stalin drifted back into sleep, Beria would drop the limp hand and spit on the floor.

  Khrushchev was in the room when Stalin finally died. He was watching Beria’s face. There was no mistaking the glowing smile of triumph.

  Observers of Soviet politics figured Khrushchev was about the fifth most powerful figure in Stalin’s inner circle. Standing five foot two, with his baggy suits and gap-toothed smile, he was used to being underestimated. Overlooked. That was fine with him. It was just where he wanted to be.

  * * *

  Born in a tiny village in southern Russia in 1894, Nikita Khrushchev grew up with his parents and sister in a wooden hut. From the age of six, in shoes made from tree bark, he gathered wood and water for the family and herded cows and sheep for nearby landowners. At fourteen, his red hair cut short, Nikita began working twelve-hour days as an equipment repairman in a coal mine.

  Even by the standards he’d grown up with, Nikita was shocked by the extreme poverty of the miners, the criminally low pay, the miserably hot mines, the constant threat of deadly fires and cave-ins, the filthy, disease-ridden barracks. All of this was surrounded by a bleak, treeless landscape of mud—while clearly visible in the distance, like a taunt, wealthy mine owners lived in grand houses on leafy lanes.

  There had to be a better system than this, a fairer way to distribute a country’s wealth. Khrushchev became interested in communism, which he believed would improve life for workers and their families. He met Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, a devoted communist who lectured miners on the basics of communist philosophy. They were married, and with Nina’s help and advice, Nikita began working his way up in the Soviet Union’s all-powerful Communist Party.

  Khrushchev quickly realized that the Soviet Union was not the workers’ paradise he’d heard described in lectures. The Soviet government truly controlled everything. There were no elections, no free press, no freedom of speech or religion. When Joseph Stalin seized control in the mid-1920s, he stamped out every hint of opposition, jailing, starving, outright murdering millions of citizens to tighten his grip on power.

  Khrushchev marched with Stalin every step of the way. The workers’ paradise—that would come someday, he convinced himself. In the meantime, he focused on surviving Stalin’s rages, moving up step by step. Even as his own friends were dragged off in the night by the secret police, declared “enemies of the people,” and shipped to slave labor camps, Khrushchev continued to praise his boss.

  “Our hand must not tremble,” he said in defense of Stalin’s brutal crimes. “We must march across the corpses of the enemy toward the good of the people.”

  * * *

  Now, in the months after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev set out to seize the opportunity of a lifetime. He could not stand to see Stalin be replaced by Lavrenty Beria, another mass murderer. And he knew that if Beria took over, no one—including himself—would be safe. One by one, Beria would eliminate all potential rivals. Khrushchev used this fear to his advantage.

  “Listen, Comrade Malenkov, don’t you see where this is leading?” Khrushchev said in a private meeting with his colleague. “We’re heading for disaster. Beria is sharpening his knives.”

  “You want me to oppose him all by myself?” Malenkov asked.

  “There’s you and me,” Khrushchev suggested. “That’s already two of us.”

  Behind the scenes, one conversation at a time, Khrushchev lined up alliances against Beria within the Presidium—the council of top Soviet officials. By June, he was ready. The night before the trap was to be sprung, Beria and Khrushchev drove home from work together. As they shook hands before parting, Khrushchev could barely hold back a laugh of satisfaction.

  You scoundrel, he thought, smiling at his rival. This is our last handshake.

  The next day, Presidium members met in a conference room in the Kremlin, a complex of government buildings in Moscow. Khrushchev proposed that the group discuss the matter of Comrade Beria.

  Beria’s rat instincts tingled. He grabbed Kh
rushchev’s hand.

  “What’s going on, Nikita?”

  “Just pay attention. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Khrushchev and his allies took turns attacking Beria, accusing him of betraying the ideals of communism. Beria squirmed, realizing he’d been outmaneuvered. Right on cue, military officers loyal to Khrushchev charged in, shouting, “Hands up!”

  They dragged Beria downstairs, shoved him into a car, and dumped him in prison.

  * * *

  Khrushchev drove out to his dacha that evening, drained and satisfied. He loved to get away from the noise and smog of the city and was happiest at his country home, a two-story cottage with a greenhouse, acres of rose bushes and fruit trees, and a wooded path down to the Moscow River.

  There was much work ahead. Nikita Khrushchev still believed in the goal that had driven him since youth, the dream of improving life for the Soviet people. He believed the Soviet Union deserved to be respected as a world power equal to the United States. Eventually, he expected to win the Cold War. Those were problems for another day.

  Nina and their teenage son, Sergei, greeted Nikita as he drove up to the dacha.

  “Today Beria has been arrested,” the new Soviet leader told his family. “It seems that he is an enemy of the people.”

  THE WORST SPY

  AND NOW WE’RE NEARLY BACK to where we began, with a paperboy’s tip cracking open in a Brooklyn stairwell.

  While Nikita Khrushchev consolidated power in Moscow, Rudolf Abel continued to prepare for a more active phase of his mission in America. The Soviet spy walked the streets of New York, neighborhood by neighborhood, picking out ideal dead-drop locations. He found a hollow space in the base of a lamppost in Fort Tryon Park. He noticed a bit of loose carpet beneath a seat in the balcony of the Symphony Theater.