Stalin and the Bomb
Holloway, David
STALIN AND THE BOMB: THE SOVIET UNION AND ATOMIC ENERGY 1939-1956 David Holloway Yale University Press /464 pages / $30 reviewed by DONALD LYONS A decade after the discovery of radiation, the...
...n immediate supervision of the whole enterprise was the sinister Beria, who "visited the various institutes and plants, issuing threats and exuding an air of menace...
...Holloway faces these facts, but spends very little time on them in his eagerness to label the Soviet nuclear Babel "a curious combination of the best and worst of Soviet society...
...In 1943, at the height of the battle of Stalingrad, Stalin authorized a nuclear project, to be headed by Kurchatov, who knew it would take years...
...On January 25, 1946, Stalin summoned Kurchatov to an audience...
...Impossible to say with certainty...
...n 1933, the Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov had a cyclotron built in Leningrad...
...With Beria and Kurchatov watching from a tower, Fuchs's recipe for plutonium implosion was tested on August 29, 1949...
...I trust no one, not even myself," he muttered, like a mad emperor in Tacitus...
...Holloway unveils with great authority and sobriety a forbidden world and recounts a fascinating tale...
...Flerov judged by the sudden vanishing of articles on nuclear topics from U.S...
...For one thing, there was a dearth of uranium in Russia...
...Holloway insists that thus "the bomb saved a small island of intellectual autonomy...
...In this sense, Stalin and the Bomb succeeds much as The Double Helix did—by rendering arcane science intelligible to the layman...
...It worked, and Beria kissed everybody...
...At the very last minute, Stalin apparently realized that such a spectacle, however pleasing, would cost him his bomb...
...H olloway is unsure and uninteresting on strategic questions about the role of nuclear weapons in such postwar international crises as the Berlin blockade and Korea...
...That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used...
...Maybe...
...The Soviet H-bomb was masterminded by the son of a Moscow physics teacher, Andrei Sakharov...
...When the Revolution came, Vernadskii opposed the Bolsheviks, but was allowed to found the Radium Institute in Petrograd in 1922...
...Kurchatov at once directed his lab to try to reproduce the Berlin experiment...
...The entire project had an air of Alice in Wonderland: not only did Beria carry around a list of physicists to be executed in case the damn thing didn't explode, but the bomb was being built in slavish imitation of the U.S...
...These huge H-tests, with their awesome damage and accidental deaths, frightened the scientists: Sakharov started down the road to dissidence, and old Kurchatov decided to retire, gasping, "Such a terrible, monstrous sight...
...What this meant in practice was slave labor from the Gulag: at least half-a-million uranium miners and construction workers...
...STALIN AND THE BOMB: THE SOVIET UNION AND ATOMIC ENERGY 1939-1956 David Holloway Yale University Press /464 pages / $30 reviewed by DONALD LYONS A decade after the discovery of radiation, the Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadskii was urging in 1910 that Russia assess its supplies of radioactive minerals...
...when glitches arose, Beria smelled sabotage and had to be calmed down...
...Stalin did believe in the inevitability of World War III, but foresaw this as a replay of World War II, with Soviet land forces playing a far more definitive role than these new weapons...
...We can always shoot them later...
...This time the Sovietsdid not copy the U.S., but managed an original design: Sakharov came up with a "layer-cake" type of boosted A-bomb that technically qualified as thermonuclear and was successfully tested in August 1955...
...That intelligence came from Fuchs, who had gone to Los Alamos in 1944, and from Los Alamos machinist David Greenglass, and was passed along to Kurchatov...
...Kurchatov later confided to his notebook how thrilled he was to see "Comrade Stalin's love for Russia and V.I...
...He called the conference off, saying to Beria, "Leave them in peace...
...There is good evidence that by 1953, his last year, he was preparing not just another frightful purge—this time a vast pogrom—but war itself...
...A New York Times article in May 1940, 66 The American Spectator February 1995 mailed to Vernadskii by his son at Yale, alerted Russian physicists to the danger that German scientists might in fact be working on an atomic bomb...
...Stalin okayed the North Korean aggression, but Holloway urges against this as evidence of nuclear recklessness...
...He had just decimated Soviet biology by elevating to dogma the crackpot theories of Lysenko, and he was preparing a public "conference" on physics for March 1949 that would doubtless have been an orgy of confessions and executions...
...bomb at the very time when Stalin was insisting that no Soviet science owed anything to the West...
...Despising Marxism and turning, in fact, to the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin in the 1930s, Vernadskii looked on the tiny Russian scientific community as the bearers of a democratic future...
...about atomic experiments there that Lavrentii Beria, head of the OGPU, urged Stalin to get off the dime...
...He had reason to be thrilled: Stalin had promised him and his top colleagues dachas and cars ("to relax"), and unlimited government backing...
...The German invasion of 1941 scattered physicists and ended physics, save for Kurchatov's brilliant young colleague Georgii Flerov, who actually produced a design for an atomic bomb in December 1941...
...By the beginning of 1945, Soviet intelligence had a clear general picture of the Manhattan project," says Holloway...
...in November a true thermonuclear bomb was dropped from a plane (there are extraordinary pictures of these tests in Holloway...
...Vernadskii was depressed to find that all uranium extraction had been put in the hands of the OGPU secret police...
...Lenin...
...It was only when physicist-spy Klaus Fuchs sent espionage data from the U.K...
...Holloway insists that, throughout this century, the discipline of physics has constituted a challenge to the Party's writ, a "sphere of relative autonomy in a society dominated by a regime Donald Lyons is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications...
...as sole and wicked author of the arms race...
...That December, the tyrant was 70, his cruelty and paranoia exacerbated by dementia...
...with totalitarian pretensions...
...If it overvalues the moral stature and intellectual independence of these scientific apparatchiks, Stalin and the Bomb does drive another stake into the undying revisionist scenario of the U.S...
...A political scientist at Stanford, Holloway writes with clarity and suspense about physics itself...
...But Stalin was deaf at this point...
...71 68 The American Spectator February 1995...
...For security reasons, these laborers, unlike other Gulag inmates, were never released back into society...
...But it is also a study of the interaction between science and totalitarianism, and an investigation of nuclear weapons' influence on international politics...
...It gave him his atomic recipe...
...It is, I guess, always good for liberals to wake up...
...He sees his scientists as being on the way up from the Platonic cave toward the sun, while I see them as still in the cave, nerds with blinders, and find it noteworthy that a measure of democracy finally came to Russia not as a trickle-down from science, but, as usual, from a popular love of liberty...
...journals that research had gone secret...
...The revered Kurchatov was paraded by a boastful (but at least sane) Khrushchev in Britain in 1956 as an ornament of Soviet science...
...But, again, it took Hiroshima to energize Stalin, to get him to build Kurchatov a modern kitchen...
...He knew about them because at this point nuclear physicists were naively publishing their experiments...
...His death paradoxically accelerated the Soviet dash toward a thermonuclear bomb, and brought a soberer attitude toward nuclear war to the Kremlin...
...Hundreds of thousands more were callously exposed to radiation, and there was incalculable environmental devastation—infinitely worse than anything in the West...
...And yet, as late as 1989, Sakharov was justifying the construction of the Soviet H-bomb on grounds of balance of power and "in spite of the fact that we were giving the weapon into the hands of Stalin and Beria...
...Most of it was eventually to come from conquered Germany...
...Was Stalin's refusal to stop the Berlin airlift by the Allies due to the fact that Truman might have moved A-bombs to England...
...by 1934 he was reproducing Enrico Fermi's experiments...
...Vernadskii's optimism is David Holloway's theme...
...I'd say it saved some dachas and labs, at the cost of putting lightning in the hands of a modern Nero...
...Much was made in reviews of this book in the liberal press of its clear proof that Stalin now wanted a bomb of his own at all costs and would not have been salved by Henry Wallace's utopian fantasies of "sharing" or "dismantling...
...But from 1937 to 1939, Stalin's purges destroyed much of the Soviet scientific community—just as fission was being discovered in Berlin in 1938...
...His successors were more informed and more timid...
...By July 1948, a reactor was operational...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
