Atomic Spies - Importance of Atomic Spies

Importance of Atomic Spies

Before the beginning of World War II, the theoretical possibility for nuclear fission was a highly discussed topic among the top physicists in the world. The elite scientists in the Soviet Union had made theoretical breakthroughs in nuclear physics and many of the scientists won Nobel Prizes for their contributions in this field. Soviet scientists knew that in theory nuclear fission would have military implications and had the theoretical knowledge to embark on this project. This process of applying the theory of fission to bomb-making would require vast amounts of money, a large supply of uranium and plutonium, and the development of new techniques for purification. All of these elements were in short supply in the newly-formed USSR was coupled with the threat of the Nazi invasion. The combination of the Soviet Union's industrial infancy and the impending war with Hitler’s Germany led to a degree of resource scarcity that worked against complex research and development projects.

The United States, in collaboration with the British and (after the war) West Germans, had sufficient resources at their disposal. During the quest to create an atomic bomb it is estimated by Schwartz that four hundred million dollars, eighty-six thousand tons of silver, and twenty-four thousand skilled workers drove the research and development phase of the project. Those skilled workers included the people to maintain and operate the machinery necessary for research. The largest allied facility had five hundred scientists working on the project as well as a team of fifty to derive the equations for the cascade of neutrons required to drive the reaction. The situation was quite different for the USSR as the Soviet program consisted of fifty scientists and a mere two mathematicians trying to work out the equations for the particle cascade. The research and development of techniques to produce pure enriched uranium and plutonium would have been a much greater and more time-consuming task for the insufficiently staffed and funded Soviet program. The knowledge of techniques and strategies that were being employed in the American, German and British programs that the Soviet Union procured through espionage played a significant role in rapid development of the Soviet bomb.

The research and development of methods suitable for doping and separating the highly reactive isotopes needed to create the pay load for a nuclear warhead took years of vast dedicated resources. The allies of the United States and Great Britain dedicated their best scientists to this cause and constructed three plants each with a different isotope extraction method. The allied program decided to use a gas phase extraction to obtain the pure uranium necessary for an atomic detonation. To find this method it took large quantities of uranium ore and other rare metals such as graphite to successfully purify the U-235 isotope.

The Soviet Union did not even have natural uranium ore mines at the start of the nuclear arms race. A lack of materials made it very difficult to undergo a research and development phase attempting all methods for uranium and plutonium purification. This was on top of the fact that the purification was an area of extreme difficulty for the Soviet scientists. The Soviet scientists were experiencing degradation of their supposed pure U-235 isotope due to a lack in their development of the techniques and mathematical understanding of the element. Without the information acquired through espionage, the problems the Soviet atomic team experienced would have taken much longer to rectify and thus the development of weapons-grade elements would have been significantly delayed.

The missing element that explains the great leaps in the Soviets Union’s atomic program is the espionage information and technical data Moscow was able to obtain from the Manhattan Project. Upon the realization of the American plans to develop an atomic bomb during the 1930s, Moscow began actively seeking agents to get information. Moscow was very specific in asking for information from their intelligence cells in America and demanded updates on the progress of the allied project. Moscow was also greatly concerned with the procedures being used for U-235 separation, what method of detonation was being used, and what industrial equipment was being used for these techniques.

To obtain this information from the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union needed spies that, first of all, had security clearance high enough to have access to classified information, and secondly, could understand and interpret what they were stealing. Moscow also needed reliable spies who believed in the communist cause and would provide accurate information. One such Soviet spy was Theodore Hall, who had been a developer on the bombs dropped in Japan. Hall gave up the specifications of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This information allowed the Soviet scientists a firsthand look at the successful set up of an atomic weapon built by the Allied team.

Although Hall’s information was helpful to the cause, the most influential of the atomic spies was Klaus Fuchs. Klaus was a German-born British physicist who was sent to America to work on the atomic project where he became one of the lead scientists. Klaus became a member of the Communist Party while he was still a student in Germany. At the onset of World War II, Klaus fled to Great Britain to escape the fighting, where he became one of the lead nuclear physicists in the British program and was later sent to collaborate on the Manhattan Project. Due to Fuchs’s position in the atomic program, he had access to most, if not all, of the material Moscow desired. Klaus was also able to interpret and understand the information he was stealing, which made him an invaluable resource. Klaus provided the Soviets with detailed information on the gas phase separation process. He also provided specifications for the pay load, calculations and relationships for setting of the fission reaction, and schematics for labs producing weapons grade isotopes. This information helped the smaller undermanned and undersupplied Soviet scientists with a hard push in the direction of the successful detonation of a nuclear weapon.

The Soviet nuclear program would have eventually been able to develop a nuclear weapon without the aid of espionage. But this would have required much more time due to the sheer amount of research and development of the techniques and industrial equipment needed to successfully produce a fission bomb. The information passed helped the Soviet scientists identify which methods worked and prevented wasting valuable resources on techniques proven ineffective in the development of the American bomb. The speed at which the Soviet nuclear program achieved a working bomb with so few resources was driven by the amount of information acquired through espionage.