it leads on capitol hill and have your say as events unfold on tv, radio and the web. next on american history tv, it was a great surprise to the u.s. government when the soviet union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. an historian with the international spy museum, vince hougtton talks about how it may have led to the atomic bomb.on, talks about how it may have led to the atomic bomb.hton, talks about how it may have led to the atomic bomb. >> we are delighted today to have our own historian. don't know if all of you have met him, dr. vince houghton he is the historian and curator of the museum. he holds a ph.d from the university of maryland where his

research centered on u.s. scientific and technological intelligence, specifically nuclear, in the second world war and the cold war which makes him ideally suited to deliver today's talk. he also got his masters degree focusing on the relationship between the u.s. and russia. so you may get some questions focusing on the current difficulties with russia. he's taught extensively, including at the universityon the diplomatic history, cold war and history of sciences. he is a u.s. army veteran, served in the balkans where he assisted in both civilian and military intelligence activities. so we're just delighted to have you as our speaker, as our first speaker. so please help me welcome vince houghton.

>> thank you peter. thank all of you for coming here today. getting a chance to talk about the atomic spies, about nuclear intelligence, this is my field this is also my passion. i try to do everything i can to talk about this to anyone hop wants to listen. so it's nice to actually have people who are interested in this. it does look a little strange walking around d.c. talking to myself about nuclear weapons on a daily basis, so it is always nice to have people who are here and interested. this is my first chance to speak to the smithsonian group. i came to the spy museum in march so i only know you by reputation. but the reputation is that you are, by far, the most educated and most intelligent audiences that we can possibly have here at the spy museum. i'm sorry i don't want to come across like i'm pandering. you're far too intelligent, good looking and well dressed to fall

for any pandering. have you lost weight? in all seriousness this is my field. nuclear intelligence was something that i fell in love with at a very early age. at 7 years old i saw a tv movie called "the day after" in the 1980s. i remember that. i really fell in love -- that's probably a weird word when talking about nuclear annihilation of the united states, but i fell in love with the intricacies of this weapons system that is the worst the world has ever seen but at the same time might be primarily responsible for us not having a major war in 70 years. just that dichotomy was something that really drew me to this field. today we're going to be focusing on the atomic spies who spied on the united states. we'll start with a little background. in august of 1949, the united states was shocked to learn that the soviet union had detonated their first atomic bomb. they called it rds-1 nimcknamed it first lightning.

here in the united states we called it joe-1, little homage to joe stalin. the soviet's bomb was detonated in kazakhstan. they did it there so no one would know about it. they actually warranted to keep this bomb secret. you would assume a big public relations coup. their worry was when the united states found out the soviets had a bomb we'd double or re-double our efforts to create the next generation of weapons system and create more bombs. well, they were right. what the united states didn't know is the united states created a scientific intelligence platform to discover when the soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. we called this measurement and signature intelligence. it was a modified b-29 the same type of bomber used to drop bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki. this was modified to take air samples around the world to try to find out if there are any fissfis fission products in the air. this discovered the bomb test

days after it was done by picking up excess radiation, excess fission byproducts as it flew a racetrack pattern in the pacific ocean. immediately the united states got this information. secretary of defense lewis johnson didn't believe it at first. he couldn't come to grips with the fact the soviet union had developed the bomb long before anyone assumed they would do so. truman also could not believe that the soviets were now a nuclear power. he very famously said "i couldn't understand how "those asiatics were able to match what we had done so quickly." after 90% of u.s. atomic physicists looked at the data brought back by this one flight, they concluded, without any real equivocation, yes, the soviet union had in fact detonated their first atomic bomb. so truman had no choice but to accept this and to announce to the american public in september that the arms race had begun.

now congress did what it did best -- they rallied very quickly and started pointing fingers at everybody they could possible point fingers at. how could this possibly happen? how could we be so surprised that the soviet union had detonated a bomb long before we thought they were going to? how did they get it so quickly? the estimate the intelligence community had given them was 1953 as the most probable date for a soviet bomb. but the worst case scenario that the intelligence agencies had given the government was 1951. they were just too slow and too stupid to be able to get the bomb as quickly as they did. so new ideas new hypotheses were brought up how did they possibly get this bomb rolling. the sflat and house had a joint and nuclear energy committee brought together and brought the cia in front of them and other witnesses. one thing was the intelligence was right, it was actually going to take them eight years to build a bomb. the fact is they started in 1941 so we weren't really

wrong. it did take them eight years. now the fact that you didn't know when they started is a bit problematic if you want to say how good your intelligence was but this is something that made them feel a little bit better about them selves. they also argued that maybe they had better it made them feel a little bit better about them selves. maybe thee had some germans we didn't know about. we'll talk more about open

source intelligence later on. these are open source resources the soviets could have used to find out information about the american bomb program. they also talk about the fact maybe the soviets used safety shortcuts. when we built the atomic bomb here in the united states the manhattan project, out of 500,000 people working on the project, only two were killed during this time. this is exceptional for war time. two people were killed every day doing building aircraft and tanks here in the united states. the fact that building an atomic bomb only killed two people meant two things. one, is that we were very good at what we were doing. and we were very lucky. the other one is that we actually had some very stringent safety standards that we imposed. well, if the russians decided because they're russian -- they don't really care too much about human life -- to throw out these safety concerns, well, they could probably knock a couple years off this program. so congress was happy to hear that. then of course it's possible they had smart scientists. we had dismissed them out of hand. we'll talk a little bit more about our perception of soviet

scientists but they -- everyone kind of xhuk lechuckled to themselves -- that's not the reason! the one they were able to latch on to was this idea of espionage. that the soviets were supdtupid, evil, but they were able to steal our ideas. they had nothing original on their own but they were able to come into the united states deal with these commies giving secrets over. today we're going to focus on three major ideas, three major questions that are historically important for the atomic spies. one, who are the spies. what makes up their spy networks. what were their ideology, what was the reason that they were spying on the united states. secondly, when did the united states discover the espionage effort and what did we do to try to stop it. most of the american public doesn't discover the espionage effort until late in the 1940s, and even into the 1950s with the

rosenburg trial. when did the u.s. government know it was going on? finally, for my purposes, how much did it matter? it is one thing to say there were spies, it is one thing to say we were doing something about it but how much of a difference did it make? this is the real historical question here. first two questions are relatively straightforward factual and informative questions. this one is the real counterfactual, the what-if of history. professional historians, academics like myself, we like to pretend we don't like these what-if questions, it's above us we're the ivory tower, we don't want to deal with these what-if questions. we're lying to you. we like them as much as anybody else. these are the kind of questions that academics sit around at 2:00 in the morning after having a little too much wine or something else and have these conversations like we all do. if i could have a time machine if i could go back and punch out hitler's great great grandfather right before he met his great great grandmother, i'd be ugly

to have hitler. this is the same basic idea. if the soviets didn't have espionage, would they have still gotten the bomb. if the soviets didn't have espionage, how quickly would they have gotten it? these are the kind of things we can have lots of debates about. i'd love to talk to you a little bit about it afterwards question wise. let's talk about the sources of atomic intelligence that the soviets were able to gather during this time period. first, volunteers ideologues these are the people who truly believed in the soviet system, that truly believed in the idea that communism was this new way of life that was going to continue over capitalism in the long run. there is also open source intelligence. these are things widely publicized, whether publications actually put out by the u.s. government or things like a

course sulyllabus. the french were a key component. they get a bad wrap sometimes rightly so, as cheesy surrender monkeys. but they did have very brilliant scientists. the problem is their brilliant scientists were also communists. finally, there was also targeted intelligence by safety officials. this is one of the least told stories of the atom tick spy period. there were actually gru professionals who ill fin traited the united states with the expression purpose of bringing back information about the american atomic bomb program. let's talk a little bit about the soviet espionage structure. these are actually professional organized infrastructure. at the very top was the nkvd but with some assistance from the gru. the nkvd is the predecessor it the kgb. gru is soviet military intelligence. at the head of all of this was a man named lavrenti beria.

he was responsible for all the intelligence gathering for the soviet union. he was a horrible, horrible person. we'll talk more about this in a second. but he was so good at infiltrating u.s. atomic bomb program that stalin kept him around. you know if he basics about soviet history in the late '30s early '40s right before world war ii stalin essentially killed everybody. took out his entire hierarchy. anybody who could potentially be a threat to him in the future. beria survived because of his ability to infiltrate the atomic bomb program. below him, we have others. there is a hierarchy here developed by the soviet union from the resident here in the united states -- we call it the chief of station -- to those people directly responsible for running th atomic spies here in the united states. work our way down to harry gold who was an american currier

bringing message from the atomic spies to the soviets. finally the cpusa the xhoonist party of the united states, and their main person, steve nelson, who is responsible for establishing a very little known spy ring at colleges and universities in the united states. let's break them down a little bit. at the top of the soviet hierarchy, beria. he is not a very nice person. had he some very interesting tastes in young girls and boys. he really enjoyed torturing people. he wasn't somebody that ordered torture. he ordered it, then watched it and took a lot of real pleasure in it. stalin did not like him very much. he was hated throughout the soviet system. but again he was so good at what he did that he was kept around. the interesting thing about beria is he was one of the pure architects of the red terror during this time period. personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. he is ironically, the last person who fell victim to the red terror. when nikita includes chevkhrushchev

took power and destalinized the soviet union, b bechlteria received karmic justice. the top soviet intelligence person in the united states not in washington, d.c. actually stationed out of new york city, that was the main base for soevviet intelligence during the war. hireerarchy continues with the senior case officer. this is the person who will be running the spies on a day to day basis. his real name was yaxsov came to the united states under the pretense that he was the general counsel of the soviet union in new york city. pretended he was a lawyer. this is really his cover for his activities as nkcbd senior case

officer for this spy network. what makes him interesting and very important in this case is that his specialty was scientific and technological intelligence. you don't want to just send anybody if you're going to run an atomic spy ring. atomic weapons are very complicated, especially in the 1940s when very few people understood what was going on with nuclear fission. you wanted somebody that understood scientific and technological intelligence which made him the perfect person. then then alexander feklisov. he was the resident in the 1960s and where a lot of people may know his name is that he was the back channel for the cuban missile crisis. he was the man who robert kennedy and others spoke to to try to create this deal to trade the jupiter missiles in turkey for the missiles in cuba. his book is fascinated, called "the man behind the rosenbergs."

the title gives away everything. there's not a lot of secrecy behind what the book is about. really what this book does it came out end of the cold war and really ended a lot of the debate about julius rosenburg. we'll talk more about rosenburg in a second but there was always this left liberal debate was rosenburg scapegoated because he was jewish or was a liberal. this book ended a lot of that debate. then you've got lower levels. harry gold. gold actually was a chemist by trade so he knew what he was looking for. he was somebody that made a lot of sense to run atomic spies. he was born to russian-jewish immigrants. never really gave up this russian side to him. interestingly enough, he was a very successful chemist but he lost his job in the great depression. this is something that helped radicalize him. we talk about ideology and any to people who are

407440 and below, they don't really understand how people could turn against their country and become a communist. because communism for anyone that age was a dying institution that obviously doesn't work. but for those who grew up in the 1930s or who came of age during this time period and saw the great depression, the loss of jobs, the 20% to 25% unemployment and the idea of bread lines and the fact that people were going through such hardship, and then looked over at the propaganda coming out of the soviet union where everybody had a job where everybody had a good life, where there were no class distinctions where in some cases there were flo religious or racial distinctions. now this is a pipe dream. this is nonsense. but this is what was coming out of the soviet union. ideologically it is hard to explain but it is not hard to empathize with people who said this is the real wave of the future. harry gold was one of these guys. kwh he lost his job in the great depression depression, this was one of the real stirs steps to led to his radicalization. he is a currier later on for

arguably the most atomic spy. steve nelson was the primary prechutepre recruiter for a lot of university-based professors who were giving information to the soviet union. nelson was a naturalized citizen so he wasn't a natural u.s. citizen to begin with. he had spent a lot of spain in spain. he was an american volunteer that went and fought on the side of the republicans against the fascists during that time. then moved to russia for several years, then returned to the united states in the early 1940s. be forewarned, he was on our radar the minute he walked back into the country. he is not somebody that was able to sneak back in and get away with it. when he was here he was a member of the national committee for the communist party of the united states and really the leader in california. he had no official title but he was really the guy who ran the

california communist party. his specialty what he did during the war was direct activities at the university of california at berkeley which for those who went through the '60s you know this became the hotbed of liberalism. this was certainly also the case in the 1940s. this was a target-rich environment for recruiting people into the communist party. he eventually would span out from california to recruit professors and grad students from many major universities. chicago, columbia university in new york all focusing on people who were working on weapons design for the u.s. government. mostly nuclear but not always. sometimes radar. sometimes proximity fuses or things that could be stolen and used by the soviet union. let's look at the recruits themselves. i've spoken the recruits down into three tiers. the top tier. these are the people that either are incredibly important when it comes to what information they provided the soviet union or the most well known, the most famous

of the atomic spies. alan nunn may is the first spy uncovered by western intelligence. of course you have klaus uchltklaus faux fuchs. i have the next slide in front of me.uchs. i have the next slide in front of me. the second tier doesn't mean they are less important they're just less well known. have you a list here of not only scientists but also people like ethyl rosenburg who were somewhat controversial in whether or not they contributed to atomic spying. these are people who aren't as well known but they are very important. finally the third tier. that's primarily steve nelson's ring. he created a ring of scientists that were able to provide bits and pieces of information to the soviets throughout the second world war and the early cold

war. none of these guys were individually responsible for the soviets getting a weapon, but they provide odd little bits and pieces throughout to give them this information. now this acronym at the bottom is the federation of architects, engineers, chem plissists and technicians. now let's talk about some of these guys individually. alan nunn may is famous for being caught in many respects. he pled guilty and was sentenced by the british to ten years hard labor in 1946. he was caught because of a defector a man who was a soviet clerk working out of the ottawa embassy in canada during the second world war. that man came to canada and fell in love with the west like the real dangers that most of the soviets really feared is that when some of their people would get a taste of their freedom

that they would really embrace. well, he embraced it. he was young had he a young wife and a young family. he liked the fact that you could go to movies any time you wanted to, you could walk around the country without being chased or followed and liked the fact that the canadian people really reached out to help the soviet union during the second world war. we looked at the west and certainly the canadians -- they have this reputation for being the most polite people in the world. even though they faced real hardships in canada, they did everything they could to give money, support and supplies to the soviet war effort. at the same time, he saw there was a real massive espionage effort against canada. this didn't sit right with him. when he was finally called back to the soviet union in 1945 at the end of the war, he decided he wasn't going to go. his wife told him, if we're going to leave defect, let's have some actual ammunition. grab everything you can. he grabbed every single piece of paper he saw lying around. gave this information over to

the canadians and part of this was this massive espionage effort directed at the american, canadian and british atomic bomb problem which out the alan nunn may who was arrested and pled guilty in 1946. may is really a top-quality scientist. he studied with a man named james chadwick. chadwick is famous. he discovered the neutrons. if you remember back to middle school science, the proton electron and neutrons but we didn't know about the neutrons before chadwick. nunn may studied under one of the top scientists of the 20th century. nunn may like many of these other atomic scientists, there is a lot of controversial about whether or not he had a real full-fledged role in the atomic program. well, in 20002 before he died he did a full confession. called his children and said i was spying. i was giving information, i gave a lot of information over. he spied for the gru again soviet military intelligence and he was responsible for

giving samples of two isotopes of uranium. if you think back to middle school science, an isotope is a type of element that has a little bit different atomic number. well, the atomic weight. a couple less neutronses or a couple more neutronses. in this case uranium had a lot of different isotopes. the ones that mattered were uranium 235 and to an extent uranium 233. he gave these samples over to the soviets and he also talked about the process of creating plutonium. plutonium is not a naturally occurring element. if you look hat a table, plutonium comes after iranian. we thought uranium was the highest element on the table on earth. however, when you find uranium and put it through a process like a knew clee renuclear reactor,

nunn may was able to provide the soviets with some key information about the manufacturing of plutonium. then you have klaus fuchs. fuchs is by far the most important of the soviet spies. he provided the soviets with the process called gastochlt us diffusion. it is everyone all over the world. it is naturally occurring element. but what we pull out of the ground you can't create a bomb out of it. this isotope cannot be used in a nuclear weapon so 99.3% of uranium -- so i pull out a softball sized chunk of uranium. 99.3% of that uranium is uranium 238, an isotope you can't use to make a bomb. .7% -- so about the size of a

grain of race of that softball sized chunk of iranian -- is uranium 235. that's what you can make a bomb out of. we talk about enriching uranium talk about getting rid of uranium 238 and try to get out the uranium 235. a process that we found out worked really well for that was a process called gaseous diffusion. we came to that by trying dozens of different ways of refining uranium and it took us years to figure out the best way to do this. well fuchs provided the soviets with the answer to that question before it even began. forget all the other ideas. gaseous diffusion is the way to go. it cut years off their bomb program -- well, arguably. we'll talk about that down the road. beside that was a real integral part of the manhattan project. fuchs was a group leader at lostthat was part of the broader process that create the atomic bomb.

he only had one immediate boss. he was privy to all the ideas and conversations and plans for weapons improvements after the war. something called boosted weapons where you go from the nagasaki bomb which was the equivalent of 20 kilo tons of tnt. to a few short years later you have boosted weapons have that hundreds of kilo tons of tnt. of course the hydrogen bomb of the early 1950s where he starts talking about mega tons or millions of tons of tnt. fuchs was in all these conversations. fuchs was part of these conversations. all of them were leaked to the soviet union. then you have greenglass. david greenglass gets a lot lf bad rap was he was the primary witness against the roserosenburgs in the trial. turns out he lied about a lot of things he was saying.

he was a machinist at los alamo alamos. it is one thing to actually make stuff. that's one part of the process that mattered. you can't drop papers filled with equations on the germans or japanese and the war. you actually have to drop a bomb. actually make a physical product. so greenglass was mart of this process. he actually helped develop the high explosive lens that was integral to the nagasaki bomb to directing the explosives inward. he also provided sketches and descriptions of not only the lens but also some of the dynamics of creating these weapons systems to the soviet union. he gave a list of personnel to the soviets that could potentially be recruited later on by soviet intelligence. really what he comes down to somebody he is the real supplement to fuchs.

he he, fuchs, was the one with the real ideas and providing the real physics behind the atomic bomb whereas greenglass could provide the actual mechanics behind building these weapons systems. so together they provided the soviets with a lot of really important information. so we flou actually so some of the greenglass sketches that he provided to the soviets during this time because of the end of the cold war and declassification of some of this. this first sketch is actually the sketch of the fat man boy the plutonium bomb, they used implosion to create a nuclear clan reaction. in the explosive lenses are the things on the outside that instead of exploding, they imploded to create this chain reaction. this was an incredibly complicated process that greenglass was able to provide the soviets with this information. then finally most famous of all is julius rosenberg. rosenberg was a true believer an ideologue. he was someone that truly believed in the idea that communism and the soviet system was the way of the future.

he's not somebody that kind of sort of believed. he was somebody that bought in 100% to the ideas coming out of the soviet union in the 1930s. even before he was providing atomic information, providing military information to the soviet union ploeft important of these was the proximity fuse. the proximity fuse was a way to tell a weapons system, a missile or a bomb, to explode when it got close to something. your missile didn't actually have to hit its target. it could get within a certain range, then would explode. he gave them this information when he was working even before the manhattan project when he was working at an organization called emerson radio, a corporation in new york city. this proximity fuse, interestingly enough, was used later on, a couple upgrades a couple tweaks to shoot down francis gary powers' u2 spy plane in the '60s. so this information comes from rosenberg. he also provides ozthousand of

top-secret classified reports that the predecessor to nasa called naca, national advisory committee on aur naught iceronautics. these are about aircraft plans, the first jet fighter for the united states. plan for that was given to the soviet union by julius rosenberg. later of course, rosenberg was accused, and certainly we believe that he did so to have recruited sympathetic individuals into nkb service. one of the spies was the one that provided all this naca information to the soviet union. let's jump to the obvious next step in this case. his wife ethyl. ethel was part of what i considered the second tier of russian spies. mainly because her role is really still up for debate. julius, there's not much debate anymore. he was a full-fledged communist.

somebody that employed lots of information. ethel, on the other hand, was tricky. there are questions if she was actually a spy. the reason she was convicted of this was david greenglass said she typed up all the information for the spies that was eventually provided to the soviet union. so she knew about it she aided and abetted this spy ring and by typing up all this information. that's what greenglass said he lied about. so ethel probably didn't type up all this information. was she a communist? absolutely. she was as ideological as her husband. was she involved in some way? probably. did she know about it? almost certainly. julius spied for the soviets for so long that if ethel had no idea about it, i'm not sure how that could possibly be the case. they were true confidants with one another. they talked about everything. more than anything else, we assume that ethel knew about it. does this mean that she should be executed for it?

well, that's certainly a debate that's still up for grabs. then a very interesting scientist, ted hall. he was the youngest scientist at los alamos. only 19 years old when he went there. but he was a full-fledged believer. really got sucked into communism at an early age. his importance rivals fuchs. not quite there but he's about as key component to the eventual design of the soviet bomb as you can get. he gave a detailed description of the fat man plutonium bomb to the soviet union. and also gave several processes for purifying plutonium that the soviets couldn't have gotten on their own. the interesting part about this is that the bomb that went off, joe 1, the first soviet atomic bomb was almost a mere image of the nagasaki fat man bomb. so hall's information directly led to this design. he also gave them a lot of information about the little boy

bomb which is the hiroshima bomb, the uranium-based nuclear weapon including what we call the critical plas. this is the amount of fissle material, the amount of uranium necessary to create a chain reaction. this is a calculation that not only took the americans years to figure out but actually is what derails the german atomic bomb program. they just couldn't figure out the critical mass. they made some math errors and they thought the critical mass was going to be huge. americans took some time to figure out what it was. hall landed this over to the soviets. they didn't have to do a lot of the same calculation that it took the united states. then like fuchs he provided information about the next generation of nuclear weapons, about boosted fission weapons, then eventually about hydrogen weapons. then there is brew flow pontecorvo. he is someone that is a little more controversial as far as his role in the atomic bomb spy ring. his scientific bona fides are

undoubtable. he studied under a famous italian scientist who later becomes a key component to the american bomb program. he could have actually discovered fission. he didn't know. it would eventually be a german team but. instead of uranium thinking about breaking into two smaller things which is what fission is they thought they built bigger stuff. they looked at the results, they discovered fission, made a mistake in their conclusions. bruno was part of that team. this is a top-level scientists. he worked with the british program during the second world war. but the argument he made and argument he made to the death was that he work on reactor programs not weapons. so there is still some controversy about his role.

working on nuclear reactors still gives you a lot of the physics and theoretical information to help build nuclear weapons but he still claims he never gave them any military secrets but he did acknowledge he was a spy. this is his quote, when he was asked why did you do it. he didn't beat around the bush. the simple explanation is this -- "i was a creten. the fact that i could be so stupid and many people close to me could have been quite so stupid." then he trailed off. he just couldn't finish that sentence. he really understood the pipe dream of the soviet system but far, far too late to actually do anything about it. so these are the recruits. these are people that were targeted by soviet intelligence to provide information. but there's one last spy i want to talk about. this is the professional. this is the individual that was sent specifically in the united states to do spying on the american atomic bomb program. a man named george koval.

koval was born in iowa, but he went at a very early age to the soviet union. both of his parents were russian natives and he was brought to the soviet union at an early age. he actually went to college in the soviet union before coming back to the united states. the great story is he became an electrical engineer in the soviet union, did all the physics and chemistry research there, had a degree. then was sent into the united states as somebody who had never gone to college before. when he went to college in the united states, everybody's like this guy is a natural! he learns everything so quickly! you know, he was acing a tests without studying. he was kind ever -- this guy is just like all these top scientists. because he had already learned all this stuff already. he was noticed, for obvious reasons, by the u.s. military and sent to be part of the atomic bomb project. we know how important he was.

as you can see on the slide. when this was finally declassified in russia in november 2007 putin himself flamed koval a hero of the russian federation the highest possible award you can get. what made him so dangerous is that his role in the manhattan project wasn't as a scientist it wasn't as a technician. it was as a health physics officer. essentially what that was, was it was his job to make sure nobody was getting too much radiation and that nobody was actually getting a dangerous level of any kind of possible carcinogen or anything else that could possibly cause them problems. we talked about safety considerations. what this allowed him to do was have free access to everyone and everything. there was no laboratory he couldn't go into. there was no one he couldn't talk to. he could go from all the different labs from los alamos to oak ridge where they were building the fissle material for the bomb talk to everyone from oppenheimer on down. he could supply them with any

information he could possibly one. the most important information was about the fat man bomb again the bomb that was tested in 1949. we realized at a very early stage that using plutonium as a fissionable product for nuclear weapon was difficult to do because plutonium was so highly reactive. you actually needed something to slow down the clanhain reaction because if you didn't, you'd have a fizzle. you would get a small non-atom non-atomic -- maybe a big bomb compared to other bombs but it wouldn't be this big, massive atomic blast. you needed something to slow down the neutrons. when we discovered that we could use another substance, another element called pulonium as an initiator. if i go back quickly to this drawing. that thing in the center of the fat man bomb was the polonium

based initiator. when the bomb imploded, this sphere in the middle of the bomb slowed it down. this is something we discovered by accident. this is something that was one the most important discoveries during the process to build the atomic bomb. koval gave it so the soviets. in many cases koval was a good spy, but a lot of times it was pure luck. he just happened to find himself in the right place at the right time. he traveled from los alamos to oak ridge to washington. he just so lappedhappened to be where they were discussing this and was able to get the plans and bring them back to the soviet union. this is something we'll talk about later on and the impact of this that's too hard to understate. but again, we'll tak about that in a second. i want to move on now to our second stage of this conversation. that is, u.s. counterintelligence.

what did we know about this and what were we doing about this. most of the american public doesn't find out about this later on but when does the government discover what happens happening. in the beginning it was faced with significant handicaps that prevented them potentially finding out what was going on. how did we not see this coming lou did we not do anything to stop? the answer is we saw it coming and did everything we possibly to to try to stop it. but some things were standing in the way of doing something significant in this respect. first is war time mobilization. when the second world war began, some of these hastily designed organizations like the oss, like the manhattan project like the fact that the state department doubled and tripled in size in a span of a couple weeks, if not a couple days, was a real problem for security for doing what you normally would need to do to make sure that the people that you're hiring on are not communist sympathizers or not

spies. in some cases with the oss, for instance, and with some of the manhattan project scientists, there was only eight-day background collection to be brought on to government service. now if any of you who have worked in the government know, an eight-day background check -- that was a year-and-a-half in some cases for top-secret clearance. but you didn't have the time to do that. there were just so many people being brought flu government service at the beginning of the war that needed to have top-secret clearance and there were so few investigators that it just was done very haphazardly. the manhattan project itself grew to an event number of 500,000 people employed by the manhattan project. the manhattan project begins in 1942. and ends in 1945. in three years it grows from zero to 500,000. there are not enough fbi agents to check everybody's background as much as we would like them to. so this is a real problem. the next one, very

tongue-in-cheek, scientists are pinkos. a lot of signscientists certainly in the '30s and '40s tended to be left-leaning intellectuals and liberals who if you wanted them to work in your government you had to overlook the fact they had swlaomewhat leftist sympathies. if you wanted the best of the best, you had to embrace the fact that robert oppenheimer was very, very left wing and he was a fellow traveler as the terminology in the 1950s was used with a lot of communists. his ex-mistress was a full-fledged member of the communist party. his brother, frank had been a member of the communist party. it is not just oppenheimer. it is a good number of top american scientists were left wing, were at least xluncommunist leaning. you had to overlook this if you were going to build a bomb. the next real handicap is science is universal. we don't own the physical theory behind atomic weapons. this is something that was

understood worldwide. it was something that was developed in germany and europe. it was something that was understood by scientists from japan, from germany and russia the united states and all over the place.something we could keep secret. it wasn't something we could hide. it was an yunz stood idea. the next major handicap, compartmentalization, the idea that one side didn't know what the other side was doing. . the fbi didn't know what the manhattan project was doing. and vice versa except at the very highest levels. fbi agents who were trying to hunt down spies could have worked well with the counterintelligence guys, but they weren't talking to each other. scientific intelligence is hard. this is something that is incredibly difficult. most fbi agents don't have a scientific background. if you tell them to protect scientific secrets some more important than others, they may not know what they should be looking for or they should be protecting. this is especially true in a whole other ball game for our spieses that we sent out into germany and other places to look for what the german program was doing. having a scientist and a spy together was something we didn't

have very many of. the spies were good at spying. the scientists were good at science. not so much crossover. this is a real problem. i have been teasing you. some of these open source ideas were really interesting. one real handicap was the fact that when american scientists rallied to work at los alamos, they stopped teaching at their universities across the country. it was very easy for any spy, german or soviet, to start looking at course syllabi or schedules from princeton and columbia and berkeley and chicago and realize, fermi is not teaching his class anymore, oppenheimer is gone all of a sudden. none of these top scientists are teaching anywhere. where are they? they must be somewhere else. it is not a far stretch to look at train schedules and to look at people who all of a sudden, why are all of these people going to new mexico in the middle of nowhere. that is open source. that is something you can find

in the yellow pages. all of a sudden, oppenheimer isn't publishing anything anymore. why aren't there american scientists publishing stuff on nuclear physics anymore. these are things you don't need to steal secrets to find out and they can't be protected. they're common sense. nothing that we can do about it. finally, the french problem. i alluded to this before. primarily this is a very specific frenchman, a made named fredrick joliet curie. the last name curie rings a bell. he is the son-in-law of the famous marie curie and pierre curie. their daughter irene was also a physicist. married frederick. together, they ran the most important lab in france. this lab was taken over by the germans when they invaded, but with the liberation of paris, curie wanted to re-energize his lab and reach out to some of the french sciences that had left to go to canada to work for the british program and start working on the british programs.

that was their manhattan project. the problem was, curie was a card-carrying member of the communist party. he literally had the membership card. he was somebody that joined the communist party, was a fellow traveler, worked hand and foot to do everything he could. he was a very good physicist. and had access to a lot of information. the fbi couldn't stop him. he was in france. the american counterintelligence could do very little to stop him from sending information over to the soviet union. so how was ci set up during this time? you really have two different major organizations that were doing counterintelligence during this time period. one was the fbi. the fbi paid attention to this atomic spying during and after the war. they were the primary domestic counterintelligence wing. one of their main targets was an american federation, the federation of american scientists.

that scientists began creating formal organizations to talk about nuclear weapons policy. there were organizations around the country. there is the atomic scientists of chicago. the association of oak ridge scientists. association of los alamos scientists. eventually, they came together as a federation of atomic scientists and later the federation of american scientists. the fas is now an organization that is today doing some really good work not only on atomic weapons but general foreign policy. turned into a bit of a think tank today. the fbi thought this was a front for all of the commie pinkos that were running around the united states. the fbi made a real focus on this organization. they gathered information. all the way to the fbi doing it. they surveilled scientists. after meetings. they took down license plates. they followed people from place to place. they had undercover fbi agents attend meetings themselves. they gathered literature. they used wiretaps to tap the

meetings, to tap the homes of these scientists. we're talking about oppenheimer and others in this case. they used informants to spy on these agencies, everything from taxi drivers who overheard conversations in taxis to recruiting far right conservatives from universities to pretend that they were left-wing to infiltrate these organizations. in all the time they spent doing this, they caught no one doing anything wrong. they spent millions of taxpayer dollars and ran and chased their tails. what is up here is an interesting document from hoover himself to the special assistant to fdr harry hopkins, where he talked about the fact, and this is again from early in the war, that we had known from an early stage that the soviets had been spying on the united states. then there is the second tier, arguably the better tier, of the ci bureaucracy. this is the manhattan engineering district. or the m.e.d. this is the fancy name for the manhattan project, had its own

intelligence branch. its own counterintelligence wing. the top of this was the head of the manhattan project itself, brigadier general leslie groves who ran everything. if you want micromanaging, look at leslie groves. he actually wreath wrote -- part of my dissertation is run nothing a 1960s era business management textbook that was taught in business schools and groves had a chapter in it. it was how to manage. the entire chapter was don't delegate anything. do everything yourself. no one had ever really brought this out for me as far as a researcher was concerned. he had two people he trusted to do this for him. one was lieutenant colonel john lansdale. lansdale was his intelligence chief. on the manhattan project. he would go on after the war to to become an anesthesiologist. you talk about research he wrote a book that was never published. the only place you can find the manuscript of his book is in the association of anesthesiologists on their website.

again, gold i found. finally, lieutenant colonel boris cash. he would do some amazing things in discovering what was happening with the german atomic program, but he was one of the top counterintelligence agents for the manhattan project. this is an interesting quote from lance dale labsdale, from his unpublished book. talking about the germans and japanese as an enemy. but then he said from the beginning beginning russia was regarded, from an intelligence standpoint, as an enemy. this wasn't a case where the cold war brought about the animosity. this is a case where from the very beginning of the war, from 1942 or earlier, russia was regarded as an intelligence enemy, as somebody we needed to keep as far away from the manhattan project as we possibly could. what pash did under groves' direction was to run the western defense command intelligence branch. in doing so, western meant he was in charge of california. he really targeted a lot of

these programs run by steve nelson and others trying to infiltrate the american program. pash's files have just been declassified, is counterintelligence, handwritten in this case typed files about these different scientists that he was surveilling. and they're declassified because i foia requested them and whined and moaned for so many years. here's an example, you're not expected to read this stuff, just an idea to the extent to which pash was doing research -- on the left, his notes about frank oppenheimer, robert oppenheimer's brother, who he did a lot of extensive research into surveilled, wiretapped, all these things. pash really focused on the scientist scientists. pash cleared robert oppenheimer for work on the manhattan project. that's how much general groves trusted him. he looked at frank oppenheimer. those who were suspected were put under surveillance. the one on the right is the surveillance chart for a man named leo solar.

he is famous for being the first person to warn the united states about the potential of an atomic bomb. you may have heard of the einstein letter to fdr. einstein didn't write the einstein letter to fdr. leo solar wrote the letter and signed it. . reason he didn't write it is because fdr, just like you, hadn't heard of leo solar. so he said look albert they were friends, please put your name on this so you get the einstein letter. pash was researching and surveilling everybody, including robert and frank oppenheimer, leo solard. across the board. so he followed these guys. they miked up their houses in places they frequented like bars and restaurants. they went into the houses and changed the telephone cords so their phones, not only so they could tap the phones, so they could turn the phones themselves into microphones so they could listen to all the conversations throughout the house.

all of this without warrant. no fisa court. this is about as far of an overage as you could possibly get when it comes to, you know, the kind of invasion of privacy that you could expect from it. these were investigations into scientists who were suspected leftists. these are two of the scientists i gave you on the third tier of nelson's group. i am blowing this up a little bit, so that you can see it a little bit. this is about one of the scientists in nelson's rank. in the middle under remarks it says, subject has been an active member of the communist party, and while his party affiliations are not evident at present he is still considered to be associated by local communist party leaders and it is believed that he is still sympathetic with communist principles. for this reason subject is dangerous as an employee at the radiation laboratory. this is the cal laboratory. pash single-handedly could keep people from getting jobs inside the manhattan project.

here you have three of the top people on that third tier of scientists under steve nelson's command. i want to read you the recommendation for max friedman, who was one of these guys providing information. it is recommended that subject be immediately separated from his employment on this project. drafted into the army, and then removed as soon as possible to an outpost where he is not in position to obtain additional information about the project or transmit information that he already possesses. there is a second letter where they say they want to clarify what he means. send him to siberia. or send him anywhere but here. so that's really what pash is trying to do. there is a third win. counterintelligence diplomacy. an attempt to use agreements and international processes to keep the soviets from getting this information. the first is the quebec agreement. this is between the united states canada and great britain

that says that we will not, either of us in this case the united states and great britain, communicate any information about tube alloys, that's the british name for the manhattan project, to third parties except by mutual consent. we're saying we're not going to tell anybody else. the real reason for this is we didn't want the british to tell the french anything about the atomic bomb program. then you get the combined development trust in june of 1944. this is the idea that the british and americans are going to do everything they can to buy up all of the uranium worldwide that we possibly could. we didn't understand at the time that uranium was everywhere, but we thought there was uranium in czechoslovakia, there's a lot in korea, the belgian congo. let's make a deal and buy it all up so they won't have any for themselves. if we dug straight down, we would run into uranium. it's everywhere. we were trying the best we could. there's something a little bit controversial called the smythe report. this is named of a princeton physicist who did not work on

the atomic bombs. general groves wanted someone to come into the project and write about it. that sounds kind of counterintuitive when it comes to the idea of keeping things secret. the idea that groves had was that you could have somebody write about the science of the atomic bomb, we could publish this, and that would provide parameters by what you could say and what you couldn't say. does that make sense? i know it doesn't. at first i'm like why would you tell anybody? the idea was that at the point in 1945, groves sat down with the scientists and said, what is going to be widely understood information in the world of international science in the next year? what can a first year graduate student in physics figure out from the atomic bombs in the next year or so? let's release that information now. let's put it out there so everyone knows at this point what they can and cannot say to journalists and foreign operatives. or anything else. they said, we are going to release the smythe report and

this is as much as you can talk about. when oppenheimer was interviewed after the war, all these atomic scientists were rock stars after the war was over, they knew they could only talk about what was already released in the smythe report. for groves this is a way to kind of contain the information. to say anything outside of this you're instantly breaking the law. finally the mcmahon act and this is really heavy handed. in june of 1946 after allen nunn may was outed, it looked as though there was some pretty significant leaks in the british atomic bomb program. we didn't think there were any leaks in our program, but the british were leaky. the mcmahon act was passed named after brian mcmahon who was the head of the atomic energy commission in congress saying that we basically were cutting the british off. we're saying thanks for helping us build the bomb during the war, but you're on your own. we are no longer going to share information with you about atomic weapons. this is an attempt to plug the leaks from the british side and

keep this information from getting out. of course, the argument has been made in the last 60 years about, why didn't we do enough? hopefully, i've shown you we did a significant amount. i'm even going to argue today that we did too much. i'm a left-winger myself, but there was some significant counterintelligence overreach. during this time period. it actually had some detrimental effects for the american scientific community, and in essence the american national security community. there is a real backlash against nuclear theorists in the united states. because of claude fuchs, allen nunn may, the rosenbergs and others, every theorist was painted with this brush of they're leftists they're communists, they're sympathizers. the argument made at the time -- oppenheimer has said this to one of his sub order thats when algar hiss was outed it didn't make lawyers look like they're communists, but when one or two

nuclear theorists are outed every single nuclear theorist was looked at as being a security risk. it had real implications on american science. most universities around the country instituted loyalty oaths for their professors and scientists. even berkeley had a loyalty oath. that tells you a lot. it caused a real brain drain. it caused a real problem with retaining top-level scientists in government service or nongovernment service. by the spring of 1949, berkeley lost all of its theorists. every single one of them resigned because they either refused to take the loyalty oath or because they were outed as being too left wing. this had a real problem, real impact on u.s. national security. if you want top scientists in the field of government, if you want people building the next atomic bomb or the next fighter aircraft or the next spacecraft, you need scientists. scientists were having a real problem getting clearance. from the u.s. government.

somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 scientists and engineers were backlogged waiting for clearance in the early 1950s every year. that's 20,000 to 50,000, these are top people that we needed to beat the russians into space. top people that we needed to develop the plane to rival the mig-15. but they were waiting, they couldn't get clearance because of this overreach, and this fear of soviet spies everywhere. so i'm going to read you -- i was going to read you a longer one, but this is the money sentence at the very end, someone that was talking in front of a group of scientists during this time of real overreach and he ends a long talk when he talks about the fact that we need to have an environment of trust, an environment of openness in science with this. it's such an atmosphere talking about this atmosphere of fear and suspicion. such an atmosphere is un-american. the most un-american thing we have to contend with today. it is a climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to

change their theories to match changes in the police state's propaganda line. not steve nelson. it's not some berkeley scientist, it's president harry s. truman. speaking before a group of scientists in 1948. this gives you an indication about how far we have gone. this is before mccarthy. i'm still talking 1948 and the problem that scientists ran into. okay, so finally, and then i'll wrap up and open up for questions. how much does the spying matter? how much did it make a difference? would they still have gotten the bomb? great quote the only secret about the atomic bomb was whether or not it would work and that question had been answered by hiroshima and nagasaki. the man doing the quote is glenn seaborg. discoverer of plutonium, the manhattan project scientist, he is somebody who knows. there is a longer quote i'm not going to read all of, but this is from a man who was the chief

scientist for what is called the american mission to discover what the german atomic bomb program was doing -- he understood scientific intelligence. so this is after the bomb, right after the soviet bomb came out. and said, the recent revelations of early leaks of atomic revelation to russia reflect a state of mind which should fill each of us with grave concern. the general impression seems to be russia has a bomb, therefore someone must have given her our secrets. we skip down to the bottom. by all means let us understand clearly and admit openly that the russians constructed their bomb all by themselves without any help from us or from captured germans. it is very wrong to underestimate one's adversaries. the question is, did they get the bomb because of the spies? the answer to that is that probably not. they were going to get it anyway. atomic science is not nationalistic. we talked about this before. the basic tenets were understood worldwide. the discovery of fission opened the field completely. within minutes of hearing about

the discovery of fission enricoer ifmy held up his hands in the united states and said this much uranium and poof it's all gone. and within days after the discovery of fission robert oppenheimer was drawing crude designs of bombs on his chalkboard. this is instantaneous understanding. this wasn't something that was going to be a secret for long. the argument that soviet scientists were idiots as much as we tried to embrace that argument, there's a great story here i have to tell you. a man named herbert york, and york was a second generation manhattan project scientist. he was a very young guy in the manhattan project and then became one of the top people working on the later project. york told a great story in his memoirs that come out later on. he says he was called in by the u.s. military, a bunch of generals, who were worried about the soviets sneaking in a suitcase-sized bomb into washington or new york and then starting world war iii by blowing up one of these cities with a secret bomb. so the generals asked york, is this a possibility?

could the soviets do this and york said absolutely not, there's no chance. and the general is like, how can you be so sure? york said tongue-in-cheek, the soviets haven't mastered the technology of the suitcase yet. so that's the perception a lot of people had of soviet science. but soviet science was as good as everybody else. we just didn't want to believe they knew what they were doing. the same people that the american manhattan project scientists studied under in europe in the 1930s the soviet scientists studied under. this is the country of mendleyev. this is going to happen one way or another. i'm actually going to skip this because it is really long. this is the first real talk about atomic bombs. look at when it is. 1914. h.g. wells wrote a book called "the world set free" where he talks about the atomic bombs being used in a war in the future. this wasn't an idea that we came

up with. this is an idea that had been around since the very beginning of the 20th century. so the idea that we were going to be the only ones to have the bomb and the soviets were too stupid, it would have happened one way or the other. so the spies can be forgiven for that. now the other question that matters, how much more quickly? how much faster would they have gotten the bomb? more quickly based on what? that is a key question involved in all of this. the american scientists had one vision of this. academics like oppenheimer saying they're going to get the bomb in a year or two. don't underestimate these guys. government scientists were giving a much broader prediction. her yert york is giving you an idea. the military people, leslie groves, were predicting 20 years before the soviets got the bomb. politicians like harry truman very famously when asked when would the soviets get the bomb, said never. that asiatic comment gives you an idea of what he was thinking. then the intelligence agencies, they had a different view. so they had some -- i'll go through this quickly.

the first estimate of when the soviets would get the bomb in 1946. soviets would develop an atomic bomb sometime between '50 and '53. the next estimate was the joint nuclear energy intelligence committee, same prediction as before, by july '48 they acknowledge it's impossible to determine when they're going to get the bomb but maybe by 1950s, most probable date mid 1953. all that changes here. june '49 report same as above. july '49 report, just a month before. the office of scientific intelligence said information now available substantiates the date already estimated in the '49, '48, '47 and '46 report earliest date mid '50s, most probably mid '53 but new information says not before mid 1951. my favorite was 1949 predicted a first soviet bomb in mid 1953.

this is 23 days after -- all right. so you can see how well the intelligence community was doing when it came to predicting this. real quickly, the argument for the idea that spies were important we've already gone through all this. intelligence showed the soviets what path not to take. the mistakes we made they didn't have to make. the russian defense ministry later on when koval was awarded 2007 hero of the russian federation said that the intelligence allowed the soviets to make the initiator prepare to the recipe provided by coval. stalin, beria soviet science, all these wanted american know-how to tell them whether or not their scientists now what they were doing. stalin said i don't believe what our scientists say unless i see the west has done it first. technical drawings are very important. the ones that greenglass provided were key to figuring

out the soviet bomb and then of course we talk about uranium separation and prue tone yum production for things that took us years to figure out and it was easier for the soviets. the quick argument against, the smythe report. this provided a lot of the information necessary right off the bat that there wasn't needed to be stolen that gave the soviets the theory behind the atomic bomb. it provided form but not function. what i mean by that is it gave the recipe but it didn't give the experience of how to actually cook the meal. my wife and i are dramatically different in our cooking skills. you could hand us both a complicated recipe and mine would be set on fire and hers would be a beautiful, great meal. we knew how to cook. the soviets didn't. we provided them with a recipe but not the experience on how to actually do things. in this case it's not about building one bomb. it's about building lots and lots of bombs. so the technical capability of building this stuff was not something you could provide with just drawings and information. most of the claims about how

great the soviet intelligence was comes from retired kgb officers. so take that for what it's worth. you just give the recipe means they had to redo a lot of the experiments, investigate competing processes for separating uranium and plutonium and it still duke longer for them to pull off than the manhattan project. this isn't primarily because of uranium and industrial capacity. it took them much longer to refine uranium and much longer to build all of these apparatuses in this industrial background. we had to build cities for the manhattan project. oak ridge tennessee was built from the ground up, not to mention los alamos which was just desert. that took time. the soviets needed to catch up with that industrial capacity. so arguments for, arguments against. i will end it there and take questions. i want to give you guys a chance i could talk forever but i don't want to do that. i'm going to make steve go crazy by taking the mic and moving around. i don't like standing in one spot. wait for the microphone to get

to you. laura right there. >> thanks very much for the presentation. not only do you know a lot about this stuff you structured it very, very well to help us. a couple of questions of detail. should we believe david x''ao greenglass when late in life he says he lied? secondly, what was steve nelson's background before he became a naturalized american? i'm grinning that you'll say he's a brit. >> so we actually don't know a lot about steve nelson before he came to the united states, to answer that question second. he actually gave different stories for where he came from. he know he was naturalized at one point. again the documents, because he was a private citizen, that wasn't under surveillance before that, there's not a lot of research into his background. he wasn't a brit. he was most likely something russian background. there are arguments about was he latvian? or was he one of the pre-baltic. but he was from eastern europe

or eurasia beforehand. to answer your first question, it is always tricky when you're dealing with deathbed confessions or later in life confessions but what makes greenglass perhaps believable was his motivation at the time for lying. he wanted to make sure his wife was not implicated in this. so pushing off and agreeing to testify against ruth -- i'm sorry ruth was his wife, against ethel and julius rosenberg was his way of keeping the blame from being pushed onto his wife. so it is one of those kind of courtroom, get immunity for telling a lie kind of things, where it is more believable in my mind that ethel probably was certainly knowledgeable, but a willing participant. she didn't know anything. she really could have done nothing but type. and if typing gets you the death penalty, that is a pretty steep process -- even hoover, interestingly enough, j. edgar hoover was gung ho behind let's

get them you know, thrown in prince for the rest of their lives we need to get them convicted. when the judge passed down the death sentence, he was like, whoa. i wasn't expecting that. it was very harsh. i mean certainly for ethel. julius you could argue one way or the other. julius certainly gave information. but if you compare them to what the british knew, allen got ten years and served six. claus gave way more information than does julius rosenberg. we just have harsher punishment here in the united states than other places. yes? wait for the microphone. >> is there any evidence that soviet participants with the research were giving information to the west about the progress of the soviet atomic program? >> yes. that is a great question. we get to go the other direction. i love that. eventually there would be a book about that.

about yet. so, yes, there are some. there are a lot of hints that come out of the soviet union that there is a process happening. there is an active offensive intelligence operation to try to discover what is happening inside the soviet union. so there are people, we call it the scientific underground passing information from scientist to scientist to scientist. that becomes really problematic. it's like the game of telephone. you whisper something in one person's ear and then it goes around the room because by the time it gets back to the united states it's gone through 15 different iterations and all of a sudden who knows whether it's real or not. the real issue we flun at that time is double sided. one is the american intelligence apparatus collapses after the war. with the collapse of the oss, the cia takes a long time to get going. the cia gets going, but intelligence gets left behind a little bit. you don't have the office of scientific intelligence, which is the office created to do foreign intelligence towards the

atomic program. until the very beginning in 1949. that's when the program is created. it takes some time to get their act together. by the time the russians had the bomb, you could see what they are putting out. it's not very good. the second problem is that there is no real impetus to have a strong scientific intelligence program for the soviets. most americans think they are a bunch of idiots. most americans are looking at the soviets from the perspective that the scientists are stupid, that their industry is so backward that there is no way they could produce these kind of weapon systems. that it will take them years to refine enough uranium. to make a bomb. the fact the soviet system itself is not designed for innovative science and innovative technology. the idea of bush who was the top u.s. sciencist during the second world war, wrote a book actually in 1949 talking about how the free world will always have better science than the totalitarian world. basically said the nazis the soviets, same basic idea, you just don't have the creativity

to do high level state-of-the-art science. so we had this perception that they just couldn't do the state-of-the-art. there really wasn't a lot of pressure behind american intelligence to find out what's happening. inside the soviet union. and some actually historians have written about, incorrectly, about that there was this real big program to figure out what they were doing. they are taking bits and pieces of documents from the archives, look, so-and-so was trying to find out what was happening. this person was hunting down uranium. but it is kind of the exception that proves the rule in many respects. we can find a couple of these examples that try to make it look like it's a program. there's no program. at the highest levels, nobody cared. again, groves, was in charge of this -- 20 years. he didn't care about the scientists. he thought they were smart. he said they can't reproduce what i did. groves was a proud man. the u.s. spent $2 billion on the manhattan project in 1941. you can extrapolate that to

hundreds of billions of dollars today. about the cost of one f-35. but lots and lots of money. the soviets just didn't have that infrastructure, or at least we thought they didn't have that infrastructure. so it was somewhat nah, they'll eventually get it but we'll be ready for them when they do. right here. >> yeah. last year, i read diana west's latest book on the new deal era, the roosevelt times. she went into great detail about harry hopkins being a soviet agent of influence and also she talked about somebody saying that that nuclear materiel was shipped through montana by air to the soviets. do you agree with that? those -- >> -- harry hopkins.

they got 2.5 pounds. 2.2. they got one kilogram. the soviets requested tons of uranium, refined uranium. you had people within the administration -- hopkins being one of them, certainly henry wallace being another -- the story of henry wallace is fascinating. he wasn't a communist himself all his friends were. and he was vice president of the united states until he was replaced by harry truman. and all of his top aides were spying for the soviets. so if fdr had died with henry wallace as his vice president the president of the united states would have been the great greatest conduit to the soviet union you ever had. the answer to the question is they asked for tons of enriched uranium. of course the white house agreed because diplomacy carried the day. but groves got in the middle of it. groves went berserk, as you can expect, went to george marshall. groves was one person as a one-star general that could walk into george marshall's office screaming and throwing stuff and

not get court-martialed for it. he went into the office screaming bloody murder. convinced marshall of the stupid idea. then convinced stimson this is a really stupid idea. groves got in the middle, slowed it down and eventually conceded as a compromise to give them one kilogram of enriched uranium. 2.2 pounds which you can't do a whole lot with. this is like 10% refined uranium, too. you couldn't even make a nuclear reactor out of this. you need about 80%, 90% refinement of uranium to make a bomb. so, yes, he was very much -- they were very much looking to please the soviets because they were allies, but there was no transfer of uranium that made a difference at this point. yeah, right back there with the glasses. and then directly next to you after that. and i saw you up here. >> i have a couple questions real quick. could you say the germans were going about it the wrong way with this heavy water?

>> right. >> was that absolutely the wrong way to go in light of what the united states did? second question is, do you think it's true that the counterintelligence under leslie gross was actually investigating and spying the wrong people? >> i'll answer the second question first. yes and no. they widely identified almost every member of nelson's spy chain. he got all the low hanging he fruit. he got all the lower tier people. the issue was pash, by the time it mattered, by 1943 when the american atomic bomb program was in full swing when you could have potentially stopped the

clock, he doesn't come over until then you could have stopped the rosenbergs, pash with all the experience of counterintelligence, the best of the best, had a new mission and it was to go over to europe and find out what the germans were doing. he became an offensive intelligence guy. see, you lost a lot of this institutional knowledge at this time. i'm a big fan of boris pash and i'm biased in this regard but that's my answer to that question. the first part, heavy water is an interesting concept. the germans do not mess up because of heavy water. heavy water is something we investigated as well. heavy water is a -- water where the hydrogen atom actually has -- it's two protons. it's d2o. it's heavy hydrogen. that's all we need to talk about. so it's a process that you can potentially use to create fissile material. we did it in this country and found it didn't work very well. it was a very bad way to try to create the -- the -- the kind of

necessary materiel for creating a nuclear chain reaction. we ended up using graphite in this country instead of heavy water because graphite had a much better job in absorbing neutrons which you need to do. you need to be able to absorb neutrons. graphite was easier to use. heavy water was much more difficult to develop. heavy water in the german case was an easy target. there was a capture plant in norway. we sent -- the british sent two missions of saboteurs of special forces in to try to take out this heavy water plant. it did it temporarily. groves wasn't very happy with that so groves bombed it into the stone age. and decided he wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to tip off the germans that he was targeting a heavily water plant so he bombed several other cities around it too, just for good measure to fry to hide what he was actually bombing. over 1,000 planes went over. that's how groves did things. what really derailed the german atomic bomb program is a simple math mistake.

that's one of those things in history that is fantastic. there were trying to figure out the critical mass for building an atomic on. how much material did you need to build a bomb? the head of the program turned to one of his top, top scientists, a guy who was, theoretical math beyond any of us, said figure it out, do the math. the guy took a couple of days -- did the math. this is math that took like a whole notebook for one equation. did the whole thing and said we need way too much critical mass. we need instead of pounds we need tens of pounds or even hundreds of pounds of mass. and he's like that's too much. it's impossible to do. it turns out he made a simple math mistake in the middle of the calculation. for us it would be the equivalent of not carrying a one or doing something very simple. for him, it was a differential equation. but for somebody at that level, it was a simple math mistake but no one checked it. because everyone assumed this is the best guy we had for math. you could have given a first year grad student his equation and he would have said oh

there's a mistake here. the mistake ended up when highsenberg was called in front of german command and said could this be done? maybe. it's going to take a lot of resources. it's going to be very difficult to do. and the german high command said unless you say definitely and we can do it for cheap we're not going to do it. we need to build bombs, we need to build tanks, submarines, we don't have the money to do both so since you say maybe and it's going to take a lot of money the plan is to just kind of do laboratory research. at the same time the americans were ramping up the manhattan project in 1942 the germans were ending their real serious research into an atomic bomb. and so a lot of what happens after that, like the bombing of the heavy water plant, was overkill. it was groves flexing his muscles to make sure. we didn't know that yet. we had no idea until the very end of 1944. we were very worried. the nazis with a bomb is the ultimate terror at this time. the gentleman right next to -- yeah.

-- talking about different topics, but what hit me when you mentioned ethel rosenberg with the similarities between actually the execution of ethel rosenberg, and marery suratte she may not have been involved but she knew about it, but what got her was the political climate of the time. >> exactly. >> how much of what happened applied to what happened to ethel rosingberg? >> there's no question. i think, if you look at the spying since then. if you look at some of the spies. the atomic bomb is about as important as it gets. but there have been spies we have captured since then. robert hansen, aldrich ames, john walker, who arguely had a larger impact on -- forget the atomic bomb, had a larger impact on u.s. foreign policy and they got prison they didn't get executed. we're not executing people anymore for even the most heinous of espionage crimes.

ethel didn't do anything. even if she did type stuff up, she typed stuff up. she wasn't stealing secrets she wasn't passing stuff on to the soviet union. so there's no way in my opinion, to talk about this without saying that it's with absolutely was a blood lust based on the political environment of the time. the mccarthyism is really coming into full swing. the idea that it looked like the united states was losing the cold war. at this time period. if you look at the progression of events from 1948 on you have the berlin blockades, the soviet bomb, losing china, the korean war, you know, 1953, in 1954 the soviets get the hydrogen bomb. it looks like we're going backwards. it looks like we're losing the war. so within this hysteria, within the red scare you get all of a sudden these are the guys that gave them the bomb. i mean, it's -- if ethel wasn't executed she may have been strung up in the town square. that's how much animosity was against this. and if you look at the polling from the time period the

majority of americans wanted her taken out. even if they had -- they understood that there was still confusion about her role. the majority of people like, yeah, fry them. there wasn't a lot of sympathy for them. i -- i'll go to him and then go here. i saw earlier. >> there [ inaudible ] espionage activity at the hanford engineering works? >> there was an attempt. hanford was difficult because the process there was something that a lot of people didn't quite understand. hanford was primarily producing plutonium, and most people at the very beginning did not know what plutonium was. or what it did. an american discovers it. it was the discovery during the manhattan project. it was accidental. in many respects. so hanford was a target later in the war when people said plutonium might be an issue. he ted hall and fuchs were able to pass some secrets this is something you might want to pay attention to.

so there was, hanford especially from the northern californian spies. steve nelson's group. steve nelson's group had been outed by boris pash so we knew exactly what to look for and we were able to keep them out of hanford. they were far more successful at oak ridge and los alamos, but these are higher-level spies we weren't expecting. hanford tended to be more of an industrial plant. it was not a lot of innovative research. once you figured out how to do it at los al motion and refined it at oak ridge then it finally went to hanford as a finished product to many extents. so the real research wasn't being done there. that's why you didn't have a lot of the scientists being sent to hanford. does that make sense? the microphone right there. >> the last one. >> the last question. make it a good one. >> getting back to the germans and the atomic bomb, in baseball lore there is a story about mo byrd, who was a mediocre catcher, but a terribly

brilliant person. >> right. >> he knew seven languages and couldn't hit in any of them. >> twelve. >> is it true that he was recruited by the oss to go to the meetings in switzerland? if you're hysenberg, and byrd was to stake out his revolver and shoot him. is that a true story? >> it is a true story. so byrd is the one we had at the spy museum yesterday nicolas davidov to wrote the book the catcher was a spy. he was here. he talked about it. it's the 20th anniversary of that book. made him feel a little older than he wanted to. yes, it is absolutely true. so mo byrd so heisenberg was somebody we were terrified was going to be integral in building the german atomic bomb. heisenberg takes quantum mechanics, which is the other real major physics movement of the 20th century the relatively theory which is einstein's

movement and then quantum mechanics which wasn't invented by heisenberg, he was the one who made it work. he created the uncertainty principle which is the most important principle in quantum theory. he is as good a scientist or perhaps better than the einsteins of the world, than the oppenheimers and fermis of the world. what we found out through the scene tiefic underground is he was going to get a talk in zurich, switzerland. this is on a neutral country during the war. zurich was a neutral city where everyone kind of went to talk to each other and deal with people from other countries. we found out about this and byrd was sent in. now he was sent in for several reasons. one is that he spoke very many languages and did it very well. the other was that when he was earlier put on a probably the mission which i mentioned was the american mission to determine what the germans were doing with the bomb program as a

member of the oss he realized he needed to know a little bit about this whole atomic bomb thing so he grabbed all of the quantum theory books and read them all on a plane flight from rome back to the united states. then about 20 hours he learned quantum theory. we talk about being brilliant. and so he attended this lecture and the lecture was a little bit over his head still it was about mate ricks mechanics which is what highsenberg wanted to know. he followed along a little bit but yes, if any time during this talk highsenberg indicated that the germans working on the bomb program he was instructed to stand up, pull out his pistol and shoot highsenberg in the head. the story is better than that. he's inside the theater and he's waiting for the speech to begin and in front of him walked the entire german top scientists. one of the top guys named in the einstein solard letter, and some of the other top germans sit directly in front of him, in the row in front of mo byrd.

not only could he shoot highsenberg he could have gone down the line and shot all the top german scientists and taken them out. at the talk itself there's nothing that indicates that highsenberg is working on the bomb program so byrd says i'm not sure yet. he's invited to the after party. so this after party one of our top agents in europe who organized all this, and so burgh is there talking to these top german scientists, talking to highsenberg. the whole time he doesn't know he's dealing with an american agent. berg's german is not spectacular and it was good enough and people were drinking enough that no one knew he was an american. still got nothing from it. berg arranged it to when highsenberg left berg left at the same time the two of them walked through the streets of zurich together back to their hotels. chatting. about much to inks of the day, about nuclear physics, other things. highsenberg having no idea he's an american, no idea he's a jewish american, no idea he has a pistol in his pocket waiting

to kill him and by the time the night is over berg is convinced they're not working on the bomb program. highsenberg talks about germany lost the war there's no hope. i can't wait to start working on real science again there's nothing here. and so he lets him live they shake hands they walk away. highsenberg doesn't know he was dealing with an american agent until decades later when finally the mission is declassified. you don't realize how close to death he was. yes, it's very much right out of a movie, but it's absolutely true. so i -- by the way before you leave since davidov was here yesterday he signed a lot of copies of the book the catcher is a spy which are in the book store right now if you're frommed in knowing more about mo berg he wrote this story. thank you for being here guys. i really enjoyed it. you've been watching american history tv on c-span3

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as events unfold on tv, radio and the web. next on american history tv author and journalist howard blum describes german espionage in the u.s. with a focus on the years 1915 to 1917. before america entered world war i. in his book become become 1915 germany's secret war on the hunt for the first terrorist cell in america he details how german spies engaged in sabotage germ warfare and assassination attempts in an effort to prevent the u.s. from entering the war. he also profiles nypd inspector tom cunning who helped develop a modern counterterrorism strategy. this event was hosted by the new york military affairs symposium. it's about an hour. good evening and welcome. i am pleased to welcome howard