Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Early in 1934, young Robert Oppenheimer sits in his car with a date, grad student Melba Phillips, gazing out across San Francisco Bay from their perch in Berkeley. Oppenheimer asks if he might step out for a brief walk; she agrees. He walks away and she falls asleep; hours later, she wakes and finds Oppenheimer is still gone. She contacts the police, who find the man asleep at home. Preoccupied with scientific ideas, he’d completely forgotten about the date.

Brilliant but frail and sickly as a boy, Oppenheimer stayed home and studied languages, literature, and science while other kids played. Socially awkward, he was most comfortable discussing science, but he was always so quick and firm about his ideas that he annoyed others. He graduated from Harvard in 1925 and then earned multiple advanced degrees in Europe.

Oppenheimer begins his career at a time of great discoveries in physics: Scientists are learning the makeup of the atom. Hired to teach at UC Berkeley, where he helps build a world-class physics department, Oppenheimer is known as an intense lecturer, scribbling equations furiously while talking rapidly and chain-smoking cigarettes. According to one student, “Everyone sort of regarded him, very affectionately, as being sort of nuts” (11).

Late in 1936, Oppenheimer begins to notice the Great Depression’s effects on students, who struggle to find jobs after they graduate. He attends labor union meetings and worries about the rise in Germany of Hitler’s Nazis, who begin persecuting Jews, including scientists. Oppenheimer has Jewish relatives and friends there, and he dedicates some of his salary to a fund that helps them escape. By 1938, Hitler’s Germany has conquered Czechoslovakia and Austria; it looks like a world war will begin soon.

By the late 1930s, scientists know that atoms consist of smaller particles, including a central nucleus made of protons and neutrons that’s surrounded by orbiting electrons. Some atoms are unstable and can release high-speed neutrons. In 1938 Germany, physicist Otto Hahn places such a “radioactive” element next to a bar of uranium metal and discovers that the unstable element causes some of the uranium atoms to split apart.

Hahn contacts a fellow physicist, Lise Meitner, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany for Sweden. She and her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, draw on Neils Bohr’s idea of an atomic nucleus being wobbly like liquid and conclude that a uranium atom could indeed be split apart, the two remaining droplets flying away with great energy. That energy, harvested from several pounds of uranium, would be “by far the most powerful bomb ever built” (15).

Frisch reports the idea to Bohr, who realizes the discovery makes “wonderful” sense. Bohr reports on the finding to an American physics conference early in 1939. The news reaches Oppenheimer, who recognizes at once that this “U business” contains the possibility of a new weapon.

Oppenheimer realizes that if he knows about this, so do German scientists. Hitler is threatening to attack Poland; England and France say they’ll declare war if he does. A new weapon could change the outcome.

Fearing that Germany is already trying to build an atomic weapon, Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard—both recent Jewish escapees from Hitler’s Europe—visit Albert Einstein, hoping he’ll inform US President Roosevelt of the new danger. Einstein is vacationing at his cottage in the coastal town of Peconic, New York. At once, he realizes the problem and works with Wigner and Szilard to compose a letter to the president.

War begins in Europe; several weeks later, Alexander Sachs, a friend of both Szilard and Roosevelt, meets the president, presents Einstein’s letter, and explains the potential for a devastating uranium bomb. The letter warns that Germany has halted sales of Czech uranium—a “chilling clue” as to its intentions. Roosevelt decides to act immediately. 

Within weeks, Roosevelt commissions a joint science-military Uranium Committee to look into the requirements for an atomic bomb. Einstein sends the president a second letter warning that secret research involving uranium is underway in Germany.

Meanwhile, Harry Gold agrees to smuggle industrial secrets from his current company, a chemical factory of the Pennsylvania Sugar Company, to agents of the Soviet Union. He does so in gratitude to an acquaintance named Tom Black, who secured a job for him. Black is a Communist and plays on Gold’s naive eagerness to please, as well as his desire to help the downtrodden.

As the war unfolds, Gold realizes the Soviet Communists aren’t as nice as he thought. He wants to stop spying, but his handlers threaten to expose his activities if he leaves. Instead, they make him get work at a weapons factory. They also teach him spycraft, including how to elude a tail and (especially) never to express interest in communism.

By May 1940, Germany has conquered most of northern Europe. England remains free, but it suffers under constant aerial bombardment. In June 1941, Hitler invades the Soviet Union, and Gold’s handlers convert him into a courier, delivering papers and purloined weapons samples from all across New York state (and sometimes further).

Gold’s contact, Sam—real name Semyon Semyonov—is an engineering graduate of MIT who works at a Russian trading company. His real job, though, is as a spy for the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency. He works out of the KGB’s hidden New York office, where Gold’s information is translated and telegrammed to Moscow. 

Sam and his spy partner, Alexander Feklisov, get good at evading the FBI. They know the US is trying to help the USSR fend off Hitler’s armies, but they also know there’s no love lost between America and the Soviets. If the US is content to let Russia do the fighting, the two men feel they can do their spying in good conscience.

On the west coast, the FBI keeps track of Oppenheimer, who attends discussion groups led by Communist Haakon Chevalier. Oppenheimer aches to do something to help the war effort: Hitler and the Japanese have formed a pact, and soon Japan is conquering huge swaths of east Asia. In late 1941, Oppenheimer joins the Uranium Committee. They discuss the largest human-made explosion in history: a ship carrying millions of pounds of explosives that blew up in Halifax Harbor, Canada, in 1917, killing 2,000 and flattening the port for a mile around. A single uranium bomb would do 10 times the damage. Oppenheimer has his wartime task.

Weeks later, Japan attacks the US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Planes drop bombs and sink 18 ships, destroy 350 aircraft, and kill nearly 2,400 servicemen. Roosevelt gets the US Congress to declare war on Japan, prompting Hitler to declare war on the US. The US, Britain, and the Soviets align against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Oppenheimer meets with a former student, young physics professor Robert Serber, and asks him to join “Rapid Rupture”—the code name for the effort to design an atomic weapon. Serber and his wife move from Illinois to Berkeley and take residence in an apartment above Oppenheimer’s garage, where Serber and Oppenheimer begin to draw up designs for the new bomb. They know the Germans are working on a similar project: “We were aware […] of what it might mean if they beat us to the draw” (34). 

During the German occupation of Norway, Knut Haukelid finds ways to resist the invaders. He starts by tossing a Norwegian Nazi off a ferry. Later, he joins a secret resistance group and begins transmitting information by radio to British intelligence. He’s part of a small cadre that tries to kidnap Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling, but the plan fails. Haukelid escapes to Britain, where he’s recruited to sabotage Germany’s atomic bomb project in Norway.

The Gestapo, the German secret police, question Haukelid’s mother. She thinks Haukelid is in the mountains, but the Germans know he’s in Britain. They demand to know his plans; she doesn’t know but says, “You will find out when he comes back” (37).

As German and Soviet forces battle it out in 1942, young physicist Georgi Flerov, a Soviet air force officer, reads science journals from America about uranium. The reports suddenly cease, and Flerov tells his government that “the seal of silence has been imposed, and this is the best proof of the vigorous work that is going on now abroad” in developing an atomic bomb (38). The US isn’t exactly best friends with Russia; worse, Hitler’s scientists no doubt are working on a bomb as well.

For the moment, Soviet scientists must focus on designing conventional weapons to stop the Nazi invasion, but eventually the USSR will need an atomic bomb. The only practical way to get one is to steal America’s plans. They code-name this project “Enormoz”—Russian for enormous. Early attempts fail because the FBI keeps a close eye on Soviet visitors. One American scientist accidentally reveals to a friend that he’s working on an atomic bomb; the friend secretly is a Soviet informant. The informant learns nothing further; the scientist gets taken off the project, drafted into the US Army, and sent to northern Canada.

The Soviets draw up a list of scientists likely to be involved in the US atom-bomb project and sympathetic to communism: “The first name on the list was Robert Oppenheimer” (44).