So this is a man directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and what does he do in his spare time? He prowls the streets of Moscow in his limousine and brings young women back to his home, where he rapes them inside his soundproof office. They found a bunch of bones in his backyard, so he apparently didn’t stop there. Those who left his home alive were handed a bouquet of flowers, because in his mind nothing says consent like taking flowers from the secret police. People knew about it. Even members of the Politburo warned their daughters to stay away from that asshole.
I read about a woman who was breastfeeding and refused to let Beria touch her. When the secret police mistakenly handed her a bouquet anyway, he apparently said, “Now it’s not a bouquet, it’s a wreath! May it rot on your grave!” He had the woman arrested the next day. He took a Russian actress to his home and promised her he’d set her father and grandmother free in exchange for sexual favors. He then told her: “Scream or not, it doesn’t matter. You are in my power now. So think about that and behave accordingly.” She, too, was arrested, and sent to the gulag. Her father and grandmother had died weeks before Beria offered to free them. We know most of this from the mouth of Colonel Rafael Semenovich Sarkisov, one of Beria’s most senior bodyguards. During the war, Beria had Sarkisov keep a record of all the women he took back to his house. Sarkisov was supposed to burn it all at some point, but he kept a copy, which he handed to the new head of the MGB when Beria’s fall from grace began. I really wanted to let the Kibsu have a go at Beria, but I settled for the bullet in the head he got in real life. For a deeper look into the mind of Stalin and his profoundly messed-up entourage, try Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book.[9]
Beria apparently bragged about killing Stalin. There has been a lot of speculation about Stalin’s death, and many believe he was poisoned, presumably with warfarin. It was reported that Stalin was drinking diluted Georgian wine on the night he fell into a coma.
Perhaps ironically, it was Beria who requested a new trial for Sergei Korolev after he was sentenced to life in the gulag. Beria had just been named head of the NKVD. He saved Korolev’s life to sell himself as a fair and humane leader. It did not last, but Korolev survived because of Beria’s actions.
The former is a transliteration of his Chinese name, family name first; the latter is the Americanized version he used while in the US. Qian was one of the people behind the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a real genius. While in the US, he was temporarily made a colonel so he could go to Germany and debrief Wernher von Braun and others after they surrendered to the Americans. The government later accused him of being a communist during the Red Scare. After spending five years under house arrest, he was finally allowed to return to China, presumably in exchange for some prisoners from the Korean War. The US got rid of an absolutely brilliant man because they were paranoid about communism.
In China, things were dicey at first for Qian. Mao wasn’t the most trusting guy. Qian came from the US, and his father-in-law worked for the government the communists had just overthrown. He had to profess loyalty to the party a bunch of times, but things got better for him soon enough. In 1956, he became director of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, where he ran the missile and nuclear development program. He reached his goal in record time, and China tested its first nuclear bomb in 1964. Qian also founded the Chinese space program, so you may hear from him again at some point. Qian never returned to the United States (he was pissed). He died in 2009, at the age of ninety-seven. His work on complex systems was groundbreaking and served as the basis for some of China’s social engineering experiments.
There’s been so much written on the subject, lots of movies even, that I chose to focus on smaller, lesser-known events. It’s also why the book ends in 1961, before Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Some of the events I mention were huge when they occurred—the Vanguard rocket explosion, for example. It happened live on national television, at a time when the US was deeply troubled by the Soviet space endeavor. Google “Vanguard explosion” and you can watch it blow up; there are tons of videos online.
When they go back to the US, Mia works at the Jet Propulsion Labs as a human computer. You probably recognized the term from Hidden Figures.[10] Little was known about these insanely smart women and the role they played in the space program before Margot Lee Shetterly’s book and the movie that followed. Both were huge successes and went a long way in giving these pioneers some of the credit they deserved, even if it came fifty years too late. Hidden Figures follows a group of black women working as human computers in a segregated section of NASA’s research center at Langley beginning in 1961, right after this book ends. There were, of course, some women working in scientific positions in the early days of rocket science, before the era of spaceflight. Nathalia Holt’s book[11] (also nonfiction) follows a handful of women leaving their mark on the other side of the country at JPL during more or less the same timeline as this book.
Mia thinks that, once at JPL, she might work on the Ranger program. Those were unmanned missions, basically trying to hit the moon after taking close-up pictures of the surface and transmitting them to Earth. The first six Ranger missions all failed, leading to a congressional investigation of both NASA and JPL.
At the end, Sarah dies when she causes a Titan missile to fall on her and the Tracker at Vandenberg Air Force Base. That happened, though it was an accident. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end for the people who were there. The blast doors were a mere twelve hundred feet from the explosion, and it was quite the explosion. It destroyed the two-hundred-ton silo doors. Debris flew all the way to the Vandenberg golf course, a few miles away. Miraculously, there were no casualties.[12]
One of the most interesting (and depressing) things one learns reading about climate change is how long we’ve known about it. There are people today who aren’t sure how big a role humans played in the process, but there are also plenty who simply don’t believe that the temperature is rising, or that greenhouse gases have anything to do with it. Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in 1896 (you can read his paper online[13] if you’re curious), and he wasn’t the first. We’ve known this stuff for over a hundred years.
I really enjoyed reading about ice core research. I just love the simplicity of it. I have no idea who thought about air bubbles trapped in ice first, but I like to think the conversation involved an ice cube tray and sounded a bit like the one between Mia and her mother. The hydrogen and oxygen isotope thing is a bit more complicated, but still very cool. The credit for that belongs to Willi Dansgaard,[14] the Dutch paleontologist Sarah worked with. I drop a few more names throughout the book; feel free to look them up.
9
Simon Sebag Montefiore,
10
Margot Lee Shetterly,
11
Nathalia Holt,
12