“Whatever happened to freedom of speech?” Miranda was shaking her head. “Sounds a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War, the way people ratted out their friends and neighbors to the Stasi.”
“Oh, come on,” said Thornton. “We were in the midst of a horrific war. Global, apocalyptic war. Secret codes, spies, sabotage — those were real things, legitimate concerns. A slight erosion of civil liberties in a top secret military installation seems pretty far down on the list of World War II evils, if you ask me.”
“Children, childen,” I said. “Let’s not bicker.” I heard Miranda draw a deep breath, and saw her relax, which meant Thornton and I could relax, too. “Does the army have a card that could tell us why Leonard Novak was reading books on espionage when he was killed?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ve got people combing the Venona transcripts to see if they can find anything that might connect with Novak.”
Miranda looked puzzled. “Venona was the code name for a massive counterespionage operation,” Thornton explained. “Between 1944 and 1948, the agency that’s now called the NSA — the National Security Agency — intercepted and decoded thousands of telegram cables sent to Moscow from Soviet consulates around the world. Most of them were boring, bureaucratic stuff. But some, especially the ones from New York to Moscow, were spy reports. They used code names for people and places — the messages were in code, so the names were codes within codes — but the code-breakers eventually managed to decipher most of them. Amazing feat, really, because the Soviets were using complicated codes that changed every day. Cryptanalysists have extra gears in their minds — like physicists — that help them grasp things we mere mortals can’t make sense of. Anyhow, one of the interesting intercepts was telegram 940—”
“Telegram 940? I like it,” Miranda interrupted. “It even sounds like something from a spy thriller.” She was leaning forward on the table, rapt with attention now. Thornton smiled, pleased to have won her over, or relieved that she was off her civil-liberties high horse.
“Telegram 940 was sent in December 1944,” he said. “It listed seventeen scientists who were working on what it called ‘the problem.’ The names included Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Nils Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Arthur Compton — some of the top brains of the Manhattan Project.”
I held up a hand, which I practically had to wave directly between Thornton and Miranda to catch his attention. “I know some of those names,” I said, “but not all. Fermi was the guy who cobbled together the little reactor under the stadium in Chicago. But Bethe and Bohr — remind me. Physicists?”
“Right,” he said. “They were in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. Bohr was a Nobel laureate — so were Lawrence and Fermi, of course. Bohr escaped from Denmark under the noses of the Nazis, who were hoping to recruit him. He made it to London, then he and his son were flown to the States in an army transport plane.”
“Edward Teller,” said Miranda. “I’m not a fan of his.”
“No, I wouldn’t expect you to be,” he said. “Teller’s big claim to fame came in the late forties and fifties, of course, when he pushed for the hydrogen bomb — the ‘super,’ he called it — over the objections of Oppenheimer. Back during the Manhattan Project, Teller and von Neumann helped develop the implosion trigger for the plutonium bomb, the one used on Nagasaki.” I saw Miranda’s eyes cloud at the mention of Nagasaki; I’d noticed that anytime a discussion turned from the herculean labors of the Manhattan Project to the explosive fruits of those labors, it troubled her.
I tossed in another question, hoping to lead us away from Nagasaki. “How about Kistiakowsky? I never heard of him.”
“Interesting guy,” said Thornton. “Explosives expert. He cleared the first ski slope in Los Alamos by using rings of explosives to cut down trees.”
“Cool dude,” said Miranda. “See, that’s a use of explosives I can really get behind.” I was just congratulating myself on asking about Kistiakowsky when Thornton dropped the other, unfortunate shoe.
“Kistiakowsky was one of the unsung heroes of the project, if you ask me,” he said. “He was the bridge between the pie-in-the-sky theoretical physics and the nuts-and-bolts realities of building the bomb — the ‘Gadget,’ they called it in Los Alamos — and making it actually explode. Kistiakowsky came up with what’s called the implosion lenses for the plutonium.”
“Lenses?” I hadn’t known the atomic bomb involved optics.
“Not really lenses,” he said. “That was the term they used for wedges they formed out of conventional high explosives. The lenses surrounded the spherical core of plutonium. The theory was, when the lenses exploded, they’d create a very focused shock wave, which would compress the plutonium enough to cause critical mass.”
“And kablooey?” The edge on Miranda’s question was so fine as to be nearly invisible. I noticed it, but Thornton didn’t.
“Kablooey,” he said, with unfortunate cheerfulness. “But the wedges, the lenses, had to be machined with incredible precision — like, accurate to zillionths of an inch. Nobody thought Kistiakowsky could do it, including Oppenheimer. In fact,” he went on, warming to the story, “one reason they did the Trinity test with a plutonium bomb was because they were confident the uranium bomb would work but afraid the plutonium bomb would be a dud. Poor Kistiakowsky was already being set up as the scapegoat for failure. He finally got so fed up with the skepticism that he bet Oppenheimer a whole month’s pay — against just ten bucks from Oppenheimer — that it would work. And of course it did.”
“So Kistiakowsky got his ten bucks,” said Miranda, “and Nagasaki got vaporized.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “A real win-win.”
“Could’ve been worse,” said Thornton, finally punching back. “Fermi could’ve won his bet.”
Oh hell, I thought, here we go.
“And what was Fermi betting,” she snapped, “that maybe we’d come to our senses and not use the damn thing on innocent civilians?”
“Guys, guys,” I said, trying to de-escalate the conflict, but the chain reaction had gotten out of hand.
“No,” shot back Thornton. “Fermi was betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere. He was taking side bets, too: Would it incinerate the whole world, or just New Mexico?”
“Jesus,” said Miranda. “That is sickening.”
“You. Weren’t. There.” Thornton’s voice was quiet but hard as steel. “How dare you judge them? How dare you? You and I are part of the most sheltered, pampered generation ever to walk the face of this earth. These scientists, a lot of them, were refugees, Jewish refugees, from Europe — the land of Hitler, the land of the Holocaust, remember? Six million Jews murdered, just for being Jews. Tens of millions of other civilians killed just for living in the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong politics. If those scientists felt the need for a little gallows humor, who can blame them? The gallows was casting a shadow over the whole damn world at the time. How dare you sit there in your privileged, liberal smugness and pass moral judgment on them?”
Miranda drew back as if he’d slapped her. “Excuse me,” she whispered. She stood up, and before I knew what was happening, she was gone, the steel door of the bone lab banging shut behind her.
Thornton and I sat staring at each other. “Well, shit,” he finally said. “I just scorched the earth, didn’t I?”