Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Houtermans—in Otto Frisch’s words an “impressive eagle of a man” but “not quite adult” and with “an over-developed sense of humor which he often exercised at the expense of his colleagues… and no discipline”—was fortunate to be alive. He had been born in Danzig [26] Danzig is now Gdansk in Poland. to a wealthy Dutch banker and his half-Jewish Viennese wife. He had rejected his father’s bourgeois values but was proud of his Jewish ancestry. He had grown up in Vienna and, as a young man, had been psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud until he admitted he had been making up the dreams he so vividly related.

While visiting his father in Germany, Houtermans, who had become a communist, had come to the attention of the Gestapo, who arrested and interrogated him. After his release, he fled first to Britain and then to the Soviet Union. However, in 1937, he fell victim to Stalin’s purges, was arrested by the Soviet secret police, and spent the next two and a half years in prison, where he was tortured and questioned relentlessly. He was made to stand for days on end (revived with buckets of icy water when he fainted) until his feet became so swollen his shoes had to be cut off. Other times he was stretched against a wall and his feet were kicked back until his whole weight rested on his fingertips—an agonizing position for any length of time. Ernest Rutherford’s favorite protege, Peter Kapitza, helped Houtermans’s wife and their two children get out of Russia, but he could do nothing for Houtermans himself. Thin and broken—a “former human being,” as he introduced himself to another prisoner—Houter­mans kept himself sane in the appalling conditions by performing complex mental mathematics and scratching equations with a matchstick on scraps of soap.

In 1940, as a result of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, Houtermans had been taken to the border town of Brest Litovsk, handed back to the Nazis as a “German,” and immediately arrested by the Gestapo as a suspected Soviet agent. He managed to send a brief message—“Fizzl is in Berlin”—to a friend, who guessed he must be in prison. This man hurriedly enlisted the help of Max von Laue, who was also Houtermans’s friend and who used his influence to secure his release. Houtermans found himself a job with the inventor and scientist Manfred von Ardenne, who had a private laboratory in a suburb of Berlin. Von Ardenne was interested in fission studies and, perhaps surprisingly, had persuaded the German post office to divert some of its large but mostly unallocated research budget to him. It was in von Ardenne’s laboratory that Houtermans made his perturbing discovery.

Houtermans decided that he had to get a warning out of Germany and chose as his messenger the Jewish scientist Fritz Reiche. Reiche was still living in Berlin with his family but in circumstances of such stress and isolation that his daughter had had a breakdown. He had finally, after repeated desperate efforts, secured visas for the family to emigrate to the United States. They departed just six weeks before the implementation of new laws forbidding any further Jewish emigration. Reiche reached the United States safely in April 1941 and passed on Houtermans’s message to the physicist Rudolf Ladenburg at Princeton. Because of the risks of carrying anything on paper, Reiche had committed Houtermans’s words to memory. As he later recalled, Houtermans had asked him to say: “We are trying here hard, including Heisenberg, to hinder the idea of making the bomb. But the pressure from above…. Please say all this; that Heisenberg will not be able to withstand longer the pressure from the government to go very earnestly and seriously into the making of the bomb. And say to them, say they should accelerate, if they have already begun the thing.”

Ladenburg handwrote a note to Lynam Briggs, the head of the U.S. Uranium Committee, reporting Houtermans’s warning. He also organized a dinner in New York for Reiche to meet his fellow refugees, including Eugene Wigner, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann. Reiche told them what Houtermans had said. As he later recalled, “They listened attentively and took it [in]. They didn’t say anything but were grateful.” No doubt for all those at the dinner, events in Germany were gathering an ominous momentum. The nightmare of an atomic bomb in Nazi hands might indeed become a reality, justifying Leo Szilard’s bleak conviction that “Hitler’s success could depend on it.”

Two other countries, both shortly to become combatants, had also been assessing the potential of nuclear fission during the previous two years.

In the Soviet Union official interest in fission was slow to ignite. Under Stalin’s pact with Hitler, the Soviets had occupied part of Poland in September 1939 and had fought a brief war with Finland, which had ended in March 1940. However, at that time the Soviet Union remained on the sidelines of the European war—a position Stalin intended it should occupy as long as possible—with no particular impetus to explore the threats or possibilities of atomic weapons.

Most Soviet scientists were skeptical about the immediate applications of nuclear fission. They were also still reeling from Stalin’s purges and reluctant to draw attention to themselves by promoting initiatives that might not succeed. At a conference held in Kharkov in November 1939, scientists had concluded that although “the possibility of using nuclear energy” had been discovered, the chances of achieving it were “fairly fantastic.” Peter Kapitza agreed, believing that separating isotopes of uranium would require “more energy than one could count on obtaining from nuclear reactions.”

Nevertheless, Russian scientists continued to conduct some experiments to test atomic theories, and, despite Szilard’s attempts at censorship, enough articles appeared in the American press to rouse their interest. These included a report by William Laurence in the New York Times of 5 May 1940—describing experiments with U-235. and suggesting that the implications of nuclear fission could be enormous—which was mailed to a prominent Russian scientist by his son, who was working at Yale. This new information, coupled with their own new experimental findings, convinced some Soviet scientists that their earlier reactions to fission had been too casual. In the summer of 1940 they began to lobby a more receptive government, which set up the Uranium Commission, including Kapitza among its members, and instructed it to draw up a research program. Yet less than a year later, when on 22 June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, reneging on their neutrality pact, Soviet scientists were immediately diverted from atomic research to other work perceived as more pressing.

In 1940 in Japan, Lieutenant General Takeo Yasuda, a research engineer and the director of the Aviation Technology Research Institute of the Imperial Japanese Army, had noted reports on fission appearing in the foreign press. At his request Yoshio Nishina—Niels Bohr’s former pupil who had become Japan’s leading physicist—began to look into the potential applications of fission. Nishina was currently building a large 250-ton cyclotron at Tokyo University—a successor to a smaller 28-ton device—using plans provided in a spirit of comradely cooperation by Ernest Lawrence’s team at Berkeley. On the basis of advice from Nishina and others, in April 1941 the Imperial Army Air Force authorized the establishment of an atomic bomb project. With the incipient Russian program wavering and Britain and the United States still pondering the way ahead, Germany and Japan were thus the only countries with military research projects specifically dedicated to establishing the feasibility of an atom bomb.

On 13 April 1941 Japan and Russia signed a five-year neutrality pact. On 2 July, ten days after the German attack on Russia, an imperial conference was held in Tokyo to discuss Japan’s territorial aspirations. Among the decisions made by the conference and approved by Emperor Hirohito were measures to hasten the end of the protracted war in China and for an advance south “in order to establish a solid basis for the nation’s preservation and security.” The goal was the establishment of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, under which Japan would satisfy its aspirations for more land and be guaranteed access to the natural resources such as oil and iron lacking in its home islands by imposing a hegemony over much of its region. The initial step would be an early advance into French Indochina.