Cold War Secrets: Stealing the Atomic Bomb

On August 29, 1949,

four years after the American bombing of Hiroshima,

the USSR prepares to fire its first atomic bomb.

Stalin owed this astonishing speed

to a remarkable spy plan at the very heart

of the United States.

With ruthless efficiency,

it allowed him to find out all the nuclear

discoveries made by the Manhattan Project.

The success of this huge operation

was due to an exceptional woman

whose achievement has remained a secret until today.

On June 22, 1941,

Hitler opened his eastern borders

and three million German soldiers

invaded Russian territory with an aim

to annihilate the Red Army.

Three months later, the Germans were at

the gates of Moscow.

On the night of October 12, 1941,

Stalin asked to meet with Vassily Zarubin,

Elizabeth's husband, who was an important Soviet agent.

Stalin told him to leave for the United States immediately

on a mission with his wife.

- Elizabeth and her husband arrived

in Germany and witnessed the terrifying rise

of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Elizabeth was a committed and militant Jew,

but she didn't run from this horrific

storm of anti-Jewish persecution.

Instead, she risked her life to create networks

and to lay down the foundations of her recruitment work.

- So Ruben had known Margarita Konenkova

for a long time as the wife of sculptor Konenkov,

who made the famous statue of Einstein in Princeton.

She recruited her in 1936.

On January 6, 1939,

a news item upset the scientific world.

Two German scholars, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman,

published an article in which they demonstrated

the possibility of splitting uranium.

Nazi Germany was moving towards nuclear weaponry.

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist of Jewish origin,

who immigrated to the USA,

was the first to react to this article.

He'd been thinking about fission

and the possibility of a nuclear weapon

for a very long time.

And so he understood the implications

as well as probably anyone.

He wanted to warn the president of the United States

about this discovery,

but he recognized that he didn't have any name recognition.

And so he was in no position to approach the president.

So he went to Albert Einstein.

Einstein, of course, was world famous at the time,

just as he is today.

And he convinced Einstein to co-author a letter

with him and they sent it to the president

of the United States.

- This letter is dated August 2, 1939.

In his response, Roosevelt informs of his decision

to form a committee to study the use of uranium.

It's the first step of the future American atomic program.

- That's how the Manhattan Project got its start.

It wasn't known as the Manhattan Project at the time.

There was simply a committee known as

the Uranium Advisory Committee which handled

the affairs of this research.

But the Manhattan Project would take

several more years to come into existence.

December 7, 1941.

Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor

suddenly changed history.

The United States, which had until then been

ambiguously neutral,

immediately joined in the war.

Roosevelt's Uranium Advisory Committee,

who'd been seen as apathetic,

now took on a new sense of purpose.

- The Manhattan Project really was an enormous

national effort.

The project employed nearly 130,000 people.

The thing is, you're not going to have an atomic bomb

if you don't have enriched uranium or plutonium

to put in it, and so many of the people

involved in the project were construction workers.

They were building some of the largest buildings

ever erected before.

Specifically, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

And the main mission at the time was to enrich uranium.

The other big laboratory was at Hanford, Washington.

And they were trying to enrich plutonium there.

And so these were very important missions.

There would have been no atomic weapons

had it not been for Oak Ridge and Hanford

and the people who had been working there.

- In Moscow, work was also being done

on the nuclear front.

Even if he didn't believe it or didn't want

to believe in the bomb,

Stalin was informed by his intelligence services

that the Americans were going down the atomic route.

The Soviets had really good scientists,

but the industrialized, the western portion

of that country was decimated during World War II.

In September 1942,

Stalin assigned the implementation of the atomic plan

to Lavrentii Beria,

chief of internal and external security for the USSR.

On September 17, 1942,

the American authorities named Leslie Groves

as the director of the atomic bomb project.

A colonel who they had promoted to general

for that very reason,

he's the one who christened it the Manhattan Project.

Groves was not a scientist.

He was an engineer.

He had just finished building the Pentagon.

And he thought because of building the Pentagon

right before World War II,

that he should get a combat assignment

somewhere in Europe or the Pacific.

So he was disappointed when he was told

he was going to be the head of this top secret project.

- Less than a month after his appointment,

on the 8th of October, Groves met Oppenheimer at Berkeley.

The 25th of February, 1943,

although not everyone was in agreement,

Grove selected Oppenheimer as the scientific

director of the Manhattan Project.

And so it was this man who would go down in history

as the father of the first atomic bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer's a very complex man.

His parents were German immigrants,

but he was born in New York City,

so he was a US citizen.

It was known early on that he was brilliant,

and he went to the Ethical Culture School in New York City.

And there were sometimes that the teacher sent

him to the library because he knew more

than the teacher did.

He went through Harvard University in three years

as an undergraduate,

and so he was offered positions

around the United States,

but he took the position at University of Berkeley

to do the works on the cyclotron.

And so that kind of brought then nuclear physics west

because he said for physics it was a desert.

There was nothing going on there.

Groves and Oppenheimer,

the soldier and the scientist.

The mythical pair behind the American atomic journey.

Two very different characters who actually formed

the perfect team to drive forward

this atomic project.

I think why he chose Oppenheimer,

there were a couple reasons.

One is because he was not a scientist.

Oppenheimer was able to explain in non-scientific terms

what the Manhattan Project was about.

The other reason was because Oppenheimer

was young and hungry for fame.

There were other more senior scientific physicists

who could've been picked,

but Groves said I want somebody who is hungry,

who will go do the hard work seven days a week,

as many hours as they can.

Not to rest and say, you know, I already have a Nobel Prize.

Wanted somebody who would work really hard

and he saw that Oppenheimer was that driven.

The first mission that Groves

assigned to Oppenheimer was to choose

and recruit other scientists.

It was a fantastic challenge.

Oppenheimer became a sort of scientific coach,

in charge of the most extraordinary team

of scientists the world had ever seen.

- Oppenheimer was able first of all to recruit

scientific talent from around the country.

He would go to somebody and say,

we're working on this top secret project.

I can't tell you what it is,

but if you sign up for this,

then you'll come to a very beautiful part of

the United States and you will work

on a very important war effort.

Oppenheimer didn't specifically recruit all of them.

He spent his time recruiting the leadership

of the laboratory.

People like Robert Bacher who I mentioned,

tried to bring in the Hans Bethes

and the Enrico Fermis of the world.

And of course they all had graduate students

working for them.

And they brought in their graduate students