Ever since World War II there have been persistent stories that the Nazis constructed an atomic bomb, and even that they tested a crude device in the closing phases of the war. It is true that an atom laboratory exploded in Leipzig in June 1942, when a nuclear pile went critical, and overheated, but the stories of a Nazi nuclear bomb have no basis in reality. As in other scientific nations, there were people in Germany who knew how an atomic bomb could be made, but some were too isolated to bring the ideas to fruition, and others seemed to have been determined to prevent the Nazis from finding out how to make a nuclear weapon. Dr Horst Willkomm, a leading German physicist, knew many of the principal players well and tells me that Otto Hahn and his research colleagues were determined not to give the Nazis the possibility of an atom bomb, and concentrated on working in theoretical physics and the design of a nuclear pile reactor. When Hahn heard that the Americans had constructed atomic weapons — and had dropped them on densely populated cities — Willkomm tells me that Hahn was ‘highly terrified’. No-one can doubt the veracity of that.
As the Uranium Club was meeting inconclusively in Germany, American physicists were meeting to discuss how to proceed. In Denmark, the great nuclear scientist Niels Bohr was beginning to formulate plans for an atomic weapon, and he was smuggled to the West by the British Secret Service shortly before the Nazi occupation of his homeland in 1940. One of Bohr’s great friends was a Japanese physicist, Yoshio Nishina, who had also known Albert Einstein. In the 1930s he had built cyclotrons in Japan, and in 1940 he was sent a report by Lieutenant-Colonel Tatsusaburo Suzuki, a military scientist, which proposed that Japan should embark upon a nuclear weapons project. Nothing was done until April 1941 when the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, reviewed the proposals and issued orders for development work to proceed. By the end of the year, over 100 research scientists were working on an atomic bomb, and mineralogists were sent out across Korea, Burma and China in search of uranium ore.
As we have seen, it is a tradition in many nations that the various arms of the military do not engage with each other, and so the Imperial Japanese Navy instructed their Research Institute to prepare their own study of nuclear weapons with several professors from the Imperial University in Tokyo. The conclusions were that a nuclear bomb was certainly a possibility, and that the Americans and Europeans would be working on the subject themselves; but that it was impossible for a weapon to be in production by the end of the war, and — since this would apply as much to the Allies — there was no need to pursue the matter. In 1943 the Imperial Japanese Naval Command returned to the topic with a pilot project under the leadership of Dr Bunsaku Arakatsu, a physicist who had studied under Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and at Berlin University, under Albert Einstein. One of his team was Hideki Yukawa, who would later become the first physicist from Japan to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.
The Army, meanwhile, embarked upon their own version of the project at Riken, while a separate arm of the Navy, the Fleet Administration Office, began funding research physicists at Kyoto University to design an atomic bomb of their own. The various schemes were surrounded by bureaucracy and little progress took place. Had the teams worked together, the outcome might have been different — but, as matters stood, the research made slow progress and there was never sufficient funding. Not until 1945 were the teams near the production of uranium for an atom bomb, and then the laboratories were attacked by the United States. By the time the Americans were inspecting the ruins of Japan at the end of the war, they discovered that the research laboratories at Riken — which they had expected to be state-of-the-art and advanced — were run down and neglected for lack of finance.
Just as in the case of the Nazis, there have been allegations that the Japanese detonated a test weapon, on 12 August 1945 at Hungnam, Korea, a few days after the atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here too, there is simply no evidence for the claim.
The idea of an atom bomb in the Soviet Union led to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) setting up an information-gathering project in 1940 and, at a conference on nuclear physics in Moscow, the proposal for research into atomic weapons was formally adopted. When Germany attacked Russia in 1941 all research was curtailed; not until 1942 was Stalin interested in an update on current knowledge. He had been lobbied by several leading nuclear physicists who had received smuggled copies of the British Maud Committee reports which said that an atomic bomb was a possibility. In spite of the pressures upon the Russian economy, Stalin at last gave the go-ahead. Espionage was stepped up and, because of the fashionable belief in communism that was emerging in Britain, a steady flow of information about the use of plutonium was beginning to reach Moscow from well-connected spies in Britain as well as America. They were also learning of the American plans for a nuclear reactor to be built in Chicago and in 1943 an eminent physicist named Klaus Fuchs came to the United States with the British team to continue developmental work.
However, Fuchs was a Russian agent, and began to send the details of the work back to Moscow. He was posted to Los Alamos with Julius Rosenberg, another spy who was later executed with his wife. By the end of the war, all the current information on the bombs that the Americans were to successfully produce had already been sent to Russia, and teams of Soviet and American experts went on to pursue rival claims for supplies of uranium ore as Germany was invaded. For Russia this was of overwhelming importance, as they knew of no sources from which they could mine their own uranium. The Americans retrieved about 1,100 tons, ten times as much as the Soviets.
Work in America had been well planned and perfectly coordinated. It was believed to have been carried out under complete secrecy, and the Americans were convinced that nobody outside the research project could possibly know anything about what was planned. On 16 July 1945 the first bomb was exploded in New Mexico, and at the Potsdam Conference later that month President Truman revealed to Stalin that America had a new super-weapon. The President was taken aback by Stalin’s reaction: the Russian leader seemed to be not in the least surprised. In August, the Soviet Union formally declared war against Japan and Stalin ordered that an atomic bomb should be manufactured ‘as quickly as possible’. It was by then, of course, too late.
The uranium brought back from the Soviet conquest of Germany was used to build Russia’s first nuclear reactor, code named F-1, which was first initiated on 25 December 1946. They later found supplies from East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), and also in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. The Russians subsequently found large domestic supplies, and their first atomic explosion, code named First Lightning, took place on 29 August 1949. The design was based on the United States’ plutonium weapon, nicknamed Fat Man, details of which had been smuggled by spies back to Russia. And so the years of the Cold War began.
Meanwhile, the Russians speedily designed and built the world’s first nuclear power station at their ‘science city’ of Obninsk, about 60 miles (100km) from Moscow. It was an experimental pilot station designed to produce about 30mW of thermal power, sufficient for 2,000 homes. The construction started in 1951 and the plant was connected to the domestic supply in June 1954. It ran successfully until April 2002.