I was reading about the theft of the US Govt Manhattan project secrets (of how to built an atomic bomb). It is quite apparent that the Soviet union was able to acquire quite a bit of technology, that substantially shortened their own A-Bomb program. What I find unbelievable is the amateurish way that the spies contacted their sources-some guy shows up at the airport, carrying a tennis ball in his right hand-his contact announces “I am agent “X””-the spie replies “I am agent Y”. did these interchanges really take place?
Also, los alamos NM (where the research and dvelopment took place0 was supposed to be the most secure place on earth-how were the Soviets able to penetrate it so easily?
I suspect that the Russians got a LOT of dated material-which probably did cut down their dvelopment time-but they would have had no problem doing the whole thing by themselves.
What do historians today say?
The government was very intensely watching scientists at Los Alamos. The problem was that they were watching the wrong scientists. The ones they were suspicious of were completely innocent and the ones they paid no attention to had no trouble moving secrets. But it wasn’t just Los Alamos. British scientists gave as much if not more information to the Soviets. It wasn’t that the Soviets penetrated either place as much that certain scientists didn’t want the U.S. to have hegemony over atomic power.
And what’s wrong with simple techniques for identification? The simpler, the better. Complex schemes call attention to yourself and go wrong far more easily.
I don’t really know the direct answers to your questions, but these links are pretty interesting:
In employee orientation (I started working at LANL one year ago), they talked about security and spies from WWII and the Cold War Era. The thing that stuck out in my mind was that one of the scientists hand-coppied much of the classified information that he delivered to the USSR.
One thing about the Lab that made it so secure from outside penetration at that time was its geography. Los Alamos is basically built on a ridge, and there are two large canyons on either side. This does nothing to prevent moles and defactors, but does limit access quite a bit. Today, this geography is still favorable, but technology has advanced to the point that it is less consequential.
This cloak and dagger routine is cliché for a reason; it’s popular and it works. In more sophisticated times cut-outs are used, but a physical handoff, if done properly, is harder to track than a digital trail or mail service.
The thing is that the Soviets themselves really didn’t penetrate anything. The used Americans sympathetic to the notion of Communism (even though what the Soviets were practicing at home was far more akin to fascism) to recruit other Americans, including scientists and engineers involved in the Project. There were only a few, but while physical security of the facilities and data was reasonably tight (though Dick Feynman has a few amusingly critical things to say about this in his autobiographies), security of personnel was not so much. The Project needed brains, the best they could find, and didn’t have the time to thoroughly vet everyone against possible alterior motives. Even if they had, they probably would have lost some of their most critical (and loyal) people, like Robert Oppenheimer, who had close associations with known Communists and sympathies to the ideals of humanistic socialism, but was in no way a security risk or a traitor.
In the end, you have to have trust in your people. Even if you strip search everyone leaving the premises (good luck with that, or retaining a highly talented workforce that will put up with such procedures) you can’t prevent people from divulging what they know. In the case of Klaus Fuchs, he had a very signficant role in both Manhattan and the follow-on “Super” projects. And vetting people for patriotism isn’t sufficient; many of these people sincerely felt that they were doing the best thing but not allowing the United States and Great Britian to hold a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
Stranger
You’ve also got to consider that scientists, as a class, have an inherant aversion to secrecy. The reason people like me and Stranger have high post counts is that we like telling people what we know. Well, the Manhattan scientists liked telling folks what they knew, too… Except what they knew was how to make A-bombs.
Apparently, the LANL still has bugs to work out…
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/03/national/main2151021.shtml
I’d argue that there are aspects of that factor that cause security problems:
-Boredom factor. Not much to do in LA, especially in the WWII days. So the lab rats have to drive to Albuquerque, or Santa Fe at least, and you can’t keep very good tabs on them there…and some of them will be out to get the maximum amount of partying in before making the trip back up the hill. I’ve actually dumped a couple of friends because they were using me as an unpaid inn keeper for their Albuquerque weekends, and expecting me to party 'till all hours…and that was pre Indian casinos. If I was a handler, at least one of them would have been pretty easy to compromise I bet.
-Being a socially awkward male in a small town filled mostly with socially awkward males probably made the average cold war era lab worker a pretty ripe target for a honey trap.
-If you huck a bundle of documents over a fence into the woods, odds are pretty good nobody will find them by accident for at least a few days. And its pretty up there…not much trouble convincing anyone that your out for a nature walk.
-Lack of alternative employment in the area when the worker bees get tired of bumping up against the career ceiling for non-phDs, or the threats of layoffs due to funding cuts, etc. The LANL docs I know seem pretty gruntled…the non-docs not so much.
This is probably true, but the big leaks (or at least the acknowledged ones) weren’t extortion or blackmail gags but people voluntarily handing over large swaths of technical data for a multitude of philosophical, financial, or personal reasons. While spy literature is full of people being cajoled or tricked into acquiring and transmitting classified secrets in order to save themselves or a loved one from disclosure or harm, the reality is that the best and most prolific spies are those who are predisposed to provide information; witness the Walker Spy ring, the Boyce-Lee case, Bob Hanssen, and the Cambridge Four. And the “honey trap” mentality as never been particularly effective in the West; old stories (possibly urban legands) abound about CIA employees letting themselves be picked up by a “bee” for a roll in the hay and then filing a boastful foreign contact report complete with pictures offered up for blackmail. One would think such behavior would be indicative of someone incautious and therefore unsuited to intelligence work (even, or perhaps especially data analysis) but there are all kinds of stories of this sort of flakiness in the intelligence community, and perhaps it’s better to let people make an open joke of it than to force them to conceal such attempts to preserve their career.
I think your other points are on the money, though; boredom and career/lifestlye dissatisfaction seem to be strong impulses for people to shift loyalties or contrive a rationale for breaking their integrity and giving or selling controlled information.
True, but I’d like to think that most scientists or engineers are smart enough to make a disctinction between “interesting public knowledge” and “classified”. I don’t doubt that it’s likely–to a point of certainty–that someone working on top secret information with the kind of intensity and focus that was required during the Manhattan/Super projects would inadvertently drop a bit of secure information here and there, but unless you were already familiar with the context for it I doubt it would be terribly meaningful, and you certainly couldn’t acquire technical plans or data that way, though it would be useful in confirming what you already have in hand.
Of course, some scientists have a philosophical issue with secrecy (which I think is what Chronos is probably referring to). One would think such individuals would avoid working in an area where secrecy is required, but people change perspectives and philosophies, and perhaps in some cases a hypothetical scientist thinks that the best way to challenge the system is to divulge secure information. This is generally a bad strategy–it’s unlikely the other side plans to use the information in a benevolent manner–but it can also be frustrating to be responsible for developing some cool (or threatening) new technology and not to be awarded kudos or control over it. Still, there are plenty of scientists like Andrei Sakharov or Ted Taylor, who worked on nuclear weapon development and later opposed nuclear proliferation without disclosing secrets or becoming spies.
Stranger
Much of it was done pretty much exactly like that.
Fuchs is the obvious case. In contact with Soviet intelligence in Britain, he’s at very short notice switched to the US. Unable to set up a new contact before he goes, there’s inevitably an apparent clumsiness (and danger) to his initial spying activities in the US. But he’s suddenly found himself in a strange country and so he has to go through the whole risky process of establishing contact all over again.
None of the leaks to the Soviets from Los Alamos were really a result of them targeting the site. The likes of Fuchs and Greenglass were, in their different ways, essentially people who wound up there and used the opportunity to pass stuff out. Moscow didn’t so much penetrate the place as reap the windfall from sympathisers who were posted there.
By contrast, there does appear to have been a slightly more systematic approach at targeting the Rad Lab at Berkeley.
Of course, with Fuchs there’s the additional complication that he was vouched for by the UK.
It’s generally agreed that the first Soviet test used a close copy of the Trinity design, but the driver behind this decision was Beria and his paranoia rather than Kurchatov. The main Soviet physicists involved were all clearly highly competent and quite capable of delivering a success by themselves. The leaks from Los Alamos thus may have had a marginal effect on their programme, but that was about it.
None of this ever happened during WWII. Do you have any evidence that any of it happened at a later time?
I recommend Richard Rhodes’ Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which, despite the subtitle, has a great deal of fascinating information about the Soviet bomb program (Rhodes was able to research the Soviet archives as well as American and British ones) as well as their spy network, including Fuchs and the Rosenbergs.
He switches chapters between the US H-bomb project and the Soviet/spy stuff, so it’s easy to just read the things you’re interested in, but I recommend it all.
Last night I listened to a radio play about Oppenheimer et al, a friend of mine recorded it some time ago, and has also lent me American Prometheus (on Oppenheimer) by Kai Bird and M J Sherwin.
At the time Russia was an ally, the LA scientists probably knew more about the concentration camps than most people (at least one had a spa cure in Dachau) so it is not hard to see some of them reckoning that the technology was safer spread amongst super powers.
Last night’s listening also made me suspect that the intrusive security, and the nature of those running the security, would have been rather disturbing to a scientist who considered themselves members of the human race before citizens of a specific state.
It had not occurred to me, prior to last night, that McCarthyism might have been alive and kicking prior to his appearance on the scene.
Just a thought.
I am not suggesting it has ever happened. The OP opined that LANL “was the most secure place on earth”, and Pygmy Ruggerthen mentioned the Los Alamos’ geography as a security asset. I am saying that putting a secure facility out in the boonies can be as, if not more, averse to security as it is helpful. A point made over and over again in this thread is that the overwhelming majority of security problems are people related, and not problems with the physical security of a facility. Isolating workers from the “real world’s” social connections and infrastructure makes maintaining morale, loyalty, and vigilance all the harder.
Come to think of it, I could argue that the lab’s remoteness was a factor in the Win Ho Lee affair: The distance between the lab and places where typical Americans would like to, and can afford to*, live increases the temptation to take work home…“I could spend two hours on the road to put in 3-4 hours on Saturday, or I could just take this stuff home and work on it there.” And yes, I know it is pretty well established that the Chinese got nothing from W.H.L., but it was still a security breech.
*Los Alamos is surrounded by rugged terrain, Bandolier National Monument, and Indian land. There is some residential property available in Los Alamos, and nearby White Rock. There are some really nice places up there, but the natural beauty of the area means that lab workers are in competition with the wealthy looking for vacation/retreat homes for the limited land. And while pretty, many people raised in urban environments wouldn’t choose to adapt to such rural living.
Yes, this is mainly what I meant. Many scientists take the view that knowledge should be known, and in fact that’s what drives many of us to become scientists. I was perhaps trying to be a little too glib before, which may have obscured my point.
And there’s also one very useful piece of information from the Manhattan Project which could not possibly have been kept secret, regardless of the security measures. That’s the simple fact that an atomic bomb was possible. Before it was done, nobody was quite certain that it could be. But after, once you’ve got the conclusive proof that the bomb is possible, it’s a lot easier to motivate your own project to build one.
I saw a film on cable wherein the actor playing Leo Szilard (sp?) visits the secretary of state and tells him exactly that and goes on to point out that Truman was never briefed about that. Do you think the Soviets would have abandoned work on their project had the Americans not conducted the Trinity shot?
Thanks,
Rob
They barely had a project at that stage. Indeed it’s plausible that, despite the leaks to the Soviets, Stalin didn’t really grasp what was at stake until Hiroshima. Once he realises what the bomb has done there, he immediately prioritises the issue.
But it’s also unlikely that the US could have maintained the secret of the weapon’s existence into the postwar world - even if they’d wanted to - merely by not taking the step of setting one off. Someone like Szilard would probably have seen it their duty to humanity to publicise the matter once the war was over and hence the story would get out that way.
By mentioning geography as a security asset, I meant from outsiders, not from insiders, which is how all the information got out. Heck, that’s why they put the Lab here.
Seconded on how awesome the natural beauty is! Unfortunately, seconded on your housing comments, too. Downtown Santa Fe, on the other hand, is a good time!
No.
As Chronos notes, just knowing that it is possible gives great impetus to the funding and effort to develop The Bomb. By most accounts The Germans (certainly the Heisenberg-lead team out of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) concluded that a fission bomb of the gun-type device was impossible in terms of both size and attaining supercriticality fast enough for an explosively energetic reaction.
Would the Soviets have abandoned their work? Possibly not, but clues they gleamed from the American and British efforts clearly gave focus to their efforts. On the thermonuclear device, however, the Russians were quite advanced, and the general claim is that Andrei Sakharov came up with his “Third Idea” entirely independent of the essentially identical American Teller-Ulam process.
Stranger
Goo info. I read that Igor Kurchatev alerted Stalin to the (possibility) of an atomic bomb-he had noticed that all refernces to fission research wnt missing from the American and British scientific journals, in 1941. The sudden change was enough to convince the Russians of what we were up to. Did the Russians get much valuable info on the hydrogen bomb? Or did they work it out themselves?