Lecture 8

Moral Opposition to Nuclear Weapons

1. Soon after use of the nuclear bomb, many scientists, even those crucial to the bomb's creation, led a scientific movement opposing its use.  Among these scientists were: Joseph Rotblat, Leo Szila, Albert Einstein, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
2. Joseph Rotblat was a Polish emigrant to Great Britain, a close collaborator of Chadwick Initiator, and a participant in the British bomb project. He moved to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project.  Rotblat resigned after the defeat of Germany in objection to the project's continuation.  In response, the US Government accused him of being a spy.  The US press later called him an “unknown” physicist of no importance.  Afterwards, Rotblat moved back to the United Kingdom. Rotblat became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race, signing the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955, and with Bertrand Russell he founded the Pugwash Conference in 1957. Despite the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, he advocated establishing links between scientists from the West and East. Just as the Hippocratic Oath provides a code of conduct for physicians, he thought that scientists should have their own code of moral conduct. He was knighted in 1998 and died in 2005.
3. J.R. Oppenheimer wrote publicly about his reactions to the Hiroshima bomb: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another. 

Attempts at Global Nuclear Control

1. Acheson-Lilienthal Report - Dean Acheson was charged to design a plan of international control on nuclear weapon development. Acheson was well aware of his limited understanding of the scientific aspects of atomic energy. To assist the committee, he appointed a board of consultants that would work out the details of the proposal. Its chairman was David Lilienthal, an energetic, optimistic man who had successfully headed one of the most admired achievements of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority. By far the most influential consultant was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist who had been the director of the Los Alamos laboratory during the war and was now at the University of California at Berkeley. On March 17, 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal report was ready. The key was an Atomic Development Authority that would control the whole field of atomic energy, from mining through manufacturing. Rather than rely on international inspection teams -- what might be called atomic cops -- the consultants proposed to control potential cheating at the source, the uranium and thorium mines. This solution, developed by Oppenheimer, Acheson termed "brilliant and profound." The Acheson-Lilienthal report recognized that with the fundamentals of atomic energy widely known, it was impossible to outlaw atomic weapons. It concluded that "so long as intrinsically dangerous activities may be carried out by nations, rivalries are inevitable" and that, therefore, a single international authority should become the only legal participant in activities associated with atomic arms.
2. The Baruch Plan - Bernard Baruch, a conservative Wall Street Banker, was charged by Truman to present the plan to the newly founded United Nations. Baruch made it clear he was not about to accept the report as written and present it to the United Nations; as he put it, he would not be "a messenger boy." Moreover, he would not include any scientists among his advisers. Baruch assured Lilienthal that he could "smell his way through." Baruch was worried about putting the profitable US mining business under international control.  Baruch made two key changes in the Acheson-Lilienthal report that proved fatal. He insisted that swift and sure penalties greet violations and that punishment not be subject to a Security Council veto. Such conditions, Acheson believed, were a prescription for failure.
3. The Soviet Union, a non-nuclear power, insisted upon retaining its United Nations veto and argued that the abolition of atomic weapons should precede the establishment of an international authority. Negotiations could not proceed fairly, the Russians maintained, as long as the United States could use its atomic monopoly to coerce other nations into accepting its plan.
4. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate, proposed an international convention prohibiting the possession, production, and use of nuclear weapons.  Only after the convention was implemented, should measures be considered to ensure “the strict observance of the terms and obligations.” 
5. In London, on July 9, 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein created the Russell Einstein Manifesto, wherein the following points were made:
   
   1.  Scientists have special responsibilities to awaken the public to the technological threats, particularly nuclear threats, confronting humanity.
   2.  Those scientists with the greatest knowledge of the situation appear to be the most concerned.
   3.  Nuclear weapons endanger our largest cities and threaten the future of humanity.
   4.  In the circumstance of prevailing nuclear threat, humankind must put aside its differences and confront this overriding problem.
   5.  The prohibition of modern weapons is not a sufficient solution to the threat; war as an institution must be abolished.
   6.  Nonetheless, as a first step the nuclear weapons states should renounce these weapons.
   7.  The choice before humanity is to find peaceful means of settling conflicts or to face "universal death."

6. The Pugwash Conference - Russell and Rotblat proposed an annual international conference on nuclear disarmament. The first conference was planned by Nehru for India, but this was postponed due to the outbreak of the Suez crisis. An offer by Aristotle Onassis to finance a meeting at Monaco was rejected. Cyrus Eaton, an industrialist in America, intervened. Eaton had been a trustee of the University of Chicago and had known Russell (a visiting professor there) in 1938. He provided financial support for the conference of scientists to meet in his hometown of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. The first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs was held in 1957.  In 1995, the Nobel Prize was given to Joseph Rotblat for his work in the Pugwash Movement. 

Cold War and Proliferation

1. After Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and the defeat of Germany, the US was believed to be in the absolute lead in nuclear weapon technology, US even supported the Baruch plan for a short period of six months. But proliferation had started even before the Trinity test and developed rapidly to a whole set of Nuclear Powers over the following decades.
2. Spies and Proliferation
3. 1. At the Potsdam conference of 1945, Stalin was informed about the US bomb project. An efficient Russian spy system in the US had been established based on US communist cells and emigrant sympathies and worries about a single dominant political and military power. Klaus Fuchs, a German born British physicist and part of the British Collaboration at the Manhattan project, passed information about the Manhattan project and bomb development and design Plans to Russia. He was arrested in 1949 in Britain and convicted to 14 years of prison.   He served 9 years, then returned to East Germany as Director of the Rossendorf Nuclear Research center.  The Fuchs case caused panic and enhanced security in the US. Fear of communist take-over was fueled by McCarthy propaganda. Numerous subsequent arrests and trials occurred culminating in Rosenberg case!
   2. It is unknown whether Fuchs' fission information had a substantial impact. Considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much "time" this saved the Soviets. Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs' data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb (“Joe-1") should resemble the American plutonium bomb (“Fat Man") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs.  The information Fuchs passed on the hydrogen bomb was too early to be of much material use: the key methods for making a hydrogen bomb work had not yet been discovered in the United States during the time Fuchs was working on the project (the Ulam Teller mechanism was not proposed until 1951). Soviet physicists would later note that they could see as well as the Americans could that the early designs by Fuchs and Teller were useless.

World map in 1980, in the cold war.  Image courtesy of  Aivazovsky.  Click to Enlarge.

Start of Soviet Weapons Program

1. The Soviet Weapons Program was ordered by Stalin in 1943 after being informed about US efforts. The administrative head of the program was Lavrenti Beria.  The scientific director was Igor Kurchatov, who headed the Russian nuclear research program and built the first  Russian cyclotron in 1934.  At first, the program size was limited, with only about 100 people, including 25 physicists.
2. Citizen Kurchatov - (1903-1960); head of the Soviet Nuclear physics program. He developed the big Russian Cyclotron in 1934, built the first Russian reactor in 1946, developed the first Russian fission Bomb in 1949, and the first fusion bomb in 1955. Named after him are the Kurchatov Institute and element 104 Kurchatovium. Kurchatov managed to build, with the full support of Stalin and Beria, a competitive nuclear research program from 1943 to 1945, stimulated by successful Trinity test. He built an entire weapons research laboratory structure called Arzamas-16, taking Manhattan project structure as a guide. Arzamas-16 was often referred to as Los Arzamas (since 1993 sister city of Los Alamos). Arzamas-16 represented a network of “secret cities” and research labs.
   
3. Arzamas-16 - In 1946, the little monastery town Sarov disappeared from Russian official maps. The town became the site for the first Russian nuclear weapons laboratory.  Presently home of two weapons facilities: The VNIEF nuclear weapon design institute, and the AVANGARD warhead assembly facility.  Today, Arzamas-16 (Population: ~ 82,000) is fenced off from the surroundings. It has been the center for Soviet/Russian nuclear research for 50 years. Besides Arzamas-16 there existed nearly 50 additional nuclear weapons research, production, and test sites distributed over the former Soviet Union.  Privileged workers and researchers were under heavy KGB surveillance.The camps and facilities were all build by GULAG workers and POWs.
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