Western Expectations
America judged the Soviets would take considerable time if they were to develop atomic weapons, comparing the tremendous U.S. effort and capacity with the war-damaged Soviet industrial base and limited technology. Although Soviet weapons designers benefited from the American plutonium bomb design, they had to independently validate the material they were given in preparing their first bomb. The Soviet Union also had to invest substantial resources in developing the engineering and industrial infrastructure to translate a theoretical design into an actual weapon.
The matter of secrecy came up at an Interim Committee meeting in mid-May 1945. The question of when the Russians might get the bomb — considered crucial to the decision of whether to tell them of the weapon before its use — was left unresolved. At that meeting, James B. Conant, the only member of the committee proper with training as a scientist, voiced the almost unanimous opinion of those who had built the bomb that the Russians would catch up with the United States in three to five years. Groves was the sole dissenter.
The Secretary of State's Committee would be the first governmental body to look into the atomic secret outside of the Manhattan Project. Appointed to head that committee by Byrnes and Acheson, former TVA Director David Lilienthal wrote in his journal of the opportunity this task presented: "Inevitably (as I see it), the assignment would force an examination of the crucial question: What is there that is secret? If my hunch that in the real sense there are no secrets (that is, nothing that is not known or knowable) would be supportable by the facts, then real progress would be made. For then it would be clear that the basis of present policy-making is without foundation." Lilienthal was also openly skeptical of what he termed "the Army-sponsored thesis that there are secrets." He continued, "And since it is in the Army's hands (or, literally, Gen. Groves') to deny access to the facts that would prove or disprove this vital thesis, there has been no way to examine the very foundation of our policies in the international field."
The Intelligence Community's first judgment on Soviet atomic capability was made very early in the Cold War. It appeared on 31 October 1946 in one paragraph of ORE 3/1, a short, but wide-ranging estimate on the progress of a number of Soviet weapons programs. Although ORE had very little evidence on which to base its analysis, it made a fairly definitive judgment: "It is probable that the capability of the USSR to develop weapons based on atomic energy will be limited to the possible development of an atomic bomb to the stage of production at some time between 1950 and 1953." ORE revisited the question on a regular basis and refined the judgment, but the principal effect was to increase the weighting toward 1953. In other words, with analysis, ORE's projections became more precise but less accurate.
In December 1946 a chemical engineer from the former I. G. Farben plant at Bitterfeld in East Germany volunteered in Berlin that this plant "had started in the past few weeks producing 500 kilograms per day of metallic calcium. Boxes of the chemical are sent by truck every afternoon to Berlin, labeled to Zaporozhe on the Dnieper. Calcium is believed to be used as a slowing agent in processes connected with the production of atomic explosive." This was the lead the Foreign Intelligence Section of the Manhattan District Headquarters had been waiting for.
The "Summary Report of the Status of the Russian Nuclear Energy Program" on 1 June 1947 stated that the "indication from metallic calcium production ... appears to be the construction of two plutonium producing reactors ... with 500 megawatts (MW)" of total power. * "It is particularly significant that a project of this size cannot be supported by the estimated reserves of uranium ore available to the Russians ... 514 tons uranium oxide already available and 2200 tons of uranium in reserves. ... The best information indicates that this program is not proceeding well, and in fact uranium metal appears to have been produced in insufficient quantity to operate more than a very small pilot reactor, such as that first operated in this country in December 1942. Thus, if it is assumed in the worst case that Russian progress from this date will proceed at a rate comparable to that of the American project ... then to produce a single bomb, January 1950 represents the absolute lower limit." There was not a single thought that — just possibly — the Russians were planning in the light of full engineering information, and that US estimates of their expected available uranium were low. The Greeks called it "hubris".
European Command forthwith stopped all further shipments of vacuum pumps and sicromal to the East Zone. The U.S. had already put vacuum pumps on the "COCOM" export control list in April 1946, thereby stopping a tidy order recently placed by AMTORG, the Russian trading organization in New York. Thus export control pressure against the Russian atomic program was being applied as rapidly and as forcefully as could be arranged. How much, if at all, it slowed the Russian atomic program down is problematical, but it certainly forced Russian and Bloc industries to widen the scope of their manufactures rapidly.
An early January 1948 report from the UK, for example, indicated that "those German scientists who were deported from Bitterfeld and who had knowledge of the production of pure metallic calcium ore are at Sverdlov near Gorki." But there is no town of Sverdlov near Gorki. CIA's Central Reference Service identified the famous explosive manufacturing and shell loading plant "Sverdlov" in the town of Dzerzhinsk, just west of Gorki. Next to Sverdlov is the Chemical Plant "Kalinin," which makes the sulfuric and nitric acids used at Sverdlov for the production of explosives, and the chlorine which would be needed for calcium chloride production for feed for a calcium plant. The special calcium chloride plant designed at Bitterfeld for erection in the USSR was actually built at either the Kalinin or Sverdlov plant in Dzerzhinsk. As far as the technical side of the Bitterfeld calcium operation was concerned, by 1948 the British (and in turn we ourselves) knew as much about it as the Russians did.
The real danger would alert the Russians lay in the Soviet penetration of MI-6 and the British Foreign Office: Donald McLean, secretary to the Combined U.S.-UK (atomic) Policy Committee, and "Kim" Philby, MI-6 representative to CIA at the time, were later both shown to be active members of the Russian Intelligence Service.
A surprisingly complete photointerpretation report written in 1943 on the Bitterfeld complex to locate the calcium facilities and get exact building dimensions — something the sources never seemed to have available. In the process it was discovered just how enormous an operation the Bitterfeld Combine really was. No wonder bombing had never completely halted operations. General W. Bedell Smith, U.S. Ambassador at Moscow, later Director of Central Intelligence and Under Secretary of State, told Secretary Forrestal in July 1948 that the Soviets did not, in his opinion, have the industrial competence to develop the atomic bomb in quantity for five or even ten years. General Leslie R. Groves, who supervised the Manhattan Project and who knew the enormous problems of producing an atomic bomb, reportedly advised the US Government that "the Soviets would need fifteen or twenty years to build the atomic bomb."
Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, believed that the spread of the bomb could be limited by controlling the sources of natural uranium. In May 1945, when physicist Leo Szilard [who had induced Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project] suggested that the Soviet Union might soon produce nuclear weapons, Truman's incoming Secretary of State James Byrnes observed that "General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia". No. Szilard replied, the Soviet Union has plenty of uranium.
At the time, no Uranium deposits were known in Russia, but they were soon found. Uranium is ubiquitous; it could even be extracted on a large scale from seawater, although no country has done that yet. Over the summer of 1948. “New evidence” came to hand suggesting that earlier estimates of the Soviet Union's atomic production potential might be too low. Citing “further discussion with geological consultants, further literature studies,” and “new information from the field,” a CIA memorandum for the president reported that “Soviet reserves of uranium were higher than previously supposed.”
In the estimates of 1949 (by then these were interagency estimates by the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee under CIA chairmanship) the prime conclusion was that the Russians were headed at least for a plutonium bomb. Even as late as the mid-1949 estimate, it was recognized that if the uranium fuel were irradiated at reasonable values to yield between 200 and 400 grams of plutonium per ton of uranium, then one could assume by analogy a Russian long-range target of perhaps two 250-MW graphite-moderated Hanford reactors using about 500 tons of uranium per year, with an additional 200 tons for initial loading. These numbers always conflicted with the uranium ore estimates, which tended to be lower. In mid-1949, for instance, the distilled calcium stockpile of 680 tons easily could have produced 1500 tons of uranium metal, compared to the 850 tons probable and 1320 tons possible of uranium as judged from the ore estimate. So in the mid1949 estimate, one 250-MW Hanford-type graphite-moderated reactor was assumed as one alternative, a heavy-water-moderated reactor being assumed as the other one. Any additional later reactors were subsumed in the stated errors. These estimates consistently placed mid-1950 as the earliest possible date for the first Russian nuclear test, with mid-1953 being more likely. The general feeling that the first Russian pilot reactor went operational in mid- to late-1947 was, of course, crucial to the minimum estimate.
Most of the CIA analysts involved came from the scientific community where hard data reigned, possibly leaving them unused to using the “softer” information from covert sources. ORE did not believe that the Soviets had derived any benefit from their penetration of the US Manhattan Project, a view sustained through at least 1950. On 29 September 1949, Willard Machle, assistant director for scientific intelligence, complained to CIA Director Hillenkoetter about “the almost total failure of conventional intelligence in estimating Soviet development of an atomic bomb.”
Information on what was going on in Russia came hard. Through mid-1950, the only additional informant on Elektrostal was Dr. Hans Kerschbaum, who had been arrested and interned in the USSR, gone to Elektrostal for an interview with Riehl, instead worked on electronics at Shchelkovo near Moscow, returned in early 1949 to East Germany, and then fled to the West. He merely confirmed that Riehl was reducing uranium with calcium, though he did add that he thought it was from uranium fluoride, rather than uranium oxide. The Russian defector "Icarus" in July 1950 confirmed many of our conclusions about Elektrostal, Bitterfeld, transshipment offices, etc., but his information was primarily non-technical.
In the end, US experience, however valid it might be from a scientific or technological point of view, did not offer a valid timeline for Soviet nuclear development. It failed to allow for whatever benefits the Soviets derived from information made public after the war,[8] from espionage, from the input from captured and “immigrant” German scientists, and from the incalculable advantage they had in knowing with absolute certainty that the thing could be made to work.
Finally, in August 1949, the Russians detonated their first plutonium bomb secretly. The Air Force Technical Applications Center intercepted the radioactive debris almost by happenstance. Admiral Hillenkoetter, Director of Central Intelligence, established a Nuclear Intelligence Panel to determine why we had estimated mid-June 1950 as the earliest possible date, when in fact it occurred in August 1949.
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