The mistake that the men of science made was that they confused ideas with techniques and capabilities. Fr. J. Robert Oppenheimer verged on an understanding of this when he told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1949 : �history time and again shows that we have no monopoly on ideas, but we do better with them than most other countries.� The idea of nuclear fission, and ultimately of the bomb, was never a monopoly or a secret. But translating that concept into an actual device was a monopoly and would have remained so for many years were it not for the wholesale theft of atomic secrets by the Soviets—(etc).
In 1933, two years after Dr. Harold Urey and his associates at Columbia had discovered heavy water, one of the first major breakthroughs on the road to nuclear fission . . , the Soviets were still groping . . . (etc)..
( . . )
At the time Moscow �modestly� boasted of [some] scientific achievement, Dr. Enrico Fermi was working in Italy with a group of brilliant assistants, including the spy-to-be Bruno Pontecorvo. (Etc.)
Science had become a kind of detective story in 1938, when Dr. Otto Hahn and Dr. F. Strassmann, two chemists, determined that when uranium is exposed to neutrons under the right conditions, an isotope of barium is created. Not fully comprehending what they had discovered, Hahn wrote to the physicist, Dr. Lise Meitner, whom had had smuggled out of the Third Reich, where she had been persecuted for her Jewish antecedents. From Copenhagen, Dr. Meitner wrote back explaining the significance of the experiment. �She pointed out,� Hahn later told Lewis Strauss, the inspiration and financial backer of much early nuclear study, �that what had happened was that we had fissioned the uranium atom. The use
of the word �fission� in that connection, I think, was made for the first time.�
As a physicist Dr. Meitner was also able to do the ;computation necessary to a full comprehension of the experiment. ( . . ) The atomic scientist Leo Szilard reported that the Physics Department at Princeton was �like a stirred up an heap.� Szilard . . . wrote . . . tat the new discovery� might lead to a large-scale production of energy and radioactive elements, unfortunately, also perhaps to atomic bombs.� His letter is dated January 25, 1939.
By February 22, 1939, Szilard and Fermi were at hard work, fairly certain that they could create a chain reaction . , (etc). Early in March, the two scientists had advanced far enough in their experiments to believe that there was a fifty-fifty chance of success, and Strauss had agreed to finance the purchase of a quarter ton of uranium oxide for their use. And now the question of security arose. ( . . ) The major leak was Joliot-Curie in France—conceited, selfish, a Communist, and ambitious. He, of all the Western
scientists, insisted on publishing those results of nuclear research he knew—which were considerable.*
* Under pressure from Joliot-Curie and the British scientist P. M. S. Blackett (latter to be quoted approvingly by the Kremlin for his support of its position on international �control� of atomic energy), an important paper by Szilard and Walter H. Zinn, Instantaneous Emission of Fast Neutrons in the Interaction of Slow Neutrons With Uranium, was published despite their protests.
( . . )
The first alert for the Soviet Union that something might perhaps be added to the dimensions of war came in July 1939, when Leo Szilard and Edward Teller visited Albert Einstein, then vacationing at Peconic Bay, Long Island. The scientists engaged in nuclear research had arrived at several conclusions : (1) their own experimental chain reaction had reached a point where further studies
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could not be privately financed ; (2) success in manufacturing an atomic bomb had moved from the realm of possibility to that of probability ; and (3) government action was needed to corner the most important source of uranium, the mines in Katanga, then part of the Belgian Congo. Strauss had been urged to intercede with President Roosevelt, but he had wisely absented himself . . . by pointing out to the eager scientists that his close association with Herbert Hoover would make him non grata at the White House. The intermediary most likely to impress the President, it was decided, would be Einstein.
The Einstein letter to Mr. Roosevelt, dated August 2, 1939, was not delivered until two months later—(etc). ( . . ) . . . President Roosevelt had set up a high-level advisory group made up of himself, (etc).
From that point on, everything about the research project was presumably so hush-hush that even mention of atomic energy was kept out of the news papers. The American public and the Nazis remained thoroughly in ignorance. The same cannot be said of the Communists. Starting in the early 1930s, the Center in Moscow, working through Red Army Intelligence, Fourth (Industrial) Section, had been systematically placing its operatives in orbit around the great men of science in the West. (Etc).