Saturday, July 25, 2015

Book Review 350: Stalin and the Bomb

STALIN AND THE BOMB: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956, by David Holloway. 464 pages, illustrated. Yale paperback.

Except for one astonishing, unbelievable and unexplainable omission, David Holloway’s “Stalin and the Bomb” is a remarkably full account of the first nuclear arms race.

At times, it has the page-turning appeal of a howdunit — we know the reds got the bomb, but which were the turning points, which the key decisions, which the intelligence coups, which the lucky breaks?

There really never were any atomic secrets to steal. Competent physicists everywhere all drew the same conclusions immediately when fission was discovered in 1938. Russia, somewhat surprisingly, had plenty of competent physicists.

The first chapters rehearse the history, how a country where most people couldn’t sign their names managed to have a substantial physics intelligentsia; and how the bleeding, hungry early USSR found the resources to keep training physicists. Many were revolutionary soldiers before being sent to physics institutes or engineering schools. Holloway does not say so, but few would have been educated under the tsar. Whatever else it did, the revolution tapped Russia’s best resources: brains.

In 1940, Russia was in a position to start building an atomic bomb. It had sufficient industrial and intellectual resources, but no uranium.

Until 1938, the radioactive element of interest was radium. The West got its radium from pitchblende ores in Czechoslovakia and Congo; uranium was a nearly useless by-product. Russia got its radium from deep brine, with no uranium. No systematic search for uranium deposits was made until 1944.

More seriously, there was no political commitment to a bomb. Holloway concludes that Stalin and Molotov did not really believe a bomb could work. Thus he reinterprets Stalin’s famously cool response to Truman’s tip at Potsdam that the U.S. had a new bomb of “unusual destructive force.” Stalin was not just hiding his intelligence success; he thought Truman was bluffing.

When it turned out that the U.S. had a way to conclude the Japanese war, Stalin was unpleasantly surprised. He was now unable to pick up easy gains in southern Sakhalin and  Hokkaido, or to have a say in the occupation of Japan. In Europe, he was now open to being outflanked diplomatically. And he was obliged to divert resources desperately needed for reconstruction to a crash bomb program.

When it came later to a decision about the “Super” or hydrogen bomb, that offered Russia a chance to catch up or even leap ahead and make up for the misjudgment of 1940. But here is where Holloway unaccountably gets it all wrong.

He judges that there was never any real chance that Stalin in his fear would have decided against an atomic arsenal, and that there was never any chance for international control. But for Stalin the issue was completely simple: The USSR was under relentless (if weak) armed attack by the United States. Few Americans knew it, possibly not even Truman, but Stalin knew.

Therefore the American proposals for international control or debates about whether to build the H-bomb were interpreted in the Kremlin, correctly, as trickery.  

So much for the politics of nuclear stupidity. Most of the book is about the scientists and how they operated — and why they willingly and earnestly worked to give Stalin (more correctly, Russia) a bomb, even those who were pulled out of prison camps to do it. Americans don’t want to admit it, but Russians who remembered tsarism thought Bolshevism, even Stalinism, was better.

“Those who took part in the project believed that the Soviet Union needed its own bomb in order to defend itself, and welcomed the challenge of proving the worth of Soviet science by building a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible.” They also, he thinks, maintained a certain civic independence that had been eliminated from the rest of society, with implications for the future.  

The key figure was I.V Kurchatov, head of the Soviet bomb effort. Unlike the Americans, the Russians picked a scientist, not a general, to direct their bomb program. Kurchatov was a talented administrator and had a gift for getting men who did not like each other to work together.

Holloway agrees with the general opinion that spying shortened Russia’s trip to atomic weaponry by only a year or so, at most. It appears that having Kurchatov was worth at leastas much as having  Klaus Fuchs.



 


17 comments:

  1. The USSR was under relentless (if weak) armed attack by the United States.

    Oh, bollocks. Compare and contrast with what the USSR was doing at the time, particularly with regard to Eastern Europe.

    Oh, and relentless doesn't mean what you think it does.

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  2. The USSR was concerned to keep Germany at bay permanently. A reasonable position that the US should have shared. And maybe some part of the government did. But the CIA was running its own policy and it ruined whatever policy the sensible people had.

    The Red Army did withdraw from areas that had not been used to invade the country and threaten its existence: Manchuria, Iran, Austria.

    The anticommunist policy of the US government played into the hands of the Bolshevists at every turn. Pure idiocy.

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  3. A reasonable position that the US should have shared.

    Apparently you have never heard of NATO (among many other things). Unfortunately, none of that worked, because Germany invaded 27 other countries since 1945.

    Oh. Wait. Never mind.

    The anticommunist policy of the US government played into the hands of the Bolshevists at every turn. Pure idiocy.

    That is as astonishing a statement as I've ever seen from you, and that is a very, very, high bar.

    Aside from wondering what the proper reaction should be to a vile ideology that was bent on subversion everywhere it could, there is an even more obvious question: is it because US policy played into the hands of Bolshevists at every turn that Bolshevism stands triumphant today?

    Oh. Wait. Never mind.

    Unlike you, Harry, I've seen the place first hand.

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  4. Seen without comprehending. And you didn't see it earlier, which is the relevant comparison.

    If we weren't going to overthrow the USSR regime -- and despite the ravings of the anticommunist right, we weren't -- then antagonizing it and making piddling war on it was extraordinarily stupid.

    You do not reject repellent regimes -- you have made excuses for even more repellent ones. Just communist ones. The US supported many regimes as repellent as long as they were 'on our side,' which, of course, they weren't.

    The world might heave been different -- maybe even better -- if the anticommunists had also been democrats, but the dominant strain preferred fascism.

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  5. Seen without comprehending.

    Harry, that is pure bollocks. I saw plenty, and comprehended it just fine, thank you very much. The place was completely, soul suckingly, awful.

    Everything was ugly, shabby, decaying, and filthy.

    Everything.

    You didn't see it ever; and I'll bet that if you had, it would have been through Duranty's eyes.

    You do not reject repellent regimes ...

    More Harry's Bollocks. I understand that the worst evil was communism, and that countering it often required holding our noses. No non-communist regime was as bad as communist regimes.

    See Cuba, North Korea, the Warsaw Pact, et al. All prisons.

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  6. Seen without comprehending.

    Robert Conquest saw, and comprehended. Perhaps you could learn from history.

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  7. Seen without comprehending.

    Robert Conquest saw, and comprehended. Perhaps you could learn from history.

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  8. 'No non-communist regime was as bad as communist regimes.'

    Really?

    Well, you prove my point about rightwingers and their distaste (to say the least of it) for democracy.

    'place was completely, soul suckingly, awful'

    No doubt. Being continuously attacked does not bring out the best. There are awful places where communism never set its cloven foot, so what you saw does not prove the point you want to make.

    I'll bet you never went to, say, Potosi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potos%C3%AD

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  9. Well, you prove my point about rightwingers and their distaste (to say the least of it) for democracy.

    What, precisely, does communism have to do with democracy? (Well, except the elimination of it.)

    Being continuously attacked does not bring out the best.

    When? By whom? Please be specific, you are not dealing with an amateur here.

    There are awful places where communism never set its cloven foot ...

    True, although a great many of those awful places took Marx as their inspiration.

    But never mind. It takes a great deal of ideology, and absolutely no sense, to go from the FRG to the G"D"R, (scare quotes missing from the original) and from a place people wanted to live to a place people were dying to escape.

    You never went through the looking glass, aka Checkpoint Charlie.

    I'll bet you never went to, say, Potosi.

    I'm struggling to understand the relevance here, in as much as you are trying to equate a place in an extreme environment to another place separated by a communist built prison wall.

    But never mind that, you would be, as you usually are, wrong. I haven't been to Potosi, but I have been to Cusco, which is as close as dammit is to swearing.

    And having been to Cusco, I end this reply as baffled about your point as I started.

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  10. I wasnt talking about the climate but about the treatment of labor. ayou skipped the part about the mules?

    Who attacked communism? I think you are an amateur. US, UK, Japan, Germany even freaking Bulgaria.

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  11. I wasnt talking about the climate but about the treatment of labor.

    Be specific. Provide cites.

    I think you are an amateur. US, UK, Japan, Germany even freaking Bulgaria.

    When, how, to what extent? Did any non-communist country attack a communist country with the intent of eliminating it?

    Until you back up your pronunciamentos with specifics, you are dealing in mere twaddle.

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  12. ' Did any non-communist country attack a communist country with the intent of eliminating it?'

    Yes, yours, among others.

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  13. 'Be specific'

    The documentation on the exploitation of workers at Potosi is large. For example:

    http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/the-man-eating-mines-potosi

    Nary a socialist in the story in 400 years, either.

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  14. Did any non-communist country attack a communist country with the intent of eliminating it?

    Be specific.

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  15. The documentation on the exploitation of workers at Potosi is large.

    And? I trust you have a point here.

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  16. Uh, I was specific.

    Point? Why yes, there was a point. When it comes to being completely, soul-suckingly awful, you'll have a hard time topping Potosi which is also, as it happens, the cynosure of capitalism and has been for centuries.

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  17. Harry, that is utter crap.

    You completely ignore the swath of awfulness that was socialism: so bad it needed a wall around it.

    And if Potosi is the cynosure of capitalism, why are there so vanishingly few examples in the capitalist world?

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