Freeman Dyson has an interesting—alas, far too interesting—review of Frank Close’s new book, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy, which I guess should be titled “Physicist and Spy,” although Dyson pretends he isn’t sure if Pontecorvo, a brilliant experimental physicist who worked with the legendary Enrico Fermi, actually was a spy, even though Pontecorvo did defect to the Soviet Union in 1950, after having worked on nuclear energy projects for both Canada and Great Britain, starting in 1943. In addition, Pontecorvo is on record as having said, sourly, in 1993 to a request from the Russian government to submit to an interview by an historian “I want to die as a great scientist, not as your fucked spy,” suggesting that he felt both used and abused by the Soviet Union.
According to Dyson, Pontecorvo’s defection robbed him of the chance to be a truly great scientist:
“[T]he move to Russia was a disaster. He was an experimenter, and needed world-class apparatus to do world-class experiments. Several times, he had ideas for experiments that might have produced major discoveries if he had been free to use the newest apparatus in Western Europe or the US. Doing experiments with the apparatus available at Dubna, he could not be competitive. He was well aware that the move to Russia had ruined his chances of becoming a world leader in physics like his teacher Fermi.”
Consideration of Pontecorvo’s plight leads Dyson to take a backwards look at the “atomic spy” era of the early fifties, highlighted by the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In doing so, he takes up the disinformation campaign that I first encountered as a teenager in the late fifties, reading popular accounts of atomic energy1 by such men as Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg,2. Over and over again I was told “There’s no secret to building an atomic bomb. Anyone can do it.” Hey, these are the guys who built the bomb. They know what they’re talking about!
Of course, they did know what they were talking about, but they were lying. It is in fact extremely difficult to build an atomic bomb. The U.S. is the only country in the world that ever built a “scratch” bomb—thanks to the greatest assemblage of scientific talent the world has ever seen, drawn principally from Europe, backed by the industrial and engineering might of the US, with motivation supplied by the greatest threat to western civilization the world has ever seen, Adolf Hitler. Brilliant men like Seaborg were lying because they didn’t want to admit that spies within the Manhattan Project, principally Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, had given the Soviet Union vital assistance in building its bomb, and they further did not want to admit that the widespread sympathy for the Soviet Union within the scientific community may have been a contributory factor to the success of the Soviets in penetrating the Manhattan Project.3 Nor did they want to admit how deeply many of them had bought into Stalin’s lies and his enormous crimes.
Dyson echoes this line, saying that the technical information passed to the Soviet Union “had only a minor effect on the history of Soviet weapons development. Perhaps the spies accelerated the production of the first Soviet bombs by two or three years, but those bombs soon became obsolete and were superseded by new designs invented without the help of spies.”
That’s passing over the possibilities of “alternative history” rather quickly. Suppose that the Soviet bomb had been delayed three years. Would Stalin have engineered the Korean War without it? The Korean War was the true fuel for McCarthyism—Joe’s career as demagogue in chief falls almost entirely within the four years during which 50,000 Americans died fighting in a country few of their countrymen had ever heard of. Suppose the secrets provided by the physicist spies had saved the Soviets five years instead of two or three. Then the USSR would have lacked the bomb after Stalin’s death, when, for a brief while, the now forgotten Georgy Malenkov held leadership of the USSR. Would he have made a deal with the West?
Well, probably not. I’m pretty much a “what could have happened did” guy. To my mind, the decades-long collision between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was unavoidable. But a U.S. without the Rosenberg executions, without the Korean War, and without the McCarthyism that it bred might have occurred, if large numbers of brilliant men had not sold their souls to communism. That would be a US worth having.
But Dyson isn’t done in his attempt to rewrite history. He argues that “technical” spies, like (presumably) Pontecorvo, and Fuchs and Hall, don’t do much damage. It’s the “tactical” spies, like Kim Philby who give spies a bad name. Philby, “a British intelligence officer who held high positions in the British diplomatic service. He gave his Soviet contacts lists of names of undercover agents operating in various countries, so that Soviet authorities could quickly eliminate them. He was directly responsible for many disappearances.”
It’s “humorous,” I guess that Dyson, even when talking about the bad, “tactical” spies, can’t quite bring himself to use words like “kill,” or “murder,” or “torture,” even though that’s what happened to the undercover agents that Philby identified. Dyson also says, quite stupidly, of tactical spies, “They are fair game for any soldier to kill, with or without a legal trial,” which is absolutely false.
But Dyson still isn’t done, nor am I done with him. He recalls a fascinating event from his youth, when he first came to the US from the UK as a graduate student at Cornell. The Cornell community was set on its collective ear in 1947 when a friend of Dyson’s, Alfred Sarant, a junior professor of engineering, suddenly disappeared, leaving his wife and two children behind. Another friend of Dyson’s, Carol Dayton, also disappeared, leaving her husband and two children behind. Like Pontecorvo, they had gone to the Soviet Union. Dyson tells Sarant’s story this way.
“Sarant was in fact a Soviet spy, working in a ring organized by Julius Rosenberg and including another engineering colleague, Joel Barr. The ring operated successfully for several years during and after World War II, while the three spies were engaged in various kinds of secret work. Then Rosenberg was arrested and executed, and Barr and Sarant—along with Carol, who had not been a spy—escaped to Russia. Joel Barr became Iosif Berg.
“Staros [Sarant’s Russian name] and Berg lived openly with their Russian names, and their past history as spies was forgotten. A Communist society gave them some of the opportunities that they and Rosenberg had dreamed of when they were idealistic left-wing students at the City College of New York and Cooper Union in the 1930s. With the help of Nikita Khrushchev, who was then trying to modernize the Soviet Union, Staros and Berg built a high-tech city with the name Zelenograd, intended to be the Soviet equivalent of Silicon Valley. Zelenograd flourished under their leadership and became a center of electronic and computer industries.
“It is difficult to weigh the good that they did in providing modern electronic technology to Russia against the evil that they did to the United States by spying.”
I will skip the jokes about Soviet smart phones (because they’re too easy) and remark instead on Dyson’s comment that “A Communist society gave them some of the opportunities that they and Rosenberg had dreamed of,” a statement that I find both preposterous and disgusting. Precisely how did the “modern electronic technology” Staros and Berg supplied benefit anyone except the Soviet elite, whose unending lust for power and privilege, coupled with their limitless incompetence at actually running a modern society, systematically degraded the lives of hundreds of millions of people? Dyson wants to believe, and wants us to believe, that the dreams of his left-wing colleagues—to use science to better the lives of human beings all over the globe—came true in some measure within a communist society. This is, in fact, a lie, and it’s not appropriate for someone as brilliant as Freeman Dyson to tell lies.
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I read popular accounts because I was entirely incapable of understanding real physics. ↩︎
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Wikipedia gives a brief account of Seaborg’s extraordinary accomplishments here. ↩︎
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Project Director Robert Oppenheimer, for example, was not a communist, but both his brother and his wife were. Oppenheimer subsequently said “I wanted to believe that a train that I was riding on would never stop at the wrong station.” But it did. ↩︎
