lot have been looking at a of the treaties over the last five years and i found quite a few inequities on the part of the federal government to live up to treaties. i guess all of us are aware that this.are days in here, roald burley was talking about a treaty made by the u.s. government with his great-grandfather. i believe you mentioned that the lands in oklahoma are actually in over ship of the tribes with certain restrictions. but i have a question that i would like to ask all of you and i would like to give the spec to you too. if individual families on these lands and have deeds to these lands, and over the years there have been oil companies drilling on these lands and they never received one penny of revenue from all of this drilling, then what is the next step to get this rectified. if they are on their land and they just took the land without considering the family's what is it that can be done? what do you recommend? for a quickime response. >> get a lawyer. [laughter] i graduate about 80 of them a year who do indian law. .> thanks so much for mya new lecture students on john mcintosh. [applause] 10-minute break and then the podium will resume. >> you are watching american history tv all weekend every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history . on american history tv, it was a great surprise to the american government when the soviet union tested the first atomic bomb in 1949. international spy museum historian vince houghton talks about soviet spies who infiltrated u.s. atomic on research and how this may have led to the development of the russian a-bomb. the international spy museum and smithsonian associates cohosted this 90-minute event. >> we're delighted to have our own historian. i don't know if you have met him. dr. vince houghton, historian and curator of the museum. he has a degree from the university of maryland where the research centered on u.s. scientific and technological intelligence. nuclear in the second world war and the cold war, which makes him ideally suited to deliver today's talk. he also got his masters degree focusing on the relationship between the u.s. and russia. so, you may get some questions focusing on the current difficulties with russia. he has taught extensively, including at the university of level on history of the u.s. intelligence, diplomatic history, cold war, history of science. u.s. army veteran. served in the balkans where he assisted in both civilian and military intelligence activities. so we're just delighted to have you as our speaker, as the first speaker. so, please help me welcome vince houghton. [applause] >> thank you, peter. thank all of you for coming here today. to get to talk about the atomic spies and nuclear intelligence, this is my field. this is also my passion. i try to do everything i can to talk about this to anyone who wants to listen. so it is nice to have people to listen. this is my first chance to speed to the smithsonian group. i came to the spy museum in march. so i only know you by reputation. the reputation is that your by far the most educated, the most intelligent audiences that we can possibly have here at the spy museum. i don't want to come across like i am pandering. to are far too intelligent buy any kind of pandering. have you lost weight? [laughter] in all seriousness, this is my field. nuclear intelligence is something that i fell in love with at a very early age. at seven years old, i saw a tv movie called "the day after" in the 1980's. i really fell in love, probably a weird word when you talk about the nuclear annihilation of the united states. but i fell in love with the intricacies of the weapons system that is the worst the world has ever seen but the same time might be primarily responsible for us not having a major war in 70 years. that dichotomy is something that true me to the field. today we start with the atomic spies that spied on the united states. we start with background. united states was shocked to learn the soviet union detonated the first atomic bond. -- atomic bomb. they nickname it first lightning. in the united states we call it joe-1. a little homage to joe stalin. it was made in kazakhstan. they did it there so that no one would know about it. they wanted to keep the bomb secret. unlike you assume a big public relations coup. the worry was when the united states found out that the soviets had a bomb we'd double or redouble the efforts to create the next generation of weapon systems and we'd create more around more bombs. they were right. they didn't know the united states created scientific intelligence plat tomorrow to -- platform to discover when the soviets detonated the first atomic bomb. e call this mess and measurement intelligence. this was the same bomber used to drop a bomb on hiroshima. this was modified to take air samples around the world to see if there are fission byproducts in the air. this was afoat-1. air force office of atomic energy. this discovered the bomb days after it was done, by picking up the excess radiation, the excess fission byproducts as it flew a racetrack pattern in the pacific ocean. immediately the united states got this information. the secretary of defense lewis johnson didn't believe it at first. he couldn't come to grips with the fact that the soviet union developed a bomb long before anyone assumed they would do so. truman could not believe the soviets were now a nuclear power. he famously said i couldn't understand how the "asiatics" were able to match what we did so quickly. after 95% of the u.s. atomic physicists looked at the data brought back by the one flight afoat-1 they concluded without any real equivocation that the soviet union had in fact detonated their first atomic bomb. truman had no choice but to accept this and announce to the american public in september that an arms race had begun. now, congress did what it did best. they rallied quickly and started pointing fingers at everybody they could possibly point fingers at. how could this happen? how could we be so surprised that the soviet union detonated a bomb long before we thought they were going to? how did they get it so quickly? the estimate, the intelligence community had given them was 1953. as the most probable date for a soviet bomb. the worst case scenario that the intelligence agencies had given the government was in 1951. they were just too slow and too stupid to be able to get the bomb as quickly as they did. so, new ideas, new hypothesis were brought up. how did they get the bomb rolling? the senate and the house had a joint nuclear energy committee brought together. they brought the head of the c.i.a. in front of it and several other witnesses. they started trying to brainstorm possibilities. one of them was that they started earlier than we thought. the intelligence was right. it was going to take them about eight years to build a bomb. the fact is they started in 1941. we weren't really wrong. it did take them eight years. the fact that you didn't know when they started is a bit problematic if you want to say how good your intelligence was but this is something that made them feel a little better about themselves. they also argue that maybe they had better germans than we did. during the second world war there was a huge policy, which we will talk about later that rounded up all the top german atomic physicists. you have a little knowledge about this with operation paperclip and the space program. the same thing was done with the atomic physicists like heisenberg. the germans that were second rate and underlings were snatched by soviets but all of a sudden, maybe the germans were better than ours. nobody bought this but they felt better. there is also something called open source intelligence. we talk more about this later on but these are publicly available resources the soviets could have used to find out information about the american bomb program. the one they were able to latch on to was the idea of espionage. when we built the one here in the united states come out of five people working on it, only two were killed. this is exceptional for wartime. two people were killed every day doing -- building aircraft's and tanks in the united states. the fact that building an atomic bomb only killed two people meant two things. one, we were very good at this and we were very lucky. number two, we have very stringent safety restrictions imposed. careussians don't really too much about human life. they could probably knock a couple of years office program. commerce was happy to hear this. had smartsible they scientists. we dismiss them out of hand. we will talk about our perception of soviet scientists. everyone kind of chuckled to themselves. no, that was not the reason. but the one they were able to latch onto was this idea of espionage. the soviets were stupid. the soviets are evil. but they are able to steal our ideas. they have nothing original on their own but they were able to come in the united states and deal with the commies running around giving the secrets to the soviets and that's how they got the bomb. that is going to be the preface of our conversation today. so what we are going to focus on, are three major ideas. three major questions that are historically important for the atomic spies. one, who are the spies? what makes up their spy networks? what were the ideology? what was the reason they were spying on the united states? secondly, when did the united states discover the espionage effort? what did we do to try to stop it? most of the american public doesn't discover the esspy an only effort -- espy -- espanoge effort. it's one thing to say there were spies or it doesn't matter but how much of a difference did it make? the first two questions are straight-forward, factual, informative questions. this one is the real counterfactual, the what-if of history? professional historians, academics like myself, we like to pretend we don't like the counterfactual what-if questions. it's above us. we don't want to deal with the what-if questions. we are lying to you. we like them as much as anybody else. these are the kind of questions that the academics sit around at 2:00 in the morning after having too much wine or something else and have these conversations, like we all do. you know, if i could have a time machine, if i could go back and punch out hitler's great, great grandfather right before he met his great, great grandmother, he wouldn't have hitler. or if i could stop the j.f.k. assassination, would the beatles still be together? these are the questions we throw around. this is the counterfactual. if the soviets didn't have espionage, they would still have gotten the bomb? if they didn't have espionage, how quickly would they have gotten it? these are questions we like to debate. let's talk about the sources of the atomic intelligence, that the soviets were able to gather during this time period. first, volunteers idealogues, the people you have heard of. the people who truly believe in the soviet system. that truly believe in the idea that communism was the new way of life that was going to take over capitalism in the long run. this also open source intelligence. these are things that are widely publicized. whether they are publications put out by the u.s. government or they are things like course syllabi or the college university schedules. we will talk about that later on. then there are foreign sources of intelligence. the french were a key component to all of this. the french get a bad rap and sometimes rightly so. but they did have brilliant scientists. the problem was their brilliant scientists were also communists. finally, there was actually target intelligence but espionage professionals. this is one of the least told stories of the atomic spy period, that there were g.r.u. professionals who infiltrated the united states with the expressed purpose of bringing back information about the american atomic bomb program. so let's talk about the espionage infrastructure. these aren't one off spies, but professionally organized infrastructure. at the top was the nkvd but assistance from the g.r.u. nkvd is the predecessor to the k.g.b. g.r.u. is soviet military intelligence. at the head of this was a man named lavrenti beria who was stalin's intelligence chief. he was responsible for the intelligence gathering. he was a horrible person. we'll talk about this in a second. he was so good at infiltrating the u.s. atomic bomb program that stalin kept him around. in the early 1940s before world war ii, stallin killed everybody. he took out many people that were a threat to him in the future. he took out his entire hierarchy. but beria survived because of his ability to infiltrate the atomic bomb program. we'll talk about the people one-by-one in a second but you can see there is a hierarchy here developed by the soviet union from the residents, the chief of station but the resident in united states, to the people directly responsible for running the atomic spies in the united states. work our way down to harry gould, who was an american courier, bringing messages from the atomic spies to the soviets. finally the c.p.u.s.a. communist party of the united states and the main person steve nelson who is responsible for establishing very little known spy ring at colleges and universities in the united states. so let's break them down a little bit. at the top of the soviet hierarchy is beria, the head of the nkvb. he is not a nice person. he had interesting tapes and young girls and boys. -- very interesting taste in young girls and boys. he really enjoyed torturing people. he wasn't somebody that ordered torture. he ordered it and then watched it and took a lot of real pleasure in it. stalin did not like him much. he was hated throughout the soviet system but he was so good at what he did that he was kept around. the interesting thing about beria is he was one of the pure architects of the red terror during this time period. personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. he is ironically the last person who fell victim to the red terror. when krusheft took power in the 1950's and started to destalinizing the soviet union the last summary excuse of the stalin period was beria. -- execution of the stalin period was beria. nice karmic justice for him in the end. then you have zarubin, a soviet intelligence resident. he was the top soviet intelligence person in the united states. not in washington, d.c. actually, he was stationed out of new york city. that was the main base for sew yet intelligence during the war. -- for soviet intelligence during the war. hierarchy continues with yakalev. he was the senior case officer. this is the person who will be running the spies on a day-to-day basis. yakalev, himself, his name was yaksolv. he came to the united states under the pretense he was a general counsel of the soviet union in new york city. pretending he was a lawyer. this was his cover as his activities as the case officer for the spy network. what makes him interesting and important in the case his specialty was scientific and technological intelligence. you don't want to just send anybody if you are going to run an atomic spy ring. atomic weapons are complicated. especially in the 1940s when very few people understood what was going on with the nuclear fission. you wanted somebody that understood scientific and technological intelligence which made him the perfect person for this. then you have alexander fekkekov. a name some of you might be familiar with. he was the direct handler of rosenberg and was also the resident in the 1960's. where people may know his name is he was the back channel for the cuban missile crisis. he was a man who robert kennedy and others spoke to, to create the deal to trade the jupiter missile in turkey for missiles in cuba. his book is fascinated. it's called "the man behind the rosenberg. mem rar of the k.g.b. spy master that helped resolve the cuban missile crisis." the title gives away everything. there is not a lot of secrecy of what this is about. this ended the debate about julius rosenberg, but we will talk more about that in a second. there was also a left liberal debate was rosenberg scapegoated because he was jewish or because he was a liberal? this bookended a lot of that debate -- this book ended a lot of that debate. lower levels. in some cases there were no religious or racial distinctions. harry gold was a chemist by trade. he is somebody that made a lot of sense to run atomic spies. he was born to russian-jewish immigrants. he never really gave up the russian side to him. interestingly enough, he was a successful chemist and he lost his job during the great depression. this helped radicalize him. we talk about ideology. anytime we talk to people through our -- who are 40 and below, they don't really understand how people can turn against their country and become a communist because communism for anyone that age was a dying institution that obviously doesn't work. in the those who grew up 1930's, who came of age in this time period and saw the depression, the loss of jobs 25% unemployment and the idea of bread lines, the fact that people were going through such hardship, and then looks over at the propaganda coming from the soviet union where everybody had a job, where everybody had a good life, where there were no class distinctions. in some cases, there were no religious or racial distinctions. this is a pipe dream. nonsense. but this is what was coming out of the soviet union. ideologically it's hard to explain and not hard to empathize with people who said this is the real wave of the future. harry gold was one of these guys. when he lost his job in the great depression this is one of the first steps that led to radicalization. he is a courier later on for one of the most important atomic spy and he worked with rosenberg's ring. steve nelson is one of the most unknown of the atomic spy ring leaders. he was a primary recruiter for a lot of the university-based professors who were giving information to the soviet union. nelson was naturalized citizen. he wasn't a u.s. citizen to begin with. he spent time in spain in the spanish and the war. -- the spanish civil war. he was an american volunteer that fought alongside of the republicans in that time. he moved to russia for several years and returned to the united states in the early 1940's. be forewarned he was on the radar the minute he walked back in country. he was not somebody who was able to sneak back in and get away with it. when he was here, he was a member of the national committee for the communist party of the united states and the leader in california. he had no official title but he was the guy who ran the communist party. his specialty and what he did in the war was directing the activities at the university of california at berkeley. which for those who went through the 1960's, this became the hotbed of liberalism. this was the case in the 1940's. a target-rich environment for recruiting people to communist party. he would span out from california to recruit professors and grad students from many major universities, chicago, columbia university in new york. all focusing on people who were working on weapons design for the u.s. government. mostly nuclear but not always. sometimes radar, sometimes proximity fuses or things that could be stolen or used by the soviet union. take a look at the recruits themselves. i have broken the recruits down to three tiers. start with the top tier. these are the people that either are incredibly important when it comes to what information they provide the soviet union or the most well-known, the most famous of the atomic spies. alan nunn may and the reason he leads this off is he is the first spy uncovered by the western intelligence. you have klaaus fuchs, rosenberg and greenglass, rosenberg's brother-in-law. let's talk about the second tier. i even had the next slide in front of me. i don't know why i did that. the second tier doesn't mean they are less important. i means they are less well-known. you a list here of not only the scientists but also people like ethel rosenberg who were somewhat controversial in whether or not they contributed to atomic spying. these are people that aren't as well known but they are very important. finally the third tier. the third tier is primarily steve nelson's ring. steve nelson created a ring of scientists who were somewhat lower level. they were to provide bits and pieces of information to the soviets throughout the second world war and the early cold war. none of these guys were individually responsible for the soviets getting a weapon. but they provided little bits and pieces throughout to give them this information. the bottom, acronym at the bottom is the federation of architects, junior chemists and technicians. so now let's talk about some of the guys individually. so alan nunn may is famous for being caught in many respects. he pled guilty and was sentenced by the british to ten years hard labor in 1946. he was caught because of a defector, a man by the name of igor gazengo who was a clerk out of the ottawa embassy in canada. he came to canada and fell in love with the west. like the real dangers that most of the soviets really feared is that when some of their people would get a taste of freedom, they would really embrace it. he embraced it. he was young. he had a young wife and a young family. he liked the fact he could go to movies anytime he wanted to, walk around, move around the country without being chased or followed. he liked the fact that the canadian people really reached out to help the soviet union in the second world war. we looked at west and certainly the canadians, they have a reputation of being the most polite people in the world. even though they were facing real hardships in canada, they did everything they could to give money, support and supplies to the soviet war effort. at the same time he saw there was a massive effort against canada. this didn't sit right with him. so when he was called back he decided he wasn't going to go. his wife said if you are going to leave, let's defect. grab everything you can. so before he left the soviet embassy in ottawa, he grabbed every piece of paper he saw lying around. he gave the information to canadians and part of it was a massive espionage effort directed at the canadian, american and british atomic bomb program. this outed may who was arrested and pled guilty in 1946. may, himself, is a really top quality scientist. he said he was a man named james chatwick in britain to where he a man namedd with james chadwick in britain to where he got his ph.d. he is famous because he discovered the neutron. if you remember back to middle school science, proton, electron and neutron. nunn may, like other scientists there is a lot of controversy about whether or not he had a full-fledged role in the atomic program. well, in 2002, before he died he did a full confession. he called his children and said i was a spy. i was giving information, i gave a lot of information over. he spied for g.r.u., the soviet military intelligence. he was responsible for giving samples of two isotopes of uranium 233 and 235. you think back to middle school science, isotope is a type of element that has a little different atomic number. the atomic number has a little different atomic weight. a couple of more or less neutrons. uranium had different isotopes. ones that mattered were urainum 235 and to an extent uranium 233. he gave the samples to the soviets and he talked about the process of creating plutonium. it's not a naturally occurring element. if you look at the periodic table, plutonium comes after uranium. we thought uranium was the only element that you could have -- the highest element on the periodic table that you could find on earth. we were right. however, when you refine uranium and put it through a process like a nuclear reactor, you create transuranics. these are elements that are heavier than uranium. plu tomium is one of -- plutonium is one of these. it's a process. you have to create plutonium. nobody knew how to do it until the united states figured it out. nunn may provided soviets with key information about manufacturing of plutonium. then you have fuchs. he is by far the most important of the soviet spies. he provided the soviets with a process called gaseous diffusion. uranium is all over the world. it's everywhere. a naturally occurring element. the uranium we pull out of the ground is not physical. -- not fissiable. you can't create a bomb out of it. there is an isotope that cannot be used in a nuclear weapon. i pull out a softball chunk of uranium, 99.3% of that is the uranium 238. it's an isotope you can't use to make a bomb. .7 of 1%, grain of rice size is uranium 235. what is what you can make a bomb out of it. when you talk about enriching uranium, we are talking about getting rid of uranium 238 and get out the uranium 235. a process we found out worked well for that is called gaseous diffusion. we came to that by trying dozens of different ways of refining uranium. it took us years to figure out what is the best way to do this. well, fuchs provide soviets with the answer to that question before it even began. forget the other ideas. gaseous diffusion is the way to go. it cut years off the bomb program. arguably. we'll talk about it down the road. so he decided that was a real integral part of the manhattan project. he was a group leader at los alamos, which meant he wasn't a peon. he ran other sciences and part -- ran other scientists and was part of the broader process to create the atomic bomb. his only immediate boss was robert oppenheimer. that is how high level we are talking about in this case. he was privy to all the ideas and the conversations and plans for weapons improvements after the war. they were called "boosted weapons" where you go from the nagasaki bomb, which was 20 kilatons of tnt to boosted weapons. then the hydrogen bomb of the early 1950's where you start to talk about megaon thes or mills of tons of tnt. fuchs was in the conversations and part of conversations. he was part of all of these conversations and all of them were leaked to the soviet union. then you have david greenglass. he gets a lot of bad rap because he was the primary witness against the rosenbergs and their trial. it turns out much later that he lied about a lot of the things he was saying. it's a good possibility that ethen rosenberg was executed because of some of the lies of greenglass. but it doesn't undercut his role in the atomic spy program. he was a machinist at los alamos. it's one thing to have a scientific theory and come up with the grand ideas. it's another thing to make stuff. that is part of the process that matters. you can't drop papers filled with equations on the germans or on the japanese and the war. you have to drop a bomb. you have to make a physical product. and so greenglass was part of the process. he helped develop the high-explosive lens integral to the nagasaki bomb. he had sketches and descriptions of the lens and the dynamic of creating the weapons system to the soviet union. he gave a list of personnel to the soviets that potentially would be recruited later on by soviet intelligence. really, what he comes down to is he is the real supplement to fuchs. fuchs was a theorist. he had the big ideas. he was the one providing physics behind the atomic bam. whereas, greenglass provided the mechanics to build the weapons well system. together they provided soviets with a lot of important information. we have the greenglass sketches he provided to the soviets in the time because of the end of the cold war and the declassification of some of this. this first sketch is actually the sketch of the fat man boy, the plutonium bomb used implosion to create a nuclear chain reaction. explosive lenses are the things on the outside that instead of exploding, they imploded to create this chain reaction. this was an incredibly complicated process. that greenglass was able to provide the soviets with this information. then finally the most famous of all is julius rosenberg. rosenberg was a true believer. he was an idealogue. somebody that truly believed in the idea that communism and soviet system was the wave of the future. he is not somebody that kind of sort of believed. he was someone that bought in 100% to the ideas coming out of the soviet union in the 1930s. even before he was providing atomic information, he provided military information to the soviet union. the most important of these was the proximity fuse. the proximity fuse was a way to tell a weapons system, a missile or a bomb to explode when it got close to something. so your missiles didn't actually have to hit the target. it could get within a certain range and explode. he gave them this information when he was working even before the manhattan project, when he was working out of an organization emerson radio. a corporation in new york city. the proximity fuse interestingly enough was used later on, with a couple of upgrades and tweak to shoot down the francis gary powers spy plane. this information comes from rosenberg. he provided thousands of classified top-secret reports about the predecessor to nafta called naca. this is the national advisory committee on aeronautics. the first plan for the fighter. later, rosenberg was accused and we believe he did so to have recruited sympathetic individuals into the service. one of the rosenberg spies was one to provide all of this naca information to the soviet union. let's jump to the obvious next step in this case. his wife ethel. she was part of what i consider the second tier of russian spies. mainly because her role is really still up for debate. julius, there is not much debate anymore. he was a full-pledged communist and he provided a lot of information. ethel on the other hand is tricky. there are still questions about was she a spy. the reason she was convicted of this is that david greenglass said she typed up all this information for the spies that was eventually provided to the soviet union. she knew about it. she aided and abetted the spy ring. by typing up all this information. that is what greenglass said he lied about. so ethel probably didn't type up all this information. was she a communist? absolutely. she was as ideological as her husband. was she involved in some way? probably. did she know about it? almost certainly. julius spied for the soviets for so long that if ethel had no idea about it, i'm not sure how it could possibly be the case. they were true confidants of one another. they talked about everything. we assume ethel knew about it. does it mean she should be executed for it? that is a debate up for grabs. a very interesting scientist, ted hall. he was the youngest scientist at los alamos. he was 19 when he went there. he was a full-pledged believer. he really got sucked into communism at an early age. his importance, he rivals fuchs. not quite there but about as key component to the design of the eventual soviet bomb as you can get. he gave a detailed description of the fat man plutonium bomb to the soviet union. the bomb that went off, joe-one, the first soviet atomic bomb was almost mirror image of the nagasaki fat man bomb. so hall's information directly led to this design. he also gave them a lot of information about the little boy bomb, the hiroshima bomb. the uranium based nuclear weapon. including what we call the critical mass. this is the amount of the amount, the uranium necessary to create a chain reaction. this is a calculation that not only took the americans years to figure out, but actually is what derailed the german atomic bomb program. they just couldn't figure out the critical mass. they made some math errors and they thought the critical mass would be huge. the americans took time to figure out what it was. paul handed this over to the soviets. they didn't have to do a lot of the calculation. like fuchs he provided information about the next generation of nuclear weapons. about boosted fission weapons and eventually about the hydrogen weapons. then there is pontecorvo. he is someone that is a little more controversial as far as his role in the atomic bomb spy ring. his bona fides are undoubtable. he studied around a famous italian scientist. fermi could have discovered nuclear fission. he did but he didn't know that he discovered nuclear fission. it would eventually be a german team under otto hahn. but fermi discovered it two years earlier but they thought it was something else. the conclusion was oh, you created a heavier element system. instead of thinking about uranium breaking into two smaller things, they thought they built bigger stuff. they look at the results and they discovered fission. they made a mistake in their conclusions. pontecorvo was part of the team that discovered fission. this is a top-level scientist. he worked with the british program in the second world war. but the argument he made and the argument he made to the death was that he worked on reactor programs, not weapons. so there is still some controversy about his role. now working on the nuclear reactors still gives you a lot of the physics and the theoretic information to build nuclear weapons. but he claims he never gave military secrets. he did acknowledge he was a spy. >> he went to an early age to the soviet union. he did not beat around the bush. he said i was a cretin. the fact that i could have been so stupid and many people around me should have been so stupid -- and then he trailed off. he could not finish the sentence. he really understood to the pipedream of the soviet system, but far too late to actually do anything about it. so these are the recruits. these are people that were targeted by soviet intelligence to provide information. but there is one last spy i want to talk about. this is the professional. this is the individual that was sentenced specifically in the -- sent specifically to the united states today spying, a man named koval.cobol -- george he was born in iowa. he went to an early age to the soviet union. both of his parents were russian natives. and he was brought to the soviet union at an early age. he actually went to college in the soviet union before coming back to the united states. the great story is he became an electrical engineer in the soviet union. he did all the physics and the chemistry research there. he had a degree. he was sentenced to the united states as somebody who -- sent to the united states as somebody who never went to college before. when he went to college in united states, everybody was like this guy is a natural. he learns everything so quickly. he was acing tests without studying. he was kind of oh, this guy is like the top scientists. he had already learned all this stuff already. he was noticed for obvious reasons by the u.s. military. and sent to be part of the atomic bomb project. we know how important he was. you can see on the slide, when this was finally declassified in russia, in november of 2007, putin himself named him a hero of the russian federation, the highest award you can get. what made him so dangerous is that his role in the manhattan project wasn't as a scientist. it wasn't as a technician. he was as a health physics officer. essentially what that was, it was his job to make sure nobody was getting too much radiation, and nobody was actually getting a dangerous level of any kind of possible carcinogen or anything else that could possibly cause them problems. we talked about the safety considerations. what this allowed him to do was have free access to everyone and everything. there was no laboratory he couldn't go into. there was nobody he couldn't talk to. he could go from all the different labs like los alamos to oakridge where they were bringing the material for the bomb. talk to everyone from oppenheimer on down. provide them with any information he could possibly want. the most important thing he gave them was about the bomb that was tested in 1949. we realized at a very early stage that using plutonium as a fissionable product for a nuclear weapon was difficult to do because it was so highly reactive that you needed something to slow down the chain reaction. if you didn't, you have a fizzle. that before this self-sustaining chain reaction and the atomic blast, you would get a small, nonatomic, maybe a big bomb compared to other bombs. but it wouldn't this big massive atomic blast. you needed something to slow down the neutrons. i won't get too technical on it. but when we discovered we could use another substance, called pulonium as an initiator. if i go quickly to this drawing. similar to the microsecond. that thing in the center of the fat man bomb was the pulonium based initiator. this is the element when the bomb exploded the sphere in the middle of the bomb was able to slow down the chain reaction to make it nuclear. this was something we discovered by accident. this is something that was one of the most important discoveries during the process to build the atomic bomb. koval gave it to the soviets. in many cases, koval was a good spy but a lot of times it was pure luck. he happened to find himself in the right place at the right time. he traveled from los alamos to oakridge to handford in washington. he happened to be at the place where they were discovering this initiator and was able to get -- when they word discussing this initiator and was able to get the plans and bring them back to the soviet union. this is something we will talk about later on and the impact of this, that is too hard to understate. but again, we will talk about that in a second. so what i want to move on now to is the second stage of this conversation. that is u.s. counterintelligence. when we know about this and what were we doing about it? most of the american public doesn't find out about this until later on. when does the government discover what is happening? counterintelligence from the very beginning was faced with significant handicaps. that prevented them potentially from finding out what was going on and stopping it. you know, in hindsight, we look back and say how did they not see this coming? how did we not do anything to stop it? the answer is we saw it coming and we tried everything we could possibly do to stop it. there are some real things standing in the way of us doing something significant in this respect. first is wartime mobilization. when the second world war began, some of the hastily designed organizations like the o.s.s., like the manhattan project, like the fact that the state department doubled and tripled in size in the span of a couple of weeks if not a couple of days was a real problem for security. for doing what you normally would need to do to make sure that people you are hiring on, are not communist sympathizers and are not spies. in some cases with the o.s.s. for instance and the manhattan project scientists there was only an eight-day background check to be brought on to government service. now, if any of you who have worked in the government know that an eight-day background check. it's now a year and a half in some cases for top secret clearance. you didn't have time to do that. there were just so many people brought in government services at the beginning of the war that needed to have top secret clearance and there are so few investigators that it was done haphazardly. and for the manhattan project, itself -- i mentioned before -- this grew to 500,000 people employed by the manhattan project. this project begins in 1942. and ends in 1945. so, in three years it grows from zero to 500,000. there are not enough f.b.i. agents to check everybody's background as much as we would like them to. so this is a real problem. next one, very tongue and cheek said scientists are pinkos. a lot of scientists, certainly in the 1930's and 1940's, tended to be left-leaning already. intellectuals and liberals who if you wanted them to work in your government you had to overlook the fact that they had somewhat leftist sympathies. if you want the best of the best, we have to embrace the fact that robert oppenheimer was very left wing and a fellow traveler as the terminology in the 1950's is used with communists. his ex-mistress was a full-fledged member of the communist party. his brother frank had been a member of the communist party. it's not just oppenheimer but a good number of the top american scientists were left wing and at least communist-leaning. you had to overlook this if you were going to build a bomb. the next real handicap is science is universal. we don't own the physical theory behind atomic weapons. this is something that was understood worldwide. this is something developed in germany and in europe. it was something that was understood by scientists from japan, germany and russia and the united states and all over the place. it wasn't something we could keep secret. it wasn't something we could hide. it was an understood idea. the next major handicap is compartmentalization. that one side didn't know what the other side was doing. f.b.i. didn't know what the manhattan project were doing and the vice versa except for the highest level. f.b.i. agents trying to hunt down spies could have worked well with the counterintelligence guys but they weren't talking to each other. scientific intelligence is hard. this is something that is incredibly difficult. most f.b.i. agents don't have a scientist background. to tell them to protect scientific secrets, some more important than other, they may not know what they should be looking for or protecting. this is especially true on another ballgame. for our spies that we sent out in to germany and other places to look for what the german program was doing. having a scientist and a spy together was something we didn't have many of. the spies were good at spying. the scientists were good at scientist but not so much crossed over. this is a real problem. finally, i have been teasing you with some of the open source ideas that were really interesting. one real handicap was the fact that when american scientists all rallied to work at los alamos they stopped teaching at the universities across the country. so it's very easy for any spy, german or soviet or anybody else, to start looking at course syllabi or schedules from princeton and columbia and berkeley and chicago. and realize hey, he is not teaching his class anymore. oppenheimer is gone all of a sudden. none of the top scientists are teaching anymore. where are they? they must be somewhere else. it's not a far stretch from there to look at train schedules. and to look at people all of a sudden why are all these people going to new mexico in the middle of nowhere? that is open source. that is stuff you can find in the yellow pages. all of a sudden oppenheimer isn't publishing anymore. why aren't american scientists publishing things on nuclear physics anymore? this are these that can't be protected. they are common sense. nothing we can do about it. finally the french problem. i alluded to this before. primarily this is a key for a specific frenchman, fred lick joliet churi. the son-in-law of the famous churi. their daughter was a physicist in her own right. they ran the most important lab in france. it was taken over by the germans. with the liberation of paris he wanted to reenger size his lab and reach out to the -- reenergize his lab and work with those who went to british program. it was their manhattan project. but he was a card-carrying member of the communist party. that is thrown around a little bit. he literally had a membership card. he was somebody that joined the communist party, fellow traveler, worked hand and foot to do everythingco he was a very good physicist. he had access to a lot of information. the f.b.i. couldn't stop him because he was in france. american counterintelligence can do very little to stop him from sending information over to the soviet union. so how was this set up in this time? you have two major organizations doing counterintelligence during the time period. one was the f.b.i. certainly the f.b.i. paid attention to this atomic spying during and after the war. there were the primary domestic counterintelligence wing. one of their main targets was an american federation, f.a.s., federation of american scientists, that hiroshima and nagasaki, they began to formally have organizations to talk about the policy. they are the atomic scientist of chicago. association of oakridge scientists and association of los alamos scientists. they came together as the f.a.s. it's now an organization that is today doing really good work. not only on atomic weapons but general foreign policy. it's turned into a bit of a think tank today. well, the f.b.i. thought that this was a front for the commie pinko creeps running around the united states. f.b.i. made a focus on this organization. they gathered information. all the way to the f.b.i. was good to do. surveilled scientists after the meetings, took down license plates and followed people from place to place. they had undercover f.b.i. agents attend meetings themselves. they gathered literature. they used wiretaps to tap the meetings, to tap homes of the scientists. we are talking about oppenheimer and others in this case. they used this to spy on the agency, everything from taxi drivers that overheard conversations in taxis to recruiting far right conservatives from the universities to pretend they were left wing to infiltrate the organizations. all the time they spent doing this they caught no one doing anything wrong. but they spent million of taxpayer dollars and ran and chased their tail. what is up here is very interesting document from hoover, himself, to the special assistant to f.d.r. harry hopkins where he talks about the fact -- this is again from early in the war. we had known from an early stage that the soviets had been spying on the united states. then there is the second tier, arguably the better tier from my perspective of the c.i. bureaucracy. this is the manhattan engineer district. or the m.e.d. the fancy name for manhattan project. it had his own intelligence branch, its own counterintelligence wing. of course, the top of was the head of the manhattan project itself. brigadier general leslie growes who ran everything. if you want micro-managing, look at look at leslie growes. part of my dissertation was running into a 1950's era business management textbook taught in business school. growes had a chapter in it. how to manage. the chapter was don't delegate anything. do everything yourself. no one had ever really brought -- this was gold for me as far as a researcher was concerned. he had two people he trusted to do this for him. one was lieutenant colonel john lanesdale. he was the intelligence chief in the manhattan project who would eventually go on after the war to be anesthesiologist. interesting enough, you talk about research into this stuff. he wrote a book that was never published. the only place you can find the manuscript is the association of anesthesiologists on their website. again, gold i found. finally lieutenant colonel boris pasch. he later on did amazing things to discover what was happening in the german atomic bomb program but he was first a top counterintelligence agent for the manhattan project. so this is an interesting quote from lanesdale from the book, unpublished book. talk about the germans and the japanese as the enemy. he said from the beginning russia was regarded from an intelligence standpoint as an enemy. this wasn't a case where the cold war brought about the animosity. this is a case where from the beginning of the war, from 1942 or even earlier russia was regarded as an intelligence enemy. as somebody that we needed to keep as far away from the manhattan project as we possibly could. so what pash did under growes direction was run the western defense command intelligence branch. in doing so, western meant he was in charge of california. so he really targeted a lot of the programs run by steve nelson and others that were trying to infiltrate the american program. pash's files had just been declassified. his actual counterintelligence, hand written in this case, typed files about the different scientists that he was surveilling. and they are declassified because i f.o.y.a. requested them and whined and moaned for many years. here is an example. you are not expected to read this stuff. just an idea about who and the extent to which pash was doing research. on the left is pash's notes about frank oppenheimer, robert oppenheimer's brother who he did extensive research into. surveilled, wiretapped, all these things. he focused on the scientists. interesting enough, pash cleared oppenheimer, not frank but robert oppenheimer for work on the manhattan project. that is how much general growes trusted him. look at frank oppenheimer. those suspected to be under surveillance. the right is the surveillance chart for sallard. heard that name before? he is famous for being the first person to warn the united states about the potentials of an atomic bomb. you may have heard of the einstein letter to f.d.r. einstein didn't write the einstein letter to f.d.r. savard did. the reason he didn't write it is f.d.r. just like you hadn't heard of sallard so he said look, albert, they were friends. please put your name on this. so you get the einstein letter. it's really the sallard letter. pash was researching and surveilling everybody. if you follow the guys, they mic up the houses and the placed they frequented like bars and restaurants. they went into the houses and changed the telephone cords. not just so they could tap the phones but they could turn the phones themselves into microphones and listen to conversations inside the house. all of this without warrants. no f.i.s.a. court. this is all about as far of an overreach as you can possibly get when it comes to the kind of invasion of privacy that you could expect from this. these are investigations into scientists who are suspected leftists. these are two of the scientists that i gave you on the third tier of steve nelson's group. i'm blowing this up a little bit so that you can see a little bit but i will read it in case you can't. this is about one of the scientists in nelson's ring. in the middle under "remarks" it says, "subject has been active member of the communist party and while his party affiliations are not evident at presence he is still considered to be associated with the local communist party leaders and believed he's still sympathetic with communist principals. he is dangerous to the laboratory." so pash single-handedly could keep people from getting jobs. then you have people in the third tier of the scientists under steve nelson's command. i'll read the recommendation for max friedman, one of the guys providing information. it says, "it is recommended that the subject be immediately separated from his employment on the project. drafted into the army and removed as soon as possible so outpost would not be in position to obtain additional information about the project or transmit information as he already possesses." this is a second letter where they said they want to clarify what does he mean? he says send him to siberia or send him anywhere but here. so that is really what pash is trying to do. there is a third wing. counterintelligence diplomacy. an attempt to try to use agreements in the international project to keep the soviets from getting this information. first is the quebec agreement, between the united states, canada and great britain that said we will not, either of us, in this case the united states or great britain, communicate any information about the two alloys. that is the british name of the manhattan project. to third parties except by mutual concept. we're saying we won't tell anybody else. the reason for this is we didn't want the british to tell the french anything about the atomic bomb program. then you get the combined development trust in 1944. this is the idea that the british and the americans will do everything they can to buy up the uranium worldwide we possibly can. we didn't really understand at the time that uranium was everywhere. but we thought there is a lot in czechoslovakia. at this point in 1945, growes a lot in the -- let's make a deal that makes a lot of money and buy it all up. it is everywhere, but we do not have to understand it very something a little bit controversial. this was named after a princeton physicist. he wanted to write about it. we read about the science of the atomic bomb, published it, and that would provide parameters. at first, i was like, why would you tell anybody? he sat down with scientists. what can i first year student figure out from the atomic bomb in the next year or so? put it out there so everyone knows what they can and cannot say. basically said, this is as much as you can talk about. stars afterw rock the war was over. they knew they could only talk about what was already released in the smyth report. for growes, this is a way to kind of contain the information. to say anything outside of this, you are instantly breaking the law. then finally the mcmahon act. this is heavy-handed. june of 1946. after nunn may was outed, it looked as if there were significant leaks in the british atomic bomb program. we didn't think there were leaks in our program but certainly the british were leaking. so the mcmahon act was passed, named after brian mcmahonbe, head of the energy commission in congress, saying we are cutting the british off. thanks for helping us build the bomb in the war but you are on your own. we are no longer going to share information with you about atomic weapons. this is an attempt to plug the leak from the british side and keep the information from getting out. of course the argument has been made in the last 60 years about why didn't we do enough? hopefully i have shown you we did a significant amount. i'm even going to argue today we did too much. i'm a left winger myself, but there was significant counterintelligence overreach in this time period. actually it had detrimental effects for the american scientific community and in essence the national security community. because there is a real backlash against nuclear theorists in the united states. because of fuchs and nunn may and later because of the rosenbergs and others. every theorist was painted with the brush of they are leftist, communist, they are sympathizers. the argument made at the time, it wasn't oppenheimer who said this but one of his subordinates, when alger hiss was outed, it didn't make lawyers everywhere look like they were communists but when theorist was outed every one was looked to be a security threat. most had loyalty for the professors and the scientists. even berkeley had a loyalty oath. that tells you a lot. what it really did is cause a real brain drain. it caused a real problem with retaining top-level scientists and government service or even in nongovernment service. by the spring of 1949, berkeley lost all the theorists. every single one of them resigned because they refused to take the loyalty oath or they were outed as being too left wing. this had a real problem. real impact on u.s. national security. if you want top scientists in the field of government, if you want people building the next atomic bomb or building the next fighter aircraft or the next spacecraft. you need scientists. scientists were having a real problem getting clearance from the u.s. government. somewhere between 20 and 50,000 scientistst and engineers were backlogged waiting for clearance in the early 1950's. that is 20,000 to 50,000. these are the top people we needed to beat russians in space. top people to develop the plane, the mig-15. but they were waiting and they couldn't get clearance because of the overreach and the fear of soviet spies everywhere. i am going to read you -- i was going to read a longer one. this is the money sentence at the very end. someone that was talking in front of a group of scientists during this time of real c.i. overreach. he ends the long talk and he talks about the fact we need to have an environment of trust, environment of openness in science with this last paragraph. such an atmosphere is un-american. it's not steve nelson. not a berkeley scientist. it's president harry s. truman. speaking before a group of scientists in 1948. this gives you an indication about how far we had gone. this is before mccarthy. we're still talking 1948. and the problem that scientists ran into. okay. so finally -- then i will wrap up and open up for questions. how much did the spying matter? how much did it make a difference? the first question. would they still have gotten the bomb? a great quote. the only secret about the atomic bomb was whether or not it would work. it had been answered. the man doing the quote is glen seborg, discoverer of plutonium. chairman of the atomic energy commission. he is somebody who knows. then there is a longer quote i'm not going to read all of. but a man named samuel goossmith. the chief scientist for the american mission discovered what the german atomic bomb program was doing. so he understood scientific intelligence. this is after the bomb, right after the soviet bomb came out. and said recent revelations of the early leaks of atomic information to russia reflect the state of mind that should fill each of us with grave confirm. the general impression is russia has a bomb, therefore, someone must have given her our secrets. skip to the bottoms. let us understand and admit that the russians constructed their bomb all by themselves without any help from us or captured germans. it is very wrong to underestimate one's adversaries. so the question is did they get the bomb because of the spies? well, the answer to that is probably not. they were going to get it anyway. atomk -- atomic science is not nationalistic. the tenets were understood worldwide. the field was open completely. within minutes of hearing about the discovery of fission, feramie held up his hands and this much uranium and poof, it's all gone. within days after the discovery of fission, robert oppenheimer was drawing crude designs of bombs on his chalkboard. this is instantaneous understanding. this wasn't something that was going to be a secret for long. the argument is that soviet scientists were idiots. as much as we try to embrace that argument. there is a great story that is beautiful. york was a second generation manhattan project scientist. he was part, he was a very young guy in the manhattan project and he became one of the top people working on the later project. york told a great story if his memoirs that come out later on. he says he was called in by the u.s. military, a bunch of generals who were worried about the soviets sneaking in a suitcase size bomb into washington or new york. and then starting world war iii by blowing up one of the cities with a secret bomb. so the general asked york, is this a possibility? like could the soviets do this? york said absolutely not. there is no chance. the general is like how can you be so sure? york tongue and cheek said the soviets haven't mastered the technology of the suitcase yet. that is the perception a lot of people had of soviet science. but soviet science was as good as everybody else. but we didn't want to believe they knew what they were doing. the same people that the manhattan manhattan project science studied in the 1930's, the soviet science studied under. this is the country of pavlov. they have a long tradition of top quality scientists. this was going to happen one way or another. i'm going to skip this because it's really long but this is the first real talk about atomic bombs. you see atomic bombs. look at when this is. 1914. h.g. wells wrote a book called "the world set free" where he talks about the atomic bombs being used in a war in the future. this wasn't an idea that we came up with. all right? this is an idea that had been around since the beginning of the 20th century. the idea we were going to be the only ones to have the bomb and the soviets were too stupid, it would have happened one way or the other. the spies can be forgiven for that. the other question that matters. how much more quickly? how much faster would they have gotten the bomb? more quickly based on what? that is key question involved in this. the american scientists had one vision of this. academics were saying oppenheimer were saying they would get the bomb in a year or two. don't underestimate the guys. but the government scientists were giving them a broader prediction. york gives you an idea what the government scientists were saying. military, people like leslie growes were predicting 20 years before the soviets got the bomb. politicians like truman famously asked when will the soviets get the bomb said, "never." that asiatic comment gives you an idea of what he was thinking. intelligence agencies had a different view. i will go through this quickly. the first estimate of when the soviets would get the bomb was o.r.e.-3-1. office of report and estimates. they would develop a bomb between 1950-1953. the next estimate was the joint nuclear energy intelligence committee. december 1947, same prediction as before. by july 1948, acknowledge is impossible to determine when they would get the bomb but maybe by 1950. most probable date is mid-1953. not a lot of changes. june 1949 report. same as above. july 1949 report. a month before. the o.s.i. report, office of scientific intelligence said information now available to substantiate the dates already estimated in the 1949, 1948, 1947, and 1946 report, earliest date mid-1950. the most probable date 1953. although, new information suggests it would not be before mid-1951. and my favorite one was the report of september 20, 1949, predicted a first soviet bomb in 1953. this is 23 days after joe-1. so you can see how well the intelligence community was doing when it came to predicting this. so, real quickly. the argument for the idea that the spies were important. we have gone through this. intelligence showed that soviets what path not to take. the mistakes we made they didn't have to make. the russian defense ministry later on when koval was awarded the hero of the russian federation said the intelligence to provide them to make the initiator prepared by the recipe by koval. stalin, beria, soviet science, all of the guys wanted this american know-how and the american influence to tell them whether or not their scientists knew what they were doing. stalin famously said i don't believe what our scientists say unless i see the west has done it first. technical drawings are very important. the ones that greenglass provided were key to figuring out the soviet bomb. we talk about the uranium separation and the plutonium production that took us years to figure out and it was easier for soviets. the quick argument against the smyth report. this provided a lot of the information necessary. right off the bat. that wasn't needed to be stolen. that gave the soviets a theory behind the atomic bomb. it provided form, but not function. what i mean by that, it gave the recipe, but it doesn't give experience in how to cook the meal. my wife and i are dramatically different in our cooking skills. you could hand us both a complicated recipe and mine would be set on fire and hers would be a beautiful great meal. we knew how to cook. the soviets didn't. so we provided them with the recipe but not the experience on how to do things. in this case, it's not about building one bomb. it's about building lots of bombs. so the technical capability of building this stuff was not something you could provide with just drawings and information. most of the claims about how great the soviet intelligence was come from retired k.g.b. officers. take that for what it's worth. like i talk about before, you just give the recipe. it means they still had to redo a lot of the experiences, decide to investigate competing processes for separating uranium and plutonium and it still took longer for them to pull off than the manhattan project. this isn't primarily because of uranium and industrial capacity. it took them much longer to refine uranium and much longer to build all the apparatuses and the industrial background. we had to build cities for the manhattan project. oakridge, tennessee, and hanford, washington were built from the ground up. not mention los alamos which were desert. that took time. soviets had to catch up with the industrial capacity. arguments for and arguments against. i will end it there and take questions. i want to give you a chance. i could talk forever but i don't want to do that. i will make c-span go crazy by taking the mic and moving around. good luck. wait for the mic to get to you. right there. >> thank you for your presentation. i know you know about a lot of this stuff. but you structured it very, very well to help us. a couple of questions of detail. should we believe greenglass when late in life he said he lied? secondly, what was steve nelson's background before he became naturalized american? i am dreading that you will say he was a brit. >> so, we actually don't know a lot about steve nelson before he came to the united states, to answer that question second. he gave different stories for where he came from. we know he was naturalized at one point. because he was a private citizen and wasn't under surveillance before that, there is not a lot of research into his background. he wasn't a brit. he was most likely something russian background. there are arguments about was he the pre-baltic or latvean but he was from europe beforehand. this is tricky when you deal with the deathbed confessions or later in life confessions. ma makes greenglass perhaps believable was the motivation at the time for lying. he wanted to make sure his wife was not implicated in this. so pushing off and agreeing to testify against -- ruth was his wife. against ethel and julius rosenberg was his way of keeping the blame from being pushed on to his wife. so it is one of those courtroom get immunity for telling a lie kind of thing where it's more believable in my mind that ethel probably was certainly knowledgeable. but a willing participant. she didn't know anything. she really could have done nothing but type. if typing gets you the death penalty, that is a pretty steep -- even hoover, interestingly enough. hoover was gung-ho about let's get them thrown in prison if rest of their lives. when the judge passed down the death sentence, he was like whoa. i wasn't expecting that. it was very harsh. certainly for ethel. julius you can argue one way or the other. julius certainly gave information. but if you compare them to what the british do, of course. it's like the game of telephone. if you whisper something in someone's ear and it goes around the room. by the time it's gone through the united states it's gone through 15 iterations and who knows if it's real or not? the real issue we run into at that time is double-sided. one is the american intelligence apparatus collapses after the war. with the collapse of the o.s.s., the c.i.a. takes a long time to get going. the c.i.a. gets going but scientific intelligence gets left behind a little bit. you don't have the office of scientific intelligence, which is the office created to do foreign intelligence toward the atomic program. until the beginning in 1949. that is when the program is is the office created to do foreign intelligence toward the atomic program. until the beginning in 1949. that is when the program is created. by the time the russians have a bomb, you see what they are putting out. it's not very good. the second problem is that there is no real impetus to have a strong scientific intelligence program. most americans think they are a bunch of idiots. most americans are looking at the soviets from the perspective, their scientists are stupid, the industry is so backwards there is no way they can produce these weapon systems. that it would take them years to refine enough uranium to make a bomb. the fact that the soviet system itself is not designed for innovative science and innovative technology. the idea of vanover bush, the top scientist in the second world war wrote a book in 1949 talking about how the free world will always have better science than the totalitarian world. in the book he said the nazis, soviets, the same basic idea. you don't have the creative toy to do high level state-of-the-art science. we had a perception that they just could don't the state-of-the-art. so there really wasn't a lot of pressure behind american intelligence to find out what is happening inside the soviet union. actually historians have written about -- incorrectly about there was a big program to figure out what they were doing and they are taking bits and pieces of documents from the archives that oh, look, so-and-so is trying to find out what is happening in there. this person was really hunting down the uranium. but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule in many respects. that we can find a couple of the examples that try to make it look like it's a program. there is no program. at the highest level, nobody cares. again, growes in charge of all of this. 20 years. he didn't care about the scientists. he thought they were smart. he just thought they can't reproduce what i did. he was a proud man but he realized the u.s. built three cities and spent $2 billion on the manhattan project in 1949. extrapolate that to hundreds of billions of dollars today. about the cost of one f-35. lots and lots of money. the soviets just didn't have that infrastructure. or at least he thought they didn't have the infrastructure. so it was somewhat nah. they will eventually get it but we'll be ready for them when they do. >> you know, last year there was the latest book on, i guess the new deal era, and she went into great detail about harry hopkins being a soviet agent of influence. also, she talked about somebody saying that nuclear material was shipped under lenlese through montana by air to the soviets. it turns out he made a simple math mistake in the middle of the calculations. for us it's the equivalent of not carrying a one. for him it was something with the equations involved but somebody at that level it was a simple math mistake. but no one checked it. everyone assumed this is the best guy we had for math. you could have given a first year grad student his equation and he would have gone oh, there is a mistake here. but the mistake ended up heisenberg when called in front of the german high command was asked can it be done? he said maybe. it will take a lot of resources and it will be difficult to do. the german high command said unless you say definitely and we can do it for cheap, we are not going to do it. we need to build bombers and tanks and submarines. we don't have the money to do both. since you say maybe and it will take a lot of money, the plan is to just kind of do laboratory research. so the same time the americans were ramping up the manhattan project in 1942, the germans were ending their real research into an atomic bomb. what happens after that, like the bombing of the heavy water plant was overkill. i was growes flexing his muscles to make sure. we didn't know it yet that they had given up the plan. we didn't know end the end of 1944. we were worried. the nazis with the bomb was the ultimate terror at this time. the gentleman next to you. >> thank you. like you, i went around the city talking about different topics, but what hit me when you mentioned ethel rosenberg was the similarity between the excuse of ethel rosenberg and mary sorat. the evidence is that she may not have been involved but she knew about it. >> right. >> really what got her was the political climate at the time. >> exactly. >> my question is how much of that was applied to what happened to ethel rosenberg? >> there is no question. if you look at some of the spying since then, if you look at some of the spies -- the atomic bomb is as important as it gets but there have been spies we captured since then. robert hanson, ames, john walkers who had a larger impact -- forget the atomic bomb. had larger impact on the u.s. foreign policy. they got prison. they didn't get executed. we are not executing people anymore for even the most heinous of espionage crimes. ethel didn't do anything. even if she typed stuff up, she typed stuff up. she wasn't stealing secrets or passing stuff on to the soviet union. there is no way to talk about this without saying it was a bloodlust based on the political environment at the time. mccarthyism in full swing. it looked like the united states was losing the cold war at this time period. if you look at the progression of events from 1948 on, right, you have the berlin blockade, the soviet bomb, losing china, the korean war. you know, in 1953, in 1954 the soviets get the hydrogen bomb. it looks like we are going backwards and losing the war. within the hysteria, within the red scare, you get these are the guys that gave them the bomb. if ethel wasn't executed she may have been strung up in the town square. that is how much animosity was against this. and if you look at the polling from the time period, the majority of americans wanted her taken out. even they understood there was still confusion about her role. the majority of people were like yeah, fry them. there wasn't a lot of sympathy for them. go him and then here. i saw earlier. >> was there any espianage at the hanson works? >> some. hanford was producing plutonium. most people in the beginning didn't know what plutonium was or what it did. an american discovers it, discovery during the manhattan project. i was accidental in many respects. handford was a target later in the word. when ted hall and fuchs were able to pass secrets that the plutonium thing might be something you want to pay attention to. so there was from the californian spies. nelson's group. the issue at the time steve nelson's group had been outed by boris pash. we knew what to look for so we were able to get them out of hanford. they were more successful at oakridge and los alamos. these were higher level spies we weren't expecting. hanford tended to be an industrial plant. there wasn't a lot of innovative research happening there. once you figure out how to do it at los alamos and refined it at oakridge, it went to hanford as a finished project. the real research wasn't being done there. so you didn't have scientists sent to hanford. does it make sense? all right. get a microphone right there. sorry, the last question. make it a good one. >> getting back to the germans and the atomic bomb. in baseball lore there is a story about -- >> right. >> mo, a mediocre catcher but a terribly brilliant person. >> right. >> his coach said he knew seven languages and couldn't hit in any of them. is it true he was recruited by the o.s.s. to go to a meeting in switzerland to hear heisenberg and it seemed that heisenberg had the secret of the atomic bomb that he was to take out a revolver and shoot him. is that a true story? >> it is. berg is an interesting story. yesterday we had nicholas davados who wrote "catcher was a spy." it was the 20th anniversary of the book. made him feel older than he wanted to. yes, it's absolutely true. mo berg -- so heisenberg was somebody we were terrified would be integral in building a german atomic bomb. heisenberg if you aren't familiar with him takes quantum mechanics the other real major physics movement. the relativity theory which is einstein's movement. and quantum mechanics wasn't invented by heisenberg but he made it work and made it make sense. he won the nobel prize and created the heisenberg uncertainty principle. he is as good a scientist or better than the einsteins of the world. we found out through the scientific underground which i mentioned before that heisenberg during the war was going to give a talk in zurich, switzerland. this is a neutral country during the war. zurich was a neutral city where everyone kind of went to talk to each other and deal with people from other countries. we found out about this and berg was sent in. berg was sent in for several reasons. one, he spoke many languages and did it very well. the other he was put on the mission, which was the american mission to determine what the germans were doing as a bomb program. as a member of the o.s.s. he realized he needed to know a little bit of the atomic bomb thing. he grabbed the theory books and read them on a plane from rome to the united states. in 20 hours he learned quantum theory. we talk about being brilliant. he attended a lecture. the lecture was over his head still. it was about matrix mechanics. he followed along a little bit. but yes, if anytime during the talk heisenberg indicated that the german work on the bomb program, he was instructed to stand up, pull out his pistol and shoot heisenberg in the head. the story is better than that. he is inside this theater. he is waiting for the speech to begin. in front of him walked the entire german top scientists. otto hahn, discovered fission, one of the top guys named in the letters and several others were sitting in front of him. in the row in front of him as he is watching this. not only could he shoot heisenberg but he could gone down the line and shot all the german scientists and taken them out. at the talk himself, there is nothing to indicate he is working on the bomb program. berg says i'm not sure yet. so he is invited to the afterparty. the afterparty is at top agent in europe's house who organized this. berg is there talking to the top german scientists, talking to heisenberg. the whole time heisenberg doesn't know he is dealing with a american agent. his accent is not spectacular but people were drinking enough they didn't know he was an american. he got nothing from it. berg arranged when heisenberg left he left at the same time. the two of them walked through the streets of zurich together to their hotel chatting about topics of the day, about nuclear physics and other things. heisenberg having no idea he's an american, no idea he's jewish american or that he has a pistol in his pocket waiting to kill him. by the time the night is over berg is convinced they are not working on the bomb program. heisenberg talks about they've lost the war and he can't wait to work on science again. he lets him live. he walks away. heisenberg doesn't know he was dealing with an american agent until decades later when the mission is declassified. he didn't realize how close to death he was. it's right out of a movie but it's absolutely true. in that case. before you leave, actually, davidoff was here yesterday and he signed copies of his book "the catcher is the spy." if you are interesting to learn more, he brought it out to everybody. thank you for being here. i enjoyed you taking the time. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> great presentation and a great way to start! you are watching american

Related Keywords

Montana , United States , Los Alamos , California , Oakridge , Tennessee , Kazakhstan , Turkey , China , Manhattan , New York , New Mexico , Slovak Republic , Russia , Quebec , Canada , Washington , District Of Columbia , Alger , Algeria , Ottawa , Ontario , Berkeley , Rome , Lazio , Italy , Iowa , Cuba , Switzerland , Spain , Chicago , Illinois , Japan , Germany , Hiroshima , Zurich , Züsz , Columbia University , United Kingdom , Oklahoma , Maryland , Paris , Rhôalpes , France , Joliet , Berlin , Italian , Americans , Canadian , Californian , Soviets , Russian , Germans , Czechoslovakia , Britain , Canadians , Spanish , French , Soviet , German , British , Russian Federation , Frenchman , Russians , Japanese , American , Cuban , John Mcintosh , Joe Stalin , Robert Oppenheimer , Frank Oppenheimer , Ted Hall , Francis Gary , Pacific Ocean , Robert Hanson , Steve Nelson , Harry Hopkins , Julius Rosenberg , Harry S Truman , Harry Gould , Mo Berg , Otto Hahn , Robert Kennedy , James Chadwick , Vince Houghton , Roald Burley , Max Friedman , Ethel Rosenberg , Boris Pasch ,