The Bleeding Edge

 

THE BLEEDING EDGE, AND GUMS ,

    OF NUCLEAR  INTELLIGENCE

By Russell Seitz      

   

 

A generation before neocon happy warriors and hegemony buffs started hooting up faulty WMD ntelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, George Kennan observed that if mistakes were grounds for dismissal, not an intel analyst would remain in the corridors of power.  WMD’s and nuclear ambitions have never been easy to fathom. America began sharpening the  tools to harvest technical intelligence before the birth of the atomic bomb, but some early gathers of nuclear secrets ended up cutting themselves in the process.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II,  General George Marshall ordered espionage covering all enemy "scientific military developments. “ In 1941,the OSS followed up with

a secret program, code named ALSOS, to preemptively sabotage any Axis nuclear effort. Its most famous operation sank  a ferry carrying  heavy water bound for  Germany,and crippled the unique Norwegian plant that produced it.

Not all ALSOS missions were as successful. Hearing that Hitler's chief nuclear scientist, Werner Heisenberg still lectured at Swiss universities, OSS Zurich station chief Alan Dulles suggested placing an agent in the audience. If Heisenberg’s physics talk suggested Nazi A-bomb progress, he was to be assassinated forthwith. Dulles put this sporting proposal to ALSOS chief scientist. But Samuel Goudschmit, declined on the grounds that "Physicists do not shoot other physicists."

 Dulles settled for an erudite Boston Red Sox catcher. Moe Berg didn’t mind taking a gun to a physics colloquium. He had already photographed Imperial Japanese munitions plants during a prewar All Stars tour. Berg listened intently to the Uncertainty Principle’s author, and chatted with him over tea. But Berg decided not to waste a bullet. shrewdly recognizing that the implosion of German science had left Heisenberg quite clueless about bomb physics .

That wasn't the end of ALSOS . After D-Day Allied forces found all the thorium in France was on an eastbound  boxcar. Discounting the story that it was wanted for gas lamps,  the  ALSOS team tracking other radioactive ores went in hot pursuit of it. They nabbed the ore and its Norwegian exporter before they crossed the Rhine and in Jan Petersen’s suitcase found documents revealing he frequented Hechingen, where the Allies had just unearthed Heisenberg’s uranium-laden secret lab—but this smoking gun soon cooled .

Wild Bill Donovan . the OSS head, was not amused by the rest of the suitcase’s contents. It was full of  Thorium toothpaste  samples and advertising copy, some of which you can see here, and letters from Petersen’s aged mother, a Hechingen native .  Looking for evidence of WMD's, ALSOS had uncovered an Austrian cosmetic company’s diabolical postwar plan to displace popular radium-based Radiogen toothpaste, with cheaper ( and safer) thorium product. Since gas mantles glowed like limelight, they were ready to plaster postwar billboards with :

"Use toothpaste with thorium!  ...Have sparkling teeth with .....radioactive brilliance! "

Decades later a Cold War audit revealed France had a problem. Examining African uranium ore import ledgers, the French nuclear establishment was shocked, shocked  -- enough U-235 for a dozen A-bombs had gone missing from its enrichment plant books. Had it gone off to Algeria, or Israel - or Quebec ?

It took a year to exorcise this seemingly catastrophic failure of intelligence.Only after the Surete' rounded up the usual suspects to no avail did the Quay d'Orsay  think to dispatch scientists to the rich mines of  Gabon, and  panic gave way to postcolonial  tristesse tropique : Mother Nature had stolen the missing African uranium. 1.8 billion years ago, undecayed  Uranium-235 was so much  more abundant than today that the rich deposit had lit up as a natural nuclear reactor that  spluttered merrily with only light water as a neutron moderator.   fissioning out of existence 7 tons of  what the French would seek to extract eons later- and releasing pehaps a ton of plutonium directly into the environment .

No one belabored FDR for invading Normandy without  first sorting out the toothpaste question. Or censored him for using Berg's All Star team to spy on the Japanese Empire between exhibition games . Because  the imperative of overthrowing tyranny existed independently of the desire to stop the Axis from going nuclear.

As politics refocuses attention on the uranium -free Affaire Nigerien, some may find consolation in the classics. Pliny wrote "There is always something new coming out of Africa" , but new isn't necessarily true.  Pliny’s Natural History ranked unicorns and basilisks a creatures of massdestruction on a par  with Carthaginian war elephants.

Since Rome often based its foreign  policy on analyzing the entrails of sheep and the flight of eagles, the Republic naturally suffered its share of disasters. Yet its Senate Intelligence Committee never threw an Augur or an Haruspex to the lions. They got off easy by practicing what Kennan might style The Wisdom of the Ancients. Whenever Eagle-watchers and Sheep-Int analysts met on the way to the forum, they customarily fell down laughing at each other’s outlandish costumes – and latest mistakes.

Comments

[David Moelling]

Right after the war the British imprisoned the key players of the german bomb program in a country club like prison called Farm Hall. It of course was bugged as well and the Farm Hall transcripts were published many years later. The response of the inmates to news of Hiroshima is telling. First they did not believe it, then a few simple calculation showed where their errors had been. Clearly they were working on a bomb, and just as clearly the German system had dropped it when they convinced themselves it would not work.

[John Burgess]

Wonderful post. Thanks!

The Farm Hill transcripts inform Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen".

[mick bright]

Not Hechingen but Haigerloch was where Heisenberg had his "atom keller". A very interesting and evocative place. Hechingen is the nearest railway station (where I alighted last year to visit the Haigerloch lab.20 km distant) by car. Of course, the lady probably did come from Hechingen.

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