13.
Hiroshima woke up Stalin. Perhaps because he was preoccupied with the conclusion of the war against Germany and then a race to join the war against Japan in order to seize Japanese territory before Tokyo could surrender, Stalin does not seem to have understood the strategic importance of the atomic bomb, despite the wealth of intelligence information he possessed on the American nuclear weapons program. The flash of atomic fire that destroyed a Japanese city six thousand miles from Moscow destroyed in the same instant the sense of security that Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership thought they had achieved in their victorious struggle against Nazi Germany. Four years of the most devastating war of annihilation in history, a titanic conflict with Hitler’s legions in which tens of millions of Soviet citizens, civilian and military, had perished and much of the nation had been laid waste, had ended with security a mirage. They were once more in peril should the Americans, in future years, ever turn on them. What stunned Stalin most was not merely the power of this new weapon, but the fact that the United States had not hesitated to use it against a nation he considered already beaten and on the verge of giving up.
“Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed,” he said in a meeting with Kurchatov in the middle of August. There would be no safety now until the Soviet Union had its own atomic bomb. On August 20, 1945, the State Defense Committee, which Stalin chaired, issued a secret decree establishing a special committee, headed by Beria, to oversee the nuclear weapons project. Igor Kurchatov was to continue as scientific director, in effect the Soviet equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project, but his organization was no longer to be stingily funded. No expense was too great. “If the child doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs,” Stalin told him. “Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.”
Making an atomic bomb entails much more than the creation of a laboratory city like Los Alamos, and this is where the industrial espionage of the third major Soviet spy, George Koval, counted. It requires the establishment of an entire nuclear industry, from mines to garner raw uranium ore, plants to process it into metal, and large-scale reactors and gaseous diffusion facilities, such as those General Groves had built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at Hanford, Washington, to enrich uranium into the U-235 isotope and to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The undertaking had cost the United States $2 billion, an enormous sum in 1945. The Soviets would have to spend the rough equivalent, in labor and resources if not in cash, because they would have to replicate what the Americans had done, and Stalin was ordering this accomplished in a land suffering from destruction on a scale difficult to imagine.
What had not been blasted in the fighting, the German invaders had systematically burned down or blown up during their retreat. (Nazi cruelty toward the Russians was deliberate and without limit, emanating from the racial doctrine that all Slavs were subhuman —Untermenschen. Hitler had planned to raze Russia’s two greatest cities, Leningrad and Moscow, and to turn Russia and its associated lands into a vast new Teutonic colony in which all the Slavic peoples would be reduced to serfs, deprived of education and medical care. The largest group of human beings murdered by the Nazis, aside from the Jews, were Soviet prisoners of war—about 2.7 million of the 4.5 million captured. The Germans did not waste poison gas on them. Especially at the outset of the war, when they were confident of winning and few of their own men had been captured, the Germans either worked Soviet prisoners to death or herded them into barbed wire stockades and gave them the slow death of starvation. Mass shootings of civilians in areas where there was resistance from partisans and looting and rape were commonplace. The Germans were fortunate that they committed crimes like this in the modern era. In ancient times the customs of vengeance would have demanded the dismemberment of the defeated German nation, a pitiless slaughter of the males, and the selling of the women and children into slavery. There was revenge—wholesale rape of German women and uncontrolled looting—after the Red Army, its soldiers enraged by what they saw as they fought their way westward, finally penetrated the Reich. And there was some vengeance killing in Berlin brought on by the ferocity of the fighting there. These were reprehensible war crimes, but hardly equivalent to the killing of millions.) The cities of western Russia and Ukraine—industrial centers as far east as Stalingrad on the Volga—were in ruins. The flaying hand of war had reached out to smash 4.7 million houses, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages. Twenty-five million people were homeless. Agriculture and transportation had also been devastated. One hundred thousand collective and state farms had been ravaged, along with thousands of tractor and farm machinery stations. Seven million horses were gone and 20 million of the country’s 23 million pigs. More than 40,000 miles of rail line had been torn up and 15,800 locomotives and 428,000 freight cars destroyed or damaged.
The task of reconstruction just to restore the prewar status quo was daunting, and yet Stalin was immediately ordering an immensely expensive project that would detract from reconstruction and delay homes for the homeless and adequate nourishment for the hungry. And he was soon to order other expensive military programs in radar, rocketry, jet-propelled fighter aircraft, and the building of a fleet of long-range bombers copied from the B-29, which would further detract from civilian reconstruction. That he did not hesitate to make the choice told a great deal about the nature of the Soviet state, the character and personality of this man who had fashioned it in his image, and why Americans like Bennie Schriever returned home from one war to find themselves quickly caught up in a new and different confrontation.