Fourth Spy at Los Alamos Knew A-Bomb’s Inner Secrets

There were actually hundreds of people in Roosevelt's administration who were working for the Soviets. It was called hysteria to cover the facts. See Diana West: AMERICAN BETRAYAL.

"The anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954." Based upon this article, it would seem that those concerns about Soviet spies infiltrating the US may not have been so "hysterical", after all.

Another spy, David Greenglass is routinely described as a 'machinist'. My recollection {>40 yrs} is that Greenglass was machining the shaped explosive charges which, upon ignition by the firing circuit, would compress the plutonium core. Thus, at least two spies were involved in work on the explosive triggering mechanism.

I am intrigued at the number of posts that attempt to justify spying against one's country to benefit a murderous totalitarian regime. There can be no excuse for this.

So Sebohrer fled to Moscow in 1951 and our crack counterintelligence operatives took only 4 years after that to figure out that he was spying for the Soviets. God Bless America.

What these spies did was help to equalize the ability of the Soviet Union, a sort of workers' state, to protect itself from the war-making ability of the major capitalist state after WWII, the United States. Recall that Churchill launched the Cold War immediately after the end of WWII hostilities, signaling the initiation of a renewed attempt to reverse the Russian revolution - which Hitler had failed to do. Without the equalization, there would have been the opportunity of the United States to do what Hitler had failed to do. McArthur certainly had the goal in mind. Ironically, money and corruption did what the Bomb failed to do 40 years later.

It is amazing how sophisticated countries with the greatest amount of cutting edge spy technology can get scammed. Cases that come to mind like Stalin oblivious to Hitler attacking him, 911, Pearl Harbor and this, Los Alamos. The Soviets almost blew it by having too many spies at this site.

I continue to be baffled by these people. An engineer or scientist of Seborer's ability would have had a very nice middle class life in the US. Nice house, pool, new Chevy every couple of years, good schools for the kids. When I was in the Soviet Union in 1990 I was astonished to see a dysfunctional, poor, derelict, oppressive, crumbling country. Utterly soul-destroying. (Of course they didn't believe in souls.) To trade for that is mind-boggling. Was it worth it comrades?

The article states that “The main appeal of implosion was that it drastically reduced the amount of bomb fuel needed.” No so. Implosion allows plutonium to be used, vs. uranium. It is vitally important to explosively assemble a critical mass of uranium or plutonium, and then—and only then—to introduce a few (10 or fewer) neutrons to start the chain reaction. If stray neutrons are present, the chain reaction might start too soon, before critical mass is obtained, and the device will be a dud. It will blow itself apart before a full chain reaction can occur. Plutonium is made artificially from uranium in nuclear reactors. Different plutonium isotopes are made with time in a reactor; all have shorter half-lives than uranium and are more radioactive, producing unwanted stray neutrons. Implosion, driven by chemical explosives, can be made to occur rapidly enough to make the probability of premature detonation unlikely. Richard Rhodes’ book, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, is an excellent reference.

Even before Germany was defeated the Soviets began workin on completely infiltrating the U.S. Government. Their primary routes were the diplomatic corps and the universities. As you can tell, absolutely nothing has changed. As far as the leading universities going anti-American are concerned, had this happened all at once, we would have declared war on whoever did it.

Seborer, under the Soviet code "Godsend", figured in Soviet transmissions to and from the United States intercepted and partially decoded in the Venona Project after early 1943 and not declassified until 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project#References_and_further_reading https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/ "Solo" is the remarkable double agent Morris Childs featuring in John Barron's "Operation SOLO: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin". Some of the spying in America during this period was influenced by the fact that the Soviets were our ally against the Nazis.

Along with insights from espionage, the Soviets gained valuable assistance from captive German scientists in their bomb efforts -- not unlike the critical role German rocket scientists played assisting the Americans' development of rockets for NASA and missiles for the military.

As others have said, this is not surprising. We had our share of informants in the other camp as well, I'm sure. This kind of game goes on as we speak. Luckily, we have been able to counter balance things - for the most part. We don't know what information and data that we collected that the other side revealed, "The Americans were able to steal our secrets." While this action was newsworthy for its time, I think today's theft of intellectual property and it actions that go unpunished for the moment, is much bigger news and much more damaging to our freedom as a country.

Spying occurred on both sides during this time period. From this article it seems Russia may have been assisted at arriving at a workable implosion device sooner than they would have independently. The time difference between a spy assisted or an independently developed device would have been a matter of years. There is no question that both parties were on path to developing weapons that produced the nuclear standoff of mutual assured destruction. That capability still exists. It remains a potent worldwide threat. Spies of many nations continue to do their work in the a world where nations seek weaponry advantages over others. History demonstrates the secrets behind those advantages don't remain secrets for long. As long as escalation in weapons is a greater force than disarmament, there will be spies stealing secrets.

I would hope someone does a study on why these people decided to support Russia. What in their makeup slanted their view of who the “good guy” was. There have been some spy’s that just do it for money, but here since there were so many it must have included other things.

Under what worldview did these people think the Soviet way of life was more conducive to human actualization and progress that it would be better for the USSR to have American nuclear weapons technology? It doesn't jibe with me at all. Why did they believe in totalitarian communism so fervently? It's a cautionary tale of how foreign ideologies can be a truly subversive influence.

At last an article that's not about Trump's impeachment (or lack of it). I relished every word of it. A different age to ours. However naive and foolish (and ultimately dangerous to society) the Soviet spies were, at least they believed in a cause and a higher purpose that went beyond today's posturing and self-promotion.

It amazes me that after experiencing freedom in America, these individuals could still spy for the Soviets. Communism was indeed the opiate of the intellectuals at that time. Let’s hope that foreign spying in the Silicon Valley doesn’t some day reveal similar damaging disclosures to a foreign power.

It has been years since I read the two books based on the Mitrohkin Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive The genre of spy fiction has many devotees. These two books are a substantial contribution to a different kind of genre: spy fact. Many of the mysteries of the fifties and sixties are illuminated. Mitrohkin thought the Rosenbergs were KGB assets.

The description of the Hiroshima bomb's working is incorrect. It did not work by firing anything "into" anything. The moving part was the outer, "female" one which rapidly and forcefully surrounded the passive "male" prong. There is an obvious reason for this: one wants the moving part in such a mechanism to move smoothly and predictably; the female of the pair can be, and was, designed to be guided on all sides by contact with the casing within which it travelled.

The 1945 telephone directory suggests that things were so confused during that time, that it was difficult to even to compile the names and locations of people in a telephone book. According to the directory: "This first edition of the Los Alamos Telephone Directory has been prepared during a transition period that has made accuracy difficult." In technical projects a technician generally works under the supervision of a more senior person. In the phone book, "Seborer, T/4 Oscar 357" seems to be a reference to U.S. Army technician fourth grade. For what it's worth, Wikipedia also lists a third and fifth grade, with the lower numbers having a higher rank. One reason that these firing circuits are “unbelievably complicated” is in their switching components. They probably couldn't use mechanical relays for this because they are too unpredictable in terms of timing. For what it's worth, according to Wikipedia: "They [Krytrons] are best known for their use in igniting exploding-bridgewire and slapper detonators in nuclear weapons..." Cite: Wikipedia "Technician fourth grade" (27 JAN 2020) Wikipedia "Krytron" (27 JAN 2020)

"... Oscar Seborer, had an intimate understanding of the ... inner workings." Not necessarily. For espionage purposes, all Seborer needed was access to documents. Note that Ralph Carlisle Smith believed that "... Mr. Seborer was a military technician in the Laboratory ..." (letter to Donald P. Dickason dated Sept. 18, 1956) Also note that Seborer is listed as a "T/4" in the 1945 telephone directory. That means Seborer was a Sergeant. See the Wikipedia article, "Technician fourth grade", for more. That suggests that there should be military records for Seborer.

Why would the Seborers suddenly move to Moscow, if they didn't feel they were in imminent danger? So, the FBI already knew in 1951 about the leaks.

Fascinating. So it used to be true that the Soviet Union spymasters relied on nearly anonymous engineers, defecting for idealistic reasons. Now, Mr. Putin merely picks up the phone, and has his man in the White House jump, and how high.

Putins Russia powers the same aggressive tentacles into perceived competitors or opposition business that the Cold War KGB / GRU did. (See: Sochi Olympics, UK poisonings, Crimean and other Ukrainean takeovers, etc etc) They may have different kinds of chaos at home in Russia, but they have never doubted the importance of competing by any means possible for power on a world stage. This is an extraordinarily consequential example. (And PS also a great example of the false and limited notion that the most educated immigrants are the “best” ones for this country and the world.)

More evidence that even completely sincere idealists with the purist motives can be dreadfully mistaken.

This fourth spy and the information he gave the Soviet Union raises new questions which are both important and pertinent. Yep, Russian mathematics and physics have all along been very good. On the other hand, their practical efforts (Sputnik, military aircraft and the like) often depended more on brute force engineering and less on cutting edge theory. Without these spies (that is, without the betrayal of our own scientists, and their recruitment by Russia), especially this fourth one, how much longer would it have taken them to produce such weapons? Decades? Is it possible they never would have accomplished some of the more difficult aims? The Soviet Union's economy and society were in a shambles after the war. Millions of young men had perished. Even during the 1950s the centralized Soviet system was already showing signs that it would not have the economic oomph to both match the American arms buildup and provide the barest of necessities (food, health care, etc.) to its citizens. We now know that the rapid economic growth in the Soviet Union after the war was simply a temporary trend caused by temporary factors including the war itself. Was this, especially the fourth spy, an unprecedented national security failure on the part of Los Alamos and our own intelligence agencies?

Don't know if this belongs in Science, politics or the At War series, or all of them, but this was an important piece of history - - and one that I probably would never have read about except for the NYT. The story also makes it clear that spying is universal, and rarely do any leaps in science ( or war) remain securely held for long. And it's a reminder, too, that we cannot be so naive as to ever think that our own country doesn't require its own intel gathering forces, even tho' they are notoriously difficult to oversee.

The evidence here points to the significance of this revelation. It did not happen in a vacuum, though. The Soviet scientific community wasn't just sitting there, waiting for what Stalin's spies could uncover. They were hard at work on the nuclear weapons problem, the mere knowledge of which was more than enough to prod Stalin to pursue these weapons. That was the most significant of all revelations and it was made, if not from Soviet detection of the first test in New Mexico in July 1945, then it certainly was with Truman's announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even absent the details of how it might work, the fact that it was possible to build such a weapon was confirmed by those press reports and, while even more secret than the bomb itself, by sampling the consequent fallout. Assessments of how long the Soviets would take to develop nuclear weapons varied. The longer estimates seemed to depend on the belief that Soviet physicists lacked the skillsets needed to bring it about. While their efforts benefited from details that may have been revealed by Seborer, the general consensus was that mere knowledge that fission weapons worked would lead to Soviet nuclear weapons within a decade. What would have been the result if lacking this detail? A wider window for what SAC's Gen. LeMay later asserted was a brief window in which he could have attacked the USSR and "won" a war by a first strike. The problem with that? Fallout doesn't respect borders.

As long as there have been secrets there have been people willing to share those secrets. For any number of reasons.

My father worked on the implosion "problem" at Los Alamos. I would love to be able to talk with him about this. I remember sitting in our back yard when I was in High School (1960's) and he explained the two different bombs. It was fascinating. I think he would be shocked by this information.