Atomic Spies

Inside the Cold War race to steal nuclear secrets

n the morning of 6 August 1945, seven American aircraft head towards the Japanese city of Hiroshima. As part of Special Mission 13, the Enola Gay is the only one fitted for weapons delivery – this is no ordinary bombing raid. The city has been on alert most of the night due to radar detecting large numbers of American planes heading towards the south. The alert has been called twice and at 07:09 the all clear is sounded. At 08:09 the Enola Gay begins its bomb run and at 08:15 the first atomic bomb is dropped. Forty-four seconds later it detonates in the air with the force of 16 kilotons of TNT, killing around 30 per cent of the population immediately. Two days later, a similar device is dropped over the city of Nagasaki. Between 129,000 and 226,000 people are killed in the combined detonations. Since the discovery of nuclear fission in Nazi Germany in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, the possibility of its weaponisation had not escaped the warring powers. More than any other, World War II was a conflict dominated by technology and science. Zyklon B, the gas used in the chambers of Auschwitz, was a relatively recent commercial pesticide and camps such as the Japanese Unit 731 conducted lethal biological and chemical experimentation on prisoners. As soon as the possibility of atomic weaponisation was understood, a race began that would reach a devastating climax on those two fateful days in August. The United States atomic research project, codenamed the Manhattan Project, began formally on 28 December 1942. It came into being after President Roosevelt ordered the unification of several independent research strands, including experiments at the University of Chicago on nuclear chain reactions and Glenn Seaborg’s attempts to produce pure plutonium. The top-secret Manhattan Project had one explicit aim: weaponising nuclear energy before Nazi Germany or another Axis power could achieve the same deadly goal. J Robert Oppenheimer, who had been conducting research of his own and had impressed Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (the military leader of the operation), was selected as the project’s head. On 1 January 1943 the project laboratory was formally established and a group of scientists began working on two distinct types of bomb: Little Boy, a uranium-based design, and Fat Man, a plutonium weapon.