To Trinity and Beyond (chapter four: Atomic Comics)

(Continuing a tale begun here)

Can it be that Joseph Stalin was well informed about the American development of the atomic bomb long before President Harry Truman? Venona and other recently available sources tell us that Soviet intelligence was regularly reporting to the Kremlin on the top-secret British-American atom bomb project as early as 1941. Truman was not briefed on it until April 1945, shortly after he was sworn in as president.

Truman met Stalin for the first time at the Potsdam Conference... The closely guarded secret of the bomb could now be shared with our Soviet ally. Churchill was standing nearby. The president later recounted the incident: "On July 24, I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'"

Stalin exhibited no surprise because he already knew about the American atom bomb test from Soviet intelligence. Two weeks earlier, an NKVD message to Beria reported that the Americans had scheduled the first atomic bomb test. The message identified the spies who provided the information by their Venona code names "Mlad" and "Charles." The latter was Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee who was part of the British team sent to work on the A-bomb. "Mlad" was a teenage employee at Los Alamos named Theodore Hall...

- Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, 2001

As was later written abroad, at that moment Churchill fixed his gaze on Stalin's face, closely observing his reaction. However, Stalin did not betray his feelings and pretended that he saw nothing special in what Truman had imparted to him. Both Churchill and many other Anglo-American authors subsequently assumed that Stalin had really failed to fathom the significance of what he had heard.

In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin, in my presence, told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. The latter reacted almost immediately. "Let them. We'll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up."

I realized that they were talking about research on the atomic bomb.

- Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, The memoirs of Marshal Zhukov, 1971

Because Fuchs had arrived at Los Alamos but was not yet reporting, the Soviets apparently first learned about the principle of implosion and its implications from a report Hall passed to Sax during a rendezvous in Albuquerque in December 1944 ... the information reached Igor Kurchatov, the Soviet physicist who was heading Stalin's atomic bomb project, in Moscow in March 1945. Implosion was an idea that had not occurred to him, Kurchatov said in his memorandum commenting on the intelligence report, "but the implosion method is undoubtedly of immense interest, is fundamentally correct, and should be subjected to close scrutiny both theoretically and experimentally."
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When Sax returned to Harvard in early 1945, Hall acquired a new courier...

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

One of the more famous wartime Superman stories actually appeared after the war ended thanks to the Department of Defense. "Battle of the Atoms" was originally going to appear in late 1944, but finally appeared in Superman #38 (January-February 1946) and featured a classic battle with Luthor save for the fact that Luthor's new weapon was an "Atomic Bomb". Since the Manhattan project, which gave rise to the first two American nuclear weapons, was in full swing in 1944, the Defense Department wanted nothing tipping off the Germans that America was even considering work on an atomic bomb, not even from a comic book. While the weapon used by Luthor looked nothing like the actual weapon, and was not anywhere near as destructive as the real bomb, government agents came to DC's offices and demanded that the story not be printed until official clearance was given, citing the need for a unified national defense. Obviously, the people at DC were confused, realizing that they must have come up with something more than their normal fantastic story.

- Wallace Harrington, Superman and the War Years

When Sax returned to Harvard in early 1945, Hall acquired a new courier, Lona Petka Cohen, an attractive Polish-American woman, then in her early thirties, who, along with her husband, Morris, was to become a legendary operative in the Soviet secret service... Her second trip to New Mexico occurred after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, when the secret of what had been going on at Los Alamos was out and the laboratory had become a much publicized place. The Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the federal Bureau of Investigation had greatly increased security in the whole area. As soon as Hall passed her his report at a rendezvous on the campus of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, she hurried back to a boardinghouse in the New Mexico town of Las Vegas, about eighty miles away, where she had been staying to avoid the attention she might have attracted by putting up at a hotel in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. She stuffed the papers Hall had given her under the top tissues in a box of Kleenex, grabbed her suitcase, and headed for the railroad station.

At the station, she discovered that plainclothes security men were questioning everyone getting on the train and searching their baggage...

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

Following that, another story, "Crime Paradise", was also censored and delayed. It ultimately appeared in 1946 in Action Comics #101 and told the story of Superman covering an atom bomb test, actually filming it for the Army. It featured a great cover by Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye showing an explosion with the now familiar "mushroom cloud".

- Wallace Harrington, Superman and the War Years

At the station, she discovered that plainclothes security men were questioning everyone getting on the train and searching their baggage. She waited inside until just before the train was due to depart, then walked up to two agents on the platform next to one of the cars. She put down her suitcase and began to play the helpless female who was late for her train, fumbling at the zipper on the handbag in which she had placed her ticket. Making believe she needed to free her hands to work the zipper, she passed the Kleenex box holding the fruits of Hall's atomic espionage to one of the agents. After the handbag had been opened, she displayed her ticket and answered the agents' questions. They searched her bag and suitcase. She then picked up the suitcase and proceeded toward the steps into the car, deliberately leaving the Kleenex box behind with one of the agents. She shrewdly assumed he would think she had forgotten it and be gallant enough to call this to her attention and hand it to her, which is precisely what he did. Back in New York she joked with her NKVD handler from the consulate on East 67th Street that Hall's report had been "in the hands of the police."

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

As amazing as it sounds, during the later years of World War II, DC had several other instances where the Defense Department demanded that their stories not appear in print considering them a threat to national defense. In April, 1945, Alvin Schwartz wrote a story for the syndicated Superman newspaper strip, which involved the use of an atom smasher, or cyclotron. At the time, this concept was still science fiction, but Schwartz's story was close enough to reality that agents from the Defense Department demanded that the sequence not be run to eliminate the possibility of leaks. In an interview with Schwartz, he said, "I'd gotten my material about cyclotrons from a 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics, so I didn't have any idea about the bomb. I never even knew that the FBI got involved until years later when I saw an article in the New York Post which said, "Superman had it first," in other words, the bomb. The FBI had actually gone to Jerry Siegel who was in the armed forces at the time, but nobody mentioned it to me until years later."

Jack Schiff, an editor of the Superman comics and newspaper features, recalled in an interview that, "A pair of FBI agents visited DC Comics publisher Harry Donenfeld in early 1945. They insisted we get rid of the cyclotron, and bring the story to a quick conclusion. I refused to make the changes, so Donenfeld arranged for someone else to ghost the changes."

Once the war ended, there were several stories in Time and Newsweek mentioning the censorship of the Superman comic strips. In 1948, Harper's published a previously confidential memo written in 1945 by Lt. Col. John R. Lansdale, Jr, that outlined the War Department's discomfort with the information in these stories...

- Wallace Harrington, Superman and the War Years

In Russia the Nazi invasion had interrupted the already very limited fission research program. Facilities and personnel were transferred to Kazan and other industrial cities beyond the Urals and scientists diverted to more urgent defense projects... However, in early 1942 a sharp-eyed physicist, twenty-eight-year-old Georgii Flerov, had noticed that the names of all the well-known scientists understood to have been working on atomic fission had disappeared from international academic journals. Personally and passionately convinced of the feasibility of constructing a nuclear weapon and suspicious about "dogs that did not bark," Flerov wrote to Stalin, urging that the Soviet Union should build the Uranium bomb without delay...

Diana Preston, Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima, 2005

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.

Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.

That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.

We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.

- President Truman announces the development and first use of the atomic bomb (Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference) August, 1945 (Press release here)

"This publication was produced at the request of the Assistant Manager for Public Education, Oak Ridge Operations Office, Atomic Energy Commission."

- Adventures Inside the Atom, 1948
(US Department of Energy web page)

"The first Soviet atomic test was First Lightning, August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as Joe 1. The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design."

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R...

Nearly four years ago I pointed out that "scientific opinion appears to be practically unanimous that the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known. There is also substantial agreement that foreign research can come abreast of our present theoretical knowledge in time." And, in the three--nation declaration of the President of the United States and the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and of Canada, dated November 15, 1945, it was emphasized that no single nation could, in fact, have a monopoly of atomic weapons.

- President Truman announces the Soviet A-bomb, September 1949

 
Epilogue -
The End of the Stick