RAINCLOUDS WERE HANGING OVER IDLEWILD INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT as the KLM flight from Amsterdam touched down on the tarmac. Sergey Lebedev peered out of the window, unimpressed. They had told him in Moscow that New York was at its best in April—bright and sunny, yet without the oppressive heat and humidity of summer. He had left his raincoat at home and advised the six Soviet computer experts joining him for the trip not to bother bringing theirs either.
The propellers of the Lockheed Super Constellation were still winding down as the group got to the top of the plane’s steps. One by one they looked up at the gathering storm and realized their wardrobe error. Above the noise of the engines, Lebedev could hear the grumbling begin.
It was Sunday, April 19, 1959. They had left Moscow two days earlier, and all were in need of sleep.
Each man carried a black leather briefcase. Some contained drawings and notes about the biggest and best computers in the Soviet Union—information they planned to present to the Americans. Others were carrying vodka and black caviar to treat their hosts during what was scheduled to be a two-week tour of the United States.
They had come for a rapprochement. The US government had agreed to let the Russians see inside America’s most secret computer labs; the Kremlin would offer the same courtesy in exchange.
Lebedev, at age fifty-six the Soviet Union’s top computer expert, had been tasked with leading the delegation himself. During World War II he had built a system to stabilize the sights of tank cannons. He then created the first computer in the Eastern bloc with a small group of researchers at the University of Kiev, which in turn led to him being handpicked by Joseph Stalin to lead the USSR’s computer effort. He had retained the role under the new premier, Nikita Khrushchev, and was finally starting to make progress with his inventions.
Although the Soviet Union had caught up with America on the nuclear bomb and had beaten the Americans into space with the launch of Sputnik some fifteen months earlier, computer technology was one area where the Americans had a sizable advantage.
Stalin was an obstacle to the development of Soviet computer technology. He had objected to the development of any machine that would replicate the human brain or replace a man on a factory production line; he saw it as a capitalist evil. That had forced Lebedev and his contemporaries to develop computers with very strictly defined military missions: for translation, weather forecasting, and to calculate the firing range of missiles.
America, on the other hand, had burned billions of dollars on a sprawling mass of computer projects with undefined or moving objectives. Private companies were competing with universities and government departments for lucrative defense contracts to build computers for the army, the air force, the navy, or the newly created commercial honeypot that was NASA, the American space agency. It was a creative hotbed that had spawned a booming industry, one that was inventing ever more advanced technologies at breakneck speed.
Lebedev had built an impressive machine in his lab in Moscow, but had not worked out how to mass-produce the device effectively. The Americans, meanwhile, were already rolling out reliable computers by the hundreds.
American businesses were installing giant machines sold by the likes of IBM and RCA which could be used to run their payrolls or settle their taxes. Programs were under way to computerize air traffic control and US census data.
Both superpowers knew that computer technology had the power to change the dynamics of the Cold War. There were clear economic benefits to be gained from the digitization of the American economy. Yet there were also more direct military uses for computing power. Both sides were developing nuclear missiles at great pace, and computers were needed to guide those missiles and to identify and shoot down any incoming enemy threats. The American science community was bubbling with stories about one young scientist in particular.
Dudley Buck at MIT had developed an ultrafast computer with no moving parts that would fit in a man’s shirt pocket. Given that the most advanced computers at that time occupied whole floors of office buildings, it was an attention-grabbing concept. Buck had been touring America to educate academics and business leaders about his work. Although the term had not yet been coined, he had invented a prototype microchip named the Cryotron.
The Soviet Union was years behind on this technology, and that posed a serious problem for Lebedev. According to an article Lebedev had seen in Life magazine two years earlier, Buck’s tiny computer chip would be used as the guidance system for America’s new intercontinental ballistic missile. At the time the article was published, Buck’s prototype device was a long way from being capable of deployment with a nuclear warhead. In the intervening period, however, a number of large research projects under the auspices of the US government had been set to drive forward Buck’s Cryotron technology. Yet it was still not quite perfected.
The US State Department had given Lebedev and his team permission to see inside Buck’s lab. Just three days’ after Lebedev and his team of scientists touched down in New York, they were scheduled to meet Buck—and to see his invention for themselves.
DUDLEY BUCK WAS working late in his lab yet again. Although he had a wife and three young children, including an infant that was only a few weeks old, he was rarely home before 8:00 p.m. those days. Especially just then, when he was so close to cracking the problem.
He had an apparatus mounted on a workbench that looked a bit like a glass television tube placed on a table with its screen down. Some chemicals were inside it—substances he had only ever seen before on the Periodic Table. On the opposite bench, large metal probes attached to electrical wires disappeared into bulky steel canisters filled with liquid helium.
The two sets of equipment held the key to his great experiment. Inside the glass tube he was trying to create computer chips. His design relied on superconductors—chemical elements that only conduct electricity at ultralow temperatures. Helium only liquefies at temperatures of 4 Kelvins, or -269 degrees centigrade, ranking it as one of the coldest substances on earth that can be procured relatively easily. The steel vats of helium on the workbenches were being used to create a cryogenic environment.
Plumes of evaporation clouds would fill the room as the experiments were changed over. Buck knew that there were others out there trying to do the same thing: to invent an integrated computer circuit small enough and cheap enough to bring to the masses. The basic task was to find a way to create a device that could switch from an “on” position to an “off” position extremely quickly—from “1” to “0” in terms of the language of binary code upon which all computer programs depend. While the earliest computers had used mechanical switches to perform this task, scientists across the world were now racing to find better, quicker, and more efficient electronic switches. For it was only once the switches got quicker that computers would be able to start fulfilling their potential, by performing ever more complex tasks.
There were many different avenues being pursued, including the semiconducting silicon chip that eventually won the battle and drives most computers today. Yet, at the time, Buck was considered to have the scientific lead with his concept of the “superconducting” microchip. He had already won international acclaim for an earlier version of this microchip, which was manufactured using just two bits of wire wound around each other and suspended in the helium canister. Even that crude version of the device promised to become the fastest computer ever—potentially hundreds of times faster than anything commercially available at the time. But only if certain issues could be resolved. Now he was working on a more technically-advanced version.
A steady stream of newspaper reporters had trickled through his spartan little office under the dome in the main building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A scriptwriter had come to interview him about turning the story of his invention into a prime-time drama. Buck and his wife had been invited to Paris for a conference that summer. MIT officialdom was also excited. A cryotron, with accompanying notes on use, was buried in a time capsule on campus in 1957 at the behest of James Killian, the president of the university, and Dr. Harold Edgerton, the world-renowned inventor of strobe lighting who built underwater cameras for Jacques Cousteau.
Yet it was in Washington, DC, that the greatest level of interest had been generated for Dudley Buck’s invention. A few weeks after the Russian visit, he was due to attend a top-secret meeting of a new advisory committee for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was on the creation of the first generation of supercomputers for the American defense and intelligence community.
Hundreds of scientists across America were already working on the scheme, code-named Project Lightning. One of the key goals was to make Buck’s new chip function. Computer scientists at NASA thought it could be useful in space. Lockheed Missile Systems and Boeing both thought it could be used as a guidance system for the newest nuclear missiles being designed.
The second incarnation of Buck’s cryotron, that he was then trying to perfect, was a much more advanced device. Rather than winding wires around each other by hand, he was laying thin lines of the metals alongside each other using an electron gun. A team of more than a hundred physicists at IBM was working on Project Lightning, under contract to the National Security Agency (NSA), the newest and most obscure of America’s intelligence agencies. Buck wanted to solve the remaining problems himself, however, ideally in time for his big meeting in Washington, and so he was putting in long hours. Not everyone around him grasped why he was devoted to the work.
To his students Buck was a gifted, prank-playing young professor. He was an incredible teacher who had helped out a number of less-affluent students on campus by giving them jobs in his lab to help them fund their studies. They knew he had been part of the MIT team that had designed the first computer random-access memory (RAM), an invention that helped turn computers from a curiosity into a useful tool. The full extent of his groundbreaking work was unknown to them, however.
As well as an MIT scientist, Buck was a government agent. For the previous nine years he had been working part-time for the NSA, playing roles large and small in classified defense projects such as the Corona spy satellite program, assorted missile programs, and countless schemes to build bigger and better computers for various branches of the military. He had worked as a codebreaker in Washington. Diary entries show that he was familiar with many of the Manhattan Project scientists. He had even spent time seconded to one of the most infamous intelligence arms of the CIA, which took him behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe.
Throughout his time at MIT, Buck moonlighted as one of the NSA’s top troubleshooters. He was all too aware of the importance of his Cryotron chip to his superiors at NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Since the USSR had launched its Sputnik satellite eighteen months earlier, building better computers had become an obsession of both the White House and the Pentagon.
The idea that the USSR’s top computer experts would get to breeze through his lab left Buck with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was a laid-back character, an optimist. He had always been free with his ideas, telling anyone who would listen about his newest discoveries—even before they were properly patented. It had even gotten him into trouble in the past. Nonetheless, the idea of telling the Russians about his work seemed a step too far.
The trip had been arranged months in advance. He had made note of the date, writing “RUSSIANS 2 PM” in bold capitals in his diary. At the back of his mind, he chewed over how to deal with the situation.
There was little point in being too precious with information. A paper he had published four months earlier explained the experiments he was working on in considerable detail. If the KGB—the Soviet intelligence service—was anywhere near as good as it was thought to be, then Lebedev would surely have been given a copy before his trip. The paper had created quite a stir.
“The day is rapidly drawing near when digital computers will no longer be made by assembling thousands of individually manufactured parts,” Buck had written in the introduction. “Instead an entire computer, or a large part of a computer, will be made in a single process.”
The comment about making computers “in a single process” is a reference to the upgraded cryotron that he was making with an electron gun. What Buck was manufacturing was one of the first integrated circuits.
Lebedev and his group of Soviet scientists were originally invited to attend the conference where Buck unveiled his work, but bilateral negotiations to arrange the trip became bogged down in complications. Technical problems ensured that the first few exchanges by wire transmission were difficult for the Americans to translate. Cyrillic characters had been converted into English ones, resulting in messages that did not quite make sense. There were also transmission errors that added an extra layer of complexity. Yet the bigger problem was that the Soviet negotiators took such a long time to agree to a return visit. A year passed between the first invitation letter from the US National Joint Computer Committee and the trip taking place. The final itinerary agreed by both governments included a trip to Buck’s lab at MIT.
Although Buck knew the trip had been sanctioned by the highest levels of government, he appeared a little reticent about the exchange of information. When Lebedev and his six colleagues stepped into Buck’s lab on the third floor at MIT, they discovered that the demonstration they had been promised would not happen. Buck had instructed a couple of his students to remove the helium canisters and have them refilled. He explained away the problem as a badly timed piece of routine maintenance. Buck was polite and courteous, and explained to Lebedev the general principles of his work, but the Russians left with little more than what they’d known beforehand.
But Lebedev did not make a scene. In his first two days he had already gleaned more about the American computer industry than any foreigner ever had, having been given a guided tour of the IBM factory. He and his six colleagues left Logan Airport in Boston to carry on their tour, flying to Philadelphia, then Washington, and back to New York before heading home.
A few weeks after they flew back to Moscow, Dudley Buck was dead.