In April 1942 a 29-year-old lieutenant in the Soviet Union’s volunteer air force stumbled on the greatest secret in the world.
Georgy Nikolayevich Flerov was fighting for his homeland at the time. In 1941 the Germans had invaded the USSR and pushed deep into the Soviet heartland. Almost a year later, the front line stretched across the country, from Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg) in the north to the Crimean peninsula in the south. Flerov was a junior engineering officer stationed in Voronezh, a short distance from the front line, who worked to repair bombers. As far as the state was concerned, he was a nobody – just one of the millions drawn from across Russia to fight in the Great Patriotic War.
Flerov’s origins were humble. He was born in Rostov-on-Don to an impoverished family who couldn’t afford to provide him with an education. Throughout his teens, he was a labourer, engine greaser and electrician. In 1931, aged 18, he made his way to Leningrad to work at the massive zavod Krasny Putilovets, a munitions and tractor factory whose strikes had swept the tsar from power 14 years earlier. Two years later, he was sent by the state to attend university – the Soviet Union needed sharp minds – and fell in with Igor Kurchatov, the Russian answer to Ernest Lawrence. Under Kurchatov’s tutelage, Flerov blossomed into a promising nuclear physicist. In 1940, while investigating the different isotopes of uranium, he and another researcher discovered that fission can occur spontaneously in nature – that elements could become unstable and split apart on their own. It was an impressive discovery ... but the Axis invasion robbed him of any opportunity to follow it up.
Flerov was convinced he was of more use to his country as a physicist than as a mechanic, and had vowed to keep his scientific career on track. When off duty, his preferred way to relax was to head to the local university library and catch up on the latest research journals. And it was during one of these breaks that he noticed something was missing. Two years earlier, he had written a paper on spontaneous fission. Nobody had responded to it. In fact, nobody seemed to have published a word about atomic research at all. Flerov couldn’t imagine that the British, Americans and Germans, with their amazing machines and vast resources, had abandoned the ‘uranium problem’ wholesale. That could mean only one thing: everybody else was working on an atomic bomb.
The Russians didn’t have a nuclear weapons project. Instead, the state had prioritised metallurgy and heavy industry, and had dispatched its best chemists and physicists to work in industrial plants. Flerov had never been convinced this was the right course of action. In 1941 he had visited the Russian Academy of Sciences, outlining exactly how a bomb could be made, and had also written repeatedly to Kurchatov, begging the ‘prodigal son’ of nuclear science to unleash the power of the atom. Convinced the Americans were doing just that, Flerov knew he had to act. If the other physicists wouldn’t listen, perhaps The Boss would.
Flerov wrote to Stalin.
Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,
Ten months have elapsed since the beginning of the war, and all the time I have felt like a man trying to break through a stone wall with his head […] Perhaps being at the front, I have lost all perspective of what science should deal with at present […] [but] I think we are making a big mistake. The greatest follies are made with the best intentions. All of us want to do all we can to rout the Nazis, but there is no need for such hurry-scurry, no need to deal with problems that only come under the term ‘pressing’ military objectives […] This is my last letter, whereupon I lay down arms and wait till the problem has been solved in Germany, Britain or the USA. The results will be so overriding it won’t be necessary to determine who is to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country, the Soviet Union.
Flerov ended with a demand. A seminar with the best Russian scientists and ‘an hour and a half for the report, in your presence’ to plead for the creation of a Soviet atomic bomb. It was an astonishing gamble – Stalin wasn’t known for taking pen pals and had a habit of ‘disappearing’ malcontents – but the lieutenant had been pushed too far. All he could do was wait for his reply: a commendation or a bullet.
The message reached Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. Its arrival coincided with a bundle of intelligence from Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police, also making the case for an atom bomb. Stalin paced his office, puffing away on his cherry-root pipe as he discussed the idea with his scientific consultant, Sergei Kaftanov. Kaftanov agreed it was ‘necessary to act’. Next, Stalin called in his four greatest physicists and abused them. Why was some upstart lieutenant able to see something they had all missed? This ‘Lieutenant Flerov’, just a name on a piece of paper, had guts. Stalin liked guts. The USSR needed guts. The physicists were to start work on an atomic bomb immediately.
Georgy Flerov had baited the Great Bear into atomic action.
* * *
The first Russian atomic bomb detonated in August 1949. First Lightning, or RDS-1, was almost identical to Gadget, with the same ‘Fat Man’ bulbous body designed to explode inward and initiate a plutonium chain reaction. The similarity was no fluke: the Russians had stolen the plans. Rather than the Trinity test’s solitary pylon, the Russian test site in the remote steppes of Kazakhstan was surrounded by wooden buildings, a fake subway station, tanks, planes and 1,500 animals to see what would happen. The animals didn’t make it.
The USSR’s programme had almost as many luminaries as the Manhattan Project. The lead scientist was Kurchatov. Overseeing the whole project was Beria, a man who had already ordered the deaths of thousands, perhaps millions, in Stalin’s purges. Failure wasn’t worth contemplating.
Flerov was another of those at the test. Shortly after his letter, he had been reassigned (much to his relief) to focus on atomic work. By the war’s end he was a key part of the Soviet nuclear machine, and in mid-1945 found himself in Germany, trying to establish just how far the Nazis had come with atomic research. The answer was ‘not very far’. The German bomb project had never got off the ground, in part thanks to sabotage by Norwegian chemists. The programme that did exist (described by the Allied scientific head as ‘ludicrously small-scale’) had already been picked clean by the British and Americans. Flerov worked to ‘recruit’ any German scientists that remained, now dressed as a colonel in the NKVD – Soviet state security. Unfortunately for Flerov, most of the top German nuclear scientists had already been rounded up by the British and were prisoners in Farm Hall, a manor house on the banks of the river Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire.
Among the scientific prisoners had been Otto Hahn, the man who, with Lise Meitner, had discovered fission. In 1944 he had won the Nobel Prize for it. Meitner, in one of the great moments of scientific sexism, got nothing (when the Nobel records were later opened, it was revealed she had been nominated and overlooked 48 times). An ardent anti-Nazi, Hahn had stayed in Germany but, unlike many of his fellow prisoners, refused to work on the bomb project. When word reached Farm Hall about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he felt personally responsible and contemplated suicide. Once again, the dark side of science had taken its toll.
But Germany was a long way from Kazakhstan and yet more bombs. After First Lightning, Flerov was released from his nuclear obligations and began to turn his attention to element discovery. In 1956, after hearing about Al Ghiorso’s discovery of mendelevium, Flerov used Kurchatov’s cyclotron in Moscow to bombard plutonium with oxygen in an attempt to make element 102. Perhaps he even succeeded, although even Flerov admitted the results were inconclusive.
In Georgy Flerov, the Soviets had discovered their own element mastermind. But if he was going to compete with the Americans, he needed a laboratory that could rival Berkeley.
* * *
The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) sits at the heart of Dubna, a small town two hours’ drive from Moscow. To get there involves a trip down a long, single-lane carriageway that slices through heavy pine forests and cuts past a T-34 tank parked to mark the point where the Axis invasion was stopped 75 years ago. You can begin to feel the history of the place before you arrive.
Dubna is a naukograd, one of Russia’s dedicated science hubs. Entry is past a giant metal sculpture proclaiming the town’s name – a cast-steel version of the Hollywood sign – and banners immortalising its scientific heroes. The Volga River cuts the settlement in half. On the south bank, where the Volga meets the Moscow canal, a 25m (80ft)-tall statue of Lenin keeps a lonely vigil. Originally, it was accompanied by a similar bust of Stalin, but that was quietly dismantled shortly after the dictator’s death.
By all accounts, Dubna hasn’t changed much since JINR was established, save for a few Western touches that have crept in since the Iron Curtain fell: a McDonald’s, a small supermarket, a fantasy-themed hotel. It’s easy to overlook these capitalist trappings and imagine the town the first scientists must have seen when they arrived in the 1950s, drawn from across the communist world to create a centre of nuclear excellence.
The man I’m here to see was one of those arrivals. He has been here, save for lectures abroad, ever since. His name is Yuri Oganessian, and he is currently the only living person to have an element named after him.
I’ve seen photos of Oganessian as he was when he started work at JINR: a fresh-faced 28-year-old of Armenian descent, short in stature, with classical features, his hair slicked down and a mischievous grin always playing at the corner of his lips. As a young man, Oganessian initially wanted to be an architect, but his penchant for science brought him to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. Here, it soon became clear Oganessian had a gift for organising the large-scale projects that would drive post-war science. He had a creative, eager mind that could solve problems; and, more importantly, he had a talent for bringing the right people together to realise his ideas. Upon graduation, Oganessian found himself wooed by the greatest minds in the USSR. After giving his future some thought, he elected to join Flerov as his chief engineer.
It was a typically bold appointment by Flerov – the young Armenian didn’t even have a PhD. The job interview was equally bizarre. Flerov sat Oganessian down and chatted to him for an hour without asking a single question about science. ‘From the first meeting with him, there was a conversation,’ Oganessian told the YouTube channel Periodic Videos. ‘He didn’t ask me about physics. He just asked me what I liked in life. Sport. If I liked the theatre, music, other things. It was just a conversation like that. Then he said “OK, OK, I’m satisfied. Thank you very much – I’ll take you in my group.”’
Apart from the town of their birth (Oganessian was also from Rostov-on-Don), the two men had little in common. Yet, as with Seaborg and Ghiorso, they were the perfect fit. ‘This programme of superheavy elements was so fantastic for a young guy,’ Oganessian recalls. ‘If I had the chance to start again now, I would do it this way again.’
The feeling of respect was mutual. Flerov had in mind an audacious plan that needed someone of Oganessian’s brilliance. Tired of Berkeley’s domination, Flerov planned to join the race for the superheavy elements and had designed a machine – a new cyclotron – he believed could beat the Americans. Oganessian was going to build it.
The entry to JINR is at the end of a muddy road across a ruined level crossing (the warning siren always on, the barrier always open). A small checkpoint guards the entrance, where my passes are checked and authorised. A moment later, stepping through a small wooden door, I’m standing on the main boulevard of Russia’s premier science facility. Some of the buildings have a fresh coat of paint and new wings as they have expanded; others have boarded-up doors and shattered windows, and seem to be in a state of general dilapidation. JINR, my guide Nikolay Aksenov explains, comprises seven laboratories, all looking at different areas of nuclear science. Funding depends on success – and some labs have been more successful than others.
The Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions is the second building on the right. It is clearly one of the more affluent laboratories, although the building itself is a blockish, whitewashed complex that takes the same form as all the others. Outside, 0.5m (2ft) metal dewars – pots containing liquid nitrogen – have been stacked ready for use. The caps to the dewars were lost a long time ago; these days, empty baked bean cans do the job.
Aksenov leads the way into the building, up the stairs to the first floor, through a secretary’s office and into a long, oak-panelled room dominated by a massive conference table stacked with magazines, reports and scientific papers. At one end, rising from his desk, is the lab director, Sergey Dmitriev; standing next to him and smiling warmly is Oganessian – the man who, with Flerov, put JINR on the map. Still surprisingly spry for someone in his eighties, he hurries over to greet me in flawless English. We’ve never met before, but he shakes hands like I’m an old friend, promising to catch up later before heading to his office. It’s hard to get over the thought that I’ve just met one of the most influential scientists in the world.
Dmitriev is also effusive in his welcome. He directs my gaze to a large plasma screen positioned on the wall behind me. On it is a live feed from the new cyclotron under construction, a few hundred yards down the road. It’s a strangely still image: the only activity on screen is an old woman with a mop and bucket, cleaning around what looks like a giant, 6m (15ft)-wide lump of circular metal on the floor. It takes a moment to realise that these are the two dees, the electrodes that form the beating heart of a cyclotron. Once finished, it will be one of the most powerful pieces of scientific equipment in the world, joining the other five cyclotrons operated by the Flerov lab team. Currently it’s still waiting on its other vital components, not least the magnet that will cause those ions to spin.
‘I can’t wait to see one in action,’ I say. I never did see the cyclotron at Berkeley – the sticky rib sandwich laid on by Jacklyn Gates distracted me.
Dmitriev smiles. ‘OK, let’s go. Now is a good time to visit the main cyclotron. It works 24 hours a day and there’s a queue to use it. But at the moment we can get in.’
Today U400M – the U stands for uskoritel, or accelerator – is being used by a private space company, bombarding their satellites with ions to simulate cosmic rays. The machine is only turned off for two weeks a year, Aksenov explains on the way, as Dmitriev leads us down a flight of stairs and along an unmarked corridor. That’s because at the height of summer, the water taken from the Volga is too hot to act as a coolant. ‘That’s when the engineers can make repairs,’ Aksenov says. ‘There’s another reason we do it then too: we can all take a summer vacation.’
Down the corridor, past one turn and through a small control room bedecked with monitors, readouts and flashing buttons, we arrive. The sight is like nothing else in the world. In principle, the U400M is exactly the same as the first generation of cyclotrons: an ion machine gun. It just happens to be a machine gun the size of a house that fires 6 trillion bullets per second.
When visitors saw Lawrence’s 1939 cyclotron they called it a ‘truly colossal machine’. It weighed 220t. U400M weighs 2,100t. At first it looks like a power plant – a large, cold concrete box with a humming machine in the centre, pipes shooting off everywhere guarded by emergency valves and metal walkways arranged to step over the crucial equipment. Yet glancing up at the huge contraption that dominates the room, you can just make out the familiar zinc battery appearance of the cyclotron’s dees, sandwiched under a huge magnetic arch as if they were gripped by a clamp.
It’s loud. The whole thing hums constantly as its electromagnet keeps the beam where it needs to go ... valves occasionally hiss as they release pressurised steam ... coolant rumbles from somewhere inside. White beards of frost appear at key joints where the liquid nitrogen is added from the baked bean can dewars. This coolant, along with water from the Volga, is essential. As a cyclotron demands an electrically charged projectile, atoms used in the beam have to be heated to strip them of their electrons. This means that U400M shoots an intensely hot plasma – electrically charged gas – of around 600 °C.1
‘This is all pretty typical equipment,’ Aksenov says, pointing around the room. ‘It’s just of very good construction. Pumps, pipelines, cooling water. The injection of ions is here, accelerator here, this is the beam line.’ He traces his finger along the route of a pipe that weaves its way across the floor before vanishing into a solid wall. ‘You focus it on a target in there. We hide the target; these blocks are to isolate the radiation, so this room is always at background radiation levels.’
Aksenov is being modest. The machine is a modern marvel: it helped discover five chemical elements.
* * *
U400M is a world away from JINR’s first effort, the U300. Built to custom specifications in Leningrad and 3m (10ft) in diameter, Flerov had ordered a machine to match anything else in the world. Handing the plans to Oganessian, he had tasked his young assistant with turning his vision into a reality.
At first, progress was slow: none of the Russian team had any experience building a cyclotron. ‘One had to be a pioneer in almost everything,’ the JINR records state, ‘and the only guide was one’s academic knowledge and intuition. Lack of coordination and mistakes were inevitable.’ Yet in Oganessian, Flerov had chosen the perfect leader. Somehow, the young Armenian kept the team together, preventing conflicts, delegating jobs and solving problems before they derailed the project. ‘It was largely Oganessian’s skills,’ the record continues, ‘[that ensured] the success of its accelerator complex.’ On completion, it was probably the best machine in the world for discovering new elements, capable of accelerating ions as heavy as neon.
The Berkeley element hunters also had a new toy to play with. At the suggestion of Luis Alvarez, the laboratory had collaborated with Yale University to build a heavy ion linear accelerator (HILAC), hauling its parts up the Blackberry Canyon pass on flatbed trucks. In April 1957, HILAC had begun operation. Now the Americans had the ability to shoot heavier ion beams too.
Figure 5 Transporting part of the HILAC to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1956.
Sadly, Lawrence would never see the fruits of Berkeley’s latest ‘Big Science’ scheme. In 1958 President Eisenhower asked him to attend nuclear treaty talks in Switzerland. Despite having a flare-up of ulcerative colitis, Lawrence agreed. He fell ill and died shortly after his return to the US. Less than a month later, the University of California decided to name their two nuclear research sites after him: the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories at Berkeley and Livermore were formed.2
With the completion of U300 and HILAC, the US and USSR teams were evenly matched. Both had cutting-edge equipment, the resources of a superpower behind them, and skilled leaders capable of element discovery.
It was the wider Cold War in microcosm – and it would prove to be just as divisive.
Notes
1 Calcium usually turns to gas at around 1,484 °C, but the system is kept in a vacuum, which lowers the boiling point.
2 In 1971 they became Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; in 1995 they both got ‘National’ in their titles.