Word: fermi
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...other physicists passed atomic secrets to people they knew to be Soviet moles, out of a desire to help the U.S.S.R., then an American ally, defeat Hitler, and because they believed widespread knowledge of the secrets of nuclear-bomb making would contribute to world peace. Sudoplatov alleges that Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard would leave secret papers available in laboratories, including the one in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was developed, knowing the moles would find and copy them...
...still idols in the world scientific community cooperated with the espionage network? "Gumshoe braggadocio," fumes Richard Rhodes, author of a 1986 Pulitzer- prizewinning book on the making of the A-bomb. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and a fervent anticommunist, scoffs at the idea that Fermi would ever have cooperated with the Soviets, because Fermi "clearly opposed the Stalinist nightmare...
...Moscow the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service -- a successor to the agency that Beria once headed and Sudoplatov worked for -- put out a rare public disclaimer. Sudoplatov's "allegations ((about)) Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer," it said, "do not correspond to reality." Oleg Tsarev of the same agency, an in-house expert on atomic spying, says, "Having seen the summary file ((on nuclear espionage)), I can tell you there are no such names as Sudoplatov mentions in it." He makes one tiny exception: "One of our sources had a discussion with someone who knew Oppenheimer in 1945." But the report...
...boss Beria was purged and shot in 1953, Sudoplatov was accused of mass murders by the victorious Nikita Khrushchev and jailed for 15 years. He was eventually rehabilitated after addressing a 1982 plea to the Communist Party Central Committee mentioning his exploits in obtaining atomic information from Oppenheimer, Fermi and Bohr, among others. The committee, say the Schecters, could easily have checked every word...
...January 1943, says Sudoplatov, the Soviets received a full report on the secret experiment conducted the month before by Fermi in Chicago, in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was produced for the first time. But in a memo dated July 3, 1943, and reprinted in an appendix to the book, physicist Igor Kurchatov says he thinks the Americans might conduct such a successful experiment "in the near future"; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed...