Word: greenglasses
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...David Greenglass (Ethel Rosenberg's brother) was a U.S. Army machinist stationed in Los Alamos as part of what turned out to be the Manhattan Project. In January 1945, he said, Julius Rosenberg asked him to watch out for a new bomb, parts of which he soon found himself machining. On June 3, Green-glass handed lens-mold sketches to a courier who gave the password "I come from Julius." In September, Greenglass went to New York and gave Rosenberg a cross-section sketch of a Nagasaki-type bomb. Greenglass pleaded guilty before testifying, got a 15-year sentence...
Strong Corroboration. To shake the Greenglass story, Sobell's lawyers attacked the Nagasaki-bomb sketch (TIME, Aug. 12) with affidavits from two ex-Manhattan Project scientists. Both scorned the sketch as amateurish, inaccurate, a naive "caricature" of the bomb, which could not possibly have aided the Russians...
With gentler scorn, Judge Weinfeld pointed out that the Government was not required to prove that the espionage agents had "achieved perfection" by stealing all specifications for mass-scale bomb production. Such standards were "irrelevant" to the case, Weinfeld said. Greenglass was merely out "to get what he could"; his success was proved by the scientists' own affidavits, which described his version of the bomb as "correct in its most vague and general aspects." In 1945 that was plenty...
...result of Manhattan Project Machinist David Greenglass's secret testimony in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for giving the Russians what the U.S. prosecutor described as a sketch of the 1945 Nagasaki "Fat Man" atomic bomb (see cut). For purportedly aiding the Rosenbergs, Morton Sobell got 30 years. But was the sketch substantially accurate...
This was basically the description that Greenglass gave in his impounded testimony. Whether or not such knowledge was vital to Russian development of the bomb remains speculative. In any case, the same general principles are used in modern tactical atomic weapons, even though engineering refinements have gone drastically beyond the crude "Fat Man" version of 21 years...