A Compassionate Spy
August 8, 2024 11:56 PM Subscribe
The Boy Who Gave Away The Bomb [ungated] - "Drawing on intelligence sources in Russia and the United States, we had identified [Ted] Hall as an atomic spy, the long-rumored third spy at America's Los Alamos bomb laboratory."
The only people at Los Alamos known and convicted as Soviet agents were the German Klaus Fuchs and the American David Greenglass, whose espionage led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But Hall, who was then a conscience-driven idealist of 19, was the first to provide the Soviets with the crucial information that helped them build the bomb.
- Spy For No Country. A New Book by Dave Lindorff
- Remembering The Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved The World From Nuclear War
- SPYSCAPE: The Boy Who Betrayed America: Ted Hall and the Secrets of an Atomic Spy
- NOVA: Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies
- Atomic Angst and the Teenage Spy
Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 at the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist working on the development of an atomic bomb and eager to win a race against the Nazis. Later, fearing the consequences of a single country’s monopoly on such a terrible weapon, he decided (with the help and encouragement of his best friend, the poet Saville Sax) to pass classified nuclear details to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and decades of surveillance, Hall was never prosecuted, his spying concealed from the public until a few years before his death in 1999.'What people accused Oppenheimer of doing': the untold story of spy Ted Hall - "In Steve James's documentary, A Compassionate Spy, a lesser-known figure from the Manhattan Project is given the spotlight."
In archival interviews from the years before his death in 1999 from renal cancer (likely the result of his work with plutonium at Los Alamos), Hall recalls his mindset at 19, freshly recruited from Harvard, as one of idealism aided at least in part by youth. “I was a young person,” he said. “I saw the world, I guess you might say, through rather pinkishly colored glasses.”The Teenage Atomic Spy That 'Oppenheimer' Left Out - "Steve James' (Hoop Dreams) new doc A Compassionate Spy tells the story of Theodore Hall, a Manhattan Project physicist who passed secrets to the USSR."
“In my mind, this was a question of protecting the Soviet people, as well as all people, from attack,” he said. His fears were not unfounded; shortly after the war ended, Truman reportedly threatened to deploy a nuclear bomb on the USSR, lest they agree to remove troops from occupied Iran.
Ted also had great misgivings about the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the euphoric public response in the U.S. As he says in an old interview, “Two-hundred thousand people had been incinerated, and nobody seemed to care much.” A thin, handsome, soft-spoken young man with fervent beliefs, he did what he firmly felt was the right thing, knowing that few would agree, and that he would be severely punished if caught...The spy who loved her: How wife shielded US nuclear scientist after intel leak to USSR - "New documentary 'A Compassionate Spy' reveals the crisis of conscience that led Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall to spy for the Soviets, and how his spouse Joan kept his secret."
There is no overt narrative voice here, but it’s not hard to presume James is sympathetic to Hall’s notion of treason as a means of peace. A closing onscreen note tells us that “This film is dedicated to all those who have risked their lives for peace.” Asked in an archival interview why he did it, Hall, a gaunt and ill man in old age, pauses and replies with conviction: “The major factor would be compassion.” To Hall, this elusive quality far outstripped nationalism.
“I think the position of the film is that whatever your feelings on what Ted did, its rightness or wrongness, he did act on his conscience,” James said. “He didn’t do it because he hated America, he didn’t do it because he could profit by sharing these secrets. He did it because he really had a genuine concern over America having the bomb.”
Maybe. But in that first article where Hall was interviewed late in life, he suggested the US might have used the bomb to intervene in China in 1949-50 if not for the Soviets having it as well, and it’s hard to dismiss the possibility out of hand.
No Cold War = no space race, satellites, modern communications, or at least all much delayed. How do you disentangle the good and the bad of an era that defined half a century?
posted by rory at 4:37 AM on August 9 [4 favorites]
No Cold War = no space race, satellites, modern communications, or at least all much delayed. How do you disentangle the good and the bad of an era that defined half a century?
posted by rory at 4:37 AM on August 9 [4 favorites]
It's absurd to suggest that a US bomb monopoly would have resulted in a safer world, considering we're the only country that used it in war precisely because we knew no retaliation would be forthcoming. If peace was ever the goal, the end of WWII was the perfect time to do it, since the USSR at least thought we were still allies. Instead we got underway with a forcible partition of Korea and the re-nazification of Europe under Gladio.
Regardless, a monopoly would never have been possible. The Manhattan Project brought innovations in not only weaponry, but in secrecy, necessitating a new regime of classification, secrets, and unaccountable governance. Even then there were 3 spies within the project itself. Additionally, Soviet science was no less capable than our own, as the space race demonstrated, and the only thing that might have prevented them from reaching the same technology independently would be leveraging our dominant position and constantly threatening escalation to open warfare.
This is of course our strategy in the middle east and south east Asia. It's going great.
posted by jy4m at 5:09 AM on August 9 [8 favorites]
Regardless, a monopoly would never have been possible. The Manhattan Project brought innovations in not only weaponry, but in secrecy, necessitating a new regime of classification, secrets, and unaccountable governance. Even then there were 3 spies within the project itself. Additionally, Soviet science was no less capable than our own, as the space race demonstrated, and the only thing that might have prevented them from reaching the same technology independently would be leveraging our dominant position and constantly threatening escalation to open warfare.
This is of course our strategy in the middle east and south east Asia. It's going great.
posted by jy4m at 5:09 AM on August 9 [8 favorites]
Ironically, the Manhattan Project wasn't really all that secret, at least no more so than many other wartime projects. Almost immediately after the war, the broad strokes of how the weapons worked and how they were developed was published as a book. The only part they ever really tried to keep secret after the fact were the technical details.
We often limit ourselves by viewing events through a modern lens rather than in the context of the times. To pick a couple of examples, had there been a framework of international control of nuclear arms, it is not at all clear the Soviet Union would have bothered developing an independent capability, and even if they did they still may have been deterred from first use. And there still would have been good reason to develop rockets, both because they're pretty useful even with conventional warheads and because people were already well aware of the possible usefulness of satellites for Earth sensing, communications, and intelligence gathering.
Anyway, I don't want to give the impression that I think Hall is somehow a bad person for doing what he did. Given the information he had at the time his actions were perfectly rational. I'm just not sure that we can really say that the world wouldn't have turned out better without the spies speeding up the Soviet bomb project. The Soviets were perfectly capable of doing it themselves, yes, and to a large extent did. However, the early knowledge of it being possible to successfully build a bomb, better estimates of the materials needed, and technical data helped speed up the process by turning a whole bunch of known unknowns that slowed down the US effort into known knowns.
Of course, we also can't say that we would have been better off in that scenario, though it is very easy to believe that given the events that happened later. I just think it's very possible that those events may have played out quite differently without the shock of RDS-1 killing off more moderate thinking almost entirely and the realization of how much leakier the Manhattan Project was than most initially believed birthing the secrecy state we've been living with ever since.
We certainly had secrets before, but they were typically much more limited in both scope and duration. The idea that information could be born secret and could and should be kept under lock and key for generations didn't really exist before the response to nuclear proliferation. That kind of secrecy has proven to be a cancer. It has allowed all manner of horrors to continue long past their "natural" shelf life.
Hell, you can even trace the existence of the CIA itself to the nuclear hysteria. Basically all the bad shit we normally only pulled out of the drawer for major wars was reinstated in that about face and has remained a permanent fixture ever since.
Sorry, that got a little long. I highly recommend Alex Wellerstein's book Restricted Data for some background on how things evolved. The early years were unfamiliar to me despite having long had an interest in how nuclear weapons and the security state work. Pretty sure that's the one, anyway.
posted by wierdo at 6:16 AM on August 9 [6 favorites]
We often limit ourselves by viewing events through a modern lens rather than in the context of the times. To pick a couple of examples, had there been a framework of international control of nuclear arms, it is not at all clear the Soviet Union would have bothered developing an independent capability, and even if they did they still may have been deterred from first use. And there still would have been good reason to develop rockets, both because they're pretty useful even with conventional warheads and because people were already well aware of the possible usefulness of satellites for Earth sensing, communications, and intelligence gathering.
Anyway, I don't want to give the impression that I think Hall is somehow a bad person for doing what he did. Given the information he had at the time his actions were perfectly rational. I'm just not sure that we can really say that the world wouldn't have turned out better without the spies speeding up the Soviet bomb project. The Soviets were perfectly capable of doing it themselves, yes, and to a large extent did. However, the early knowledge of it being possible to successfully build a bomb, better estimates of the materials needed, and technical data helped speed up the process by turning a whole bunch of known unknowns that slowed down the US effort into known knowns.
Of course, we also can't say that we would have been better off in that scenario, though it is very easy to believe that given the events that happened later. I just think it's very possible that those events may have played out quite differently without the shock of RDS-1 killing off more moderate thinking almost entirely and the realization of how much leakier the Manhattan Project was than most initially believed birthing the secrecy state we've been living with ever since.
We certainly had secrets before, but they were typically much more limited in both scope and duration. The idea that information could be born secret and could and should be kept under lock and key for generations didn't really exist before the response to nuclear proliferation. That kind of secrecy has proven to be a cancer. It has allowed all manner of horrors to continue long past their "natural" shelf life.
Hell, you can even trace the existence of the CIA itself to the nuclear hysteria. Basically all the bad shit we normally only pulled out of the drawer for major wars was reinstated in that about face and has remained a permanent fixture ever since.
Sorry, that got a little long. I highly recommend Alex Wellerstein's book Restricted Data for some background on how things evolved. The early years were unfamiliar to me despite having long had an interest in how nuclear weapons and the security state work. Pretty sure that's the one, anyway.
posted by wierdo at 6:16 AM on August 9 [6 favorites]
[raises hand in the comic book nerd section] The graphic novel Watchmen was in part a meditation on what the world might have been like if America had nuclear superiority (albeit in the form of a naked blue superman). Also, at least by the 1970s, there was enough known about the bomb publicly for a Princeton undergrad to come up with a design that might have worked.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:53 AM on August 9 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:53 AM on August 9 [3 favorites]
"A few years ago, I worked for a while at the Los Alamos scientific laboratory in New Mexico. I had a job there as a spy. No, I guess you know that the staff out there at that time was composed almost exclusively of spies…of one persuasion or another."—Tom Lehrer
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:21 AM on August 9 [2 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:21 AM on August 9 [2 favorites]
^link, for Tom Lehrer's The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be (Live)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:28 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:28 PM on August 9 [2 favorites]
A science fiction author had figured out the broad outlines of the atomic bomb while it was still in development with enough details to get a visit from the FBI in 1944. The secret was never going to be secret for long.
posted by Mitheral at 7:00 PM on August 9 [3 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 7:00 PM on August 9 [3 favorites]
Given that it would be an alternate history, we really can't know what would have happened had the US monopoly on the atomic bomb lasted.
true, but we can look at data from the periods that the United States did have Monopoly, 1945 to 1949.
it wasn't until 1947 that the United States had the ability to deliver a weapon anywhere in the world. at this point the world's political elements shifted policy towards a cold war.
It's absurd to suggest that a US bomb monopoly would have resulted in a safer world, True, everyone eventually knew Russia would get the bomb. let's look at data from 1945 to 1946 concerning the Soviets and some of their geo political moves.
"general elections in Hungary in the fall of 1945 were held under supervision and resulted in the defeat of the Communist supported groups.
September 1945 Moscow United withdrew troops from Norway.
the Moscow agreements of December 1945 the government of Romania was enlarged to include non-communists after which both the United States and Great Britain recognized it.
the Soviet military also withdrew from Czechoslovakia at the same time and free elections produced a coalition government of Communists and non-communist committed to keeping the country's door open to both the east and west.
In spring of 1946 Soviet troops left Danish island of bornholm.
stalin abandoned greek Communists at a critical juncture in their civil War leaving Greece within the Western sphere of influence.
in Austria the Soviet army supervised free elections in the occupation zone and withdrew after signing the Austin Peace tree of 1955.
1946, Soviet troops pulled out of Iran.
an interesting aspect gained from a defected Soviet official, plans for the Soviet Union to rip up all the railroads or at least many of them laid during the war this would have been for the use of material.
Stalin didn't pursue an aggressive policy in the far East during these two to three years Stalin supported chaing kai-shek and Red army troops in May 1946, Departed from Manchuria." 1
this shifted, from nuclear supremacy, the Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan, these threatened Stalin.
posted by clavdivs at 10:16 PM on August 9 [1 favorite]
true, but we can look at data from the periods that the United States did have Monopoly, 1945 to 1949.
it wasn't until 1947 that the United States had the ability to deliver a weapon anywhere in the world. at this point the world's political elements shifted policy towards a cold war.
It's absurd to suggest that a US bomb monopoly would have resulted in a safer world, True, everyone eventually knew Russia would get the bomb. let's look at data from 1945 to 1946 concerning the Soviets and some of their geo political moves.
"general elections in Hungary in the fall of 1945 were held under supervision and resulted in the defeat of the Communist supported groups.
September 1945 Moscow United withdrew troops from Norway.
the Moscow agreements of December 1945 the government of Romania was enlarged to include non-communists after which both the United States and Great Britain recognized it.
the Soviet military also withdrew from Czechoslovakia at the same time and free elections produced a coalition government of Communists and non-communist committed to keeping the country's door open to both the east and west.
In spring of 1946 Soviet troops left Danish island of bornholm.
stalin abandoned greek Communists at a critical juncture in their civil War leaving Greece within the Western sphere of influence.
in Austria the Soviet army supervised free elections in the occupation zone and withdrew after signing the Austin Peace tree of 1955.
1946, Soviet troops pulled out of Iran.
an interesting aspect gained from a defected Soviet official, plans for the Soviet Union to rip up all the railroads or at least many of them laid during the war this would have been for the use of material.
Stalin didn't pursue an aggressive policy in the far East during these two to three years Stalin supported chaing kai-shek and Red army troops in May 1946, Departed from Manchuria." 1
this shifted, from nuclear supremacy, the Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan, these threatened Stalin.
posted by clavdivs at 10:16 PM on August 9 [1 favorite]
A few years ago, on thinking over the whole issue of spies, espionage, and all I somehow came to the conclusion that - from an overarching perspective, sort of the gods-eye view - pretty much all spying and espionage is a very good thing.
Like if you have two enemy countries facing off, the very last thing you want is one or both of them going off without a really detailed knowledge of what is really going on in the other country.
What the leaders of the enemy country don't know from facts, they are very likely to fill in by way of their worst fears - and then react accordingly, which is almost always bad for everyone involved.
Spying and espionage is a big part of keeping the two sides accurate apprised of what is truly going on, on the other side. Things the other side would like to keep secret are often the most important things its enemy needs to know in order to have a really accurate assessment of the situation. So - spies.
Similarly, the absolute last thing you want is for one of the countries to develop an overwhelming technical or weapons advantage over the other, to the point where they can just go ahead and use that weapon with little or no opportunity for the other country to defend or retaliate.
If one country or the other has that kind of overwhelming advantage, sooner or later they are going to use it. It truly is not a question of if, but only when.
The best scenario is where both sides are basically at an equilibrium, and things like spying and espionage help to keep it that way.
I am not sure this is universally true but there surely seems to be a lot of truth to it specifically in the way the Cold War played out.
posted by flug at 3:35 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
Like if you have two enemy countries facing off, the very last thing you want is one or both of them going off without a really detailed knowledge of what is really going on in the other country.
What the leaders of the enemy country don't know from facts, they are very likely to fill in by way of their worst fears - and then react accordingly, which is almost always bad for everyone involved.
Spying and espionage is a big part of keeping the two sides accurate apprised of what is truly going on, on the other side. Things the other side would like to keep secret are often the most important things its enemy needs to know in order to have a really accurate assessment of the situation. So - spies.
Similarly, the absolute last thing you want is for one of the countries to develop an overwhelming technical or weapons advantage over the other, to the point where they can just go ahead and use that weapon with little or no opportunity for the other country to defend or retaliate.
If one country or the other has that kind of overwhelming advantage, sooner or later they are going to use it. It truly is not a question of if, but only when.
The best scenario is where both sides are basically at an equilibrium, and things like spying and espionage help to keep it that way.
I am not sure this is universally true but there surely seems to be a lot of truth to it specifically in the way the Cold War played out.
posted by flug at 3:35 AM on August 10 [1 favorite]
Many a folly has arisen from a lack of good intelligence, but also from a lack of sufficient command and control. Even today those things continue to bite us in the ass on the regular. We like to imagine that our leaders have good information and complete control of the ship of state and especially the armed forces, but they really have almost zero tactical control outside of a few rare exceptions for the once in a lifetime missions deliberately planned and implemented that way even to this day.
The reasons for these limitations are, of course, legion. Between human fallibility and motivated intelligence estimates it's a small miracle that we don't make even worse decisions than we do.
posted by wierdo at 4:06 AM on August 10
The reasons for these limitations are, of course, legion. Between human fallibility and motivated intelligence estimates it's a small miracle that we don't make even worse decisions than we do.
posted by wierdo at 4:06 AM on August 10
John Campbell figured out how the bomb worked, including the tricky isotope seperation problem, all by reading unclassified scientific journals.
Campbell figured out the U.S. was building the bomb in Los Alamos too, because so many of his subscribers moved there.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:09 PM on August 10
Campbell figured out the U.S. was building the bomb in Los Alamos too, because so many of his subscribers moved there.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:09 PM on August 10
Charles de Gaulle worked hard to prevent France becoming a U.S. vassal state during and after WWII, which included France's nuclear weapons program. Russia tested their first bomb in 1949, while France tested one only in 1960, but..
There were several parties who wanted the bomb, and obtrained it independently, so realistically they'd all have obtained the bomb even if early ones like Russia took an extra couple years doing so.
"With the return of Charles de Gaulle to the presidency of France in the midst of the May 1958 crisis, the final decisions to build an atomic bomb were taken, and a successful test took place in 1960 with Israeli scientists as observers at the tests and unlimited access to the scientific data. Following tests de Gaulle moved quickly to distance the French program from involvement with that of Israel."
I've heard this phrased more bluntly that Charles de Gaulle somewhat favored nuclear proliferation, under roughly the Ozzy Osbourne theory. Yet, obviously this extended to Israel, who nicely destabalized historical adversaries, and not to French colonies, or even West Germany.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:12 PM on August 10
There were several parties who wanted the bomb, and obtrained it independently, so realistically they'd all have obtained the bomb even if early ones like Russia took an extra couple years doing so.
"With the return of Charles de Gaulle to the presidency of France in the midst of the May 1958 crisis, the final decisions to build an atomic bomb were taken, and a successful test took place in 1960 with Israeli scientists as observers at the tests and unlimited access to the scientific data. Following tests de Gaulle moved quickly to distance the French program from involvement with that of Israel."
I've heard this phrased more bluntly that Charles de Gaulle somewhat favored nuclear proliferation, under roughly the Ozzy Osbourne theory. Yet, obviously this extended to Israel, who nicely destabalized historical adversaries, and not to French colonies, or even West Germany.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:12 PM on August 10
Ozzy does fit into the Cold and post Cold War.
the Austin Peace tree of 1955.
auto correct is funny as Austin Peace Tree would make a fair title for a spy novel.
posted by clavdivs at 7:58 PM on August 10
the Austin Peace tree of 1955.
auto correct is funny as Austin Peace Tree would make a fair title for a spy novel.
posted by clavdivs at 7:58 PM on August 10
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It was the reaction to RDS-1 that shut down all but the most hawkish, caused Congress to go apeshit with the national security state, and started the massive arms buildup. For those first few years after the end of WWII it seemed like there was a good possibility things could go a different way. Nuclear research was practically on hold and nobody was much interested in continuing to spend a bunch of money on conventional arms, either, despite Churchill's ranting about the Iron Curtain.
posted by wierdo at 2:52 AM on August 9 [3 favorites]