J. Robert Oppenheimer and other U.S. scientists gave the Soviets information on their efforts to build the first atom bomb, a retired Russian spy says in his memoirs quoted in Time magazine.
The information passed on during World War II "significantly altered the direction of Soviet nuclear research," says Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov, who plotted the assassination of Leon Trotsky for Josef Stalin.Excerpts from "Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - a Soviet Spymaster" appear in the April 25 issue of Time.
The United States and the Soviet Union, World War II allies, raced to beat Nazi Germany to the creation of the first A-bomb. Postwar antagonism chilled the superpowers into the Cold War.
Sudoplatov writes that members of the American science team who shared progress reports with the Soviets included Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and Neils Bohr, who worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project.
"Since Oppenheimer, Bohr and Fermi were fierce opponents of violence, they would seek to prevent a nuclear war, creating a balance of power, through sharing the secrets of atomic energy," Sudo-pla-tov writes.
Sudoplatov also had moles working in the Manhattan Project labs in Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Chicago, he says.
Oppenheimer and the other scientists shared information "through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on," Sudoplatov writes.
In 1945, the Soviets received a description of the design of the first atomic bomb and the 33-page design of the bomb that became the basis for their own work, Sudoplatov writes.
That year, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The USSR exploded its own nuclear bomb in 1949.
Sudoplatov, 87, ran espionage networks in Europe and North America for Stalin. He lives in Moscow.