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How the Gas Centrifuge Changed the Quest for Nuclear Weapons

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How the Gas Centrifuge Changed the Quest for Nuclear Weapons 7KH(QGRI0DQKDWWDQ+RZWKH*DV&HQWULIXJH&KDQJHG WKH4XHVWIRU1XFOHDU:HDSRQV 56FRWW.HPS Technology and Culture, Volume 53, Number 2, April 2012, pp. 272-305 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/tech.2012.0046 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v053/53.2.kemp.html Access provided by username 'llane' (21 Feb 2015 01:49 GMT) 04_TEC53.2kemp 272–305:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 4/30/12 10:55 AM Page 272 The End of Manhattan How the Gas Centrifuge Changed the Quest for Nuclear Weapons R.SCOTTKEMP Introduction The first nuclear weapons were born from technologies of superindus- trial scale. The Manhattan Project exceeded the domestic automobile in- dustry in its size. The gaseous-diffusion plant that enriched uranium at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee employed at its peak some 12,000 people, enclosed forty-four acres under a single roof, and by 1945 consumed nearly three times the electricity of the highly industrialized city of Detroit.1 In the 1940s and ’50s the making of nuclear bombs was under- stood to be a massive undertaking that required vast resources and nearly unparalleled human ingenuity. The U.S. atomic enterprise encouraged a way of thinking about nuclear proliferation that was intimately tied to technol- ogy and industry. In the words of President Harry S. Truman, it seemed “doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world.”2 The difficulty was not in the bomb per se—scientists had warned that this step would not be hard to replicate—but rather in the apparently mas- sive effort needed to produce the nuclear-explosive materials that fueled the R. Scott Kemp studies problems of international security by combining physics, history, and public policy. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is currently an associate research scholar at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security. In completing this article he is indebted to Michael Gordin and the editors and reviewers of Technology and Culture for their input. ©2012 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/12/5302-0002/272–305 1. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), AEC Handbook on Oak Ridge. 2. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A- Bomb at Hiroshima”; Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Lillian Hodde- son, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine L. Westfall, Critical Assembly; Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan, the Army and the Atomic Bomb; Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., The Manhattan Project. 272 04_TEC53.2kemp 272–305:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 4/30/12 10:55 AM Page 273 KEMPK|KGas Centrifuges and Nuclear Weapons bomb.3 General Leslie Groves thought such an effort would take the Soviets “fifteen to twenty years—more likely the latter.”4 Specifically, Groves felt the greatest secret of the bomb was in the industrial organization and tech- niques required, but even these he felt would be developed by the Soviets given sufficient time.5 Truman was so convinced of Soviet backwardness that, upon learning about their first nuclear test, he refused for a time to believe it to be true.6 Truman and Groves were not the only ones to hold this view. Treasury Secretary John Snyder, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Walter Bedell Smith, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, and numerous other Kremlinologists all agreed, as Forrestal put it, that “[t]he Soviet Union could not possibly have the industrial competence to make the atomic bomb.”7 While others, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, were more skeptical that the United States could maintain an “atomic monopoly,” the apparent failure of the Baruch Plan to bring about a system of international control left, as Tru- man put it, “no alternative [but] to maintain, if we could, our initial supe- riority in the atomic field.”8 The mythology of atomic-industrial superiority was codified in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which outlined a system of secrecy and tech- nology control as the primary mechanisms for preventing nuclear prolifer- ation—a system that could only work to the extent that the myth was true.9 When the Soviet Union acquired weapons in 1949 and the United King- dom in 1952, both disruptions could be eased into the mythological frame- work without shattering it: namely, that the Soviets had been advantaged by espionage, and that the British were collaborators on the Manhattan Project, indeed had founded it, and had come to learn the secrets alongside American scientists.10 Until the French nuclear weapons test and perhaps 3. James Franck et al., “Report of the Committee on Political and Social Problems” (Franck Report). 4. Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 69–70; Nuclear Task Force, “Nuclear In- spection.” 5. Alex Wellerstein, “Knowledge and the Bomb,” 173. 6. Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson also believed it was a reactor accident; see Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 219ff. 7. Ibid., 70–71 (emphasis added). As an example of the hubris that surrounded the Manhattan Project, Groves, in trying to refine his estimate, telephoned G. M. Read of DuPont, which had built the plutonium-production facility at the Hanford Nuclear Res- ervation in Washington State. Read informed Groves that “[e]ven if they had all the plans, I don’t think they would live long enough to build one of these things.” 8. Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, 247. 9. For an excellent account of how the system of secrecy was established, see Weller- stein, “Knowledge and the Bomb.” 10. Academic historians generally consider that spies only helped to speed the Soviet program by a modest amount, but that they were not crucial; see, for example, Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn. 273 04_TEC53.2kemp 272–305:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 4/30/12 10:55 AM Page 274 TECHNOLOGYANDCULTURE even after it, it would have been feasible to believe that nuclear weapons were a privilege of the technological elite.11 There is, however, one technology for which the story is exactly re- versed: the uranium-enrichment gas centrifuge. This machine was created in the Soviet Union and conveyed to the United States by spies and inform- ants. Unlike any of its predecessor technologies, it was small, inexpensive, APRIL and relatively simple to make, yet the gas centrifuge was just as capable of 2012 enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Today, it is best known as the de- VOL. 53 vice that made nuclear weapons available to the developing world, but ac- counts of its proliferation tend to highlight the machinations of a murky nuclear black market and leave the centrifuge itself as a mysterious, some- times glorified technical gem.12 The existing literature lacks an adequate ex- planation of how and when this device came to change the dynamics of nuclear proliferation. Several historical aspects of the centrifuge are well known. For example, it is widely reported that the Manhattan Project was not successful in devel- oping centrifuges, but that after World War II, German prisoners of war helped to perfect the centrifuge in a Soviet labor camp. Little has been writ- ten on what was required or the consequences these developments had for nuclear proliferation. This article traces the centrifuge’s development and explores the role of technological change and tacit knowledge in the on- ward proliferation of the device. The findings presented here show that the centrifuge was never a sophisticated or resource-intensive technology, but a rather simple one that only became simpler over time. It is a machine that breaks with the Manhattan Project’s legend of techno-industrial greatness and invalidates the technology-based nonproliferation controls that flowed from it. Recently released intelligence reports and memoirs have provided new information about centrifuge development in the Soviet Union. Notably, participants have acknowledged that Soviet contributions were of equal importance to those made by German scientists. Also used here are the per- sonal papers of the former director of the U.S. centrifuge program, Ralph Lowry, which were officially declassified by the Department of Energy in 1985 though never released to the public. The archive contains over thirty- three linear feet of records and was stored in Lowry’s office until he died in 11. This was especially the case with enrichment. Myron Kratzer, who served as head of the AEC Division of International Affairs, reports that “[i]n those days [1945–70] we really did believe we [the United States] were the masters of enrichment and that nobody could compete with us in the field.”He added: “We did worry about the centrifuge in the 1960s, however” (Kratzer, personal interview with author). 12. See, for example, the following popular texts: Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, Fallout; David Albright, Peddling Peril; Frantz and Collins, The Nuclear Jihadist; William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar; Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs; and Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, The Bomb in My Garden. 274 04_TEC53.2kemp 272–305:03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 4/30/12 10:55 AM Page 275 KEMPK|KGas Centrifuges and Nuclear Weapons 2007. This article is the first to make use of the Lowry archive, which de- scribes a remarkably small-scale development effort. This scale directly contradicts the image of proliferation as a massive undertaking during the 1940s and ’50s. In analyzing both the early Soviet and U.S. programs, this article argues that a centrifuge was technically feasible during the Manhattan Project, but was not successfully developed. The Manhattan Project’s centrifuge had sev- eral critical shortcomings, and the project was shut down before its devel- opers had an opportunity to resolve them.
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