ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PRINCIPAL UNCERTAINTY: U.S. ATOMIC INTELLIGENCE, 1942-1949 Vincent Jonathan Houghton, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jon T. Sumida Department of History The subject of this dissertation is the U. S. atomic intelligence effort against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the period 1942-1949. Both of these intelligence efforts operated within the framework of an entirely new field of intelligence: scientific intelligence. Because of the atomic bomb, for the first time in history a nation’s scientific resources – the abilities of its scientists, the state of its research institutions and laboratories, its scientific educational system – became a key consideration in assessing a potential national security threat. Considering how successfully the United States conducted the atomic intelligence effort against the Germans in the Second World War, why was the United States Government unable to create an effective atomic intelligence apparatus to monitor Soviet scientific and nuclear capabilities? Put another way, why did the effort against the Soviet Union fail so badly, so completely, in all potential metrics – collection, analysis, and dissemination? In addition, did the general assessment of German and Soviet science lead to particular assumptions about their abilities to produce nuclear weapons? How did this assessment affect American presuppositions regarding the German and Soviet strategic threats? Despite extensive historical work on atomic intelligence, the current historiography has not adequately addressed these questions. THE PRINCIPAL UNCERTAINTY: U.S. ATOMIC INTELLIGENCE, 1942-1949 By Vincent Jonathan Houghton Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor Jon T. Sumida, Chair Professor Thomas D. Cohen Professor David Freund Professor Whitman H. Ridgway Dr. David A. Rosenberg Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been completed without the advice and guidance of Professor Jon T. Sumida, who suffered through draft after draft1 of my attempts to build a coherent argument. In addition, professors David Freund, Madeline Zilfi, Thomas Friedel, Kate Keane, Keith Olson, Nick Lambert, and Whitman Ridgway have made critical suggestions and offered their support. Outside of the Department of History, Thomas Cohen of the Department of Physics provided invaluable information about nuclear physics.2 Finally, I am grateful for the guidance and support of one of the world’s foremost experts on American nuclear policy, David A. Rosenberg. His knowledge of this subject, and his willingness to share that knowledge, was integral to the completion of this dissertation. Thanks have to go to the office staff of the Department of History: Jodi Hall, Paula Barriga-Sanchez, Catalina Toala, Courtney Lanier, and Star Angelopoulos. They truly run the department, and without their constant assistance this dissertation would have been impossible. Of course, this dissertation could not have been done without the support of my family, especially my wife Kate. It is only because of you that I had the strength and perseverance to get this done. 1 After draft, after draft, after draft… 2 Although he bears no blame for any scientific mistakes on my part. I am a historian after all. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: A Reasonable Fear…………………………………..………………18 Chapter 2: Making Something Out of Nothing…………………………..……..52 Chapter 3: Alsos………………………………………………………………...97 Chapter 4: Transitions………………………………………………………….146 Chapter 5: Regression………………………………………………………….185 Chapter 6: Whistling in the Dark………………………………………………239 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….……..276 Bibliography……………….……………………………………………….…..288 iii Introduction: A “Curious Incident” In September 1949, the U.S. intelligence establishment was shocked to discover that the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb. Coming just four years after the United States had become the world’s first nuclear power, the Soviet atomic bomb was produced in half the time American intelligence had predicted. The consensus among the intelligence community, American scientists, the military, and the civilian political leadership had been that the earliest probable date for a Soviet atomic bomb was 1953. Somehow the Soviet Union had exceeded the expectations of American national security experts by almost four years. Compounding the confusion of U.S. leadership was the fact that, during the Second World War, American intelligence had engaged in an effort against Nazi Germany that had correctly assessed the status of the German atomic bomb program. The German program had been given considerable attention by American intelligence, yet despite the belief that the German atomic bomb project was significantly ahead of the progress of the American Manhattan Project, in 1944 U.S. intelligence discovered that the Germans would not develop an atomic bomb in time to affect the outcome of the war. Both of these intelligence efforts operated within the framework of an entirely new field of intelligence: scientific intelligence. For the first time in history a nation’s scientific resources – the abilities of its scientists, the state of its research institutions and laboratories, its scientific educational system – became a key consideration in assessing a potential national security threat. Information concerning a nation’s technological 1 capabilities had been a priority for U.S. intelligence organizations since the American Revolution. Yet scientific intelligence was a product of the Second World War and the development – and strategic implications – of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb itself was a direct application of scientific theory to a weapon of war, the culmination of four decades of scientific research into the physics of the atom. Nuclear weapons, therefore, made intelligence about an enemy nation’s scientific abilities an integral part of strategic planning. It was no longer sufficient to know just the ramifications of an enemy’s deployed weapons systems or technological achievements. With the advent of a weapon of unprecedented destructive force, it became paramount to acquire information about an enemy’s scientists, research laboratories, universities, and overall scientific infrastructure in order to correctly assess the immenseness of dire strategic threat. Such information was indeed crucial to national survival. Scientific intelligence also forced a change in thinking about intelligence collection and analysis. Other types of intelligence can base their collection and analysis efforts on tangible things: technological intelligence can look at an aircraft and calculate the air speed, payload, survivability; military intelligence can count tanks, troops, divisions; economic intelligence can determine industrial capability, monitor debt, calculate GDP. Yet scientific intelligence is primarily focused on future potential, on how the scientific abilities of a particular state might, at some point, threaten national security. In doing so, scientific intelligence takes general assessments of a nation’s scientific ability and presupposes that these findings are indicators of a potential strategic threat. In other words, assessments made about particular scientific research with strategic 2 applications – such as the ability to develop nuclear weapons – are extrapolated from general assumptions made about the totality of a nation’s scientific abilities. The subject of this dissertation is the U. S. atomic intelligence effort against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the period 1942-1949.1 In 1942 American scientists began to fear the possibility that Germany would develop and deploy an atomic bomb before the Manhattan Project could build its own weapon. As a result, American scientists created an ad hoc organization for atomic intelligence, drawing upon their scientific contacts in Europe and their scientific experience to learn and discern what they could about the German atomic bomb program. In the summer of 1943 the U.S. Government authorized Manhattan Project director Brigadier General Leslie Groves to take complete control of all atomic intelligence-related operations. This action was a response to the acute fear of German scientific ability, the ineffectiveness of American scientists in collecting any actionable intelligence on their own, as well as the recognition that there were no existing intelligence organizations that could carry out such a difficult task. In doing so, the government gave Groves unprecedented power to centralize and consolidate intelligence functions. A little over a year later, the decision to give Groves that responsibility paid off. The Manhattan Engineer District (MED - the formal name of the Manhattan Project) 1 During the Second World War, American atomic intelligence made no considerable effort to collect information on atomic developments in Japan. There were several reasons Japan was dismissed as a potential atomic threat. First, it was believed that Japan did not have the necessary raw materials to produce an atomic weapon. Second, U.S. intelligence assumed that Japan did not have the necessary industrial capability for an atomic program on the scale needed to produce deployable atomic weapons. Third, while the American scientific