Georeactor Blog

2024 Recap

I finished nonfiction books on papyrus, Borneo, Yugoslavia, India's princely states, NYC languages, diplomacy, a performance art project, the French Foreign Legion, Madagascar, NYC's Chinatown (reviewed later in this post), the Clinton administration, American archaeology, and two fiction books (Dear Wendy, Clark and Division).
That's a little over 1/month. A good deal of reading was done while on the road, and this book on the Soviet nuclear program has been circulating around my apartment for four months. I also reviewed half of the Hoover book - I intend to finish that and get into a book on the international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.
One problem this year was time on social media, especially with the new podcast timesink, and the other was setting aside books partially-finished. Topics include: pirates in the Persian Gulf, Goa independence, sanctions on Iraq, nuclear proliferation, and Mennonites in Indonesia. Maybe I am being more choose-y, maybe I need to improve how I select books to read.

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (David Holloway, 1994)

A deep dive into the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan Project, recommended on the Arms Control Wonk podcast. Holloway is a Stanford professor who had previously written about the Soviet nuclear program (The Soviet Union and the Arms Race in 1983). After the fall of the USSR, he used this book to revisit the subject with more access and documents. In addition to the physics, we get a look into where Stalin was personally involved, and whether the bomb had shaped how the USSR acted during the Berlin blockade and the Korean War.

We start with Abram Ioffe working with the discoverer of X-rays in Germany, then declining multiple international positions to attempt to start institutions at home. Few Russian scientists were willing to stay, and without a physicist pipeline, the country would be set back. Pyotr Kapitsa, who had established a successful lab in Cambridge, visited the USSR and was prevented from leaving for decades (Time magazine in 1966)

In the mid-1930s, Ioffe's program survived self-criticism hearings where the scientists were challenged to focus their research on industry and engineering. Ideologically, Marxism was seen as a science which could explain other fields. Lenin would write about natural laws and matter as part of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which was too early to anticipate quantum mechanics and relativity. This was dangerous to frame as being in contradiction, sometimes used to introduce politics and win arguments. There was a purge in the late 30s, which faded before the War. In the late 40s, Lysenko successfully subverted biology research and ideologues would emerge in other fields, but the nuclear project was too important, and Stalin got talked into defending physics.

In 1940, William Laurence's article in the New York Times (Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science) galvanized Soviet science, though influential scientists still believed it would take decades or centuries to control. During the war many Russian scientists enlisted or redirected their efforts to other military projects such as demagnetizing ships.
Georgy Flerov's story is like from a movie - while a soldier stationed in Voronezh in 1942, he noticed the disappearance of nuclear physics from American research journals, and wrote an urgent letter to Stalin to accelerate the USSR's bomb program.

It was time for Ioffe to pass leadership to the next generation, and the manager job went to Igor Kurchatov, who would grow his beard until the project succeeded. This small group was tasked with finding uranium resources, studying nuclear fission, and projecting whether the Nazis could build their own bomb.
Note: Kurchatov hired his brother, which neatly mirrors the Oppenheimers. Something to think about.
Through accidents of history, the USSR collected radium in a different way from other countries, so it did not have a source of uranium. Research into deposits was stop-and-start during the war. After V-E Day, the USSR moved quickly to seize resources, scientists, and mines (including a deal with the Czechoslovak government in exile).

The book casts some light on initial nonproliferation efforts by General Groves (played by Matt Damon in Oppenheimer). Discovering that the Soviet invasion was maneuvering to seize Nazi nuclear materials, Groves included Oranienburg in the bombing of Germany. When Soviets requested uranium through the lend-lease act, he figured out how much could be spared for an ally without providing too much pure uranium.

Stalin barely acknowledged Truman's heads-up that the US planned to use the bomb. Shortly after Japan's surrender, the Soviets sent their diplomat to visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Observers there and at Bikini Atoll reported that Japanese cities were just more dense and vulnerable; Soviet theory was that the US and UK bombings of German cities had demoralized civilians but remained militarily ineffective, and the same would apply to this early era of nuclear tactics. This helped the Soviet Navy and other conventional military industries to continue holding influence. Stalin promoted the nuclear program to get much higher priority and the best resources, but reportedly was uninterested in learning the physics or micromanaging.

Instead, the nuclear program moved inside the NKVD, and Beria (whose moment as chairman was dramatized in The Death of Stalin) became director. Beria was chosen to push men and money around and get things done, but this exacerbated work culture differences between scientists and industrial managers. Kapitsa wrote to Stalin suggesting a strategically fast and cheap nuclear program rather than investing in copying the Manhattan Project. Beria forced him out.
(The author has also written a paper on "Technology, Management and the Soviet Military Establishment").
The unclassified Smyth Report and spycraft helped the Soviets follow the same tried and true choices as the US. Their timeline from chain reaction to first test was directly comparable, with Fuchs's information saving two years or arguably more.

There are sections about each team involved in building the reactor and other facilities leading up to the USSR's first nuclear test. At times these felt like more movie scenes, with the directors of one project sleeping in a train car as a work town was constructed, and another project setting up offices inside a former monastery. Nationally-envied conditions for scientists, the worst conditions for uranium miners and gulag laborers (tellingly, the author found accounts from East German work crews, but none from any surviving Soviets). There is also a grim but admitted apocryphal detail that the medals awarded after the atomic bomb test were leveled based on whether the scientist would have been shot or imprisoned in event of failure.

Similar to how the Manhattan Project assigned fusion/hydrogen to one scientist (Teller) until the end of the war, the Soviet program sent hydrogen bomb designs to a separate group of physicists (the Moscow school). They developed an architecture ('layer cake') which differed from the American two-stage version (using a fission bomb to trigger the fusion). According to Fuchs the Soviets asked him about tritium, implying that they knew as much as he did via other leaks or independent research.
There were rumors into the 90s that the Soviet program improved their design from photos of American hydrogen bomb tests and spectrograms of fallout, but the author found evidence against this.

After Stalin's death, Lev Landau left the nuclear project, indicating he had only participated to keep his family safe from purges; later he would win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Kurchatov, like Oppenheimer, was unnerved by the additional power of the hydrogen bomb and sought to retire after viewing tests.

The author finds that Truman and the hawks were right, that hydrogen bomb development was inevitable under Stalin. He would not have been receptive to a pause or ban on its development. After Khrushchev came into power, the US had more success in establishing over-flights and military observations to prove neither side was planning a surprise attack. There were meetings between scientists including a Geneva meeting beginning the first IAEA and safeguards meeting. There were also softer relations with China (confounding JINR, a Soviet alternative to CERN), and Kurchatov could lecture abroad about nuclear power plants.

Notes

The overall pacing of the book can be strange. I get the sense that the author had an encyclopedia of Soviet scientists (with biographies of where they were born, where they studied, etc.) and a handful of transcripts and records. So we get a bio, a dense section about the 1930s self-criticism hearings and who said what, etc. without the book firmly stating a continuing thread.

I hadn't thought about the short eight year gap between the first Soviet atomic bomb and the launch of Sputnik. It would seem that the next Soviet launch could be nuclear, especially since bombers at the time had limited range.

During WWII, the Truman Committee revealed wasteful spending and apparently there's a theory (conspiracy?) that Truman was recruited as VP to avoid him revealing and/or canceling the Manhattan Project.

Stalin rejected an analysis by Eugen Varga that the Great Depression and World Wars made the capitalist countries adopt more socialist tenets, stabilizing internal issues, reducing the appeal of communism, and becoming more fearful of war with each other.

Unfortunately CERN ended cooperation with Russian institutes at the end of 2024 https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/77/12/20/3321121/With-no-end-in-sight-for-the-war-in-Ukraine-CERN

On the White Sea Canal, the book says "hundreds of thousands of camp laborers had died", citing Gulag Archipelago. Wiki gives estimates between 12,000 and 25,000; the entire workforce at any given time was 125,000.

Another section claims that 100,000 were arrested and 40–50,000 shot in unrest in Northeast China under Gao Gang as the Chinese prepared to enter the Korean War. After I did some failed research and citation checks, this might be a reference to a report by Gao which may have inspired Mao's "three anti-s" campaign? IMO the sections on China felt the most dated / distant in this book.

Comprehensive answer on questions about drug use in the USSR: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fgutf4/when_people_think_of_the_80s_and_cocaine_we/

Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown (Scott D. Seligman, 2016)

Not on theme, but I wanted to review this while it's fresh in memory. Seligman uses deep archival research to recount the gang wars concentrated in a few blocks of Chinatown. Despite the legend of Doyers Street as 'the Bloody Angle', this was considered to be neutral territory.
I was expecting the book to be a tour of a deep complex underworld, but in text it was mostly two tongs (Hip Sing and On Leong) in constant conflict. Both sold vices on their own turf. Occasionally there would be an intervention by the Chinese consul, or movement of community leaders and criminals between Chinatowns in San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere.
Police, judges, and juries were kept in the dark with bribes, witness intimidation, and a vast cultural gap. Tom Lee, while head of On Leong, used the government's ignorance of Chinatown to become a 'deputy' and 'mayor of Chinatown' with connections in Tammany Hall.

The 'Bloody Angle' has been brought back as a protest against plans to build a jail inside Chinatown: https://welcometochinatown.com/news/stop-the-jail

Updates to Reads

There's a new series on Peacock, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth which follows Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims in his attempts to investigate the attack. I only know about Lockerbie from a forensics summer camp I went to where we all got assigned cases. Swire pushes for an international trial and deal with Gaddafi, before deciding that the method put by the prosecution is wrong, and that responsible countries were let off the hook, even helping the one man convicted by the court file his appeals. I really struggled with this series because this looks like an early example of someone going full QAnon. The series shows that he's alienated everyone at home and in groups set up for victims' families, but what is the actual theme when it's hero shots of this guy meeting Gaddafi and comparing diagrams of computer chips if we're supposed to leave thinking some or all of his evidence was wrong?
The US is about to put another Libyan suspect on trial which makes the timing of this extra confusing.

Netflix has a Polish movie Justice about a Communist-era police officer getting brought out of retirement. Interesting concept. An orange and almond cake early in the movie inspired me to look up recipes and bake one.

Wikipedia has some policies around not labeling someone born in Northern Ireland "Northern Irish" unless there's evidence that they want that over being English or British or Irish.

The Presidents subreddit (which typically bans mentions of Trump, Biden, and Harris) went through a little dance with the return of Trump and funeral of Jimmy Carter. One quote post attributed to Carter turned out to be a recent fake - despite attempts to link it to a famous biography.

The Neil Gaiman subreddit has been helping readers process the revelations about Gaiman's history of sexual assault, even before the most recent article. There are a few cases of people complaining or diminishing, but in general as a subreddit it appears to be believing women, encouraging people to buy used books or thrift, etc. One parent was complaining that the grandparents gifted new Gaiman books even after the kid and parent made it clear that they were moving on from the fandom.

The Malay language subreddit had a post that the being verbs (ada / adalah) were invented to make written Malay have an SVO grammar when spoken Malay has more of a "topic-comment" structure with no verb needed. I found an old grammar book for English readers which uses "adalah" only twice. It could be that ada/adalah means "exists" and was about as rare as using "exists" in English instead of a being verb. But IDK.

AfrAId is a predictable movie about an evil AI assistant, but I was pleasantly surprised by: depicting taking a covid rapid test, an intro using generative AI, comparing Alexa and a "large language model", and playing with the trend of representing the AI as the quantum computer rig. Deducting points for the AI killing a driver with no follow-up and the strange gestures to signal or summon the AI (?).

On Academic Quran subreddit, there was a claim that the "polytheists" in pre-Islamic Arabia were actually "associators" who had one principal god but also credited and worshipped angels and other intermediate beings

Syria's border on OpenStreetMap dealing with some weirdness