Tag: Nuclear Arms Race

On a Nervous Singer

The room began to fill with partygoers, and the sight of all those happy people coming into the union hall gave Ethel the shakes. “Why?” she said to herself; “why would I agree to sing at a New Year’s Eve party in front of total strangers?” The 18 year old girl retreated to a corner of the hall in an attempt to steel her nerves.

A young man with a pencil-thin mustache noticed her sitting in the corner, twisting her handbag in obvious distress. He approached her and asked, “What’s going on with you then?” Ethel looked up quickly. “Hmm?” she asked. He repeated his inquiry. “What’s going on?” Ethel glanced around the young man and pointed to the incoming crowd of revelers. “That. Them. Those people. That’s what’s going on. I agreed to sing tonight, but now, I’m not so sure.”

“Well, can you sing at all?” the young man asked. Ethel looked up at him a bit surprised. “Well, yes. A bit,” she said. “Then, what’s the trouble?” he wondered, and he pulled up a chair and sat next to Ethel.

She looked at him closely. He was somewhat handsome, she thought, with kind eyes behind his round eyeglasses, and he wore a nice smile. “I guess it’s nerves,” Ethel explained. “This’ll be the largest crowd I’ve ever performed for.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1935, and the Union Hall in New York City was buzzing with excitement. The Great Depression had put a damper on such celebrations in recent years, but the Roosevelt New Deal programs had begun to have a positive effect in some segments of American society by that point. The Union Hall was where what we today might refer to as socialists would meet to discuss how they could help affect even more change in the capitalist system. As they saw it, the moneyed interests represented the biggest culprit in the crushing of the American worker underfoot in recent years. The hall that night was filled with other, young and idealistic young people who put economic theory on the backburner for one moment and wanted simply to have a good time and welcome in what they hoped would be a better year to come for their cause.

And Ethel had agreed to sing. And now she was having second thoughts.

Well, the young man calmed her down. He politely excused himself and returned in moment with a drink that Ethel gladly accepted. She gulped it down, and he smiled at her. “Say, let’s go there (he pointed at this point to a nearby room), and you can sing to me to practice. It might also calm you down some.” Ethel smiled and agreed.

And it worked. Ethel sang that night, but she was singing to her new friend, the young man with the nice smile and the kind eyes and the round glasses and the dapper mustache. And he was waiting for her when she came off the stage to a nice round of applause.

“What’s your name?” he said over the clapping. “Ethel,” she answered, “Ethel Greenglass. And what’s yours?”

The man who would become her husband three years later, the man who would become the father of her two sons, and the man who would seal her fate, answered.

“Good to meet you. I’m Julius Rosenberg.”

On a Weapons Project

Nuclear fusion was first accomplished by German physicists in Berlin in 1938. The potential power released in this experiment caused nations to sit up and take notice. War was looming again in Europe, and a race started among various countries to be the first to develop a weapon based on this discovery.

As World War 2 began, the nuclear arms race intensified. The fear was that the enemy would create a nuclear weapon first and bring the war to an end either by the use of the weapon or the threat thereof. The government sponsored conferences to begin to tackle the problem. The administration called the top scientists and physicists in the nation together and gave them top security clearances. Plans were made to have a weapon produced by the mid-1940s. An overall strategy was devised, a step-by-step plan set up. The government set the goal of first creating a nuclear reactor in which the fission could be created and controlled.

The program was so top-secret that research and development was spread out over several locations across the nation, and work was managed by many different departments for security reasons. Workers on the bomb only knew their relatively small area of expertise and had no idea that others were working on other elements of the bomb’s production. Many of those involved did not even realize what the project that they were working on actually was. Only a few top military and political personnel knew the overall project goals and its progress.

University physics departments were coopted by the government to provide research labs and technicians. While uranium nuclei were the primary fuel for the experiments, some of the universities and research facilities sought other methods for creating a nuclear superweapon that would end the war.

And, as the war progressed, the pressure on the program increased. The other side often seemed to have the advantage in the war, and the fear that they would win the nuclear race motivated the scientists and workers to work long hours. Fears of espionage and sabotage exacerbated the progress. Setbacks and funding also often hampered the work.

Finally, in 1942, a major turning point in the research and development of the bomb was reached. The science was clear, and it was time to make a decision. The findings were gathered by the leading physicists and announced to the government on June 4, 1942. The findings showed that…the nation was not that much closer to developing a bomb than they had been three years before. Oh, the capabilities were there, but the costs in terms of manpower, production, and materiel were prohibitive.

The decision was made to scrap the entire project. The scientists, laboratories, and workers all turned their attentions to developing conventional weapons rather than nuclear ones.

And that is why Nazi Germany never developed a nuclear weapon.