Russia Honors the Spy Who Stole the A-Bomb

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports on the life of George Koval, codenamed Delmar, one of the most important spies to have infiltrated the Manhattan Project, the secret program that created the world's first nuclear weapon. President Putin recently granted Koval a posthumous Hero of the Russian Federation award, the highest honorary title that can be given to a Russian citizen. Koval was born in Iowa, spoke fluent American English, and played baseball. But he was also recruited and trained by the GRU, Russia's largest intelligence agency."

Comments

You are forgetting something.

[Anonymous Coward]

One man's hero is another man's terrorist.

that's awesome

[circletimessquare]

how you can find only one side responsible in a two sided fight

you do realize the japanese were slaughtering millions themselves in the name of imperialism? you do realize that if no A bomb was dropped, that more japanese and americans would have died in a land invasion of japan?

Re:that's awesome

[Kjella]

you do realize that if no A bomb was dropped, that more japanese and americans would have died in a land invasion of japan? A lot of soldiers would have died, including a lot of US soldiers too. I doubt as many as were killed by the bombs though. In total during WWII, including the whole campaign in Europe the US lost 400,000 and the bombs killed 220,000. In short, they made a choice to nuke civilians rather than sacrifice more soldiers. Soldiers die in war, unpleasant but true. Deliberately targetting civilians? Why, I do know what the US would call that these days. I don't know what kind of moral compass that would possibly make it right to kill a hundred thousand or more women and children. Except "We're americans, they're the enemy so they don't count."

Re:that's awesome

[darkmeridian]

I am sick and tired of revisionists coming up with this tripe every time the nuclear bombings of Japan are discussed. It might be true that the Japanese were unable to continue their existence. After the war, debriefed Japanese leaders said that the mining of Japanese harbors as part of Operation Starvation was singlehandedly winning the war for the Allies. He said that if the Allies had continued the operation for another few months, the Japanese would had to have surrendered. But how many Japanese civilians would have died before the leadership would quit? The Japanese military leadership wanted to force an invasion that they were going to lose, so they could at least dictate some conditions of peace.

In spite of all this, the Allies were ready to invade Japan. After the nukes were dropped, they revised the plan to include "softening up" the beachheads with nukes three days before GIs would hit the shores. (They didn't know too much about fallout back then.) The plans were for deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The order for Purple Hearts, the military honor for being wounded in combat, in preparation for this invasion was so large that the supplies did not run out until recently in the new Iraq War. Despite what we now may know, Allied leaders were planning on invading Japan, and the nuclear bomb stopped this from happening, and saved many lives on both sides of the table. In the documentary "The War," an American infantryman that was going to be sent to Japan, when asked about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said that he was relieved and glad, and that he knew this was horrible, but that the news meant that he wouldn't have to die. The troops tasked to invade Japan had no illusions of getting out alive; they assumed there were going to die because the Japanese were ruthless soldiers who fought to the death and mistreated the few prisoners they took.

The Japanese were not innocent victims in World War II. They committed all sorts of atrocities such as vivisection, raping and pillaging, and testing biological weapons on civilian populations. Japanese soldiers in the Phillippines were actually cannabalizing American GIs. (Read "Flyboys.") The Japanese still had a dominion over a large civilian population in occupied territories at the time the nuclear bombs were dropped. The civilians there were dying at a very high rate due to Japanese mistreatment. And the Japanese had said they were going to execute all the POWs they held (about a hundred thousand or so) if there was an invasion.

The bombings saved lives. Even if it didn't, the Allied leaders thought that they were saving lives by dropping the bombs. Sixty years later, it's easy for us to sit back and second guess them. But the leaders truly believed Japan had to fall. No one planned for the Japanese to surrender peacefully, even if their situation was screwed. Everything else is revisionist history ignoring who started the war, who committed the true atrocities, and who refused to quit fighting a war they had lost.

Re:that's awesome

[Man On Pink Corner]

there was no reason to drop the second bomb.

Well, duh. If you drop one atomic bomb and they still don't surrender, what else are you supposed to do? You have to convince the Japanese (and, yes, the Soviets) that Hiroshima wasn't just a one-shot parlor trick. The idea of losing one major city wasn't enough to convince everyone in Japan not to fight. The idea of losing one major city every three days, though, was.

It's hard for people like you to realize that nobody considered it that big a deal back then. A-bombs didn't have the totemic power they have today. All they offered at the time was one-stop shopping convenience; you could carry out a Dresden- or Toyko-scale firebombing campaign with a single plane. The idea that atomic explosions represented something radically new, different, and immoral didn't gain widespread traction until they became a hundred times more powerful.

Re:that's awesome

[Loki_1929]

"The reason you dropped two bombs was that one was a uranium based device, the other a plutonium device of radically different design.
You just had to try both designs out, didn't you?"

Prior to being dropped on its target, the Uranium bomb wasn't even tested. The mechanics of it were so simple that it was assumed to be every bit as reliable as a conventional bomb. The Plutonium bomb had been tested previously, so we knew it worked. The physics were solid, but the mechanics of the implosion device were in question until it was tested (at the Trinity test site).

So in one hand you've got a bomb we knew would work, and in the other you've got a bomb we'd tested already. Just had to try out both designs? That's just stupid.

Both were dropped because they didn't surrender immediately. Had they continued their refusal to surrender, we would have kept dropping nuclear weapons until no one was left alive from that country to threaten the world. The United States did not start that war, we ended it. We ended it by hitting two military targets, one of which was chosen because of the military value combined with the fact that the surrounding topography drastically limited the blast radius to minimize civilian casualties. You just can't drop bombs that big without civilian casualties. On the other hand, there was no way to convince Japan that continuing the fight was futile without dropping bombs that big. Until they believed that they would be completely annihilated without even the honor of taking as many of their enemy down with them, they were committed to a land war where every man, woman, and child would fight to the death.

Elections is coming...

[Pecisk]

Said already enough. All these actions - playing Antiamerican cards, claiming Russia "best nation in the world", trying to "correct" international thinking about Stalin etc. etc. at absurdum - is to get already tired people from all this bullshit to vote for Putin comrades. Economy is going down (nevermind huge sales of oil and gas), inflation goes trough the roof, common people only see that one type of oligarchs have been replaced by another, more nationalistic/militaristic, but still don't caring much about nation. But Russians dies out as a people, trough heavy drinking/hunger/strong disillusion about the country. They become more dangerous than any radical Islamists, who cause at least could be understood.

Imperialists don't want to admit simply that Russia as "strong arm dictarionship" is dead horse, which will never work in modern time settings. I just hope their last resort won't be trying to play "hard" with the rest of the world. As we easily know how it is to have people who have nothing to loose.

Re:Elections is coming...

[Pecisk]

As it is not only Russians problem (almost all post-Soviet nations share similar sentiment. I know, as citizen of Latvia), I think problem hides in that people thought democracy is a miracle - it will come and it will work. Wow, corruption. Wow, hunger, lies, rising crime. Ahh, nah, democracy just doesn't work. Let's go back to Soviet times? Damn, USSR is gone? What a shame. Heck, let's have supreme lea...errr, strong president then.

Let's remember how it was in US 100 years _after_ their Constitution was created. KKK, crime by army and police, religious nuts, US Indians issue. Capitalism wasn't rosy game altogether. Even now they still have problems. But heck, they are trying, even if there is some nuts like Bush who trying to undo all achieved.

People simply need to be more patient, and work on democracy to achieve it best. However, people want to have miracle already. Lot of problems, including huge bribery and corruption in post-Soviet countries, are just consequences of so called "fall out generation", which were in their best years when USSR felt. Generation which knew that they won't see fruits of huge work in democracy today, so they want everything NOW.

Just my humble opinion,
Peter.

Re:News for Nerds How?!!!!

[4D6963]

This man was a thief, a traitor

No, that's the nuance between a traitor and a spy. From the Russian point of vue, this guy helped shape history in their favour, by tremendously helping them get the tool required to afford to make the USA crap their pants for about 40 years.

Re:Pride?

[sinclair44]

If you're feeling like a jerk
'cuz your A-Bomb just won't work
Go ahead and steal the thing
Then you'll finally have the US's bling.
BURMA SHAVE

eh hem....

[djupedal]

'he was also recruited and trained by the GRU, Russia's largest intelligence agency'

When you're an English-speaking, baseball-playing, corn-on-the cab chewing, native-Iowan, those young Prussian female recruiting babes, I mean 'agents', are pretty hard to resist.

They should be the ones getting the honors, actually...

surely a hero to the whole World

[BoxRec]

The man is possibly one of the greatest heroes of all time, he equalised the power balance and prevented the Americans from bombing whoever they wished.

Re:surely a hero to the whole World

[Ash Vince]

The man is possibly one of the greatest heroes of all time, he equalised the power balance and prevented the Americans from bombing whoever they wished. I wish I had mod points for this but I don't so I will have to just repost it with a higher score (until some pro-us looneys mod this down as a troll or whatever).

The one thing that history has taught us is that power corrupts. If we in the west had the ability to make communism go away with one button and no chance of any reprisals we may have done it (or our policians may have done it for us without asking).

Also note that the Russia had a policy of never striking first with Nuclear weapons unless we deployed them first, we (NATO) had no such policy. We held on to Nukes as way to discourage a conventional invasion so we had a policy that allowed us to strike first with WMD's, otherwise this policy would not have been effective.

The rulers of the west had one thing in common with Hitler, they both despised the idea of Socialism in the form adopted by Russia. The fact is that in the cold war we came very close to a nuclear exchange anyway, and this was when we knew the opposing side could match us.

If we knew they had no chance of retaliating except with a conventional attack I could see us in the west having taken things a lot further. I also believe that Russia would probably have not stopped the tanks when they did, if not for us demonstrating our nuclear ability against Japan.

Re:News for Nerds How?!!!!

[drgonzo59]

That's alright, as long as all spies are thieves and traitors regardless of the government they are working for. Or let me guess, the American spies are heroes and anti-American spies are traitors and thieves? Of course, because we are "God's" country and we are special. Our killings are always "fights for freedom" and "wars on terror".

What's the news for nerds angle here?

That Russia Honors the Spy Who Stole the A-Bomb . Duh...

Yeah, some nerds like to take a break from playing D&D and are actually interested in what's happening in the real world.

Nice trolling

[SmallFurryCreature]

Millions of japanese? 140.000 at Horishima 80.000 at Nagasaki, several thousand afterwards. That is a quarter million from the results of the way. The cities in question would have had to been wiped out from fallout and after effects SEVERAL times to even reach one million.

So where do you get your millions from? The total death toll of WW2 is estimated around 50 million, the americans accounted for a small fraction of that. Major culprits where the germans, the russians and the japanese. It is often forgotten but they had a regime as brutal as the holocaust.

The A-bombs are noteworthy because they killed a lot of people with just one device. Before that you needed large bomber formations or massive organisation to achieve the same amount of killing, but compare it to the slaughter on the eastern front, the japanese death camps, the german concentration camps or even carpet bombing, and they were just a small note on that huge ledger of lost lives that we call WW2.

Millions of japanese lives, geez. Grow up and read a book.

Prussian?

[Nursie]

I suppose they could have used east germans, but I think for something that impoatant they would have used their own people.

Re:News for Nerds How?!!!!

[Pecisk]

As I dislike arm race of Cold war, we must admit that US started it, because they hated Commies so much. If Russia won't have nuclear arsenal, I think it would be matter of time before US would try to sweep them out. And then lot of people would be dead for sure.

So this man somehow bring balance (yes, rather unpleasant, but still) in the world again. USSR having nukes stopped any other nuclear attacks just because US didn't want to risk with it.

I don't admire or celebrate what he did, but definitely it wasn't easy time for anyone, because both countries were at constant readiness to blow each other in pieces.

Re:News for Nerds How?!!!!

[opencity]

> I see nothing in this story that could be considered geeky

Trinity was the biggest physics experiment ever until George. Your definition of 'geeky' must be very sectarian.

Re:Pride?

[richie2000]

Something was stolen from someone. I do believe the US still had the A-bomb after this so-called "theft".

Well, not so much

[Ancient_Hacker]

Er, um, we don't really know what this guy found out, do we?

Chances are, given the considerable security, he did not learn a whole lot.

Even the top designers of the Oak Ridge gas separation plant did not know exactly what they were doing. What are the chances this guy got the goods?

And half of what they did at Oak Ridge was electromagnetic separation, which turned out to be way too inefficient. If he gave the Soviets that info, he did us a huge favor.

The Polonium separation that went on at a scientist's mother's house in Dayton was straightforward chemistry, nothing particularly novel or secret.

No James Bond here.

Article text

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a sucky article. After logging in (cheers bugmenot), the article is on multiple pages. Well, here's all of TFA. Please mod this post up if you can.... it might make some slashdotters RTFA ;)

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

November 12, 2007
A Spy's Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin's ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as "the only Soviet intelligence officer" to infiltrate the project's secret plants, saying his work "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own."

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval's story -- the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

The spy's success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent.

"He was very friendly, compassionate and very smart," said Arnold Kramish, a retired physicist who studied with Dr. Koval at City College and later worked with him on the bomb project. "He never did homework."

Stewart D. Bloom, a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who also studied with Dr. Koval, called him a regular guy.

"He played baseball and played it well," usually as shortstop, Dr. Bloom recalled. "He didn't have a Russian accent. He spoke fluent English, American English. His credentials were perfect."

Once, Dr. Bloom added, "I saw him staring off in the distance and thinking about something else. Now I think I know what it was."

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were "walk ins," spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

By contrast, Dr. Koval was a mole groomed in the Soviet Union by the feared G.R.U., the military intelligence agency. Moreover, he gained wide access to America's atomic plants, a feat unknown for any other Soviet spy. Nuclear experts say the secrets of bomb manufacturing can be more important than those of design.

Los Alamos devised the bomb, while its parts and fuel were made at secret plants in such places as Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio -- sites Dr. Koval not only penetrated, but also assessed as an Army sergeant with wide responsibilities and authority.

"He had access to everything," said Dr. Kramish, who worked with Dr. Koval at Oak Ridge and now lives in Reston, Va. "He had his own Jeep. Very few of us had our own Jeeps. He was clever. He was a trained G.R.U. spy." That status, he added, made Dr. Koval unique in the history of atomic espionage, a judgment historians echo.

Washington has known about Dr. Koval's spying since he fled the United States shortly after the war but kept it secret.

"It would have been highly embarrassing for the U.S. government to have had this divulged," said Robert S. Norris, au

Mixed up story, I don't recall him being a traitor

[SmallFurryCreature]

Although lots of people seem to think him a traitor, he really wasn't (although it depends heavily on how your read the history). His father at one point emigrated to the US, then moved back to russia, taking his american born son with him. So while the guy was american born, when he became an agent he was a soviet citizen.

Using people as agents who have lived in the country they are supposed to work in is nothing new. But he worked as an agent for the country of which he was a citizen. He entered the US as a spy and as such did NOT commit treason.

That is an important difference to make.

Odd by the way that a lot of americans seem to condemn hailing this guy as a hero, when their own space program was built upon a nazi war criminal. Russian spy vs nazi, oh yeah the ruskies are the baddies alright. Working people to their death vs taking a dangerous mission to protect your home country.

For those of us with a mind (american, Idol is on) this guy and others helped created the policy of mutually assured destruction. While nukes are scary, they ain't half as scary as they would have been if only one side had them. Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?

Anticommunist sentiment in the US goes back to...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

at least 1917, well before the "Cold War".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Communism

Re:you're not a historian, you're an anti-american

[db32]

Oh hush. These type of people have no concept of cultural differences and are just as ignorant and arrogant as the people they pretend to oppose. Seriously... Oh no it's just the evil conniving Americans! Yeah... well those evil conniving Americans weren't teaching 12 yr olds how to operate artillery instead of sending them to recess at school. The Japanese culture was entirely different, shame is worse than death, and completely alien to American thinking. Americans were horrified by this, because to an American shame is not worse than death. There is a HUGE cultural significance in bringing baseball to Japan. We were giving them sports heroes to follow instead of warrior heroes to emulate.

Go ask Korea or some of the other surrounding neighbors about how vicious Japan was to fight against. The Japanese believed they were doing you a favor by killing you instead of letting you return home shamed. They didn't understand how Americans could surrender. To them surrendering made you a non person.

I swear...I am pretty pissed about a lot of things that America has done over the years, but this is one of those areas that people need to wake up, read their history, and attempt to understand the cultural differences that lead to that horrific event. "America is eeevil" card gets so overplayed, now that we actually need it to fix things no one takes it seriously. Catapult the propoganda and all... But hey, good luck explaining that to the folks you are chastising for believing the anti-American propoganda. That's kinda the point of propoganda. :)

Mod parent down, he is lying

[nunyadambinness]

(who had volunteered to be used in such a fashion, unlike the civilians who had no such luxury).

They did not volunteer, they were drafted.

If you're going to comment on something like this as though your opinion should be considered, you'd better make sure you don't make an obvious and glaring mistake like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States#World_War_I_and_World_War_II

"Conscription was next used after the United States entered World War I in 1917. The first peacetime conscription came with the Selective Service Act of 1940, which established the Selective Service System as an independent agency. The duration of service was originally twelve months. It was expanded to eighteen months in 1941. When the United States entered World War II, service was required until six months after the end of the war."

Learn about the subject before you pretend to knowledge you obviously don't have.

Re:Mixed up story, I don't recall him being a trai

[dillon_rinker]

"Would you have trusted the US as the only country with nuclear weapons?"

For several years, the United States WAS the only country with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. The United States under had the means to directly dominate the entire world. It refrained from doing so.

Re:News for Nerds How?!!!!

[Thyamine]

I'm glad someone else mentioned this. Some people seem to think that all we (nerds, geeks, whatever you call yourself) can possibly be interested in is science news. This is news for nerds, not science news for nerds, not space news for nerds, but all news. Certainly science and related fields are what we primarily expect to see, but I get tired of the !news tags accompanying all sorts of stories just because someone wasn't interested in it. I agree that some are very fluff-a-licious or are more advertising than news, but just like most news outlets have fluff pieces to break up the monotony, I don't mind a change of pace.

Re:Mixed up story, I don't recall him being a trai

[vux984]

It refrained from doing so.

So what? One or two presidents were either smart enough or lacked the motivation to use them or both. How long do you really think that would have kept up? How long before we had a dim bulb in power with an enemy to provoke him? We'd have never lasted until now, without using them.

Remember, the US was involved in several wars after WW2, and one the the big reasons it refrained from using nukes, or even fully committing to those wars for that matter was the threat of nuclear retaliation from the USSR if they pushed too hard.