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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."
One man's hero is another man's terrorist.
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
Omnes stulti sunt.
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.
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.
> 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.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.