Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Haukelid meets with British agents who specialize in sabotage. They place him in a training program that German spies refer to as “International Gangster School” (52). With 30 other young Norwegian men, he learns lock-picking, martial arts, setting traps and poisons, and other tools of the trade. They then train him to parachute out of planes, planning to drop the recruits secretly back into Norway. Haukelid accidentally shoots himself in the foot and lies in a hospital bed while others perform the first mission.

Jens Poulsson leads the five who make the cut. Their task is to sabotage the German-controlled Vemork power station near the Norwegian town of Rjukan, where Poulsson grew up. The Germans use the station to filter for heavy water, whose hydrogen atoms contain a neutron that makes the water about 10% heavier, enabling it to process uranium into bomb material. This is vital to the Nazi atomic program. The Norwegians will prepare the way for British commandos to sabotage the plant.

The men are flown to a plateau in Norway and parachute to the ground.

Poulsson’s men and their equipment land safely. The next morning, they begin a month-long process of building a landing strip for the commandos, finding a route to the power station, and learning the disposition of the station’s guards.

They discover they’re 65 miles from the commando landing site and must tote 140 pounds each on skis across unseasonable slush. It takes three weeks of heavy work to reach the rendezvous spot; they survive thanks to the extra food they find in abandoned cabins along the way. Once there, the team sets up landing lights and alerts Britain.

The 34 commandos arrive in two large wooden gliders—planes with no engines that can sneak silently into enemy territory. Towed toward their destination by British bombers, the planes both crash. The Gestapo hears of wounded survivors holed up in a cabin. They find both planes, learn the commandos’ destination, try but fail to get more information from the captured men, and execute all of them.

The Germans reinforce their heavy-water plant, but the British won’t give up. They turn to the remaining Norwegian resistance fighters, including Haukelid.

While a physics student in Germany, Klaus Fuchs becomes disheartened by the rise of Nazism. He joins the Communist Party and is nearly beaten to death by Hitler’s men. He escapes to England, completes his doctorate, and in 1941 is recruited to help design an atomic bomb. The British know of Fuchs’s political past but believe he has changed. In fact, he decides to inform Moscow of his work and establishes contact with Ruth Werner, a trained Communist spy.

The information is useful but not critical. In America, meanwhile, Soviet agents are getting nowhere. Sam—Semyonov—asks Gold to keep an eye out. On the west coast, spies ask French literature professor Haakon Chevalier, whose Communist discussion groups Oppenheimer attended, to approach the scientist.

At a small dinner party, Chevalier privately suggests to Oppenheimer that he could help the Soviet cause by informing them of atomic bomb developments. Oppenheimer turns him down flat, saying such an act would be treasonous. He neglects to mention the incident to General Groves, though. 

Oppenheimer and Groves visit a remote canyon area of New Mexico—a region the physicist once saw as a boy at summer camp. A plateau contains a small private boys’ academy, Los Alamos Ranch School. It has several buildings and dormitories that scientists can use right away. The property is bought up and new construction begins.

Oppenheimer travels the US, interviewing scientists and offering many of them positions on the bomb team. Few at first are eager to abandon their current lives, but nearly all accept when they learn it’s a patriotic effort that could change the world and win the war. Richard Feynman, a physics grad student at Princeton, learns about the bomb project and promptly signs up. “This would be a very, very powerful weapon,” he said, “which in the hands of Hitler and his crew would let them completely control the rest of the world” (69).

Late in 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi tests the theory that when uranium atoms split, they release neutrons that cause other uranium atoms to split. This releases more neutrons, which split more atoms, and so on—a “chain reaction” that also emits energy.

As part of this project, Fermi directs the construction of the world’s first nuclear reactor: a pile of graphite roughly 25 feet per side located in a squash court at the University of Chicago. Throughout the pile are small amounts of uranium and long poles covered in cadmium. The graphite will help the chain reaction, while the cadmium will slow it down.

Groves worries that if the reactor goes out of control and explodes, the surrounding three million Chicago residents would be in grave danger. Fermi assures him that he knows what he’s doing.

From a table filled with electronic machinery on the balcony of the squash court, Fermi directs that the cadmium rods be removed one at a time. Detectors give off a clicking sound that speeds up as more rods pull away and more neutrons fly through the pile, fissioning uranium and causing still more neutrons to fly.

With all the rods removed, the pile sustains a continuous chain reaction, and the neutron detector emits a solid roar. Smiling, Fermi announces, “The pile has gone critical” (73). Every two minutes, the reaction doubles in force. Fermi lets the pile’s chain reaction continue for several minutes and then orders the rods replaced, shutting the reaction down. The experiment has proven that fissioning uranium releases energy. Applause erupts, and someone distributes paper cups of wine. No one offers a toast; it’s a solemn moment.

Heavy water—whose hydrogen atoms often contain a neutron alongside a single proton—facilitates nuclear chain reactions even better than graphite. The Germans’ Vemork power station in Norway generates the world’s entire heavy water supply. The Allies want to destroy it, but bombers likely would kill innocent civilians and do little damage to the power station.

Knut Haukelid recovers from his foot wound and rejoins the Norwegian commando team in Britain. Their assignment, code-named Operation Gunnerside, is to land in Norway, rendezvous with Poulsson’s men, and then hike to the Vemork facility and sabotage critical equipment there. The odds are less than 50-50 that they’ll succeed and make it out alive.

The men train for weeks before flying to Norway and parachuting onto a frozen wilderness plateau. They land on solid ground—not on the ice-covered lake they were expecting. They find a cabin, break in, and hunker down during a five-day snowstorm. When the storm breaks, they ski toward the rendezvous point and locate Poulsson’s men, who have been waiting for them since the first commando landing failed.

They agree to attack the power station from below—a direction the German guards won’t expect. If any of them are captured, they must take a fatal cyanide pill that each carries in his mouth.

The men ski toward the gorge where the power station lies, “like a medieval castle, built in the most inaccessible place, protected by precipices and rivers” (81). At night, they climb down into the gorge, cross the partially frozen river, and then climb up the rock face beneath the power plant. While guards patrol a nearby suspension bridge, the commandos sneak up to the fence, break open a gate, and head for the plant.

They locate a narrow air duct and climb through it into the plant’s “high concentration” area, where the heavy water is processed. They capture a Norwegian worker, wrap explosive charges around the heavy water machines, and then light a fuse and run from the room. The charges detonate, blowing out the windows. A German soldier emerges from the barracks, scans the area, and goes back inside. The commandos hurry from the plant and shinny down the cliff; they are crossing the ice-clogged river when sirens blare. They re-climb the gorge, find their skis, and escape.

Most of the commandos ski to the Swedish border; Haukelid stays behind with another commando, radios news of the success to Britain, and disappears into the countryside to continue helping the Norwegian resistance. A 10,000-man German search party pursues the commandos, but every member of the sabotage group gets away.