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Saturday, October 26, 2019

Review: The Nuclear Spies by Vince Houghton

The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation against Hitler and Stalin
Synopsis:  Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi 's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?


If you are looking for a work on the more well known "nuclear" spies like Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs or Harry Gold, then you will be a little disappointed for they are not really here.

This tome deals with "scientific intelligence" or more importantly, America's need to know where their rivals stood in the race for atomic weaponry. The main time frame is the 1930s and 1940s, and the period in which the US entered WWII to find the Germans working with nuclear fission and making all sorts of discoveries that would eventually lead to what we know as the Manhattan Project.

So, whilst the US undertook a merry chase across Europe for the fleeing German scientists in their pursuit for atomic knowledge and to put a stop to Hitler detonating an atomic bomb, they gravely underestimated the Soviets own capabilities in doing exactly the same.

Here we find out just why that came about - and one word could quite nicely cover this - assumptions. 

" ... for the first time in history a nation's scientific resources ... became a key consideration in assessing a potential national security threat ..."

The US dealt in assumption, speculation and prediction (or guesswork) rather than cold hard facts; and this assumption of the Soviets would continue for over a decade before the US abandoned its naive belief in stereotypes and brought the search for scientific intelligence under one cohesive banner.

For in this fledgling period of time, the USA's scientific research was being carried out in the academic sector, privately funded.  During World War II, it finally fell under the purview of Lieutenant General Leslie Groves and Houghton covers off Groves' input in painstaking detail.  However, analysis of scientific information was still being conducted on an ad hoc basis, with no single agency as a centralised depository - and even the analysis of the information was speculative at best and determined by stereotyping, and information to the contrary was considered disinformation.

The US believed that the race to stop Hilter from detonating an atomic bomb was a priority based upon their belief that - at the time - German scientists were pre-eminent in the field of science - no-one else could compare with their facilities, discoveries, personnel.  In the face of advancing armies, these scientists scattered, and the US focused their efforts on capturing both them and their research - the OSS was sent out in 1943 - to France, Germany, Italy - the Alsos Missions.  It was only when the US realised that German efforts to build an atomic bomb had actually stalled that the shift moved towards preventing the Soviets from getting this information - and the scientists! 

Post WWII, there was a decline in collection and collation of scientific intelligence as the researchers and scientists, being poorly treated by the US government, drifted back to academia, and hostility grew between the scientific community and US government.  In the years immediately after the war, ".. effective atomic intelligence was prevented by the inability to create a unified, coherent policy ..." and the US found itself relying on the experiences of others to predict the Soviet's completions of their atomic weaponry and were thus literally caught with their pants down!  Even after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, the US refused to believe it as they considered the Soviets to be a backward nation - an alarming attitude that would prevail over the next decade.

Very well researched with lots of history on the fledgling US intelligence network and the atomic weapons program.


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