- Benford, Gregory.
The Berlin Project.
New York: Saga Press, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-4814-8765-8.
-
In September 1938, Karl Cohen returned from a postdoctoral
position in France to the chemistry department at Columbia
University in New York, where he had obtained his Ph.D.
two years earlier. Accompanying him was his new wife,
Marthe, daughter of a senior officer in the French army. Cohen
went to work for Harold Urey, professor of chemistry at Columbia
and winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the
discovery of deuterium. At the start of 1939, the fields of
chemistry and nuclear physics were stunned by the discovery
of nuclear fission: researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute in Berlin had discovered that the nucleus of
Uranium-235 could be split into two lighter nuclei when it
absorbed a neutron, releasing a large amount of energy and
additional neutrons which might be able to fission other
uranium nuclei, creating a “chain reaction” which
might permitting tapping the enormous binding energy of the
nucleus to produce abundant power—or a bomb.
The discovery seemed to open a path to nuclear power, but it
was clear from the outset that the practical challenges were
going to be daunting. Natural uranium is composed of two
principal isotopes, U-238 and U-235. The heavier U-238 isotope
makes up 99.27% of natural uranium, while U-235 accounts for
only 0.72%. Only U-235 can readily be fissioned, so in order
to build a bomb, it would be necessary to separate the two
isotopes and isolate near-pure U-235. Isotopes differ only in
the number of neutrons in their nuclei, but have the same number
of protons and electrons. Since chemistry is exclusively determined
by the electron structure of an atom, no chemical process
can separate two isotopes: it must be done physically,
based upon their mass difference. And since U-235 and U-238
differ in mass only by around 1.25%, any process, however clever,
would necessarily be inefficient and expensive. It was clear
that nuclear energy or weapons would require an industrial-scale
effort, not something which could be done in a university
laboratory.
Several candidate processes were suggested: electromagnetic
separation, thermal or gaseous diffusion, and centrifuges.
Harold Urey believed a cascade of high-speed centrifuges,
fed with uranium hexafluoride gas, was the best approach,
and he was the world's foremost expert on gas centrifuges.
The nascent uranium project, eventually to become the
Manhattan Project, was inclined toward the electromagnetic
and gaseous diffusion processes, since they were believed to
be well-understood and only required a vast scaling up as
opposed to demonstration of a novel and untested technology.
Up to this point, everything in this alternative history novel
is completely factual, and all of the characters existed in
the real world (Karl Cohen is the author's father in-law).
Historically, Urey was unable to raise the funds to demonstrate
the centrifuge technology, and the Manhattan project proceeded
with the electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion routes to
separate U-235
while, in parallel, pursuing
plutonium production
from natural uranium in graphite-moderated reactors. Benford
adheres strictly to the rules of the alternative history game
in that only one thing is changed, and everything else follows as
consequences of that change.
Here, Karl Cohen contacts a prominent Manhattan rabbi known to
his mother who, seeing a way to combine protecting Jews in
Europe from Hitler, advancing the Zionist cause, and making
money from patents on a strategic technology, assembles a syndicate
of wealthy and like-minded investors, raising a total of a hundred
thousand dollars (US$ 1.8 million in today's funny money) to
fund Urey's prototype centrifuge project in return for rights
to patents on the technology. Urey succeeds, and by mid-1941 the
centrifuge has been demonstrated and contacts made with Union
Carbide to mass-produce and operate a centrifuge separation
plant. Then, in early December of that year, everything
changed, and by early 1942 the Manhattan Project had bought
out the investors at a handsome profit and put the
centrifuge separation project in high gear. As Urey's lead on
the centrifuge project, Karl Cohen finds himself in the midst
of the rapidly-developing bomb project, meeting and working with
all of the principals.
Thus begins the story of a very different Manhattan Project and
World War II. With the centrifuge project starting in earnest
shortly after Pearl Harbor, by June 6th, 1944 the first uranium
bomb is ready, and the Allies decide to use it on Berlin as a
decapitation strike simultaneous with the D-Day landings in
Normandy. The war takes a very different course, both in Europe
and the Pacific, and a new Nazi terror weapon, first hinted at
in a science fiction story, complicates the conflict. A
different world is the outcome, seen from a retrospective at
the end.
Karl Cohen's central position in the Manhattan Project introduces
us to a panoply of key players including Leslie Groves,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Freeman Dyson,
John W. Campbell, Jr., and Samuel Goudsmit. He participates in
a secret mission to Switzerland to assess German progress toward
a bomb in the company of professional baseball catcher become
spy
Moe Berg,
who is charged with assassinating Heisenberg if Cohen judges
he knows too much.
This is a masterpiece of alternative history, based firmly in
fact, and entirely plausible. The description of the postwar
consequences is of a world in which I would prefer to have been
born. I won't discuss the details to avoid spoiling your
discovery of how they all work out in the hands of a master
storyteller who really knows his stuff (Gregory Benford is a
Professor Emeritus of physics at the University of California,
Irvine).
December 2017 