The Manhattan project, Soviet espionage, and an equation for outcome & choices

The date is 06th August, 1945. The entire United States glistened with the lights of victory! Almost everyone on the streets was a little bit inebriated. In the midst of all that, one man, clad in a grey suit, with a cigarette between lips and a hat lowered slightly to cover his face, walked steadily towards the southern end of the Castillo Bridge station in Santa Fe.  He stopped at the end of the station area, lit up a matchstick and ignited the cigarette. As soon as his face lit up in the light of the matchstick, another man emerged from the darkness, and walked towards him. The stranger asked the man how to get a train to go to the east side, the man replied “I don’t know. Where are you coming from?” while carefully noting the dress of the stranger. The reply came in a measured tone, “I am coming from Julius” and the man with the cigarette extended his hand. 

“My name is Dexter. You?”

“Charles Raymond. How do you do?”
“Can we sit somewhere?”
“Come, I know a place just next to the station.”

Inside the restaurant, Dexter took out a box of cigarettes and extended it to Charles, “Got Matches?” Charles took the box, slid it inside his coat-pocket and brought it out in just another second along with a lighter. A young couple sitting on the next table hardly realised that the box had been skillfully replaced by another similar one by then. 

Both Charles and Dexter were made up names, to hide the individual identities of the two people, one of whom was one of the key scientists working on the Manhattan project. “Julius” was a Soviet spy courier, and within that small box of Pall Mall cigarettes, in a tiny micro-film, was critical information about the results of the Manhattan project experiments.

If you are a Bengali literature fan and are about to raise your accusing finger towards me, I admit very honestly that the premise and the first few lines are (loosely) translated from Biswasghatok by Narayan Sanyal. For those who are unaware of this book, read along to know about arguably the most high-impact espionage in our history, and a simple quadratic equation to determine the value of the same!

It was Narayan Sanyal, and not Christopher Nolan who introduced me (and many others) to the mind-boggling world of the Manhattan project. I will not go into the details of what happened in the making of the first atomic bomb and the long list of illustrious people involved in the project (I trust my college-time idol to mesmerise all of us with that on the big screen soon). I will instead look a little at the straight-out-of-a-novel thrilling tale of espionage by a certain member of the team, and the analysis of the choice made by that person and its outcome.

Spoiler alert! We already know who the spy was. Google it, in case you have not done it already. What you might not find on google is the reason why Klaus Fuchs (read up on him) chose to hand classified information about the Manhattan project over to the Soviets. Well, nobody knows the actual reason, but in his book, Narayan Sanyal hints at something which has stayed with me since the first time I read the book. But before that, let us get back to the restaurant of Dexter (Fuchs) and Charles (Harry Gold) that evening.

After giving a very specific amount of tip to the waiter Charles and Dexter step outside the restaurant. Dexter gets down on the road and turns to say goodnight to Charles. “Just a minute! You are forgetting your suitcase”, said Charles, to the confusion of Dexter. “What is in there”, he asks. “Check the weight yourself, all in twenty and fifty dollar bills”. For a world-renowned physicist like Dexter, it was a simple task to calculate the total value of the money by looking at the dimensions of the box. 

But he exploded in a fit of rage, which took Charles by surprise. He says loudly, “Dexter does not work for the greed of money, go and tell this to Julius!” Charles, visibly taken aback, does not try to convince him and slowly walks away with the suitcase in hand.

That night, Dexter wrote in his diary, “Others talk, hope, wait and are repeatedly disappointed, Because they don’t understand the true nature of political power. Well, I’m going to act. I’ve acted. Maybe I have prevented another World War.”

The equation that Sanyal uses to describe how much value Fuchs could have possibly made out of that deal, is one of the most beautiful blending of mathematics and storytelling I have ever seen. And it looks something like this: x(x-109)=0

As is evident, there are two roots (or solutions) of the above quadratic equation. One, x=109 or one billion. The other, x=0. Both are valid solutions of the equation. And in extension of the analogy, both are in a way the correct evaluation of the worth of the choice Fuchs made. He traded information worth a billion dollars, in exchange for nothing! 

Maybe he did not want a billion dollars, maybe he craved a world which would not be unipolar, one where one nation/entity would not have the monopoly over civilisation-altering technologies. Maybe he wanted a world without the hegemony of capitalist bullies. Maybe he wanted geopolitical balance, and maybe some validation of his own socio-political tilt.

Did he succeed? Maybe. Maybe not. In all likelihood, the Soviets would have anyway built their first bomb by the early 1950s, even without his help. And did the balance of weapons on both sides really work? If not for Vasily Arkhipov, there very well could have been a catastrophic nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis less than two decades after WWII. By the 1990s the world did more or less become unipolar with one big bully doing what it feels to be right. But, it is also true that we have not had another World War in the last 75 odd years, nor has there been another use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict (so far).

But Fuchs could not have known the future. If he did, would he change his choice? Would that change make any difference? Would Oppenheimer choose to become “the destroyer of worlds” if given the chance again? Or was that outcome, like all others, predetermined? There is so much beauty in representing Fuchs’s choice through the quadratic equation, it is almost like poetry! Each outcome, individually distinct, and also perfectly satisfying the predetermined equation. There could not possibly be a better representation of the ‘Principle of Alternate Possibilities’.

Then there was the other unintended outcome of Fuchs's espionage, the validation of anti-communist vilification in the name of national security in the US. Oppenheimer himself was extensively surveilled, put on trial and stripped of his public glory. Journalists, activists, Government officers, public figures (including the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles) were blacklisted, targeted and harassed for having even the slightest left-of-centre views. Rampant harassment, scare-mongering, destroying thousands of careers in the 1950s... but McCarthyism is too vast a topic to touch upon here.

Coming back to the alternate possibilities principle, what if we extend that analogy to ourselves and ask, are we all, each day, making our own quadratic choices? Our own fluctuations of outcome between zero and a billion? In deciding our courses, careers, friendships, relationships, life goals, what to eat for lunch, whom to help and support, we all have our zeroes and billions in front of us. But do we really make a “choice” in any of that? Or are each of our choices just one of the possible values of a function derived from our predetermined socio-economic hierarchy and other determinants?

The thing about free will is that it “feels” free, so we easily assume it to be so. Of course, I had the “option” to do a high-paying corporate job and not work in the social sector, and of course I “chose” to do what I do every day. I had multiple, mutually exclusive options to choose from, hence the principle of alternate possibilities holds, hence I chose this and thus free will exists! 

Except, that choice of mine was shaped (and in turn, caused) by multiple predetermined factors like my socio-economic standing, family support, socio-political belief systems, childhood experiences, conducive environment and many more. Most of which I could not control. And a variation on any one of those factors could have changed my outcome. Which would still be 100% valid and correct. The outcome (i.e. our value of x) remains a function of the determinant factors, and not of free will. 

So, did I never have a choice? Fuchs did not choose x=0? Oppenheimer did not choose to become the “destroyer of worlds”? Well, they did. And so did I. But our choices were not out of pure, unadulterated “free will”. Each choice was determined by an entire life-history of events, beliefs, values, pain, joy, anger, love, hatred, death, misery and so much more. It was, like everything else, predetermined. 

Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children had rightly said, “in order to understand just one life, you have to swallow an entire world”. Our brains, for the most parts, are incapable of doing that. That is why it is intuitively difficult to comprehend a fully deterministic world. If I have to calculate an entire life-history worth of data to establish the cause of one tiny choice, it feels like too hard a task for our primitive brains. 

If I had enough time, I could look back at my life and see an unbroken chain of causal events going back as far as the beginning of time itself! I can see my ancestral house, my parents' bookshelf, old photographs of my childhood, stories of my grandfather crossing over Cyril Radcliffe's doodle, Congress's resignation from the Council of Ministers, Tagore tying a rakhi in 1905, some greased cartridges of Enfield rifles, Job Charnock coming over to the other side of the Hooghly river, and so on and on. A direct causation which led me to write this article at this very moment, and technically there could be an equation to represent this outcome. It would invariably be a very complex equation, of a degree equal to all the possible alternate outcomes I could ever have. It is so much easier to think that I chose to write this out of my own free will. Which is exactly what I did. I have acted, and now no one can take that away from me!