An alternate history: What if Germany developed the bomb first?
I. Haigerloch, Württemberg — 3 May 1943
The pile sat in a cave cut into the rock beneath the castle church, and when Dr. Ernst Kolbe came down the stairs in the morning, he could hear the villagers at Mass above him. He had never settled whether this was blasphemy or merely architecture.
It should not have been possible. He said so at the time, in a meeting room in Berlin with a map of the Volga on the wall, and the room ignored him; afterward he was careful never to say it again. But he knew where the impossibility had come from.
In the winter of 1942, eleven men had come down out of the Norwegian snow to destroy the heavy-water plant at Vemork, and a patrol that had no business being on that road at that hour had found them in a drift above Rjukan. Kolbe learned of it months later, in a supply memorandum, in three words: production continues uninterrupted. It took him until 1946 to understand that his life had turned on the insomnia of a corporal from Bremen.
The rest was money and fear. After the Sixth Army went into the bag at Stalingrad, ninety-one thousand men walking east into the snow, of whom Kolbe would eventually learn that fewer than six thousand walked back. The Ministry stopped asking whether the project was worth the steel. They asked only when.
He had given them a number. He had believed the number was honest. He also knew, in a room somewhere behind the room where he did his thinking, that he wanted to see whether it would work.
He never afterward managed to separate the two.
II. Airfield at Zaporozhye, Ukraine — 14 October 1943
Oberleutnant Kurt Sanne was twenty-four and had flown the Heinkel long enough to distrust it the way a man distrusts a relative who has borrowed money. The crews called it the flaming coffin. The engines were two engines pretending to be one, and they set themselves alight over the Bay of Biscay, over Kiev, over nothing at all.
They had stripped the aircraft of everything they could unbolt. There was a civilian aboard, a technical officer in a flight suit that did not fit him, who sat by the bay with his hands on his knees like a man at a dentist’s and spoke to no one. In the bay lay a shape under canvas that no one had let the ground crew look at; men from another unit had loaded it at night, then flown out again before dawn.
The briefing had taken four minutes. Someone issued them goggles of smoked glass. It gave them the release altitude, the heading off target, and the angle of the turn, steeper than any Sanne had made in a loaded aircraft in his life. They would have forty-three seconds, it said. It did not say forty-three seconds of what.
They went east into a clean grey morning with two fighter escorts that turned back at the river bend. Below them the country was the country they had been fighting over for two years: burnt villages, the black scribble of trench lines, roads with the ruts frozen into ridges.
Then the city.
Sanne had expected something. He had not expected a corpse. Stalingrad was a corpse. The factories were roofless rectangles, the apartment blocks stood open to the sky like cabinets with the doors torn off, yet it was coming back to life anyway, obstinately, from the river outward. He could see the pontoon bridges. He could see barges. He could see, in the grid of ruin near the tractor works, the pale new timber of scaffolding, and smoke going straight up from stovepipes, which meant people, which meant morning, which meant tea.
The civilian said, “Now.”
The aircraft came up light, the way it always did, a lurch of relief in the belly, and Sanne put it over into the turn and heard the airframe complain and counted, and the count did not matter because at some number he never afterward remembered the world outside went white.
It came through the goggles. It came through his eyelids. It came through the back of his own hands, which he had put over his face without deciding to, and he saw the bones in them, dark and neat, like the twigs in a winter hedge.
The shockwave caught them twice, once from the air, once from the ground, and the second one lifted the plane like a hand under a plate. When he could see, the tail gunner was screaming on the intercom, not words. Sanne looked back once. A column was going up through their own altitude and past it, and he had the ridiculous thought that they were flying beside a mountain that had not been there when they took off.
The civilian was weeping into his gloves. Sanne flew the plane. That was what there was to do, so he did it, and he did it well, and he brought them home with an engine on fire, and in November a man who could not look him in the face gave him a decoration.
III. Krasnaya Sloboda, east bank of the Volga—the same morning
Nadya Belova, nineteen, was carrying two buckets up the path from the water when the far side of the river turned into a light.
There was no sound with it. That was the part she could never make anyone understand afterward, not her sister, not the doctors, not the men who wrote down what she said in a room in Kuibyshev. The light came first, and it was silent, and it lasted long enough that she had time to think the sun is behind me and to turn her head and look for the sun and find it exactly where it should be.
Then the sound arrived, and the pressure with it, and she went down into the frozen mud on the path with the buckets rolling away from her, and the shed behind her came apart into the field.
When she got up, the river had gone strange; flattened, whitened, hurrying. Across the water where the city had stood, a wall of dust climbed from the earth into the sky, glowing from within.
She waited for the birds to start again. She waited a long time.
IV. Stockholm—winter 1943 into spring 1944
The channel had been open since the summer: a trade attaché of the Soviet delegation, a Baltic German businessperson with an interest in tallow, a man from the Wilhelmstrasse who travelled on a passport in someone else’s name. Before October it had been a thing that existed so that neither side could say it had refused to listen. After October it was the axis on which the world turned.
They met in an apartment on Strandvägen with the curtains open, because closed curtains attract attention.
“How many,” said Vishnevsky. He asked it every time, in the same flat voice, as a man returns to press a bruise.
“You will understand that I cannot answer.”
“Then I will answer. You have four.”
Dr. Brandt looked out at the water and let a moment go by, and in that moment he was as frightened as he had ever been, because the true number was one, had been one, and would be one for eleven months more, and every day of those eleven months was a day in which the Red Army could decide to spend three million men and take Berlin and be right to do it.
“You may work from four,” he said. “I would not encourage you to work from fewer.”
What they finally initialled in May 1944 they did not call a peace. They called it an armistice, and then a Protocol, and it drew a line from Narva down through the Pripet marshes to the Dnieper and the sea, and it left tens of millions of people on the wrong side of that line, and it bought the Soviet Union what its signatories understood perfectly well it was buying: time, and engineers, and the survival of a government that had come three weeks from collapse in the autumn and would not admit it for forty years.
There is a photograph. Nobody is smiling. It was not that kind of photograph.
V. Washington — 1944 to 1946
Ellis Hoyt was twenty-eight and worked in a corridor of the State Department where someone had taped the windows in 1942 and nobody had got around to taking the tape off.
He watched the argument happen in memoranda. The Casablanca formula, the unconditional surrender they had proclaimed to the whole world as a moral absolute, died the way such things die, not by repudiation but by ceasing to be mentioned. The planners postponed the landings in France in February, restudied them in April, and quietly gave them a new codename in June, so that they could call the old one cancelled without cancelling anything. The Chiefs would not put five thousand ships in the Channel and eight hundred thousand men on four beaches when a single aircraft could reach them at dawn.
London went half-empty that year. So did Liverpool and Glasgow. There was a plan for the dispersal of the government to Worcestershire, and a second plan, which Hoyt saw once, for the dispersal of what would remain of the government afterward.
The bomber offensive went on. That was the strange thing, obscene in retrospect and inevitable at the time: the war did not stop. It only stopped deciding anything. Men died at Monte Cassino and at Anzio and in the Pacific for two more years, in a war that everyone at the top of it had privately concluded no one could win any more, only end.
The President won in November by eleven electoral votes and died in April, and in his second week the man who replaced him learned about the project in New Mexico, and in his third about the German count: nine, by then, or eleven; the estimates disagreed.
The desert shot came in July 1945. A man who had been drinking told Hoyt about it, and kept saying now we’re even, and Hoyt went home and sat on the end of his bed with his shoes on and thought: no. Now we are both able. That is not the same word.
There was no vocabulary for it yet. Deterrence was a word for afterward, for the professors. In 1945 and 1946 there were only men in rooms, drawing up lists of cities and marking them with the number of aircraft they thought might get through, and reaching the bottom of the list, and starting again.
VI. Lisbon — 11 September 1947
They signed it in a hotel above the Tagus, in a ballroom with the chandeliers wrapped in linen because the management had not managed to replace the lamps.
Hoyt carried the folder. That was his function; he was thirty-one and junior and he carried the folder from a table at the side to the table in the middle, and stood back, and watched eleven men put their names to a document in four languages.
The frontiers froze where the armies had stopped. There would be a commission on prisoners, which would sit for six years and repatriate perhaps a third of the men on its lists. There would be an International Commission on Atomic Energy, with its headquarters in Bern, which would meet twice in 1948 and then not meet. There were mutual undertakings on the non-employment of what the text called, in a phrase that had taken nine weeks to negotiate, devices of the class first employed on the Volga. There were tariffs. There was a great deal about tariffs.
There was nothing about the camps.
Hoyt had read the reports. Everybody in that ballroom had read the reports: the Polish courier’s account, the two men who had got out of the Silesian camp with the drawings, the aerial photographs that had sat on file since 1944, which a marginal note he had seen with his own eyes dismissed as of no immediate operational significance. The transports had not stopped. They were running that morning, east of the line, four hundred miles from this room, and would go on running as long as the Reich that had signed this paper went on existing, and this paper existed in order to ensure that the Reich went on existing.
Not one delegation had raised it. Not because they were monsters. Because there was no clause to write. To demand it was to demand the war back, and nobody at that table could any longer say what the war back would cost, except that the number began with a city.
Afterward they took photographs and handed round the pens as souvenirs, and a Portuguese official made a short speech about the harbor having received ships of every nation for five hundred years.
Hoyt went out onto the terrace. The city had lifted the dim-out in the spring, and the whole place was burning with light: the trams, the shopfronts, the strings of bulbs along the waterfront, the ships lit stem to stern out in the roads. It was the first time in his adult life he had seen a European city with its lights on.
He found that he could not look at it directly. He stood with his back to the rail and the brightness on the side of his face, and he tried to compose the sentence he would write to his sister that night, and got as far as It is finished, and knew he would cross it out.
Nobody in that room could have said what they had made. They knew only that it was theirs now, and that it had not ended: that they had set it down, carefully, the way you set down something you have been told is stable, and step away from, and do not turn your back on.
Somewhere east of the line, a train was moving.
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