Arzamas-16, USSR

August 18, 1978

Major Yevgeny Yarovitsin drove up to the checkpoint leading towards Arzamas-16. It was a tangle of ugly looking concertina wire, guard dogs, and watchtowers with heavy machine gun emplacements. The machine guns pointed outwards towards a barren wilderness, and inwards to intimidate their own residents. A dual corridor of barbed wire fencing, twelve feet high and six feet wide, marched away from the paved road into the dense forest and swamps.

The ground was cleared on either side of the barbed wire corridor for fifty yards, creating an effective kill zone. Believers, Jews and Muslims provided the forced labor, usually at the cost of their health and sometimes their very lives. The thirsty ground soaked up their blood and toil. Construction was an angry time filled with shouts, whips, and beatings. More than one grave lay in the murky mosquito filled swamps or hastily dug graves. No one who worked on the perimeter security for Arzamas-16 ever returned to society. Their anguished cries and terrible sorrows became mere echoes on the wind, forever hidden.

A prisoner assigned duty at Azamas-16 would be better off dead, and all of them eventually did die. The prison camp was fifty kilometers deeper into the wilderness than Arzamas-16. Slave labor enabled the Soviet Union to build the great fence around a city once known as Sarova, located in the Nizhni Novogrod Oblast.

Arzamas-16 was designated a closed city and officially ceased to exist. In 1946, Soviet mapmakers erased the city located at latitude 55.23 north, longitude 43.50 east. The map symbols for road, rail, and town vanished beneath the state’s powerful attention. Similarly, the same happened to Chelyabinsk-70, located some twenty kilometers north of Kasli in the Urals. Again, Soviet mapmakers erased all evidence at latitude 56.05 north, longitude 60.44 east.

The All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, known as VNIIEF, was born. Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 became the research and development laboratories for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The best and brightest were culled from ravages of the Great Patriotic War for service toward developing and deploying a credible nuclear hammer.

Never again would the Russian Bear be forced to back down before the American Eagle as had happened in 1946 over Iran. The one-time ally, America, became a mortal enemy and shook a mighty nuclear saber. The years of craziness known as the cold war began, and the manic death dance between the eagle and the bear commenced.

Stalinist Russia overcame its lack of industrial capacity with loathsome five-year plans and a plentiful supply of slave labor. The extinction of Hitler’s Germany provided several thousand German prisoners of war who were never repatriated. Jews, Christians, Gypsies, and Muslims were rounded up for their beliefs and differences. Pogroms simply took on a different form to fit the requirements of the new Czars living in the Kremlin.

Slaves built the long fence around Arzamas-16. They took saws and axes into the woods to cut down and form the wood poles where the machine guns now perched. Rocks and stumps were pulled from the ground with nothing more than heavy chains and brute strength. Men and women, who had little more than a ration of watery soup and a scrap of stale bread to sustain them, cleared the fifty-yard kill zone. In this way, closed cities were created.

Major Yevgeny Yarovitsin produced his papers identifying him as a member of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti—Committee for State Security—KGB, and his travel documents providing him a visa to enter and exit Arzamas-16. Rules regarding closed cities were extraordinarily strict. Access was heavily restricted. The schedules for orbiting American satellites tightly monitored. Once assigned to Arzamas-16, few left.

Yevgeny waited quietly in his car. A BTR-60 armored fighting vehicle blocked the road inside the gate. The 7.62 mm machine gun held the aiming reticle painted on Yevgeny’s chest. The soldier stood ready in the AFV for any sign of treachery. Penetration of the VNIIEF facilities would not be tolerated.

The soldier returned from the wooden guard shack. It was little more than rotting timbers, a wood burning stove, and a field radio. Yevgeny’s visa was checked against the book. If his visa was not properly registered in the book, Yevgeny would have been told to exit his vehicle. The slightest miscue would have beckoned the heavy machine gun to life. The soldier handed Yevgeny his papers.

“Comrade Major. Please proceed to Building 70. You are cleared for three hours. Please do not be late,” he responded with a sharp salute.

Yevgeny waved a sloppy hand back to the soldier. The BTR-60 blocking the road clattered to life and pulled back into the weeds. He gunned the car forward, driving slowly down the paved road towards the box like, three-story warehouse buildings. He breathed out deeply and checked again the heavy case on the back seat. He had been shepherding this cargo for weeks.

Inside the barbed wire perimeter were additional buildings that had their own dogs and guard towers. Some buildings seemed to be half buried into the ground, and a few hid their dealings behind heavy blast doors. The ground around these buildings was plowed and denuded of foliage.

On these very streets, Andre Sakarov built the Soviet hydrogen bomb. In 1946, chief designer Yuli Khariton began the long journey towards making the Soviet Union a credible nuclear power. Arzamas-16 is the Soviet Los Alamos.

Yevgeny parked the car next to a rack of bicycles along the front of Building 70. Beyond the squat row like buildings, Sarov’s ancient bell tower could be seen. The trees were a brilliant green, acting as a border between concrete slab like buildings and the ancient monastery for St. Seraphim Serovsky. He squinted in the bright afternoon sunlight and reached into the back seat to retrieve the heavy black case.

The case contained little pieces of silicon in special static-free bags, and a machine called a PROM burner to encode the chips. Everything was secured inside an egg carton set of foam rubber pads and wrapped tightly in heavy static-free black plastic. The case was certainly heavier than the contents. A great effort had been made to secure the materials.

He hefted the case using the side straps and awkwardly moved towards the door. An armed militiaman moved from his kiosk next to the entrance and opened the door leading into the building. Yevgeny went through the door and found a cart next to the ancient elevator. He wondered idly whether it would work today, or if he would have to struggle up the steps to the second floor.

He settled the case on the floor and stabbed the round up-arrow button. It was time to see the Jew again. Dr. David Kudrik was a man gifted with an intellect rare in any circles. He had doctorates in plasma physics, mathematics, and theoretical engineering. At forty-one, he lived a comfortable life within the confines of Arzamas-16. The State sponsored commissary provided western goods. They ensured that his parents had a working Moscow apartment and a sufficient pension for their retirement years. His sister, her husband, and their children lived comfortably along the Black Sea.

David’s family was permitted to practice their religious beliefs without interference from the Supreme Soviet. Even the children were permitted religious training in a government that refused to acknowledge God. They lived a privileged life in a land identified by Ezekiel as Gog and Magog—future purveyors of a Great War against Israel. In a land of persecution for Jews and Believers alike, no one worried about prophecies three thousand years old.

The Supreme Soviet’s largess came with a price. The price was David. His mind, his brilliance, his intuitive ability to make connections where others stumbled, was the payment for their lifestyle and protection. David Kudrik was not merely brilliant; he was a once-in-a-century genius. His genius brought him to the gilded cage called Arzamas-16.

David stood next to a workbench examining a stainless steel cylinder. He held a metal caliper as he took measurements at various angles and wrote the results in a notebook. There were several blackboards plastered with incongruous equations using radicals, powers, and roots. One board had a giant red “X” scrawled across the entire calculation. The shelves were littered with various technical manuals and journals, some written in Russian, but most in English and French. Several issues of Byte magazine lay opened or marked on another counter.

A black polished chemistry table with a sink, test tubes, and eight ports for Bunsen burners was in the center of the lab. Hasty notes were scribbled in several loose-leaf binders next to jars with cryptic labels. No one questioned the mess or attempted to organize his notes. David produced things no one else even dreamed of creating. On a final workbench were the dissected remains of an Altair microcomputer. A spiral notebook filled with notes lay next to a soldering iron and Ohmmeter.

Once someone had intruded upon David’s chaos, intent on straightening things out. That person vanished the next day. In a place where guards patrol a barbed wire perimeter and internal security soldiers patrol a broader soft zone, David established one place where he ruled. The Chekists read his mail and filtered his phone calls. They examined his technical journals and supplied whatever he asked for. They searched his apartment and monitored his comings and goings, but no one violated his lab. In the ultimate worker’s state, David ruled because he produced.

Yevgeny stood in the doorway with the black case on a cart. He knocked and waited for the Jew to acknowledge his presence. Their relationship held a healthy dose of animosity and silence. Yevgeny maintained a careful watch on David’s relatives, always taking the opportunity to suggest that their welfare depended on his effort, and David assured the KGB Major his rank relied on David’s satisfaction with his procurement of Western components. It was not unlike the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction practiced between the superpowers—a doctrine with the apt acronym MAD.

David examined his jailer. He remained silent regarding the injustice he felt about not being allowed to leave Arzamas-16’s ten square kilometers for the last fifteen years. Nor did he express anger at the annual telephone calls he was permitted to his parents and sister. Their pictures were tacked to the plaster wall above one of his benches. He could barely remember their voices these days, and without the photographs, he had trouble visualizing their faces. In some ways, they were dead to David, but he had yet to grieve their passing.

He knew Arzamas-16’s ten square kilometers very well. He knew the roads, the drab brownish red and gray structures, and the trees along those roads. He played a game memorizing each soldier’s name, and hair and eye colors. He was permitted conversation only with other scholars. While no one tore his Torah from his hands, YAHWEH seemed as dead to him as his family.

The robbery of his youth, and now middle age, where his eyesight wavered and breathing seemed harder, angered him. There was no one with whom to share these years. No one to raise children; but who would want to bring children to a place where they considered blowing the world to atomized particles? David turned into himself, delving deeper and deeper into the technical realm. His genius became his curse—a Prometheus chain binding him to this world where he considered the unthinkable every day.

He set the caliper next to the cylinder and examined the KGB major. “Yevgeny, is that it?” He pointed to the black case.

Yevgeny shrugged, not even knowing what it was. “I suppose. They tell me it is what you requested.” He puffed his chest, “It came all the way from California.”

David nodded distractedly. California did not exist. Nothing existed except Arzamas-16’s ten square kilometers. California and the burgeoning Silicon Valley area might as well be on the far side of the moon for all he cared. He did not even truly understand who the Americans were. He simply understood they were evil, because his jailers told him they were evil. Could they be as evil as his jailers?

“Well, bring it here.” He waved his hand and walked to one of the less cluttered workbenches.

He eyed the case rolling through his lab. He turned to the notebook opened on the desk and pulled out a list. There were red check marks next to a long list of items. He said idly, “You have the RAM chips?”

“Whatever those are. I understand I have two hundred 4K-DRAM chips and one hundred SRAM chips. I have no idea what they all are,” replied Yevgeny.

David chuckled, “They are the future, Major.”

“If you say so.”

He knelt down and flipped the side latches on the case. The heavy lid lifted up on a pair of simple hydraulic pumps. It hissed quietly.

David squatted next to the KGB man. He looked like a child next to a Christmas tree and all the presents were for him. He pulled out the first static bag and unwrapped the heavy black plastic. Inside the bag, gently pressed into a white half-inch Styrofoam board, were rows of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. They looked like an army of angry ants. He could make out the silk-screen printing identifying the chip number and Motorola’s logo. He reached out next to the plastic static wrap and touched it gently with his fingertips. He set the bag on the bench.

“I’ve never seen anything like these things,” muttered Yevgeny.

David nodded agreement. “Just some computer hobbyist in the United States.” He laughed to himself, “I wonder if the fools understand what they have created.” He turned, his eyes dancing. “Imagine, Yevgeny! A computer smaller than this case and more powerful than anything anyone has.”

“It’s not possible,” protested Yevgeny. “I’ve seen our computers. They are as big as this building. The disk drives alone are almost as large as your workbenches.”

David reached up, pulled a small Japanese transistor radio from a shelf, and handed to the Major. “This is how. They’ve abandoned tube technology almost completely, and they are moving towards the chip! The chip is getting smaller and smaller. Each generation has more capability in a smaller footprint. You can’t do that with tubes. Tubes get hot and take up space, and space requires a bigger footprint.”

“But we make the best tubes in the world,” protested Yevgeny.

David shrugged. “There used to be buggy whip makers too.”

He pulled out a larger bag and opened it reverently. There—each in their open bubble wrap and static bags, were 8080 microprocessors. Stickers indicated that there were stringent import/export control laws to be obeyed. International Business Machines and a second company called Intel were listed on the chips. David shrugged. Intel must be some minor manufacturer.

“These are the brains. According to my studies this chip can address up to one megabyte of memory.” He spread his hands wide and explained, “The memory board would have to be this large.”

“How much would that cost?”

“Thousands of rubles, I am sure. No one has done it.”

He found the PROM burner and a set of PROM chips next to them.

Yevgeny shook his head, “RAM, PROM, DRAM, CPU—an alphabet soup you’re brewing here.”

“Programmable Read Only Memory—we’ll burn the software onto these chips.”

Yevgeny pointed at the PROM chips asking, “On this you’ll build the program for the trigger mechanism?”

“Nothing quite so crude. It will all be logic gates and buffers. I’ll use machine code to make it work. Then, Major, you shall have your portable weapon.”

“How heavy?” he asked eagerly. Details were always important when talking to his masters.

David looked into the air. “I’d guess around seventy kilograms. The plutonium bomb should take about twenty-two kilos, and the lead shielding probably another twenty kilos. Then we’ll need some sort of steel housing and the computer trigger. I think we’ll need some batteries as well.” He stood and rustled through his notebook drawings. “I’m setting it up to use a dry cell in the event the lithium batteries fail. A capacitor should maintain all information in the non-volatile RAM.” He nodded confidently. “It’ll be quite a bomb.” He looked down at the Major and leered evilly. “You could carry it in a suitcase Yevgeny! But that’s the entire idea isn’t it? A man portable nuclear weapon.”

A cold finger traveled down Yevgeny’s spine. The Jew was supposed to be brilliant. Perhaps, he was going quite mad as well.

David rubbed his hands together before stooping down to retrieve the precious PROM burner. He looked at the burner’s plug, saying, “I’ll need another step-down transformer to handle the load for this device.”

Yevgeny nodded. “Give me a list.”

David patted his pockets and produced a list. He gave it to the KGB man as casually as a grocery list. “I’ll need some breadboards, LED display crystals, numeric key pads and these button lithium batteries.” He flipped one between his thumb and forefinger before catching it again in midair.

The Major looked over the list. “What’s an LED?”

David stared past him. “A light emitting diode. They are generally red or green these days. We’ll need enough to display twenty characters of data. Oh, and Major, considering we stole this stuff from the West; I doubt we’ll be able to easily display Cyrillic letters. Western alphabet only.”

“A training issue,” said Yevgeny dismissing the issue. Training was not his problem. Keeping David productive was his problem. “Where should I get this stuff?”

“America, naturally. And Major, make sure the breadboards have the finest gold contacts. Copper and silver will probably oxidize over time—gold and only the finest. Make sure the boards are four-layer wafers at a minimum. I’d prefer six-layer boards, but you might arouse some attention.”

Yevgeny jotted down the additional information on David’s shopping list. He had no idea what a wafer was or that the breadboards were flat green silicon where components were plugged in.

“Sakarov built his demonstration bomb in ‘61.” David shook his head ignoring Yevgeny. “He built a fifty megaton bomb and detonated it—just to say it could be done. He could have made it a hundred megatons. But what use is such a large weapon?” He spun and pointed to his workbench holding the components for his computerized trigger and proclaimed, “These have a far more practical effect. These, Major, shall change the world.”

“Whatever you say.” He looked up from his list. “Is there anything else?”

David focused back on the Major. “Yes, I wish to see my sister.”

Yevgeny sighed, “You know the rules. I can’t—”

“My sister. I need to see my sister!” He snapped, then softened, “Surely, you can understand. It’s been so long.” He spread his hands.

“I’ll see what I can do, but no promises. It’s not up to me.”

“Yes, of course.” He turned away from the KGB and shuffled over to another bench.

The audience was over. Yevgeny had his shopping list. He would have to send someone out to find this stuff. It was probably available in New York. The Americans seemed to have everything in New York. How foolish of them to place the United Nations building in such a populous and convenient place. He turned and walked out.

David watched the door close and looked back down at his notebook. He had written in large Hebrew letters: SAMSON. Yes, he would call the weapon SAMSON—a suitable name. He pulled the manual on Assembler across the bench and flipped to a section. He checked on the commands needed to display a string—a message.

Samson delivered a message to the Philistines in his final act of defiance. Blinded and chained, Samson stood before the Philistines, a joke for their amusement. The Philistines were jailers like David’s own jailers. Jailers who forgot how dangerous their prisoner could be. They never noticed Samson’s hair had grown back, the symbol and source of his strength. He killed three thousand with his last breath—Samson killed more Philistines in death than during his life.

David glanced across the room to the 8080 microprocessors and decided they were the source of his strength. Yes, he was certain it would work.

Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota E-Mail readermail@DouglasDeBono.Com