As the great war against Germany was raging toward its inevitable conclusion, Ezra Prentice was already fighting the next one. It was a silent war, a cold war, and one being waged in the dark territories of abstract physics and counter-intelligence. His primary foe this time was not somewhere in Berlin or Moscow, but back at Los Alamos, and his most powerful weapon was the complex web of deceptions he was building around the Soviet mole at the center of Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs.
Ezra's own and ultra-clandestine counter-espionage program, Operation Chimera, was an overwhelming success. The weekly reports by Sullivan sent to the safe house at New York created the semblance of an ideal intel operation. Fuchs, being an intelligent and ideologically committed communist, was an assiduous and proficient spy. And he was also, all unbeknownst to himself, the most effective spreader of disinformation in Ezra's arsenal.
He faithfully collected up the "bait" abandoned by Ezra's groups. A haphazard equation written on a blackboard, a "lost" document from an unarmed library, an innocent but precisely wrong conversation overheard at the mess hall—Fuchs gathered them all. He delivered incorrect designs of the plutonium tamper, the critical component of the implosion weapon. He delivered incorrect calculations of how much U-235 would be needed to achieve critical mass. He returned inflated, ominous reports of the gigantic engineering difficulties and instability of the American weapon.
The effect of this corrupted intelligence was colossal. Ezra, thanks to an high-level contact his network had established at the British intelligence effort responsible for liaison work with the Soviet Union, got translated reports trickling from Igor Kurchatov's project to develop an atomic weapon. The Soviet scientists were baffled. The intelligence they were being fed from their most valuable asset was an inconsistent mixture of contradictions. The American weapon, as Fuchs represented it in his reports, seemed to be an fragile, infinitely complex, and practically alchemical device. Kurchatov complained to his powerful boss, Lavrentiy Beria, that the project would be more difficult and take longer than he originally feared. Ezra's disinformation campaign was working as planned.
He now had before him an altogether new and far larger strategic question, one he discussed only with men he trusted most intimately: Sullivan and his most senior legal advisor, Mitchell. The war against Germany would soon be over, at most this year. The atomic weapon would be at his disposal. The war against Japan would, he knew, be terminated promptly after being deployed. Then what?
The naive view, common among both the public and leaders of the American polity, was that the world would revert to an enduring peace, secured by America's new super-bomb. Ezra knew better.
"Germany was never quite the long-term enemy," Ezra stated in the dead quiet of the safe house, the words an utmost shock to the comrades around him. "They were a rabid dog that needed killing. An anomaly of history. The true, ideological, and strategic enemy of the next century has at all times been, and is now, the Soviet Union. Their communist system naturally clashes with our standard of living. Their reach has global dimensions. Once the war with the Axis has concluded, the true struggle for the future of the planet will begin"
He explained his vision of the world after the war: a split planet, a bipolar war between two powerful powers armed with weapons of planetary annihilation. A long, twilight struggle fought, not in trenches, but in proxy wars, in laboratories, and in men's hearts and minds. A "Cold War."
Mitchell, the lawyer, looked at him, his face wrinkled. "Then this subterfuge, this information we are passing to Fuchs... where does it lead in the end? If they will construct the bomb anyway, then what have we gained?"
"Time," he responded, his voice a soft, menacing whisper. "Time is the only currency of significance. The poisonous intel isn't to prevent the Soviets from getting the bomb. This cannot be done. Their scientists are quite competent, and the laws of physics cannot remain secret forever. It is to delay them. To give the United States a necessary, five-to-ten-year period of sole atomic monopoly after the war."
He stood up and began to walk, his mind racing at a pace that made the other men breathe hard. "In this time frame, as they grapple with our marred designs and wasting resources, we will build ourselves a new world order. We will wield our unchecked power to build our alliances—NATO, our treaty with Japan. We will forge our economic institutions—the World Bank, the IMF—that will bind the free world to us. We will cement our technological preeminence. We will build an alliance fortress and economic institutions so powerful that by the time the Soviets begin the first rude device, they will already be contained, already hopelessly behind in a game which they never knew they were playing."
No longer thinking of winning the current war, he was meticulously planning the first steps, the very shape of the battlefield, of the gigantic struggle to define the rest of the twentieth century.
He made one final, decisive decision. He stood up to Sullivan. "Prepare one final, large batch of disinformation for our visit from Dr. Fuchs. This will be his magnum opus, his last great theft prior to Los Alamos closure after the first test."
The package would be perfection, an authoritative report seeming like the definitive, completed design of the plutonium bomb. It would be packed to the brim with plenty of real, verifiable data to make it completely believable. But built into its very core would be one, sinister but destructive flaw. It would significantly overestimate the quantity of fissile material needed to achieve critical mass.
"It will demonstrate to them it's the real thing," Ezra explained. "Its own scientists' numbers will ultimately persuade them the number's too high, but they will be forced to question their own work presented with our apparent success. It will take months, may take a year or longer, of debating, of re-working, of wasting effort as they produce more plutonium than they actually need for one of their initial weapons."
He was adding valuable months to America's monopoly. He was doing the exact opposite of preventing the Cold War. He was actively and willfully making its initial conditions to his own great advantage.
He had long reconciled himself to being an outsider of time, clearly no longer one of history's players, but one of its furtive architects. While the world was cheering at the prospect of victory over one form of totalitarianism, Ezra Prentice was privately designing the weapons and writing the strategies for the long, cold war against the next.