2020-02-01_New_Scientist

(C. Jardin) #1

30 | New Scientist | 1 February 2020


Film
Ironbark
Directed by Dominic Cooke

THE cold war was about to get
messy and two people were in the
thick of it. Ironbark, the gripping
story of Greville Wynne, a UK
businessman recruited by MI6,
and Soviet intelligence officer
Oleg Penkovsky, premiered at the
Sundance film festival last month.
Taking its title from the
codename used by Penkovsky,
it stars Benedict Cumberbatch
as Wynne, Merab Ninidze as
Penkovsky and Rachel Brosnahan
as CIA agent Emily Donovan. It
tells how Penkovsky, via contact
with Wynne, shared nuclear
secrets with the West prior to the
Cuban missile crisis – intelligence
that the film’s PR calls “crucial”.
But what was Soviet nuclear
capability really like? And did
Penkovsky’s espionage, feted by
the US, matter?
The CIA describes Penkovksy as
“one of the most valuable assets”
in its history and credits him with
helping to prevent a nuclear war.
It also claims intelligence gleaned
via Penkovsky was vital during the
stand-off over Cuba in 1962, when
the USSR deployed nuclear
weapons there, within striking
distance of much of the US. As the
CIA says on its website: “Because
of Penkovksy, [US president]
Kennedy knew that he had three
days before the Soviet missiles
were fully functional to negotiate
a diplomatic solution.”
However, this narrative of
the spy standing between two
closely matched superpowers
on a collision course isn’t quite
right: there are important facts
to remember as you watch.
For one thing, by 1962 Soviet
nuclear weaponry was far from

The spy that saved the world?


Ironbark is one of 2020’s most anticipated films. But did one man in Russia
really prevent two nuclear superpowers colliding, asks Chris Baraniuk

equal to that of the US. Since the
dawn of the nuclear era, the Soviet
Union had been chasing Western
weapons. Spies had funnelled
information to Moscow from
the Manhattan Project in the US,
which built the first atomic bomb.
The first successful Soviet device,
detonated in 1949, ended up being

a copy of the one that Allied
scientists had demonstrated in
1945 in the Trinity test.
Soviet bomb makers had to be
resourceful. They needed uranium
but at first had no idea where to
mine it in the Soviet Union. But
they had been able to retrieve
some 300 tonnes of the stuff taken
from Nazi research sites at the
end of the second world war. Nazi

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Kojevnikov at the University of
British Columbia, Canada.
When tensions rose during
the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev
publicly flaunted his nation’s
nuclear readiness. In private, his
feelings were different. As early as
the mid-1950s, he reportedly said
he couldn’t sleep for several days
until he became convinced that he
could never actually give the order
to use the weapons.
Did Penkovsky, executed in 1963
by the Soviets as a spy, alter the
course of the Cuba crisis as the CIA
claims? It isn’t clear. What is clear
is ironic: greater easing of tensions
came when the nuclear arsenals of
both sides were better matched –
and diplomacy was unavoidable. ❚

Chris Baraniuk is a freelance science
and technology writer

rocket science also influenced the
Soviets, leading to the 1957 test of
the R-7 – the first intercontinental
ballistic missile and the rocket that
put Sputnik into orbit.
In the 1950s, Austrian and
German scientists working for the
Soviets developed a brilliant way
to enrich uranium that was better
than the methods used in the
West. And, in 1961, the Soviets
carried out the largest ever nuclear
detonation, the Tsar Bomba test.
Despite all this, by the
early 1960s the US remained far
ahead, with thousands more
bombs and warheads, hundreds
more military vehicles capable of
carrying nuclear weapons and a
geographical advantage in terms
of launch sites.
Penkovsky helped show the US
how the Soviets lagged in areas
such as missile guidance and
weapon sophistication. The US
was trying to hold on to that
advantage, while the USSR was
playing catch-up, says Alexei

A control room at a Soviet
nuclear missile base
outside Moscow

“ By the early 1960s,
the US remained far
ahead of the Soviet
Union in terms of
nuclear weapons”

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