Fifties (17 page)

When Ulam returned from Princeton with the news that they would need different calculations, Teller did not take the news well. “He was pale with fury yesterday literally but I think is calmed down today,” Ulam wrote von Neumann. For a time, Teller even challenged Ulam’s motives. Earlier GAC skepticism about the project was proving legitimate, “far more justified than the GAC itself had dreamed in October 1949,” Bethe later noted. In Bethe’s words, Teller was a desperate man. His egocentrism became something of a joke among the other scientists at Los Alamos: At one point Ulam wrote von Neumann that he had thought of a new idea, had communicated it to Teller, but because Teller seemed to like it, “perhaps that meant it would not work either.”

Then in February 1951, thanks largely to Ulam’s projections, they made the breakthrough. Even Oppenheimer was impressed with the new calculations. They turned him back instantly from the moralist who doubted the practicality of the Super to the physicist with a passion for adventuring into the unknown. “That’s it,” he said when he saw Ulam’s new calculations. “Sweet and lovely and beautiful.”

Still, Teller did not relax. He remained, even in victory, a man apart. He was notably ungenerous about sharing credit with Ulam, and although the United States government was willing to issue a joint patent to the two men, Teller refused it. The idea of swearing under oath that he had invented the bomb together with Ulam was completely unacceptable to Teller. Indeed, it would be perjury, he noted, so he never filed for a patent. To Ulam, this was no surprise.

By the time the first thermonuclear test took place, on November 1, 1952, at Eniwetok, Teller was no longer at Los Alamos, and so estranged from most of his colleagues that he did not even attend.

The code name for the first explosion was Mike. Mike was not a bomb; rather, it was a device in a lab building on the small atoll of Elugelab. It weighed some 65 tons, so heavy that it recalled Oppenheimer’s joke that if we needed to use the Super in war, we would have to deliver it by oxcart. It yielded some 10.4 million tons of TNT, or a force a thousand times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Leona Marshall Libby, a witness to the explosion, wrote of it: “The fireball
expanded to three miles in diameter. Observers, all evacuated to 40 miles or more away, saw millions of gallons of lagoon water turned to steam, appear as a giant bubble. When the steam had evaporated, they saw that the island of Elugelab where the bomb (or building) had been, had vanished, vaporized also. In its place a crater ½ mile deep and two miles wide had been born in the reef.”

Teller watched the event at a seismograph in the Livermore laboratory at Berkeley, where he found the generally more conservative scientific staff congenial company. At the time he used to joke, “I’m leaving the appeasers to join the fascists.” As the needle on the seismograph danced back and forth violently, Teller sent a coded message to his estranged colleagues at Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.”

Soon after the test, Teller lunched with Rabi and Oppenheimer. “Well, Edward, now that you have your H bomb, why don’t you use it to end the war in Korea?” Oppenheimer asked him. Teller said that he answered, “The use of weapons is none of my business, and I will have none of it.”

The Russians were not far behind. By the summer of 1953, they had completed the planning for their first thermonuclear test. They had, Sakharov discovered in July, made very little in the way of plans for the fallout. At the last minute, the Russians took emergency precautions, guided primarily by American literature on the subject. The Russian test was on August 12, 1953, some four years after their first atomic test. The sight was similar to that viewed by the American scientists: the cloud bigger than that of the fission bombs, turning “a sinister blue-black color.” In Washington it was given the name Joe Four. Two years later, on November 22, 1955, the Russians finally tested a thermonuclear bomb. On this day Sakharov did not wear the requisite dark goggles but faced away from the explosion, turning only after he saw the flash reflected on the buildings he was facing. Several minutes later, he saw the shock wave coming at them and yelled at his colleagues to jump. Even the men who had built the bomb were awed by its power. At a meat-packing plant a hundred miles away, the windows shattered. Even further away, in a small town soot blew into people’s homes.

Not unlike many of his American colleagues, Sakharov was torn by what he had done. In addition like many of the American scientists, he came to feel a loss of control over his work. At a celebration dinner given by Marshall Mistofan Nedelin, the military director of the test, Sakharov gave toast: “May all our devices explode
as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.” Those at the table, Sakharov noted, fell silent. Then Nedelin said he would like to tell a parable: “An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: ‘Just pray to be hard, old man. I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.” Sakharov felt as if he had been lashed by a whip at that moment. The story was not merely crude but blasphemous as well. Its point was to put the scientists in their place. “We, the inventors, scientists, engineers and craftsmen,” he later wrote, “had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of the Party and military hierarchy would make the decisions. Of course, I knew this already—I was not
that
naive. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being, like the reality of life and death ...”

SEVEN

E
VEN AS DOUGLAS MACARTHUR
promised Harry Truman that the Chinese would not enter the Korean War and that if they did, he would slaughter them, the Chinese Fourth Field Army was entering the country. The Fourth Field Army was one of the great infantry forces of the modern era, even though it consisted of peasants and remarkably little hardware. It had fashioned a brilliant victory over Chiang, who had far greater firepower. It moved on foot instead of by wheels and, lacking even the simplest of modern communication systems, coordinated its attacks with bugles—which had the additional advantage of terrifying the adversary. The troops had grown up in a world where the enemy always controlled the skies. Therefore they were trained not to move at all when an airplane passed overhead. To say that they were tough and experienced was a vast understatement. They marched (or trotted)
286 miles to their assembly point at the Yalu in eighteen days, carrying only eight to ten pounds of gear and supplies: a weapon, a grenade, eighty rounds of ammunition, perhaps a week’s supply of rice, and a tiny bit of meat and fish. An American soldier, by contrast, carried sixty pounds. Being familiar with the terrible cold of the Korean winter, the Chinese soldiers did have thickly padded, quilted jackets. They were not expert marksmen; rather, they were trained to attack close to their enemy and unleash bursts of automatic fire, a method that demanded that they take extremely heavy casualties.

Some people thought the Fourth Field Army was the best that the Chinese had. It was divided into six groups; each consisted of four 30,000 man armies, and each of these had three divisions of about 8,000 to 10,000 men. They started crossing the Yalu, it was believed, on October 13. They used the regular bridges and built some of their own—invisible underwater fords, by means of sandbags. Their camouflage was so good, and MacArthur’s intelligence was so bad, that none of their movements was detected. By the time MacArthur made his reckless pledge to Truman to slaughter them, there were probably at least 130,000 Chinese soldiers already in the country.

Though we did not know much about the Chinese, they knew a great deal about us. They received a pamphlet about the American troops just before the first battle began. The Americans, it said, were not to be underestimated. They were good soldiers, well equipped, and had the advantages of mobility and modern firepower in their attacks, enabling them to make lightning-quick strikes. But their weaknesses were noted as well: They did not fight well when forced to defend, and attacks at night would panic them, forcing them to leave behind their heavy equipment.

As both forces moved inexorably toward a confrontation at the Yalu, MacArthur was no longer merely the commander of the American forces, he was the sole policymaker as well. Washington had permitted him to cross the 38th parallel but had placed a strict ban on his going too far north or doing anything that might seem unduly provocative to the Chinese. His orders were to stay away from the Yalu, but seeking to capture the North Korean army that had escaped after Inchon, he simply disobeyed. At this point, the UN troops, whose misfortune it was to be carrying out MacArthur’s last great dream of glory, were undersupplied, underclothed, underfed, and far from their base camp. As those United Nations units moved forward they began to feel a growing sense of isolation. Something ominous was in the air. In late November, a British officer was taking
his first bath in weeks when word was brought to him that four men on horseback had been spotted near his brigade headquarters. He dressed and rushed over just in time to see them ride off. He knew instantly that they were Chinese, not North Korean. Later, he came to refer to them as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In Tokyo, MacArthur urged his two main forces on to their appointed meeting place at the Yalu. The optimism at his headquarters was at its height. The war was virtually finished, MacArthur told reporters in briefings. There was talk about bringing the boys home for Christmas. In Washington, the Defense Department started canceling plans for projected troop shipments to Korea. Yet the In Min Gun had fled north in October, and some American field commanders regarded it as disturbing: Almost overnight the enemy seemed to have disappeared.

There had been an agreement between MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that as he moved nearer to the Yalu, he would clear all movements with them. In mid-October, the JCS readily approved crossing a line across the north at Chongjiu-Yongwon-Hamhung. But fearing that the Chiefs would stop his forward movement, MacArthur became less forthright. On October 17, he sent a directive to Washington that unilaterally set a new forward line of Sonchon-Pyongwon-Songjin, thirty miles further north. That was still arguably within his orders. What he intended to do, though, was use this, not so much as a final position, but as a staging area to go even further north.

On October 24, he ordered his troops forward. He did not clear this with the JCS, but the Chiefs heard of it through the Army backchannel and warned him that these moves were not consistent with their previous instructions. MacArthur snapped back that there were military reasons for doing this and that he had the right to go ahead based on instructions from Marshall and from the Wake Island meeting. That stunned Washington.

The first ROK troops reached the Yalu on October 25 and began taking the first Chinese prisoners. These men were captured all too readily and almost seemed to be offering themselves up as an early warning signal. Some units of the ROK Eleven Corps were hammered by enemy forces that seemed a great deal more fierce than the North Koreans. More Chinese prisoners were taken. Their uniforms were different from those of the North Koreans, and they spoke Chinese with southern accents. General Paek Sun Yup, the temporary ROK commander, spoke fluent Chinese. “Are there many of you here?” he asked. “Many,” one answered. General
Walton Walker, still not accepting that the Chinese had arrived, noted that a few Chinese prisoners were not necessarily significant. “After all,” he said, “a lot of Mexicans live in Texas ...”

Despite the growing evidence of a Chinese military presence, MacArthur’s headquarters remained absolutely adamant that it had not encountered the Chinese. On October 29, John Throckmorton, commander of the Fifth Regiment of the 24th Division, was moving on a northwesterly course toward the Yalu when he ran into unusually stiff resistance at a North Korean blocking position. The intensity of fire was, Throckmorton thought, different and disquieting. He took eighty-nine prisoners, two of whom were Chinese. He was only forty miles from the Yalu. “By that time I could feel the hair raising on the back of my neck,” he said. On October 30, Ned Almond, the commander of X Corps, went by chopper to visit an ROK unit that had taken sixteen Chinese prisoners. After looking at the prisoners and talking with their South Korean captors, he sent a message to MacArthur’s headquarters that fully organized Chinese units were in the country. But his message had little impact.

Just after dusk on November 1, the Chinese forces hit an American unit with their full fury for the first time. The unit was part of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, which held positions just north and west of Unsan. At first the Americans had been there in support of ROK troops. Now, suddenly, they were desperately trying to save themselves. They were facing, it was estimated later, nothing less than two, and quite possibly three, full divisions of Chinese troops.

It was a new kind of war. Just when the Americans thought they might have slowed the assault, more Chinese would come—like an endless human wave. A few men in an American defensive position would lay down a perfect field of fire and kill a hundred attacking Chinese. But then the bugles would sound; the attack would begin again. When the relief forces finally reached the site where the Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment had been hit, they found a ghostlike scene. At one point an artillery battery had been overrun, its 155s and tractors carefully arranged in a defensive ring. There were American bodies everywhere. Not a living soul was anywhere. One NCO thought the site resembled another Little Big Horn. It had been a devastating defeat. Some six hundred men in the regiment had been lost, all told.

Yet MacArthur continued to give orders, pushing his units forward despite their vulnerability and the terrible cold. Sadly, MacArthur remained in Tokyo, refusing to accept the evidence that the war had changed. That did not surprise his peers.