Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Pandora's Keepers (46 page)
For this reason, if and when I come to Los Alamos in the future I will completely refrain from any discussions relating to the superbomb.
Bethe concluded his letter with a caveat: “In case of war I would obviously reconsider my position.”
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Four months later the Korean War broke out, and he indeed returned to Los Alamos. Bethe hoped that by doing so, he could prove to himself and others that a superbomb could not be made, and actually did some calculations attempting to prove this.
Such an outcome offered the best—perhaps the only—solution to Bethe’s tortured conscience. For even while working on the superbomb, he “still hated the thing.”
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But Bethe stifled his impulse to tell military officers at Los Alamos “what a horrible thing we were working on,”
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and, paradoxically, ended up playing a major part in the development of the very weapon that he feared and had initially opposed. Deep down he would long wonder whether his anxieties about the Russians might not have been an attempt to rationalize a simple desire to take part in another clever trick of nature.
The doubts never went away. “I am still not reconciled to the hydrogen bomb although I have myself worked on it,” Bethe told an audience of physicists at Los Alamos in 1953. “I still think that it is a more evil thing than the atomic bomb.”
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He finally came to the conclusion that the superbomb “was probably inevitable, but one wishes it could have been avoided.”
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He also reflected on his own role in its development. “I am afraid my inner troubles stayed with me and are still with me and I have not resolved this problem,” confessed Bethe. “I still have the feeling that I have done the wrong thing, but I have done it.”
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Others had also changed their minds. This was most evident at a meeting on superbomb design held at Princeton in June 1951. Those attending included not just Teller—but also Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Fermi.
*
An eyewitness described what took place:
Pictures were drawn on the board. Calculations were made, Dr. Bethe, Dr. Teller, Dr. Fermi participating the most in this; Oppy very actively as well…. I remember leaving that meeting impressed with this fact, that everyone around that table without exception—and this included Dr. Oppenheimer—was enthusiastic now that you had something foreseeable. The bickering was gone. The discussions were pretty well ended, and we were able within a matter of just about one year to have that gadget ready.
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Why did those who had opposed the superbomb so strongly on moral grounds eventually assist in its development? Because, in their minds, the superbomb had become inevitable. With its theoretical feasibility proven, and the nearly limitless resources of the federal government behind it, they thought the superbomb was almost certain to be constructed. Refusing to work on it would not prevent it from being made.
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Equally important, it now seemed likely that the Russians would be able to make it, too, and the scientists—like America’s political leaders—felt it would be intolerable for the superbomb to be in the hands of the Soviet Union but not the United States. Once “it was clear that it could be done, not only by us, but also by the Russians,” said Bethe, “Oppenheimer and I concluded that it
had
to be done.”
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There was another, crucially important reason. Oppenheimer himself explained it. “When you see something technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same.”
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Oppenheimer’s remark conveyed none of the moral anguish that he and Fermi had so forcibly expressed in their October 1949 GAC report, or that he had offered in reply to Teller’s question “If the president gave the [superbomb] project the go-ahead, would you come back to Los Alamos?”—“Certainly not.”
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Oppenheimer’s candid admission underscored the Faustian bargain that scientists struck through their work on the atomic bomb and now on the superbomb: whatever their moral and political scruples, what was “technically sweet” was, in the end, simply irresistible to them. Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Fermi were not narrow technocrats oblivious to the larger consequences of their work; they were intelligent, intensely curious men whose moral and political compunctions were exceeded only by their compulsion to understand nature’s secrets.
Their adversary in the superbomb debate, Teller, was driven by this compulsion more than anyone. He conceded this fact with remarkable candor in later years:
One of my main reasons for working on the hydrogen bomb was its novelty. I wanted both as a scientist and also for practical reasons to know how it would work. I believe it is not irresponsible to try to work out those technical developments that can be worked out.
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In this sense, the scientists’ complicity came not from any ill intentions, but from wanting to know more.
An American superbomb was finally ready for testing on November 1, 1952. The test site was Elugelab, in the Pacific Ocean atoll of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. Although invited to witness the test, Teller did not go. “I very much wanted to see the explosion of the device that had consumed my energies and that had dragged me into so many arguments,” he later said, “but I knew that I really was not needed at Eniwetok.”
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Yet the curiosity that had driven Teller’s quest for the superbomb remained intense and unquenchable. Shortly before the predawn test—it was midday on the West Coast of the United States—Teller crossed the Berkeley campus from the Rad Lab to Haviland Hall, home of the geology department, whose basement housed one of the most sensitive seismographs in the world. There Teller hoped to see signs of the shock wave generated by the detonation five thousand miles away.
The small room was lit only by a dim red lamp, which was turned off. Teller’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. It would take about a quarter of an hour for the shock wave to travel deep under the Pacific basin to the California coast. He sat alone in the darkness, with a loudly ticking clock hovering anxiously above the sensitive seismograph that would indicate the slightest tremor with a tiny beam of light on a photographic plate. He recalled what happened next:
I waited with little patience, the seismograph making at each minute a clearly visible vibration which served as a time signal.
At last the time signal came that had to be followed by the shock from the explosion and there it seemed to be: the luminous point appeared to dance wildly and irregularly. Was it only that the pencil which I held as a marker trembled in my hand?
I waited for many more minutes to be sure that the record did not miss any of the shocks that might follow the first. Then, finally, the film was taken off and developed. By that time I had almost convinced myself that what I saw was the motion of my own hand rather than the signal from the first hydrogen bomb.
Then the trace appeared on the photographic plate. It was clear and unmistakable. It had been made by the wave of compression that had traveled for thousands of miles and brought positive assurance that Mike [the bomb’s nickname] was a success.
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Lawrence was the first to offer congratulations.
The superbomb’s explosion expanded in an instant to a blinding white fireball more than three miles wide. (The Hiroshima fireball had measured little more than one-tenth of a mile.) The fireball seemed to blot out the whole horizon. It dug out of the sea floor a crater two hundred feet deep and a mile and a half wide. Observers felt a wall of heat as if someone had opened an oven, heat that persisted for an unnervingly long time. “You would swear that the whole world was on fire,” one eyewitness wrote home.
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Swirling with intense radioactivity, the enormous fireball became a burning mushroom cloud with a skirt of boiling water around its base that fell back to sea with a roar. The ominous cloud began to spread out, its top cresting in the stratosphere at twenty-seven miles across, its stem eight miles wide. “It really filled up the sky,” said a physicist who had witnessed earlier atomic tests and was not easily impressed. “It was awesome. It just went on and on.”
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The superbomb had exploded with the force of more than 10 million tons of TNT, a thousand times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Less than two years later, on March 1, 1954, American scientists developed and tested a superbomb with the explosive force of 15 million tons of TNT. Before the decade was over, the Soviets would develop a superbomb with an explosive yield of 60 million tons of TNT Where would it all end?
As with the atomic bomb in 1945, the superbomb debate forced scientists once again to reflect on the implications of their work. It made them come face-to-face with moral and political issues of enormous moment and scope—for example, weighing the current national interests of their own country against creating a perpetual catastrophic danger for the world. Teller and other proponents argued that it was in the nature of science to pursue knowledge, and no amount of moral scruples or hand-wringing should—or could—stop this quest. “It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which laws [of nature] can serve the human will,” Teller wrote at the time of the debate. “It is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used.” He put the point more sharply toward the end of his life: “As a scientist, it is my responsibility to make things work that will work. How they’re used is not my responsibility.”
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For Teller, trying to stop the pursuit of knowledge was not only futile but irrational and even immoral. Knowledge was inherently good.
In the end, even Teller had to occasionally confront the implications of a weapon whose destructiveness boggled the mind and tortured the conscience. When he did, it left him deeply ambivalent—with elemental feelings of awe mixed with dread. On a spring afternoon in 1950, just weeks after Truman gave the go-ahead to the superbomb, the physicist had a very private and candid talk with his old friend Cloyd Marvin, president of George Washington University, whom Teller had known since arriving in the United States in 1935 to teach at GWU. Teller and Marvin sat together in Marvin’s office in Foggy Bottom until the shadows lengthened and the room grew dark. Teller was in a curious mood; he seemed to be searching for something. Finally he got around to his question. “Suppose you could develop a force capable of destroying all life on earth,” said Teller, pausing for a moment. “Is it right even to take any steps in that direction?” Marvin said it was, assuring Teller that such a force would be safe in the hands of the United States.
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That same spring, Teller began composing a bedtime rhyme for his young son, Paul, basing each stanza on a successive letter of the alphabet. He first wrote rhymes for A and B:
A stands for
atom;
it is so small
No one has ever seen it at all.
B stands for
bomb;
the bombs are much bigger,
So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger
.
Later Teller added a rhyme for
H:
H has become a most ominous letter.
It means something bigger if not something better.
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R
OBERT OPPENHEIMER HAD
a mind and a manner that could be very persuasive, but also an arrogance and an impatience that could be very wounding. His moral sensitivity, moreover, stood at odds with his desire to be near power, an enterprise not often guided by considerations of sin. Famous after the war, Oppenheimer became infatuated with the Washington scene and his influence within it. He became ever sensitive to the way he appeared; Robert Oppenheimer was on his mind at all times. While Oppenheimer’s vanity irritated many of his friends, to his enemies it was intolerable.
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