Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (25 page)

With Khan’s help, Pakistan succeeded in building an atomic bomb. On 28 May 1998, they demonstrated their new might in Pakistan’s Chagai Hills.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had no choice; it was a matter of national pride. On the detonation of their bomb, Pakistan was jubilant, as they had at last matched India’s display of military strength. Khan became a national hero.
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Khan’s primary motivation for developing nuclear weapons was to support his home country geopolitically and against their apparently bellicose neighbour. Pakistan’s nuclear capacity may indeed have made India think twice before provoking Pakistan. Yet the motivations of others who spread nuclear weapons capabilities to states such as Libya, North Korea, Iran and possibly beyond surely extended far beyond national pride, and were more likely rooted in greed and narcissism than political ideology. We still do not know for certain how far these proliferation networks might have spread, or whether any of their components are still active.

Nuclear non-proliferation efforts over the last forty years have undoubtedly constrained the number of states owning weapons. However, the actions of proliferation networks demonstrate that the spread has not been stopped altogether. This failure is in part due to the inevitable one-sided nature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. International law is made in the interests of those with the power to create and enforce it, and consequently a great fault line runs down the middle of the Treaty.

Nations are split into nuclear haves and have-nots. The five nations (US, UK, France, Russia and China) to acquire nuclear weapons before the Treaty came into force are granted nuclear hegemony over all others. Any nation with a nuclear power programme, but no nuclear weapons, must open itself up to weapons inspections. There is no obligation for nations holding weapons to reciprocate. Those with nuclear weapons are unwilling to give them up, while those without strive to own them.

I lived through the tense decades of the Cold War, during which time the existence of nuclear weapons held us in an uneasy peace. In earlier centuries, two great superpowers like the US and the Soviet Union would undoubtedly have engaged in war, but the terrible prospect of a thermonuclear Armageddon held them on the brink.

Global peace relied on a simple threat: should either side launch a nuclear attack, the other would unleash its entire nuclear arsenal. The result would be the complete annihilation of that nation. As the US
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described it: ‘Technology has now circumscribed us all with a horizon of horror that could dwarf any catastrophe that has befallen man in his more than a million years on earth … Deterrence of nuclear aggression means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.’
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That statement encapsulated the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), and created a single strategic imperative: to ensure its safety, strategists concluded, the US needed the ability to inflict total destruction on any aggressor, even after sustaining a nuclear strike. The US nuclear deterrent had to be large enough to withstand the full onslaught of the Soviet Union’s arsenal, and still wipe them out. To use the jargon, they needed to retain ‘second strike capability’.

Soviet strategists reached the same conclusion, and so each side set about building a vast nuclear arsenal. For any increase made by the enemy, the arsenal had to grow further if it was to withstand a strike by the enemy. The great arms race of the twentieth century was on. By 1982, each side had more than 10,000 strategic warheads. They were spread around the globe to reduce the possibility they could be destroyed in a first strike: on inter-continental ballistic missiles hidden in reinforced concrete silos, on nuclear submarines deep under the seas, and on fleets of planes constantly circling in the air. The primary aim on each side was not to convey aggression, but to provide an effective and credible deterrent: ‘if you attack me, you will die too.’

In the Soviet Union, the logic of second-strike capability was taken to its extreme in the construction of a ‘Dead Hand’ system, wrapped in secrecy but rumoured still to exist today.
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Should a US nuclear attack wipe out the Soviet leadership, the Dead Hand would be triggered and an automated nuclear response would be launched. Dead Hand would send a series of unarmed missiles flying across the Russian continent, broadcasting a radio code to thousands of armed missiles, firing up from silos across the nation to obliterate America.

The consequence of mutually assured destruction was perverse and terrifying: huge nuclear arsenals, able to destroy the world many times over, were built in order that they might never be used. It created constant dread and occasional terror, but it sustained a peace of sorts.

But the world today is different. The simple balance of mutually assured destruction between two superpowers has gone. Instead, we have a multitude of nuclear actors, whose motives are complex and upon whose rationality we cannot rely. Among these nuclear powers, nationalism and identity politics can prevent critical thinking about the blunt reality of nuclear weapons. For each additional player, the risk of disaster increases, whether a launch is triggered by misinformation, misjudgement or mechanical accident. Perhaps most frightening of all is the prospect that weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, for whom death is no deterrent.

In harnessing uranium, and unleashing the first nuclear reaction over Hiroshima, we tapped the primordial energy source of the Universe. For sixty years since, annihilation has been prevented by the threat of mutually assured destruction, but we can no longer rely on that uneasy equilibrium. The probabilities of disaster are too great, and the damage too severe. If a nuclear bomb were dropped today, the destruction would be many times that unleashed at Hiroshima.

Walking among the groups of school children in the Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum, I realised more than ever the need for education, of both the young and old, about the stark realities of nuclear weapons. As I sat and talked to Governor Yuzaki, who is leading a renewed drive for nuclear non-proliferation, we agreed that we must be hopeful about a future free of nuclear weapons. Constructive political discourse at an international level is not easy, if possible at all. But it is worth the effort if we can reduce the risk of one more nuclear bomb being dropped. Total eradication may be unrealistic, but we have to try.

With new generations, fresh thinking from minds that do not remember the Cold War years may see nuclear weapons for what they are in their simplest form: a terrifying weapon of unparalleled destruction. As we spoke of writing papers and treaties, Governor Yuzaki looked out on his city and deftly summed up the issue at hand: ‘These are people, not pieces of paper.’

I
N OCTOBER 1950
,
Popular Science
magazine featured a ‘new rival’ that ‘challenges aluminum and steel as a structural material for airplanes and rockets, guns and armor’. Strong, lightweight and corrosion resistant, titanium was presented as the wonder metal of the future.
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Titanium was discovered in 1791 by William Gregor, an English clergy-man, mineralogist and chemist, when he isolated some ‘black sand’ from a river in the Manaccan valley in Cornwall. We now know this as the mineral ilmenite, an iron-titanium oxide, from which he produced an impure oxide of a new element that he called manaccanite. Four years later, Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, isolated titanium dioxide from titanium's other major ore, rutile. He called the new element titanium, after the gods of Greek mythology the Titans, who were imprisoned inside the Earth by their father, Uranus. Klaproth also discovered uranium; he chose abstract names for both elements as, at the time, their properties were not fully known.
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Yet, coincidentally, Klaproth’s name turned out to be apt: like the Titans, trapped inside the Earth, titanium is strongly bound in its ore and is very difficult to extract.

It was not until 1910 that the metallurgist Matthew Albert Hunter, working at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside New York, created a sample of pure metallic titanium. In doing so he revealed titanium's remarkable physical properties. It took until the 1940s, 150 years after titanium’s original discovery, to develop a commercial process to extract titanium from its ore.

Now, as tensions mounted at the start of the Cold War, each side,
the US and the Soviet Union, was desperate to establish a technological advantage that would give it superiority in the seas, skies and outer space. Titanium seemed a new miracle metal that could do just that. The First and Second World Wars were fought with iron and carbon; the Cold War would be fought with titanium and uranium.

Titanium made possible the most extreme of Cold War engineering, such as the supersonic spy plane the Lockheed Blackbird. Flying at three times the speed of sound, Blackbird aircraft could outrun the most advanced Soviet missile technology, bringing vital military intelligence back to US soil within hours. The Blackbird is an awe-inspiring work of engineering and is still the fastest air-breathing manned jet in the world.
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‘Well fly at [27,000 metres] and jack up the speed to Mach 3 … The higher and faster we fly the harder it will be to spot us, much less stop us,’ explained Kelly Johnson, Vice-President of Advanced Development Projects at Lockheed aerospace company, to a group of engineers.
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In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the US was desperate to know about Soviet military capabilities. Proposed satellite technology had severe limitations: orbits were fixed and too predictable for their paths to go unnoticed, while images taken from outer space were often blurred.

Kelly Johnson believed his spy plane was the only way to gather adequate military intelligence and also ensure the safety of the pilots onboard. The first spy planes developed during the Cold War were converted Second World War bombers that were slow and travelled at low altitude, making them vulnerable to attack from the Soviet Union. Lockheed’s U-2 state-of-the-art spy plane of the late 1950s could travel at heights of 21 kilometres and speeds of up to 800 kilometres per hour, but the Soviet Union was investing heavily in advanced anti-spy plane weaponry that could attack the U-2. The US was mindful of the vulnerability of the U-2 to the Soviet’s anti-spy technology and sought to develop a new spy plane that could go even higher and faster. Indeed, in 1960, just as work on the Blackbird had begun at Lockheed, a U-2 plane was shot down and the pilot, Gary Powers, captured by the KGB.

The Blackbird, flying four times faster and eight kilometres higher
than the U-2, was the realisation of that American ambition. The plan was incredibly ambitious: the US air force wanted to build a plane that no longer just hid from Soviet missiles, but which could outpace any missile that could lock on to it. Aircraft had flown above Mach 3 before, but only for short bursts using afterburners. The Blackbird would cruise at this speed. It would fly whole missions on afterburners. But to succeed in building such a sophisticated piece of engineering, Lockheed’s engineers had first to learn how to harness titanium.

In 1959 work on Johnson’s Mach 3 aircraft began at Lockheed’s design and engineering facility, the ‘Skunk Works’, named for the unbearable stench given off by a nearby plastics factory. The engineers soon realised that titanium was the only lightweight metal able to withstand the high temperatures created at Mach 3 flight; steel was just too heavy.

At a height of 27 kilometres the air is so thin that it is almost a vacuum. The temperature is a freezing minus 55 degrees centigrade. Even so, the Blackbird’s nose, travelling faster than a rifle bullet, is heated by air friction to over 400 degrees centigrade.
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Near the afterburner, the temperature is over 560 degrees. If it were not painted black, giving the aircraft its name, the temperature would be even higher.
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The temperature is so extreme that the aircraft expands several inches during flight. The frame and fuel tank would only align correctly at high speeds so that when on the ground fuel leaked through gaps and on to the runway.

Over nine-tenths of the Blackbird’s structural weight was made of titanium. At the start of the project, no one had worked with titanium on such a scale before or in such extreme conditions. Only one small company in the US, the Titanium Metals Corporation, milled titanium and the sheets they produced were of uneven quality. Moreover, they could not find enough titanium to build the plane. The CIA searched the globe and eventually sourced an exporter in the Soviet Union who was unaware they were aiding the creation of a spy plane to be used against them.

During the design testing and construction of the aircraft, over thirteen million titanium parts were manufactured. Engineers encountered many problems in the process. Slight impurities can turn titanium brittle and, at first, some components would shatter when dropped from waist height. Lines drawn on with a pen would quickly eat through thin titanium sheets;
cadmium-plated spanners caused bolts to drop out; most mysteriously of all, spot-welded panels produced in the summer would fall apart while those produced in winter would hold. Eventually the source of contamination was found to be chlorine that was added to water tanks at the Skunk Works in the summer to stop the growth of algae.

Solutions were found for these problems, but they were expensive. Engineers had to work in a meticulously clean environment, pickle each component in acid and weld in a nitrogen atmosphere. The aircraft’s costs rapidly spiralled into hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it
was
built and, on 22 December 1964, the Blackbird made its maiden flight, completing a supersonic flyby down the runway of the air-base for Johnson’s amusement. Lockheed had succeeded in creating the most incredible aircraft in human history. It remains today an example of what can be accomplished when human ingenuity is combined with the extraordinary properties of the Earth’s elements.