Sleepwalking With the Bomb (5 page)

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N A
drizzly London day in September 1933, only months after his Hitler-induced exile from Germany, Leo Szilard had the crucial eureka moment. The great Hungarian grasped before any of his fellow physicists that a nuclear chain reaction would release enormous energy, sufficient to destroy a city. The next step came just before Christmas 1938, when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman stumbled upon an unexpected effect. The physicist member of their group, Lise Meitner, had just fled to Sweden. From there, she and her nephew, fellow refugee Otto Robert Frisch, interpreted what had happened—the central nucleus of a uranium atom was apparently unstable. The absorption of an extra neutron was enough to split it, resulting in two smaller atoms and an immense release of energy—a process Frisch dubbed “nuclear fission.”

Tipped off by Meitner, Szilard saw that here could be the beginning of the chain reaction he had foreseen. He persuaded Albert Einstein to write his famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. “[T]he element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” Einstein wrote FDR, calling for “watchfulness, and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.” He explained:

It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.… A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

Szilard chose Einstein to deliver the message, to lend it the weight of his unmatched prestige. He had calculated well. On October 19 FDR convened an advisory panel to look into the matter, and by 1942 the Manhattan Project (so named to conceal its true purpose) was under way. Yet according to James B. Conant, a top FDR science adviser, FDR had “only fleeting interest in the atom,” and “the program never got very far past the threshold of his consciousness.”

The discoveries made by Manhattan Project scientists first led to two types of atomic bombs (A-bombs), based upon uranium and plutonium, each a thousand times more powerful than bombs with conventional explosives. These atomic bombs, in turn, laid the foundation for the later development of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a thousand times more powerful than the A-bombs dropped on Japan.

Forty-two months after the founding of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb was a reality. A flood of European scientists, refugees from Hitler, made this astonishing success possible. To Los Alamos flocked geniuses: two more Hungarians, the mathematics prodigy John von Neumann and the “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller; the great Danish founder of the atomic theory, Niels Bohr; the young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam; the brilliant German Hans Bethe, who explained how fusion energy powers the stars; and the Italian Enrico Fermi, considered by his peers the most deeply knowledgeable of them all. They joined Americans like J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose technical brilliance was complemented by his organizational ability and knack for picking the right people for each complex task; young physicist Glenn Seaborg, who created the devilish artificial element plutonium in 1941; and a contingent from Britain that included James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron particle essential for nuclear fission.

Fear that Adolf Hitler would get the atom bomb first drove the Manhattan Project’s crash program. Szilard feared that by Christmas 1943 or New Year’s Day 1944, the Nazis would A-bomb Chicago. These scientists knew the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of Germany’s Napoleonic leader: “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast.” The Allies were certain that Hitler would not hesitate to use the bomb. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister, noted in his diary in spring 1942:

I received a report about the latest development in German science. Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to the point where… tremendous destruction, it is claimed, can be wrought with a minimum of effort… It is essential that we be ahead of everybody.

The Nazis were, in fact, not even close to developing the bomb, but the Allies understandably erred on the side of assuming the worst case, partly out of supreme respect for legendary German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Had they passed up development, and Hitler managed somehow to build the bomb, utter annihilation surely would have befallen the great democracies. That they were not close was proven by Heisenberg’s reaction upon being told about the Hiroshima bombing. He guessed that the bomb had not been a uranium weapon, but instead a superpowerful chemical explosive bomb.

After the war, Einstein regretted having helped the Allies by persuading FDR to pursue A-bomb research. He lamented to his secretary: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!”

The Nazis did, however, jump into a huge lead in another department during the war. The great German rocketeer Wernher von Braun led development of “vengeance weapons”—the German “V” series of rockets. V-1s—jet-powered low-flying subsonic missiles that usually can be steered in flight (what today we call cruise missiles, albeit the pioneering V-1 was not maneuverable)—began dropping on London in 1944. Later that year, the V-2, the world’s first true military ballistic missile, hit London. (A ballistic missile—from “ballista,” a medieval catapult of large stones—is set on its course by a few minutes of powered flight, then coasts until gravity pulls it back to earth.) Unlike the V-1, which flew at constant speed and altitude until its final plunge, and thus could be easily shot down by ground fire or by intercepting aircraft, the V-2 attained a velocity of nearly one mile per second and thus fell on its targets with no warning, arriving before the sound of its approach. Had Hitler’s warheads carried atom bombs of the kind dropped on Japan in August 1945, the heart of London could have been obliterated with but a few such hits.
²

The nuclear age formally began on the morning of July 16, 1945, when in the New Mexico desert the Trinity device was detonated. Its blinding brightness led Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, to famously recall a verse from the Indian epic, the
Bhagavad-Gita
(“The Song of God”):

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. For I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.

Oppenheimer’s awe-induced invocation of ancient sacred poetry was spot-on: the glare from the blast would have been visible from the planet Jupiter, some one-half billion miles away from Earth.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later changed warfare and global politics forever. The age that began two-thirds of a century ago has gone through several stages—from the all-out arms race of 1945 to 1967, to the arms control of the seventies and eighties, and finally to the era of rogue nuclear weapons proliferation we entered in the early nineties.

W
ITH A
combination of wartime espionage at Los Alamos and its own scientists at Sarov (the monastery town turned closed city for the Russian bomb project), the Soviet Union lagged only four years behind the U.S. in nuclear bomb building.

The end of the war found the former allies now armed with nuclear weapons, facing off in a struggle lasting nearly 50 years, with Europe divided by Soviet aggression. Though labeled “cold,” the war was very hot in several major regional proxy conflicts and numerous smaller fronts around the globe. Nuclear arsenals kept the two superpowers not only from a nuclear conflict, but from a major direct conventional-force conflict as well.

The race to develop the “Super”—the H-bomb—began right after Russia exploded its first A-bomb. In 1952, the Americans vaporized an atoll in the South Pacific with a massive hydrogen device, one far too large to qualify as a true bomb. The Soviet H-bomb was tested in August 1953 on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The vast power of these hydrogen bombs made destruction not merely of cities, but of civilization itself, a plausible prospect.

In December 1953 President Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace program, when only three powers—the U.S., Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—had gone nuclear. His idea was to provide a compelling reason for countries not to pursue nuclear energy for military purposes. In exchange for such forbearance they were to be guaranteed help in developing peaceful atomic energy uses. Under the aegis of Atoms for Peace, dozens of nations received economic and technical aid to develop commercial nuclear technology. Coupled with America’s precipitous 1946 disclosure of Manhattan Project technology, knowledge pertaining to nuclear weapons began spreading around the globe. As there is no bright line between commercial research and military use (see the “Interlude” at the end of
chapter 7
), out popped the proliferation genie.

The year 1957 brought new urgency to the technology arms race with two dramatic Soviet triumphs. That August, the Soviet Union tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a ballistic missile with a range further than 5,500 kilometers—around 3,500 miles, roughly the distance from Nova Scotia to Portugal. Such a device was hardly inevitable: FDR’s wartime science adviser, Dr. Vannevar Bush, told Congress in December 1945 that such a machine could never work. But Stalin wanted it; in 1947 he was telling senior deputies that an ICBM “could be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Two months after the Soviets tested their ICBM, they had their second triumph: they launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik (“traveler”).

Between 1957 and 1967 the superpowers raced to close the window of nation-ending catastrophic vulnerability the new technologies had opened. They hid their intercontinental ballistic missiles underground in storage cylinders, encasing underground launch pads, all bearing the gentle agrarian name of “missile silos.” They hid intermediate-range ballistic missiles under the oceans in submarines, and they retained air bases for their strategic bombers. As technology improved, this “triad” of nuclear systems (a nuclear “system” is a weapon plus the platform on which that weapon is mounted) reduced each side’s vulnerability to a surprise nuclear first strike, what nuclear strategists call the “bolt from the blue.”

In the first quarter century of nuclear weaponry, five nations conducted hundreds of above ground tests. Almost half came in 1962 alone, the peak of worldwide nuclear testing. Most of these were U.S. tests in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean on the Marshall Islands. A few were British tests in the Australian outback and on Christmas Island. France tested in Algeria. China tested its devices in its vast western interior, and the rest were Soviet tests in Kazakhstan or in the Arctic at Novaya Zemlya. Amid rising awareness of nuclear fallout, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that they would confine future tests to shots fired deep in underground testing caverns.

To reduce the risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, a quarter century of intense efforts at arms control followed the all-out race. Arms control became a dominant theme in 1967 when the United States announced it would unilaterally freeze—that is, freeze without Russia’s participation—the number of offensive nuclear weapons platforms it deployed. Arms control acquired iconic status in 1972 with the U.S.-Soviet agreement known as SALT I. Superpower arms-control agreements became central strategic policy. Many politicians and analysts treated arms control as uniquely important among national security issues.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War brought the superpowers close to nuclear war again—notwithstanding their arms-control talks of the previous year. Soviet and American naval ships drifted into a tense confrontation in the Mediterranean, as the U.S. declared the highest nuclear alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis. As in 1962, cooler heads prevailed, and catastrophe was averted.

How limited was the influence of arms talks became clear as the Soviet Union began aggressively backing Third World Marxist movements, often with gifts of sophisticated conventional weapons. The Soviets induced Cuba to send soldiers to fight “wars of national liberation” in Africa. These actions revived a policy that strategists called “linkage.” More and more, American politicians and diplomats called for linking strategic arms negotiations to the increasingly bellicose geopolitical conduct of the Soviet Union. Total Soviet warheads surpassed America’s in 1978, with America’s number declining and the Soviets’ count climbing (to a peak in 1986). After the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ardent arms controllers found that their position—that nuclear arms control is of unique and overriding importance and can be divorced from other considerations—had become politically untenable. “Linkage” became enshrined as a bedrock principle of superpower relations.

President Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative restored missile defense as a legitimate option to limit the destructiveness of a nuclear attack. In 1987, the U.S. and USSR signed the first true arms-reduction treaty, eliminating their intermediate- and medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles (those that can reach targets roughly 600 to 3,500 miles away). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, symbolizing liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow’s jackboot. Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union on the last day of 1991, the superpowers negotiated the first major strategic nuclear-warhead-reduction accord—that is, one involving long-range weapons such as ICBMs. The next year, the U.S. unilaterally ended warhead modernization.