Sun in a Bottle (10 page)

The Castle Bravo accident marked a turning point in the perception of nuclear tests. Every time such a test weapon exploded, it spewed radioactive ash into the atmosphere, and scientists noticed that the world was becoming increasingly radioactive as a result. As tests continued, the problem got worse. Scientists were particularly concerned about a radioactive isotope of the metal strontium: strontium-90. Produced by fission in an atomic or hydrogen bomb, strontium-90 is metabolized in a way similar to calcium. It is readily taken up by the body, especially a child’s body, and is deposited in bones, teeth, and mother’s milk. Once it is inside the body, it destroys from within. (Nuclear scientists measured strontium-90 dosages in “sunshine units,” but the cheery name didn’t reassure anybody.) And observers were detecting more and more strontium-90 worldwide.

By the mid-1950s, scientists such as Albert Schweitzer and Linus Pauling were raising the alarm. “Each nuclear bomb test spreads an added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world,” read a Pauling-drafted petition from 1957. “Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective children that will be born in future generations.” Thousands signed, but millions began to fear the specter of worldwide radiation. Public opinion was turning against hydrogen bomb testing.
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Teller and his allies insisted that there was nothing to fear from a little extra radiation, even as nuclear tests were strewing fallout around the globe. The AEC’s Willard Libby declared to a university audience in 1956, “It is possible to say unequivocally that nuclear weapons tests as carried out at present do not constitute a health hazard to the human population.” He was lying. One test in 1957 produced “observable fallout on Los Angeles.” And worldwide, strontium-90 levels were indeed rising rapidly. Scientists gathered data from unusual places. A research group in St. Louis pushed for mothers to donate 50,000 baby teeth for analysis. Others sampled the bones of children who died of other causes.
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All the data showed that concentrations of strontium-90 were doubling every two years.

Teller, for his part, also tried consistently to squelch the growing fears about fallout. The radiation from atomic testing is “very small,” he argued. “Radiation from test fallout might be slightly harmful. It might be slightly beneficial.” He ridiculed the public’s concerns. Afraid of the risk of mutations caused by radiation? “Our custom of dressing men in trousers causes at least a hundred times as many mutations as present fallout levels,” he wrote in 1962, “but alarmists who say that continued nuclear testing will affect unborn generations have not allowed their concern to urge men into kilts.” Teller even suggested that the dead captain from the
Daigo Fukuryu Maru
might have died from hepatitis, not from radiation exposure.
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In his view, the “fallout fear-mongers” were damaging the security of the United States because they were threatening to end his nuclear schemes. In Teller’s view, “insignificant and doubtful medical considerations” about fallout led to an event “which has contributed decisively to our weakness and our danger”: a nuclear testing moratorium.

In March 1958, Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union. Within days, he took the offensive against the United States. “The Administration was bracing itself today for Moscow’s next big propaganda strike,” warned the
New York Times
on March 29. “It is expected to be a declaration that the Soviet Union would end nuclear testing or production or both.” Two days later, the plan was revealed: a complete moratorium on nuclear testing. On Moscow Radio, Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, announced the “cessation of tests of all forms of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the Soviet Union.” The world wanted a solution to the growing fallout problem and a stop to the nuclear arms race, and the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, had responded. With the promise to suspend testing, “Russia has beaten us on propaganda all around the world,” declared House Speaker Sam Rayburn.

This immediately posed a problem for U.S. politicians. How should they respond to the USSR’s moratorium on nuclear testing? Should they ignore it and risk losing ground in the propaganda war against their Communist rival, or should the United States also cease testing? Teller was dead set against such a ban. Stopping nuclear testing was tantamount to surrendering America’s nuclear advantage to the Russians. Teller would do almost anything to stop it from happening. At an Atomic Energy Commission meeting in May, Teller argued that the United States needed a combination of underground and surface testing to get necessary data on new weapons systems. He warned that banning even surface explosions, much less following Russia’s lead and banning tests entirely, would prevent the development of antimissile warheads. Then he stressed that a moratorium would damage Project Plowshare, his program for peaceful nuclear bombs.

Despite Teller’s arguments, the pressure was too great for the administration to resist. The United States would follow the Russian lead—it would voluntarily cease testing nuclear weapons right after performing a last (and hastily cobbled together) test series. On November 1, 1958, nuclear fires stopped blazing in the United States.

Teller believed the moratorium was a huge mistake. He felt that with the ban in place the United States was getting weaker and the Soviet Union was getting stronger, and he repeatedly accused the USSR of cheating on the moratorium, of testing weapons underground or in space during the temporary test ban.
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He concluded that U.S. adherence to the test ban had squandered the American nuclear advantage, and that his country was woefully unprepared for a coming “limited war” with the Soviet Union, a limited war that would almost certainly include the use of nuclear weapons. And developing new nuclear weapons required nuclear testing.

The mask had come off. Teller’s opposition to the test ban had little to do with a vision of a fusion utopia. His future was not a future of peace, but of war. He had tried to stop the test ban because he wanted the United States to be prepared for tactical nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He had used the promise of peaceful nuclear explosions as a tool to ensure continued military research—and to make sure that weaponeers had more bombs to design. Teller’s Plowshare was not a vision from the prophet Isaiah, but one from the prophet Joel: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.”

 

 

As it turns out, the test ban was only a temporary inconvenience to Teller. Throughout the moratorium, he made plans, so he could quickly resume his work when the agreement finally fell apart. Through 1959 and 1960, even as the moratorium held, he pushed Project Chariot—the Alaskan harbor—despite increasing resistance from the locals. When the moratorium ended after a Russian test in August 1961,
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Teller was ready.

Within weeks, the United States was testing again, above and below the ground. The first new test series, Nougat, began on September 15. The seventh shot of Nougat, code-named Gnome, was a Plowshare test of nuclear excavation. A relatively small nuclear bomb, 3.1 kilotons, was placed deep in a shaft in a salt dome. When it went off, it instantly vaporized more than two thousand tons of rock and created a huge spherical cavern about 160 feet across. (It also vented a plume of radioactive smoke and steam, even though the radioactivity was supposed to be entirely contained.) The next Plowshare test came a few months later, in July 1962. It was the first shot of Operation Storax. Code-named Sedan, it used a 100-kiloton warhead buried 600 feet underground. Sedan carved an enormous crater—1,200 feet across and 300 feet deep—into the Nevada landscape. (Sedan, like Gnome, spewed radioactive ash into the air.) It was exactly the sort of test Teller needed: he proved that fusion weapons could move earth on a huge scale.

Unfortunately for Teller, shortly after Sedan the Alaska harbor project slipped out of his grasp. Local opposition was too great for the Atomic Energy Commission to overcome, and in 1962 the plan was scrapped. But that did not stop Plowshare from marching forward. If anything, it gained momentum. In May 1962, even before the Sedan test was complete, President Kennedy ordered the AEC to tackle the problem of building a second Panama canal with fusion devices.

Such plans were becoming increasingly harder to make, though. During the moratorium and after it, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had been negotiating a formal test ban treaty with Khrushchev. The so-called Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963; this was the agreement that banned anything but underground nuclear explosions. It also forbade any tests that allowed radioactivity to leak beyond national borders.

Teller bitterly fought the treaty. He and his allies attempted to undermine it at every turn. He did it directly, warning Congress of “grave consequences for the security of the United States and the free world” should they decide to ratify it: “you will have given away the future safety of our country.” Teller also tried to sink the treaty indirectly, with Plowshare. Throughout the negotiations, the AEC kept trying to build a loophole into the treaty’s language saying that peaceful nuclear explosions—Plowshare—should be exempt. Every American draft of the treaty had that exemption written into it. The Russians were against the exemption; they countered that “peaceful” nuclear bombs were “superfluous and even dangerous.” After years of negotiation, Kennedy gave up on the exemption, and the accord was signed. However, it was only a matter of months before both sides were violating the brand-new agreement.

When, in January 1965, American planes first sniffed the cloud of radiation drifting over Japan, they had little idea that it was the first test of Project No. 7, the Soviet answer to Project Plowshare.
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A Sedan-like explosion, 140 kilotons’ worth, carved the crater that became Lake Chagan.The radiation that was released by the blast violated the new treaty, as did the radiation that vented from the April 1965 Palanquin shot in Nevada. Palanquin was a Plowshare test meant to see how nuclear weapons cratered dry rock, material similar to what would be encountered in digging a second Panama canal. (The radioactive plume from Palanquin rapidly crossed the northern border of the United States into Canada and beyond.) Soon the Americans and Russians were accusing each other of violating the new treaty. Peaceful nuclear explosions were not exactly maintaining the peace.

Despite all the effort and money poured into peaceful fusion explosions, the United States never got any nonmilitary benefit from Project Plowshare. No gigantic earth-moving projects ever materialized; neither the Alaska harbor nor the second Panama canal ever got beyond the planning phase. (President Nixon formally abandoned the latter project in 1970.) Of all the marvelous applications suggested by Teller and his colleagues, only one was actually tested. Three nuclear tests carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, code-named Gasbuggy, Rulison, and Rio Blanco, attempted to use nuclear explosions to release natural gas. (The theory was that a big enough explosion would fracture the rocks trapping the gas.) But the three tests were not terribly successful. Rio Blanco failed because the bomb didn’t produce caverns of the expected shape. At first, Gasbuggy and Rulison seemed to work. The nuclear bombs shattered rocks around the test site and natural gas poured out of the wells. Unfortunately, the gas was radioactive, and no utility would buy it. After twelve years of trying and twenty-seven nuclear tests, Project Plowshare sputtered to a halt without ever having proved the usefulness of peaceful nuclear bombs.

Thirty years after Teller first dreamed of liberating the power of the sun upon the Earth, Project Plowshare was dead. Even the discovery of oil in Alaska in the late 1960s didn’t make his proposal of a bomb-carved harbor any more palatable. In his waning years, Teller turned away from peaceful nuclear explosions and back toward using fusion as a tool of war, dreaming up unworkable schemes to defend the United States from a Soviet missile attack. He was behind President Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” program, which, in its first incarnation, would have seeded the heavens with fusion bombs. If the Communists launched their missiles, Teller’s orbiting bombs would detonate, shooting out beams of x-rays that would destroy the incoming warheads. The project was abandoned as unworkable after just a few years, another example of Teller’s manic optimism.

Throughout his career, Teller schemed and plotted to prevent any sort of hiatus in his quest for nuclear supremacy. Treaties with the Soviet Union were signs of weakness; detente and peacemaking would just lead to the destruction of America. Project Plowshare was a lie; to Teller, it was not a tool of peace but a means to undermine treaties with the Soviet Union. Teller was a man of swords, not plowshares. “I’ve never seen [Teller] take a position where there was the slightest chance in the interest of peace,” said Isidor Rabi. “I think he is the enemy of humanity.”

 

 

Project No. 7 had a little more success than Project Plowshare. After the creation of Lake Chagan, the Soviets briefly experimented with nuclear excavations of lakes and dams, but the results were disappointing. The Russian efforts to turn on gas and oil wells with bombs were more successful than the American tests. Production often increased dramatically. But reports indicate that at least one oil field is contaminated with radioactivity, and its oil is “not acceptable to regional refineries.”

In 1966, the Soviets used a nuclear bomb to shut off a gas well and snuff a runaway fire. They also used nuclear explosives to make underground caverns for storing toxic waste, to break up mineral ores, and to create seismic shockwaves to aid in the exploration for natural resources. Sometimes accidents happened: the Kraton-3 explosion, a seismic experiment, vented so much radioactive steam into the Siberian tundra in 1978 that the Soviets had to declare a two-kilometer exclusion zone around the site.