Sun in a Bottle (42 page)

Apparently, Soviet translators erred when they received word of Fermi’s experiment. Soviet scientists were led to believe that the nuclear pile was in a “pumpkin field” instead of a “squash court.”

In the interest of secrecy, Manhattan Project scientists seldom referred to these compounds by their real name. Uranium-235 was referred to by the code names “magnesium” or “25”; plutonium-239 was “copper” or “49.”

Teller’s obsessive hatred of Communists and single-minded desire to build fusion weapons reportedly led Enrico Fermi to tell him, “In my acquaintance, you are the only monomaniac with several manias.”

Teller was so ridiculously optimistic that fellow physicists measured enthusiasm in “Tellers” just as they would measure mass in kilograms or time in seconds.

The Los Alamos physicist Robert Serber later wrote, “On Edward Teller’s blackboard at Los Alamos I once saw a list of weapons—ideas for weapons—with their abilities and properties displayed. For the last one on the list, the largest, the method of delivery was listed as ‘Backyard.’ Since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it elsewhere.”

That didn’t end the speculation. As General Groves later recounted, “I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi the evening before [the first atomic bomb test], when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.”

Teller limped because of an accident in his youth. At the age of twenty, he jumped off a tram and nearly lost his right foot.

This was, in part, because Russian military intelligence had penetrated the Manhattan Project. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who was involved at the highest level of theoretical work on the atomic and hydrogen bombs, was a spy.

They were using a technique that became known as the
Monte Carlo method
; the dice were for generating random numbers that allowed them to get a ballpark solution to a problem much more quickly than an exact calculation would permit.

The world came very close indeed. After the Soviets and Chinese massed a fresh set of troops on the Korean border in March 1951, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered that atomic bombs be used if the Communist troops launched a major new offensive. The bombs were deployed. Truman even signed an order authorizing their use but, luckily, he never sent it.

Teller, as often was the case, remembered the situation differently from how his peers did: he says he came up with a solution himself. According to Carson Mark, a weapons designer, “Ulam felt that he invented the new approach to the hydrogen bomb. Teller didn’t wish to recognize that. He couldn’t bring himself to recognize it. He’s taken occasion, almost every occasion he could, not every one, to deny that Ulam contributed anything.”

It’s not entirely clear why Oppenheimer and others who had expressed such deep moral qualms about the hydrogen bomb in 1949 reversed their position so dramatically in 1951. Oppenheimer said that the idea was so “technically sweet” that the United States had to go ahead and try it and then, later, argue about what to do with it.

Oppenheimer’s history was troublesome, especially an incident in 1943, in which, ironically, he alerted authorities to a possible security risk. Oppenheimer told a military officer that a certain person was worth keeping an eye on (and he was), but he lied about the details of how he knew this (through a friend who was a member of the Communist Party). Oppenheimer, when confronted with the lie, admitted to it in front of the panel: “Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr. Oppenheimer, that according to your testimony now you told not one lie to Colonel Pash, but a whole fabrication and tissue of lies?” asked the AEC attorney. “Right,” answered Oppenheimer.

In 1910, the famed physicist Ernst Mach wrote, “If belief in the reality of atoms is so crucial, then I renounce the physical way of thinking, I will not be a professional physicist, and I hand back my scientific reputation.”

In truth, the analogy is terribly flawed, and electrons don’t really “orbit” a nucleus. To explain the behavior of electrons in an atom, you need to get into quantum theory, but this level of subtlety isn’t necessary to understand fusion.

Technically, these pieces are helium-4 nuclei: two protons and two neutrons all bound together in a tight bundle.

Technically, a third particle known as an antineutrino is also created.

The fusion furnace accounts for the abundance of light elements. But if fusion can’t fuse nuclei to get atoms heavier than iron, where do we get gold and lead and uranium from? It turns out that they are created in the very final moments of a star’s life. As the star explodes, the explosion is so hot and so violent that heavy nuclei are colliding with protons, neutrons, and other particles with great force. Sometimes, the particles stick, making the nucleus bigger. This process absorbs energy rather than releasing it—it’s like rolling the ball up the shallow side of the hill—but it happens because the explosion is so energetic. It is from the very last moments of a supernova that we get all the elements heavier than those in the iron group.

A fusion reaction that isn’t properly compressed becomes a big, expensive dud. In weaponeers’ terminology, the bomb “fizzles.” Livermore’s first nuclear tests fizzled, including its first hydrogen bomb test, Castle Koon.

While fusion hawks like Teller and Strauss led the push to turn weaponry into something to benefit mankind, even the scientists on the other side of the hydrogen bomb divide—those who opposed the development of the Super—pushed to turn nuclear knowledge into a boon for humanity. “I had a hand in formulating and popularizing that hope of peaceful potentials,” wrote the former AEC chairman (and Oppenheimer ally) David Lilienthal. “The basic cause, I think was a conviction, and one that I shared fully, and tried to inculcate in others, that somehow or other the discovery that had produced so terrible a weapon simply
had
to have an important peaceful use.”

Taylor had less peaceful uses in mind, too. The neutrons generated by an exploding fusion bomb buried under the ice could generate oodles of tritium; such a bomb exploded over a blanket of uranium could manufacture all the plutonium that the defense industry could possibly need.

He would not be the last, nor would Castle Bravo be the only fusion “oops.” When the Soviets detonated their first Ulam-Teller-type device in 1955, a temperature inversion in the atmosphere reflected the shockwave back to the ground, causing a tremendous amount of damage. A Russian soldier died when his trench collapsed, and in a nearby settlement a two-year-old girl, who had been playing with blocks, was killed when the shockwave smashed the bomb shelter she was in.

Despite the bad press, some scientists involved with the project were glib. A month after the accident they dubbed a draft plan to return the evacuated islanders to their home Project Hardy, as in Thomas Hardy, who wrote
The Return of the Native.

Pauling received his second Nobel Prize—the peace prize—for his efforts to warn the world about the danger of fallout. In his presentation speech for Pauling’s award, the chairman of the Nobel committee noted, “The opposition Pauling encountered came first of all from two scientists, E. Teller and W. F. Libby, of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.”

At a secret 1955 meeting Libby proposed a particularly gruesome way to get samples to measure strontium-90 concentrations: “So human samples are of prime importance,” he said, “and if if [
sic
] anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”

Teller’s arguments defending nuclear testing ranged from the disingenuous to the downright outrageous. At one point he attacked scientists who had the temerity to suggest that fallout-caused mutations might be a bad thing: “Deploring the mutations that may be caused by fallout is somewhat like adopting the policies of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who approve of a past revolution but condemn future reforms.”

There was no evidence for this. Teller was consistently (and unreasonably) pessimistic about the ability to detect Soviet nuclear tests underground and in space, a striking contrast to his consistent optimism about fusion weapons and his other nuclear schemes.

The United States accused the Soviet Union of reneging on its word. The USSR, on the other hand, had declared that the moratorium would only be valid so long as Western countries all ceased testing, and France exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1960. From the Russians’ point of view, this ended their commitment.

Interestingly, Teller had warned of a coming “Plowshare gap” in 1962. “The Communists might develop Plowshare before we do,” he wrote. “The time may be near when the Russians will announce that they stand ready to help their friends with gigantic nuclear projects.”

In early 1951, the new Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, tried to nationalize Iranian oil. This was unacceptable to Britain and to the United States. Declared
Time
’s man of the year for 1951, Mossadegh was ousted in 1953 by a coup. Not surprisingly, the coup was engineered by Britain and America in a CIA operation known as TPAJAX. Out of the ashes was born a new company: British Petroleum.

The
New York Times
reporter wryly noted that “There seemed to be some puzzlement, however, over the President’s declaration that, while foreigners systematically lie, he always is a shining champion of the truth.”

Or Kelvin. Or even Fahrenheit, if you prefer. At these sorts of temperatures, it scarcely matters.

Just how much is a subject of debate. Contemporary reports put the cost of Huemul as low as $3.7 million and as high as $70 million. Of course, the international humiliation was priceless.

It is somewhat analogous to how the force of the stem that binds the apples to the branch of an apple tree gets overwhelmed if you shake the branch energetically enough. Pour enough energy into the branch and you will break the bonds, freeing the apples.

Possibly so named because they were raiding the Treasury on behalf of “Friar” Tuck.

This is about one quarter the power produced by a typical commercial power plant. Roughly speaking, a home consumes 1,000 watts on average, so 150 million watts would power 150,000 homes.

Making matters easier still, neutrons are easy to detect. Since they are neutral particles, they aren’t affected by the magnetic fields of the plasma and zoom right out of the reactor vessel.

The next morning, the puzzled cleaning staff, picking up all the bottles from the previous night’s celebration, wondered aloud whether the ZETA machine had begun running on pale ale.

The American press was defensive. The
New York Times
rather lamely attributed the delay to the “backlog of experimental results” from fusion reactors that needed to be declassified.

Of course, the Russians tried to get a share of the credit, too. “British scientists pointed out that the ZETA installation used a method of thermo-isolation employing a magnetic field,” read a dispatch in
Tass,
“which, as we all know, Soviet academicians I. E. Tamm and A. D. Sakharov first proposed in 1950.”

Even the expensive model-C Stellarator, whose price had swollen 50 percent since its proposal, wasn’t much of an improvement over the earlier models. When it first came on line in the early 1960s, it was only better than its predecessors by virtue of its larger physical size, which meant that it took longer for a particle to stray far enough to strike a wall.

Sakharov saw even deeper similarities between himself and Teller, going far beyond the physics and into their motivations for participating in the arms race. “One had only to substitute ‘USSR’ for ‘USA,’ ‘peace and national security’ for ‘defense against the communist menace,’” Sakharov later wrote. This was something of an exaggeration, though. Sakharov did not share Teller’s almost monomaniacal hatred of the enemy. Because of this, their paths would soon dramatically diverge, beginning with the debate over fallout. Sakharov would become a firm opponent of atmospheric nuclear testing and a fearless proponent of a test ban and international cooperation. While Teller was honored by his country and reviled by the Nobel committee for his actions, Sakharov went into internal exile in the Soviet Union and received the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his.