The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Teller disagreed. At Berkeley in the summer of 1942 he had been one of seven physicists who had mulled over the feasibility of man-made fusion, and he never forgot what he later called the thrilling “spirit of spontaneous expression, adventure and surprise.” To his disappointment, the consideration of thermonuclear possibilities was discontinued in 1943. Since the temperatures required were so high that only a fission bomb could produce them, the fission riddle had to be solved first, anyhow, and once that happened, it was thought, they ought to stop. At about this time Teller began speaking of the mythic Super as “my baby.” His colleagues were glad to leave it to him.

  After V-J Day he said he would stay on at Los Alamos if he could start thermonuclear experiments. When the response was negative, he accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies. The following year he returned for a conference on the Super, where he argued that the bigger bomb could be perfected in two years. He was in a minority. The leader of anti-Super physicists was Albert Einstein. Einstein thought it wrong even to consider construction of an H-bomb. Teller couldn’t see why. The Hiroshima bomb, he pointed out, had been built because Nazi scientists were thought to be on the track of it. Now Soviet physicists were believed to be working on a thermonuclear device. Was Stalin any safer or saner than Hitler?

  The turning point for the development of a new U.S. nuclear arsenal was the announcement, on September 23, 1949, that the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb. From this point on, the rise of the fusion bomb owed much to a series of stimuli which served to break down objections to it. First there was the discovery that Leningrad physicists had been investigating the possibility of fusing light nuclei as early as 1932. That convinced Alvarez and Ernest O. Lawrence; they came down hard on Teller’s side, and the three of them became known in the scientific community as “the Supermen.” The Supermen’s chief adversaries were Einstein, Oppenheimer, and President James B. Conant of Harvard, the three biggest names in American science. All other things being equal, the opposition should have won easily, and in the beginning it did. On October 25, 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission met in Washington to weigh arguments in favor of a weapon which, if dropped on a major city, would instantly kill somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the inhabitants. They rejected it. Apart from moral objections, the H-bomb project was thought to be so expensive and complex that it would slow down the mass production of A-bombs in Albuquerque, and even if it proved feasible, the only Russian targets large enough to justify its use were Moscow and Leningrad, both of which could be annihilated with fissionable materials.

  That was a triumph for common sense, but it was only the beginning of the struggle. The Supermen had picked up an ally in Rear Admiral Lewis A. Strauss, USNR, one of AEC’s five directors (the other four were then opposed), and they were gaining other converts in Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, the Joint Chiefs, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, and Paul Nitze, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. The prestige of the United States, the Supermen insisted, owed much to the dominance of American technology; if the Russians built the first fusion bomb, the U.S. would lose face. On January 13, 1950, Omar Bradley decided to approve the Super on the ground that as chairman of the JCS he could endorse no move which might lead to any Russian advantage, however temporary, in the accelerating arms race. Hiss had been convicted that month, setting the stage of McCarthyism, and four days after Bradley made his commitment word of the second stimulus favoring the H-bomb partisans came from London; Fuchs had been charged with treason. It was impossible to say with any certainty how much Fuchs had known, but he had sat in the highest councils of Anglo-American science, and official Washington was in a mood to overreact. Meeting in the Executive Office Building on January 31, a three-man ad hoc special committee—Secretaries Acheson and Johnson, AEC chairman Lilienthal—again pondered the advisability of a thermonuclear crash program. Lilienthal was outvoted. That afternoon President Truman announced that he had directed the AEC to develop “the ‘hydrogen’ or super bomb.”

  The consciences of many scientists were outraged. Speaking for them Oppenheimer said, “In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.” The cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in each issue had carried a clock registering eight minutes to twelve; now it was moved up to three minutes before twelve. Under the leadership of Hans Bethe of Cornell, twelve U.S. senior physicists issued a statement deploring Truman’s decision. They declared: “We believe that no nation has the right to use such a bomb, no matter how righteous its cause. The bomb is no longer a weapon of war but a means of extermination of whole populations. Its use would be a betrayal of all standards of morality and of Christian civilization itself.” Their sincerity was beyond question, but Bethe’s indignation proved evanescent. In less than five months the resolution of the protesters was tested by the outbreak of the Korean War and the challenge of the new project to their scientific curiosity. The first was his undoing; he decided that patriotism required him to drop his objections to the H-bomb and plunge into the search for its early perfection—which he did with such vigor that his contribution to it became a major factor in its success. Curiosity was the greater goal for most, however. In June of 1951, on the first anniversary of North Korea’s rupture of the 38th Parallel, Teller spoke before several distinguished associates at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Gordon Gray, the new chairman of the AEC, made notes of the discussion. They read in part:

  Out of the meeting came something which Edward Teller brought into the meeting with his own head, which was an entirely new way of approaching a thermonuclear weapon…. Calculations were made, Dr. Bethe, Dr. Teller, Dr. Fermi participating the most in this. Oppy [sic] very actively as well…. [E]veryone around that table without exception, and this included Dr. Oppenheimer, was enthusiastic now that you had something foreseeable.

  That same week Gray committed the AEC to the financing of America’s first H-bomb plant. Thirteen years were to pass before the savage parody of Teller in the film Dr. Strangelove. By then the monsters of which he had dreamed at Berkeley would lie in underground silos, available at the touch of a button.

  ***

  The first riddle to be solved was a math problem, or a series of them. Equations for the A-bomb had been complicated enough; the new ones went right off the blackboard. Each step in the completed device required a staggering number of precise calculations to gauge its impact on millions of tiny parts in the bomb, and since the steps succeeded one another in tiny fractions of a second—for all practical purposes they were instantaneous—the human mind could not cope with them. Nor were the calculating machines of 1951 much help. Despite its 500 miles of wire and 3,000,000 electrical connections, the instrument IBM had built for Harvard was nowhere near fast enough. Improved models were coming along, but the best of them, the new ENIAC, could recall only twenty-seven words. They were maddeningly temperamental. Storms put them out of commission. Tubes went out. Circuits went wrong. Repair crews couldn’t find the trouble. Technicians would sit up night after night with a sick computer, spending months on one problem while other specialists in their design teams awaited an answer. Los Alamos added a day to the work week and round-the-clock shifts for computer crews. The Tech Area still marked time until one of the scientists, John von Neumann, decided to tackle the bottleneck. Neumann reflected the ambivalence of the Supermen; he called their goal “the hell weapon” and drove himself mercilessly in the search for it. In the 1930s he had acquired an international reputation in mathematics. His hobby was the construction of robots and mechanical toys, and now his most enduring contribution to the Superhunt became a kind of Supertoy. It could retain and remember 40,000 bits of “software”—computerspeak for data—and complete three months of equations in a day; he called it a “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer.” Only af
ter the device was patented, and its name irretrievably registered with the AEC, did his colleagues realize that the acronym for it was MANIAC.

  With maniacal help, then, the Supermen completed a sixty-five-ton H-bomb in the last year of the Truman Presidency. In that era of the Kansas-Wyoming Line and the Punch Bowl, it is perhaps unsurprising that they christened it “Mike.” Mike was towed to Eniwetok atoll in the Marshalls and housed in a shed on the tiny island of Elugelab with various ion chambers, high-speed cameras, beta ray spectrographs, containers of uranium and heavy hydrogen, and other nuclear paraphernalia. There the ritual worked out seven years earlier on the semidesert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, was repeated. On the night of October 31–November 1, 1952, all ships withdrew forty miles while a team of volunteers made last-minute preparations. After they, too, had left, the countdown began on the boats over public address systems. At dawn the counters reached zero and Mike was immediately transformed into the first man-made star. Dumbfounded sailors saw a ball of fire rise five miles into the sky followed by a gigantic cauliflower-shaped cloud, all mauve and blue and gray-green, that rose twenty-five miles into the stratosphere while beneath it Elugelab burned, broke in two, and sank.

  Divers found a mile-long, 175-foot-deep canyon in the ocean floor. The scientific observers calculated that the bomb’s four-mile-wide fireball would have vaporized all of downtown Spokane or San Francisco, most of St. Louis or Pittsburgh, or everything in Manhattan from Central Park to Washington Square. Navy security was slack; descriptive letters were passed by censors. They were chilling; one witness wrote that “It would take at least ten suns” to equal the light of the explosion. Some of the letters found their way into local newspapers, and presently the whole world knew of the test and its awesome results. Nine months later Georgi Malenkov triumphantly announced in Moscow that “the United States no longer has a monopoly of the hydrogen bomb.” Radioactive traces found in the skies over Asia by B-29 flying laboratories confirmed him. The British had meanwhile exploded their first atomic device, distinguished by a macabre Z-shaped cloud. The nuclear club was growing. The nightmare envisioned by Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Conant had come true, and the imbalance of terror had begun. “General annihilation,” Einstein told reporters, “beckons.”

  Absolute weapons, it now developed, were to be provided with absolute transportation. In the early 1950s automation had not yet eliminated the human factor from bombing. Responsibility for America’s nuclear arsenal was vested in the Strategic Air Command, which employed 270,000 men in a ceaseless B-29 shuffle around the globe, making certain that even if the United States ceased to exist, posthumous vengeance would be wreaked. SAC can hardly be called attractive. Each of its pilots was riding with more explosives than all the Allied air raids in World War II. Its generals put up billboards proclaiming PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION. They called sonic booms “the sound of freedom,” and their annual maneuvers, in which who-hit-what-target was recorded in railroad boxcars stuffed with radar, were “the World Series of Bombing.” Still, the generals and their pilots were people. As such, they were about to become obsolete.

  Their replacements were to come from, of all places, the smoking ruins of the Third Reich’s laboratories. Alone among World War II’s belligerents, the Germans had foreseen the martial possibilities of rocket propulsion. The scientists who had hatched the V-1 and V-2 weapons were now the men of the hour, and SAC strategists were beating paths to their doors. With the thrust of rocket engines, a nuclear explosive could cross the Atlantic or the North Pole in less than a half-hour. SAC had considered rockets before and rejected them as too inaccurate. Their margin of error could not be honed below two-tenths of one percent. At a range of 5,000 miles this meant a deviation of ten miles, too much for an A-bomb. But it wasn’t too much for an H-bomb. The sinking of Elugelab had cast matters in a new and brutal light. In the chilling words of Fortune, “Because of the quantum jump in the destructive power of the thermonuclear warhead, not to mention the still greater area of lethal fallout, delivery within eight or ten miles of the center of the target became militarily acceptable.”

  The admittance of the sinister word “fallout” into the language, and the expansion it implied in a bomb’s circle of death, signaled a change in the whole concept of war. Another significant new term was “overdestroying.” With the refinement of the H-bomb into a “fission-fusion-fusion” or FFF bomb—to the A-bomb trigger, and the fusion of the fuel, it added fusion of the bomb casing—the area of lethal fallout could be increased to 300 square miles.

  It was at this point that people started digging. World War II’s civil defense program had been something of a joke; the oceans had been too wide for Axis bombers to constitute a real menace, and the air-raid wardens in their flat white tin hats had been a little shamefaced about the whole thing. Now their long vigils made some sense. Reactivated, they supervised drills in schools. Elsewhere there was a brisk trade in amulets and quackery. Medicasters advertised lead-foil brassieres, lead girdles, aluminum pajamas, and drawstring bags to be pulled over the head in time of danger. One crank hawked a “U-235 Atomic Shock Cure” until the U.S. Public Health Service found its active ingredients to be bicarbonate of soda, table salt, and water. Another advocated shaving all pets so their hair wouldn’t become radioactive. The SPCA protested, and nothing came of it.

  Still, there was something unreal about all civil defense campaigns. The most determined, with the greatest potential for enterprising entrepreneurs, was the shelter program. In an attempt to encourage excavations, a construction company in Los Angeles staged a ground-breaking ceremony for one of the first family shelters in January 1951. A Mrs. Ruth Colhoun, a mother of three, ceremoniously turned over the first spadeful for television cameramen. She had contracted to pay $1,995 for an underground refuge with brightly painted concrete walls, shamrock green plastic carpeting, storage space concealed by clever sliding doors, and a lightweight Geiger counter. “I do a lot of canning and bottling in the summer,” she cheerfully told the television audience, “and it will make a good storehouse.” As an afterthought she added, “It will make a wonderful place for the children to play in, too.”

  For $3,000 you could have the “Mark I Kidde Kokoon.” That included a three-way portable radio, air blower, wind-up clock, first aid kit, Sterno stove, radiation charts, protective apparel suits, chemical toilet, gasoline-driven generator, pick-and-shovel combination (“for digging out after blast”), and everything else needed for a family of five to spend three to five days underground.

  For most people the sticking point was the problem of what to do on D-day about improvident neighbors who had neglected to build refuges of their own. After retreating to your own dugout you would have no room for them. It would be necessary to lock them out, and you might have to use force. Some kits began including pistols with this in mind, but the public wasn’t prepared to be that realistic. In time the backyard cavities became curiosities. Some were converted to barbecue pits. Others were used to stow garden tools, snow tires, and children’s bikes.

  After a while stories of the horrors which would accompany a nuclear holocaust became familiar to Pentagon strategists, and they moved almost effortlessly from the consideration of megatons to megadeaths—each megadeath being the killing of one million persons, with ten or fifteen possible in a single day. The threat of a thermonuclear holocaust which could envelop the world in flame remained very real for some thoughtful people outside the military establishment, but they felt impotent. Cold-warriors had become deaf to warnings of doomsday, men in public life seemed paralyzed by McCarthyism, and intellectuals who had been in the grip of one international crisis or another since Munich could not summon the wit or strength to break the hold of this one.

  Meanwhile, the passage of time had brought a new generation of Americans to maturity. Surely, sensitive men thought, the air-raid drills in public schools, with their apocalyptic implications, must have aroused the children. Their elders looked hopefully toward them and
suffered a cruel disappointment.

  ***

  In the twilight months of the Truman administration, college teachers gradually became aware of a slow, creeping rot in the country’s intellectual life, which, it turned out, was the younger generation. It is curious to recall that in those years students were chastised for their apathy, but they were, and with justice; never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous—and silent.

  The silent generation was a phenomenon of the 1950s, as characteristic of it as tailfins and white bucks. A vast hush had settled over the universities. Liberalism had become tired and dull. There seemed to be no indignant young men on campuses, no burning causes, and no militancy, except among a reactionary handful on the far right. Protest was confined to a few “beats,” who like their peers were in full retreat from idealism and contention. For the majority, acts of social significance were replaced by the panty raid or something called “stuffing,” in which the largest possible number of undergraduates would squash themselves into some small space—forty of them in a Volkswagen, say, or a dozen in an outdoor phone booth. At Fresno State in California, students lowered a booth into the deep end of the college swimming pool; seven volunteers then held their breaths long enough to cram themselves in it.

  A few zealous sociologists tried to find significance in this—arguing that the stuffers were dramatizing interdependence—but the students themselves had no illusions. It was all meaningless, and they knew it; after the fun was over they could be found waiting in queues for interviews with recruiters from the nation’s largest corporations. They waited so patiently for everything that visitors to campuses began commenting on their docility. Cartoonists depicted students as empty Brooks Brothers suits. Robert Frost said he was troubled by their “lack of decisiveness.” A CCNY alumna returned for a social function and left shocked; the coeds could talk only of their future homes in suburbia, the very sort of trivial chatter which CCNY girls of other years had scorned as being typical of expensive women’s colleges. Debaters from Oxford, touring American campuses, were startled to find free enterprise regarded not merely as an economic system, but as a way of life. “What is there to crusade about?” a bespectacled Princeton junior asked Professor Otto Butz. At Harvard David Riesman wrote of undergraduate complaints: “When I ask such students what they have done about these things, they are surprised at the very thought they could do anything. They think I am joking when I suggest that, if things came to the worst, they could picket!”