The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  After writing a joint report with Ulam on March 9, 1951, Teller went to Washington to present their new concept to the AEC in June. The man who had so significantly opposed Teller and his Super over the previous six years, J. Robert Oppenheimer, now said that this new direction had to be fully supported as the science was so “sweet.” Los Alamos would develop a bomb based on the Teller-Ulam design, and it would be tested on the Elugelab atoll in Eniwetok, a Marshall island three thousand miles west of Hawaii, on November 1, 1952. Understanding the change in thinking of atomic bureaucrats during this period can be seen with the simple evidence that, instead of the lyrical Trinity, this first significant thermonuclear test would be called Mike.

  Now, just as Edward Teller after decades of struggle and failure was to finally achieve the great triumph of his life’s work, the cancerous element in his nature erupted. Françoise Ulam: “From then on, Teller pushed Stan aside and refused anything to do with him any longer. He never met or talked with Stan meaningfully again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded than he knew by this unfriendly reception, although I never heard him express ill feelings toward Teller. He rather pitied him instead.” Herb York: “What Ulam did was not a thermonuclear device. It was a general idea. What Teller did was convert that into something which was a sketch of a Super that would work. Teller sketched out a Super bomb. Ulam simply presented a fairly general idea in dealing with that topic. I think Teller has slighted Ulam, but I think also Teller does deserve 51 percent of the credit.”

  Hans Bethe: “Before the end of the summer of 1951, the Los Alamos Laboratory was putting full force behind attempts to realize the new concept. However, the continued friction of 1950 and early 1951 had strained a number of personal relations between Teller and others at Los Alamos. . . . There was further disagreement between Teller and [director] Bradbury on personalities, in particular on the person who was to direct the actual development of hardware. Bradbury had great experience in administrative matters like these. Teller had no experience and had in the past shown no talent for administration. He had given countless examples of not completing the work he had started; he was inclined to inject constantly new modifications into an already going program, which becomes intolerable in an engineering development beyond a certain stage; and he had shown poor technical judgment. Everybody recognizes that Teller more than anyone else contributed ideas at every stage of the H-bomb program, and this fact should never be obscured. However: . . . Nine out of ten of Teller’s ideas are useless. He needs men with more judgment, even if they be less gifted, to select the tenth idea which often is a stroke of genius.” Then “Teller accused the leadership of Los Alamos of not working wholeheartedly on the hydrogen bomb, on the Mike test,” Dick Garwin said, “and he walked out.”

  With the full backing of Ernest Lawrence, Teller insisted that, as fusion development was haphazard and erratic on the mesa, there needed to be a new lab competing with Los Alamos to create his revolutionary weapons. Los Alamos director Norris Bradbury: “Lawrence believed Edward. Simple as that. Why not? Edward could sell refrigerators to Eskimos.” Just as Szilard was able to use his Los Alamos credentials to talk Congress out of giving nuclear oversight to the Pentagon, Lawrence and Teller campaigned across Washington to build another weapons lab. At meetings with the Department of Defense, the physicists insisted that the Russians, through their just-revealed American spy nest of Fuchs, Gold, Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs, would soon achieve atomic dominance if things did not change immediately. They were so convincing that the air force warned the AEC that if the agency didn’t accede to Teller and Lawrence’s plan, the USAF would build its own weapons lab, regardless of the civilian mandate.

  After being expelled from the paradises of prewar Budapest and Weimar Berlin, the once-shy foreign émigrés with then-comical-to-American-ears glottal accents were now éminences grises, invited into the private chambers of Washington to consult with the most powerful men on earth. Attending Pentagon advisory boards and AEC committees, or making appearances before Congress and writing memos to the White House, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann had all achieved a remarkable version of the American dream. Men long famous for being solitary eccentrics now learned to mount political campaigns, and the intersection of science, business, and government pioneered by Marie Curie reached a new pinnacle under the rise of Eisenhower’s noted military-industrial complex and Lawrence’s big science.

  A few years before, the AEC had awarded Lawrence $7 million to turn a defunct naval air station into a neutron factory—its swimming pool would be a coolant tank—to generate fuel for the Super. On September 2, 1952, the civilian agency then gave in to the Pentagon’s threats, and Lawrence’s Livermore was transformed into a second federal nuclear weapons lab. Instead of Edward Teller as its director, though, Lawrence appointed Herbert York, and by now it was too late for Teller to take Mike with him to Livermore; the Teller-Ulam design was instead birthed at Los Alamos. Hans Bethe: “Once Teller left Los Alamos, even though they were working on ‘his’ weapon, he found all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t work.” Then, the first of Livermore’s designs were tested. They were spectacular failures. Ed Teller: “Our first computer at the Livermore site had a glass case standing on top of it, complete with a small hammer and the instructions In case of emergency, break glass. Inside the case was an abacus.”

  Vannevar Bush, the brilliant World War II OSRD chief, was now working on arms control, and he tried to get Mike postponed, as he was developing a breakthrough treaty with Moscow: “I felt strongly that that test ended the possibility of the only type of agreement that I thought was possible with Russia at that time, namely, an agreement to make no more tests. For that kind of an agreement would have been self-policing in the sense that if it was violated, the violation would be immediately known. . . . I think history will show that was a turning point . . . [and] that those who pushed that thing through to a conclusion without making that attempt have a great deal to answer for.” Mike had another party interested in its delay, for when he learned it was set for three days before the November presidential election pitting Adlai Stevenson against Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman sent word to the AEC “that the President would not change the date, but he would certainly be pleased if technical reasons cause a postponement.”

  All of these concerns were completely ignored as Mike became a physical manifestation of Cold War hysteria. By October 1952, over nine thousand enlisted men and two thousand civilians were in tents or on ships in the Eniwetok vicinity, supported by eighty aircraft and a full navy task force of ships. Five hundred scientific bases were on thirty islands; the control room was on Estes atoll, while the core scientists and technicians were on Parry. Troops bullied Elugelab’s coral rock and sand into a platform to improve the explosion’s visibility, then built atop that a six-story-high shot cab. Seven mirrors reflected the explosion to streak cameras housed in a bunker, one of which could attain a speed of 3.5 million frames per second. A nine-thousand-foot plywood tunnel with a shell of concrete filled with helium balloons would carry neutrons and gamma rays to instruments on the island of Bogon, almost two miles away. C-54 photography planes, F-84 sniffer jets, and B-47 and B-36 technical planes would orbit between ten thousand and forty thousand feet overhead. Serviceman Michael Harris: “We called the place the Rock. Like the federal prisoners did on Alcatraz. The local bar was called the Snakepit in honor of Olivia de Havilland’s insane asylum.”

  It was popularly known as the hydrogen bomb . . . but hydrogen was the least of it. On November 1, 1952, at 7:15 a.m., ninety-two detonators triggered Mike’s outer high-explosive shell, which created a shock wave compressing the uranium layer onto its plutonium ball, collapsing the centerpiece—the urchin initiator, which had beryllium and polonium to infest the supercritical mass of surrounding uranium and plutonium—creating a fission fire hotter than the sun. This in turn began to heat and compress a tank of liquid deuterium (which until then had been kept motile at -417°F) into a gas of tr
itium, which additionally activated a fission spark-plug, the plug’s X-rays irradiating the compressed deuterium, mingling with the radiation coming from the outside shells, pushing the atoms of the heavy water over the electrostatic barrier and triggering thermonuclear fusion—the power of starlight; the energy of our sun—with a neutron density 10 million times that of a supernova.

  With the Teller-Ulam design, Los Alamos achieved fission-fusion-fission and created a weapon of unimaginable force. Even those who’d attended a prior atomic blast were flabbergasted by the outcome in the Pacific—10.4 megatons, eight times the power of Hiroshima, a three-mile-diameter fireball—Hiroshima’s was one-tenth of a mile—surrounded by a hundred-mile-wide and twenty-five-mile-high mushroom cloud. One sailor wrote home, “You would swear that the whole world was on fire.” Elugelab was vaporized into a crater, its 80 million tons of obliterated cremains rising into the sky as a cloud of radioactive fallout. After this cloud began to disperse, rains brought it down as a radioactive mud, and within this mud was a new element, number 100. It would be named after the Italian navigator who had overseen the first fission reactor and given Edward Teller the idea for the thermonuclear bomb in the first place: fermium.

  Though Mike was the great dream Teller had spent eleven years imagining, designing, and fighting over, he was so insistent that Los Alamos would fail that he refused to attend the test. Instead, after having estimated the time Mike’s seismic wave would take to travel across the Pacific, “I went down into the basement of the University of California geology building in Berkeley, to a seismograph that had a little light-point marking on photographic film. A tremor of that point would show when the shock wave, generated thousands of miles away on Eniwetok Island, reached Berkeley. . . . At exactly the scheduled time I saw the light point move. . . . There was the signal, just as predicted. . . . I at once wired to a friend . . . ‘It’s a boy!’ ”

  One side effect of Mike was to make Fermi’s and Bohr’s apprehensions about Szilard’s wartime strategy of research secrecy come true. Since the AEC and the Pentagon keep their fusion science classified, to this day much of the results of their thermonuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific remain top secret and unavailable to scientists not working on classified research for the federal government. Secrecy meant that for decades, there was little effort to achieve anything with this revolutionary science except make more, and bigger, and ever-less-useful bombs. Photographs from these tests are about as awe inspiring as anything produced by the hand of man—such power, such strength, such magnificence, emanating from the tiniest of sources . . . it is remarkable to contemplate. Just as remarkable is to think of what all that money, manpower, and scientific endeavor could have done if it had been directed to something worthwhile, instead of hundreds and hundreds of ever more absurd weapons and atmospheric tests that poisoned the whole of the continental United States. Besides the mythic imaginings of thermonuclear annihilation in a cataclysmic mushroom cloud big enough for God to see, there is, in the end, a dispiriting tragedy in this spectacle.

  Mike’s success did exactly what every arms-race breakthrough did—thrilled those American who thought twenty thousand atomic bombs were better than two thousand, while spurring the Russians to bake Sakharov’s sloika. On August 8, 1953, after the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev’s coup removed Lavrenti Beria from power, and to make sure its great foe would not try to take advantage of the turmoil, the Kremlin announced, “The United States is said to have a monopoly on the hydrogen bomb. Apparently it would be of comfort to them if that were the truth. But it is not. The government considers it necessary to announce that the United States does not hold a monopoly in the production of the hydrogen bomb.” Like Molotov with fission, this was a demi-bluff. Layer Cake hadn’t yet been proven a success; its first test would be four days after this proclamation. Andrei Sakharov: “Of course, we worried about the success of the test, but for me, anxiety about potential casualties was paramount. Catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I was struck by the change—I looked old and gray.”

  Andrei’s sloika was tasty. Though having a fraction of Mike’s power, unlike Los Alamos’s immense gadget with its tank of liquid deuterium, this was a real weapon that could be ferried in the bay of a Soviet bomber and dropped on American cities. The US Air Force sniffed it, called it Joe 4, and brought back such detailed information on its effluvia that Hans Bethe could tell it was a design similar to Teller’s two-year-old Alarm Clock—named for being the bomb that would wake up the world. Sakharov was given the Stalin Prize, the title Hero of Socialist Labor, promoted to chief of theory at Arzamas-16, and went back to working like two dogs in the yard.

  Physicist German Goncharov: “An absolutely insane task was set for us not to lag behind the United States by one iota. We had to have everything the Americans had. There couldn’t be the slightest gap. And so as soon as new information arrived about the work in this or that direction, we absolutely had to do the same thing.” On March 1, 1955, Tesla exploded with seven kilotons; on March 7, Turk did forty kilotons; and Russian scientists began voicing the same regrets as had so many from Los Alamos. Sakharov: “When you see the burned birds who are withering on the scorched steppe, when you see how the shock wave blows away buildings like houses of cards, when you feel the reek of splintered bricks, when you sense melted glass, you immediately think of times of war. . . . All of this triggers an irrational yet very strong emotional impact. How not to start thinking of one’s responsibility at this point?” Physicist Nikolay Larionov: “Even if you strike first, you will perish together with the defeated side. That is the paradox of our time.”

  Just as with First Lightning, the Soviet’s fusion tests terrified a coterie of American policymakers. A committee headed by General James Doolittle suggested offering the Kremlin two years to come to an agreement, and to launch a nuclear first strike if it refused, while a Joint Chiefs’ study group thought the United States should “deliberately precipitate war with the USSR in the near future . . . before the USSR could achieve a large enough thermonuclear capability to be a real menace to [the] Continental US.” Eisenhower passed on both attempts to jump-start global holocaust. Instead, the president now wanted to offer the Russians Vannevar Bush’s original test-ban agreement. Eisenhower’s AEC director, Lewis Strauss, talked him out of it.

  The Doolittle Report paved the way for a new era in American foreign policy as it proposed, “We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. . . . [American citizens need to] be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.” Even Eisenhower had to agree: “I have come to the conclusion that some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now flounders. Truth, honor, justice, consideration for others, liberty for all—the problem is how to preserve them . . . when we are opposed by people who scorn . . . these values. I believe that we can do it, but we must not confuse these values with mere procedures, even though these last may have at one time held almost the status of moral concepts.”

  The ratcheting levels of American terror in the face of the Soviets’ presumably malevolent intentions can readily be seen in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address, as Ike was one of the least fearmongering of Cold War leaders: “What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness. Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, the whole world of ideas—all are harnessed to this same chariot of expansion. The Soviets are, in short, waging total cold war.” And Washington’s paranoia escalated all over again when Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly threatened to annihilate the West. In one incident during Senator Hubert Humphrey’s visit to the Kremlin, Khrushchev asked where the American politician was from, then used a blue pencil to mark Minneapolis, explaining, “That’s
so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.” In August of 1957 the Soviet Union launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile—ICBM—and then, on October 4, Sputnik, the first man-made earth satellite.

  But it was all a magnificent bluff. The premier’s rocket-scientist son, Sergei Khrushchev, later admitted, “We threatened with missiles we didn’t have.” Their long-range bombers could attack the United States, but only as one-way suicide missions, and their missiles couldn’t accurately strike their targets. By the end of 1959, the Soviets had a total of six long-range-missile sites, and each missile needed twenty hours to prepare for launch, meaning that the total number of Soviet missiles available to attack the United States before retaliation was . . . six.

  In the traditional version of Los Alamos’s black postscript—the history of Robert Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings—the founder of the mesa is portrayed as a martyr both to science and to arms control, necessarily atoning for the sin of having created our nuclear plague. Foreign-policy adviser George Kennan summed up this position: “On no one did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. . . . In the dark days of the early fifties . . . I asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’ ”