The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  Conversely, even in the wake of the rabid Cold War bomb tests that poisoned the bodies of everyone born between 1951 and 1958, there’s some Janus good news. For decades, doctors thought that the cells of the adult heart were different from all other cells in that they lasted a lifetime and never died and regenerated. Swedish scientist Jonas Frisén then realized that a significant percentage of the world’s population, contaminated by the Cold War’s nuclear tests, had been stamped by carbon-14, and this stamp could reveal the age of heart cells. From his research Frisén determined that in each of us “the heart muscle cells will be a mosaic: some that have been with that person from birth, and there will be new cells that have replaced others that have been lost”—which sounds to me like a resonant fable about the emotional toil of a human heart. The same nuclear-test stamp is starting to be used to save elephants, for it can separate legal African ivory from poached.

  Finally, natural radioactivity is what keeps us warm. Around half of the earth’s inner heat of forty-four terawatts comes from the decay of uranium, thorium, and their ilk, with the rest either having been trapped in the planet’s molten lava core since its birth, or caused by something yet unknown . . . something to be discovered by future geologists. Since it takes millions of years for these elements to half-live their way to nonradiant stability, we’ll keep having a warm planet for a bit—the earth cools at a rate of 100°F every half a billion years. From that subterranean nuclear heat a future engineer might devise a source for electrical power more promising than fusion. Our planet’s all-natural nuclear force, after all, is so massive that it powers the migration of the continents, and the quakes of the crust.

  The Age of Radiance’s beginnings showcased an idea of Marie Curie’s, “Now is the time to understand more, so that we fear less.” Clearly the world has moved past the Cold War’s duck-and-cover apocalyptic terrors, but we still fall into bouts of hysteria when an atomic utility fails, while devoutly maintaining a plethora of myths about nuclear science. The future of radiance must be understanding more to fear less.

  Can we ever learn to believe that atomic bombs are just another kind of weapon, and that nuclear plants are just another form of utility, instead of imbuing each with mythic powers? Can we learn to accept as common sense that the same radiation that kills diseased cancer cells also kills healthy cells, producing the side effects of nausea and baldness? Or that a meltdown every decade or so is the price paid to save three hundred thousand lives every year from infection by petrochemical effluvia? Or that the same process that produces this clean energy can also be turned by a rogue state into weaponry?

  Enrico Fermi late in life said that the “history of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.”

  After seven decades, it is humankind’s responsibility to use the two-faced miracle discovered by Curie, Meitner, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, and Ulam correctly, not turn away from it in fear, superstition, and ignorance. It is time to enter a post–Atomic Age, an era where the fearful products of nuclear science are minimized, and its beneficence maximized.

  It is time to learn to live with blessed curses.

  1. Wilhelm Röntgen’s cathode ray discovery was so mysterious he called it X—the unknown.

  2. Outcasts from the inbred society of Parisian science, Pierre and Marie Curie made Alfred Nobel’s medal significant, while his prize made them famous across the globe.

  3. Marie Curie’s daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric Joliot, created the foundation of nuclear medicine. Marie was the first woman to win the Nobel and Irène, the second.

  4. The greatest physicists in history at the 1927 Solvay Conference. In the first row, Max Planck sits to the left of Curie, with Paul Langevin to the right of Einstein. Niels Bohr is the last man in the second row, while Werner Heisenberg is third to the last in the rear.

  5. Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr on the Appian Way, circa 1931. Bohr did not think a bomb made from uranium was technically feasible, and Fermi started the process that proved him wrong.

  6. One of the greatest figures in science—Lise Meitner, discoverer of fission—is no longer remembered, as she was written out of history by the Nazis for being a Jew, and by the Germans for being a woman.

  7. On December 2, 1942, Fermi and Szilard’s nuclear reactor burned to life in a squash court, which Soviet intelligence translated as “pumpkin patch.” One of the most dangerous experiments in the history of physics, it was flawlessly executed.

  8. Norman Hilberry and Leo Szilard outside the University of Chicago’s abandoned football stadium, where nuclear power was born. Szilard convinced Einstein to write Roosevelt letters warning of Hitler’s nuclear intentions; these ignited the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age.

  9. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence in a 184-inch cyclotron in 1946. They began the era as the closest of friends, but ended it as enemies over arms control and Robert’s affairs.

  10. The Trinity gadget—covered in electrical explosive charges that had to be executed with perfect timing and geometry to compress its inner plutonium core and achieve fission.

  11. At sixteen milliseconds after ignition on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb’s combination of plasma, ionized air, and debris created a “skin” that made it look like a biological creature rising from the deserts of New Mexico.

  12. Edward Teller was the Richard Nixon of physics, testifying against Robert Oppenheimer and leading Ronald Reagan down the path of Star Wars. But many believe his invention of the hydrogen bomb made Alfred Nobel’s dream come true, keeping the Cold War cold and the world at peace.

  13. Los Alamos’s Little Boy uranium bomb was so simple, and its fuel so rare, that its first test detonation would be in the skies over Hiroshima.

  14. Fat Man—the “gadget” as weapon—trundled across Tinian Island on its way to Japan.

  15. Over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: the second and last time an atomic weapon was ever used in war.

  16. On July 1, 1946, Able exploded over Bikini, creating revolutions in both weaponry and swimwear.

  17. Thousands of atomic bombs were test-detonated in Nevada; May 23, 1953, marked the first time a nuclear warhead was shot from a cannon.

  18. This mannequin family lived a typical US sub-urban lifestyle until a nuclear bomb exploded fifty-five hundred feet from their Nevada test home on May 5, 1955.

  19. During the heyday of atomic euphoria in the United States, Gilbert produced a 1950 children’s toy with a Geiger counter, cloud chamber, spinthariscope, electroscope, and five radioactive elements.

  20. The US Office of Civil Defense believed Americans could be trained to survive nuclear attack with shelters dug out of backyards and terrifying exhortations from popular magazines.

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  22. First a comic book designed to educate children on the wondrous benefits of nuclear medicine, power, and bombs, September 1953’s Picture Parade became a chilling symbol of nuclear holocaust in the 1960s. Today it is a comical mouse pad.

  23. The John Amos Power Plant in Poca, West Virginia, August 1973. Our false sense of alarm in looking at this image—which is not even nuclear, but coal powered—reveals both our beliefs in the atomic myth, and the downfall of the Atomic Age.

  24. Both the 1986 Chernobyl explosion (pictured on the left) and 2011 Fukushima meldown (pictured below) were dramatic, with Chernobyl releasing a cloud across Europe equal to four hundred Hiroshimas. But the real danger to human health was in core meltdowns through the floor, contaminating the water supply.

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  HEARTFELT THANKS

  I WORK WITH the greatest guys and gals in to
wn, baby, and don’t you forget it. My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, is so fantastic he gets his own page in this book . . . so if there’s anything I’ve written that you don’t like, it’s entirely his fault. My editor, Colin Harrison, is like a child’s fantasy of a publishing executive: hardworking, caring, thorough, and kind. Who could ask for anything more? Marketing titans Johanna Ramos-Boyer and the Great Kate Lloyd, future Viking-Random-Harper editorial directors Katrina Diaz and Kelsey Smith, Oppenheimer heiress Susan Moldow, the glorious executive titans of Scribner—Nan Graham, Roz Lippel, Brian Belfiglio, Paul O’Halloran, Daniel Cuddy—and the mythic warriors of SKA—Shana Cohen, Ross Harris, Kathryne Wick, and Elizabeth Kellermeyer. My magnificent jacket is by Tal Goretsky and its resonant innards are courtesy of Ellen Sasahara. To all of you, I bow my head in gracious servitude.

  Librarians, archivists, and docents—every time I slip on those paper gloves to wear while browsing, I fall in love with you all over again. I’d like to thank for their remarkable professional courtesies and hard work both in person and in absentia the staffs of the American Museum of Science and Energy, Niels Bohr Library and Emilio Segrè Visual Archives of the American Center for Physics, Bradbury Science Museum, Bureau of Atomic Tourism, Churchill College Archives Centre, Library of Congress, Los Alamos Historical Society and Museum, Mandeville Department of Special Collections at the University of California at San Diego, Harvey Mudd College Oral History Project on the Atomic Age at Claremont, National Archives and Records Administration, National Atomic Museum, National Security Archive at George Washington University, Nuclear Weapons Archive, Society of Nuclear Medicine, Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, US Department of Energy, Titan Missile Museum, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, and Woodrow Wilson Center.

  Isaac Newton thanked giants who supported him with their shoulders, and though I’m no Newton, there are indeed giants, starting with the magisterial Richard Rhodes, the fundamental overviews of Amir Aczel, Jim Baggott, David Lindley, James Mahaffey, Marjorie Malley, John Mueller, Jay Orear, Jon Palfreman, N. J. Slabbert, P. D. Smith, Tom Zoellner, the American Institute of Physics, and the US Department of Energy; Ève Curie and Susan Quinn on Marie Curie; Patricia Rife and Ruth Lewin Sime on Lise Meitner; Laura Fermi and Emilio Segrè on Enrico Fermi; William Lanouette and Bela Silard on Leo Szilard; István Hargittai on the other Martians of Budapest; William Laurence on the Manhattan Project; John Hersey and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation on Hiroshima; Svetlana Alexievich and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation on Chernobyl; and the New York Times reports on Fukushima Daiichi.

  © HELVIO FARIA

  CRAIG NELSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Rocket Men, as well as several previous books, including The First Heroes, Thomas Paine (winner of the Henry Adams Prize), and Let’s Get Lost (short-listed for W. H. Smith’s Book of the Year). His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, National Geographic, New England Review, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest, and a host of other publications; he has been profiled in Variety, Interview, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out. Besides working at a zoo and in Hollywood, and being an Eagle Scout and a Fuller Brush man, he was a vice president and executive editor of Harper & Row, Hyperion, and Random House, where he oversaw the publishing of twenty national bestsellers. He lives in Greenwich Village.

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  ALSO BY CRAIG NELSON

  Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

  Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations

  The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory

  Let’s Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open

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  NOTES

  1. Radiation: What’s in It for Me?

  “What spreads the sea floors and moves”: Preuss.

  “afterheat, the fire that you can’t put out”: Socolow.

  2. The Astonished Owner of a New and Mysterious Power

  “a tall, slender, and loose-limbed man”: Dam.

  “A yellowish-green light spread all over”: Ibid.

  “When at first I made the startling discovery”: Nitske.

  “I have seen my death”: P. D. Smith.

  “Exactly what kind of a force Professor Röntgen”: Dam.

  “A more remarkable picture is one taken”: Moffett.

  “The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays”: Nitske.

  “Civilized man found himself the astonished owner”: P. D. Smith.

  “Röntgenmania”: Nitske.

  “I will never be satisfied with explanations”: P. D. Smith.

  “One wraps a Lumière photographic plate”: Becquerel, January 24, 1896, lecture to the French Academy of Sciences, cited in Slowiczek and Peters.

  “there is an emission of rays without apparent cause”: P. D. Smith.

  “My existence has been that of a prisoner”: Quinn.

  “Stas is very funny”: Ève Curie.

  “If [men] don’t want to marry impecunious young girls”: American Institute of Physics.

  “I have fallen into black melancholy”: Redniss.

  “For the children, the dreadful nature of Czarist occupation”: Ève Curie.

  “Constantly held in suspicion and spied upon”: American Institute of Physics.

  “While his wife was being treated”: Ève Curie.

  “Weak as I am, in order not to let”: Ibid.

  “One of the boarders infected Bronya”: Ibid.

  “For many years we all felt weighing”: American Institute of Physics.

  “We sleep sometimes at night”: Ève Curie.

  “My situation was not exceptional”: Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “Pierre’s intellectual capacities were not those”: Ibid.

  “I did not regret my nights”: Redniss.

  “As I entered the room, Pierre Curie”; “noticed the grave and gentle expression”; “had a touching desire to know”; “It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing”: Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “It is a sorrow to me to have”: Quinn.

  “I have the best husband”: Ève Curie.

  “I think of you who fill my life”: Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “practical and dark, so that”: Ève Curie.

  “My husband and I were so closely”: American Institute of Physics.

  “my dear little child whom I love”: Ève Curie.

  “the subject seemed to us very attractive”: Slowiczek and Peters.

  “In truth, the red glaze emitted”: Homer Laughlin Company, response to Good Morning America’s report on domestic radiation, March 16, 2011.

  “from this point of view, the atom”: Mme. Skłodowska Curie.

  “Neither of us could foresee that”: American Institute of Physics.

  “The life of a great scientist in his laboratory”: Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “We lived in our single preoccupation”: Ève Curie.

  “You can’t imagine what a hole”; “Life is not easy for any”: Ibid.

  “Radium has the power of communicating”: Mme. Skłodowska Curie.

  “Sometimes we returned in the evening”: American Institute of Physics.

  “Viewed through a magnifying glass”: Marie Curie, “Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives,” Annales de Chemie et de Physiques (Paris), 1903.

  “read a dozen square yards of newspaper daily”: Ève Curie.

  “A phenomenon of such extended malignancy
”: Tuchman.

  “not only as mass, but also”: Mahaffey.

  “would possess a weapon by which”: P. D. Smith.

  “anemia, arteriosclerosis, arthritis, asthenia, diabetes”; “Such a light as this should shine”: Redniss.

  “I don’t see the utility of it”: Ève Curie.

  “I have wanted to write to you”: To E. Gouy, January 22, 1904, in Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “It’s pretty hard, this life”: Ève Curie.

  “The Radium Water Worked Fine”: Kean, “Radium.”

  “One girl fainted at the sight”: Harvie.

  “The luminosity was brilliant”: P. D. Smith.

  “neither very well, nor very ill”; “had grown so accustomed to the idea”: Letter to Bronya, August 25, 1903, American Institute of Physics.

  “I have been frequently questioned”: Curie, Pierre Curie.

  “Did I eat a beefsteak?”: Ève Curie.

  “a little heartache”: Quinn.

  “His body passed between the feet”: Ève Curie.