Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  To lessen the chances of hostilities reaching the nuclear level, a series of meetings between Eastern and Western negotiators had taken place in Geneva since 1955. Disarmament of conventional forces was a general aim, but most felt that a more practical immediate goal would be to halt the testing of nuclear explosives, mainly to reduce the annual dose of radioactive fallout deposited in the atmosphere and to slow the spread of nuclear capability to new nations. This is why Linus Pauling had been out there in front of the White House.

  Dyson’s liking for things Russian came in handy in 1962 when he was a summer employee of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, with an office in the old State Department Building in Washington, D.C. Here his facility with Russian allowed him to scan Soviet military journals, which in turn allowed him gain fresh insights about Cold War military mentality.

  The ACDA was formed in September 1961 to help guide the American approach to the test ban treaty negotiations. The Geneva meetings were often testy, and matters were made worse just about this time by the resumption of open nuclear testing, including a fresh run of American weapons tests. One of Dyson’s jobs in the summer of 1962 was to tally the tests. In the march of years since Hiroshima in 1945, the number of nuclear bombs exploded in tests had doubled about every two or three years. Even if the bombs since 1945 had not been deliberately dropped on people, the fallout that came along with the explosions was killing people in the form of increased cancers. Dyson’s earlier prick of conscience over the expected fallout from Orion missions was magnified now into something alarming. The tests could not continue to grow at this rate. The day Dyson graphed the explosions was the day he began to change his mind about the treaty.4

  This advance in thinking was aided by his growing understanding of Russian military and political doctrine. For example, Dyson drew up an assessment of the Soviet “defense-by-bluff style.” The USSR defended itself, Dyson argued, by boasting of its lead over the United States in nuclear missiles. The United States countered this by meticulously demonstrating the falsity of the Russian claims. This served only to oblige the Russians to make good on their bluff by building many more missiles. We should have allowed the Soviets their bluff, Dyson reasoned, allowing them to maintain a smaller inventory of missiles, rather than goading them into actually building the missiles they said they had.

  The same American blunder might now be repeated with antimissile technology. The Russians would overstate their capabilities, the Americans would refute the claim, and the Russians would consequently accelerate their actual antimissile deployment. Wouldn’t it be better, Dyson insisted in an ACDA memo, to allow the Soviets to keep up the fiction of high technology rather than to have them quicken toward a truly sophisticated defense?

  Dyson knew that his ACDA memo, like many of his Bomber Command memos in the 1940s calling for abrupt changes in reasoning, had little chance of acceptance in high government circles. After all, how could a responsible American official publicly acquiesce to a proclaimed Russian technical superiority—even if the superiority was a sham? An escalating arms race was the result. Such was the military-political-technological climate of the early 1960s.

  This was a fatalistic time, perhaps not unlike the era in which the young Freeman Dyson came of age—the late 1930s, when it seemed as if war was inevitable, a war that would be more terrible than the previous Great War. Now in the 1960s Dyson would return home some days feeling grim. It was also exciting. To be at the office was to see telegrams arriving from around the world bringing sensitive intelligence from trouble spots. Dyson’s office was at ground level, with windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk. He was concerned that passersby would look in and read the secret communications.5

  The government had to prepare for the worst. Within solemn meetings called to discuss the most dire nuclear war scenarios, certain bureaucrats could dispassionately produce estimates of startling vividness, enumerating buildings knocked down and bodies left in the streets. The most apocalyptic of these nuclear assessors was Herman Kahn, who, working from his consultant’s office at the RAND Corporation, produced the fullest nonclassified accounting of how a hydrogen bomb conflict would unroll. Kahn’s 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, took upon itself the grim job of depicting exactly what would happen if the bombs started to fall for real. Yes, he said, nuclear war between two powers would be an unprecedented catastrophe for at least one but not necessarily both participants, depending on the preparations made previous to hostilities and the manner in which the nuclear salvos were begun and continued.

  Kahn accumulated gruesomely fascinating details about the expected course of nuclear holocaust. For example, one table in the book, labeled “tragic but distinguishable postwar states,” attempted to correlate possible American casualty figures with the expected economic recuperation time: 40 million dead would entail a twenty-year recovery period, while 80 million fatalities would require a fifty-year comeback.6 Under these circumstances, would the living envy the dead? Not particularly, he answered confidently. A majority of the survivors would, after a number of adjustment years, lead nearly normal, happy lives.

  One of Kahn’s appendices, “War Damage Equalization Corporation,” outlined a government-supported insurance scheme for getting things going again once the mushroom clouds had dissipated.7 While certainly not advocating nuclear war or minimizing the blighting effects of even a “small” war, Kahn demonstrated on page after page that such a war could, at least in a numerical sense, be “won.”

  The most famous part of Kahn’s book was his description of a Doomsday Machine. This ultimate deterrent worked as follows: a central computer is buried far underground and is invulnerable to any attack from above. The computer, through a vast system of sensors, monitors activities on the surface. If the sensors should pick up evidence of multiple nuclear detonations on U.S. targets, the computer would automatically and irrevocably trigger a retaliatory nuclear attack in other parts of the world. The nation that possessed such a doomsday device might itself be consumed in the process, but at least there would be no surviving victor.8 Of course the point of having such a menacing mechanism is that it would scare an adversary into not launching an attack in the first place.

  Offered by Kahn as a hypothetical über-weapon and bargaining chip, the Doomsday Machine turned up in Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove where, with tragicomic effect, it destroyed the world. Kubrick studied On Thermonuclear War while preparing his film, and some have argued that Kahn was a model for the character of Dr. Strangelove.

  Dr. Strangelove ends amid farcical destruction, courtesy of the doomsday device, but much of the rest of the movie is devoted to a plausible story about the accidental launch of a nuclear war. Some flamboyant actorly performances notwithstanding, the drama is mostly not a farce. Sequences showing the arming of bombs, the scrambling of jet aircraft, the revealing of secret flight paths, and the breaking down of the fail-safe chain of command structure all give the viewer the impression that the cataclysmic end of world civilization could happen exactly like this.

  Surely some kind of controlling judgment was needed here. To help prevent this kind of nightmare, Soviet and Western scientists, including Dyson, met in England in the fall of 1962. The point of this Pugwash conference (so named from the first such meeting in 1957, in Pugwash, Nova Scotia) was to diffuse mistrust between the two sides and to propose peaceful alternatives. The first of the two meetings was held at Cambridge University. Although there was much vigorous debate, the discussion revealed that the gulf between East and West was bridgeable. Here, perhaps helped along by sherry and by the sheltered environment of English gardens and being away from official government posturing, the scientists found a zone of hopefulness.

  Dyson’s impression: “I lived for four days mentally in a disarmed world, with all its difficulties, and the longer I was there the better I liked it.”9

  Nevertheless, only weeks after this Pugwash meeting, a Strangelove-like sequence began unfolding in the real
world. Aerial photographs of Cuba revealed a dreadful reality, what looked like Russian nuclear missile sites. Quickly more disturbing photos arrived: the missiles themselves were visible. The United States government demanded publicly that the missiles be removed. The Soviet government, after first denying that the missiles were there at all, refused.

  The nuclear-armed chess game continued. The United States threatened an air strike against the sites. The USSR threatened a missile strike against the U.S. The U.S. planned a naval blockade against additional Russian vessels delivering in new missiles. The USSR sent new missiles anyway. At the United Nations the United States displayed photographic evidence of the offending missiles. Then the USSR shot down an American surveillance plane flying over Cuba. Every day, almost by the hour, tension grew. Some American generals were for attacking Cuba right then, regardless of larger consequences. The potential toll of a nuclear war—the hundreds of millions of fatalities and the flattened cities depicted in Kahn’s appendices—would dwarf all past wars and the worst of contemporary terrorist strikes.

  The danger escalated. Russian ships approached, while the American naval ships were poised to intercept them. Salvos of messages—not yet missiles—flew secretly back and forth. Conflicting Russian cables offered to withdraw the missile sites in exchange for a promise that there would be no U.S. attack on Cuba. A second Russian gambit was to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba on the American doorstep, in return for a withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey on the Soviet doorstep. Meanwhile the Russian and American ships were closing upon each other at sea. American planes were prepared for an imminent action. The pages of On Thermonuclear War seemed to be coming alive.

  ON THE BEACH

  No one knows how the exchange of nuclear explosions began. The only apparent survivors of the holocaust were a few pockets of civilization in Australia and a lone U.S. submarine emerging from the protective depths of the Pacific Ocean. Cautiously creeping into San Francisco Bay, officers in the sub squint through a periscope at Fisherman’s Wharf and see … nothing. The buildings are intact but the streets are empty. The sub’s instruments detect dangerously high radiation levels. The nuclear blasts, wherever they were, apparently didn’t kill through their blast effects but only through the aggregate burden of fallout. But where did all the people go?

  Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove shows how the catastrophe might have begun. Another movie, Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, shows how it might end. In the story, based on the novel by Nevil Shute, the Australians, spared temporarily by their remoteness, are eventually engulfed by the same radioactive cloud that has snuffed out life everywhere else on the planet. In a real war, Dyson pointed out, such a fatal cloud could not have persisted. The intense radioactivity in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion washes out of the sky relatively quickly. The science was wrong, but Dyson felt the movie had been truthful nevertheless, especially in depicting the blunt facts of a nuclear war.10 The dropping of thermonuclear weapons would create havoc.

  The scenario depicted in On the Beach did not actually take place. The Americans did not launch their planes, and the Russians did not try to run the naval blockade. Shortly after the events of October 1962, Russian missiles were withdrawn from Cuba and the following year American missiles from Turkey. The two sides had drawn back from their state of hair-trigger alert. “The greatest crisis the world has known,” as American secretary of state Dean Rusk called the affair, was over.11

  To say the least, an event like the Cuban Missile Crisis made people think. One way Dyson responded to this actual event was to become even more engaged in the public scientific discussion over nuclear issues. “We are human beings first and scientists second. Knowledge implies responsibility,” Dyson said.12

  He had first been involved with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in the 1940s, not long after it was formed by veterans of the Manhattan Project. Later he was on the FAS council. They were glad to have him, since his early opposition to the test ban treaty helped to counteract the FAS’s perceived liberal tilt.13 Moreover, as a consultant for the Livermore and Los Alamos weapons labs, Dyson had excellent nuclear credentials.14 Then, during the period of greatest peril—parts of 1962 and 1963—Dyson was FAS chairman.

  He was also a contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, another offspring of the nuclear age. This is the publication whose cover featured a clock face. From month to month, year to year, the hands of the clock were positioned closer or further from midnight depending on the degree of world danger, as judged by the editors. The hands were, at this time, very close to the zero hour.

  The March 1962 issue carried an article by Dyson about bomb shelters. The subject of civil defense was a matter of grave concern, especially the concerted construction of temporary habitats for protecting the citizenry from the blast and fallout residues of detonations. Some commentators felt that nothing less than an extensive shelter program was vital.

  Dyson, the contrarian, suggested that shelters could become too effective. He argued that a nation too self-assured of its survivability against nuclear attack might tend to be reckless in its international dealings, or at least less cautious than it ought to be. A nation that felt it could prevail in a nuclear exchange, in the way Herman Kahn had suggested, and that felt emboldened by the comparative safety of its underground redoubts, might be a nation preparing to trespass the ultimate boundary. It might be a nation contemplating thermonuclear war. Consequently there could be, in addition to a race to build more bombs or more missiles, a spiraling race to build deeper and more bombproof shelters.

  Dyson, always looking for commonplace illustrations, told the story of his living in Münster, Germany, in the summer of 1947. There the inhabitants, including his onetime admirer Hilde Jacob, lived immersed in the rubble created, as Dyson likes to admit, by his own Bomber Command. That the residents of Münster, the hardy survivors, could emerge from their own shelters, clear a path, and put on rudimentary opera performances amid the debris, was a fine testimony to human tenacity and resourcefulness. But what if, Dyson asked, this same tenacity allowed them to believe that they could survive a nuclear equivalent of Bomber Command?15

  Science magazine, impressed with Dyson’s assessment, devoted an editorial to his quantification of the radioactive burden shelters must contend with. The partially tongue-in-cheek essay looked at Dyson’s units of fission energy needed to produce various outcomes. A “Beach” (the term coming from On the Beach) was the explosive yield that would render a global fallout dose fatal to half the world’s population. A “Kahn” (the term coming from the name of the author of On Thermonuclear War) was the explosive yield, said Science, needed to thoroughly kill the population of the target nation, presumably the United States attacking the USSR or vice versa. A third unit was the “Stockpile,” the effective explosive yield that would actually be available for use in bombs in the coming decade.

  A Kahn was smaller than a Beach; without effective shelters, the U.S. or USSR, aiming only at each other, just might kill off the other and spare the rest of the human race. But a Stockpile was bigger than a Beach. With effective shelters, the U.S. or USSR would be harder to defeat, and the attacker would have to pound harder, possibly creating thereby the human extinction scenario dramatized in On the Beach.

  Having summarized Dyson’s doomsday deliberations, Science magazine went on to define a fourth term, the “Dyson,” as the “measure of the speculation you must introduce into an argument in order to go from the premise to the conclusion.” The editorial concluded that Dyson’s own argument ranked high on the Dyson scale, and that some kind of shelter-building preparation, if not exactly of the provocatively deep construction that Dyson feared, would be in order.16

  Thus the Dyson name, which already had been attached to a particle physics protocol (Feynman-Dyson diagrams), to a description of how ferromagnets behave (the Dyson-Schmidt equation), and to a hypothetical solar energy collector (Dyson spheres), was now associated with the
weighing of extremely unlikely but dire nuclear contingencies.

  RADIOACTIVE MILK

  Ideological differences and intense mistrust had so far kept East and West from concluding a test ban treaty. The negotiations had particularly foundered on the issue of on-site inspections. The Americans, who wanted the inspections, feared Soviet cheating. The Soviets, who didn’t want inspections, feared American spying. Years of bickering in Geneva had accomplished little.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis changed things. Both Chairman Nikita Khrushchev and President John Kennedy indicated that the near-disaster had underscored the need for a treaty. On June 10, 1963, Kennedy gave a speech making prominent reference to the loss of 20 million Russians during World War II and how such a calamity must be avoided. He announced that the United States was suspending further bomb tests in the interest of getting the treaty process rolling again.17

  The Russians responded positively, and new talks were scheduled. This time the stepped-up effort would take place not in neutral Geneva but in the capital of the USSR. Instead of consuming further years of argument, the settlement would wrap up in a mere dozen days in July. Both sides agreed that a complete ban on nuclear tests was impractical. A limited ban on tests in space, the atmosphere, and the sea was the new goal.

  The last major impediment to a treaty, ironically enough, concerned limitations on bomb explosions for peaceful uses—things like digging canals and propelling rockets toward Saturn. The Russians were against exempting tests for this kind of activity. The Americans, particularly senators enamored with peaceful nuclear projects (which, within the Atomic Energy Commission, went under the name of Project Plowshare), were ardently in favor. When Averell Harriman, the chief U.S. negotiator in Moscow, had extracted as many concessions as he could from the Soviets, and still found the them adamant against peaceful tests, he cabled the president to see if Plowshare could be sacrificed in the interest of obtaining a treaty.