Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  The Bible tells us that the children of Israel wandered forty years through the desert. Our desert has been the fear of nuclear war. But I don’t see any sign of the Promised Land.

  U.S. policy has tried to rely on superior technology. Whenever there was a chance to make nuclear weapons more devastating, we took it. We introduced the H-bomb and the transcontinental bomber, we escalated the number of nuclear weapons and later that of nuclear missiles, and (worst of all) we introduced MIRV [multiple-warhead missiles]. In every case, the Soviets followed suit, three to five years later, and we were less secure than before….

  Nuclear explosives have shattered the meaning of the age-old words “weapon,” “war,” and “defense.” A weapon is intended to achieve some definite military or political objective, but any use of nuclear explosives carries the risk of virtually unlimited destruction. Hence plans that assume that nuclear devices can be used to wage war are irrational. Nuclear “weapons” have only one purpose—that of deterring war….

  The first forty years of the nuclear age should have taught us that we have only two choices: mutual security or mutual insecurity. During the past forty years we have blundered, and in effect chose mutual insecurity. In the next forty years we must strive for mutual security. If we do we will steadily decrease the risk of nuclear war, and restore confidence that we are masters of our fate. 86

  Ten years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima in August 1995, Bethe returned to Los Alamos and implored scientists there to withhold their talents from creating new weapons of mass destruction. “Enough is enough,” he said in a weak but insistent voice, speaking from notes written in a careful but shaky hand. “We shouldn’t design any more.” 87 He issued this statement:

  As director of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos, I participated at the most senior level in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic weapons.

  Now, at the age of 88, I am one of the few remaining such senior persons alive. Looking back at the half-century since that time, I feel the most intense relief that these weapons have not been used since World War II, mixed with the horror that tens of thousands of such weapons have been built since that time—one hundred times more than any of us at Los Alamos could ever have imagined.

  Today we are rightly in an era of disarmament and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. But in some countries nuclear development still continues. Whether and when the various nations of the world can agree to stop this is uncertain. But individual scientists can still influence this process by withholding their skills.

  Accordingly, I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons—and for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.

  Hans Bethe 88

  These confessions were part of a gradual but powerful disaffection with the profession of nuclear weaponeering he had done so much to create. In his last years, Bethe grew acutely sensitive to the moral implications of the bomb. “I still believe that we contributed to the security of the United States” in first developing the atomic bomb, he said. “However, while working on weapons I wonder whether our security was really served by their perfection.” He paused. “It seemed quite logical,” he said in defense of the choices he had made, then added almost wistfully: “But sometimes I wish I were more consistent an idealist.” 89 His poignant remark captured the dilemma that each of the atomic scientists confronted, and resolved, with varying degrees of success and guilt. Bethe took to quoting the famous dictum: “Sin must needs come into the world, but woe to him who brings it about.” “Perhaps that applies to us,” he confessed. 90

  The final founding brother of the atomic age died quietly at his home in Ithaca, New York, at ninety-eight, on the night of March 6, 2005. Bethe’s death brought the story of Pandora’s Keepers to a close. The legacy of Pandora’s Keepers remains urgent and undiminished by the passage of time.

  EPILOGUE

  The Atomic Scientists

  and Today

  TODAY THE vast azure sky of New Mexico meets the bleached sand of its high desert just as it did early on the morning of July 16, 1945, but now flowers and scrub grow, camera crews shoot footage, and tourists inspect the parched ground of Trinity Site. All that remains of the giant steel tower where the first atomic bomb exploded 100 feet above ground are melted stubs at its base. Nearby is a short obelisk of black lava rock commemorating the event and a stretch of sand scorched so severely that July morning in 1945 that it fused into jade-colored glass called trinitite. The area is closed to the public, but twice a year—on the first Saturday of April and October—the U.S. government opens the site, part of the normally closed White Sands Missile Range, so that people can make a pilgrimage to the place where the nuclear age began. The number of visitors, a trickle at first, has grown steadily over the years. 1

  B Reactor, which opened in 1944, rises above the desolate semidesert plain at Hanford, in southeastern Washington, a windowless, dilapidated, and ominous landmark of the nuclear age. The brass-knobbed control room containing the reactor’s looming panel of antique nozzles and tubes looks as if Enrico Fermi had just gotten up from his chair. Here, where the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was bred in gigantic piles, underground tanks containing the country’s greatest concentration of radioactive wastes have been leaking for decades. Because of the contamination, the byproduct of fifty years of nuclear weapons production, the government allows only occasional visitors, and nobody younger than eighteen. Yet this hazardous structure, a crucible of the Manhattan Project, may become a national landmark, too. The U.S. Department of Energy, at the behest of Congress, is studying the feasibility of decontaminating and preserving B Reactor, and perhaps one day opening it to the public. They are also considering the Ice House on Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, where components for the first atomic bomb were stored, and a fragment of the sprawling, forty-four-acre K-25 building in Oak Ridge where U-235 was separated for the Hiroshima bomb. Nations traditionally make monuments of their most important places—even those that evoke unpleasant and painful memories—and the birthplaces of the atomic bomb are no exception. “When you’re standing in front of the reactor,” said a visitor to Hanford in the spring of 2001, “you realize this is what humans can do if pushed to the limit. It’s a great place to contemplate war.” 2

  When Otto Hahn chanced upon fission in December 1938, he had no idea that his discovery would mark the first step on the road to an atomic bomb. When news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached Hahn in August 1945, he was so shocked and aggrieved at how his discovery had been used that his friends feared he might commit suicide. Hahn’s discovery reminds us that science, like all human endeavors, is unpredictable—full of unanticipated and unwanted consequences. Individuals, no matter how intelligent and well meaning, rarely possess enough foresight to anticipate the effect of their actions.

  So it was with the atomic scientists. The bomb changed them, and the world, in ways they could not have foreseen or even imagined. Before the war physicists almost never occupied themselves with problems and questions that could in any way be called practical. During the war they gave up pure science and built a terrible weapon of mass destruction. In some ways, it is not hard to understand their decision. Nazism had to be fought, and since the Nazis might be making atomic bombs, then the Manhattan Project physicists had to make them, too; they had no choice. They felt a patriotic desire to serve their cause and country in an hour of danger, and in this endeavor they did not want to lose a single moment.

  They were also quite unaccustomed, by nature and by nurture, to pondering any nonscientific implications of their work. No ethical framework or sensibility existed for them because of the abstract nature of prewar physics. It was an aesthetic pursuit wholly unrelated to questions of politics and morality. They were discoverers, not inventors. The physical universe they worked in had its own set of rules and was so
absolutely pure that it isolated them—or so they thought—from the world of man. Compelled by the exigencies of war and their received outlook on science, they did not stop to consider the long-term effects of what they were doing until after the bomb had been made.

  Of course, the atomic bomb was an untried weapon; they did not make the decision to use it; they did not pilot the plane that dropped it. Their sense of personal responsibility was diluted by distance, by evasion, by denial, and by the way in which creation of the weapon was shared by so many people. All of these things diminished their moral sensitivity and made them feel removed from responsibility. The few among them who did confront these unsettling issues either argued against using the bomb on Japan or felt that war itself forced a stark choice among lesser evils and that using the bomb to end it was the moral price that had to be paid. It brought death to innocent civilians, but it also brought surrender and peace.

  Once this first, albeit uneasy, moral compromise had been made, the atomic scientists found it less difficult and disquieting to make subsequent compromises. The mysteries of fission and then fusion had a seductive appeal to those who had devoted their lives to physics and whose curiosity was insatiable. To understand and exploit nature at its most fundamental and powerful level was an intoxicating exercise of human intelligence and imagination that compelled curious minds to make ever more destructive weapons.

  The feeling of power was difficult to resist. Nuclear weapons became all important to the state, and so therefore did the exceptional minds that created them. This link powerfully reinforced and magnified the egos and ambitions of physicists who saw the development of atomic and then thermonuclear weapons as the grandest arenas for the exercise of their vast talents. The secrecy and funding that surrounded these exercises intensified scientific rivalries and lent a false prestige to the new weapons. Physicists understood, even if they did not often acknowledge, that a fundamental change had occurred. The prewar functions of a physicist—teaching and basic research—had given way to an entirely different postwar function—huge and costly weaponeering driven by an almost mindless momentum.

  The atomic scientists rationalized all of this by reasoning that the bomb’s destructive power was so vast that it would become obvious to political leaders throughout the world that war would no longer be a rational means for achieving political goals, no matter what those goals were. They desperately wanted to believe that the death and destruction of World War II—culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—would never be repeated, and that the bomb they had created would be the ironic but irrefutable instrument for not repeating them. They had mastered the atom and they had made all-out war obsolete.

  In the ensuing years, as the atomic scientists became wiser, more mature, and more sophisticated, they gradually turned away from such simple notions. They came to realize that claims similar to theirs had been made before. Each time a weapon of great destructiveness was introduced, its inventors soothed their consciences with the thought that this finally made war impossible. When the machine gun was invented, its creators felt they had made war so horrible as to be obsolete. This claim also accompanied the introduction of dynamite, poison gas, and many other innovations in military technology.

  In fact, the atomic bomb most likely did deter major war between the great powers after 1945—an unusually long period in historical terms—but security against aggression now rested on the fear of retaliation against civilian populations, and during that time the great powers found only one way to maintain this state of affairs: to indulge in an ever-escalating nuclear arms race. The atomic bomb prevented large-scale war, but it did so by raising the price of failure—through accident, misperception, aggression, or whatever—to annihilation and the possible end of human civilization. And we are arguably moving closer to the edge now that smaller states webbed into bitter argument have nuclear capabilities and a host of others seem intent on acquiring them.

  All of this made the atomic scientists intensely self-conscious about what they had done and poignantly challenged their optimistic faith in reason and the benevolence of science. The bomb’s fundamental message directly undermined their cherished belief—bordering on faith—that science was good. The shattering of this faith was particularly traumatic in American scientific circles, where it had taken especially deep root. Until the atomic bomb, science had remained almost unchallenged as a source of enlightenment, understanding, and hope for a better, healthier, safer world. It enjoyed worldwide respect almost akin to reverence. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a significant change took place: a pursuit once held in high esteem was now equated in the minds of many people with the destruction of life and a threat to civilization. Physics—especially nuclear physics—became associated in the popular imagination with mass destruction and the threat of ultimate annihilation. An entire part of physical reality—nuclear energy—was now regarded with distrust and profound fear of its dangers.

  Nuclear symbols became symbols of the horrors of modern war. The popular image of the scientist shifted from that of Prometheus, who had helped mankind by giving him fire, to that of Faust, who had imperiled mankind by arrogantly divorcing knowledge from moral responsibility. Some thought physicists were like children playing with matches. I. I. Rabi felt this sentiment during a taxi ride after the war. Driving from the airport, the cabbie asked Rabi what he did. Rabi replied that he was a professor of physics. The atmosphere suddenly became cool. “You’re going to blow us all up, ain’t you?” the cabbie said. 3 Robert Oppenheimer put it well when he wrote that atomic bombs “touched very deeply man’s sentiments about the evil of having too much power.” 4 This threat was made even more acute by the fact that it would never go away. What the atomic scientists created cannot be uninvented. If enough bombs were made by enough different states, some of them would eventually blow up—through accident, or folly, or madness. How many, or when, did not really matter. What did matter, given the sobering combination of human imperfection and enough time, was the eventuality.

  What a shattering realization this was for sensitive, thoughtful men who had believed that knowledge was an absolute good, who had assumed that science—and particularly physics—always led to progress, and who had meant to do well. While they felt their work on the bomb was vital to ending World War II, many—indeed most—of them later came to see what they had done as a great tragedy. They never dreamed in 1945 that there would be so many bombs in the arsenals of so many countries more than half a century later. There was the pride of accomplishment—and the shame of being associated with it. They saw themselves as smart—and foolish. These central, painful contradictions remained with all of them to the end of their lives.

  Disassociating action from feeling and failing to consider the broader consequences of what they were doing, the atomic scientists made a terrible weapon. But in time they came to terms with their creation. They learned from their experience to ask the fundamental questions. And in doing so, questions of usage ultimately became more important to them than questions of research. Their tragedy was also their triumph.

  A dozen years after the end of the Cold War, America still possesses 6,000 nuclear weapons. The price for this arsenal is nearly $6 trillion, about one-tenth of all federal government expenditures from 1940 to 1996. Washington plans to reduce the number of operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal to 3,800 by 2007, and to between 1,700 to 2,000 warheads by 2012. It is a step in the right direction, accomplishing in one bold stroke what years of arms control negotiations had failed to deliver. But Washington has no plans to destroy warheads removed from strategic systems or to eliminate the capacity of these platforms to be rapidly refitted with these reserve warheads. America’s nuclear stockpile would still have an explosive force equivalent to forty thousand Hiroshima bombs. Russia has a similar force. It is very hard to imagine any plausible contingency that requires this kind of capability. After destroying all conceivable military targets, the remaining weapons of just these two countries could o
bliterate thousands of cities with populations of more than 100,000 people; there are fewer than five hundred such cities in both countries. Even taking into account other potential nuclear-armed adversaries over the next decade, it is difficult to see how these possible adversaries, projected by U.S. Intelligence to have a total of fewer than 200 nuclear weapons over the next decade, justify U.S. retention of 1,700 to 2,000 operationally deployed warheads and the much larger force being held in reserve.

  On the other hand, the strategy of deterrence—the idea that because nuclear war would be so horrible, it is inconceivable—has worked since World War II in the sense that there have been no wars among the major powers. The threat of mutual assured destruction has deterred this catastrophic result, and to that extent, the “balance of terror” has turned out to be stable. This record reinforces the assumption that strategic issues and war in the nuclear age lend themselves to careful calculation and control. The long history of deterrence in politics and war going back to ancient Greece reinforces its credibility. But the consequences of deterrence’s failure in earlier wars were always limited. Nuclear war entails no such limits, and this radically distinguishes nuclear deterrence from that earlier tradition.

  Who, moreover, believes deterrence can work everywhere and forever, no matter how effective it has been and currently may be? Who, looking at the long record of human folly and accident—to say nothing of human wickedness—that led to international catastrophes of the past, believes that rational decision will prevail always in the future? It should be noted that even rational political leaders in the past have made wishful, mistaken, and foolish estimates of consequences that have led to catastrophic wars. And there is no telling what might happen if fanatics, driven by a zealotry that knows no ethical constraints, gain possession of nuclear weapons.