by Mattias Berg
I think that everything became still. But inside my head there was a hissing, a roar, as Ingrid went on.
“Erasmus, I’m sorry . . . but I thought we needed something in common that neither of us would forget. Not even when confronted with the worst challenge any human being has ever faced: with Doomsday in the palm of our hand. So I burned my own code system into your subconscious as well. Tested you first with the arachnophobia. And when that was securely lodged I—and you—were ready for that abhorrent memory from childhood. The moment when a mother disappears within herself.”
She hesitated for an instant—and then went on to clarify.
“So you have to understand. It wasn’t you who made up the code. Not you who had a pathological fear of spiders. Not you who sat there at the kitchen table with your distraught mother, only thirteen years old and showing her the book cipher as some kind of distraction. Who had a dark enough imagination to come up with that peculiar key sentence.
“No, it was me, Erasmus. And my own poor little mother.”
7.02
When you no longer understand anything, everything can be a clue.
Which is why, inside the solemn solitude of the isolation cell, I took out my dissertation and started to turn the pages again. From cover to cover, over and over. Trying to remember the exact circumstances in which each separate part had been written. What I had been thinking, what she had said. Who I might indeed have been at various stages.
They had also let me keep my notebook. Not out of kindness, but because they genuinely wanted to know, Edelweiss said. See the end of my chronicle. How I would describe even this unlikely ending. So I did as they—as Edelweiss—wanted, did not know what else to do. Was scrupulous not to change anything to fit the knowledge I now had. Or to judge what might have been real and what was not. In that way I kept the account pathetically innocent, or ignorant, up to and including our interrogation.
The question is, of course, what is credible in all of this: the whole tangle of mind control, multiple agendas and cosmetic transformations. Where the very existence of nuclear weapons, man’s ingenious invention for exterminating himself, may in the end be the most unbelievable thing of all. The Doomsday conviction I tried to explore in my dissertation.
You must understand. But you won’t.
How there was very nearly no further development, how it could all have been interrupted.
*
Most of it happened over a few months in 1949. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, came to the conclusion during the fall’s demanding discussions within the General Advisory Committee of scientists and industrialists. That the next step should under no circumstances be taken. That the hydrogen bomb—the thermo-nuclear weapon, the scientifically miraculous idea of trying to imitate the sun’s fusion processes, not fission but fusion of the atomic nucleus, The Evil Thing—should never be either researched or developed.
During the committee’s final meeting on October 29–30, 1949, the engineer and businessman Hartley Rowe made his classic remark: “We already built one Frankenstein.” Some years later he developed his reasoning: “I may be an idealist, but I can’t see how any people can go from one engine of destruction to another, each of them a thousand times greater in potential destruction, and still retain any normal perspective in regard to their relationships with other countries and also in relationship with peace.”
The committee’s conclusion in its final report to the decision makers could not be misinterpreted. The message was crystal clear. The atom bomb, fission technology, could not be compared with this thermo-nuclear weapon. The hydrogen bomb was something utterly different. Partly from a technological point of view, partly—and primarily—from a moral one.
In their report, the committee described the critical differences between a hydrogen bomb and an atomic bomb. Emphasized that a thermo-nuclear chain reaction of that sort, based on deuterium, heavy hydrogen, would have limitless potential: “This is because one can continue to add deuterium . . . to make larger and larger explosions.”
But there were proponents. One of them was Glenn Seaborg, named earlier. During these days at the end of October 1949, when the committee held its conclusive meeting, Seaborg was in Sweden on a lecture tour. He had been invited by Manne Siegbahn, Meitner’s first Swedish scientific contact. According to some of my sources, Meitner and Seaborg met during this visit. What they discussed is nowhere recorded—nor is there an explanation for the fact that Meitner chose exactly this moment to become a Swedish citizen.
In earlier discussions, Seaborg too had been doubtful about whether the hydrogen bomb should be developed. But during the visit to Sweden he wrote a letter to Oppenheimer, which he even recommended him to show to the committee’s other members. In it, Seaborg strongly supported the project’s historic necessity: the need for a speedy, full-scale development process. “Although I deplore the prospects of our country putting tremendous effort into this, I must confess that I have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should not.”
Most researchers in the field emphasize the historical background to Seaborg and others’ conversions. The situation at that point in history, during and after the convulsions of the war. Just as the American security services produced evidence to show that Germany during the war was one step ahead with the development of an atomic bomb, the Soviet Union was now the issue. The dreaded enemy no longer Adolf Hitler, but Josef Stalin.
In this way, humanity once again found itself in what I call “reverse logic”. The one thing that was absolutely unthinkable became the only thing that was absolutely thinkable. Something that required the greatest possible effort, gigantic investments, the depths of mankind’s ingenuity, seemed, in the end, inevitable.
After an intensive debate around the turn of 1949–50, the U.S. political and military leadership decided to disregard the committee’s almost pleading report recommending that the development work be shelved before it had even been begun in earnest. The arguments in favor of this new kind of nuclear weapon, at that time called the “super bomb”, were mostly about being able to destroy the Soviet Union first. “There will be no second time”, was a refrain of the advocates of the hydrogen bomb.
In the decision makers’ written answers to the scientific committee in January 1950, however, the tone was different. Here there was nothing at all about mutual destruction. The rhetoric had been toned down, and even what remained was colored by the gravity of the moment: the irreversibility of the path toward an impending catastrophe of biblical dimensions. The feeling that even the atomic bomb was no longer deterrent enough.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded it as “necessary to have within the arsenal of the United States a weapon of greatest capability, in this case the super bomb. Such a weapon would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy sources.” The super bomb, they argued, “might be a decisive factor if properly used.” They preferred “that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than that of the enemy.”
It was an irony of fate that the man who came to lead the development work, eventually called the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, was Edward Teller. The same man who, following the dropping of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, maintained that a new internationalism was the only solution. The catchphrase for the then relatively comprehensive global movement was “One world or none”.
In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine launched after the war to give worried scientists a forum within which to try to limit the growth of nuclear weapons technology, Teller had written: “Nothing that we can plan as a defense for the next generation is likely to be satisfactory: that is, nothing but world union.”
Just a few years after this, in other words, Teller became responsible for the next historic step in the arms race. This weapon, the hydrogen bomb, was developed without even those
most closely involved knowing very much about the consequences. In this case, about the nature of the thermo-nuclear reaction itself.
At first it was believed that the reaction could not be limited: the more deuterium, heavy hydrogen, that one added, the more powerful it would become. A violent process with endless power and duration.
Then Teller changed his mind about that too. There was indeed a limit to the purely destructive potential of the thermonuclear process. At about the 100 megaton level—in practice double that of the most powerful nuclear weapon ever devised, the “Tsar Bomb”—the atmosphere would disappear into space. However much one increased the charge beyond that, only the speed with which the earth’s atmosphere would vanish into space would increase. Not the explosive force itself.
This was the type of calculation that set the course for the most advanced scientific project of its time, with by far the greatest budget and an entirely unknown potential. It reminds us of the fact that Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi more or less in earnest wanted to make a bet with his research colleagues about whether the atmosphere would catch fire or not, just before the first atom bomb test in New Mexico.
None of those engaged in the development of the thermonuclear weapon had any idea of its secondary effects. How long it would take for our entire civilisation to be obliterated—or if the greater part of our atmosphere would vanish into outer space.
Yet what the scientific committee in its report had called “an evil thing”, had a racing start. Like a self-playing piano at top speed. For most of those involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb, everything must have been broken down into detail: thousands of challenging intellectual and practical problems needing to be solved—until the entirety became a fact. Once again, scientific curiosity took over.
Many of those involved have testified to the almost unbearable silence after the test of the first hydrogen bomb, “Mike”, in November 1952, during the age of slow communications. The telegram from Teller to one of his key collaborators, Marshall Rosenbluth, therefore came as a great relief.
It contained just four words, in the typically low-key jargon of scientists. A confirmation that history’s hitherto worst weapon of mass destruction had now been born without mishap.
“IT WAS A BOY,” the message read. No more, no less.
7.03
The last night, I lived that nightmare again. Dreamed that I was back in the subterranean eternity of the facility, carrying out the Test. The missile itself was as ever only a few hundred feet away. Eerily silent in its specially constructed silo, like a gigantic chained beast, a chrysalis brooding day and night under temperature control and exact monitoring of levels and flows.
No detail could ever go wrong. Once a month each of us had to do the Test, to ensure that we still remembered the correct procedures—in case anything should happen, unlikely as it might seem.
Otherwise, here we were to sit all day long, throughout the year, decade after decade, deep underground, so the status quo could continue. Up on the surface the concluding phases of the Cold War would soon be over, the world would spin forward to the fall of the Wall, détente, eventually 9/11, our invasions, global terrorism as a kind of counter-attack, the President’s fine words about a world free of nuclear weapons. But down here, time had stopped.
I often thought of it as the strangest assignment in the world. The enormous tension which never found its release: 100 per cent concentration on total inactivity. On nothing other than nothing ever happening. The fact that we had created a system all around the world which could never be used, on a scale that was larger than human life.
Equally often I wondered why we operators never received a fraction of the attention the missiles themselves did. Nobody ever checked our levels, flows, the temperature of our brains. So long as we passed the Test, all our lights showed green.
The first question this month was what we would do if the seismic alarm went off in gate L.04 after the obligatory L.F.F. test, the control routines for seeking out Launch Facility Faults. I read swiftly through the multiple choice answers.
(A) Sound the Security Alert.
(B) Contact F.S.C. (Flight Security).
(C) Contact the next gate, L.05, and obtain two confirmations from the E.M.T. team.
(D) Contact M.M.O.C. (Missile Maintenance Operations Control).
And then my mind went blank.
I tried to control my breathing. Knew after all that help was within reach: the crib that had been circulating among us without any fuss, with our commanders’ approval, for many decades. That all I needed to do was to make that little sign behind my back to be told the secret, the one that in fact no longer needed to be kept secret from anybody, except during inspections. As was the case now.
The crib was our insurance. As well as that of our superiors, the whole system’s.
Because the rigid and non-negotiable requirement from the nuclear weapons command, in other words our political establishment, was that we had to score 100 per cent on the long and demanding Test, each and every time. We were all playing to the gallery. No operator could achieve that. Not in this subterranean solitude, with the inhuman psychological pressure that we faced all day long, with only the mighty missile and its gently sighing premonition of Doomsday for company.
But all I ever needed to do was shape my fingers to make that sign behind my back. Discreetly enough so that only the necessary people would see it: the commander and the person with the crib within reach. My breathing was already back to normal, just the realization that the commander would soon be pushing that paper gently into my hand helped with that.
Which must have been why it took so long—a minute, maybe closer to two—before my pulse really started to race. When I realized that no-one was coming to my rescue this time.
I cast my eyes around the examination hall at Gate L11, hardly bothering to hide my desperation, even from the inspector, the sullen gentleman furthest back along the wall. At last I caught sight of his smirk. It was the most recently arrived operator, a ginger kid from somewhere in the Mid West, and he was pointing discreetly at his knee under the desk. That is where he had put the crib.
There was a roaring in my temples, I felt the blood coursing in time with my pulse, rising with each second. My uniform jacket was becoming soaked with sweat, everything seeping through.
Desperately I tried to concentrate on the next question. What measures should be taken if “M.O.S.R. X.” appeared on the screen in the control room.
The only thing I could recall was that the acronym stood for “Missile Operational Status Response X.”. Again I looked over at the new recruit. His eyes were focused downward. Moving between the Test on the desk, and the crib on his knee. No glance in my direction.
I read through the choice of answers as slowly as I could. The acronyms flickered before my eyes. Panic at the thought that I would not be allowed to remain down here, in my blessed sealed-off refuge, poured through my body. That they would dismiss me right away. I heard myself breaking the soft rustling quiet of the examination hall, mumbling the different options:
(A) Begin with an L.F.F. to check whether the information on the computer screen really is correct.
(B) Contact Flight Security immediately.
(C) Call Team immediately using the separate S.I.N. telephone network.
(D) Order an immediate and total evacuation of the facility with the exceptional command Emergency Launch L.F.F. Evacuation.
When I caught up with the new arrival after the Test—just outside the hall, on the way into tunnel T24 heading toward the canteen, in full sight of all the inspectors—I just took him down. Before I smashed his head into the metal floor, not once but repeatedly, the answer suddenly occurred to me.
“Of course, answer ‘D’,” I said, looking straight into his terrified eyes—and went on: anything can happen when it’s “Status Response ‘X’!”
7.04
Before they came and fetched me, after a number of day
s or weeks in my isolation cell, and when I had told them that my chronicle for Edelweiss was complete, I was granted one last telephone call. Custom dictated that one should ring home. A pointless and heart-rending conversation, a repugnant punishment, certainly, for the soon-to-be-deceased, but maybe even more so for the dependents.
Yet I could not stop myself from putting Amba through it. She was now my only hope of hearing some form of truth before it was all too late. Who would recall what I had told her about my mother, maybe even that scene at the kitchen table when I was thirteen, or my spider phobia. Whether I had revealed things I should not have during our first night together, immediately after the welcome for new teachers at The Catholic University. When she and I had poured out our memories to each other: lifetimes in fast-forward. Perhaps said something about once having been a violent young man, which Ingrid had referred to during our interrogation, and not at all the pacifist, before she had started working on me. Or muttered something in my sleep.
If nothing else, I wanted to tell her everything, give her my own version. Try to get her and the children, if not to understand—how could anybody do that?—then in some way to forgive me. At least just say that, for form’s sake. As my last rites.
But she did not answer: she never did with unknown numbers. There was only that voice, still teasing, still with the same message I could remember since so long ago. “Hi, it’s Amba, I’m probably busy with something incredibly exciting. But leave your name and number and I’ll call back as soon as I have nothing better to do.”
For a moment I thought of leaving a message. But again . . . what good would that have done? I pressed the red button, and they took the telephone away.
Then I brought out the reproduction. Bruegel’s masterpiece from 1562, more than four centuries before the year of my birth. Almost time enough for his vision to become reality. I laid the picture on the bunk, using a couple of the door-stopper-sized nuclear weapons thrillers from the bookshelves in here to flatten it out. Studied all of its details for the last time. The arc from Bruegel’s visions of Doomsday to our own. His yellowed, scorched landscape, the piles of dead, the entire, almost nuclear, apocalypse.
