Armageddon Science (8 page)

To ensure that this was the case, the triumvirate suggested setting up a United Nations commission to eliminate “the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes” and to promote its “widest use for industrial and humanitarian purposes.” This was agreed to by the Soviet Union, and in January 1946 the UN Atomic Energy Commission was established with a purpose that included “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable for mass destruction.”

President Truman had a U.S. committee established to lay the groundwork for taking the concept of worldwide nuclear control from idea to practical plan. This group, relying heavily on the technical advice of Robert Oppenheimer, decided that the UN organization’s mandate did not go far enough. The resultant Acheson-Lilienthal report, named for Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, the chairmen of the committee and its board of consultants, proposed nothing less than handing every bit of the atomic behemoth, from uranium mines to nuclear reactors, over to a single, peaceful world organization.

This was a brief moment when, despite the two bombs dropped over Japan, the world could have stepped back from nuclear brinkmanship. The Acheson-Lilienthal proposals would have turned the atomic arms race on its head. Instead of nations competing to have the greatest destructive force, this American proposal for world peace suggested that nuclear technology should be spread to every country, along with the scientific and industrial capability to handle it. This technology would be controlled by the UN-owned organization, not by any nation-state.

Any attempt to subvert that central control would be deterred by the awareness that the rest of the world would respond by switching to the production of atomic weapons. This would be mutually assured deterrence, but one where any offender was inherently outnumbered—and the deterrence was at arm’s length, as the atomic weapons did not yet exist, only the capability to produce them.

This idyllic world peacemaking body was never to be made a reality. Diplomatic relations between the USSR and the West were worsening. In March 1946, Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister, who still held a lot of influence and was dogmatically opposed to any collaboration with the Soviet Union, gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri, where the words “iron curtain” were first used to describe the division between the Soviet sphere of influence and the West.

Churchill took the opportunity of this speech to rubbish the suggestions raised in the Acheson-Lilienthal report. It would be wrong and imprudent, he said, to give the knowledge of the atomic bomb to the UN, and “criminal madness to cast it adrift in this agitated and un-united world.” Churchill, who had an unwavering enthusiasm for maintaining secrecy, believed wrongly that the secret of atomic power could be kept away from the USSR. The Acheson-Lilienthal report was fatally weakened before it had a chance to deliver any results.

The possibilities for world control of nuclear power took a second blow with the appointment of the seventy-five-year-old archconservative financier Bernard Baruch to lead the U.S. delegation to the UN Atomic Energy Commission. Baruch took an instant dislike to the Acheson-Lilienthal report and rapidly moved to replace it with a plan that was more combative. Yes, Baruch said, it was possible to dismantle atomic weapons—but only when an adequate system of world control was in place, including punishments for those who violated the controls, and only at the behest of the relevant national governments.

Further splintering of atomic cooperation came when, in August 1946, President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act. This was a domestic U.S. bill that closed the door on cooperation with the United Kingdom and Canada. With controls falling apart and international cooperation failing, each of the countries with the technological capability to make nuclear weapons went its own way. There was not to be another opportunity to move the world toward safety, away from the construction of opposing nuclear arsenals.

Instead, the creation of the new atomic arsenal led to plans in the United States that were much more hawkish. The military advice was to prepare for a total war that would be on a scale that dwarfed even the two world wars. A plan was drawn up to be prepared for a preemptive strike on the Soviets, hitting sixty-six cities with a total of 466 atomic bombs—bombs that didn’t yet exist, but soon would. What was being contemplated was the total obliteration of the enemy before it had a chance to strike.

The death and destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were awful in the true meaning of the word. Yet to support the obliteration plans, within months the United States was working on an alternative weapon that was even more fearsome than the atomic bomb. When nuclear weapons were first proposed, there was a serious concern that the explosion would be so hot that it would set the atmosphere on fire, fusing the nitrogen molecules that make up the majority of the atmosphere. Although this was proved an impossible outcome long before the first test, there was another possibility arising from that immense heat that could be put to use, according to a theory developed by Hungarian-born American physicist Edward Teller.

The original idea had come from Enrico Fermi. He speculated that the intense heat of the fission explosion could be enough to cause small molecules of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with an extra neutron in the atomic nucleus) to fuse together. In the process, the molecules would give off energy. This thermonuclear reaction, nuclear fusion, is the working mechanism of the Sun. If the deuterium could be made hot enough, there would be no need to worry about the fussy chain reactions that were required for a conventional atomic weapon—the fusion would continue until it had worked through the fuel. The explosion had the potential to be vastly more powerful than that of a basic fission weapon.

To give an idea of the scale of the explosion that nuclear fusion could provide, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War were the equivalent of around twenty thousand tons of TNT. It would only take twelve kilograms (twenty-six pounds) of deuterium to be exploded in a thermonuclear device to produce the equivalent explosive power of 1 million tons of TNT.

When Teller first got involved with this idea of an ultrapowerful bomb, alongside American colleague Emil Konopinski, his aim was to show that it wasn’t possible. He wanted to eliminate this wacky idea of Fermi’s. This was in 1942, when any form of atomic bomb was still a distant hope. But the more Teller worked on the idea, the more realistic it seemed to him. Such a thermonuclear device—a superbomb, or just “Super” as it was referred to—should be practical once a fission device existed to trigger it.

Teller became obsessed with the idea, and began to press for work on the Super, but he was quietly sidelined. There were enough problems getting a basic nuclear weapon to operate without building a device where the atom bomb was nothing more than a trigger. But Teller did not let the matter drop, and after the end of the war he was able to press forward the concept that would become known as the H-bomb or hydrogen bomb, even though in practice it would not be fueled with regular hydrogen.

Opinions were divided in the United States. Some felt that it was necessary to go the next step, now that the USSR had nuclear weapons. Others argued that the technical difficulties in building a thermonuclear weapon would be extreme, or that building such a weapon raised moral hazards. In a report on the hydrogen bomb from the U.S. General Advisory Committee (the body that advised the government on nuclear matters) there was a majority annex that spelled out this moral argument in no uncertain terms:

In a minority annex, physicists Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi went even further:

The committee hoped that the fusion bomb would never be produced, setting a limit to the totality of war, while Fermi and Rabi suggested inviting the nations of the world to solemnly pledge not to proceed with the development or construction of such weapons.

The U.S. administration was not in the mood for listening to such a viewpoint. The prevailing feeling was that to set aside the possibility of thermonuclear weapons amounted to a voluntary weakening of the military capability of the United States. It was thought that enemy countries, particularly the USSR, would see this as weakness, and that it would prove a trigger for opposing forces to align against America. The war was still fresh and raw enough to make even as successful and powerful a country as the United States wary of what it might face.

The race to take nuclear weapons to a further level of destructiveness had begun. On January 31, 1950, President Truman made a broadcast to the nation, announcing that he had directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue work on atomic weapons, “including the so-called hydrogen or super bomb.” Not only was the H-bomb to be built; Truman made sure that the rest of the world was well aware of it, and of America’s nuclear supremacy.

There was one small problem with Truman’s announcement. Although the basic concept of the thermonuclear device was sound, no one really knew how to make one work. It would require an immense explosion, well beyond the capabilities of the atomic bombs at the time, to heat a material like hydrogen sufficiently to make it fuse. Even the temperatures in the heart of the Sun aren’t enough for this—it also takes the pressure exerted by the Sun’s huge mass, and a quantum mechanical mechanism called tunneling, for the Sun to be able to fuse hydrogen.

The breakthrough, which was made around the same time as President Truman’s statement, came from two scientists, Stanislaw Ulam and the ubiquitous Edward Teller. Instead of simply heating the fusion material, the radiation from the triggering fission device could be used to compress the material, using emissions from the explosion to compact the molecules closer and closer together, making fusion easier to initiate.

After months of technical testing of components, the first thermonuclear bomb was ready to be tried out at a remote island location, Elugelab on the Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. Like the innocently named Little Boy and Fat Man, the bomb had a nickname—“the Sausage”—because of its long cylindrical shape.

When the bomb exploded on November 1, 1952, it produced an explosion with a power of over ten megatons—nearly five hundred times the destructive power of the Nagasaki explosion, totally destroying the tiny island. This was very much a test device—weighing over eighty tons and requiring a structure around fifteen meters (fifty feet) high to support it, meaning that it could never have been deployed—but it proved, all too well, the reality of the thermonuclear weapon.

Such was the bad feeling by the time of the test between Edward Teller and those involved in constructing the bomb—Teller probably felt that he wasn’t being given the central role that he deserved—that Teller was not present for the test. Instead, he waited in the Geology Department of the University of California, Berkeley, making use of one of their seismographs to observe the moment that his baby came to life. He sent a telegram to Los Alamos that seemed to reinforce the fatherlike relationship he felt to the bomb. “It’s a boy,” it read. But any sense of the H-bomb giving the United States an unbeatable lead in security was short-lived. The Soviet Union followed less than a year later with its own thermonuclear device.

By 1954, the United States was ready for another test of a hydrogen bomb, at a location that would be remembered by the general public as a result of the piece of clothing named after it, long after details of the test itself dropped out of the news. It took place on the Bikini Atoll. This was a much more practical-sized bomb, hence its nickname, “the Shrimp.” Though not at this stage a true self-contained weapon—it was more like the messy patchwork weapon used in the Trinity test—it required only a final housing to be able to be dropped from an aircraft.

This test proved that despite the deployment of the new electronic computers that were being used to make the necessary calculations—a huge advance on the electromechanical calculators used in painstaking number crunching for the Manhattan Project—the numbers involved were fiendishly difficult to get right. The scientists were expecting the bomb to be the equivalent of five megatons of TNT—big enough at 250 times the Japanese bombs. But in practice, the explosion was more like fifteen megatons and threw out debris far beyond the expected zone.

It was soon discovered after the Bikini test that the hydrogen bomb had a second deadly output over and above the impact of the original fission bombs—fallout. A mixture of debris from the target area where the bomb was exploded and uranium and plutonium from the bomb itself were flung high into the sky and rained down as a shower of deadly radioactive material. This fallout can spread for many miles around the explosion site, particularly if carried by the wind, vastly expanding the danger of radiation sickness and death.

This was demonstrated all too well in the days following the Bikini test, where eighteen thousand square kilometers (seven thousand square miles) would eventually receive significant contamination. Ninety miles away from the epicenter, on the Pacific island of Rongelap, strange white ash began to fall from the sky around four hours after the explosion, which had sounded like thunder to the occupants. They had not been warned of the test, and it took two further days before an evacuation of the island began.