Authors: Bill Streever
Obata Masatake was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Company for a 1995
Radio Eye
episode called “Tokyo’s Burning.” The show was based in part on Robert Guillain’s
I Saw Tokyo Burning
(New York: Doubleday, 1981). Guillain was a French journalist who lived in Japan from 1938 until after the end of the war.
Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt is readily available in its entirety. One source is http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml#first.
The Nobel Prize is named after Alfred Nobel, a Swedish engineer and industrialist who invented and manufactured dynamite and other explosives. Dynamite is essentially a stable form of nitroglycerin. Although Nobel’s dynamite was widely used in warfare, Nobel saw it primarily as a tool for civil engineering works, a view that superficially parallels Teller’s purported position with regard to the Plowshare program. Although Nobel sometimes claimed to be a pacifist, and though it has been said that he was deeply troubled by a newspaper headline that described him as a “merchant of death,” he knew that his products were being sold to warring nations and sometimes to both sides of conflicts. When Nobel died, his factories were producing 66,000 tons of explosives each year. Nobel’s will stated that he wished the Peace Prize to go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” One can only imagine what it would be like to have tea with Teller and Nobel at the same table, discussing the peaceful use of explosives.
Teller’s statement about looking “straight at the bomb” appears in several sources, including John Langone, “Edward Teller: Of Bombs and Brickbats,”
Discover
, July 1984, 62–68.
The comment from Herbert York about his recollection of Teller explaining how a hydrogen bomb might work was reported in Gerard J. DeGroot’s aforementioned
The Bomb: A Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 175.
Although Mike, the first hydrogen bomb, would create temperatures far hotter than anything previously created by humans, its size was driven largely by the need to keep the deuterium—the heavy hydrogen that was the fuel for fusion in the Mike device—at very low temperatures.
The description of Greek fire as coming on “as broad in front as a vinegar cask” came from the thirteenth-century memoir of Jean de Joinville, a French knight and crusader. Ethel Wedgwood’s
The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville: A New English Version
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906) is widely available, including on Google Books, and offers a firsthand description of life during the Crusades.
Edward Teller’s wonderful remark implying that he could move mountains—worded in a manner that made it suitable for greeting cards or advertising copy—comes from the
Anchorage Daily Times
, June 26, 1959. I first came across this quotation in Dan O’Neill’s
The Firecracker Boys
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994).
Ship’s surgeon John Simpson served under Rochfort Maguire. His records include heights and weights of a number of Point Barrow residents—from five feet one inch to five feet nine and one-half inches, and from 125 to 195 pounds. His writing is included in Maguire’s journal as an appendix.
The description of the colors in flames was based on a description and illustrations in John W. Lyons,
Fire
(New York: Scientific American Books, 1985). The book is well laid out and includes brilliant illustrations.
Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger’s
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008) reassured me that I am not the only author in the world writing rather odd books. It is well worth reading.
Einstein’s famous equation relates energy (E), mass (M), and a constant representing the speed of light (C). The equation appeared in Einstein’s 1905 paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy-Content?” E = MC
2
tells us that matter and energy are different expressions of the same thing. In practice—that is, to apply the formula with compatible units—energy can be expressed in ergs as g·cm
2
/sec
2
, mass can be expressed in grams, and the speed of light can be expressed in centimeters per second. One erg is the same as 1 dyne per centimeter or 100 nanojoules. The speed of light squared becomes 900 quintillion cm
2
/sec
2
. This means that the formula could be re-expressed as E = M x 900 quintillion. Clearly, relatively small masses hold tremendous amounts of energy. In a recorded lecture (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC7Sg41Bp-U), Einstein suggested that the repercussions of his formula—the realization that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing—presented “a somewhat unfamiliar conception to the average mind.”
It is often reported that the jeep was originally called the General Purpose Vehicle, which inevitably became the GP, which inevitably became the jeep. Others claim that the iconic name came from a comic strip, and occasionally it is attributed to a test driver’s quip that was quoted in a syndicated column. Ernie Pyle’s words about the Coleman stove and the jeep come from a Coleman website, www.coleman.com/coleman/colemancom/newsrelease.asp?
releasenum
=338.
Teller’s statement about the Soviets setting off nuclear weapons in the name of civil works was reported in Dan O’Neill’s
The Firecracker Boys
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). O’Neill attributes the statement to a tape recording of Teller’s Strategic Defense Initiative speech to Commonwealth North at the Captain Cook Hotel, Anchorage, Alaska, June 9, 1987, recorded by Chris Toal of SANE Alaska.
The exact number of bombs used for nonmilitary purposes in the former Soviet Union is not widely known. Milo D. Nordyke’s report “The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions,”
Science and Global Security
7 (1998): 1–117, suggests that 128 nuclear explosives were used, while Gerard J. DeGroot’s
The Bomb
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) puts the number at 156. Most of the information on the Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions comes from Nordyke’s article, as well as a report by Nordyke with the same title, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on July 24, 1996 (UCRL-ID-124410). The article and report were based on a number of articles and books published by Russians after Glasnost.
“Chetek,” in the International Chetek Corporation of Moscow, is an acronym from Russian words for man, technology, and capital.
The chairman of the meeting at which the Chetek Corporation announced its plans to market nuclear explosions for waste management was John M. Lamb, and his comments were reported by William J. Broad in “A Soviet Company Offers Nuclear Blasts for Sale to Anyone with the Cash,”
New York Times
, November 7, 1991. Somewhat ironically, the meeting was sponsored by the Canadian Center for Arms Control and Disarmament. Despite Lamb’s comment, at least some Western scientists took the Chetek Corporation’s suggestions seriously. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist, also quoted in the
New York Times
article, said that the Chetek approach would be the cheapest way to dispose of hazardous materials, including unwanted nuclear warheads.
Edward Teller’s memoir offers few insights on his visits to Cape Thompson and what he did there. I could not determine if Teller used the radio whose skeleton still remains at the site, or if he rode the Weasels that were abandoned there, or if he ate from trays like the one that I found on the ground near my tent. I can only guess that some of what remains at Cape Thompson is from later cleanup crews, but certainly some of the equipment must have been present when Teller was working on the project.
The statements by the Point Hope Village Council, Kitty Kinneeveauk, and Joseph Frankson come from Dan O’Neill’s
The Firecracker Boys
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). O’Neill used a number of sources for these statements, including tape recordings of public meetings.
Herschel’s words about the sun as “the ultimate source of almost every motion” come from his
A Treatise on Astronomy
(1833), republished in 2005 as an Elibron Classic, by Adamant Media Corporation. The passage on the sun as “the ultimate source” has been repeated many times. For example, it appeared in vol. 13 of
All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal, Conducted by Charles Dickens
, in 1865. Herschel’s speculations about life on the sun and on other planets are less often repeated. The passages quoted here come from his paper “On the Nature and Construction of the Sun and Fixed Stars,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
85 (1795): 46–72.
The physicist Hans Bethe is usually recognized as the first to realize that the energy of stars and the sun came from fusion. His paper “Energy Production in Stars,”
Physical Review
55 (1939): 434–56, was published just thirteen years before the first fusion bomb—that is, the first hydrogen bomb, Teller’s Super—was exploded on Elugelab Island, Eniwetok, and only twenty-three years before the Sedan shot in the Nevada desert.
When discussing the evolution of stars—when thinking about what happened billions of years ago and what will happen billions of years from now—it is natural to question authority. How do we know this stuff ? From Arthur Stanley Eddington, in his book
Stars and Atoms
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), answering this question in the context of his work related to the star Sirius and its orbiting companion, a white dwarf: “We learn about the stars by receiving and interpreting the messages which their light brings to us. The message of the Companion of Sirius when it was decoded ran: ‘I am composed of material 3,000 times denser than anything you have ever come across; a ton of my material would be a little nugget that you could put in a matchbox.’ What reply can one make to such a message? The reply which most of us made in 1914 was—‘Shut up. Don't talk nonsense.’”
Loring Danforth’s
Firewalking and Religious Healing
(Princeton University Press, 1989) is an academic work describing firewalking from the perspective of the author, who spent time in Greece studying traditional firewalkers and eventually walked through fire himself. The words of the man who said he believed he could survive a nuclear explosion were attributed to a
Rolling Stone
article by Jon Krakauer published in 1984.
Teller’s memoir mentions Fermi more than eighty times. The two men, from a young age, were friends, and both had fled Europe to the United States to avoid fascism. But after the war, Fermi objected to the development of thermonuclear weapons. “A desirable peace,” he wrote, “cannot come from such an inhuman application of force.” In 1954, before his fifty-fourth birthday, Fermi died from cancer caused by exposure to radiation. In 1962, Teller received the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award, in part for his “efforts to strengthen national security.”
The physicist I interviewed about supercolliders and who later showed me around at the Brookhaven laboratory was Barbara Jacek. Her knowledge of particle physics was astounding, especially when mixed with her willingness to spend time with a writer and her understanding of the need to make extremely complicated technical information accessible to nonspecialists.
Protons and neutrons are two kinds of hadrons known to most people. The lesser-known hadrons include antiprotons, omegas, lambdas, and kaons.
The Kelvin scale uses degree increments equivalent to those of the Celsius scale, but in Kelvin zero is set at absolute zero. At four trillion degrees Kelvin, one can ignore the difference between Kelvin and Celsius—at four trillion degrees, the small difference in the zero points becomes irrelevant.
My firewalking instructor was Claudia Weber (http://hypnotherapychico.com/FIREWALKwithClaudia.en.html). Her enthusiasm for firewalking and for the human spirit in general is inspiring. Firewalking has been called a New Age fad, a sham, and worse. It has been the subject of a tremendous amount of information and misinformation. A certain contingent seems to think that the scientific explanation of firewalking somehow decreases its value, and perhaps for some people it does. But for the vast majority of people, including the dozens of firewalkers whom I spoke to in the course of writing this book, firewalking offers a unique and positive experience of a very personal nature. It is interesting to watch or listen to scientists who set out to debunk firewalking with scientific explanations. They generally walk through fire themselves to show that it can safely be done without a mystical state of mind, and in so doing they seem to get a tremendous thrill from the act itself.
Dixy Lee Ray, a 1970s environmentalist who endorsed the benefits of nuclear energy, was not afraid of controversy. She believed in science and in the power of science to inform public policy. Her book with Lou Guzzo,
Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000), criticized the environmental movement for, in her view, ignoring scientific evidence that did not support predetermined political positions. “We are aware,” she wrote, “that some may conclude that we are ‘anti-environment.’ That would be wrong.” She also believed that it would be wrong “to downplay the remarkable resilience and recovery powers of nature.” In the first chapter, she questions the science behind climate change and suggests or at least implies that the Rio Earth Summit and its statements regarding the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of developed nations had more to do with redistribution of wealth than with environmental protection. She claims that the vice chairman of the Rio Earth Summit openly admitted that the conference agenda “was based upon the International Socialist Party’s platform.”
Environmental Overkill
is now more than ten years old, and it is impossible to say if the late Professor Ray would have changed her views about climate change as more data have become available.