Pandora's Keepers (60 page)
Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Bethe then reached out across the decades of their differences and disagreements:
I remember very fondly the years of our friendship, back in the 1930s and 1940s. I am very sad indeed that politics has separated us so far. But can’t we be personally friendly?
“Thank you for your kind letter,” Teller replied several weeks later, then testily asked: “Is peace better assured by negotiation with the Soviets or by working on defense?” “At this time, I do not urge work on weapons of mass destruction, but rather an effective defense against these weapons,” he summed up. “The conflict between the Soviets and us strikes me like the religious conflicts and wars lasting from 1517 to at least 1648,” Bethe replied, referring to the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing power struggles throughout western Europe. “But must we have the analogy of the Thirty Years War? With nuclear weapons, this would mean the end of civilization in the countries involved, and the ideological differences would become irrelevant.”
81
That summer, Bethe and Teller both found themselves at Los Alamos. A party was held to which each was invited. Bethe arrived first and sat down at a table on the patio, where a group of people surrounded him. Then Teller arrived, stomping in in good humor. The hostess said, “Edward, there is someone here I want you to meet,” and she took him over to Bethe. They shook hands, sat down, and talked together to the exclusion of everyone else for the rest of the party. They were like two old high-school chums who hadn’t seen each other in forty years and had just found one another.
82
Thereafter until ill health and old age slowed them both, Bethe, who visited Caltech each winter, would somehow find a way to see Teller, who was up the California coast at Stanford.
83
By then, Bethe was in his eighties and the grand old man of American physics. His friendly blue eyes, soft white hair, and broad smile gave him the look of a favorite grandfather. He was deeply troubled by the irrationality and excesses of the nuclear arms race, but he remained what he had always been: thoughtful and meticulous. He still received visitors in his small office lined with bookcases on the third floor of the Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell. He and his guests sat in straight-backed chairs around a simple metal desk covered with papers as Bethe listened attentively, barely shifting position. He spoke precisely in his deep, German-accented voice with a strength and orderliness that brooked no interruption but radiated honesty and curiosity. Asked if he sensed himself as a historical figure, he laughed. “Yes,” he said, and added: “As my son said after a talk, ‘Well, they got it from the horse’s mouth. And there aren’t so many horses left.’”
84
His work ethic remained strong, but he preferred to work now on the theory of binary stars—a peaceful theory, he liked to note, one that required experience and wisdom.
As Bethe aged, his interests broadened beyond the natural world to the world of man. He took to reading history—lots of it. A visitor to his home was more likely to see Tacitus’s
Germania
than
The Physical Review
on the table by his reading chair. He increasingly put his faith not in technology but in human beings—a remarkable stance for a man who had dedicated his life to science. Only humane reasoning and political understanding, he felt, would prevent nuclear war. “If a man does not constantly ask himself what is the right thing to do,” he said, “I do not know what will become of him.”
85
Where before he was willing to play the insider in the hope of influencing policy, he now assumed the role of blunt sage and critic. On the fortieth anniversary of the Trinity test in July 1985, Bethe had journeyed to Washington and spoke to Congress like a latter-day Jeremiah:
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.
The Atomic Scientists
and Today
T
ODAY 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.