Sun in a Bottle (9 page)

A little more than a year earlier, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed an international agreement to limit the scope of nuclear testing. No longer was it acceptable to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the Earth, in the atmosphere, underwater, or in space. Only underground testing was allowed. Even an underground test was a violation if it caused radioactive debris to float across national borders. The fallout dropping on Japan was clear evidence that the USSR was violating the treaty.

The Americans had few details about the test. At first, their seismic monitors seemed to imply that it was a 150-kiloton bomb that had exploded underground but which had been imperfectly contained, allowing some of the radiation to escape into the atmosphere. Within a few days, American scientists had revised their guess, estimating that the bomb might be as big as a megaton. They also knew roughly where the explosion happened: in Kazakhstan at the Semipalatinsk test site. They knew little else.

On January 21, Secretary of State Dean Rusk demanded an explanation from the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Dobrynin responded, “An underground explosion was indeed carried out in the Soviet Union . . . deep down underground.” Furthermore, he insisted, the amount of debris that leaked into the atmosphere was “insignificant.” It was a lie.

The explosion, and the resulting fallout, was the beginning of a top-secret Soviet project, Program No. 7. Starting with the mysterious January 1965 explosion and continuing for the next twenty-three years, Program No. 7 would use fusion weapons to dig canals, build underground storage caves, turn on and shut off gas wells, and change the face of the Earth. With the January 1965 explosion, Russian scientists, in a fraction of a second, had carved a major lake and a reservoir, now known as Lake Chagan, out of bedrock.

Program No. 7 was not the only secret government project to harness the power of fusion. An equivalent program was already under way in the United States. A few years earlier, American scientists began work on Project Plowshare and started drawing up plans to use nuclear weapons to create an artificial harbor in Alaska, widen the Panama Canal, and dig a second Suez canal through Israel’s Negev desert.

Project Plowshare and Program No. 7 were crude attempts to harness the power of fusion. Researchers quickly reasoned that if humans could learn to control the power of fusion, it could be the biggest boon that mankind has ever seen. We could visit the outer reaches of the solar system and even visit nearby stars. We would never have to worry again about dwindling energy supplies, oil crises, or global warming.

Of course, it wouldn’t work out quite that nicely.

 

 

In the early 1950s, the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war. Mankind had unleashed a force so great that it could destroy entire cities in a fraction of a second. And though the United States had a small lead over the Russians in developing superbombs, soon both sides would be armed with fusion weapons. If nothing was done, said President Eisenhower in 1953, humanity would have to accept the probability of the end of civilization. At the same time, civil defense films, while trying to calm a jittery nation, whipped up an overwhelming fear of nuclear annihilation. The scientists who had unleashed the power of the sun had placed a great burden on humanity.

But they had hopes that their work would save civilization rather than destroy it. With this unimaginable source of energy, they could usher in a golden era. Even as Bert the Turtle implored children to “duck and cover” upon sighting the inevitable flash from a Russian bomb, other films touted the brilliant future revealed by nuclear power. In the 1952 short
A is for Atom
, a giant glowing golem, arms crossed, represented “the answer to a dream as old as man himself, a giant of limitless power at man’s command.” And Eisenhower, for all his talk of nuclear annihilation, envisioned an earthly utopia if we put the power of the atom “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”

The paranoid, anti-Communist Edward Teller was the man who most desperately tried to bring us to the promised land. He and his allies lobbied for more and more money to figure out how to harness the immense power of fusion. Lewis Strauss, the AEC chairman and Teller backer, promised the world a future where the energy of the atom would power cities, cure diseases, and grow foods. Nuclear power would reshape the planet. God willed it. The Almighty had decided that humans should unlock the power of the atom, and He would keep us from self-annihilation. “A Higher Intelligence decided that man was ready to receive it,” Strauss wrote in 1955. “My faith tells me that the Creator did not intend man to evolve through the ages to this stage of civilization only now to devise something that would destroy life on this earth.”
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Unfortunately for Teller and the other fusion aficionados, it wasn’t easy to use fusion for peace. Fission, not fusion, was the obvious choice for nuclear energy. Ever since Enrico Fermi built a nuclear reactor in the Chicago squash courts, scientists have been able to use uranium to generate power. By controlling the rate of the fission in a reactor, engineers could generate as little as half a watt of power, barely enough to light a Christmas light, or as much as a few hundred million watts of power, enough for a small city. Engineers were drafting plans to build nuclear ships, nuclear submarines, nuclear locomotives, and even nuclear airplanes. But the potential of fission seemed microscopic compared to the unlimited power of fusion, and this is what excited Edward Teller so much. Fusion couldn’t just generate energy, it could move mountains. Literally. Teller was going to make it happen. “If your mountain is not in the right place,” he once said at a press conference, “drop us a card.” He meant it. He was hoping for the chance to show what fusion could do.

In 1956, world politics provided just such an opportunity. In July, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, sparking an international crisis. Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt, and the situation threatened to spin out of control. Thanks to the intervention of the United Nations, the crisis was resolved, but Western strategists were clearly frightened. The prospect of a crucial waterway in the hands of a nationalist Arab government seemed like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode into a major war. Even though the Suez crisis had been brought under control, the threat of a Suez blockade remained.

Teller and his Livermore colleagues immediately seized upon Suez as an opportunity; they announced that fusion could solve the Egyptian problem. A promising young Livermore scientist, Harold Brown, argued that engineers could use the power of fusion to dig a second canal, eliminating the Suez threat once and for all. Brown—who would later become the secretary of defense in President Jimmy Carter’s administration—figured that if a chain of hydrogen bombs, exploding across Israel’s Negev desert, cut a second channel from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, Egypt would no longer have a monopoly. Fusion energy would build a canal in the territory of a Western-friendly power. Teller realized that a new Suez was just the beginning. Fusion weapons could move great volumes of earth, completely reshaping the world’s topography to benefit mankind. In February 1957, Livermore hosted a conference to develop the idea of peaceful nuclear explosions and to solicit ideas for nuclear engineering projects.

Of course, many scientists were skeptical of the whole concept; the idea of using hydrogen bombs for peaceful purposes seemed patently absurd. Isidor Rabi, who had called the hydrogen bomb an evil thing under any light, huffed incredulously to Brown, “So you want to beat your old atomic bombs into plowshares?” Rabi’s ironic comment harked back to the prophet Isaiah’s bright vision of a coming paradise on earth: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Brown—and Teller—turned Rabi’s irony into pure optimism, and embraced Isaiah’s vision. Project Plowshare was born. Fusion power, even in a vessel as crude as a hydrogen bomb, could make the world a better place. The Livermore scientists quickly set to work figuring out what engineering projects were suitable for nuclear ditch-digging.

The ideas started coming. Build a new Suez. Dig a new Panama Canal. Cut a waterway across Thailand. Excavate a harbor in North Africa or in Alaska. Blow up rapids to make rivers navigable. Cut trenches to help irrigate crops. Straighten the route of the Santa Fe Railroad. Mine coal and rare minerals. Free oil and gas reserves. “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us,” Teller wrote. Mines and trenches were just the obvious applications. Teller also suggested using hydrogen bombs to change the weather, to melt ice to yield fresh water, and to mass-produce diamonds. (Another unconventional suggestion attributed to him was to close off the Strait of Gibraltar, making the Mediterranean a lake suitable for irrigating crops.) Ted Taylor, a bomb designer, argued that nuclear bombs would be able to drive a rocket into deep space, even to other stars.
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Teller even found the idea of bombing the moon incredibly enticing. “One will probably not resist for long the temptation to shoot at the moon . . . to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause,” he wrote.

By 1957, scientists had scads of ideas for peaceful uses of hydrogen bombs. The next step was to figure out whether these grand schemes could possibly work. Could fusion bombs carve canals and harbors, much less turn the Mediterranean into a freshwater lake? They could only find out by running experiments.

In September 1957, the United States performed an underground weapons test: Plumbbob Rainier. A small nuclear bomb, only 1.7 kilotons, was buried under the surface of the Nevada desert. When the device went off, the earth jumped a few inches and then settled. Scientists later saw that the bomb had vaporized rock to make a one-hundred-foot hole underground. From the Plowshare scientists’ point of view, it was a stunning success: nuclear bombs could indeed break up rock and change the landscape, with little release of radiation into the environment. It was time to try to change the Earth.

During the summer of 1958, Edward Teller flew to Alaska to unveil a new “nuclear engineering” project: Project Chariot. Using two large one-megaton bombs and four smaller hundred-kiloton ones, Teller hoped to carve a large harbor on the northwestern coast of Alaska. He pitched the project as an economic boon: the harbor would help Alaskans with fishing and with transporting Alaskan coal by sea. Locals were very skeptical. They had good reason to be.

Despite Teller’s slick sales job, the harbor made little economic sense. It would be icebound for most of the year, no substantial fishing was done nearby that would be helped by a harbor, and the coal would have to be transported by rail to the docks—via a railroad that would cost a staggering $100 million to build. Alaskans were wary of Teller’s grand scheme for another reason, too. Fallout.

 

 

Ever since Hiroshima, scientists had known of the deadly aftereffects of nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb had left thousands crippled—burned and blighted by the invisible radiation that streamed from the bomb, harboring cancers and genetic defects that would linger for years after the war had ended.

An exploding nuclear bomb is a veritable treasure trove of radioactive debris: the unfissioned uranium and plutonium from a bomb’s primary as well as lighter radioactive atoms left behind by the uranium and plutonium that did fission. A great burst of neutrons also accompanies a large blast; these neutrons strike surrounding atoms—in the atmosphere, in the dirt, in people—with great force. Occasionally these neutrons stick, changing once-stable atoms into radioactive ones. Neutrons can turn ordinary material into a radioactive mess, a phenomenon known as neutron activation. Neutron-activated material, catapulted high into the air, falls to earth downwind of a nuclear explosion, irradiating anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with this fallout. (Radiation strips electrons from DNA and alters its structure, killing cells and causing cancers.) If a nuclear explosion is powerful enough, it sends radioactive debris so high into the atmosphere that fallout can descend halfway around the globe.

As radioactive as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs were, the multimegaton blasts of fusion weapons were much worse. The world got a taste of their deadly potential in 1954 with the Castle Bravo nuclear accident.

At 6:45 AM on March 1, 1954, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb; ground zero was a reef in Bikini atoll. The explosion was much bigger than expected—fifteen megatons, the largest explosion yet—roughly equivalent to one thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs. The fireball pulverized the coral reef, sending pieces flying thousands of feet into the air.

By 8:00 AM, “pinhead-sized white and gritty snow” began to shower the American fleet observing the test. This was highly radioactive fallout. The radiation levels on the ships rose rapidly, and the fleet immediately steamed south to escape, but not before more than twenty sailors received radiation burns, and thousands more had been exposed to fallout. Fifteen minutes later, the snow began to fall on a Japanese fishing vessel, the
Daigo Fukuryu Maru
. The whole crew was exposed. (The captain died shortly thereafter, the first person killed by a fusion weapon.)
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Within hours, the eastward-drifting cloud dropped fallout on the Rongelap atoll and some other nearby, inhabited islands. The navy evacuated more than six hundred people, many of whom developed “raw, weeping lesions” from the radiation.

It was a public relations nightmare. AEC chairman Lewis Strauss tried to reassure the public that the island natives were “well and happy,” but it was hard to hide the truth, and the photographs of burned islanders, from the press. The newspapers had lurid details; they even told of how the ship’s cargo of radioactive fish was put up for sale on the Japanese market. (A
New York Times
subhead, “Radioactive Fish Sought In Japan,” seemed like something from a B movie. It was hardly good press for American nuclear scientists.)
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