The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  At Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury succeeded Robert Oppenheimer and invited Edward Teller to replace Hans Bethe as Theoretical Division chief. Ever since relinquishing implosion calculations to Klaus Fuchs and inspiring Oppenheimer to move him from Bethe to Fermi, Teller had continuously been working on his Super, the great thermonuclear fission-fusion design that would obsess him for decades, which would be, as he saw it, the weapon giving the United States of America the ultimate defense against dictators like Hitler and Stalin.

  Following the success of Trinity, Teller believed his Super would be put into fast-track development as the next evolution in atomic weaponry. In their last months in New Mexico together, Teller and Fermi had begun theoretical analysis of thermonuclear ignition, predicting that one cubic meter of liquid deuterium would explode with the force of 10 million tons of TNT. But when Ed asked Oppie to support postwar hydrogen bomb research, Robert coldly replied, “I neither can nor will do so.” Then, instead of joining Teller to create the next generation of nuclear weapons, almost all of Los Alamos’s most significant physicists returned to civilian life—Wigner going home to Princeton; Alvarez, Seaborg, and Segrè to Berkeley; Kistiakowsky to Harvard; and Bethe to Cornell. As Teller saw it, they had lost “their appetites for weapons work,” and only he held fast to the faith. It was the beginnings of a conflict that would rend the scientific community for the next four decades.

  On September 28, 1945, the Scientific Advisory Panel of Stimson’s Interim Committee—Oppenheimer, Compton, Lawrence, and Fermi—recommended “that no such effort [comparable to the Manhattan Project] should be invested in [the fusion] problem at the present time, but that the existence of the possibility should not be forgotten, and that interest in the fundamental questions involved should be maintained.” Oppie reported at the meeting, “General Groves told me very briefly . . . that, with things as they were, the work at Los Alamos ought to continue, but this did not apply to the Super,” while Conant, who had been a staunch supporter of weapons development before Hiroshima, said that they had built one Frankenstein and didn’t need another, that continuing thermonuclear R&D would be “over my dead body.” Compton explained their fusion decision to Vice President Henry Wallace: “We should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”

  Fermi knew that Teller had a very different opinion and asked him to write to the committee with his thoughts; Teller responded on October 31, proving himself a pioneer in the Washington tradition of threat inflation: “The time needed [for another country to produce thermonuclear weapons] may not be much longer than the time needed by them to produce an atomic bomb. . . . There is among my scientific colleagues some hesitancy as to the advisability of this development on the grounds that it might make the international problems even more difficult than they are now. My opinion is that this is a fallacy. If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it.” This brief did not overturn the committee’s overwhelmingly negative view. At around this time, Oppenheimer wrote Ernest Lawrence that nuclear weapons should be outlawed and shunned, “just like poison gases after the last war,” but Lawrence, along with Luis Alvarez, still supported fusion research wholeheartedly, and this was the moment that would split the alumni of Los Alamos into two camps: arms race or arms control.

  With support coming from nowhere, Teller gave up and joined Fermi in Chicago, where he was reunited with many old friends and colleagues, coauthored thirteen scientific articles, and appeared regularly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His life was so good that his friend and colleague Gene Wigner insisted, “The years after Los Alamos and until the renewal of his preoccupation with national security were perhaps Teller’s most fruitful years scientifically.” Leo Szilard very much also wanted to return to Chicago, but Enrico let colleagues know that there would be no room for him.

  In time, Szilard agreed with Fermi’s take that nuclear science had matured and looked for another field with the potential for world-changing breakthroughs. By 1947, he was studying molecular biology at Cold Spring Harbor. His most significant work probed the relationship of brain chemistry, electricity, and memory, but as before in Berlin and then Chicago, he was more useful serving as a sounding board and a spark of inspiration for others than as a working lab scientist. About creator’s remorse, he joked that having to watch MGM’s 1947 The Beginning or the End—with John Gallaudet as Szilard, Joseph Calleia as Fermi, Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer, and Leslie Groves as primary consultant—was more than enough atonement for the physicists who’d crafted the Bomb.

  In October 1946, Congress was considering a bill that would keep atomic arms development under the Pentagon’s command in an agency headed by Leslie Groves. After learning this, Leo Szilard and Edward Condon arranged for scientists at Chicago and Oak Ridge to send hundreds of telegrams to their congressmen and went to Washington to wage legislative war. Everyone in DC would meet with Ed and Leo since they were “Los Alamos scientists”—and, assuming their phone calls were being monitored, they ended each conversation with “And God bless General Groves!” Staggeringly, they won. On January 1, 1947, Truman signed a bill that transferred the nation’s atomic powers from the War Department to a new civilian agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), headed by David Lilienthal, who’d previously overseen the Tennessee Valley Authority; Oppenheimer was named chairman of the agency’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and began his new life as a man-about-Washington, welcomed into the highest echelons of political power.

  Bush, Conant, Oppenheimer, and Lilienthal then met constantly to forge an international policy that would prevent a global arms race, and some of their ideas were included in an American presentation by Bernard Baruch (who called it “the last, best hope of earth”) to the just-created United Nations Atomic Energy Commission on June 14, 1946. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, however, was so outraged by one of their ideas—a foreign body (a UN committee) controlling an avenue of American defense—that he included subclauses to maintain the American nuclear monopoly for years to come, something that the Soviets could never accept. Without Byrnes’s machinations, the arms race could have been stopped before it had even begun.

  Since America was the only nation with nuclear weapons, and since she expected to maintain this status indefinitely because her scientists knew “atomic secrets,” it was difficult for most Americans to even understand the point of arms control. The United States was the richest country in the world and, being the only one with the Bomb, the most powerful, and to many, it seemed that this would be the way things would remain for decades to come. Oppenheimer, fearful of the threat of a global outbreak of nuclear arms, and Teller, worrying about a nefarious Uncle Joe Stalin wielding incomprehensible hydrogen weapons, seemed obscure or old-fashioned or even neurotic.

  Instead, in the wakes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the revelation of their new status as a global superpower that had won World War II, the American public adopted nuclear weapons with the same popular enthusiasm that the world had greeted radium three decades before and X-rays at the start of the epoch. Fat Man and Little Boy became popular salt and pepper shakers; fluoroscopes were used to reveal a proper shoe size; uranium clinics offered cures for bursitis; and budding preteen chemists could experiment in the basement with their own Atomic Energy Lab while reading Atomic Bunny comics. Mailing in Kix cereal box tops and fifteen cents would get you 1947’s Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring, a plastic spinthariscope in the shape of an atom bomb that held polonium sparking a screen—“genuine atoms split to smithereens!” The AEC organized a popular fair spread over New York’s Central Park, “Man and the Atom,” sponsored by such nuclear contractors as Westinghouse, which gave youngsters a comic book, Dagwood Splits the Atom, whose hero had been chosen by Leslie Groves himself. Eventually one AEC chief, Lewis Strauss, would predict that in the next decade “it is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too
cheap to meter; will know of great famines in the world only as a matter of history; will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds; and will experience a life span far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace.”

  By the summer of 1948, Edward Teller’s Chicago idyll was upended by news of the Soviet invasions of Hungary, his birthplace, and Czechoslovakia, with its uranium mother lode at St. Joachimsthal. Communists were victorious in China, and soon enough, they would successfully blockade Berlin. It appeared to many that America’s foes were taking over the world, that the United States was in real danger. “Russia was traditionally the enemy,” John von Neumann said of his countrymen. “I think you will find, generally speaking, among Hungarians an emotional fear and dislike of Russia.” Had Edward Teller been certain that a hydrogen bomb was impossible, that nobody could make it, he would have set his sights elsewhere. But like Leo Szilard’s thinking of Hitler, Ed was tormented by what might happen if the Americans failed to create such a mighty weapon, and the totalitarians succeeded.

  Then came the call from the mesa: Los Alamos wanted Teller back. Director Norris Bradbury “was rather diffident in his approach to the scientists who had left,” Stan Ulam said, explaining the ironic origins of what would turn out to be an epic clash of Hungarian physicist and Polish mathematician. “He felt that they should recognize by themselves how important for the country and the world it was for them to come back. As a result, although he wanted to, he did not like to ask people like . . . Teller to visit. It was actually left to me, with his consent, to write such invitations. . . . Thus, in a way I was instrumental in bringing Teller back to Los Alamos.” Teller asked Oppenheimer what he thought; Oppie encouraged him to return; and in August 1948, Teller replied to Bradbury, “[I am] giving most serious consideration to this possibility. . . . The main reason that attracts me is the great importance of the work on the atomic bomb. I fully realize the menacing international situation and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism.”

  In the wake of his return to New Mexico, Ed Teller would so turn against Stan Ulam that Ulam would give him a photograph and inscribe it To My Enemy, while a student of Ed’s, Freeman Dyson, would conclude that Teller was “a good example of the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.”

  At a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London in September of 1945, Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes decided to try using America’s atomic monopoly to cow Soviet representative Vyacheslav Molotov: “You don’t know Southerners. We carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” Molotov seemed unconcerned. Later that night, he in turn was joshing with Britain’s delegate and suddenly blurted out, “You know, we have the atomic bomb.” No one knew what to think; Byrnes assumed Molotov was bluffing. In fact he was, but only by degree.

  The previous July 24, at Potsdam, Truman remembered that he “casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” “I was sure,” Churchill said, “that [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told . . . his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end. As we were waiting for our cars, I found myself near Truman. ‘How did it go?’ I asked. ‘He never asked a question,’ he replied.” Jimmy Byrnes later explained that this was a deliberate feint, that the American president didn’t want the Soviet premier to rush in against Japan when that war had already been won to claim spoils, as he was doing so furiously across Eastern Europe. But Stalin’s apparent indifference at this momentous news had a good explanation—he knew about America’s nuclear weapons program long before Truman did, since the Georgian had the world’s best espionage agency, and the American didn’t have a high enough security clearance before inheriting the Oval Office.

  The day after Enola Gay struck Hiroshima, a Soviet nuclear physicist remembered, “Stalin summoned [atomic bomb chief Igor] Kurchatov and accused him of not demanding enough for maximum acceleration of the work. Kurchatov answered, ‘So much is destroyed, so many people perished. The country is on starvation rations and everything is in shortage.’ ” He barely knew the full horror: Over 20 million Russians had died in World War II, and another 10 million had been executed by Beria’s NKVD. Twenty-five million more were homeless; one hundred thousand farms, seventy-two thousand villages, and thirty-one thousand factories had been demolished; the Russian people were indeed starving. Yet, “Stalin said irritably to his Oppenheimer, ‘If the baby doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs. Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals.’ ”

  During 1946, Igor Kurchatov created—with help from his NKVD spy network and Stalin’s urgent priority of no refusals—a Soviet copy of Fermi’s Chicago pumpkin patch at Arzamas-16, the Russian Los Alamos. Following Fermi’s technique, Kurchatov built a series of ever-larger subcritical piles, and just as Anderson and Zinn had seen on the evening of their creation, it became clear to the Soviets on December 24, 1946, that adding one more layer would trigger fission.

  Physicists B. G. Dubovsky and I. S. Panasyuk were there for Christmas, and their memories are almost a perfect echo of Chicago Pile-1’s birth, with shutdown rods slowly removed from the pile, but in this case, the winching was done by Kurchatov himself: “We were all very anxious, of course. . . . Everyone was silent. The only sounds were the clicks of neutron counts from the loudspeakers and Kurchatov’s brisk orders. As the seconds passed, the graph showed an almost linear growth of reactor power. For the first time the sound turned into a roar. The indicator lamps no longer blinked but burned with a reddish-yellow light. . . . The tension became extreme when the second boron trifluoride counter, which was located within the underground control room, began producing more frequent clicks than its background of two or three per minute—an increase which meant that neutrons from the reactor had penetrated the thick layers of earth and cement and reached the room.”

  A few days later, Beria came to see his new miracle. Stalin’s whip was disappointed that the only sign of magical weaponry was the clicks and flashes of a Geiger-like counter. When Kurchatov told his boss he couldn’t go into the room with a burning reactor since it was too dangerous, Beria became suspicious that he was being tricked, that this whole nuclear operation was some kind of fraud.

  Two and a half years later in the summer of 1949, a coal-powered locomotive carried First Lightning, its scientists, its technicians, and its soldiers across two thousand miles to the northeast of Kazakhstan, to an isolated desert steppe swept in feather grass and wormwood. A hundred-foot tower had been built for the test and, beside it, a concrete hull for assembling the first Soviet atomic bomb. Nearby were recently built tunnels, bridges, train cars, brick and wooden houses, tanks, and livestock—targets to test the weapon’s destructive power.

  The blast was scheduled for 6:00 a.m. on August 29, 1949, but, as at Trinity, desert thunderstorms delayed history. At the countdown, Beria told Kurchatov he was certain it wouldn’t work; the scientist tried to appear confident. Then, after witnessing the explosion of ten suns, Kurchatov merely said, exactly as Oppenheimer had, that it worked. A technician later insisted that if it had been a fizzle, everyone there would have been shot.

  In New Mexico, the bomb had fused the sand into a green glass; here, a scientist reported the array field as a glass plate “sparkling bluish black.” The still-suspicious Beria was attended by two “journalists” who had witnessed an American Pacific test, so they could confirm that Kurchatov’s explosion was authentic, that the Kremlin indeed had her own nuclear device.
Beria hugged Kurchatov and then immediately called his confirmation eyewitnesses: “Did it look like the American one? How much? Haven’t we slipped up? Did Kurchatov humbug us? Quite the same? Good! Good! So may I report [to] Stalin that the experiment was a success? Good! Good!”

  Beria insisted that Stalin be woken up to hear this great news. But the dictator was angry: “What do you want? Why are you calling?”

  “Everything went right.”

  “I know already.” Stalin hung up.

  Lewis Strauss, the financier who’d worked with Leo Szilard in the Hungarian’s first years in America, was now an AEC commissioner who firmly believed that America needed a detection system to discover if any other country detonated a nuclear weapon. Private company Tracerlab believed that a test’s atmospheric fallout would agglomerate into particles that could be detected in some manner, but at a meeting with Oppenheimer and Teller, the physicists insisted that such a thing was impossible, that only sonic and seismic detection would work. With Strauss’s encouragement Tracerlab technicians set up an experiment to test their thesis anyway at a series of American detonations called Sandstone on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, where sniffer planes with fuselage ducts lined with paper filters flew across the jet stream, collecting atomic fallout. By measuring isotopes captured in the filters, Tracerlab could use half-life calculations to determine when the isotopes had been born. If all the birthdays were the same, than they must have been released in the aftermath of a nuclear device. The test results were so spectacular that in July 1948 the air force told the AEC that it had the technology and could detect nuclear detonations.

  Outfitted with Tracerlab’s sniffer technology, the 375th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, three teams of B-29s based in Alaska, regularly patrolled from their home base across the Arctic and down to Japan in an arc downwind from the coastal mass of the USSR. On September 3, 1949, a member of the 375th was flying east of Kamchatka and came home with paper filters registering three hundred times normal. The analysis was so clear that, combined with rainwater tests by the navy, a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy staffer could track First Lightning’s fallout cloud drifting across the Pacific, then splitting over the midwestern United States and Canada, with the southern half floating to Washington, where it hovered for two or three days, showering the district with rain and radioactive debris. Named Joe One in honor of Stalin by officials in the United States, Tracerlab calculated that the explosion had taken place at 6:00 a.m. on August 29 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. They were off by an hour. The Americans were shocked at how quickly they had lost their nuclear monopoly—Truman just couldn’t believe “those Asiatics” had built a nuclear weapon—and Stalin in turn was flabbergasted that Washington could detect his Bomb set off in the middle of nowhere.