by Craig Nelson
Serviceman Michael Harris: “The explosion was going to be behind us. The major reminded us that this was essential, as he had done so many times before. Face the blast, he said, and our eyes could be damaged permanently, even if they were closed. And not just our eyes. Although he never did get specific about what other body parts might be affected. The disembodied voice repeated the warning again and again over the loudspeaker. ‘Don’t turn around before the countdown reaches zero. Don’t turn around after the countdown reaches zero. Don’t turn around until you are told it is safe to turn around.’ We stood at attention. And paid attention. Lined up as instructed. Backs to the ocean. Following orders. Careful to avoid damage. The countdown and the disembodied voice: ‘Four, three, two, one, zero.’ The flash of light. The low, distant rumble. The shaking of the earth. And guess what? The pilot missed the target, but our eyes hit the target. We didn’t have to turn around after thirty seconds. The fireball and the mushroom cloud were right there in front of us. We goggle-less enlisted men were facing ground zero. A result of pilot error. Major Maxwell gathered us together to explain: ‘You win a few and you lose a few and sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want. When that happens, you take it on the chin like a man and start all over again.’ ”
Additionally, the Livermore physicists had missed an important part of the equation. They thought it would be a 5-megaton blast, but instead it was a 14.8 Goliath with a four-mile-diameter fireball. Plasma physicist Marshall Rosenbluth: “I was on a ship that was thirty miles away and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us. I got ten rads of radiation from it. It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some madman would look like. You know, the surface, with the cortex convolutions, and so on. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It spread until the edge of it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.”
Serviceman Michael Harris: “A mixture of radioactive materials, including pulverized coral, was forced high into the air, dispersed over a wide area by the winds, and showered down on hundreds if not thousands of people, covering them with white, gritty, hail-like ‘snow.’ Otherwise known as fallout. At least 236 Marshall Islanders, 23 Japanese fishermen, and a minimum of 31 Americans were dangerously exposed. The victims inhaled ‘hot’ ash, and radioactive particles whitened their hair, clung to their skin, and caused radiation burns. They developed nausea, diarrhea, itching, eyes that smarted and watered, and a significant decrease of white corpuscles in the blood. Eighteen Marshallese children died (after playing in the ‘snow’) and so did Aikichi Kuboyama, a Japanese fisherman aboard a boat with the unfortunate name of Lucky Dragon.”
Though Washington denied it was responsible, “as a token of sympathy” a check for 2.5 million yen was sent to the dead fisherman’s widow. Unfortunately, Lucky Dragon’s irradiated tuna was sold into the market before anyone knew why the crew’s hair was falling out.
Bravo was the first of the Castle series, which continued with such designs as Runt, Shrimp, and Nectar. Able and Baker were detonated to see if they could annihilate a flotilla of ninety ships hosting 57 guinea pigs, 109 mice, 146 pigs, 176 goats, and 3,030 rats. They could. Publicity surrounding the tests included the announcement of a revolution in women’s swimwear: “Like a bomb, the bikini is small and devastating!”
George Cowan watched Baker from a B-17: “An Air Force photographer was on board. He removed the door on the port side of the plane and looked directly toward the zero point. He carefully strapped himself and his equipment to buckles by the side of the door. We were supposed to be at least two miles from the detonation point but our pilot was obviously creeping closer. The voice of the test manager began the last ten-second countdown. At ‘zero’ the brilliant flash was dimmed by the overlying water, but the entire bay seemed to rise toward us. Then the shock wave arrived. It would’ve stripped the wings off a plane less sturdy than a B-17. The photographer hadn’t practiced this part of the exercise. He and his equipment tumbled out the door and dangled outside on straps. We pulled him and his cameras back in. [His] work entered the history books. His picture of the huge ‘wedding cake’ of water and vapor rising from the bay, with ships decorating the cake fringes, was republished countless times.”
Fifty years later, a team of biologists returned to Bikini in the submersible M.Y. Octopus to study the long-term effects of such massive doses of radiation. They were shocked to discover the only remaining trace of twenty-three thermonuclear detonations were in the Marshall Islanders’ tombstones, which were radiant because they were made of absorbing sandstone. The lagoon waters were completely free of taint, with dosimeters not registering a blip above normal even when testing one of the sunken target ships, Saratoga. The area’s marine life was extravagantly abundant, and as far as the investigators could tell, the ocean had miraculously diluted the massive amounts of cesium left by Castle and washed itself clean.
At the same time that the world was learning about an exciting new swimming suit and weapons beyond human imagination, the era’s leading geneticists, Thomas Morgan and Hermann Muller, were irradiating the babies and grandbabies of fruit flies, with alarming results. The simultaneous news of Lucky Dragon and fruit-fly mutations would merge into a new story line in popular culture beginning in 1954, when atomic lizard Godzilla rampaged through Tokyo. While the rest of the world found Godzilla’s low-budget effects laughable, the Japanese, targets once again of American radioactive poisons, watched in silence, many breaking down in sobs. In 1957, Incredible Shrinking Man related the saga of a sailor who found himself engulfed in a mysterious cloud and grew ever smaller until he shrank into nothingness itself. After a New Mexico test site accidentally created twelve-foot ants in Them!, a scientist explained that this would become an everyday event in our modern atomic world. On TV screens The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone dramatized atomic holocaust, genetic mutations, radioactive powers, and vague, invisible, indefinable terrors. In 1964’s Fail-Safe, Pentagon consultant Walter Matthau predicts nuclear holocaust would be survived by file clerks and hardened criminals, but one of America’s most glamorous socialites tells him that he’s all wrong, that no one will survive a nuclear war, and that’s the beauty of it:
“I’ve heard nuclear war called a lot of things . . . never beautiful.”
“People are afraid to call it that, but that’s what they feel.”
Beginning in the 1960s, Marvel Comics created a new America where radiation had nothing to do with terrors about the end of the world and everything to do with the forging of superheroes. In Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and the Hulk, superheroes were all created through some form of atomic mishap, while Spider-Man combined a child’s fantasy of spiders as aggressive, toxic, and voracious in attacking human beings with radiation, the magical force that in the world of Marvel could make anything happen. It was a brilliant remaking of atomic superstition, and like all myths it worked at the intersection of doubt and faith. Do people really believe irradiation can produce a Spider-Man? No. Do they know for an absolute fact that this is impossible? Not really.
The overwhelming power of Bravo pushed the Soviets to transcend sloika and create a weapon of equal force. Within a few weeks, Arzamas-16 physicists were doing the final calculations for their own multimegaton implosion, after having uncovered on their own the Teller-Ulam fission-fusion-fission design. On November 22, 1955, their version of Mike was ready, and it was a remarkable success. Physicist German Goncharov: “Immediately, it felt as if you had put your head into an open oven. The heat was unbearable. Then we had this impressive view of the fireball, the mushroom cloud, all of it on a huge scale. What was shocking was that this great scene was unfolding in absolute silence. And when the shock wave approached us, we dropped to the ground. Thunder. Stones were flying.
Someone was hit by a large rock. There were several claps of thunder and the ground was shaking. I remember when we arrived back at our hotel, the windows and doors had been blown out. It felt as if the place had been hit by an air raid. But our joy was indescribable. We started celebrating immediately. We took out all our supplies. Someone brought alcohol. There was a sense of fulfillment, of having completed our task. That this beautiful, complex device—and that’s what it was from a physicist’s point of view—had worked was a triumph of science, of course. We all understood that.”
Both Moscow and Washington now possessed the means to rid the world of humankind. They would spend the next five decades menacing each other with thermonuclear annihilation, while internally trying to solve a political riddle: If you already have the biggest weapon in human history, but a military insatiable for growth, what do you do next?
12
The Delicate Balance of Terror
THE rise of thermonuclear arsenals triggered consequences unforeseen by either their biggest supporters or gravest detractors, as the major nations of the earth were now armed with a weapon so grotesquely overpowered that, no matter what the circumstance, only a lunatic would deploy it. Super, indeed. Yet, just as the genocidal devastation of these ever-greater devices defied human reason—bombs, torpedoes, and missiles forever expanding in omnipotence, efficacy, and power—so, too, did overseeing these cataclysmic weapons seem to inflict a type of mental disability on its bureaucrats. Ardent Cold Warriors on both sides of the Iron Curtain found themselves beset with an ordnance version of the dysmorphia seen in some bodybuilders. No matter how many bombs they had or how big their explosives grew, they needed more, and bigger: enough was never enough. No one in charge seemed to grasp the point that Winston Churchill made resonant: “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.” The only strategic logic each side followed was, if Washington had enough Bombs to make the rubble bounce and bounce again, then Moscow needed enough to make it bounce, bounce, and bounce a third time, which incited the USA to then need at least four, but better yet five, bounces, and this math would continue on as infinitely as the half-life of uranium.
Nikita Khrushchev made a joking threat of this: “I remember President Kennedy once stated . . . that the United States had the nuclear missile capacity to wipe out the Soviet Union two times over, while the Soviet Union had enough atomic weapons to wipe out the United States only once. . . . But I’m not complaining. . . . We’re satisfied to be able to finish off the United States the first time round. Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We’re not a bloodthirsty people.” His generals and admirals, however, did not at all share this perspective. They wanted, always, to one-up the Americans with ever more bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.
This aspect in the history of arms escalation reveals a deep paradox in the administration of every American president. After three months in office, Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
Yet, simultaneously under Ike’s watch, when the nation was—in practice if not in demeanor—at peace, America made for itself a surfeit of Armageddon. In 1950, the country had around 400 atomic bombs; by 1955, she had 2,280, twenty times more than the Russians and the start of a spiral of warhead escalation:
1957
3,500
1959
7,000
1961
2,305
1963
23,000
1967
32,500
Over the Cold War’s four decades, every American president except Nixon publicly spoke of his regret at this state of affairs, yet under the watch of every president, including Nixon, the tools of apocalypse exponentially grew. John Kennedy’s science adviser Jerome Wiesner discussed 1963’s twenty-three-thousand-bomb arsenal: “I will give you a simple piece of calculus. For most cities it is reasonable to equate one bomb in one city. It would take a bigger bomb for Los Angeles or New York. . . . In any event, it does not take many. And if you ask yourself, ‘Where would you put three hundred large nuclear weapons to be most destructive?’ You run out of vital cities and towns and railroad junctions and power plants before you get to three hundred. The same thing is true in the United States and the Soviet Union. If I was not trying to be conservative, I would say fifty bombs, properly placed, would probably put a society out of business, and three hundred in each of the two countries leading the arms race would destroy their civilizations. That is a pretty clear-cut fact.” Yet, his president did not ask the Pentagon why it had to have those twenty-three thousand Bombs when it only needed three hundred.
Immediately after Nagasaki, Yale political scientists Bernard Brodie and Jacob Viner began to develop theories of nuclear strategy to try to answer Oppenheimer’s question of what the atom is good for in battle beyond Bradley’s “psychological” use. Viner almost immediately arrived at a revolutionary concept: “The atomic bomb makes surprise an unimportant element of warfare. Retaliation in equal terms is unavoidable and in this sense the atomic bomb is a war deterrent, a peace-making force.” It took a year before Brodie was able to see this point, with the 1946 paper that would make him famous, “The Atomic Bomb and American Security”: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” He also echoed Oppenheimer’s math, arguing, “If two thousand bombs in the hand of either party is enough to destroy entirely the economy of the other, the fact that one side has six thousand and the other two thousand will be of relatively small significance.”
The State Department was so taken with these ideas that Brodie was made an agency consultant on nuclear control, but Pentagon chiefs did not share his viewpoint. By 1950, Vandenberg’s air staff had created a strategy of nuclear bombing three categories of Soviet targets—liquid-fuel refineries, electrical power stations, and nuclear energy plants—a strategy it called Killing a Nation. The Strategic Air Command’s Curtis LeMay predicted the next war would be nuclear—“If there is another war, we will be first, instead of last to be attacked, and the war will start with bombs and missiles falling on the United States”—and the American defense would be conducted and her atomic victory won by his global force of nuclear bombers. His idea was to strike the USSR with the entirety of his arsenal, killing over 77 million people in 188 Soviet cities—three-fourths of the population—in thirty days. But instead of Killing a Nation, he called it the Sunday Punch. Now at State, Bernard Brodie countered that the air staff was wrong—since it didn’t know enough about the Soviet Union to be sure that it had the full target list to kill a nation—and that SAC was wrong—since why would the United States use all of its nuclear weapons at once; why not hold some in reserve to use as a coercive threat? Again, the military wasn’t interested.
LeMay’s first major decision on becoming SAC chief in 1948, in fact, was to have the whole Strategic Air Command simulate a Sunday Punch against Dayton, Ohio—“a realistic combat mission, at combat altitudes, for every airplane in SAC that we could get in the air.” The exercise was an out-and-out failure, LeMay calling it “just about the darkest night in American military aviation history. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed. Not one. . . . I’ll admit the weather was bad. There were a lot of thunderstorms in the area; that certainly was a factor. But on top of this, our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, far as that goes. Mo
st of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs.” His men practiced again and again, targeting Baltimore as military intelligence insisted she resembled Soviet cities, and dummy-bombing San Francisco over six hundred times in one month. LeMay: “We attacked every good-sized city in the United States. People were down there in their beds, and they didn’t know what was going on upstairs. . . . My determination was to put everyone in SAC into this frame of mind: We are at war now! So, if we actually did go to war the very next morning, or even that night, no preliminary motions would be wasted.”
As seen when he kept his warheads after threatening America’s foes in the Korean War on behalf of Eisenhower, LeMay had little regard for civilian oversight of the armed forces. He decided the USAF’s sniffer planes patrolling the Soviet Union’s borders weren’t enough; he wanted aerial reconnaissance, which he started in early 1950. Almost immediately, Soviet fighters brought down an American PB4Y-2 eavesdropping over Soviet territory, killing ten crewmen. As the Kremlin could interpret these flights as acts of war, Truman had them banned. But after getting approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Winston Churchill in March 1952, in exchange for English crews conducting reconnaissance flights over the USSR and sharing the results with him, LeMay gave the British the best high-altitude American craft currently in production, the B-45. This sidestepping of Truman continued for two years, ending only when the US resumed its own direct surveillance, notably with the infamous and spectacular U-2.
Before the switch to satellites, the Soviets brought down at least twenty US reconnaissance craft, killing an estimated one hundred to two hundred Americans. But these flights weren’t just for surveillance, as LeMay revealed after his retirement from the service: “There was a time in the 1950s when we could have won a war against Russia. It would have cost us essentially the accident rate of the flying time, because their defenses were pretty weak. One time in the 1950s we flew all of the reconnaissance aircraft that SAC possessed over Vladivostok at high noon. Two reconnaissance airplanes saw MiGs, but there were no interceptions made. It was well planned, too—crisscrossing paths of all the reconnaissance airplanes. Each target was hit by at least two, and usually three, reconnaissance airplanes to make sure we got pictures of it. We practically mapped the place up there with no resistance at all. We could have launched bombing attacks, planned and executed just as well, at that time.”