by Craig Nelson
The great myth of nuclear arms is that they are different from conventional weapons in some magical way beyond their radioactive poisons. This was proved to be a fantasy at the very dawn of the Atomic Age, with Oppenheimer’s lunchtime comment at Stimson’s Interim Committee—he said the sole difference between atomic bombs and conventional explosives was that all living creatures within two-thirds of a mile would be irradiated, and that the look of the explosion, with its ten suns of light, shock wave, purple ionized air, boiling flames, and mushroom cloud was unforgettable. The fantasy that nuclear weapons are categorically different was also disproved through Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign. On March 9, 1945, 334 Superfortress flights dropped two thousand tons of incendiary bombs, destroying over sixteen square miles of Tokyo . . . more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined . . . killing almost eighty-four thousand men, women, and children—more deaths than either atomic bomb dealt. In the aftermath, Hiroshima’s atomic deaths were certainly no worse than Tokyo’s fire. Besides the iconic multicolored mushroom cloud and the dissemination of fallout, there is no significant difference except for size. LeMay could’ve inflicted the same damage to Hiroshima as Little Boy with 210 conventional firebomb strikes, and to Nagasaki as Fat Man with 120. Even the physics is telling, as the energy force of radioactive bombs is 40 to 50 percent blast, 30 to 50 percent heat, and 10 percent radiation . . . meaning 90 percent the same as conventional weapons.
Nuclear policy adviser Linton Brooks: “Fifty years of telling ourselves that these things are different has sort of made them different. That is the mystique of nuclear weapons.” That, and nothing more. The only distinction nuclear arms have as weapons rises from our fantasies and ignorance, from our self-created myths.
The costs of developing and maintaining nuclear warheads are ridiculously onerous, especially as they are purely symbolic and psychological. Little Boy and Fat Man may have been successful as proofs of concept, but turning their technology into usable weapons has proved impossible. How, beyond the original demonstration of their power, could atomic bombs be used as weapons in war? Oppenheimer again made this point: “It is a job that calls for a great deal of imagination to think what is the atom good for in war.”
Seven decades later and we still don’t have an answer, with Oppie’s question only raised in magnitude by Teller’s Super bombs. For if fission bombs can’t be used on the battlefield, of what use is thermonuclear, besides threatening your neighbors or destroying the islands of the Pacific and the deserts of Kazakhstan and Nevada? Mike was eight times as powerful and its fireball thirty times the size of Hiroshima’s, with a resulting mushroom cloud one hundred miles in width. Mike’s successors were even more immense . . . and what could any military commander ever accomplish with such weapons? All of the theorizing from RAND, the Kremlin, and the Pentagon that went into Killing a Nation, Sunday Punch, Massive Retaliation, Flexible Response, Madman theory, the various SIOPs, the Triad Doctrine, Decapitation, Dead Hand . . . no one could answer this basic question. The only real strategy was Robert McNamara’s Mutual Assured Destruction—which many believe absolutely true—and Bernard Brodie’s point that “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,” which both the Pentagon and the Kremlin successfully ignored.
The history of atomic weapons will in time fall in line with the history of another weapon judged equally immoral. In 1911, Fritz Haber was made the head of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s chemistry division because of the epochal discovery that would bring him the Nobel Prize in chemistry—man-made ammonia, which as fertilizer became the foundation of modern agriculture. In 1914, the German high command begged for Haber’s help in synthesizing sodium nitrate, a critical component in munitions that an English naval blockade was keeping from its German foe. Haber found a way to make gun cotton without that ingredient, and this was his turning point as a scientist, for he was no longer bettering mankind with his research. In 1915, the army asked Haber for a method of driving enemy troops out of their trenches. Fritz suggested chlorine vapors, but that could be defeated by breathing through a wet handkerchief. So, he turned to poison gas, and by 1916 he’d developed phosgene, which killed in seconds, and mustard, which when not fatal, rendered men blind and lung-scarred.
Even though across the whole of World War I less than 1 percent of battlefield deaths came from these gases, and it took over a ton to make each kill, many reacted to Haber’s weapon with portents of doomsday . . . all exactly as would happen with nuclear arms. Winston Churchill announced that humanity “has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination,” and it was repeatedly explained to the public that in a mere hour Paris could be annihilated by a hundred planes each carrying a ton of gas, while London could be wholly destroyed with forty planes and tons. Just as antinuclear activists would one day scream epithets at the scientists of Los Alamos, so Haber’s colleague Albert Einstein called him a pathological criminal. Haber’s own wife agreed with Einstein, and after he refused to stop working on weapons, she killed herself. Today, everyone knows that employing poison gas in warfare is completely ineffective since, depending on the wind, it can kill as many of you as it does of them . . . exactly as would happen with atomic fallout. Eventually this kind of common sense will reach the owners of nuclear arms.
But what of the argument that the United States and various other nations need their thermonuclear fists to counter an atomic maniac? The fear of deranged tyrants with nuclear bombs has been with us since Joseph Stalin and First Lightning, but there has already been an acid test. On October 16, 1964, a leader with unlimited powers, who supported global terrorism, threatened the whole of Southeast Asia, battled the United States and India, and insisted that his 700 million citizens did not need to fear nuclear war with America, acquired atomic weapons. At the time, Mao Zedong made comments similar to those made by Fidel Castro to Khrushchev, that if the Chinese had to be martyred by the millions in a nuclear holocaust, it would be worth it to advance global socialism. Yet even Mao at his most ruthless and sociopathic never unleashed the Bomb, and neither did his historic comrade in mass murder Joseph Stalin.
The West was terrified when Russia got the Bomb, when China got the Bomb, when Cuba got atomic missiles, when India and Pakistan went nuclear, when the Kim dynasty of North Korea got theirs, and most recently when the rumblings came from Tehran. Yet, in nearly seven decades, nothing has happened. The only country that has ever attacked another with a nuclear device is the United States of America.
That the Atomic Age is now in its twilight can be seen with two examples: the history of a mountain, and of a mouse pad. Many passengers flying across the continental United States are amazed to discover how much of the country is naked and empty, and one of those big empty places is the Great Basin, home to the Nevada Test Site and within it, eighty miles from Las Vegas, the ridge known as Yucca Mountain.
Since the dawn of nuclear power, a fee has been added to American utility bills, totaling around $750 million a year, to finance a long-term storage facility for high-level nuclear waste. As of 1985, Congress has been redirecting the moneys from that nuclear tariff into Washington’s general budget instead of into the waste fund. France, Japan, and a number of other countries recycle their waste into usable fuel, but the United States, suffering from the comic-book fear that either Communists or terrorists might develop a sinister scheme and use our radiant trash against us, never has. From 1978 to 2008, the Department of Energy spent $9 billion studying Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the potential repository for high-level nuclear waste, originally with plans to open for business on January 31, 1998.
Because of delays, the United States now has more nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain could ever hold. When the site was legislated by Congress thirty-five years ago, Nevada had no senior congressional members to oppose it. Now, it has, and everyone in Nevada opposes it. With no atomic facilities
of their own, as well as their history of being a target for federal nuclear explosions, Nevadans did not want to be a burial ground for the radioactive garbage of thirty-nine other states.
Back in 1945, six weeks after Little Boy fell on Hiroshima, the city was again attacked, by the Makurazaki Typhoon, killing five thousand people. But in another example of this history’s blessed curses, the storm’s deluge washed away so much of the American radioactivity that Hiroshima recovered, and by 1963 over a million people were living there. After President Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on October 7, 1963, halting atmospheric tests, America’s Great Basin was not lucky enough to suffer a typhoon, so today, due to a nuclear history inflicted by Washington, Nevada is in worse shape than Hiroshima. And her residents are supposed to trust the federal government and private contractors with storing nuclear waste for ten thousand years?
Federal negotiator Richard Stallings met with Nevadan residents to discuss their worries: “It was a very hard sell. When people are terrified, they’re not concerned about facts. The perception was anything nuclear just scared people to death. Their thought is that it’s some kind of green, oozy stuff that’s spewing poison, that you get near it and you’ll die within minutes or hours. . . . You’re dealing with a waste product, and a waste product that has a tremendous half-life. I mean, we’re talking about a product that’s not going to be just around for a few hundred years, but thousands of years. . . . You can’t find any engineer that’s going to sign on to a document that this hole in the ground is going to be safe for ten thousand years or safe for even two hundred years. I mean, that’s impossible to do.”
In 2012, Nevada finally triumphed, and the Yucca facility was canceled. Now the US Department of Energy will pay $16.2 billion over the next seven years for abrogating its storage agreement to utilities. While the navy alone has amassed 100 million gallons of highly radioactive waste—the less potent by-products are being stored in a New Mexican facility known as WIPP—121 of the nation’s nuclear utilities are as of this writing stuck with holding 150 million pounds of waste in local pools—such as the 1,432 tons submerged at Indian Point, just outside New York City—exactly the same kinds of tanks that were such a threat during the crisis in Japan. In Washington, the issue is so politically mired beyond even the capital’s legendary gridlock that there is no foreseeable answer. After thinking about how trustworthy industry and government have historically been when the subject is nuclear, who wants a plutonium graveyard in his or her state?
Then there’s the mouse pad. In September 1953, the Gibertson Company began Picture Parade, a comic book to be purchased by grade schools for their students to quickly learn such topics as the United Nations, the first Thanksgiving, and how kids around the world celebrate Christmas. Picture Parade’s premier issue, “Andy’s Atomic Adventures,” was the story of a boy hunting ten butterflies when his dog, Spot, ran off, into the Nevada Test Site. The army refused to let Andy look for his runaway terrier, but when the boy then revealed his fear that an atomic bomb would kill his dog, his dad took him to the hospital where his mom was getting “atomic treatments” and where the lovely Miss Raymond explained the details of nuclear medicine. A week later, the phone rang with good news—Spot had been found! But sadly, the pup couldn’t go home for a week, as he was soaked in radioactive dust. The Test Site’s Dr. Clark told Andy all about atomic weaponry, and at his father’s office at the electric company, the chief engineer explained nuclear power. Finally, Spot and Andy were reunited, and the Wilsons bought their son a damn leash.
When in the years to come Picture Parade #1 disappeared from circulation, the cover, of Andy and Spot reunited as, in the background, a test bomb rises in crimson mushroom glory, was reproduced in various forms. Stripped of its cheery educational content, the image became a chilling symbol of nuclear horror. Now, you can buy it on a mouse pad, so what was once an educational endeavor and then a disturbing image of the end of the world is a nostalgic joke.
At some point, this same devolution will hold true for the whole of nuclear history. In 1986 there were sixty-five thousand nuclear weapons; in 2007, twenty-seven thousand. Still too many, but a promising trend. Instead of the nuclear proliferation that was a global fear across the 1950s and 1960s, atomic weapons have become more and more symbolic. In a generation or two, the mushroom cloud will exist as nothing beyond a resonant piece of Picture Parade nostalgia, and a family trapped inside its backyard fallout shelter after a misunderstanding that the end is nigh will be the basis for a rip-roaring comedy. After the myth of nuclear has completely faded, when we hear that a country is pursuing an atomic arsenal, instead of worry, we’ll feel embarrassed for them. Would you like some trebuchets and blunderbusses to go with those warheads, pal?
After all the trouble nuclear has given us over the past seven decades, it’s about time for the cheek to be turned and the benefits to be clearly manifest. When in his 1961 inaugural address John Kennedy echoed Wohlstetter and referred to “that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war” (and Canadian prime minister Mike Pearson agreed with, “the balance of terror has replaced the balance of power”), their thinking was prophetic. Soviet and American fighters had a couple of dogfights during the three years of the Korean War, and this is the full extent that the two nations would directly battle each other over their entire history as mortal superpower adversaries. Mutual Assured Destruction kept the Cold War cold, and no conflict in the sixty years since Nagasaki came close to rivaling the carnages of World Wars I and II—with World War II alone slaughtering 55 million people. Nuclear arms made Alfred Nobel’s dream came true: “I wish I could produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible.” Appointed to chair the US Institute of Peace by Ronald Reagan, sociologist Elspeth Rostow insisted that the Bomb was such a deterrent to war that it should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As Luis Alvarez wrote his son: “What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect, by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel’s dreams.” Imagine our atomic arsenals, glowing and unused, not poised for Armageddon, but instead the warm, nucleic source of global peace.
Nuclear as a concept may have an aura as sinister as cancer, but it includes a number of other inarguably benevolent qualities for humankind—beginning with the radiant isotope. Following in the medical legacies of Marie and Irène Curie, Frédéric Joliot, and tracer creator George de Hevesy, Oak Ridge sent its first radioisotopes to St. Louis’s Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital in 1946. Today we have an enormous array of artificially created elements used for diagnosis and treatment, from yttrium-90 for prostate cancer, to calcium-47 for bones, carbon-11 for positron-emission tomography (PET) scans, actinium-225 for leukemia, iron-59 for spleens, rhenium-188 for arteries, erbium-169 for arthritis, and various radioactive iodines, which can both image problems in the thyroid gland and kill its tumors. In the United States, around 17 million people annually are diagnosed or treated with nuclear medicine. Ninety percent of the field is imaging, such as the CT or CAT scan, a form of X-ray; the PET scan, which uses tracers of radioactive sugar; myocardial perfusion, which uses two different radioisotopes for test and stress to analyze artery disease; and specialized scans for bones, livers, lungs, brains, gallbladders, thyroids, and pulmonary embolisms. While X-rays, CTs, and PETs reveal various aspects of human anatomy, nuclear tracer imaging unveils the actual physiological workings of the body. When radioactive iodine concentrates in the thyroid, or phosphorus in the bones, or cobalt in the liver, they reveal processes. Thirty-one radiopharmaceuticals are based on
just one isotope engineered by Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segrè, technetium-99, used against tumors and for imaging the brain, lungs, liver, skeleton, and blood. The technetium variations are especially appealing as it is a product of nuclear power plant waste and has a half-life of six hours, briskly turning wholly inert and harmless. Over 20 million people a year are treated with it in some way.
Tracers can follow the metabolism of everything from fats in people to fertilizers in plants and are even used in the petroleum industry to know which crude belongs to which company in a shared pipe. Americium-241 detects the early stages of a fire and is the essential ingredient in modern smoke detectors, while the gamma rays of cobalt-60 are used to kill bacterial and fungal pests (such as trichina and salmonella) in pork, chicken, dried vegetables, herbs, and spices. When an organism dies, it stops consuming carbon, either through digestion or photosynthesis. Some of that carbon, known as carbon-14, is radioactive, with a half-life that can be measured, the famous carbon dating of archaeologists and crime scene investigators. Nickel-63 is so long lasting it made its way into pacemaker batteries, while for over fifty years NASA has used the hot decay of plutonium-238 to generate electricity for its satellites.
Unfortunately our two-faced god is manifest here—patient overdose from X-rays, CT scans, and everything else in the radiant medical arsenal poses a far greater health peril than any atomic plant meltdown. The research of David Brenner, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, shows that radioactive procedures, their technicians, and their equipment are not as monitored as the public believes, and that children getting CT scans have increased cancer rates. Brenner told Congress that Homeland Security’s overuse of whole-body X-ray security scanners will result in a hundred more Americans getting cancer every year; his and other protests forced the federal government to replace its imaging machines powered by X-rays with ones served by electromagnetics.