The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

by Sam Kean

  In 1949, however, that transformation lay in the future. In those early days, Ulam’s Monte Carlo method mostly pushed through the next generation of nuclear weapons. Von Neumann, Ulam, and their ilk would show up at the gymnasium-sized rooms where computers were set up and mysteriously ask if they could run a few programs, starting at 12:00 a.m. and running through the night. The weapons they developed during those dead hours were the “supers,” multistage devices a thousand times more powerful than standard A-bombs. Supers used plutonium and uranium to ignite stellar-style fusion in extraheavy liquid hydrogen, a complicated process that never would have moved beyond secret military reports and into missile silos without digital computation. As historian George Dyson neatly summarized the technological history of that decade, “Computers led to bombs, and bombs led to computers.”

  After a great struggle to find the proper design for a super, scientists hit upon a dandy in 1952. The obliteration of the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean during a test of a super that year showed once again the ruthless brilliance of the Monte Carlo method. Nevertheless, bomb scientists already had something even worse than the supers in the pipeline.

  Atomic bombs can get you two ways. A madman who just wants lots of people dead and lots of buildings flattened can stick with a conventional, one-stage fission bomb. It’s easier to build, and the big flash-bang should satisfy his need for spectacle, as should aftereffects such as spontaneous tornadoes and the silhouettes of victims seared onto brick walls. But if the madman has patience and wants to do something insidious, if he wants to piss in every well and sow the ground with salt, he’ll detonate a cobalt-60 dirty bomb.

  Whereas conventional nuclear bombs kill with heat, dirty bombs kill with gamma radiation—malignant X-rays. Gamma rays result from frantic radioactive events, and in addition to burning people frightfully, they dig down into bone marrow and scramble the chromosomes in white blood cells. The cells either die outright, grow cancerous, or grow without constraint and, like humans with gigantism, end up deformed and unable to fight infections. All nuclear bombs release some radiation, but with dirty bombs, radiation is the whole point.

  Even endemic leukemia isn’t ambitious by some bombs’ standards. Another European refugee who worked on the Manhattan Project, Leo Szilard—the physicist who, to his regret, invented the idea of a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction around 1933—calculated in 1950 as a wiser, more sober man that sprinkling a tenth of an ounce of cobalt-60 on every square mile of earth would pollute it with enough gamma rays to wipe out the human race, a nuclear version of the cloud that helped kill the dinosaurs. His device consisted of a multistage warhead surrounded by a jacket of cobalt-59. A fission reaction in plutonium would kick off a fusion reaction in hydrogen, and once the reaction started, obviously, the cobalt jacket and everything else would be obliterated. But not before something happened on the atomic level. Down there, the cobalt atoms would absorb neutrons from the fission and fusion, a step called salting. The salting would convert stable cobalt-59 into unsteady cobalt-60, which would then float down like ash.

  Lots of other elements emit gamma rays, but there’s something special about cobalt. Regular A-bombs can be waited out in underground shelters, since their fallout will vomit up gamma rays immediately and be rendered harmless. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more or less habitable within days of the 1945 explosions. Other elements absorb extra neutrons like alcoholics do another shot at the bar—they’ll get sick someday but not for eons. In that case, after the initial blast, radiation levels would never climb too high.

  Cobalt bombs fall devilishly between those extremes, a rare case in which the golden mean is the worst. Cobalt-60 atoms would settle into the ground like tiny land mines. Enough would go off right away to make it necessary to flee, but after five years fully half of the cobalt would still be armed. That steady pulse of gamma shrapnel would mean that cobalt bombs could neither be waited out nor endured. It would take a whole human lifetime for the land to recover. This actually makes cobalt bombs unlikely weapons for war, because the conquering army couldn’t occupy the territory. But a scorched-earth madman wouldn’t have such qualms.

  In his defense, Szilard hoped his cobalt bomb—the first “doomsday device”—would never be built, and no country (as far as the public knows) ever tried. In fact, Szilard conjured up the idea to show the insanity of nuclear war, and people did seize on it. In Dr. Strangelove, for example, the Soviet enemies have cobalt bombs. Before Szilard, nuclear weapons were horrifying but not necessarily apocalyptic. After his modest proposal, Szilard hoped that people would know better and give up nukes. Hardly. Soon after the haunting name “promethium” became official, the Soviet Union acquired the bomb, too. The U.S. and Soviet governments soon accepted the less-than-reassuring but aptly named doctrine of MAD, or mutual assured destruction—the idea that, outcomes aside, both sides would lose in any nuclear war. However idiotic as an ethos, MAD did deter people from deploying nukes as tactical weapons. Instead, international tensions hardened into the cold war—a struggle that so infiltrated our society that not even the pristine periodic table escaped its stain.

  7

  Extending the Table, Expanding the Cold War

  In 1950, a curious notice turned up in the New Yorker’s gossipy “Talk of the Town” section:*

  New atoms are turning up with spectacular, if not downright alarming frequency nowadays, and the University of California at Berkeley, whose scientists have discovered elements 97 and 98, has christened them berkelium and californium respectively…. These names strike us as indicating a surprising lack of public-relations foresight…. California’s busy scientists will undoubtedly come up with another atom or two one of these days, and the university… has lost forever the chance of immortalizing itself in the atomic tables with some such sequence as universitium (97), ofium (98), californium (99), berkelium (100).

  Not to be outwitted, scientists at Berkeley, led by Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso, replied that their nomenclature was actually preemptive genius, designed to sidestep “the appalling possibility that after naming 97 and 98 ‘universitium’ and ‘ofium,’ some New Yorker might follow with the discovery of 99 and 100 and apply the names ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ ”

  The New Yorker staff answered, “We are already at work in our office laboratories on ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ So far we just have the names.”

  The letters were fun repartee at a fun time to be a Berkeley scientist. Those scientists were creating the first new elements in our solar system since the supernova kicked everything off billions of years before. Heck, they were outdoing the supernova, making even more elements than the natural ninety-two. No one, least of all them, could foresee how bitter the creation and even the naming of elements would soon become—a new theater for the cold war.

  Glenn Seaborg reportedly had the longest Who’s Who entry ever. Distinguished provost at Berkeley. Nobel Prize–winning chemist. Cofounder of the Pac-10 sports league. Adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush (George H. W.) on atomic energy and the nuclear arms race. Team leader on the Manhattan Project. Etc., etc. But his first major scientific discovery, which propelled him to those other honors, was the result of dumb luck.

  In 1940, Seaborg’s colleague and friend, Edwin McMillan, captured a long-standing prize by creating the first transuranic element, which he named neptunium, after the planet beyond uranium’s Uranus. Hungry to do more, McMillan further realized that element ninety-three was pretty wobbly and might decay into element ninety-four by spitting off another electron. He searched for evidence of the next element in earnest and kept young Seaborg—a gaunt, twenty-eight-year-old Michigan native who grew up in a Swedish-speaking immigrant colony—apprised of his progress, even discussing techniques while they showered at the gym.

  But more was afoot in 1940 than new elements. Once the U.S. government decided to contribute, even clandestinely, to the resistance against the Axis powers in World War II,
it began whisking away scientific stars, including McMillan, to work on military projects such as radar. Not prominent enough to be cherry-picked, Seaborg found himself alone in Berkeley with McMillan’s equipment and full knowledge of how McMillan had planned to proceed. Hurriedly, fearing it might be their one shot at fame, Seaborg and a colleague amassed a microscopic sample of element ninety-three. After letting the neptunium seep, they sifted through the radioactive sample by dissolving away the excess neptunium, until only a small bit of chemical remained. They proved that the remaining atoms had to be element ninety-four by ripping electron after electron off with a powerful chemical until the atoms held a higher electric charge (+7) than any element ever known. From its very first moments, element ninety-four seemed special. Continuing the march to the edge of the solar system—and under the belief that this was the last possible element that could be synthesized—the scientists named it plutonium.

  Suddenly a star himself, Seaborg in 1942 received a summons to go to Chicago and work for a branch of the Manhattan Project. He brought students with him, plus a technician, a sort of super-lackey, named Al Ghiorso. Ghiorso was Seaborg’s opposite temperamentally. In pictures, Seaborg invariably appears in a suit, even in the lab, while Ghiorso looks uneasy dressed up, more comfortable in a cardigan and a shirt with the top button undone. Ghiorso wore thick, black-framed glasses and had heavily pomaded hair, and his nose and chin were pointed, a bit like Nixon’s. Also unlike Seaborg, Ghiorso chafed at the establishment. (He would have hated the Nixon comparison.) A little childishly, he never earned more than a bachelor’s degree, not wanting to subject himself to more schooling. Still, prideful, he followed Seaborg to Chicago to escape a monotonous job wiring radioactivity detectors at Berkeley. When he arrived, Seaborg immediately put him to work—wiring detectors.

  Nevertheless, the two hit it off. When they returned to Berkeley after the war (both adored the university), they began to produce heavy elements, as the New Yorker had it, “with spectacular, if not downright alarming frequency.” Other writers have compared chemists who discovered new elements in the 1800s to big-game hunters, thrilling the chemistry-loving masses with every exotic species they bagged. If that flattering description is true, then the stoutest hunters with the biggest elephant guns, the Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt of the periodic table, were Ghiorso and Seaborg—who discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth.

  The collaboration started in 1946, when Seaborg, Ghiorso, and others began bombarding delicate plutonium with radioactive particles. This time, instead of using neutron ammunition, they used alpha particles, clusters of two protons and two neutrons. As charged particles, which can be pulled along by dangling a mechanical “rabbit” of the opposite charge in front of their noses, alphas are easier to accelerate to high speeds than mulish neutrons. Plus, when alphas stuck the plutonium, the Berkeley team got two new elements at a stroke, since element ninety-six (plutonium’s protons plus two more) decayed into element ninety-five by ejecting a proton.

  As discoverers of ninety-five and ninety-six, the Seaborg-Ghiorso team earned the right to name them (an informal tradition soon thrown into angry confusion). They selected americium (pronounced “am-er-EE-see-um”), after America, and curium, after Marie Curie. Departing from his usual stiffness, Seaborg announced the elements not in a scientific journal but on a children’s radio show, Quiz Kids. A precocious tyke asked Mr. Seaborg if (ha, ha) he’d discovered any new elements lately. Seaborg answered that he had, actually, and encouraged kids listening at home to tell their teachers to throw out the old periodic table. “Judging from the mail I later received from schoolchildren,” Seaborg recalled in his autobiography, “their teachers were rather skeptical.”

  Continuing the alpha-bombing experiments, the Berkeley team discovered berkelium and californium in 1949, as described earlier. Proud of the names, and hoping for a little recognition, they called the Berkeley mayor’s office in celebration. The staffers in the mayor’s office listened and yawned—neither the mayor nor his staff saw what the big deal about the periodic table was. The city’s obtuseness got Ghiorso upset. Before the mayor’s snub, he had been advocating for calling element ninety-seven berkelium and making its chemical symbol Bm, because the element had been such a “stinker” to discover. Afterward, he might have been tickled to think that every scatological teenager in the country would see Berkeley represented on the periodic table as “Bm” in school and laugh. (Unfortunately, he was overruled, and the symbol for berkelium became Bk.)

  Undeterred by the mayor’s cold reception, UC Berkeley kept inking in new boxes on the periodic table, keeping school-chart manufacturers, who had to replace obsolete tables, happy. The team discovered elements ninety-nine and one hundred, einsteinium and fermium, in radioactive coral after a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific in 1952. But their experimental apex was the creation of element 101.

  Because elements grow fragile as they swell with protons, scientists had difficulty creating samples large enough to spray with alpha particles. Getting enough einsteinium (element ninety-nine) to even think about leapfrogging to element 101 required bombarding plutonium for three years. And that was just step one in a veritable Rube Goldberg machine. For each attempt to create 101, the scientists dabbed invisibly tiny bits of einsteinium onto gold foil and pelted it with alpha particles. The irradiated gold trellis then had to be dissolved away, since its radioactivity would interfere with detecting the new element. In previous experiments to find new elements, scientists had poured the sample into test tubes at this point to see what reacted with it, looking for chemical analogues to elements on the periodic table. But with element 101, there weren’t enough atoms for that. Therefore, the team had to identify it “posthumously,” by looking at what was left over after each atom disintegrated—like piecing a car together from scraps after a bombing.

  Such forensic work was doable—except the alpha particle step could be done only in one lab, and the detection could be done only in another, miles away. So for each trial run, while the gold foil was dissolving, Ghiorso waited outside in his Volkswagen, motor running, to courier the sample to the other building. The team did this in the middle of the night, because the sample, if stuck in a traffic jam, might go radioactive in Ghiorso’s lap and waste the whole effort. When Ghiorso arrived at the second lab, he dashed up the stairs, and the sample underwent another quick purification before being placed into the latest generation of detectors wired by Ghiorso—detectors he was now proud of, since they were the key apparatus in the most sophisticated heavy-element lab in the world.

  The team got the drill down, and one February night in 1955, their work paid off. In anticipation, Ghiorso had wired his radiation detector to the building’s fire alarm, and when it finally detected an exploding atom of element 101, the bell shrieked. This happened sixteen more times that night, and with each ring, the assembled team cheered. At dawn, everyone went home drunkenly tired and happy. Ghiorso forgot to unwire his detector, however, which caused some panic among the building’s occupants the next morning when a laggard atom of element 101 tripped the alarm one last time.*

  Having already honored their home city, state, and country, the Berkeley team suggested mendelevium, after Dmitri Mendeleev, for element 101. Scientifically, this was a no-brainer. Diplomatically, it was daring to honor a Russian scientist during the cold war, and it was not a popular choice (at least domestically; Premier Khrushchev reportedly loved it). But Seaborg, Ghiorso, and others wanted to demonstrate that science rose above petty politics, and at the time, why not? They could afford to be magnanimous. Seaborg would soon depart for Camelot and Kennedy, and under Al Ghiorso’s direction, the Berkeley lab chugged along. It practically lapped all other nuclear labs in the world, which were relegated to checking Berkeley’s arithmetic. The single time another group, from Sweden, claimed to beat Berkeley to an element, number 102, Berkeley quickly discredited the claim. Instead, Berkeley notch
ed element 102, nobelium (after Alfred Nobel, dynamite inventor and founder of the Nobel Prizes), and element 103, lawrencium (after Berkeley Radiation Laboratory founder and director Ernest Lawrence), in the early 1960s.

  Then, in 1964, a second Sputnik happened.

  Some Russians have a creation myth about their corner of the planet. Way back when, the story goes, God walked the earth, carrying all its minerals in his arms, to make sure they got distributed evenly. This plan worked well for a while. Tantalum went in one land, uranium another, and so on. But when God got to Siberia, his fingers got so cold and stiff, he dropped all the metals. His hands too frostbit to scoop them up, he left them there in disgust. And this, Russians boast, explains their vast stores of minerals.

  Despite those geological riches, only two useless elements on the periodic table were discovered in Russia, ruthenium and samarium. Compare that paltry record to the dozens of elements discovered in Sweden and Germany and France. The list of great Russian scientists beyond Mendeleev is similarly barren, at least in comparison to Europe proper. For various reasons—despotic tsars, an agrarian economy, poor schools, harsh weather—Russia just never fostered the scientific genius it might have. It couldn’t even get basic technologies right, such as its calendar. Until well past 1900, Russia used a misaligned calendar that Julius Caesar’s astrologers had invented, leaving it weeks behind Europe and its modern Gregorian calendar. That lag explains why the “October Revolution” that brought Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 actually occurred in November.