by John Browne
That statement encapsulated the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), and created a single strategic imperative: to ensure its safety, strategists concluded, the US needed the ability to inflict total destruction on any aggressor, even after sustaining a nuclear strike. The US nuclear deterrent had to be large enough to withstand the full onslaught of the Soviet Union’s arsenal, and still wipe them out. To use the jargon, they needed to retain ‘second strike capability’.
Soviet strategists reached the same conclusion, and so each side set about building a vast nuclear arsenal. For any increase made by the enemy, the arsenal had to grow further if it was to withstand a strike by the enemy. The great arms race of the twentieth century was on. By 1982, each side had more than 10,000 strategic warheads. They were spread around the globe to reduce the possibility they could be destroyed in a first strike: on inter-continental ballistic missiles hidden in reinforced concrete silos, on nuclear submarines deep under the seas, and on fleets of planes constantly circling in the air. The primary aim on each side was not to convey aggression, but to provide an effective and credible deterrent: ‘if you attack me, you will die too.’
In the Soviet Union, the logic of second-strike capability was taken to its extreme in the construction of a ‘Dead Hand’ system, wrapped in secrecy but rumoured still to exist today.56 Should a US nuclear attack wipe out the Soviet leadership, the Dead Hand would be triggered and an automated nuclear response would be launched. Dead Hand would send a series of unarmed missiles flying across the Russian continent, broadcasting a radio code to thousands of armed missiles, firing up from silos across the nation to obliterate America.
The consequence of mutually assured destruction was perverse and terrifying: huge nuclear arsenals, able to destroy the world many times over, were built in order that they might never be used. It created constant dread and occasional terror, but it sustained a peace of sorts.
But the world today is different. The simple balance of mutually assured destruction between two superpowers has gone. Instead, we have a multitude of nuclear actors, whose motives are complex and upon whose rationality we cannot rely. Among these nuclear powers, nationalism and identity politics can prevent critical thinking about the blunt reality of nuclear weapons. For each additional player, the risk of disaster increases, whether a launch is triggered by misinformation, misjudgement or mechanical accident. Perhaps most frightening of all is the prospect that weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, for whom death is no deterrent.
In harnessing uranium, and unleashing the first nuclear reaction over Hiroshima, we tapped the primordial energy source of the Universe. For sixty years since, annihilation has been prevented by the threat of mutually assured destruction, but we can no longer rely on that uneasy equilibrium. The probabilities of disaster are too great, and the damage too severe. If a nuclear bomb were dropped today, the destruction would be many times that unleashed at Hiroshima.
Walking among the groups of school children in the Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum, I realised more than ever the need for education, of both the young and old, about the stark realities of nuclear weapons. As I sat and talked to Governor Yuzaki, who is leading a renewed drive for nuclear non-proliferation, we agreed that we must be hopeful about a future free of nuclear weapons. Constructive political discourse at an international level is not easy, if possible at all. But it is worth the effort if we can reduce the risk of one more nuclear bomb being dropped. Total eradication may be unrealistic, but we have to try.
With new generations, fresh thinking from minds that do not remember the Cold War years may see nuclear weapons for what they are in their simplest form: a terrifying weapon of unparalleled destruction. As we spoke of writing papers and treaties, Governor Yuzaki looked out on his city and deftly summed up the issue at hand: ‘These are people, not pieces of paper.’
TITANIUM
IN OCTOBER 1950, Popular Science magazine featured a ‘new rival’ that ‘challenges aluminum and steel as a structural material for airplanes and rockets, guns and armor’. Strong, lightweight and corrosion resistant, titanium was presented as the wonder metal of the future.1
Titanium was discovered in 1791 by William Gregor, an English clergy-man, mineralogist and chemist, when he isolated some ‘black sand’ from a river in the Manaccan valley in Cornwall. We now know this as the mineral ilmenite, an iron-titanium oxide, from which he produced an impure oxide of a new element that he called manaccanite. Four years later, Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, isolated titanium dioxide from titanium's other major ore, rutile. He called the new element titanium, after the gods of Greek mythology the Titans, who were imprisoned inside the Earth by their father, Uranus. Klaproth also discovered uranium; he chose abstract names for both elements as, at the time, their properties were not fully known.2 Yet, coincidentally, Klaproth’s name turned out to be apt: like the Titans, trapped inside the Earth, titanium is strongly bound in its ore and is very difficult to extract.
It was not until 1910 that the metallurgist Matthew Albert Hunter, working at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside New York, created a sample of pure metallic titanium. In doing so he revealed titanium's remarkable physical properties. It took until the 1940s, 150 years after titanium’s original discovery, to develop a commercial process to extract titanium from its ore.
Now, as tensions mounted at the start of the Cold War, each side, the US and the Soviet Union, was desperate to establish a technological advantage that would give it superiority in the seas, skies and outer space. Titanium seemed a new miracle metal that could do just that. The First and Second World Wars were fought with iron and carbon; the Cold War would be fought with titanium and uranium.
Titanium made possible the most extreme of Cold War engineering, such as the supersonic spy plane the Lockheed Blackbird. Flying at three times the speed of sound, Blackbird aircraft could outrun the most advanced Soviet missile technology, bringing vital military intelligence back to US soil within hours. The Blackbird is an awe-inspiring work of engineering and is still the fastest air-breathing manned jet in the world.3
Supersonic Blackbird
‘Well fly at [27,000 metres] and jack up the speed to Mach 3 … The higher and faster we fly the harder it will be to spot us, much less stop us,’ explained Kelly Johnson, Vice-President of Advanced Development Projects at Lockheed aerospace company, to a group of engineers.4
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the US was desperate to know about Soviet military capabilities. Proposed satellite technology had severe limitations: orbits were fixed and too predictable for their paths to go unnoticed, while images taken from outer space were often blurred.
Kelly Johnson believed his spy plane was the only way to gather adequate military intelligence and also ensure the safety of the pilots onboard. The first spy planes developed during the Cold War were converted Second World War bombers that were slow and travelled at low altitude, making them vulnerable to attack from the Soviet Union. Lockheed’s U-2 state-of-the-art spy plane of the late 1950s could travel at heights of 21 kilometres and speeds of up to 800 kilometres per hour, but the Soviet Union was investing heavily in advanced anti-spy plane weaponry that could attack the U-2. The US was mindful of the vulnerability of the U-2 to the Soviet’s anti-spy technology and sought to develop a new spy plane that could go even higher and faster. Indeed, in 1960, just as work on the Blackbird had begun at Lockheed, a U-2 plane was shot down and the pilot, Gary Powers, captured by the KGB.
The Blackbird, flying four times faster and eight kilometres higher than the U-2, was the realisation of that American ambition. The plan was incredibly ambitious: the US air force wanted to build a plane that no longer just hid from Soviet missiles, but which could outpace any missile that could lock on to it. Aircraft had flown above Mach 3 before, but only for short bursts using afterburners. The Blackbird would cruise at this speed. It would fly whole missions on afterburners. But to succeed in building such a sophisticated pi
ece of engineering, Lockheed’s engineers had first to learn how to harness titanium.
In 1959 work on Johnson’s Mach 3 aircraft began at Lockheed’s design and engineering facility, the ‘Skunk Works’, named for the unbearable stench given off by a nearby plastics factory. The engineers soon realised that titanium was the only lightweight metal able to withstand the high temperatures created at Mach 3 flight; steel was just too heavy.
At a height of 27 kilometres the air is so thin that it is almost a vacuum. The temperature is a freezing minus 55 degrees centigrade. Even so, the Blackbird’s nose, travelling faster than a rifle bullet, is heated by air friction to over 400 degrees centigrade.5 Near the afterburner, the temperature is over 560 degrees. If it were not painted black, giving the aircraft its name, the temperature would be even higher.6 The temperature is so extreme that the aircraft expands several inches during flight. The frame and fuel tank would only align correctly at high speeds so that when on the ground fuel leaked through gaps and on to the runway.
Over nine-tenths of the Blackbird’s structural weight was made of titanium. At the start of the project, no one had worked with titanium on such a scale before or in such extreme conditions. Only one small company in the US, the Titanium Metals Corporation, milled titanium and the sheets they produced were of uneven quality. Moreover, they could not find enough titanium to build the plane. The CIA searched the globe and eventually sourced an exporter in the Soviet Union who was unaware they were aiding the creation of a spy plane to be used against them.
During the design testing and construction of the aircraft, over thirteen million titanium parts were manufactured. Engineers encountered many problems in the process. Slight impurities can turn titanium brittle and, at first, some components would shatter when dropped from waist height. Lines drawn on with a pen would quickly eat through thin titanium sheets; cadmium-plated spanners caused bolts to drop out; most mysteriously of all, spot-welded panels produced in the summer would fall apart while those produced in winter would hold. Eventually the source of contamination was found to be chlorine that was added to water tanks at the Skunk Works in the summer to stop the growth of algae.
Solutions were found for these problems, but they were expensive. Engineers had to work in a meticulously clean environment, pickle each component in acid and weld in a nitrogen atmosphere. The aircraft’s costs rapidly spiralled into hundreds of millions of dollars.
But it was built and, on 22 December 1964, the Blackbird made its maiden flight, completing a supersonic flyby down the runway of the air-base for Johnson’s amusement. Lockheed had succeeded in creating the most incredible aircraft in human history. It remains today an example of what can be accomplished when human ingenuity is combined with the extraordinary properties of the Earth’s elements.
More than an engineering marvel, the Blackbird was a functional tool of war. It quickly began to show its worth on its first operational mission during the Vietnam War. The US military base at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam was under siege by the North Vietnamese army, but the US was unable to find the truck park which was supplying the enemy with troops and ammunition. On 21 March 1968, the Blackbird flew a reconnaissance mission over the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Vietnam. The photographs revealed not only the suspected truck park, but also the placement of heavy artillery surrounding Khe Sanh. A few days later, the US launched air attacks against these targets, and within two weeks the siege had been lifted.
Having proved its worth in Vietnam, the Blackbird was put to use once again in October 1973 when Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, instigating the Yom Kippur War. Israel was caught off guard by the sudden Arab attack and the US, which supported Israel in the conflict, feared that without adequate intelligence Israel could lose more ground. The Soviet Union, which supported the Arab forces, had repositioned its Cosmos satellite to provide information on Israeli troop positions; President Nixon ordered Blackbird to provide similar support to Israel.
The Blackbird flew from New York to the Arab-Israeli border, a distance of 9,000 kilometres, in a record time of five hours. Twenty-five minutes flying in restricted territory was all that was needed to photograph the battle lines below. By the next morning the images, showing the positions of the Arab forces, were on the desk of the Israeli general staff.
With titanium, the US controlled the skies during the Cold War. In space, too, titanium gave the Americans an advantage: it was used extensively in the Apollo and Mercury space programmes.7 But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was also using the wonder metal titanium to rule the seas, building a new class of submarine that was smaller, faster and could dive to greater depths.
Soviet subs
‘It must have an advanced design: new materials, a new power plant and a new weapons system – it must be superlative,’ said Dr Georgi Sviatov, at the time a junior Soviet naval engineer, of the K-162 submarine.8 The Soviet Union sought to create a submarine that could pass quickly and undetected through hostile waters to attack the enemy.
The engineers considered steel and aluminium, but the superiority of titanium was clear. The strength-to-weight ratio of a metal is a crucial consideration in the construction of submarine hulls, which must be light so that the submarine is naturally buoyant, but which must also be able to face extreme water pressures. Titanium’s superior ratio would enable Soviet submarines to dive to new depths. In addition, titanium is also corrosion-resistant, forming a thin layer of titanium dioxide on its surface which protects it against the harsh maritime environment. And, unlike iron, titanium is non-magnetic, reducing the likelihood of a submarine being detected and setting off magnetic mines.
As the US had done for the titanium Blackbird, the Soviet Union paid a premium for their high-tech hulls. The first titanium-hulled submarine, the K-162, was so expensive that most thought it would have been cheaper to make it out of gold; the submarine came to be known as the ‘golden fish’.9
In 1983, the Soviet Union used titanium once again, this time to build the world’s deepest diving submarine. The 400-foot-long Komsomolets, ‘Member of the Young Communist League’, was built with an inner titanium hull to operate at depths of up to a kilometre. The Komsomolets sank in April 1989 in the Norwegian Sea when a high-pressure air line burst and started a fire on board the vessel. The fire quickly spread through the oxygen-enriched air. By fire, flooding and suffocation, forty-two out of the sixty-nine crew died. The broken titanium hull, containing two nuclear reactors and at least two nuclear warheads, now sits a mile under the sea entombed in a concrete sarcophagus to prevent the toxic plutonium inside leaking.
US military intelligence first began to retrieve evidence of the Soviet’s titanium-hulled submarines in the late 1960s. Satellite pictures of a submarine hull in Sudomekh Admiralty Shipyard in Leningrad (St Petersburg) revealed an unusual metal which seemed too reflective to be steel and which was not corroding. In the winter of 1969, Commander William Green, an assistant US naval attaché, was visiting Leningrad when he retrieved a piece of debris as it fell from a truck leaving the Sudomekh yard. It turned out to be titanium. Confirmation came in the mid-1970s when, while searching through scrap metal that had been sent to the US from the Soviet Union, intelligence officers found a piece of titanium inscribed with the number 705. This was known to be the serial number of the Soviet submarine project under surveillance. For a long time the US did not believe the intelligence they were receiving. Titanium seemed far too expensive and difficult to work with on the scale of the mammoth Soviet submarine hulls.
As the Cold War came to a close, the extreme deep-diving capabilities of titanium-hulled submarines were no longer necessary, nor were the Mach 3 speeds of titanium-framed aircraft. In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, military spending on both sides of the Iron Curtain was cut; this was termed the ‘peace dividend’ by the US President George Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The last of the Project 705 submarines were deco
mmissioned and funding for the Blackbird was removed, ending its life as the only military aeroplane never to be shot down or lose a single crew member to enemy fire.
Transitional titanium
Today titanium has a limited role. It is used on oil rigs and in refineries where the harsh maritime and chemical environments would quickly corrode steel; for limb implants where strength and biocompatibility are paramount; and for high-specification ‘external limbs’, such as bicycle frames, golf clubs and tennis rackets.10 Titanium is still important in the aerospace industry, the prime consumer of the metal, where weight savings can significantly reduce fuel consumption.11 But cheaper strong and lightweight aluminium alloys are now competing with it in all but the most specialist applications. Concorde, that symbol of civilian supersonic flight, was largely constructed from aluminium. Titanium’s reign as a wonder metal was over; it had changed the world but, having done so, had been made superfluous.
But while steel skyscrapers rise out of the ground at an ever-increasing rate, we rarely see titanium used in the structures of modern society. One exception to this is the magnificent titanium-plated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, northern Spain. The futuristic ship-like curves of the exterior were originally chosen to be clad in stainless steel, but architect Frank Gehry was not happy with the appearance. It would be too bright in the sun and too dark in the shade. He considered zinc, lead and copper and, a few days before his proposal for the building was made public, was sent a promotional sampler of titanium. The new material’s reflective properties gave it a velvety sheen in all light conditions. This was the metal Gehry wanted to use, but it was just too expensive.
One day, with titanium in mind, a member of the design team noticed a sudden drop in its price. Russia, the world’s largest titanium manufacturer, had dumped large amounts of the metal on to the market. Within a week, Gehry bought all the titanium he needed before the price rose again. In 1997, the Guggenheim, covered in 33,000 titanium panels, opened to critical acclaim.