Doomsday Men
Page 40
It was left to Leo Szilard to say what no government official dared to: that after such a colossal assault, the Soviet Union might overwhelm the United States. In his short story ‘My Trial as a War Criminal’, written in 1947 but not published until two years later, Szilard describes how a surprise attack with biological weapons forces America to surrender. As a result, Szilard, together with his fellow Manhattan Project scientists and politicians such as Truman and Byrnes, are put on trial for war crimes committed during World War II, in particular the atomic bombings of Japan. Szilard’s story exposes both the hypocrisy of governments as well as the general atrophy of ethics that accompanies the quest for weapons of mass destruction.
The Soviet bomb designers were attentive readers of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to which Leo Szilard was a regular contributor. ‘We thought Szilard was a leading conscience of humanity,’ said one.33 Andrei Sakharov – the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb – read ‘My Trial’ in 1961 and was greatly moved by it. He encouraged his fellow nuclear scientists to read the story. One of his colleagues recalled that ‘the moral aspect of it would not let [Sakharov] and some of us live in peace’. This story made Sakharov and his fellow bomb designers look anew at their work on weapons of mass destruction. Szilard succeeded, says Richard Rhodes, in delivering ‘a note in a bottle to a secret Soviet laboratory that contributed to Andrei Sakharov’s courageous work of protest that helped bring the US–Soviet nuclear arms race to an end.’34
Of course, Leo Szilard was well aware of the power of the imagination. After all, he had been deeply impressed by H. G. Wells’s fictional account of the discovery of atomic energy. Indeed, in that very novel Wells had predicted that 1956 would be the year of the Last War. In the atomic age – which he had helped to found – Szilard began to use the power of his imagination to communicate his fears for the future to colleagues and the general public.
In the 1950 Chicago Round Table discussion, Szilard created an imaginary but feasible superweapon, a world-destroying cobalt bomb. In order to explain the logic that led to this doomsday device, he highlighted the escalation of terror in war and the concomitant erosion of ethics that had taken place within a generation. Before World War II, said Szilard, the public thought that it was ‘morally wrong and reprehensible to bomb cities and kill women and children’. But as the war progressed, ‘almost imperceptibly, we started to use jellied gasoline bombs against Japan, killing millions of women and children; finally we used the A-bomb’.35
Statistics confirm Szilard’s view. In World War I, 90 per cent of casualties were military. World War II became the most destructive war in history, killing 55 million people. Half of the dead in Europe were civilian casualties. America – whose homeland was untouched by war – lost a hundred thousand personnel in the Asian theatre, fewer than the number killed by one atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Three million Japanese died in the war. However, China lost 20 million people during more than a decade of conflict with Japan, a war which saw Japan use its own weapons of mass destruction – General Ishii’s bioweapons.
Within a month of two Japanese cities being obliterated by atomic bombs, the American military had drawn up a war plan for a preemptive attack on Russia using the new superweapon. For the first time the United States abandoned its traditional defensive posture in favour of a first-strike strategy. According to the war plan, sixty-six cities were to be attacked and 466 atomic bombs dropped. President Truman was also told by his advisers that ‘the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare’. The next war, they said, would be a truly ‘total’ war.36 Within two years, the new commander of the Strategic Air Command, General LeMay, proposed to his Air Force superiors that America’s war plan should have as its objective ‘killing a nation’. His proposal was accepted.37
From Fritz Haber’s clouds of poison gas used on the Ypres killing fields in 1915 to General Ishii’s biological weapons and the superbombs of the atomic age, the dream of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction led to a rapidly escalating potential for devastation. The imaginary superweapons of popular writers such as Jack London had finally become reality. As the American and British war plans of the 1950s showed, a world war fought with nuclear weapons would dwarf all previous conflicts. There would be carnage on an unprecedented scale.
The classic science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) voiced the anxiety of many in the atomic age. The alien spaceman Klaatu, sent to reason with the warring humans, sums up the dilemma facing planet earth: ‘your choice is simple: join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration’.38 But instead of making peace, the countries of the world merely accelerated their arms race. To quote one science fiction story of the period, the doomsday decade became the era of the ‘alphabet-bombs’: after A-bombs came H-bombs, and then, perhaps, the scientists’ ultimate gift of destruction – C-bombs.39 By summer 1949, President Truman had given up on post-war attempts to secure international control of atomic energy. Instead, he said, ‘we must be strongest in atomic weapons’.40 Until 6 October 1949, the President had not even heard of the hydrogen bomb. But lobbying by scientists such as Edward Teller soon convinced him that this was the winning weapon that America had to have in its arsenal.
At a Chicago Met Lab seminar, Enrico Fermi once discussed the chances of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe. According to Fermi, if there were extraterrestrials they would certainly have noticed a planet as ‘beautiful’ as our earth.
‘They should have arrived here by now,’ said Fermi, ‘so where are they?’ He didn’t expect an answer to his question, at least not immediately. But he hadn’t reckoned on Leo Szilard.
‘They are among us,’ said Szilard, glancing around knowingly at his colleagues, ‘but they call themselves Hungarians.’41
Szilard’s comment became legendary among the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, in which Hungarian émigrés such as Szilard, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and the man who became known as the father of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, played such crucial roles. Soon Szilard and his countrymen became known as the Martians. With their strange language – distinct from any other in Europe – and their other-worldly brilliance, many people thought that the Hungarian scientists might as well have originated on the Red Planet. However, the modest and retiring Wigner was not altogether comfortable with this nickname. ‘I think I was the only Hungarian scientist who wished to be a normal American,’ he said. ‘Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann liked being called “Martians”. But I did not.’42
After the war, Leo Szilard – who had dedicated his life to promoting the potential of the atom – was barred from working on atomic energy, mainly through the efforts of General Groves. Instead, he retrained and switched disciplines, from physics to biology. But even Groves could not stop him from campaigning vociferously for international control of atomic energy and to raise public awareness of the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Szilard’s activism inspired a generation of radicalized scientists who would begin to make their presence felt in the 1960s. But in the cold war, science itself was changing. In the wake of the Manhattan Project came the era of so-called Big Science. Scientists were increasingly working for what President Eisenhower would later bitterly describe as the ‘military-industrial complex’. There was now little room for brilliant but eccentric loners like Leo Szilard.
He was also out of sympathy with many former colleagues. In the cold war, the Hungarian Quartet, which had made such a significant contribution to the creation of the atomic bomb, found itself divided politically. While Szilard campaigned for arms control and negotiations with the Soviets, his three fellow countrymen, united by a visceral anti-Communism, committed themselves to facing off the Soviet threat with increasingly powerful weapons of mass destruction. One explanation for this hostility to the Soviet Union may lie in their Hungarian roots. According to John von Neumann, ‘Russia was traditionally the enemy. I think you will find, generally spea
king, among Hungarians an emotional fear and dislike of Russia.’43 After May 1949, when Communist one-party rule began in Hungary, this feeling only intensified for Teller, Wigner and von Neumann.
Interviewed in 1973, Eugene Wigner admitted that politically he shared the conservative and anti-Communist views of Edward Teller and John von Neumann. During the 1960s, Wigner was harshly criticized by students at Princeton for being a ‘hardliner’ on the Vietnam war44 ; by contrast, Leo Szilard was always a ‘staunch leftist’.45 In later life Wigner became fiercely defensive of his ‘great friend’ Edward Teller. He rejected what he regarded as unfair criticism of Teller’s personality (‘greediness, ill will, and a rash temper’) and his championing of the hydrogen bomb (‘Oh, yes, isn’t he the one whose hydrogen bomb may blow up the world?’). ‘Teller was not a conventional right-winger at all,’ said Wigner. ‘He hoped deeply that someday all nations might create a world government. But until then, he felt the safety of the West lay in the forceful, unhindered development of nuclear weapons.’46
However, even Wigner had to admit that Teller’s more extreme atomic views were frankly ‘crazy’. These included using nuclear bombs to blast out a harbour in North Alaska, and rejecting the health risks posed by fallout from atmospheric testing as the ‘necessary price to pay for military readiness’.47 Such fallout was, Teller said, no more dangerous than ‘being an ounce overweight’.48 Enrico Fermi once commented that Teller was ‘the only monomaniac he knew with a number of manias’.49 With his thick eyebrows and guttural voice, the brooding Hungarian physicist became one of the most recognizable and controversial scientists of the cold war. Once, in 1970, his Berkeley home on the campus of the University of California had to be cordoned off by riot police to protect Teller from the wrath of radical students.
In fact, Teller seemed to relish his reputation as ‘Mr H-Bomb’.50 But for many, this brilliant scientist became corrupted by his ‘obsession for power’.51 According to colleagues at Los Alamos, he had ‘more than his share of the traditional wild Hungarian temperament’.52 He annoyed neighbours at the weapons lab by seeking inspiration at his beloved piano late into the night. George Gamow, who secured Teller his first academic position in the United States, said he became a different person after working at Los Alamos. According to Emilio Segré, Teller was ‘dominated by irresistible passions’ that threatened his ‘rational intellect’.53 Another colleague said simply, ‘Teller has a messianic complex.’54
As soon as the war ended, Edward Teller began lobbying for both a new Manhattan Project to design the hydrogen bomb and a new weapons laboratory dedicated to building it. Teller’s dream of a thermonuclear weapon was originally sparked by a suggestion Fermi made in September 1941. However, Hans Bethe recalled that, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Szilard, ‘the inventor of all things’, who had first suggested a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction, using Urey’s newly discovered deuterium, as early as spring 1935.55
One of Teller’s undeniable talents was his uncanny ability to manipulate his military and government paymasters. His ploy was to exaggerate both the threat posed by Soviet weapons and his scientific ability to meet that threat. In private, President Eisenhower described both Teller and Wernher von Braun as ‘super-salesmen’, peddling defences against doomsday to scientifically naive politicians.56 In 1945, Teller announced that he could build an H-bomb in two to five years. It was an outrageously ambitious claim, and no other scientist agreed that it was possible. But he continued to promote his design for the bomb, known as the Super, even though others, including Bethe, doubted it was technically achievable. In particular, Bethe questioned whether it would ever be possible to use a fission device to ignite the deuterium.
Essentially, the Super was ‘a pipe of liquid deuterium with an atomic bomb screwed to one end’.57 Teller worked on this idea both during the war and after, even resisting overtures to apply his undoubted skills to more urgent military problems. The dream of the superbomb obsessed him. After the war, Teller began blaming his Los Alamos boss, Robert Oppenheimer, for blocking development of the hydrogen bomb. This resentment would eventually lead Teller to make fatally wounding statements against Oppenheimer during the infamous AEC security clearance hearings in 1954. According to Herbert York, who became the first director of the Livermore Laboratory (now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Teller was ‘obviously paranoid’.58 But by July 1948, Oppenheimer’s security file was one foot thick and weighed twelve pounds. In the wake of Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts, it didn’t take much to turn the authorities against the former boss of Los Alamos.
The explosion of the first Soviet atom bomb in September 1949 meant that doors suddenly opened for Teller in Washington. Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, both from the University of California in Berkeley, also began lobbying intensively for the hydrogen bomb and for a new weapons lab. David Lilienthal, chair of the AEC, described them as ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘drooling with the prospect’ of building the Super.59 (Lilienthal’s idiosyncratic code name for the Super was ‘Campbell’s’, as in the soup.) Even after President Truman backed the H-bomb, few other scientists supported the project. One Los Alamos physicist noted that it was ‘pure fantasy from the design standpoint, as well as a very difficult delivery problem’.60 Oppenheimer told James Conant bluntly, ‘I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by an ox cart.’61 As historian Gregg Herken has written, Truman’s historic decision was based on an ‘imaginary bomb’ that existed solely inside Teller’s head.62
Working out how to build an H-bomb is a hugely complex exercise which involves mapping the behaviour of individual subatomic particles at extremes of temperature and pressure. The development of electronic digital computers played a vital role in turning the dream of the H-bomb into reality. In 1945, John von Neumann had become involved in the design of early computers. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was one of the first computers to replace gears for doing calculations with vacuum tubes. Its first task, at the end of 1945, was to process calculations for Edward Teller’s Super.
The computer took six weeks to do the number crunching that would have taken a hundred Los Alamos staff a year. Initial results were promising, but more calculations were needed. For that, John von Neumann helped to design a new type of computer, one that could store a program in its memory – the direct ancestor of today’s PC. With characteristic humour, John von Neumann and its codesigner Nicholas Metropolis named it MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer). By 1949 the Polish-born mathematician Stanislaw Ulam had done some calculations on the feasibility of the Super for the new computer. But delays to the new electronic brain (as the media dubbed computers) forced Ulam to fall back on his trusty slide-rule for the complex calculations. The results were bad news for Teller. By the end of 1950, Ulam’s calculations and new ones from ENIAC showed conclusively that the Super would never explode. It would merely ‘fizzle’.63
Edward Teller was furious; others, including Oppenheimer, were delighted. Then, at the beginning of 1951, Ulam came up with the breakthrough that would finally make Teller’s thermonuclear dream a reality. It was what Ulam called his ‘bomb in a box’ idea. Essentially, what he was proposing was that the fission explosion should be contained by a dense material which focuses the energy (rather as the shaped charges had been used to compress plutonium in Fat Man) onto the fusion fuel. On its own this ingenious idea was not enough, but Teller took it a step further by using radiation from the fission bomb to compress the fusion fuel without heating it. He called it ‘radiation implosion’.64
It was the breakthrough Teller had been waiting for. The crucial insights of both men were described in their top-secret paper, titled ‘On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors’. Hans Bethe, who had predicted that Teller’s original Super design would be a dud, described it as ‘about as surprising as the discovery of fission had been to physicist
s in 1939’. It was, he said, a ‘miracle’.65 That year, Bethe reluctantly returned full-time to Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb.
According to Ulam, Teller was ‘always intense, visibly ambitious, and harbouring a smouldering passion for achievement in physics’.66 After they collaborated on the idea that made the H-bomb a reality, the two men scarcely spoke to each other again. Teller conveniently forgot Ulam’s role in the hydrogen bomb. In his memoirs, Teller confessed that he had ‘developed an allergy to him’. Ulam’s contribution to the final design of the H-bomb is entirely elided in Teller’s account.67
Ulam and Teller’s bomb was tested on the Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific on 1 November 1952, three days before the former US Army Chief of Staff, Dwight Eisenhower, was elected President of the United States. Nicknamed the ‘Sausage’ by its designers after its distinctive cylindrical shape, the device weighed 82 tons; its housing (known as a shot cab) was the size of a six-storey building. The explosion was code-named ‘Mike’ – M for megaton, a million tons of high explosive. The blast was far bigger than expected, just over 10 megatons, a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. For one observer on a plane 60 miles away, it was like ‘gazing into eternity, or into the gates of hell’.68