Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

Having fallen out with the Los Alamos scientists who built the device, Teller had remained in Berkeley, on the University of California campus. In the basement of the geology department he sat hunched over the screen of a seismograph at the time of the explosion. When the compression wave reached California, Teller saw the dot on the screen ‘do a little dance’.69 His ten-year obsessional quest for the hydrogen bomb had succeeded. Triumphantly, he cabled the Los Alamos scientists who had doubted him for so long: ‘it’s a boy’.70 And, he implied, I’m the father.

  According to many, the Mike test was the ‘thermonuclear Trinity’.71 The outgoing Truman administration concluded that ‘a weapon was in the offing which, in sufficient numbers, might have the power to destroy the world’.72 The new President, who had opposed the use of atomic weapons against Japan, visibly paled when the island of Elugelab (part of the Eniwetok Atoll) was described as ‘missing’ following the explosion.73

  In 1952, Teller, Lawrence and Alvarez finally got the go-ahead from the AEC to open a laboratory dedicated to thermonuclear weapons – the Livermore Laboratory, located on a former naval air base 50 miles east of San Francisco. ‘I have quit the appeasers and joined the fascists,’ Teller admitted privately.74 Bethe and Segré both turned down Teller’s invitation to join him at the new laboratory. After his role in Oppenheimer’s downfall in 1954 became known, many of Teller’s scientific colleagues refused even to speak to him. Teller himself never regretted developing the H-bomb, saying in true Faustian style: ‘I do not want the hydrogen bomb because it would kill more people. I wanted the hydrogen bomb because it was new. Because it was something that we did not know, and could know. I am afraid of ignorance.’75

  The guards at the Livermore soon referred to the scientists as ‘Teller’s Flying Circus’.76 In the coming years, Livermore’s many lethal creations would include miniature atomic ‘back-pack’ bombs and atomic grenades, the first megaton-class warhead launchable from a submarine (for the Polaris missile), MIRVs (Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles), the N-bomb (neutron bomb) and Teller’s brainchild of the 1980s – the third-generation nuclear weapons that formed the basis of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars as it became known.

  Von Neumann, known to his friends as Jancsi or Johnny, had once successfully cured Richard Feynman of his qualms about being involved in the Manhattan Project. ‘You don’t have to be responsible for the world you’re in,’ he told the 26-year-old physicist.77 Unlike his fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard, who always felt personally responsible for the fate of the world, Johnny von Neumann never doubted the need for the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer recalled that when the two of them discussed the question in 1949, von Neumann told him: ‘I believe there is no such thing as saturation. I don’t think any weapon can be too large. I have always been a believer in this.’78

  Einstein once criticized Szilard for overemphasizing the role of logic in people’s lives. If that was true of Szilard, then it was doubly so for von Neumann. His mind was ‘inexorably logical’, said Wigner, who knew Jancsi all his life. They had attended the same school in Budapest and worked together at both Berlin and Princeton. At Berlin, Szilard and von Neumann had taught physics courses together. Wigner recalled how Szilard liked to quarrel with the mathematician; ‘von Neumann was usually right’, he added wryly. He was a genius and he knew it: ‘he had been hearing it since he was a 10-year-old boy studying higher mathematics in Budapest’.79 Johnny had a photographic memory and as a child used to entertain family guests by reciting a page chosen at random from the Budapest phonebook.

  With his boyish moon-face and his equally childish sense of humour, von Neumann could be great company. The regular parties he and his wife gave at Princeton were renowned. The centrepiece at one was an ice sculpture of his MANIAC computer. Otto Frisch was greatly impressed by von Neumann’s ability to drink sixteen martinis in a row and remain ‘quite lucid, though somewhat pessimistic in his utterances’.80 Johnny had a rich fund of anecdotes about his fellow Hungarians and once quipped that ‘it takes a Hungarian… to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first’.81 He loved jokes and limericks. One of his favourites was:

  There was a young man who said:

  Run! The end of the world has begun!

  The one I fear most

  Is that damn’ Holy Ghost,

  I can handle the Father and Son.82

  As well as laying the foundations for the modern computer (based on what is known as ‘von Neumann architecture’), he did ground-breaking mathematical work in group theory, mathematical logic and game theory, a pessimistic account of the rules of human behaviour described by one historian as ‘the perfect intellectual rationale for the Cold War’.83 Yet this witty and brilliant man seriously advocated a pre-emptive atomic strike against the Soviet Union. In 1950 he argued that ‘if you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock.’84 Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also argued that the human race faced doomsday sooner or later, thanks to its misuse of technology. Like Teller, he advocated world government, principally because he believed the world was now too dangerous to let countries govern themselves: ‘For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable.’85

  Von Neumann believed that ‘total’ war with the Soviet Union was unavoidable and for this reason he consistently advocated a ‘maximum rate of armament’.86 The newly elected President Eisenhower appointed von Neumann as an AEC commissioner, a post he took up in 1955 at the same time as Oppenheimer lost his security clearance (and thus his AECposition). Unlike Szilard, who took great pleasure in baiting brass-hats, the hawkish von Neumann had always enjoyed war work and rubbing shoulders with the military. He described himself to the Senate committee as ‘violently anti-Communist and a good deal more militaristic than most’.87

  For scientists like John von Neumann, working on atomic weapons had the thrill and the glamour of a science fiction adventure. He clearly relished being part of what he called ‘this Buck Rogers universe’.88 He had been a consultant on military matters for bodies such as the CIA since 1951. He made his most significant recommendation in 1954, when he advised the government that research should be started immediately into creating a force of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of delivering nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union at the touch of a button. The former bomber pilot and later government adviser William Borden had warned in his 1946 book There Will Be No Time of a ‘rocket Pearl Harbor’.89 America was determined not to be caught napping again. By the second half of the 1950s, the ICBM would earn itself the distinction of being described as the ‘ultimate weapon’.90

  In the year that he became an AEC commissioner, von Neumann was told that he had bone cancer. Some suggested that he contracted this terminal condition from exposure to fallout during the Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini atoll in May 1946, during which many seamen became contaminated with radiation.91 Within a year, this painful and debilitating disease had spread to his spine. Despite being confined to a wheelchair he continued to attend AEC meetings, ferried back and forth by limousine. This has prompted some people to identify the wheelchair-bound Dr Strangelove in Kubrick’s film with the ‘militaristic’ mathematician.

  John von Neumann receives the Medal of Freedom at the White House from President Eisenhower on 16 February 1956 ‘for exceptionally meritorious service in furtherance of the security of the United States’ and for resolving ‘some of the most difficult technical problems of national defense’.

  One of von Neumann’s last public appearances was to receive the Medal of Freedom at the White House from President Eisenhower in February 1956. ‘I wish I could be around long enough to deserve this honour,’ he said poignantly. Even during his final months, he continued to be visited in hospital by the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking military men. His brother, Michael, sat by his bedside reading
aloud from Goethe’s Faust. When Michael paused to turn a page, Johnny would start reciting from memory the play about the archetypal scientist and his insatiable lust for knowledge.

  At the end, as his mind disintegrated, Johnny would awake screaming in the night. Just in case he spilled any military secrets, his orderlies in the hospital were all air force personnel. The other members of the Hungarian Quartet made the sad journey to his bedside to visit their dying friend. Later, Teller said that Johnny ‘suffered more when his mind would no longer function than I have ever seen any human being suffer’.92 He died aged 53, in the spring of 1957.

  The Los Alamos physicist Robert Serber recalled that, during the war, he saw a list on Edward Teller’s blackboard that was unusually lethal even by the Hungarian scientist’s standards. It was, he said, ‘a list of weapons – ideas for weapons – with their abilities and properties displayed. For the last one on the list, the largest, the method of delivery was listed as “Backyard”. Since that particular device would probably kill everyone on earth, there was no use carting it elsewhere.’93

  In February 1950, Edward Teller proposed building a vast 1,000-megaton H-bomb, which because of its size would have to be transported and detonated on a ship. Such a huge bomb would, he predicted, result in a damage zone of 1,000 square miles, as well as ‘very serious’ flash burns out to 100 miles. The explosion would be dirty, producing very heavy fallout, with radioactivity blanketing an area 40 miles wide by 400 miles long.

  In the same month as his fellow Martian, Leo Szilard, was frightening the world with his prediction of massive bombs rigged with cobalt, Teller was actually designing the gigaton devices that would form the basis of the cobalt bomb. He even described the effect of exploding such a bomb near Washington: ‘Let us assume that the winds are blowing north along the Alleghenies, a condition quite frequently encountered. Then Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston could all be close to the path of the radioactive cloud and even the farthest point, Boston, would be within reach of the danger.’94 But it was not until four years later, in 1954, that America and the world realized the true extent of the threat posed by Edward Teller’s grandiose Strangelovean fantasies.

  18

  The Hell Bomb

  Ring-a-ring o’neutrons

  A pocketful of positrons

  A fission! A fission!

  We all fall down!

  Nursery rhyme, AD 3955, Michael Avallone, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

  On 1 March 1954, an improved version of the Mike test device was detonated at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 5,000 miles from the west coast of America. This slimmed-down thermonuclear device had been nicknamed ‘Shrimp’ by the Los Alamos scientists who built it. When fully weaponized it would be small enough to be carried by a B-47 bomber.

  But the scientists got their calculations badly wrong. They expected a yield of 5 megatons. Instead it exploded with the power of 15 million tons of TNT, making it the biggest bomb ever tested by the United States. The fireball expanded to four miles wide. Without warning, radioactive fallout began raining down on the nearly ten thousand personnel of the naval task force gathered in the Pacific to observe the test, code-named Bravo.

  Among them was theoretical physicist Marshall Rosenbluth. He was exposed to a dose of radioactivity equivalent to about ten chest X-rays. ‘I was on a ship that was 30 miles away,’ he recalled,

  and we had this horrible white stuff raining on us… 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 a diseased brain up in the sky. 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.1

  Rosenbluth and the other observers were ordered below decks as the naval ships hurriedly retreated another 20 miles from the detonation point. The Shrimp had blasted a crater 250 feet deep and 6,500 feet wide out of the Pacific atoll. The white fallout described by Rosenbluth consisted of radioactive calcium from vaporized coral. Over the next few hours, monitoring stations recorded rising levels of radiation across the Marshall Islands. The next day, a group of American weathermen had to be evacuated from an island 133 miles from the detonation point. But it was not until two days later that the native inhabitants of Rongelap island, 90 miles away from the blast, began to be evacuated.

  Snow-like debris had begun settling on their island within four hours of the explosion and continued falling into the evening until it was an inch deep on the ground. Unaware of how dangerous it was, the islanders made no attempt to protect themselves from it. Soon they began to suffer the same symptoms as people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including diarrhoea, skin burns and vomiting. In the days to come they began losing their hair and haemorrhaging. It has been calculated that the islanders were exposed to 25 times more radiation during the Bravo thermonuclear test than people are now permitted to receive in a lifetime.

  The Bravo test cast a vast radioactive pall over thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean. But the rest of the world might never have heard about what happened were it not for what occurred two weeks later. A Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru (‘Lucky Dragon’), returned early to its homeport of Yaizu. All twenty-three crew members were suffering from a mysterious illness. It turned out to be radiation sickness. They had been fishing 90 miles east of the Bravo test, several miles outside the exclusion zone. The first the crew knew about the explosion was a blinding flash of light. This was followed three hours later by a ‘snowstorm’ which left their boat covered in a white, ash-like substance. One of the crew later recalled that the particles were so dense that they made a faint sound as they fell onto the deck. Intrigued by this bizarre phenomenon, some of the fishermen filled bottles with the dust as souvenirs. Then, following good marine practice, they hosed down the deck – an act which probably saved all their lives.

  When they arrived back in Japan, none of the crew knew why they had fallen ill. Newsreels showed scientists wearing facemasks scanning the men with Geiger counters. It was like a scene from a science fiction B-movie. In Japan, the incident ‘caused something close to panic’ as newspapers reported that ‘schools of “atomic fish’ ” might be swimming towards Japan, polluting local fish stocks.2 Initially, Lewis Strauss, the new chairman of the AEC (who had begun his career as a travelling shoe salesman), falsely accused the fishing boat of having been within the exclusion zone and of being a ‘Red spy outfit’.3

  Less than a month after the return of the Lucky Dragon, further atomic tests were conducted in the Pacific. The Japanese public were appalled and frightened by what was happening in their region. Seafood was part of their daily diet. Fears of radioactive fish prompted the government to begin checking tuna catches, and 135 tons of contaminated fish were destroyed. Six months after the Bravo test, one of the fishermen, Aikichi Kuboyama – who had already been suffering from hepatitis – died, and his colleagues were still in hospital. Japanese unions, politicians and newspapers joined in calling for an immediate end to nuclear tests.

  What especially ‘alarmed the world’ about this ‘thermonuclear monster’, as the American press labelled the Bravo H-bomb, was the invisible yet lethal fallout from the explosion.4 In spite of the warnings four years earlier from Albert Einstein and other scientists about radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, the word ‘fallout’ had scarcely been mentioned. Now the papers were full of stories describing how the fishermen had been ‘burned by fall-out’.5 The first use of the word ‘fallout’ in a popular work had been in 1950, in Richard Gerstell’s How To Survive an Atomic Bomb. This was also the first civil defence book of the nuclear age. Gerstell’s message was that fear was unpatriotic. As Daniel Lang wrote in the New Yorker, Bravo ‘was the shot that made the world fallout-conscious’.6

  After the Bravo test, which contaminated 7,000 square miles of land and sea, the scientific director of the Soviet atomic
weapons project, Igor Kurchatov, wrote a secret report concluding that a war fought with H-bombs would ‘create conditions under which the existence of life over the whole globe will be impossible’. One hundred such bombs would bring about this situation. He ended by warning his military and political masters that ‘mankind faces the enormous threat of an end to all life on earth’.7 But this dire conclusion did not dissuade the Soviets from exploding their own hydrogen bomb, on 6 November 1955. Edward Teller had also realized before 1947 that a hundred large thermonuclear explosions might raise the world’s levels of radioactivity to a ‘dangerously high level’.8

  Despite frequent reassurances from the AEC, the public in America and around the world began to wake up to the threat posed by this new, invisible killer. In its effects – spreading death by air – it seemed to many people little different from chemical or biological weapons. In fact, the H-bomb seemed to combine the worst of all weapons of mass destruction into one hellish device. ‘Talk and worry over the H-bomb’s radioactive “fallout” is spreading’, reported Time in November 1954.9 In the same month one of the most famous atomic movies of the cold war opened in Tokyo: Gojira, better known in the West as Godzilla.

  Right from the start of the atomic age, it seemed to most people that the atomic bomb was straight out of the pages of a science fiction story. In September 1945, one commentator noted: ‘The pulp writers could imagine things like the atom bomb; in fact, life is becoming more and more like a Science Fiction story, and the arrival on earth of a few six-legged Martians with Death Rays would hardly make the front page.’10 Chemical weapons had seemed similarly fantastic when they were first used.

  People who had seen the terrible effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or observed the test explosions, felt there was something quite literally ‘monstrous’ about what they had witnessed. When he first saw devastated Hiroshima, Air Force commander General George C. Kenney said that the town ‘seemed to have been ground into dust by a giant foot’.11 William Laurence described the Trinity fireball as ‘an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years’.12 For Laurence, atomic energy was ‘a man-made Titan’ who had been bound temporarily by humankind but was always threatening destruction: ‘Left without control for even a few seconds, the giant would run wild.’13 In 1952, the cartoon film A is for Atom described atomic energy as ‘the answer to a dream as old as man himself. A giant of limitless power at man’s command.’ Atomic energy was depicted in the film as a glowing colossus, towering over the earth’s horizon.14