by Joan Didion
They explained that the TRIGA operated at a much lower heat level than a power reactor, and was used primarily for “making things radioactive”. Nutritionists, for example, used it to measure trace elements in diet. Archaeologists used it for dating. NASA used it for high-altitude pollution studies, and for a study on how weightlessness affects human calcium metabolism. Stanford was using it to study lithium in the brain. Physicists from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, up the hill, had been coming down to use it for experiments in the development of a fusion, or “clean”, reactor. A researcher from Ghana used it for a year, testing samples from African waterholes for the arsenic that could kill the animals.
The reactor was operating at one megawatt as we talked. All levels were normal. We were standing, with Harry Braun, the chief reactor operator, on the metal platform around the reactor pool, and I had trouble keeping my eyes from the core, the Cerenkov radiation around the fuel rods, the blue shimmer under twenty feet of clear water. There was a skimmer on the side of the pool, and a bath mat thrown over the railing. There was a fishing pole, and a rubber duck. Harry Braun uses the fishing rod to extract samples from the specimen rack around the core, and the rubber duck to monitor the water movement. “Or when the little children come on school tours,” he added. “Sometimes they don’t pay any attention until we put the duck in the pool.”
I was ten years old when “the atomic age”, as we called it then, came forcibly to the world’s attention. At the time the verbs favored for use with “the atomic age” were “dawned” or “ushered in”, both of which implied an upward trend to events. I recall being told that the device which ended World War II was “the size of a lemon” (this was not true) and that the University of California had helped build it (this was true). I recall listening all one Sunday afternoon to a special radio report called “The Quick and the Dead”, three or four hours during which the people who had built and witnessed the bomb talked about the bomb’s and (by extension) their own eerie and apparently unprecedented power, their abrupt elevation to that place from whence they had come to judge the quick and the dead, and I also recall, when summer was over and school started again, being taught to cover my eyes and my brain stem and crouch beneath my desk during atomic-bomb drills.
So unequivocal were these impressions that it never occurred to me that I would not sooner or later—most probably sooner, certainly before I ever grew up or got married or went to college—endure the moment of its happening: first the blinding white light, which appeared in my imagination as a negative photographic image, then the waves of heat, the sound, and, finally, death, instant or prolonged, depending inflexibly on where one was caught in the scale of concentric circles we all imagined pulsing out from ground zero. Some years later, when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley and had an apartment in an old shingled house a few doors from where Etcheverry now stands, I could look up the hill at night and see the lights at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, at what was then called “the rad lab”, at the cyclotron and the Bevatron, and I still expected to wake up one night and see those lights, in negative, still expected the blinding white light, the heat wave, the logical conclusion.
After I graduated I moved to New York, and after some months or a year I realized that I was no longer anticipating the blinding flash, and that the expectation had probably been one of those ways in which children deal with mortality, learn to juggle the idea that life will end as surely as it began, to perform in the face of definite annihilation. And yet I know that for me, and I suspect for many of us, this single image —this blinding white light that meant death, this seductive reversal of the usual associations around “light” and “white” and “radiance”—became a metaphor that to some extent determined what I later thought and did. In my Modern Library copy of The Education of Henry Adams, a book I first read and scored at Berkeley in 1954, I see this passage, about the 1900 Paris Great Exposition, underlined:
... to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.
It had been, at the time I saw the TRIGA Mark III reactor in the basement of Etcheverry Hall, seventy-nine years since Henry Adams went to Paris to study Science as he had studied Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. It had been thirty-four years since Robert Oppenheimer saw the white light at Alamogordo. The “nuclear issue”, as we called it, suggesting that the course of the world since the Industrial Revolution was provisional, open to revision, up for a vote, had been under discussion all those years, and yet something about the fact of the reactor still resisted interpretation: the intense blue in the pool water, the Cerenkov radiation around the fuel rods, the blue past all blue, the blue like light itself, the blue that is actually a shock wave in the water and is the exact blue of the glass at Chartres.
4
At the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a compound of heavily guarded structures in the rolling cattle and orchard country southeast of Oakland, badges had to be displayed not only at the gate but again and again, at various points within the compound, to television cameras mounted between two locked doors. These cameras registered not only the presence but the color of the badge. A red badge meant “No Clearance U.S. Citizen” and might or might not be issued with the white covering badge that meant “Visitor Must Be Escorted”. A yellow badge meant “No Higher Than Confidential Access”. A green badge banded in yellow indicated that access was to be considered top level but not exactly unlimited: “Does Need to Know Exist?” was, according to a sign in the Badge Office, LLL Building 310, the question to ask as the bearer moved from station to station among the mysteries of the compound.
The symbolic as well as the literal message of a badge at Livermore—or at Los Alamos, or at Sandia, or at any of the other major labs around the country—was that the government had an interest here, that big money was being spent, Big Physics done. Badges were the totems of the tribe, the family. This was the family that used to keep all the plutonium in the world in a cigar box outside Glenn Seaborg’s office in Berkeley, the family that used to try different ways of turning on the early twenty-seven-and-one-half-inch Berkeley cyclotron so as not to blow out large sections of the East Bay power grid. “Very gently” was said to work best. I have a copy of a photograph that suggests the day-to-day life of this family with considerable poignance, a snapshot taken during the fifties, when Livermore was testing its atmospheric nuclear weapons in the Pacific. The snapshot shows a very young Livermore scientist, with a flattop haircut and an engaging smile, standing on the beach of an unidentified atoll on an unspecified day just preceding or just following (no clue in the caption) a test shot. He is holding a fishing rod, and, in the other hand, a queen triggerfish, according to the caption “just a few ounces short of a world record”. He is wearing only swimming trunks, and his badge.
On the day in February 1980 when I drove down to Livermore from Berkeley the coast ranges were green from the winter rains. The acacia was out along the highway, a haze of chrome yellow in the window. Inside the compound itself, narcissus and daffodil shoots pressed through the asphalt walkways. I had driven down because I wanted to see Shiva, Livermore’s twenty-beam laser, the $35 million tool that was then Livermore’s main marker in the biggest Big Physics game then going, the attempt to create a controlled fusion reaction. An uncontrolled fusion reaction was easy, and was called a hydrogen bomb. A controlled fusion reaction was harder, so much harder that it was usually characterized as “the most difficult technological feat ever undertaken”, but the eventual payoff could be virtually limitless nuclear power produced at a fraction the hazard of the fission plants then operating. The difficulty in a controlled fusion reaction was that it involved achieving a thermonuclear burn of 100 million degrees centigrade, or more than six times the heat of the interior of
the sun, without exploding the container. That no one had ever done this was, for the family, the point.
Ideas about how to do it were intensely competitive. Some laboratories had concentrated on what was called the “magnetic bottle” approach, involving the magnetic confinement of plasma; others, on lasers, and the theoretical ability of laser beams to trigger controlled fusion by simultaneously heating and compressing tiny pellets of fuel. Livermore had at that time a magnetic-bottle project but was gambling most heavily on its lasers, on Shiva and on Shiva’s then unfinished successor, Nova. This was a high-stakes game: the prizes would end up at those laboratories where the money was, and the money would go to those laboratories where the prizes seemed most likely. It was no accident that Livermore was visited by so many members of Congress, by officials of the Department of Defense and of the Department of Energy, and by not too many other people: friends in high places were essential to the family. The biography of Ernest O. Lawrence, the first of the Berkeley Nobel laureates and the man after whom the Lawrence Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories were named, is instructive on this point: there were meetings at the Pacific Union Club, sojourns at Bohemian Grove and San Simeon, even “a short trip to Acapulco with Randy and Catherine Hearst”. The Eniwetok tests during the fifties were typically preceded for Lawrence by stops in Honolulu, where, for example,
. . . he was a guest of Admiral John E. Gingrich, a fine host. He reciprocated with a dinner for the admiral and several others at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel the night before departure for Eniwetok, a ten-hour flight from Honolulu. Eniwetok had much the atmosphere of a South Seas resort. A fine officers’ club on the beach provided relaxation for congressmen and visitors. The tropical sea invited swimmers and scuba divers. There were no phones to interrupt conversations with interesting and important men . . . chairs had been placed on the beach when observers assembled at the club near dawn [to witness the shot]. Coffee and sandwiches were served, and dark glasses distributed . . .
On the day I visited Livermore the staff was still cleaning up after a January earthquake, a Richter 5.5 on the Mount Diablo-Greenville Fault. Acoustical tiles had fallen from the ceilings of the office buildings. Overhead light fixtures had plummeted onto desks, and wiring and insulation and air-conditioning ducts still hung wrenched from the ceilings. “You get damage in the office buildings because the office buildings are only built to local code,” I was told by John Emmett, the physicist then in charge of the Livermore laser program. When the ceilings started falling that particular January, John Emmett had been talking to a visitor in his office. He had shown the visitor out, run back inside to see if anyone was trapped under the toppled bookshelves and cabinets, and then run over to the building that houses Shiva. The laser had been affected so slightly that all twenty beams were found, by the sixty-three microcomputers that constantly aligned and realigned the Shiva beams, to be within one-sixteenth of an inch of their original alignment. “We didn’t anticipate any real damage and we didn’t get any,” John Emmett said. “That’s the way the gadget is designed.”
What John Emmett called “the gadget” was framed in an immaculate white steel scaffolding several stories high and roughly the size of a football field. This frame was astonishingly beautiful, apiece of pure theater, a kind of abstract set on which the actors wore white coats, green goggles, and hard hats. “You wear the goggles because even when we’re not firing we’ve got some little beams bouncing around,” John Emmett said. “The hard hat is because somebody’s always dropping something.” Within the frame, a single infrared laser beam was split into twenty beams, each of which was amplified and reamplified until, at the instant two or three times a day when all twenty beams hit target, they were carrying sixty times as much power as was produced in the entire (exclusive of this room) United States. The target under bombardment was a glass bead a fraction the size of a grain of salt. The entire shoot took one-half billionth of a second. John Emmett and the Livermore laser team had then achieved with Shiva controlled temperatures of 85 million degrees centigrade, or roughly five times the heat at the center of the sun, but not 100 million. They were gambling on Nova for 100 million, the prize.
I recall, that afternoon at Livermore, asking John Emmett what would happen if I looked at the invisible infrared beam without goggles. “It’ll blow a hole in your retina,” he said matter-of-factly. It seemed that he had burned out the retina of one of his own eyes with a laser when he was a graduate student at Stanford. I asked if the sight had come back. “All but one little spot,” he said. Give me a mind that is not bored, that does not whimper, whine or sigh / Don’t let me worry overmuch about the fussy thing called I: these are two lines from a popular “prayer”, a late-twenties precursor to the “Desiderata” that Ernest O. Lawrence kept framed on his desk until his death. The one little spot was not of interest to John Emmett. Making the laser work was.
5
Wintertime and springtime, Honolulu: in the winter there was the garbage strike, forty-two days during which the city lapsed into a profound and seductive tropicality. Trash drifted in the vines off the Lunalilo Freeway. The airport looked Central American, between governments. Green plastic bags of garbage mounded up on the streets, and orange peels and Tab cans thrown in the canals washed down to the sea and up to the tide line in front of our rented house on Kahala Avenue. A day goes this way: in the morning I rearrange our own green plastic mounds, pick up the orange peels and Tab cans from the tide line, and sit down to work at the wet bar in the living room, a U-shaped counter temporarily equipped with an IBM Selectric typewriter. I turn on the radio for news of a break in the garbage strike: I get a sig-alert for the Lunalilo, roadwork between the Wilder Avenue off-ramp and the Punahou overpass. I get the weather: mostly clear. Actually water is dropping in great glassy sheets on the windward side of the island, fifteen minutes across the Pali, but on leeward Oahu the sky is quicksilver, chiaroscuro, light and dark and sudden falls of rain and rainbow, mostly clear. Some time ago I stopped trying to explain to acquaintances on the mainland the ways in which the simplest routines of a day in Honolulu can please and interest me, but on these winter mornings I am reminded that they do. I keep an appointment with a dermatologist at Kapiolani-Children’s Medical Center, and am pleased by the drive down Beretania Street in the rain. I stop for groceries at the Star Market in the Kahala Mall, and am pleased by the sprays of vanda orchids and the foot-long watercress and the little Manoa lettuces in the produce department. Some mornings I am even pleased by the garbage strike.
The undertone of every day in Honolulu, the one fact that colors every other, is the place’s absolute remove from the rest of the world. Many American cities began remote, but only Honolulu is fated to remain so, and only in Honolulu do the attitudes and institutions born of extreme isolation continue to set the tone of daily life. The edge of the available world is sharply defined: one turns a corner or glances out an office window and there it is, blue sea. There is no cheap freedom to be gained by getting in a car and driving as far as one can go, since as far as one can go on the island of Oahu takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. “Getting away” involves actual travel, scheduled carriers, involves reservations and reconfirmations and the ambiguous experience of being strapped passive in a darkened cabin and exposed to unwanted images on a flickering screen; involves submission to other people’s schedules and involves, most significantly, money.
I have rarely spent an evening at anyone’s house in Honolulu when someone in the room was not just off or about to catch an airplane, and the extent to which ten-hour flights figure in the local imagination tends to reinforce the distinction between those who can afford them and those who cannot. More people probably travel in Honolulu than can actually afford to: one study showed recent trips to the mainland in almost 25 percent of Oahu households and recent trips to countries outside the United States in almost 10 percent. Very few of
those trips are to Europe, very few to the east coast of the United States. Not only does it take longer to fly from Honolulu to New York than from Honolulu to Hong Kong (the actual air time is about the same, ten or eleven hours either way, but no carrier now flies nonstop from Honolulu to New York), but Hong Kong seems closer in spirit, as do Manila, Tokyo, Sydney. A druggist suggests that I stock up on a prescription over the counter the next time I am in Hong Kong. The daughter of a friend gets a reward for good grades, a sweet-sixteen weekend on the Great Barrier Reef. The far Pacific is home, or near home in mood and appearance (there are parts of Oahu that bear more resemblance to Southeast Asia than to anywhere in the mainland United States), and the truly foreign lies in the other direction: airline posters feature the New England foliage, the Statue of Liberty, exotic attractions from a distant culture, a culture in which most people in Honolulu have no roots at all and only a fitful interest. This leaning toward Asia makes Honolulu’s relation to the rest of America oblique, and divergent at unexpected points, which is part of the place’s great but often hidden eccentricity.