Sun in a Bottle_The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking Read online

  The bizarre behavior became less acute once Oppenheimer relocated to the University of Göttingen in Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the world leader in theoretical physics—home to Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and many of the other leading lights of the day—and Oppenheimer established himself as a brilliant young physicist. However, he was still depressive. He was also vain, arrogant, and occasionally nasty. He had a habit of making people feel small and insignificant; he detested his “beastliness” but was unable to control it. Nevertheless, soon after moving back to the United States to become a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he acquired a circle of devotees thanks to his brilliance and wit.

  Despite Oppenheimer’s prickliness, everyone—even the occasional general—was impressed with the young professor. “He’s a genius,” wrote General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project and the man who chose Oppenheimer to lead the scientific effort. “Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.” This was by no means the most serious of his flaws, as far as the military was concerned.

  Oppenheimer was a security risk—he was absolutely surrounded by Communists. His brother and sister-in-law were members of the Communist Party. His first fiancée, Jean Tatlock, had been a member, too. His wife Kitty’s first husband had been an official in the party and had been killed fighting on the leftist side during the Spanish Civil War. The army knew about all these connections, yet Groves insisted that Oppenheimer lead the most sensitive military project of World War II. In October 1942, Oppenheimer accepted his new post and began assembling the biggest scientific project in the history of mankind.

  Laboratories devoted to the atom bomb effort sprang up around the country. Los Alamos, perched on a mesa in the New Mexico desert, was the intellectual heart of the Manhattan Project. Other facilities, such as one at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and another at Hanford in Washington, were crucial to figuring out the best way to separate bombworthy uranium-235 from the much more common uranium-238 and how to manufacture plutonium-239.2 However, the big minds roamed at Los Alamos: Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller.

  Teller, a Hungarian émigré and, arguably, a better theoretician than Oppenheimer, was brought to the University of Chicago in mid-1942 by the Manhattan Project just as it was getting under way. When Teller arrived, nobody assigned him a task, so he set to work trying to design the ultimate weapon, more powerful even than the one the project’s scientists were trying to build. He envisioned a superbomb that used fusion instead of fission. If it worked, it would dwarf an atom bomb just as surely as an atom bomb would dwarf conventional explosives. Teller became obsessed with wielding the power of the sun. It was an obsession that molded him into one of the darkest and most twisted figures of American science. “He’s a danger to all that’s important,” said his fellow physicist Hans Bethe. “I really do feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”

  Teller was born in Budapest, the child of a successful lawyer. In 1919, when he was eleven years old, the Communist Béla Kun swept to power and declared Hungary a Soviet state. “The communists overturned every aspect of society and the economy,” Teller later wrote. “My father could no longer practice law.” Two soldiers moved into the Tellers’ home, and young Edward came to know hunger. “There was no food (or any other kind of goods) for sale in the stores now owned by the communists. . . . As I recall, cabbage was often all we could find. I still dislike cabbage.”

  After rampant inflation, a coup attempt, a purge, and a military defeat, Kun’s regime ended before the year was out. But the whole experience left Teller with an almost monomaniacal hatred of Communism. In large part, his actions over the next few decades—his attempt to build an arsenal of unlimited power—would be driven by that hatred.3

  Thus Teller’s vision of a superweapon was possible because there is more than one way to extract energy from the atom. Fission is the easy way. Just get enough fissile material (such as uranium-235 or plutonium- 239) in a small enough space and a chain reaction will start on its own. Heavy atoms will split into fragments, converting mass into energy and creating an enormous explosion. The main problem is getting that fissile material. Neither uranium-235 nor plutonium-239 was easy to obtain, especially with the state of knowledge in 1942 and 1943.

  Fusion is another way to convert mass into energy; it’s the opposite of fission. In fission, heavy atoms split and the sum of the parts is lighter than the original atoms. In fusion, light atoms stick together, and the whole resulting atom is lighter than the sum of the parts that made it. The missing matter—the stuff that disappears when the light atoms combine—becomes energy.

  Fusion is several times more powerful than fission; more of the mass of each reacting atom is converted into energy. Better yet, it is much easier to find the fuel for fusion—light atoms like hydrogen—than it is to find the uranium or plutonium fuel for fission. The oceans are filled with hydrogen’s heavier sibling, deuterium, a great fuel for fusion reactions. It’s not terribly difficult to extract a practically unlimited amount of the stuff.

  Of course, there is a downside. The fusion reaction is extremely difficult to start, and even harder to keep going long enough to produce large quantities of energy. Atoms tend to repel each other, so it is very hard to get them close enough so that they stick together. You need an enormous amount of energy to slam two atoms together forcefully enough to overcome that repulsion and get them to fuse.

  For a fission reaction, you just need to get a lump of uranium big enough. For fusion, you need to manipulate your fuel in some tricky ways. First, you’ve got to compress the fuel into a tiny parcel. This keeps the atoms in close proximity to one another (so they have a chance of colliding). That, in itself, is not so hard; the trick is to keep the atoms very hot as well. Only at tens or hundreds of millions of degrees are the atoms moving fast enough to have a chance of fusing when they do collide. When you heat something, it expands—the atoms try to escape in all directions. Thus, it is very hard to keep a very hot thing compressed very tightly. So, the basic problem in fusion is that it is very difficult to heat something to the right temperature and, simultaneously, keep the atoms close enough together. Without both things working concurrently, a fusion reaction won’t get going.

  Making matters worse, if you are lucky enough to start a fusion reaction, your own success works against you. When the fusing atoms release energy, they pour heat into their surroundings. This makes the neighboring atoms hotter. The hotter the atoms get, the more the fuel expands and the harder the atoms try to escape. The packet of fuel attempts to blow itself apart. Unless the conditions are just right, a fusion reaction will snuff itself out before it produces any appreciable energy.

  Nevertheless, if scientists could get a fusion reaction going even for a few fractions of a second, its power would be virtually limitless. It could be much, much more deadly than a mere fission bomb.

  This is the idea that obsessed Teller soon after he arrived in Chicago. Unlike most of his colleagues, he was not terribly interested in working on the fission bomb. In his mind, the theoretical problems had already been solved, so he spent his energy trying to come up with even better weapons: fusion bombs. Within a month of his arrival, Teller had not only concluded that it was possible to create a fusion bomb that would dwarf anything the Manhattan Project would be able to offer, but had also convinced himself that he knew precisely how to build one. It would be years before he figured out how wrong he was.

  In 1942, though, Teller, full of enthusiasm, brought the idea to the attention of his colleagues. They quickly dubbed the new weapon the Super. By August, he and his fellow physicists were giving astounding estimates of the destructive power of a Super-like fusion weapon. A report at the time estimated that one would blow up
with the energy of one hundred megatons of TNT, about seven thousand times bigger than the eventual size of the Hiroshima bomb. Teller, a tremendous optimist,4 was convinced that fusion was easy.

  Once you have an atom bomb, he argued, you can dump the enormous power of an exploding atomic weapon into a tank of deuterium—heavy hydrogen. The hydrogen, heated to millions of degrees, would begin to fuse and generate energy in a thermonuclear reaction. This was essentially the idea behind Teller’s Super: it was, more or less, an atom bomb at one end of a vessel full of heavy hydrogen. The exploding bomb would trigger a wave of fusion in the vessel. If it worked, Teller argued, this Super had unlimited capacity for destruction.5

  To Teller, the easy part was building a weapon of tremendous power. The hard part was building a weapon that would not be so destructive that it would kill everybody on Earth. In Teller’s fertile imagination, an atom bomb that ignited a tank of hydrogen might ignite the air itself. (The nitrogen that makes up 80 percent of the atmosphere is a light atom, and just like hydrogen it will fuse if the conditions are right.) Teller’s initial calculations showed that an atomic explosion might induce nitrogen atoms in the air to fuse with each other. The runaway explosion would quickly destroy the world in a gigantic nuclear furnace—even the weak Manhattan Project bomb might mean the end of life on Earth. When Hans Bethe double-checked Teller’s assumptions, though, he found reason to relax. “I very soon found some unjustified assumptions in Teller’s calculation that made such a result extremely unlikely, to say the least.” If a fusion reaction got going, there was too much energy lost through radiation to get the atmosphere hot enough to cause a chain reaction of fusing nitrogen.6 The world was safe. Fusion was much more difficult than Teller initially imagined.

  Fusion was so hard, in fact, that the Super, at least as originally designed by Teller, wouldn’t work at all. According to the physicist Robert Serber, “Edward first thought it was a cinch. Bethe, playing his usual role, knocked it to pieces.” Hans Bethe showed that the fireball in Teller’s Super device would cool very rapidly. Here, too, the energy of a budding fusion reaction would quickly drain away through radiation; the fusion would snuff itself out before it really got going. It wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but it was enough of a problem for the Manhattan Project physicists to put Teller’s idea on the back burner. In 1943, a review committee decided that all the lines of research for the project—and for its theoretical physics division, which had relocated to Los Alamos—were worthwhile except for one: fusion. Instead of trying to build superweapons, the committee argued, the lab must concentrate its efforts on building atomic weapons to end the war.

  Teller was disappointed that his pet project was stalled. Bruising his ego further, Oppenheimer appointed Bethe to be the head of the theoretical physics division. Teller thought the appointment would be his—and he apparently took both slights personally.

  This was the turning point in Teller’s career. It was at this moment that Teller, the brilliant physicist, started becoming defined by his character flaws: his egocentrism, his nearly manic optimism, and his paranoia. All these traits would play a role in the coming tragedy, but it was the paranoia that led Teller to blame a single individual for all the insults he received at the hands of the Manhattan Project. He was refused his rightful position as head of theory at Los Alamos, and the Super was mothballed all because of one man: J. Robert Oppenheimer.

  Oppenheimer and Teller would soon become bitter enemies. The two were very different. Oppenheimer, gaunt and aristocratic, was quite unlike the limping, bushy-browed Teller.7 The most striking difference was their politics. Oppenheimer, a leftist who flirted with Communism, was bound to clash eventually with Teller, the rabid anti-Communist.

  However, in July 1945 the Teller-Oppenheimer feud was yet to ignite. It was a triumphant time for both physicists. The Los Alamos scientists had nearly overcome all the technical problems that faced them; they had manufactured and machined enough plutonium to build a “gadget” named Jumbo and had built an intricate cage of explosives that would force all the metal to assemble into a critical mass and explode. The scientists began to wager about how big the first atomic explosion—Trinity—would be. Oppenheimer bet that it would be the equivalent of a mere three hundred tons of TNT. Teller, ever the optimist, guessed that it would be forty thousand tons. It was raining in the predawn hours the day of the test, yet Teller was sharing his bottle of sunscreen with his colleagues.

  When the New Mexico desert suddenly erupted with a light brighter than the noonday sun, the Manhattan Project scientists were relieved and jubilant. When a similar flash erupted over Hiroshima, the feelings were much more somber. When the war ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender, Oppenheimer, like many of his scientific colleagues, lost his taste for weapons work.

  By mid-September, half the staff at Los Alamos was already gone. Oppenheimer stepped down a month later—and he was warning about the dangers of adding atomic weapons to the world’s arsenal. “The time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” he prophesied while accepting a military award in November. Bethe’s departure left Los Alamos without a head of theory, the very post that Teller coveted, and Teller was offered the job. But Teller would only accept if the lab would devote its resources to developing better bombs—most likely a fusion weapon. Alas, the lab was to turn its attention to production rather than to designing fusion weapons. “There was no backing for the thermonuclear work. No one was interested in developing a thermonuclear bomb,” huffed Teller. “No one cared.”

  Los Alamos was dissolving around him, and few Manhattan Project scientists seemed interested in developing the fusion bomb. Teller decided to pack his bags and move back to the University of Chicago. His relationship with Los Alamos wasn’t over, however. He would consult for the laboratory during the postwar years, and he would soon return to the New Mexico complex.

  Teller’s dream of unlimited power was just a little premature. In just a few years, the United States would embark on a crash effort to develop fusion weapons.

  The decision to build fusion weapons came from paranoia and fear. Even though the Americans had a monopoly on nuclear bombs, there was the nagging worry that the Soviets would soon build their own atomic weapons. Once that happened, Teller reasoned, they would certainly invade—unless America had an even bigger weapon in its arsenal: the Super. “Edward offered to bet me that unless we went ahead with his Super,” wrote a colleague, “he, Teller, would be a Russian prisoner of war in the United States within five years!”

  Just after the war ended, Teller tried to get the Super program started again. At a conference in April 1946, Teller and two dozen key scientists met to discuss whether a superbomb was feasible, and if so, what its future should be. There is some debate as to what the conference participants actually concluded, but the report was sanguine: “It is likely that a super-bomb can be constructed and will work,” it said, adding that if doubts about the design proved to be true, “simple modifications of the design will render the model feasible.” The report reflected Teller’s unflagging optimism. (After all, he wrote the thing.) He was promising that fusion was within reach.

  In truth, though, the road to the superbomb would be harder than Teller imagined. Not only was his design flawed, but he also had to overcome political opposition. Oppenheimer and his cronies were trying to get the United States to give up its monopoly on atom bombs—by giving nuclear secrets to the Communists. To Teller, it was madness; it was almost treasonous.

  In March 1946, the month before Teller’s Super conference, Oppenheimer and a government committee made the radical suggestion that “inherently dangerous” activities such as mining uranium should be put under international control and that all nations, including the Soviet Union, should have access to nuclear knowledge. As idealistic as this scheme might seem, at least in retrospect, it became official U.S. policy within a few months. The United States’ representative to the UN Atomic Energy Comm
ission, Bernard Baruch, presented such a plan to the United Nations. It was “a choice between the quick and the dead,” he told the world. “We must elect world peace or world destruction.” Not all nations agreed with that simplistic dichotomy. The Soviet Union opposed the proposal, and by the end of 1946 the plan was dead. It soon became clear why.

  On September 3, 1949, a modified B-29 bomber flying off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula picked up alarming traces of radiation. It was the first sign of a radioactive cloud that soon drifted across the Pacific, the United States, and Canada before crossing the Atlantic and circling the world. Physicists around the United States scrambled to figure out the source of the radiation. It did not take long. The radioactive cloud had elements that showed that it was the result of nuclear fissions. It was fairly clear: the Russians had their own atom bomb. America’s nuclear monopoly had ended much more quickly than anyone expected. On August 29, 1949, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, a nuclear cloud had mushroomed to life. The Soviets called it “First Lightning”; the stunned Americans nicknamed the first Russian atom bomb test “Joe-1.”

  The timing could hardly have been worse. On September 21, Mao Tse-tung announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China. A quarter of the world’s population suddenly had a red flag flying above their heads. Two days later, President Truman had to announce the news of Joe-1. “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.,” he said, and attempted to reassure a frightened nation. “Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected.” Even so, the Russians had caught up with the Americans much more quickly than anticipated.8 The hope of unilateral disarmament was gone forever. When Teller heard the news, he called Oppenheimer on the telephone, perhaps hoping to spur him to pursue fusion weapons. “Keep your shirt on!” was Oppenheimer’s curt rejoinder.