Sun in a Bottle Page 4

  For more than a year, Teller, along with some of his hawkish allies, had been lobbying to create a second laboratory—one dedicated to thermonuclear fusion. Oppenheimer’s GAC consistently opposed the proposal, fearing that it would split the pool of talented physicists rather than keep them concentrated in one place. However, Teller’s behind-the-scenes lobbying had yielded some powerful allies, including high air force brass such as James Doolittle, who led the heroic first air raid on Tokyo in 1942. Rather than lose control of hydrogen bomb research to the military, the Atomic Energy Commission began to capitulate. Oppenheimer and the GAC still opposed the new laboratory, but Oppenheimer’s influence was waning. New members of the GAC were more hawkish than the ones they had replaced. Worse yet, Oppenheimer’s political enemies—Teller, Luis Alvarez, air force scientist David Griggs, AEC director of research Kenneth Pitzer, and GAC member Willard Libby—had been chatting with the FBI about Oppenheimer. Pitzer went so far as to publicly question Oppenheimer’s loyalty.

  Oppenheimer’s critics had taken their toll. In June 1952, he stepped down from the GAC. The following month the AEC green-lighted the second laboratory, to be based at Livermore in California (and is today the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). Ironically, Teller was slighted yet again; he was surprised to hear that he wasn’t the director. After some arguing he signed up. “I am leaving the appeasers to join the fascists,” Teller reportedly joked.

  Teller had won. Los Alamos now had a rival, and Teller had a facility that was free from the influence of Oppenheimer’s cronies, the Soviet appeasers, the Communist sympathizers. However, it was Los Alamos that would initiate the age of fusion.

  At 7:14:59 AM on November 1, 1952, roughly a half second ahead of schedule, the island of Elugelab suddenly disappeared. A compact eighty-ton device, nicknamed “the sausage,” unleashed the power of the sun upon the Earth for a few moments. The fusion reaction from this device—the first hydrogen bomb—vaporized Elugelab. All that remained was a cloud of dust and fire that stretched twenty miles into the stratosphere.

  The nuclear test, known as Ivy Mike, was the first test of a thermonuclear weapon. The Ulam-Teller design had paid off. The energy it produced was an astonishing ten megatons, fifty times bigger than the Greenhouse George shot and about the size of seven hundred Hiroshima bombs. Eniwetok atoll was now missing an island; Elugelab had evaporated under the cloud of fusing hydrogen, leaving behind a crater that could swallow fourteen buildings the size of the Pentagon.

  Teller, the prime architect of the cataclysm, was half a world away. Having left Los Alamos, he was in a darkened room at Berkeley where a seismograph recorded the trembling of the Earth with a tiny beam of light. When that dot of light danced wildly, Teller knew he had succeeded. Ivy Mike had worked. Teller had created a weapon of virtually unlimited power. It was as if the United States had been handed the sword of Michael, the ultimate weapon.

  It had taken too long. The Russians were already hot on the fusion trail. Shortly after World War II, all across the Soviet Union, mysterious secret cities began sprouting up. Among them: Arzamas-16, near Novgorod; Semipalatinsk-21 in Kazakhstan; Chelyabinsk-70 in the Ural Mountains. After decades of speculation and spying, we now know that these were the cities devoted to designing, testing, and building nuclear weapons. And in the early 1950s, the Soviets were progressing rapidly. Just weeks before Teller left Los Alamos, the third Russian test, Joe-3, yielded forty-two kilotons. Two years later, in August 1953, Joe-4 yielded more than four hundred kilotons. Again, American scientists were shocked. This bomb was more powerful than standard fission weapons—it was clearly a fusion device.

  Russian scientists had come up with a design similar to the Alarm Clock idea, the very one that Teller had rejected as a dead end. It was still a dead end; there was no way the Russians could use the design to create a practical weapon in the megaton range. And the fact that they relied on this design shows they hadn’t yet made the Ulam-Teller breakthrough. Nevertheless, the Russian alarm clock was waking up the American public to the likelihood that the Soviet Union would have a full-fledged hydrogen bomb in a few years. The American advantage, once again, was dissolving faster than expected.

  Teller knew just whom to blame. So did Senator Joseph McCarthy. In April 1954, the senator accused Oppenheimer of deliberately delaying the H-bomb by eighteen months. After years of maneuvering—and after Lewis Strauss, a Teller ally, became the head of the Atomic Energy Commission—Oppenheimer’s enemies finally had enough power to break him. The AEC began formal hearings to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. The charges against him: various associations with Communists, lying to the FBI about Communist meetings, and strong opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer was being punished, in part, for not jumping on the fusion bandwagon.

  The Communist associations would probably have been enough to sink Oppenheimer.13 Nonetheless, Teller and his allies hammered the hapless physicist for dragging his feet about the Super project. Mercilessly. Ernest Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, and Kenneth Pitzer expressed their doubts, in testimony or in affidavits, about Oppenheimer’s resistance to building a fusion superbomb. Teller testified, too, and he seemed to relish twisting the knife. “It is my belief that if at the end of the war some people like Dr. Oppenheimer would have lent moral support, not even their own work—just moral support—to work on the thermonuclear gadget . . . I think we would have had the bomb in 1947.” When asked what it would mean to atomic science if Oppenheimer was to “go fishing for the rest of his life,” Teller said that Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos work was simply not helpful to the United States. Scientists sympathetic to Oppenheimer would never forgive Teller for his testimony. Teller likened the reception he got from his fellow physicists to his exile from Europe. He wrote: “In my new land, everything had been unfamiliar except for the community of theoretical physicists. . . . Now, at forty-seven, I was again forced into exile.”

  The outcome of the Oppenheimer hearing was almost preordained. The panel stopped short of branding Oppenheimer disloyal, but it revoked his security clearance, stating, among other things, “We believe that, had Dr. Oppenheimer given his enthusiastic support to the [Super] program, a concerted effort would have been initiated at an earlier date.” Furthermore, the panel found his opposition to the hydrogen bomb “disturbing.” Oppenheimer was to blame for the slow progress in building the hydrogen bomb.

  The scapegoat had been cast out. Oppenheimer’s nuclear career was over.

  The bitterness on both sides of the debate would last for decades, but the hawks had won. The weapons project at Los Alamos (and at Livermore) steamed ahead, buoyed by the urgency of keeping out in front of the Soviets. Los Alamos would quickly turn Ivy Mike into a deployable bomb. By 1954, the Castle Romeo test detonated a practical weapon (eleven megatons strong) designed to provide “emergency capability” to U.S. nuclear forces. And there was, in fact, an emergency brewing.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, and like Truman, he threatened to use nuclear weapons against China. In May 1953, American diplomats made veiled but clear nuclear threats that seem to have helped end the Korean War. Even after that conflict was essentially settled, the nuclear saber rattling against China continued. As the United States was drawn into the China-Taiwan standoff, Eisenhower contemplated the use of nuclear weapons. He considered them similar to any other munition, and in March 1955, at the direction of the president, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that nuclear bombs were “interchangeable with the conventional weapons” used by U.S. forces. Dulles also lamented, in a meeting two days later, that a lot of public relations still had to be done with the American people if the nation was to use nuclear bombs within the “next month or two.” Luckily, the crisis ended without a nuclear exchange.

  Even as the United States used its fusion weapons to try to black-a mail China and assert its nuclear primacy, its advantage was slipping away once again. On November 22, 1955, the Soviet U
nion tested their own Mike: a 1.6-megaton hydrogen bomb. It, too, was a two-stage device. The Soviets had also unshackled the fury of the sun upon the inhabitants of the Earth.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE VALLEY OF IRON

  ... materials dark and crude,

  Of spirituous and fiery spume, till, touched

  With Heaven’s ray, and tempered, they shoot forth

  So beauteous, opening to the ambient light?

  These in their dark nativity the Deep

  Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame

  —JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST, VI, 478-83

  Nearly a century before the quest for superweapons split the scientific community, fusion was at the center of another debate; physicists just didn’t realize it at the time. Decades before fusion was discovered, it was at the heart of an argument between physics and biology, between those who studied the fundamental laws that govern the universe and those who observed the processes of life on Earth. It was a battle between two of the leading scientific lights of the day: William Thomson (also known as Lord Kelvin), and Charles Darwin.

  In 1862, Thomson, one of the brightest—and most famous—physicists in Britain, was absolutely certain: Darwin was wrong. The theory of evolution could not possibly be correct. He had ironclad proof. According to Thomson’s calculations, it was not possible for species to change form over millions and millions of years because the sun could not have been around that long. It was a physical fact, Thomson thought, and it would destroy the biologist’s pretty theory once and for all.

  Thomson’s argument was far more ambitious than a mere attack on Darwin’s proposal. In fact, the physicist was trying to answer some of the biggest scientific questions of the day. Astronomers were just beginning to understand what the sun was made of, and they were suddenly faced with a new set of questions that once seemed unanswerable. Where did the sun come from? How old was it, really? Where did it get its energy?

  When Thomson estimated the sun’s age, he calculated that it could only be a few tens of millions of years old, far fewer years than Darwin’s natural selection would take to generate the amazing diversity on Earth. It was a major puzzle; two branches of science were giving mutually contradictory answers. It would take decades before scientists uncovered the truth. The secret was fusion. Only when physicists could understand fusion could they understand the nature of the sun, much less create one for their own use.

  Thomson’s calculations were extremely bad news for Darwin. The physicist argued that there was a fundamental problem with the theory of evolution, a problem that seemed to contradict a law of thermodynamics. If true, it would devastate Darwin’s theory. The laws of thermodynamics are among the most fundamental and sacrosanct laws of physics, and they brook no contradiction.

  The field of thermodynamics studies the relationships among heat, work, and energy. Its first law has to do with energy: energy cannot be created out of nothing. Energy can be transferred from place to place. It can change form. For example, the energy of water spinning a wheel can light a lightbulb: the energy of motion is converted into electric energy then into light energy. However, energy always has to come from somewhere; it can’t be created or destroyed. Nature has a fixed amount of energy, and it is impossible to make more. This law is central to physics, yet Thomson believed Darwin’s theory fell afoul of it.

  He based his argument on the energy flowing from the sun. When you go out on a bright summer day, you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. The sun, shining continuously in the sky, transfers some energy to you in the form of light. As you soak up the rays, that energy warms your skin. You are absorbing the sun’s energy. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, that solar energy has to come from somewhere; the sun can’t just create energy out of nothing. The sun must be using up some sort of energy reserves. As our star shines, it constantly emits more than 1026 watts of power, roughly equivalent to one hundred billion Ivy Mike bombs exploding every second, every day, every year. All that energy is radiated into space.

  This baffled Thomson. The sun was emitting energy, and things that emit energy tend to cool down over time. So how can the sun stay so hot? Perhaps it was able to replenish its energy reserves by burning fuel—but what sort of fuel could it be using? It couldn’t be burning like a giant charcoal; burning is merely a chemical reaction, and no known chemical reaction could release the sorts of energy that the sun was radiating. No fire could generate that much heat. Could the sun be getting energy from another source—by gravity, perhaps? Meteors occasionally strike the sun, adding energy to the solar furnace, but there aren’t that many meteors around, and their energy is just a tiny drop in the tsunami of power coming from the sun. Thomson knew of no possible way to generate the quantity of energy that was escaping the sun every second, yet the first law of thermodynamics dictates that the energy has to come from somewhere.

  It was clear to the physicist: no mechanism—chemical, gravitational, electrical, or whatever—existed that could generate the amount of energy the sun was emitting every moment. Since energy can’t be created out of nothing, the sun must be depleting its energy reserves at an enormous rate. And that meant that the sun must be slowly getting colder and colder. Unable to replenish its reserves through any means known to man, the sun, presumed to be a gigantic ball of hot liquid, must slowly be cooling down.

  Once Thomson reached that conclusion, he wondered: If the sun is merely a huge molten sphere of liquid, where did it get its energy in the first place? The only answer he could think of was the energy due to gravitation. Imagine that the sun came from an enormous cloud of tiny rocks. Those rocks are attracted to one another by the force of gravity. Under their mutual attraction, they begin falling toward one another. As they fall inward toward the center of the cloud, they move ever faster. The cloud of rocks begins to collapse. The individual rocks speed inward quicker and quicker, because their gravitational energy is being converted into kinetic energy—the energy of their motion. As the fast-moving rocks stream toward the center of the cloud and collide, their kinetic energy gets converted into heat energy: the cloud heats up. Eventually, it gets so hot it glows.

  Thomson calculated how hot such a protosun could have been. Then he calculated how long it would have taken to cool to its present temperature. Not long. The sun wasn’t more than a few tens of millions of years old, not long enough for the long, slow process of evolution Darwin proposed.

  In fact, Darwin was deeply shaken by the calculations. He considered Thomson’s challenge to evolution “one of the gravest” that the theory had to face, and he could do little to counter it other than argue that scientists did not have a perfect understanding of the nature of the universe.

  It was an impasse. The laws of physics seemed to say one thing, while the observations of biologists seemed to tell another.

  Physicists would have to follow a tortuous path before they could resolve the contradiction—a path that led, first, to understanding the mystery of matter.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists and chemists had unraveled many of the mysteries of the universe. Isaac Newton had divined the physical laws that govern how objects move and how gravity works. James Clerk Maxwell had figured out the subtle interrelationships between electric and magnetic forces. Thermodynamicists had codified the laws of energy and heat. At the same time, though, scientists did not know much about matter; they had little idea what sort of stuff made up stars and planets and people. That was soon to change, as they came rapidly to the conclusion that matter was composed of tiny building blocks known as atoms.

  Atomic theory, in its most primitive form, goes back to the ancient Greeks. In the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Democritus held that all matter was created out of little indivisible particles. These particles, far too tiny to see, were considered to be uncuttable. Democritus’s idea was just one of a huge number of competing theories about the universe. Some philosophers argued that everything was made of fire; others thoug
ht that objects were made from a mixture of earth, air, fire, and water. Some argued that matter was infinitely divisible; others, like Democritus, argued that there was a limit to how finely you could slice an object. Though we now know that Democritus’s idea was closest to the truth, for millennia it had no special status.

  More than two thousand years later, a steady march of experimentation and observation led scientists to the conclusion that Democritus was essentially correct: matter is made up of tiny atoms. Chemists had led the way; the work of chemists such as the Briton John Dalton, the Italian Amedeo Avogadro, and the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev began to produce a picture in which all matter consisted of a collection of invisible “elemental” particles. Water, for example, was made up of two particles of hydrogen and one of oxygen; alcohol had two of carbon, six of hydrogen, and one of oxygen.

  There was only a handful of known elements, and they each had different properties. For example, the atoms of some elements, such as hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, were very light. Other elements’ atoms, like those of mercury, lead, and uranium, were very heavy. And these particles—these atoms—were fixed in their properties; it was impossible to transmute an atom of hydrogen, say, into an atom of lead.