Sun in a Bottle Read online

  Unfortunately for Teller, shortly after Sedan the Alaska harbor project slipped out of his grasp. Local opposition was too great for the Atomic Energy Commission to overcome, and in 1962 the plan was scrapped. But that did not stop Plowshare from marching forward. If anything, it gained momentum. In May 1962, even before the Sedan test was complete, President Kennedy ordered the AEC to tackle the problem of building a second Panama canal with fusion devices.

  Such plans were becoming increasingly harder to make, though. During the moratorium and after it, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had been negotiating a formal test ban treaty with Khrushchev. The so-called Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963; this was the agreement that banned anything but underground nuclear explosions. It also forbade any tests that allowed radioactivity to leak beyond national borders.

  Teller bitterly fought the treaty. He and his allies attempted to undermine it at every turn. He did it directly, warning Congress of “grave consequences for the security of the United States and the free world” should they decide to ratify it: “you will have given away the future safety of our country.” Teller also tried to sink the treaty indirectly, with Plowshare. Throughout the negotiations, the AEC kept trying to build a loophole into the treaty’s language saying that peaceful nuclear explosions—Plowshare—should be exempt. Every American draft of the treaty had that exemption written into it. The Russians were against the exemption; they countered that “peaceful” nuclear bombs were “superfluous and even dangerous.” After years of negotiation, Kennedy gave up on the exemption, and the accord was signed. However, it was only a matter of months before both sides were violating the brand-new agreement.

  When, in January 1965, American planes first sniffed the cloud of radiation drifting over Japan, they had little idea that it was the first test of Project No. 7, the Soviet answer to Project Plowshare.29 A Sedan-like explosion, 140 kilotons’ worth, carved the crater that became Lake Chagan.The radiation that was released by the blast violated the new treaty, as did the radiation that vented from the April 1965 Palanquin shot in Nevada. Palanquin was a Plowshare test meant to see how nuclear weapons cratered dry rock, material similar to what would be encountered in digging a second Panama canal. (The radioactive plume from Palanquin rapidly crossed the northern border of the United States into Canada and beyond.) Soon the Americans and Russians were accusing each other of violating the new treaty. Peaceful nuclear explosions were not exactly maintaining the peace.

  Despite all the effort and money poured into peaceful fusion explosions, the United States never got any nonmilitary benefit from Project Plowshare. No gigantic earth-moving projects ever materialized; neither the Alaska harbor nor the second Panama canal ever got beyond the planning phase. (President Nixon formally abandoned the latter project in 1970.) Of all the marvelous applications suggested by Teller and his colleagues, only one was actually tested. Three nuclear tests carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, code-named Gasbuggy, Rulison, and Rio Blanco, attempted to use nuclear explosions to release natural gas. (The theory was that a big enough explosion would fracture the rocks trapping the gas.) But the three tests were not terribly successful. Rio Blanco failed because the bomb didn’t produce caverns of the expected shape. At first, Gasbuggy and Rulison seemed to work. The nuclear bombs shattered rocks around the test site and natural gas poured out of the wells. Unfortunately, the gas was radioactive, and no utility would buy it. After twelve years of trying and twenty-seven nuclear tests, Project Plowshare sputtered to a halt without ever having proved the usefulness of peaceful nuclear bombs.

  Thirty years after Teller first dreamed of liberating the power of the sun upon the Earth, Project Plowshare was dead. Even the discovery of oil in Alaska in the late 1960s didn’t make his proposal of a bomb-carved harbor any more palatable. In his waning years, Teller turned away from peaceful nuclear explosions and back toward using fusion as a tool of war, dreaming up unworkable schemes to defend the United States from a Soviet missile attack. He was behind President Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” program, which, in its first incarnation, would have seeded the heavens with fusion bombs. If the Communists launched their missiles, Teller’s orbiting bombs would detonate, shooting out beams of x-rays that would destroy the incoming warheads. The project was abandoned as unworkable after just a few years, another example of Teller’s manic optimism.

  Throughout his career, Teller schemed and plotted to prevent any sort of hiatus in his quest for nuclear supremacy. Treaties with the Soviet Union were signs of weakness; detente and peacemaking would just lead to the destruction of America. Project Plowshare was a lie; to Teller, it was not a tool of peace but a means to undermine treaties with the Soviet Union. Teller was a man of swords, not plowshares. “I’ve never seen [Teller] take a position where there was the slightest chance in the interest of peace,” said Isidor Rabi. “I think he is the enemy of humanity.”

  Project No. 7 had a little more success than Project Plowshare. After the creation of Lake Chagan, the Soviets briefly experimented with nuclear excavations of lakes and dams, but the results were disappointing. The Russian efforts to turn on gas and oil wells with bombs were more successful than the American tests. Production often increased dramatically. But reports indicate that at least one oil field is contaminated with radioactivity, and its oil is “not acceptable to regional refineries.”

  In 1966, the Soviets used a nuclear bomb to shut off a gas well and snuff a runaway fire. They also used nuclear explosives to make underground caverns for storing toxic waste, to break up mineral ores, and to create seismic shockwaves to aid in the exploration for natural resources. Sometimes accidents happened: the Kraton-3 explosion, a seismic experiment, vented so much radioactive steam into the Siberian tundra in 1978 that the Soviets had to declare a two-kilometer exclusion zone around the site.

  All in all, Project No. 7 consisted of 122 nuclear explosions between 1965 and 1988. Their results were mixed at best. Hydrogen bombs, it turned out, did not give humanity the power to move mountains or to reshape the landscape to suit its fancy. What they provided was a far cry from a fusion-crafted utopia.

  Fusion bombs were just that—bombs. They were swords too crude to be shaped into plowshares, unable to benefit humanity in any tangible way. Scientists would have to come up with entirely new ideas if they wanted to harness the power of the sun without getting burned.

  CHAPTER 4

  KINKS, INSTABILITIES, AND BALONEY BOMBS

  Among other bodies which the alchemists of the middle ages thought it possible to discover, and accordingly sought after, was a Universal Solvent, or Alkahest as they named it. This imaginary fluid was to possess the power of dissolving any substance, whatever its nature, and to reduce all kinds of matter to the liquid form. It does not seem to have occurred to these ingenious dreamers to consider, that what dissolved everything, could be preserved in nothing.

  —GEORGE WILSON, RELIGIO CHEMICI

  The sun itself needs no bottle. It is held together by its own gravity; the mutual attraction of all its atoms is able to keep the fusion engine in its belly from blowing itself apart. But any lump of material smaller than a star does not have enough gravitational force to counteract the enormous pressure of an expanding fusion reaction. For humans to succeed in making an earthbound sun, scientists would have to figure out how to contain the fusion reaction with an external force—figure out how to bottle it up.

  The Teller-Ulam design used atom bombs to create a temporary bottle. Pressure from the radiation of a fission bomb squashed the fuel from the outside; pressure from the explosion of a fission “spark plug” compressed the fuel from the inside. Caught in between these two nuclear anvils, the deuterium and tritium fuel was crushed, heated, and bottled up for a fraction of a second. The result was a brief burst of fusion energy: an exploding sun. However, the brevity and violence of the explosion made it suitable only as a weapon of war. To harness the power of fusion for peaceful purposes, scientists needed a muc
h subtler kind of bottle.

  In the early 1950s, the need was growing urgent. In the past, the United States had always produced more energy than it needed, but that trend was rapidly changing. Economists and scientists knew that by the end of the 1950s, America would have to begin importing fuel—oil—to keep its economy going. In Britain, the situation was even worse; dependent on oil imports, the United Kingdom was embroiled in a spat with its main supplier, Iran.30 The West was getting its first taste of oil addiction, and it wasn’t pleasant. Fusion energy—if scientists could design a bottle to contain it—could prevent a future where the Western world was kept hostage to a dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of foreign oil.

  On March 25, 1951, Argentina announced that it had designed such a bottle. Argentina’s scientists were claiming they had solved humanity’s energy problems. It was a few days before the Greenhouse tests, and Ivy Mike was months away. The United States had not yet liberated fusion energy, but Argentina’s president, Juan Perón, was gleefully bragging about having generated “thermonuclear reactions” and harnessing the power of the sun.

  The New York Times reported the claim on page 1: “The project is still in the early stages, but when Argentina is able to produce as much energy as deemed necessary, all will be used solely for industry, President Perón declared.” Not only was Perón willing to forswear his bomb-making ambitions, but he couldn’t resist tweaking the scientists in the United States and the USSR who were trying to turn fusion energy into weapons. “Foreign scientists will be interested to learn that while working on the thermonuclear reactor, the problems associated with the so called hydrogen bomb were studied in great detail, and we have been shocked to find that results published by the most reputed experts are far removed from reality,” Perón told a gaggle of Spanish-language reporters who had been summoned to a press conference at the Argentine presidential palace.

  For such a dramatic claim, Perón provided very few details. The reactor used “a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy”—fusion. Experiments had been under way for some time and had yielded some very promising results, bringing matter to temperatures of “several million degrees.” This success led Perón to establish a pilot fusion energy plant to create “artificial suns on earth.” This plant was on a small island in a lake near the Chilean border: Huemul Island.

  The director of the Huemul reactor was a German-speaking scientist named Ronald Richter, of whom little was known. After Perón finished speaking, Richter addressed the Spanish-speaking reporters through a translator. “What the Americans get when they explode a Hydrogen bomb, we in Argentina achieve in the laboratory and under control,” Richter said. “As of today, we know of a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy which does not use materials hitherto thought indispensable.” At the press conference and in a follow-up one the following day—no foreign press allowed—Richter spoke of controlled explosions of lithium and hydrogen and deuterium. And he claimed that he had achieved fusion at his mysterious lab on Huemul Island: “Yes, sir, for the very first time a thermonuclear reaction has been produced in a reactor.”

  The statement promptly set off a firestorm. Many in the physics community quickly rejected the claim; scientists around the world scoffed at Richter. When American reporters asked David Lilienthal whether there was the “slightest chance” that Argentina had attained fusion, he answered, “Less than that.” A Brazilian scientist noted that “It is strange that the names of eminent physicists working at present in Argentina are not associated with the announced atomic project.” And when asked what material other than hydrogen Richter could be fusing, a former Manhattan Project physicist, Ralph Lapp, was quick with an answer. “I know what that other material is that the Argentines are using,” he told Time magazine. “It’s baloney.” (Time promptly dubbed Richter’s reactor the “Baloney bomb.”)

  Perón bristled at the criticism. “I am not interested in what the United States or any other country in the world thinks,” he snarled, lashing out at the foreign politicians and newspapers who “lie consciously” and spread deception. “They have not yet told the first truth, while I have not yet told the first lie.”31 And even as some scientists ridiculed Perón’s claims, others began to chime in, supporting Richter’s assertions. The mystery of Huemul Island, a drama that would last for months, was getting deeper by the day. It was just beginning.

  Richter’s claims marked the official beginning of a quest that had been in the planning stages for a long time—the quest to liberate the energy of fusion for the benefit of mankind. Years before scientists achieved fusion on Earth, they had realized that the uncontrolled violence of hydrogen bombs was far from an ideal way to harness the sun’s power. What physicists really wanted was a fusion reaction they could control. They wanted a reactor that produced energy by fusing hydrogen into helium, and they wanted it to be stable, unlike the dangerous evanescent explosion of a fusion weapon. To create a workable reactor that would tap the unlimited potential of fusion energy, scientists needed to build a sun in a bottle.

  Soon, scientists the world over were squabbling, alternately claiming triumphs and debunking them. The Huemul drama was the first act in the quest to create a tiny, controllable fusion reaction. But it was far from the last.

  At first glance, it seems impossible to make a bottle sturdy enough to contain a burning sun. What kind of material is strong enough to hold a fusion reaction? To get even the most fusion-friendly atoms to stick to one another, they have to slam together hard enough to overcome their mutual electric repulsion, so the atoms have to be extraordinarily hot—tens or hundreds of million degrees Celsius.32 But matter at such high temperatures is very hard to contain. It is hotter than anything on Earth, far hotter than the melting point of steel. Even a diamond vessel would instantly evaporate in temperatures that extreme. Million-degree substances act almost like universal solvents, eating through whatever substance you put them in. Nothing on Earth would be able to contain such hot matter, at least not without some extraordinarily clever tricks.

  Ronald Richter did not have the credentials one would expect of someone who could come up with such a clever trick. He didn’t have a terribly strong scientific background. As a student, he apparently had tried to study (nonexistent) “delta rays” coming from the earth, but his proposal was rejected by his professors. His adviser merely remembered him as a “so-so” student. He hadn’t published any scientific papers and had scant experience in the laboratory. But when Perón suddenly announced that Richter had created a sun in a bottle, he caught the world’s attention.

  In the days after Perón’s announcement in March 1951, Richter provided a few more details about his reactor, which he called the “thermotron.” He described the device as a “solar reactor furnace” and said the reactor worked by fusing deuterium with lithium—a light metal whose atoms have three protons and three or so neutrons—at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This was far short of the tens of millions of degrees that fusion scientists thought were required to initiate such a reaction. Richter also said that the reactions in the thermotron created little explosions, micro-fusion-bombs, which, however, were well-contained by large stone walls that surrounded the furnace. For most scientists, this announcement only increased their skepticism. But for others, Richter’s work began to seem plausible, and they started jockeying to share in the credit for the discovery.

  On April 1, the New York Times announced that a French physicist supported Richter’s claims. The physicist was asserting that, a few months prior, he had performed experiments whose results bore a “striking similarity” to what the Argentine scientist was seeing. In the same issue, the Times’s science editor, Waldemar Kaempffert, wrote that “Richter admits that his process is not new,” and the journalist listed some of his intellectual forebears: the Britons John Cockcroft and Robert Atkinson; the German Fritz Houtermans; the Russian émigré George Gamow; and, of course, Edward Teller. Kaempffert conceded that Richter might have made a breakthrough, but
he rejected Perón’s comment that everyone else was on the wrong track. “American and European scientists are fully aware of the work of Atkinson, Houtermans, Gamow, and Teller,” he sniffed. If Richter had made a breakthrough, it was not Argentina’s alone. It was due, in part, to the work of American, British, and German physicists.

  Later that month, Perón pinned the Peronist loyalty medal on Richter’s chest, and in May he established a national physics laboratory to exploit the discovery. The Dutch government started negotiating nuclear research deals with Argentina. The South American country was trying to become a major player in nuclear politics. At the same time, though, the criticism and scorn from foreign skeptics became increasingly caustic. Time magazine and other outlets picked up a rumor that Richter had been arrested. A Brazilian newspaper, Time reported,

  said that Dr. Ronald Richter, the former Austrian scientist, was arrested after technical experts of the Argentine army had discovered that Richter “was not sufficiently advanced as a physicist” to achieve the atomic release Perón had claimed. Three experts informed Perón that Richter, in their opinion, was nothing more than a “colossal bluff.”

  It wasn’t true, but it amplified the claims of fraud that surrounded Richter. Also in May, the Austrian physicist Hans Thirring published an article that asked whether Richter’s scheme was “a swindle.” The answer consisted of the following possibilities:a. Perón has fallen victim to a crank suffering from self-delusion 50%