We make comfortable assumptions about how our adversaries will act at our potentially grave peril.
2.
THE NUCLEAR AGE: FROM “TRINITY” TO TEHRAN
Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1924, READERS OF THE BRITISH LITERARY MAGAZINE Nash’s Pall Mall opened its pages to a chilling article by Winston Churchill. In “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Churchill—a statesman then out of political office—warned what was incubating in the embers of the recent world war. Beyond the horrors of the war he had observed on the Western Front, he wrote of the immense escalation the summer of 1919 would have seen had there been no armistice. With incredible prescience, Churchill intuited the direction towards which modern war technology was heading:
Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?
…Such, then, is the peril with which mankind menaces itself. Means of destruction incalculable in their effects, wholesale and frightful in their character, and unrelated to any form of human merit: the march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities; and the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world, fanned by continual provocation and unceasing fear and fed by the deepest sense of national wrong or national danger!
Modern nuclear history began with discoveries by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century physicists looking into certain strange elements and mapping out the internal structure of the atom. By the time the first physicist grasped the potential of unlocking the energy contained there, the world was already on the path to a second global conflict. But the statesman who saw the future came first.
Churchill’s foreboding 1924 prophecy encompassed the three components of the greatest threat humankind has faced since 1945: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and fanatics in possession of both. His remarks came when guided missiles were a pipe dream, rocketry consisted of sending tiny projectiles aloft for a few seconds or minutes to reach at most a few miles’ altitude, and scientists had yet to even discover the neutron particle, which made splitting the nucleus of an atom feasible. The element plutonium was still unknown, let alone the process of thermonuclear fusion that would ultimately allow the miniaturization of high-yield weapons. Though visionaries like the sci-fi writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had imaginatively seen ahead before Churchill spoke, among statesmen of his time Churchill’s prediction was uniquely farsighted.
The First Bomb: Earliest Research through the Trinity Test
ON A drizzly London day in September 1933, only months after his Hitler-induced exile from Germany, Leo Szilard had the crucial eureka moment. The great Hungarian grasped before any of his fellow physicists that a nuclear chain reaction would release enormous energy, sufficient to destroy a city. The next step came just before Christmas 1938, when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman stumbled upon an unexpected effect. The physicist member of their group, Lise Meitner, had just fled to Sweden. From there, she and her nephew, fellow refugee Otto Robert Frisch, interpreted what had happened—the central nucleus of a uranium atom was apparently unstable. The absorption of an extra neutron was enough to split it, resulting in two smaller atoms and an immense release of energy—a process Frisch dubbed “nuclear fission.”
Tipped off by Meitner, Szilard saw that here could be the beginning of the chain reaction he had foreseen. He persuaded Albert Einstein to write his famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. “[T]he element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” Einstein wrote FDR, calling for “watchfulness, and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.” He explained:
It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated…. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.
Szilard chose Einstein to deliver the message, to lend it the weight of his unmatched prestige. He had calculated well. On October 19 FDR convened an advisory panel to look into the matter, and by 1942 the Manhattan Project (so named to conceal its true purpose) was under way. Yet according to James B. Conant, a top FDR science adviser, FDR had “only fleeting interest in the atom,” and “the program never got very far past the threshold of his consciousness.”
The discoveries made by Manhattan Project scientists first led to two types of atomic bombs (A-bombs), based upon uranium and plutonium, each a thousand times more powerful than bombs with conventional explosives. These atomic bombs, in turn, laid the foundation for the later development of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a thousand times more powerful than the A-bombs dropped on Japan.
Forty-two months after the founding of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb was a reality. A flood of European scientists, refugees from Hitler, made this astonishing success possible. To Los Alamos flocked geniuses: two more Hungarians, the mathematics prodigy John von Neumann and the “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller; the great Danish founder of the atomic theory, Niels Bohr; the young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam; the brilliant German Hans Bethe, who explained how fusion energy powers the stars; and the Italian Enrico Fermi, considered by his peers the most deeply knowledgeable of them all. They joined Americans like J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose technical brilliance was complemented by his organizational ability and knack for picking the right people for each complex task; young physicist Glenn Seaborg, who created the devilish artificial element plutonium in 1941; and a contingent from Britain that included James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron particle essential for nuclear fission.
Fear that Adolf Hitler would get the atom bomb first drove the Manhattan Project’s crash program. Szilard feared that by Christmas 1943 or New Year’s Day 1944, the Nazis would A-bomb Chicago. These scientists knew the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of Germany’s Napoleonic leader: “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast.” The Allies were certain that Hitler would not hesitate to use the bomb. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister, noted in his diary in spring 1942:
I received a report about the latest development in German science. Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to the point where… tremendous destruction, it is claimed, can be wrought with a minimum of effort… It is essential that we be ahead of everybody.
The Nazis were, in fact, not even close to developing the bomb, but the Allies understandably erred on the side of assuming the worst case, partly out of supreme respect for legendary German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Had they passed up development, and Hitler managed somehow to build the bomb, utter annihilation surely would have befallen the great democracies. That they were not close was proven by Heisenberg’s reaction upon being told about the Hiroshima bombing. He guessed that the bomb had not been a uranium weapon, but instead a superpowerful chemical explosive bomb.