The Great 20th Century Nuclear War

You mean you didn't know about it?

If you are old enough to have lived through some portion of the last century, as I did, you might be saying to yourself, well, at least we never blew ourselves up. Indeed, after the decades-long threat of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War, it does come as something of a relief to know that the conflict finally ended without ever reaching that final cataclysm. It is commonly said that we only ever fought the Soviet Union "by proxy," when smaller conventional wars were waged in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

But conventional wisdom is wrong. A nuclear war did take place in those years, with thousands of nuclear detonations -- enough to have eradicated every major city in the world, along with most of the smaller ones. What's that? You say you didn't notice? Well, that's probably because it happened over such a long period of time. And instead of dropping them on enemy cities we mostly blew them up in our own back yards, or in the neutral territory of the Pacific Ocean where it was supposed that they would be relatively harmless.

I'm speaking of course about the testing programs that were carried out by every country that developed "the Bomb." The appalling scale of these tests (and I can't write the word without hearing in my mind the repetition by the Emergency Broadcast System, "this is only a test") is rendered abundantly clear in this short video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. 

On a map of the world, he has animated a time lapse of all the nuclear bombs exploded from 1945 in New Mexico, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then everywhere else, up to 1998. The image is compelling, as are the statistics. 2,054 explosions conducted by seven countires. Over half of them by the United States, and a huge percentage of those on our own soil. (Hint: you might want to steer clear of Nevada for the next few thousand years.) Russia came in second, of course. Want to guess who's number three? If you said China, bzzt, you're wrong. The correct answer is France.

Be sure to stick with the video to the end. The true cumulative effect does not become clear until the last minute when a recap is done one country at a time and you can sense the scale of what happened. It startled me to note that the Soviet Union appears to have trashed itself from one end to the other.

At some point, treaties reigned in the madness somewhat by dictating that tests had to be done underground in order to contain the radiation and the spread of fallout. As imperfect as that may be (what about groundwater, for example?) it's a far cry from the early 1950s when open air tests were viewed from a distance like spectator sports, and the Today Show and the daily newspaper displayed maps projecting where all the strontium-90 was likely to land. It may have gone boom in the far West, but the cloud carried across the Midwest to New England and beyond, tainting the grass to be eaten by our dairy cows and milk to be fed to our children.

It didn't matter that people like Albert Einstein read statements on TV declaring that an untold number of future deaths and cancers would be the result, visited upon us for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Government spokespeople insisted the radiation levels were "safe" and that the test were necessary for the national defense. Anyone feel safe yet?

I watched the video with my grandson and explained about all that had happened back then. His jaw literally dropped in righteous indignation. And well it might. He's a millennial baby, born after the Great Nuclear War had ended. But that stuff is still in the air and the water and the earth where we grow our food. What were we thinking?

We know now that there is no safe level of exposure to radioactive materials. Even a microscopic speck of plutonium lodged in your lung continues to irradiate the tissue around it, producing a constant threat of genetic damage. Look how concerned we were about the nuclear meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukashima. Those things pale in comparison with what we deliberately did to our earth and air in the name of security.

And before we go, let's recall that thousands more of these weapons are still sleeping in their silos and submarines, ready to spring into action at a few minutes notice. Wasn't one nuclear war enough? Do we really have to prepare for another one?

The Birth of the Bomb

A history of horror and hope ...

If a blues is ever written for the entire 20th century it might go something like this:

An emigree physicist walking the streets of London suddenly sees that atoms can be split. More than that, he immediately sees that the result will be a bomb of unprecedented force. But rather than imagining the end of the world, he dares to dream that humanity will let scientists lead the way to a new world order in which lasting peace is finally achieved.

But what happens instead is that Adolf Hitler comes to power and starts the worst war in history; a race begins to see which side will build the bomb first; and even though the good guys win they have to do it by becoming bad guys, after which the existence of the bomb itself begins a new arms race that threatens to destroy the world after all.

My friend, you got the Nuclear Holocost Blues.

Such is the subtext of Richard Rhodes' definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Beginning with Leo Szilard's insight and dream of future peace (inspired by an H.G. Wells novel), he traces the whole process from the earliest theories and experiments with radiation, through the transmutation of elements and the first laboratory fission of a nucleus, to the crash projects of not only the United States but Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, as they struggled toward apocalypse.

The book informed me of some surprising facts, such as that the first atom to be split was not uranium or plutonium but humble nitrogen, the inert gas that makes up most of the earth's atmosphere. He even explains why: because of the small number of electrons in the atoms of this light element, it was easier for the protons they were bombarding it with to find their way through to hit the nucleus. Heavier elements, surrounded by more powerful fields of negative force, repelled protons and had to wait their turn to become fission targets until neutrons were discovered, which were immune to electromagnetic forces, and replaced protons as tools to hit the nucleus.

Another surprise was the relatively small role played in this saga by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is popularly credited as the father of the bomb. It is a measure of the depth of the cast of characters and the vast sweep of the story that "Oppie" makes only a small cameo appearance in the first several hundred pages, as a student temporarily in pre-war Europe. While giving this pivotal figure his due, Rhodes wisely leaves the bulk of the Oppenheimer story to biographers, who have done a thorough job of it elsewhere (including an opera called Doctor Atomic). He does not even dwell on Oppenheimer's crucifixion later on, when he became a martyr to the McCarthy-era witch hunts.

Besides Szilard, who continued to make contributions both to the creation of the bomb and the movement to peacefully contain it, the story makes clear what a powerful role Danish physicist Niels Bohr played as visionary theoretician and persistent diplomat for the cause of peace.

Bohr himself has been featured in a play called Copenhagen, by Michael Frayne, based on his mysterious wartime meeting with Werner Heisenberg, originator of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics. The play poses, but does not answer, the question about what transpired during this meeting. Did Heisenberg reveal that he was working on a bomb? Did Bohr reveal that he knew the British and Americans were doing so? Did Bohr give misinformation that led Heisenberg up a blind alley? Or did Heisenberg deliberately sabotage the German effort so as to deny the bomb to Hitler? Talk about uncertainty!

As we know, things worked out for the best. Between kicking most of their best (Jewish) minds out of the country and suffering the effects of Allied sabotage of their heavy-water program, the Germans came up empty handed. The Russians, devastated by the German invasion, had to put their program on hold while trying to survive. And the Japanese, though on the right track, lacked the industrial capacity to refine the necessary materials, especially as the close of the war brought their production to a standstill.

Yet it is still disturbing to experience the shift in perception that happens as the project grows from theory to physics experiment, and finally to military ordnance and the horror of the bomb. It is easy to understand how the Manhattan Project scientists felt when they saw the huge firecracker they had created turned loose on human flesh in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To read about the horrific injuries inflicted on the populations of those cities, and then to remember that the fission bombs were quickly replaced by fusion bombs a thousand times more powerful, is to fully grasp the nightmare of oblivion that obsessed the world through the decades of the Cold War.

Rhodes was writing in the early 1980's as the concept of "nuclear winter" was being publicized to urge popular pressure to end the threat of all out nuclear war. His closing chapter is a contribution to that cause, a meditation on the relative stability brought about by nuclear weapons, and a hope that because war had finally become non-survivable the human race could find a way to live in a permanent state of peace.

Since then the Soviet Union has collapsed, a united Germany leads the economic powerhouse of the European Union, and the threat of terrorism has replaced the threat of nuclear Armageddon. While "peace" sounds like irony while we are in the midst of two military interventions in the Middle East, it remains true that the wholesale slaughter of populations that led to over 100 million deaths in the first half of that remarkable century was drastically curtailed through the second half.

The bombs are still there, most of them, sleeping in their silos and storage facilities, ever ready to wake and destroy us all. But maybe we can learn to live with that, like having a snake under the house. Maybe we can just let them lie, and go about the business of living.

Bones, and More Bones

Three Books About Los Alamos

A couple of years ago I spent an idyllic week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at a writer's workshop. It was my first visit to that part of the West, and like many visitors I was taken by the quality and variety of the land and people. I'm used to Florida landscapes, which are wet and flat with a big sky. By contrast, the high desert was dry and mountainous with big land. Everywhere you looked the ground was sloping up to greater heights, making it possible to see clearly for sixty miles or more. Once, at dusk, a local resident pointed out the lights of three towns, each farther than the last and farther up the slant, one hovering above the other.

Of all the contrasts in the region, one of the oddest is the lurking presence of Los Alamos, birthplace of the Bomb, seeming so out of place amid the Indian pueblos, Mexican ranchos, and New Age spiritualists. I avoided it while I was there, having been told there was nothing to see anyway. But it must have stayed in my mind, because after I got back I found myself drawn to two novels set there, both of which perfectly captured the character of the region while dealing with fictional incidents that orbited around the Manhattan Project like moths drawing ever closer to a flame.

The first was called, simply and aptly enough, Los Alamos, by Joseph Kanon (Broadway Books, 1997). I'd never heard of the author, but the title jumped out at me from a used book sale. Turns out Kanon was a publishing executive and this was his first novel. It's basically a detective story. One of the project employees has been found murdered in Santa Fe, and a government investigator (our hero) is brought in to find out if it was only a crime, or something more sinister--i.e., espionage.

Which do you think it will be? Of course! But first, the Chandleresque hero, who was a newspaper reporter before he was drafted, has to do a lot of sleuthing, and a lot of getting to know the inhabitants of the project site, including Oppenheimer, the master of it all. Almost immediately he meets a woman (did you think he wouldn't?) who may or may not (what do you think?) have anything to do with the murder and possible espionage.

I'm making light of this, because there are certainly the predictable elements we expect--nay, demand--of our adventure novels. But it was much better than that. My comparison with Raymond Chandler was not facetious. The quality of the writing and the flawless evocation of the wartime milieu of the 1940's certainly called Phillip Marlowe to mind, as did the leisurely pursuit of the woman from flirtation to seduction to (naturally) love, and along the way, suspicion. And always, the backdrop of the land, the dry and diverse landscape, the odd people dotted about like seashells scattered on a beach, kept it real and intriguing, with the authentic texture of reality as a foundation.

I expected Robert Owen Butler to deal with this unique time and place in a completely different and perhaps more "literary" way, considering his track record, yet I found his Countrymen of Bones (Owl Books, 1994) to be strikingly similar to Los Alamos, and an interesting companion volume.

In this novel, a paleontologist has the misfortune to have chosen a site for his dig that is uncomfortably close to where the big bang is going to happen. He, too, has a visit from Oppenheimer, whose way of getting rid of him is to assign an assistant to speed up his work. As fate would have it, the woman he sends on this mission has another admirer, one of the scientists working on the project, whose infatuation soon takes on the pathological obsessive quality of some denizen of the novels of Jim Thompson. Indeed, you might have to consult Thompson's work to find a more suffocating immersion into a demented criminal mind.

As the inevitable triangle forms between the two men and the woman, an ancient burial site is slowly excavated, the bomb project with its looming deadline draws ever closer to completion, and the threat of violence builds to an almost unbearable level before it finally breaks, like a long overdue thunderstorm onto a parched desert.

So in the end we have two adventure tales, and oddly enough it is Butler's that has more to do with violent intentions and the motivations for them. Here again we are constantly reminded of where we are, as cars inch across the long dry land leaving clouds of dust in their wake, and the baked ground yields up its bones.

Inevitably, both stories have the same explosion coming before the end, as we know it must. The light of the new age has to burst in the night, and our protagonists must all bear witness to it from the vantage of their various points of view. I will leave you to wonder in which tale the bomb test claims a victim in a bizarre twist.

And then there is Oppenheimer, the man whose Faustian bargain with the government and the military has made him the Prime Mover of both stories. For more on him, I recommend the definitive biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This book contains, so far as a book can, an entire life. But it, too, when the time comes, must in its way evoke that same landscape, the deserts and mountain trails, with Oppy making his way across it on horseback, the future of the world on his shoulders, and its dust in his mouth.