Heat (32 page)

As the number of bowheads diminished and whaling became more challenging, the whalers realized that they could overwinter in the Arctic. They could hunt in early spring when the whales migrated through open leads in the melting ice. By the 1880s, the New England whalers built their own sod houses just east of Point Hope in a place known to the Inupiaq as Quzmiarzuq and to the whalers as Jabbertown, after the many languages spoken there by men who had signed on from scattered ports.

By now the people of Point Hope were dying as quickly as their whales, killed by syphilis, smallpox, influenza, measles, diphtheria, and tuberculosis, all compounded by alcohol. Families lay in their sod houses, mother and father and son and daughter side by side on hides of polar bear and caribou, coughing, fading into the delirium of deadly fevers, sweating while a winter wind blew above.

Like their whales, half the Inupiat population of Point Hope died in a single generation.

Atom bombs, for all their suddenness, were not unique in their ability to incinerate human beings en masse. Firebombing was widely used in Germany during World War II. The idea was simple: use aerial bombing to ignite a firestorm, to convert a city into a furnace, to cripple the war machine that supported the troops, to destroy not only factories but the houses of workers. For a time, firebombing missions were called dehousing missions. Hamburg was among the first cities to be dehoused. For some time afterward, to dehouse a city was also to Hamburgize the city. Essen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, and Hanover were Hamburgized. In Japan, Osaka and Kobe and Tokyo and Okayama and sixty-three other cities were Hamburgized.

Napalm—jellied gasoline, a thickened version of gasoline that stuck to whatever it landed on and burned ferociously—was dropped from the air. A single bomb could envelop an area 270 feet long and 80 feet wide in flames burning at 1,500 degrees.

From Robert Haney, an American prisoner of war held in Osaka: “On the night of March 13, 1945, Osaka was bombed. Our camp was barely one city block inland. The first firebombs hit about two blocks inland and continued away from us four or five miles. The raid lasted much of the night. In the morning, a vast area—later determined to be 25 square miles—was a smoldering desert.”

Obata Masatake, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing, later talked to a radio interviewer. “There were some old women wearing those thick quilted coats with padded hoods,” he said. “But they were getting so hot they pushed them back without thinking. It was fatal. It was so hot their hair just burst into flames, just like that and there was nothing I could do to help. It was so hot I couldn’t breathe.”

After a firebombing, charred bodies lay unattended in the streets, blackened corpses, mummified by heat, without hair, partially clothed or with clothes burned entirely away. Smoke and steam rose from the streets around the corpses.

Firebombing raids typically killed tens of thousands of men, women, and children. Many died from the burns themselves. Others suffocated as flames sucked oxygen from the air. Others were trampled during the panic that accompanied fire bombings.

The American aviator Ray “Hap” Halloran was shot down over Tokyo. He watched B-29s flying over the city. He watched the sky turn to flames. “I prayed for myself,” he said, “and I also prayed for them, too.”

Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing and described it in
Slaughterhouse-Five
. In the book, a bird calls, “Poo-tee-weet?” It is as if the bird is trying to make sense of something that can never make sense. The bird is asking, “Why?”

My companion and I walk with loaded packs along the beach. Jabbertown is behind us, modern-day Point Hope is behind Jabbertown, and the abandoned old village of Point Hope is behind modern-day Point Hope. The Chukchi Sea stretches out to the right, and a long brackish lagoon sits to the left. In front of us, the beach runs to the horizon, and beyond that the bluffs of Cape Thompson separate us from what is left of Project Chariot. The wind from the Chukchi blows a light gale. My boots sink into the gravel beach with every step. My feet rub against the innards of my boots, raising hot spots and blisters of the sort sometimes associated with firewalking. I sweat with the fever of activity.

On my back I carry warm clothes, matches, chemical heat packs, a pump-up cookstove that runs on regular unleaded gasoline, a pint of gasoline in a metal bottle, high-calorie dehydrated food in a bear-proof container, a tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping mat, extra clothes, and a book called
The Nuclear Family Vacation
. Over my left shoulder I carry my shotgun as protection against polar bears and grizzlies, both common along this coast. If needed, I can pull a trigger, activating a chemical reaction that will convert a solid into a high-temperature gas, and that gas, expanding, will push a slug of lead outward, with luck into the chest of a marauding bear before it successfully marauds.

Teller, the man behind Chariot, was in the nuclear bomb game from the beginning. He was among the physicists who convinced Einstein to warn Roosevelt that atomic bombs were a theoretical possibility. Einstein wrote his warning letter to Roosevelt in 1939. “A single bomb of this type,” Einstein wrote, “carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

Teller feared both the Nazis and the Soviets. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest and grew up in an atmosphere of Nazi and Communist rhetoric and violence. He left in 1926 to study physics in Germany but fled the Nazis in 1933, eventually landing in the United States. His friends Lev Landau and Laszlo Tisza described to him the Soviets’ Great Terror of the 1930s, the killing of dedicated scientists, the arrests and assassinations of anyone potentially threatening to Stalin.

Many years later, Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and bomb maker who eventually fought weapons proliferation and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, would say that Teller’s “anti-Soviet paranoia” had some basis in reality. Fear of the Soviet regime, Sakharov would say, was a reasonable fear.

On the Manhattan Project, Teller lived in a world of secrecy and compartmentalization. The address for the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was a post office box. Fake names were used. Mail was censored. Telephone calls were monitored and interrupted. Nearby communities speculated on the laboratory’s purpose. The laboratory sent people to the La Fonda Bar in Santa Fe to spread misinformation about the manufacture of electric rockets. They were building spaceships, making poison gas, building submarines, sheltering pregnant servicewomen.

For scientists accustomed to a world of open discourse, compartmentalization and severe restrictions on communication did not come easily. It was joked that a scientist supervising two departments needed a special security clearance to talk to himself.

Teller was present at the Trinity test, the first explosion of an atomic bomb, in the desert of New Mexico. “I was looking,” Teller later said, “contrary to regulations, straight at the bomb. I put on welding glasses, suntan lotion, and gloves. I looked the beast in the eye, and I was impressed.”

While his colleagues were inventing the fission bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller was thinking about the Super, the hydrogen bomb, a far more powerful device. The concept was simple. The atom bomb generates heat by splitting atoms, by making elements with large nuclei into elements with smaller nuclei. The hydrogen bomb generates heat by joining atoms, by forcing the smallest of nuclei together, by slamming hydrogen into hydrogen with such force that it becomes helium. Teller would use the heat and pressure generated by the atomic bomb’s fission reaction to ignite a fusion reaction, making hydrogen into helium and releasing vast quantities of energy. Fission was kid stuff, while fusion was the source of heat that drove the sun itself.

From the physicist Herbert York, who would become the first director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California: “I have this vivid memory of Teller going to the blackboard and just with a few strokes drawing a cartoon that was: ‘This is how you make a hydrogen bomb.’ And I remember, either at the time or that evening, getting a little bit of the shivers because I realized: That was it.”

The journey from conceptualization to explosion required substantial effort. Many of the physicists involved with the Manhattan Project were horrified by the fruits of their labor. They did not want to see an even more powerful bomb in the hands of politicians. Teller pushed it through.

The first Super, named Mike, was two stories tall and weighed sixty-five tons. It was shipped to the island of Elugelab in the Marshall Islands. Observers were told that they would soon see the world’s most powerful explosion.

Mike sent out a fireball three and a half miles wide, left a crater a mile across and almost two hundred feet deep, and turned millions of gallons of seawater into steam. When the steam dissipated, the island of Elugelab was no more.

From the physicist Harold Agnew, who was watching from a ship twenty-five miles away from the blast: “Something I’ll never forget was the heat. Not the blast. The heat just kept coming, just kept coming on and on and on. And it was really scary. It’s really quite a terrifying experience because the heat doesn’t go off. On kiloton shots it’s a flash and it’s over, but on those big shots it’s really terrifying.”