Heat (33 page)

Years later Teller met Mikhail Gorbachev, and Gorbachev refused to shake his hand.

Walking along the beach with heavy packs, we come across the bloated carcasses of a dozen walruses. They have been shot and beheaded, their tusks harvested to be converted to native art. The people of Point Hope eat walrus, but when a walrus is shot, it sinks. If a hunter cannot get a harpoon or a hook into the walrus before it sinks beyond reach, the meat is lost. But warm-bloodedness dooms carcasses to rapid decay. Underwater, the heat within the now dead sunken walrus promotes bacterial growth. The bacteria—the chemical reactions of bacteria breaking down walrus flesh—generate more heat.

Rotting carcasses of sunken dead walruses eventually fill with warm gas and float to the surface. The beach east of Point Hope tends to collect flotsam from all parts of the Chukchi Sea. These dead walruses could have been shot hundreds of miles away. By the time they land on the beach, their meat is useless, but their tusks, carved, can be worth thousands of dollars. Sometimes the tusks are elaborately carved but left intact within the jawbone, and the jawbone might remain attached to the skull. Skull and jaw and carved tusks are mounted and sold in art galleries in Anchorage, New York, and Boston.

Walruses, fat in life, are swollen in death. But even headless, beached, and swollen, they remain impressive. I kneel next to one. Gale-force winds are not enough to sweep away the stench. The animal is so bloated that I fear it might explode.

In medieval warfare, catapults of various designs were sometimes used to fling the bloated carcasses of animals and the diseased carcasses of humans over the walls of besieged castles. Catapults also threw incendiary weapons.

There were different kinds of incendiary weapons. Liquid fire—also known as sea fire, Roman fire, Greek fire, and war fire—was invented in the late seventh century, possibly by a man named Kallinikos from the city of Heliopolis, “sun city.” Later, the emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos wrote that the secret of liquid fire was “shown and revealed by an angel to the great and holy first Christian emperor Constantine.” That secret was closely guarded, but it may have involved the use of sap from pine trees and sulfur, or quicklime, or saltpeter, or calcium phosphide, which, when mixed with water, releases the highly combustible phosphine gas. Or it may have been nothing more or less than petroleum harvested from seeps, an early form of napalm.

Liquid fire could be sprayed from the bow of a ship. From the
Alexiad
, written around 1150: “On the prow of each ship he had a head fixed of a lion or other land-animal, made in brass or iron with the mouth open and then gilded over, so that their mere aspect was terrifying. And the fire which was to be directed against the enemy through tubes he made to pass through the mouths of the beasts, so that it seemed as if the lions and the other similar monsters were vomiting the fire.”

From a thirteenth-century memoir: “My opinion and advice therefore is: that every time they hurl the fire at us, we go down on our elbows and knees, and beseech Our Lord to save us from this danger. This was the fashion of the Greek fire: it came on as broad in front as a vinegar cask, and the tail of fire that trailed behind it was as big as a great spear; and it made such a noise as it came, that it sounded like the thunder of heaven. It looked like a dragon flying through the air. Such a bright light did it cast, that one could see all over the camp as though it were day, by reason of the great mass of fire, and the brilliance of the light that it shed.”

The memoir spoke, too, of praying, of weeping: “Oh! fair Lord God, protect my people!”

Almost as soon as nuclear weapons were tested, discussion of test ban treaties began. Teller, fearing a cessation of weapons testing, saw Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech and the Atomic Energy Commission’s Plowshare program as invitations to continue setting off bombs. Teller and his colleagues talked of “geographical engineering.” They talked of blasting a sea-level canal across Panama to end the need for pesky locks. They talked of blasting an alternative route to the Suez Canal. They discussed the use of nuclear explosions for mining and oil exploration, for cutting through pack ice, for propelling rockets. A project called Orion assessed the possibility of propelling a sixteen-story-tall spacecraft with nuclear explosions. A team calculated the number of blasts that would be required to fly Chicago through space.

At a press conference in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, Teller unveiled Chariot. “We looked at the whole world,” he said, “almost the whole world, and tried to pick a spot where we could most effectively demonstrate the peaceful uses of energy.” He compared the risk of fallout from a Chariot blast to the risk of radiation poisoning from his watch. He claimed that he could dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear, if that is what the people wanted. His bombs could do the work of a thousand men with a hundred bulldozers and excavators and dump trucks working around the clock for a year. His plan was to move seventy million cubic yards of frozen earth, and to do it in the blink of an eye.

From the book of Isaiah: “And they shall beat the swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

From Edward Teller: “If your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card.”

Bear tracks decorate the beach on which we walk. I daydream, envisioning my own tracks, through hot ash, footprints of a firewalker. Late in the afternoon, we set up camp on a point of land that juts back into the brackish lagoon behind the beach, well clear of the bear tracks. The sun rides low out over the Chukchi Sea. The wind blows. I pump our cookstove, pushing and pulling on the small silver handle that slides in and out of a pint-sized tank filled with regular unleaded gasoline.

A ship’s surgeon named John Simpson, traveling near here around the time of Captain Roys, when contact between Inupiat and Europeans was becoming commonplace, described the means of making fire used by the Inupiat. “For procuring fire,” he wrote, “the flint and steel is used in the North, and kept in a little bag hanging round the neck; and in Kotzebue Sound the pipe bag contains two pieces of dry wood, with a small bow for rotating the one rapidly while firmly pressed against the other until fire is produced. In the absence of these, two lumps of iron pyrites are used to strike fire upon tinder, made by rubbing the down taken from the seeds of plants with charcoal.”

Again and again, the Chukchi Sea’s wind blows out my matches, so I move closer to the stove. Ten matches later, I strike one close enough to get ignition. The stove flares with a momentary vengeance, a miniature fireball that singes the hairs on my right hand and burns the tips of two fingers. But now the stove roars, its flame blue and orange and yellow. The blue bit burns cooler than the yellow, the dark bit in the middle of the flame is hotter than the blue bit, and the flickering halo that surrounds the whole thing burns hottest of all. The heat moves through the metal parts by conduction, is carried away through the air by convection, and warms everything around it by radiating outward.

I heat water on top of my stove while I read the only book in my pack, Hodge and Weinberger’s
A Nuclear Family Vacation
. Nuclear test sites and missile silos and bomb laboratories, the authors contend, can be tourist attractions. The authors visit Frenchman Flat at the Nevada Test Site. They tour a Missile Alert Facility in Wyoming. They take in the Kurchatov Institute in Russia and a uranium conversion facility in Iran. They explore the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Some of their destinations are located near the homes of relatives: “a cousin in Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, an aunt in Las Vegas, near the site where nuclear weapons were once set off on a regular basis, and a brother in northern California, not far from the lab that physicist Edward Teller built.” The authors talk to people who are designing bombs, disassembling bombs, and guarding bombs.

In their introduction, the authors ask a simple question: “How does one plan a nuclear vacation?” The answer: one balances the value of visiting a place with the ease of getting there and the likelihood of gaining access. North Korea is scratched off the list. Because of security restrictions, “India and Pakistan have little to offer the nuclear tourist.” Point Hope, Cape Thompson, and Chariot do not even make it into the book’s index.

The water boils. I prepare noodles. The sun sets. My companion and I eat and then slither into sleeping bags. Wind whips the fabric of our tent, and my burned fingertips throb. The stove’s sudden flame had left hot spots, blisters. “It’s a mind-set,” the instructor at the Firewalking Institute had told me. “Tell yourself you’ll get hurt and you will.”

Atom bombs fueled by highly enriched uranium are famously simple. Take two blocks of highly enriched uranium, each about fifty pounds. Get a pipe about ten feet long. Shove the first brick of uranium in one end of the pipe and the second brick of uranium in the other end. Pack in high explosives behind the two bricks. Insert blasting caps into the high explosives. Plug the ends of the pipe. Apply enough current to trigger the blasting caps and, hence, the high explosives. Hot gases released by the explosion shove the two bricks of uranium toward one another. They collide, and in colliding they reach critical mass.