Ravenous Dusk (69 page)
Authors: Cody Goodfellow
The statement alleged a secret murder of a key Pentagon scientist committed in 1954 by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon overseers of the atomic weapons programs. The victim, known only by code name for the duration of his work with Manhattan and subsequent atomic weapons projects, was only identified by a photograph. Interviews and an intensive secret review of the personnel files at Los Alamos failed to determine that he ever existed or worked for the project, let alone that he was murdered. The writer noted that he never would have passed the item on to the Director, if not for the peculiar death of the anonymous FBI informant, a security handler recently retired from the Los Alamos laboratories, within days of recording his statement.
The photograph was a crumbling copy of the one that had appeared in his office. A blue pen—it could only be the Director's—had circled Dr. Keogh.
I had occasion to know Dr. Lux as well as anyone at Los Alamos, outside the inner circle of scientists, the "bomb makers." They hated to be called that, they preferred their official titles, which made them feel like they were solving the world's problems. It was part of my duties to watch them, especially the marginal ones like Lux, but as they have no direct bearing on the issue at hand, I decline to go into specifics about them. There are still too many above ground to be declassified. But the world needs to know about this. It needs to know the price it's paid, what we've become.
When Oppenheimer got the go-ahead to start recruiting for the project, there was no Red- baiting going on, we just needed the brightest minds, and fast. To slay the dragon, we needed a magic sword. Oppenheimer himself was questionable, and his brother was all but a card-carrying Red since the thirties. So a few pinks slipped into the wash. Out of the egghead Jews, Poles, Czechs and what-have-you Hitler chucked out of Europe, there were bound to be a few. They were all a lot of odd ducks, and even the few staunch superpatriots in the bunch, Teller and his cadre, could get pretty cold when they discussed kill- ratios and maximum yields, and such. It didn't seem to matter who they were talking about bombing, they were so in love with the challenge. So nobody at the time took particular exception to Dr. Lux, least of all the Pentagon. Not at first, not when he was blowing them down with his formulas.
But in a pond full of odd ducks, Dr. Lux was the oddest. Nobody had ever heard of him, and nobody knew where they dug him up. Nobody ever even found out his real name. He might have just stepped down off a cloud, as far as Oppenheimer and the brass seemed to care. The top-rated rumors had him pegged as a German refugee, maybe a Socialist kraut, or even a Jew. We didn't know about all the things they were doing over there, but we knew Jews didn't figure in the plans. In any case, he had no accent when he did talk, which was seldom. Dr. Lux talked in numbers, big sweeping formulas on every wall in his house, even on the breakfast table, like he did figures to decide what to eat. That gave them fits; they had agents come in with cameras and photograph everything in the house when he left, and then scrubbed it all down. It was all gold, apparently.
Lux was in his late thirties when he came to Los Alamos, same as most everyone else, and if he was an enigma, he didn't stand out long. He became a linchpin in Bethe's Theoretical Group, and a lot of the brightest lights gathered around him. He and a bunch of the other theoreticians hung together, formed sort of a clique, they called themselves the Plowsharers. I guess Teller and Eisenhower might've stolen the name for their half-baked plan to rehabilitate the Bomb, for digging canals and nuclear power plants, later. Bethe might've exerted a powerful influence on Lux, or it might've been the other way around. His specialty was radiation: the X-rays and gamma rays and such that come out of the A-bomb, and out of the sun all the time. He had only a peripheral role in Manhattan, but they said his work would lay the groundwork for the new post-war world. The bomb would become the doorway into a new future without poverty, without war. Ah, they don't make bullshit like that, anymore…
After the war, there was a brain-trust bust at Los Alamos. A lot of them lost the stomach for the work after seeing their handiwork do its stuff on real live human beings. To be fair, there was less of a moral imperative; the Crusade was over, and the troops were coming home. Others went back to the ivory towers of academia and screamed bloody murder about what they'd helped to create. Those of us who were keeping score weren't surprised to see Bethe leave, but we were stunned when Lux didn't. We didn't know then that he couldn't.
Lux became the leading light in the Theoretical Group—somebody else led it, but to be honest, his name escapes me. The Plowsharers became a school of thought around the labs, and they liked to draw lines and make people dance to one side or the other. They liked to argue. With Bethe gone and Oppenheimer and Teller wrapped up in their own cold war over the H-bomb, the place got ugly. The secrecy became a fetish, and everybody took turns being on the outside of it.
The Plowsharers didn't keep secrets, at first. They said that all tools are inherently neutral morally, and that man decides to use them for good or ill. Rather than pursuing a more powerful bomb, they wanted the labs to turn to using the Bomb for peace, you know, make it rain on the deserts and feed the world, free energy, the whole utopian schtick. They dragged their feet, stopped just short of sabotage, to keep the H-bomb from happening. They tried to get everyone to believe that, if America alone had the Bomb, it would keep using it until the rest of the world was ashes or slave-states. Only by parity of annihilation— Mutually Assured Destruction, they've been calling it, lately—could the world be saved from big bad America.
Teller split up the brain-pool and got his own lab in California to speed things along, and the H-bomb came in '52, but all the work, all the magic, still came from Los Alamos. Lux was there when they destroyed that little island in the South Pacific, Elugelab, to measure the gamma ray emissions. He and some of the others clashed loudly on the ship just before the test, put on a disgraceful show in front of the sailors.
The Russians had just tested their own atom bomb, you see. The Rosenbergs went to the chair, and they got Klaus Fuchs, but they never did prove that any of them gave away The Bomb. Nobody dared to say it, but I don't think I was the only one who at least suspected that it was Lux, but it could have been goddamned Oppenheimer. Once you start trying to pick apart a secret, everything becomes the truth.
But nobody pointed fingers at Lux. He loved America. He wanted to make it into some kind of Buck Rogers wonderland, but he and his associates were loyal to the core. He'd been with the labs since the beginning. He never left the Hill, never even went into Santa Fe, and if he did anything to arouse suspicion, it was so often a deliberate prank to draw out the security, that he could have gotten away with murder, once they got sick of chasing their tails.
He went uncalled during the HUAC hearings. He wanted to come speak on behalf of Oppenheimer, when Teller pushed to revoke his clearance. They told him he couldn't. He was still top secret, and there was something about him that would have done more harm than good. He knew what they were talking about. He raged at them, but he went back to the drawing board. I don't think he was ever free to leave Los Alamos, or he probably would have, then.
He was working on a new kind of Bomb, and he hated it a thousand times more than the H-bomb. It was called a neutron bomb. Some kind of small nuclear explosion, but extra high radiation yield. Supposed to kill off the people, but leave all the buildings standing, but of course, none of us knew that, then.
For Lux, this one was especially nasty, because the temptation to use it wasn't tempered by dread of destroying the earth. Since bombed areas could swiftly be repopulated, he feared that the weapon would be used on the Russians at the earliest opportunity unless a balance of terror was struck. He didn't tell anyone this, and the Plowsharers meetings went underground, even for Los Alamos. People said they had styled themselves as an egghead star chamber, reviewing projects and deciding how much, if any, effort, to put into developing them. They were deciding what to let the Pentagon have, and, some said, deciding what to give the Soviets, to protect them from us.
It was a scary story, and the Pentagon brass shit their pants when they heard it. The wall of secrecy around Los Alamos became a dome, cutting off oversight from above. My reports started to come back unopened.
Dr. Lux had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the neutron bomb project, in the winter of '53, but he never stopped working. I had occasion to question him about his state of mental health. I think I asked him about his feelings about the Bomb. Did it bother him that he was making a weapon, and if so, why did he do it?
He told me, because he was an instrument of Nature, and it was in our Nature to destroy ourselves.
I asked him, didn't he think we could learn to live with the Bomb?
He told me, "Civilizations have risen to greater heights than ours, only to destroy themselves with the tools of their supremacy."
This set off alarm bells in my head. I hadn't thought he was really nuts. After they canned him, Oppenheimer preached about ancient nuclear weapons turning up in the
Bhagavad-Gita
, you know, like God kept planting this secret in our path so we'd blow ourselves off his planet when we got too full of piss and pride. I asked Lux if he believed that humans had flown in spaceships and dropped the Bomb before?
Bhagavad-Gita
, you know, like God kept planting this secret in our path so we'd blow ourselves off his planet when we got too full of piss and pride. I asked Lux if he believed that humans had flown in spaceships and dropped the Bomb before?
He replied, "Who said anything about humans?"
I recommended that Dr. Lux be reviewed by a psychiatrist post haste. They didn't read that one, either, I guess.
In the summer of '54, they tested the neutron bomb in the South Pacific. You won't read about it in the
World Book Encyclopedia
or
Life Magazine
, but it happened. Secrecy was tighter on it than on any test before or since, because they knew what the world would think about that kind of Bomb, and what the Russians would do. Just testing it could cause a world war, if they weren't careful.
World Book Encyclopedia
or
Life Magazine
, but it happened. Secrecy was tighter on it than on any test before or since, because they knew what the world would think about that kind of Bomb, and what the Russians would do. Just testing it could cause a world war, if they weren't careful.
They picked out an atoll at 12, North, 170 West. I wasn't even supposed to know that much, but pilots talk a lot. The place wasn't on any maps, but spotter planes had noted it in the last year, and old maps had placed it as a landfall. A now-you-see-it kind of place, half a mile or so in diameter. Perfect for their purposes.
The trip out was anything but smooth sailing. We came out in a big amphibious plane to rendezvous with the destroyer ——— at the test site. I accompanied the group in an observational capacity. Dr. Lux was there, along with ——— ———, — —— ———, ——— ———, and a bunch of technicians and some unfamiliar counterintelligence agents from one agency or another. They didn't bother to introduce themselves, but it was clear from the way the Navy brass deferred to them, that they were in charge of security.
There weren't any complications with setting up. No natives to clear out, not even any animals, and only a shabby stand of palms. The scientists came ashore to oversee the assembly of the bomb and all the various measuring devices. The sailors brought livestock, a whole barnyard assortment, and staked them down in rings. Then they threw together houses of plywood and brick and lead, and with much joking, staked down pigs inside them. They anchored a bunch of decommissioned PT boats offshore with more animals and fruits and vegetables and potted plants and measuring devices onboard. It was a real Old Testament sacrifice.
They tied it to a big weather balloon on cables and let it rise to three thousand feet. The bomb was pretty small, about the size of a trash can, with weird flanges on it that the scientists said were to minimize the blast itself so the radiation's effects could be measured. As it floated up, Dr. Lux and his cronies hummed "God Bless America" and saluted.
At the end, the leader of the other security group called all of the doctors together and announced that there was a leak at Los Alamos, and that a plot to give the neutron bomb plans to the Russians had just been uncovered. There would be no more show trials, no more abuses of the bomb program in the public eye. No more Fuchses, no more Rosenbergs, no more Oppenheimers. He then took out a pistol and shot Lux in both legs.
Everybody backed away from him as he fell. Lux tried to crawl to us, and we just kept backing away from him. He did what he did to strike a balance, he said. Without a balance of terror, the human race would destroy itself.
The others scattered, and the g-men herded them back onto the Navy boats. We heard Lux screaming all the way back to the destroyer.
The test was conducted as planned, and was a resounding success. They were instructed that this incident had never taken place, told that no one named Dr. Lux had ever worked on the bomb program, and left them to ponder the new consequences of espionage.
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