The Age of Radiance (49 page)

Enrico Fermi died in 1954, at the too-young age of fifty-three. Nella Fermi:
“I personally have discussed [whether my father’s death was caused by his work with radioactivity] with two doctors. One doctor was one of the doctors that was on the scene at the time, and he said absolutely not. But, that definite ‘no’ . . . I don’t know whether I believe it or not. The other doctor I talked to is my own personal doctor, who was not there at the time, and he said that he had always assumed that, in fact, that was the case. But, he also qualified it and said that there would be no way of knowing, that it would look like cancer in any case, that the only thing you could really say or speculate was, yes, this man has been exposed to a lot of radiation, and therefore, this may have been due to the radiation. He had stomach cancer, but after his death when they did the autopsy, they found that he had another cancer as well, which was apparently unrelated to that. That, to me, strengthens the case for radiation because it would seem that there was damage all over the place.” Laura lived until December 28, 1977, when she died of pneumonia at the age of seventy, while the sixty-four-year-old Nella died of lung cancer on March 2, 1995.

Besides Carl Sagan’s catalog of Fermi honors, for decades America hosted the world’s leading cyclotron—Fermilab’s four-mile-circumference Tevatron, housed under sixty-eight hundred acres outside Batavia, Illinois—where, nearby, buffalo roam. The machine’s biggest achievement was the discovery of three of seventeen subatomic particles considered to be the building blocks of everything, and its technology led to the birth of MRI medical diagnostic technology. Four other US nuclear reactors are named for Enrico, as is element number 100, fermium. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed a previously unknown fifty-thousand-light-year remnant of a black hole eruption at the very center of the Milky Way. Cosmologist Dan Hooper:
“We’ve considered every astronomical source, and nothing we know of, except dark matter, can account for the observations. No other explanation comes anywhere close.”

In its obituary, the
New York Times
said, “More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named ‘the father of the atomic bomb.’ It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant. And eight years later, on Dec. 2, 1942, he was the leader of that famous team of scientists who lighted the first atomic fire on earth, on that gloomy squash court underneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football stadium. That day has been officially recognized as the birthday of
the Atomic Age. Man at last had succeeded in operating an atomic furnace, the energy of which came from the vast cosmic reservoir supplying the sun and the stars with their radiant heat and light—the nucleus of the atoms of which the material universe is constituted.”

T
hough now a molecular biologist, Leo Szilard continued to use his celebrity status as a nuclear pioneer to promote arms control. In February of 1950, he terrified the American public during a radio broadcast by describing how if cobalt was used as a tamper, a nuclear weapon could be designed that would bring an end to all life on earth, inspiring movie director Stanley Kubrick to fashion cobalt bombs for his satire
Dr. Strangelove
. Leo wrote to Stalin in 1947, and then to Khrushchev in 1960; Stalin never answered, but Khrushchev said he would meet him on September 27 at the Soviet mission to the United Nations. Szilard was promised fifteen minutes but unsurprisingly to any of his friends, the talk went on for two hours, with Khrushchev finally agreeing to the possibility of an international agency that would limit arms escalation and a communications hotline between the Soviet premier and the American president in case of nuclear crisis. That hotline would also appear in
Dr. Strangelove
, but would not exist in the real world until the Cuban Missile Crisis and its series of delayed telegrams made it clear to both sides that this was worthwhile.

In April 1958, the USSR unilaterally suspended nuclear testing, and after the AEC’s Strauss warned Eisenhower that a reciprocal American test ban would turn Los Alamos and Livermore into
“ghost towns,” the president growled that he “thought scientists, like other people, have a strong interest in avoiding nuclear war.” Later that year after a joint ban was enacted, Freeman Dyson wrote a letter to his parents from Livermore, now under the directorship of his longtime mentor, Ed Teller:
“A lot of the talk of Livermore was about cheating the test ban. We’ve done a lot of ways to cheat which would be quite impossible for any instrument to detect. The point of this is not that the Livermore people themselves intend to cheat, but we are convinced the Russians can cheat as much as they want anytime they want, without being found out.”

In the fall of 1958, Leo Szilard was meeting with Soviet and Hungarian delegates at the international Pugwash scientific conference. He asked them for a favor—to arrange for exit visas for Ed Teller’s mother and sister—and they did. For the first time in twenty-three years, the family was reunited. Pugwash also turned out to be a fine venue to begin discussing arms control
in person, and with friendly demeanors. The US-USSR antiballistic-missile treaty of 1972 was a direct outcome of the conference’s work.

When Leo was diagnosed with bladder cancer in November 1959, he moved to Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City and designed his own radiation therapy, telling his doctors,
“If worse comes to worse, I’ll be dead ten years longer.” If the program failed, he invented a bag that dispensed cyanide in such an undetectable way that he wouldn’t be judged a suicide and his widow, Trude, would not be denied her life insurance benefits. After the cancer went into remission, Trude told Ed Teller, “The hospital was even more relieved to be rid of Szilard than Szilard was to be rid of the hospital.”

In 1961, Russian hydrogen bomb inventor Andrei Sakharov stopped by his colleague Victor Adamsky’s office to show him a short story, Szilard’s “My Trial as a War Criminal.” Adamsky:
“I’m not strong in English, but I tried to read it through. A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then faced the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can’t get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let [Sakharov] and some of us live in peace.” Leo’s story inspired Andrei Sakharov to become a dissident, and his protests eventually helped end the Cold War’s arms race.

In 1962, news of the Cuban Missile Crisis led Szilard to flee America for Geneva; he returned, abashed, in December of that year. Two years later, he moved to La Jolla to work at Jonas Salk’s Institute for Biological Studies, where he worked until his death on May 30, 1964, of a heart attack, in his sleep.

On Sunday, February 7, 1960, the Russian Oppenheimer, Igor Kurchatov, visited with his colleague Yuli Khariton and Yuli’s wife, Maria, in the suburbs of Moscow. When the radio played a waltz, Igor danced with Maria and then turned to Khariton: “Let’s go for a little walk, Yuli Borisovich, and talk some shop.” They went to a nearby park where, though below freezing, it was sunny. Kurchatov picked out a bench, and they sat for a moment, Yuli describing the results of his latest work. Then he noticed that his boss’s eyes were glazing over. He shouted out, “There’s something wrong with Kurchatov!” But it was already too late. At fifty-seven, Kurchatov died of a heart
attack. The Russians say it was the strain of working for Beria that shortened his life, but Nella Fermi, among others, may have a different opinion: that like so many of his global peers, Kurchatov succumbed to the side effects of being a nuclear physicist.

With the deaths of Fermi, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Kurchatov, and Niels Bohr (in 1962), the great heroic generation of nuclear science had passed. They would be replaced by a very different group of men and women, a group that rarely had second thoughts about their miracle with two faces.

I
N
December 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission announced it would buy uranium at a startling inflated price as well as pay $10,000 bonuses for any successful new US ore discovery. The largesse triggered a nuclear gold rush in the Colorado plateau across the American Southwest, where nine hundred mines sprang to life. The public reaction was so explosive that both Popeye and the Bowery Boys had pitchblende adventures, while Milton Bradley amended the Game of Life to include “Discover Uranium! Win $240,000.” On July 6, 1952, a down-at-his-heels geologist, Charles Steen, cracked open a record-breaking uranium mine in the Big Indian Wash outside Moab, Utah. He had his boots bronzed and, every week, flew in his private plane to Salt Lake City for rumba lessons. Decades later, federal officials discovered that one Colorado mining town, Uravan, was so radioactive that its buildings, its streets, and its trees had to be torn down, chopped up, and buried, at a cost of $127 million.

If the Cold War meant the USA and the USSR continuously threatened each other with an ever-greater arsenal of annihilation, the real nuclear bomb targets would turn out to be American citizens. From 1951 to 1992 the AEC detonated 928 nuclear devices at the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range Proving Grounds (in time called the Nevada Test Site, or NTS), fifty miles north of Las Vegas—and an additional 126 tests were run elsewhere, notably at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands. During the same period, over four thousand radiation experiments were conducted by the AEC, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration, and NASA on (for the most part uninformed) human subjects. As
documented by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eileen Welsome, hospital patients at New York’s Sloan-Kettering, Cincinnati’s General, Houston’s Baylor College, and San Francisco’s University of California were fully irradiated to produce military data; eight hundred pregnant woman were dosed with radioactive iron and their fetuses monitored by Vanderbilt University; seven newborns and over a hundred Native Americans were injected with radioactive iodine; seventy-three mentally disabled children in Massachusetts were fed radioactive cereal by Quaker Oats and the AEC; two hundred cancer patients were dosed with enormous amounts of cesium and cobalt; and 232 inmates had their testicles irradiated at carcinogenic levels by the University of Washington. The prisoners were paid a hundred bucks and sterilized at the end of the experiment to
“keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants.”

Around two hundred of Nevada’s explosions directly irradiated over two hundred thousand site witnesses, most of them servicemen, while around ninety atmospheric demolitions afflicted thousands who would be known as “downwinders”—residents of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. The tests were so common that Las Vegas began promoting them as tourist attractions. Tom Saffer:
“We Marines were brought [to Nevada’s Frenchman Lake] at 3:30 in the morning [on June 24, 1957], the trucks disembarked us, we were left here. Hanging from a balloon two miles in that direction was a nuclear test called Priscilla [a part of Operation Plumbbob, which detonated twenty-nine bombs in Nevada from May 28 to October 7, 1957, twenty-seven of which were successful]. This was the spot where a twenty-two-year-old Marine Corps lieutenant, yours truly, was irradiated and became part of the population of 250,000 American veterans who were used in nuclear testing. Approximately half an hour before this test was conducted, a voice from an unseen loudspeaker said, ‘Good morning, gentlemen, welcome to the land of the giant mushrooms. You are going to be closer to a nuclear weapon, or an atomic bomb, than anyone since Hiroshima.’ We were told to kneel, put our forearms over our eyes and close our eyes tightly, and then the countdown started. Our right shoulder was towards the blast. We were told not to look up and none of us dared look. Then the countdown started—5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . We heard a sharp ‘click’ and this intense heat on the back of the exposed neck. And the most shocking part of this was you could see the two bones in your forearm, and a bright red light. Within a few seconds, shock waves from the bomb hit these trenches and I was immediately thrown from one side of the trench wall to the other. And I was frightened beyond belief.”