The Age of Radiance (55 page)

Never again would there be a moment when the world came so close to nuclear war.
“In my seven years as [defense] secretary, we came within a hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three separate occasions,” Robert McNamara summarized. “Cold War? It was a Hot War. . . . [In Cuba] we literally looked down the gun barrel into nuclear war. LeMay was saying, ‘Let’s go in, let’s totally destroy Cuba.’ At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close. Rational individuals . . . came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. The major lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. Is it right and proper that today there are seventy-five hundred strategic offensive
nuclear warheads, twenty-five hundred are on fifteen-minute alert, to be launched on the decision of one human being? . . . Any military commander who’s honest with himself will admit that he’s made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people . . . unnecessarily . . . through mistakes, through errors of judgment. [But] there is no learning curve with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake, and you’re gonna destroy nations.”

When the crisis ended, LeMay called it
“the greatest defeat in our history.” But in another case of a miracle with two faces, Kennedy and Khrushchev’s brush with holocaust led to a remarkable improvement in US-Soviet relations. In August 1963, the two superpowers signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, halting atomic tests in the air, in the oceans, and in outer space. Soon after, they installed a hotline teletypewriter between Moscow and Washington so that it wouldn’t take six hours to get a telegraph during a crisis.

But the most dramatic change was the American public’s attitude about nuclear war. Before Cuba, it was common US wisdom that another world war was in our future, and that armed conflict with the Soviet Union, likely nuclear, was certain. For thirty years, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
was published with a doomsday clock set at minutes to midnight; in 1960, C. P. Snow called atomic war a mathematical certainty, and many others, including Albert Einstein, had a similar outlook. In 1959, 64 percent of Americans said “war, especially nuclear war” was their country’s biggest problem . . . but by 1965 it was 16 percent. The
Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature
cites north of 400 articles on the subject “nuclear” for each year from 1961 to 1963 . . . but by 1967, there are around 120. Atomic worries revived somewhat in the 1980s, a confluence of NATO’s 1979 plan to install nuclear missiles in Europe, Reagan’s comments that these could be used without targeting either superpower, Jonathan Schell’s bestselling contemplation of nuclear holocaust,
The Fate of the Earth
, and ABC’s TV movie on the same topic,
The Day After.
But ever since, the US citizen’s fear about nuclear weapons has declined.

In America, the removal of the missiles was portrayed as a remarkable triumph. But it so humiliated the Soviets that they ratcheted up the arms race all over again. Soviet lieutenant general Nikolai Detinov:
“The results were very painful and they were taken very painfully by our leadership. Because of the strategic [imbalance] between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had to accept everything that the United States dictated to it, and this had a painful effect on our country and our government . . . [to such extent that] all our economic resources were mobilized to solve this problem. . . . [A]fter the Caribbean crisis all production and other areas
started going down thanks to the fact that all factors were mobilized in the name of military technology.”

Remarkably enough, US military chiefs had the same reaction. If the Soviets could so easily sneak such a threat in under their noses, the nation needed a far greater atomic arsenal to defend itself. Commentator Louis Menand: “What drove the Cold War . . . was not business or science. It was . . . politics—the opportunities for partisan gain made available by gesturing toward the ubiquitous shadow of an overwhelming emergency. And the manipulation was not all on one side. If the United States assigned the Soviets the role of mechanized Enemy Other, the Soviets did their best to play it. The occasional hyperbole of the [American] Committee on the Present Danger was nothing compared with the bluster of Khrushchev and Gromyko, men who had their own domestic constituencies to worry about. It served both sides in the Cold War to take each other’s rhetoric at face value. We have yet to learn how not to do this.”

F
RANKLIN ROOSEVELT
always planned to share the Manhattan Project’s final blueprints with Britain and Canada. After all, they had contributed scientists and money to the research. But after FDR’s death, the United States instead forbade the sharing of secret atomic-energy information with any foreign country, including Britain and Canada, on pain of death. It didn’t actually matter for the allies as they had been involved enough to know the fundamentals, but since the USA had a monopoly on uranium enrichment, the British were forced to engineer reactors that used natural uranium metals, moderated by graphite but cooled by gas. France followed Britain’s design in their own burners, and Canada used similar fuels, but moderated with heavy water. In the end, America’s attempts at safeguarding her atomic secrets hurt only her own allies. When in 1960, Argonne, Westinghouse, and Oak Ridge proudly displayed the first US pressurized- and boiling-water reactors for civilian utilities, they were six years behind the Soviet Union in nuclear power. The American design was much safer than the Soviet’s, however, for the simple reason that it was originally created to propel a submarine.

The system began when an American naval officer spent the years before World War II working in a sub that used diesel engines when surfaced and electrical motors when submerged. The officer was disturbed by how frequently his crew’s life was imperiled by the battery’s willingness to set itself on fire. When this captain, Hyman Rickover, was then assigned duty with the Manhattan Project, he dreamed that one day there might be a nuclear-powered submarine, which he called
Nautilus
after Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. Since the state-of-the-art wartime sub was the
Nazi
Unterseeboot
, Rickover followed many German design ideas for his own ship, including a twenty-eight-inch-wide hull. This meant that he needed a reactor core about the size of a garbage can. And to keep his crews safe, he used water as both moderator and coolant—meaning that in any radioactive crisis, the engine would automatically shut itself down—with the coolant in a sealed plumbing loop to minimize the danger of radioactive leaks.

Beginning in 1949, the AEC began testing a host of reactor designs, including Rickover’s, at Root Hog, Idaho, adjacent to the Craters of the Moon. The town changed its name to Arco, and the commission would eventually spend $500 million there, more than the estimated worth of the state of Idaho as a whole. So many of Arco’s experiments were classified that it was said, “Nuclear engineers and physicians are alike. They both bury their mistakes.” But Rickover’s was no mistake. Launched January 17, 1955, USS
Nautilus
would achieve her twenty thousand leagues under the sea on February 5, 1957, before becoming the first craft to traverse the underside of the north pole. And Hyman Rickover’s PWR (pressurized water reactor) would make its way to America’s first nuclear power plant, twenty-five miles outside Pittsburgh.

On December 8, 1953, President Dwight David Eisenhower gave a speech to the United Nations that begat both the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and what Ike hoped would be a significant part of his historic legacy, Atoms for Peace: “Today, the United States’ stockpile of atomic weapons, which, of course, increases daily, exceeds by many times the total equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theater of war in all the years of the Second World War. . . . It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. . . . The United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to finding the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

The following September, Eisenhower was on a Colorado vacation where he was presented with a cabinet of electronics and a neutron wand. When the president’s hand waved the wand over the cabinet, a neutron beam was captured by the cabinet’s rate meter, which sent a current twelve hundred miles to Shippingport, Pennsylvania, triggering a high-lift power jack to begin excavating the foundation of that first US nuclear plant, outfitted with Rickover’s burner. By 1955, Eisenhower decided a nuclear merchant
ship should be wrought as an Atoms for Peace global ambassador. Featuring Raytheon’s Radarange (the first commercially available microwave oven), NS
Savannah
was christened by first lady Mamie on July 21, 1959, and, when it docked in New York City, inspired a “Nuclear Week” of educational events, which included two episodes of the
Tonight
show. Joining the Atoms for Peace agenda with his Plowshare Program was none other than Edward Teller, who studied the use of fusion bombs to dredge harbors and canals, nuclear explosions for fracking shale oil fields, and firing a nuclear rocket into the moon. This last proposal, Teller said, was to
“observe what kind of disturbance it might cause.” He told the University of Alaska in 1959,
“If your mountain is not in the right place, just drop us a card” and “We’re going to work miracles.”

Back at the Pentagon, if the navy was going to have nuclear submarines, then goddammit the air force would get nuclear-powered jets. But much of what made
Nautilus
brilliant was unsuitable in the air. Rickover’s reactors were encased in lead to protect his seamen, and if a naval reactor needed to shut down, it could be restarted while the sub was at rest—neither an option for a jet. Even so, the USAF spent $30 billion trying to make nuclear air power work, until Kennedy shut it down in 1961 . . . but perhaps it’s for the best that the program never took off. While the Soviets have had a classified number of submarine disasters, the American air force has suffered a classified number of incidents with its nuclear-armed bombers. Sandia Labs itemized at least twelve hundred “significant” accidents with nuclear devices from 1950 to 1968. One piece of lasting evidence of these “Broken Arrows” can be seen in a twenty-five-foot crater created on May 22, 1957, by a B-36’s accidentally dropping a ten-megaton thermonuclear bomb onto New Mexico.

One of Kennedy’s great legacies as president would have its own nuclear history. In 1944, Chicago’s Met Lab worked with Los Alamos to design an atomic rocket—its reactor heated hydrogen gas until it exploded from an exhaust nozzle. In the 1950s, Freeman Dyson continued this work for the Pentagon with Helios, an egg-shaped spacecraft with the crew in a small front cabin shielded by lead. A series of atomic bombs would explode one after the next in the main sphere, their plasma shooting through a nozzle in the back and shoving the craft ever forward. With Ted Tyler at General Dynamics, Dyson then designed Orion, which exploded five nuclear bombs every three seconds two hundred feet behind itself to reach a thrust of 3,000 mph. Even though a great deal of thought had gone into Orion’s sophisticated shock absorbers, the idea had a flaw in that a liftoff from earth would leave behind a cloud of radioactive exhaust.

On June 29, 1961, the first atomic satellite powered into orbit—the US Navy’s
Transit 4A
—using plutonium-238 in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to fuel a battery, the System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power—SNAP. RTGs have since made their way into the satellites that explore the universe for NASA: Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, Curiosity—as well as in the experimental apparatus left on the surface of the moon by Apollos 12–17. Russia has sent about forty nuclear-powered reconnaissance satellites into low-earth orbit; one crashed into Canada on January 24, 1978, irradiating six hundred miles, while on April 21, 1964, an American satellite collapsed, releasing seventeen thousand curies from its SNAP over the skies of Madagascar.