Are They Useless? IV (of XV). Can We Make Them Even More Useless?
After World War II, we got right to work designing atomic bombs--fission weapons--that were even more useless for military purposes than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had been.
Oppenheimer and other scientists had advised our leaders that if a nuclear arms race began, bigger bombs would quickly be developed. That’s just what happened.
In our first nuclear weapons testing operation after the war, Operation Crossroads in 1946, two bombs of the same design and yield as the one we had dropped on Nagasaki were detonated, one in the air and one underwater. We wanted to test the effects of these weapons on ships and on animals—pigs and rats—that had been caged and tethered on decomissioned ships anchored in the area. The effects on the ships were devastating. The effects on the animals were also. Pictures were not made available to the public.
The effects of the radioactivity surprised the testers. They were so severe a third scheduled test was canceled.
We also wanted to test the effects, I’m sure, on a delegation of Soviets we had invited to witness the tests. Some of us—Secretary of State Jimmy Byrne, for example—thought the experience might cow them. That isn’t what happened. The opposite is what happened, it now seems.
By the time of our second testing operation, Operation Sandstone in 1949, we’d come up with some design improvements, and one of three bombs tested yielded 49 kilotons, more than twice what the Nagasaki bomb had yielded.
That was a good start, you could say, but even before the Manhattan Project began, physicists had realized that a different kind of nuclear weapon would be possible--a thermonuclear fusion weapon--that would make a far, far bigger bang than a fission bomb ever could.
Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists knew that a bomb of this kind was theoretically possible but they hadn’t been at all sure that it could actually be made to work. From the beginning of the Manhattan Project, a physicist named Edward Teller had dedicated himself to designing this new kind of “Super” bomb, and had even refused to work with other Manhattan Project scientists on designing the fission bomb. By January 1950, though, when President Truman committed our country to an all-out effort to develop the Super bomb, Teller still hadn’t been able to figure out how to make it work.
In January 1950, I myself was still in elementary school, third grade. I couldn’t have helped.
In January 1951, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a theoretical physicist and mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam, a refugee from Poland, had imagined a way the thermonuclear bomb could be made to work.
On November 1, 1952, seven years after the first fission bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we successfully detonated at our proving ground in the Pacific the first of this new kind of device in a test called “Mike” as part of a testing operation called “Ivy.” In “Ivy Mike,” a “primary” fission bomb like the one used on Nagasaki was used to trigger nuclear fusion in a “secondary” that contained an isotope of hydrogen that served as the fusion fuel.
The Ivy Mike test yielded almost seven hundred times what the Hiroshima bomb had yielded.
The scientists were already sure that thermonuclear bombs could be made to yield more than this. Making them even more useless as military weapons.
The biggest bomb of this kind that we ever built and tested was the “Shrimp” device detonated in the “Castle Bravo” test on March 1, 1954. It yielded 15 megatons, half again what Ivy Mike had yielded. A thousand times what the Hiroshima bomb had yielded.
In August 1949, the Soviets had exploded their first fission bomb. Their physicists would also have known already that the Super bomb was possible. If they knew we were working on one--and President Truman announced in January 1950 that we would be--they certainly would also be working on one.
In fact, one of their physicists, Andrei Sakharov, had started to work on one before President Truman told us we should. The Soviets exploded their first “true'“ thermonuclear bomb in 1955.
At the beginning of John Kennedy’s presidency, the Soviets claimed to be getting ready to test a thermonuclear bomb that much larger even than our “Shrimp.” On October 17, 1961, before the test, President Kennedy’s White House issued a press release that urged the Soviets not to conduct the test. It said we knew we could make one much bigger than Shrimp but had also realized there wouldn’t be any point: the nuclear bombs we already had would be entirely adequate to produce an equivalent, or an even more destructive, response if we were attacked with such a big bomb.
That’s interesting. The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had said the same thing in 1949 when they recommended against us being the first to make an effort to develop the Super bomb. Their recommendation had been ignored.
On October 31, the Soviets went ahead and dropped their big bomb over their island test site in the Arctic Ocean north of their country. It was big, all right. What we came to call the “Tsar Bomba” yielded almost four times Shrimp, over 50 megatons.
The Soviets said they had scaled it back from 100 megatons because the radioactive fallout might have been a bit much. In Scandinavia and other countries in Eastern and Western Europe but even in Russia itself.
After this, both of us decided we didn’t need to make a bomb more useless for military purposes than the Tsar Bomba. It’s not that the limit has been reached. There is no limit, in theory. But since 1961 nothing close to the size of the Tsar Bomba has been exploded.
Both of us later tested smaller nuclear devices, though. Hundreds of them.
Next: Are They Useless? V (of XV) Would a Smaller Bang Get Us Back in Business?