More Tests of the Super
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Ozymandius,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
The first person back here in the US to know that the “Mike” test in the Marshall Islands of the first hydrogen device had been successful was probably Edward Teller. He’d not had anything to do with actually building the device but he knew the test schedule. When Mike was detonated, Teller was thousands of miles away in a basement at the University of California at Berkeley watching a seismometer. Seismometers are instruments used to detect and measure earthquakes around the world. The detonation registered on the seismograph. Teller called Los Alamos with the news. “It’s a boy,” he said.
Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in early November, days after the test. He was told about the success of Ivy Mike only after the election. Before being elected, he, like the rest of us, wouldn’t have been allowed to know anything about it. Everything about atomic energy was supposed to be secret, you know.
Ike didn’t see pictures of the test until quite a bit later, in June 1953. At the time, he was thinking about embarking on a program called Operation Candor in which the American people would be told how things stood now when it came to nuclear weapons.
The pictures of the Ivy Mike test were, as you can imagine, dramatic. When Ike saw them, he “blanched,” said someone who was in the room with him. Here are some pictures.
Now the job of our weapons designers would be to make these devices smaller and lighter so they could be delivered as bombs. Maybe they could eventually be made small and light enough to be delivered not just in heavy bombers but on rockets. Rockets that would come in faster than the speed of sound. Many times faster.
Less and less something that could be defended against.
It became clear that these devices could indeed be made smaller, lighter, and more powerful eighteen months after the “Mike” test, on March 1, 1954, in a test called “Bravo,” in the “Castle” testing operation at Bikini Atoll. The device for this test, called “Shrimp” (Get it?), used a different kind of fusion fuel, lithium-deuteride. It was a solid. No liquid hydrogen or Dewer flasks required.
Shrimp was in a cylinder about 15 feet long and 4 1/2 feet in diameter. It weighed about twelve tons, only two tons more than the Nagasaki bomb. But it yielded 1000 times more than the Hiroshima bomb, the equivalent of 15,000,000 tons of TNT, half again what Mike had yielded. Its mushroom cloud got up there into the stratosphere. Above the weather. What got into the stratosphere stayed there for a while, though gravity did make it come down eventually.
Bravo produced much more radioactive fallout than Mike had, and it spread far beyond what had been thought to be the area of danger. The islands in a large area around the site were badly contaminated, as was a Japanese fishing boat that had been thought to be outside the danger zone. As, of course, were the fish being fished for.
Some of Shrimp’s fallout made it all the way, eventually, to the southwestern United States. Did you know that? We weren’t told about this so you might not.
Because of the radioactivity that’s still active in the Marshall Islands, islanders have been unable to return, especially not to Bikini, but not just there. Those who have returned have sometimes had malformed babies. Some looked like turtles, they said, some like jellyfish.
The evacuated Marshallese have ended up in different places, a bunch, for some reason, in Arkansas. Arkansas is not much like Enewetak or Bikini. For that matter, Bikini is not much like Bikini now. No one has been able to go back and stay.
So yes, these thermonuclear devices could be made lighter and more powerful and smaller in size. Small enough to be carried in a bomber. The big new eight-engine B-52 jet bombers we would be introducing in February were supposed to be able to carry 70,000 pounds of bombs. They might well be able to carry several of these things.
Was the knowledge of how to make a Super bomb to be our secret? Maybe not forever—we learned that with the atomic bomb—but at least for a good while ? Again, not. On November 1, 1955, three years after the Mike test, a year after Bravo, the Soviets detonated their first staged megaton-range thermonuclear device.
They had dropped theirs from a bomber, so it was already a bomb .
A “megaton” is a million tons. The Soviets’ bomb yielded the equivalent of five megatons of TNT. Not as much as Mike or Bravo, but still, over three hundred Hiroshimas. And it was already a bomb.
Now that we both knew that bombs of this kind could be made to work, what about the question of whether there was any upper limit to their destructiveness? The report of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee in 1949 that had recommended against developing the Super had said their destructiveness might be unlimited.
Could we now, say, just keep adding stages?
Yes, we could. At the beginning of Eisenhower’s second term, on May 27, 1956, again at our Pacific Proving Ground, we successfully tested a three-stage thermonuclear weapon. The test, in an Operation called Redwing, was called Zuni. Indian names were used for the tests in Operation Redwing. I don’t know how such things were decided, or whether Indians had been consulted.
Zuni had a yield of 3.5 megatons. Two months later, on July 20, 1956, in a test called Tewa, we tested another three-stage Super, this time a “dirty” version that yielded 5 megatons, just what the Soviet Super had yielded a few months earlier. 5,000,000 tons of TNT equivalent. And, of course, since it was “dirty,” much more radioactive fallout than Zuni had yielded.
So yes, you could keep adding stages. Maybe as many as you wanted? Might the destructiveness be, as the members of the General Advisory Committee had said, unlimited?
But would we be adding stages? I mean, what would be the point? We aren’t just going for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records, are we?
Not only that. Our weapons effects analysts were realizing that ten separate bombs yielding one hundred kilotons each, for a total of one megaton, would cause much more damage than one bomb that yielded one megaton. So what would be the point of single bombs that yielded what Mike and Bravo had, ten and fifteen megatons? You could do much more damage with twenty or thirty one-hundred kiloton bombs, and maybe even more with two- or three-hundred ten-kiloton bombs, bombs not even as big as the Hiroshima bomb.
Our Mark 5 fission bomb could be set to yield more than 100 kilotons. And it was just a fission bomb. The GAC had said, hadn’t it, when asked if we should try to build a Super, that the fission bombs we had already would be able to do what a Super bomb could. They were right.
We had in our stockpile now about 2000 bombs. What would be the point of building bigger bombs?
Come to think of it, what had ever been the point? Except being able to say ours was bigger?
Now that we had the Super, our scientists and engineers and military people would probably focus even more on the area that in the early 1950’s Oppenheimer had said would be where the most important developments would be taking place—the “art of delivery.” Building bombers like that B-52 that would be able to carry more and fly higher and faster and farther on a load of gas. And even be refueled in the air, which meant they could fly indefinitely, or as long as the pilots held up.
And what about rockets, called “missiles” when they were used as weapons? If the rockets were “intercontinental ballistic missiles,” they’d be able to fly from launching sites in our country to just about anywhere, certainly to Moscow, in thirty minutes, flying over the north pole and coming in at speeds many times the speed of sound. We might even be able figure out how to launch such missiles from submarines, submerged wherever. Closer to their targets. Which meant those submarine-launched missiles would get where they were going in even less than thirty minutes, depending on where the submarines were concealed. Which the Soviets wouldn’t be able to know beforehand.
Why would we be developing all this? Because we thought they would be doing it, right? Why might they be doing this, as they certainly would if we did? Because they knew we were doing it. And both of us thought the other was ready to use such weapons on the other if they could do so with impunity.
Was either one of us right about that? Who knew? Some of us seemed to think we knew. Being sure you are right doesn’t mean you are right, of course. It is more likely, I’d say, to be evidence that you aren’t.
In any case, it seemed likely by now, didn’t it?, that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to massive use. How could a massive use not be what unfolded once such weapons began to be used? Who would stop the use of them once it started? Who would able to? After it began, would we even want to?
After that massive use, after we had destroyed all we’d built and the civilization we had now become able to destroy, what would be left to make a fresh start with?
It could end up being like our planet had been struck by another planet. Only we would have done it to ourselves.
As long as nuclear weapons existed, the risk of this happening would never be zero. Not even close to zero.
Next: Eisenhower Takes Office