Part 2

Here must be mentioned another form of hydrogen, named tritium. It has long ago disappeared from nature but it is now being re-created in ponderable amounts in our atomic furnaces. Tritium, the nucleus of which is known as a triton, weighs three times as much as the lightest form of hydrogen. It has an energy content nearly twice that of deuterium. But it is very difficult to make and is extremely expensive. Its cost per kilogram at present AEC prices is close to a billion dollars, as compared with no more than $4,500 for a kilogram of deuterium. A combination of deuterons and tritons would release the greatest energy of all, 3.5 times the energy of deuterons alone. It would reduce the amount of tritons required to half the volume and three fifths of the weight required in a pure triton bomb, thus making the cost considerably lower.

But why bother with such fantastically costly tritons when we can get all the deuterium we want at no more than $4,500 a kilogram, while we can make up the difference in energy by merely incorporating two to three and a half times as much deuterium? Here we are dealing with what is probably the most ticklish question in the design of the H-bomb.

To light a fire successfully, it is not enough merely to have a match. The match must burn for a time long enough for its flame to act. If you try to light a cigarette in a strong wind, the wind may blow out your match so fast that your cigarette will not light. The same question presents itself here, but on a much greater scale. The match for lighting deuterium—namely, the A-bomb—burns only for about a hundred billionths of a second. Is this time long enough to light the “cigarette” with this one and only “match”?

It is known that the time is much too slow for lighting deuterium in its gaseous form. But it is also known that the inflammability is much faster when the gas is compressed to its liquid form, at which its density is 790 times greater. At this density it would take only seven liters (about 7.4 quarts) per one kilogram (2.2 pounds), as compared with 5,555 liters for gaseous deuterium. And it catches fire in a much shorter time.

Is this time long enough? On the answer to this question will depend whether the hydrogen bomb will consist of deuterium alone or of deuterium and tritium, for it is known that the deuteron-triton combination catches fire much faster than deuterons or tritons alone.

We were already working with tritium in Los Alamos as far back as 1945. I remember the time when Dr. Oppenheimer, wartime scientific director of Los Alamos, went to a large safe and brought out a small vial of a clear liquid that looked like water. It was the first highly diluted minute sample of superheavy water, composed of tritium and oxygen, ever to exist in the world, or anywhere in the universe, for that matter. We both looked at it in silent, rapt admiration. Though we did not speak, each of us knew what the other was thinking. Here was something, our thoughts ran, that existed on earth in gaseous form some two billion years ago, long before there were any waters or any forms of life. Here was something with the power to return the earth to its lifeless state of two billion years ago.

The question of what type of hydrogen is to be used in the H-bomb therefore hangs on the question of which one of the possible combinations will catch fire by the light of a match that is blown out after an interval of about a hundred billionths of a second. On the answer to this question will also depend the time it will take us to complete the H-bomb and its cost. To make a bomb of a thousand times the power of the A-bomb would require a 1,000 kilograms of deuterium at a cost of $4,500,000, or 171 kilograms of tritium and 114 kilograms of deuterium at a total cost of more than $166,000,000,000 at current prices, not counting the cost of the A-bomb trigger. Large-scale production of tritium, however, will most certainly reduce its cost enormously, possibly by a factor of ten thousand or more, while, as will be indicated later, the amount of tritium, if required, may turn out to be much smaller.

[Illustration: MAP BY DANIEL BROWNSTEIN]

We can thus see that if deuterium alone is found to be all that is required to set off an H-bomb it will be cheap and relatively easy to make in a short time—both for us and for Russia. Furthermore, such a deuterium bomb would be practically limitless in size. One of a million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb is possible, since deuterium can be extracted in limitless amounts from plain water. On the other hand, if sizable amounts of tritium are found necessary, the cost will be much higher and it will take a considerably longer time, since the production of tritium is very slow and costly. This, in turn, will place a definite limit on the power of the H-bomb, since, unlike deuterium, the amounts of tritium will necessarily always be limited. As will be shown later, we are at present in a much more advantageous position to produce tritium than is Russia, so that if tritium is found necessary, we have a head start on her in H-bomb development.

The radius of destructiveness by the blast of a bomb with a thousand times the energy of the A-bomb will be only ten times greater, since the increase goes by the cube root of the energy. The radius of total destruction by blast in Hiroshima was one mile. Therefore the radius of a superbomb a thousand times more powerful will be ten miles, or a total area of 314 square miles. A bomb a million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb would require 1,000 tons of deuterium. Such a super-superduper could be exploded at a distance from an abandoned, innocent-looking tramp ship. It would have a radius of destruction by blast of 100 miles and a destructive area of more than 30,000 square miles. The time may come when we shall have to search every vessel several hundred miles off shore. And the time may be nearer than we think.

The radius over which the tremendous heat generated by a bomb of a thousandfold the energy would produce fatal burns would be as far as twenty miles from the center of the explosion. This radius increases as the square root, instead of the cube root, of the power. The Hiroshima bomb caused fatal burns at a radius of two thirds of a mile.

The effects of the radiations from a hydrogen bomb are so terrifying that by describing them I run the risk of being branded a fearmonger. Yet facts are facts, and they have been known to scientists for a long time. It would be a disservice to the people if the facts were further denied to them. We have already paid too high a price for a secrecy that now turns out never to have been secret at all.

I can do no better than quote Albert Einstein. “The hydrogen bomb,” he said, “appears on the public horizon as a probably attainable goal.... If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth, has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.”

What Dr. Einstein meant by “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence the annihilation of any life on earth,” was explained in realistic detail by such eminent physicists as Dr. Bethe, Dr. Leo Szilard, Dr. Edward Teller, and others. All of them may even now be engaged on work on the hydrogen bomb.

Here is how “poisoning of the atmosphere” may result from the explosion of a hydrogen bomb: Tremendous quantities of neutrons, which can enter any substance in nature and make it radioactive, are liberated. In the case of a deuterium bomb, one eighth of the mass used—125 grams per kilogram—is liberated. In the case of a deuteron-tritium bomb, fully one fifth of the mass—200 grams per kilogram—is released, while in a bomb using pure tritium, fully one third of the mass—333 grams per kilogram—is liberated as free neutrons. There are 600,000 billion billion neutrons in each gram, each capable of producing a radioactive atom in its environment. The neutron is one of the two building blocks of the nuclei of all atoms.

These neutrons can be used to make any element radioactive, Professor Szilard and his colleagues point out. It follows that the casing of the bomb could be selected with a view to producing, after the neutrons enter it, an especially powerful radioactive substance. Since each artificially made, radioactive element gives out a specific type of radiation and has a definite life span, after which it decays to one half of its radioactivity, the designer of the bomb could rig it in such a way that its explosion would spread into the air a tremendous cloud of specially selected radioactive substances that would give off lethal radiations for a definite period of time. In such a way a large area could be made unfit for human or animal habitation for a definite period of time, months or years.

Take, for example, the very common element cobalt. When bombarded with neutrons, it turns into an intensely radioactive element, 320 times more powerful than radium. Any given quantity of neutrons would produce sixty times its weight in radioactive cobalt. If the bomb contains a ton of deuterium, 250 pounds would come out as neutrons. On the assumption that every neutron enters a cobalt atom, this would produce 7.5 tons of radioactive cobalt. That quantity would give out as much radioactivity as 2,400 tons of radium.

Now, this radioactive cobalt has a half-life of five years, meaning that it loses half of its radioactive power at every five-year period. So after a lapse of that period of time its radioactivity would be equal to 1,200 tons of radium, in ten years to 600 tons, and so on. If used as a bomb-casing it would be pulverized and converted into a gigantic radioactive cloud that would kill everything in the area it blankets. Nor would it be confined to a particular area, since the winds would take it thousands of miles, carrying death to distant places.

The radioactivity produced by the Bikini bombs was detected within one week in the United States. In that short time the westerly winds swept the radioactive air mass from Bikini, 4,150 miles away, to San Francisco. When it reached our shores, the activity was weak and completely harmless, but it was still detectable. That, by the way, was how we learned that the Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb.

But, in the words of Professor Teller, one of the Los Alamos men who made the preliminary studies on the hydrogen bomb, “if the activity liberated at Bikini were multiplied by a factor of a hundred thousand or a million, and if it were to be released off our Pacific Coast, the whole of the United States would be endangered.” He added that “if such a quantity of radioactivity should become available, an enemy could make life hard or even impossible for us without delivering a single bomb into our territory.”

One limitation to such an attack, Professor Teller points out, is the boomerang effect of these gases on the attacker himself. The radioactive gases would eventually drift over his own country, too. He adds, however, that since these gases have different rates of decay—some faster, some slower—the attacker is in a position to choose those radioactive products best suited to his attack. “With the proper choice he could ensure that his victim would be seriously damaged by them, and that they would have decayed by the time they reached his own country.”

“It is not even impossible to imagine,” in the words of Professor Teller, “that the effects of an atomic war fought with greatly perfected weapons and pushed by utmost determination will endanger the survival of man.... This specific possibility of destruction may help us realize more clearly the probable consequences of an atomic war for our civilization and the possible consequences for the whole human race.”

On this point Professor Szilard is much more specific. “Let us assume,” he said at a University of Chicago Round Table, “that we make a radioactive element which will live for five years and that we just let it go into the air. During the following years it will gradually settle out and cover the whole earth with dust. I have asked myself, ‘How many neutrons or how much heavy hydrogen do we have to detonate to kill everybody on earth by this particular method?’ I come up with about fifty tons of neutrons as being plenty to kill everybody, which means about 400 tons of heavy hydrogen” (deuterium).

Now, obviously Professor Szilard was stating the extreme case. He merely called attention to the scientific fact that man now has at his disposal, or soon will have, means that not only could wipe out all life on earth, but could also make the earth itself unfit for life for many generations to come, if not forever. Here we have indeed what is probably the greatest example of irony in man’s history. The very process in the sun that made life possible on earth, and is responsible for its being maintained here, can now be used by man to wipe out that very life and to ruin the earth for good.

It is inconceivable that any leaders of men today, or in the near future, would resort to such an extreme measure. But the fact remains that such a measure is possible. And it is by no means unthinkable that a Hitler, faced with certain defeat, would not choose to die in a great Götterdämmerung in which he would pull down the whole of humanity with him to destruction. And who can be bold enough to guarantee that another Hitler might not arise sometime, somewhere, possibly in a rejuvenated Germany making another bid for world domination or total annihilation?

It is more likely, of course, that an attacker, particularly if he is otherwise faced with certain defeat, might choose the less drastic method outlined by Professor Teller, selecting for his weapon a short-lived radioactive element that would have spent itself by the time it reached his shores. If he is the sole possessor of the hydrogen bomb, he may not even have to use it, a threat of its use being sufficient to end the war on terms to his liking. In the face of such a threat, as Professor Szilard pointed out, who would dare take the responsibility of refusing?

These are the stark, unvarnished facts about the “so-called hydrogen bomb.” They raise many questions to which the American people as a whole will have to find the answer. It is possible, and the odds here are more than even, that the very possession of the hydrogen bomb by both ourselves and Russia will make war unthinkable, since neither side could be the winner. This would be a near certainty if we had the answer to Russia’s Trojan Horse method of taking over nations by first taking over their governments, as was done in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkan countries. Suppose the Communists take over Italy, then Germany, by the same method. What would we do then? The answer is, of course, that if we wait until “then,” everything would be lost, no matter what we did. It therefore becomes obvious that our very existence may depend on what we do _here_ and _now_ to prevent such an eventuality.

Now that the hydrogen bomb has come out into the open after five years as a super-top secret, the authorities, and particularly the Atomic Energy Commission, may be called upon to answer some embarrassing questions. “Why,” we may ask, “was the work on the hydrogen bomb apparently dropped altogether during the past five years?” According to Professor Bethe, it would take about three years to develop it. This means that, had we continued working on it in 1945 and thereafter, we would have had it as far back as 1948. We have thus lost five precious years, our loss being Russia’s gain.

Some scientists and others contend that, because of our great harbor and industrial cities, the hydrogen bomb would be a greater threat to us than to the Soviet, because most Russian cities are much smaller than ours, while her industries are much more dispersed. There may be some truth in this. But on the other hand there are some great advantages on our side. With a strong Navy and good submarine-detecting devices we may have control of the seas and be able to prevent the delivery of the hydrogen bomb by ship or submarine. With a strong Air Force and radar system we could prevent the delivery of hydrogen bombs from the air.

By far the most important advantage the possession of the hydrogen bomb would give us against Russia is its possible use as a tactical weapon against huge land armies. Since they can devastate such large areas, one or two hydrogen bombs, depending on their size, could wipe out entire armies on the march, even before they succeeded in crossing the border of an intended victim. The H-bomb would thus counterbalance, if not completely nullify, the one great advantage Russia possesses—huge land armies capable of overrunning western Europe. The bomb might thus serve as the final deterrent to any temptation the Kremlin’s rulers may have to invade the Atlantic Pact countries.

Yet no matter how one looks at it, the advent of the H-bomb constitutes the greatest threat to the survival of the human race since the Black Death.

One is reminded of a dinner conversation in Paris in 1869, recorded in the _Journal_ of the Goncourt brothers. Some of the famous savants of the day were crystal-gazing into the scientific future a hundred years away. The great chemist Pierre Berthelot predicted that by 1969 “man would know of what the atom is constituted and would be able, at will, to moderate, extinguish, and light up the sun as if it were a gas lamp.” (This prophecy has almost come true.) Claude Bernard, the greatest physiologist of the day, saw a future in which “man would be so completely the master of organic law that he would create life [artificially] in competition with God.”

To which the Goncourt brothers added the postscript: “To all of this we raised no objection. But we have the feeling that when this time comes to science, God with His white beard will come down to earth, swinging a bunch of keys, and will say to humanity, the way they say at five o’clock at the salon: ‘Closing time, gentlemen!’”

II THE REAL SECRET OF THE HYDROGEN BOMB

Can the hydrogen bomb actually be made? If so, how soon? How much will it cost in money and vital materials? Above all, will it, if made, add enough to our security to make the effort worth while?

As was pointed out by Prof. Robert F. Bacher of the California Institute of Technology, one of the chief architects of the wartime atomic bomb and the first scientific member of the Atomic Energy Commission, “since the President has directed the AEC to continue with the development [‘of the so-called hydrogen, or super bomb’] we can assume that this development is regarded as both possible and feasible.” Many eminent physicists believe that it can be made, and the use by the President of the word “continue” suggests that this belief is based on more than theory. No less an authority than Albert Einstein has stated publicly that he regards the H-bomb as “a probably attainable goal.”

On the other hand, there are scientists of high eminence, such as Dr. Robert A. Millikan, our oldest living Nobel-Prize-winner in physics, who doubt whether the H-bomb can be made at all. And there are also those who express the view that, while it probably could be made, it would not offer advantages great enough, if any, to justify the cost in vital strategic materials necessary for our security.

Fortunately, facts mostly buried in technical literature make it possible for us to go behind the scientific curtain and look intimately at the reasons for these differences in opinion. More important still, these facts not only provide us with a clearer picture of the nature of the problem but also enable us to make some reasonable deductions or speculations. The scientists directly involved do not feel free to discuss these matters openly, not because they would be violating security, but because of the jittery atmosphere that acts as a damper on open discussion even of subjects known to be non-secret.

We already know that the so-called hydrogen bomb, if it is to be made at all, cannot be made of the abundant common hydrogen of atomic mass one, and that there are only two possible materials that could be used for such a purpose: deuterium, a hydrogen twin twice the weight of common hydrogen, which constitutes two hundredths of one per cent of the hydrogen in all waters; and a man-made variety of hydrogen, three times the weight of the lightest variety, known as tritium. We also know that to explode either deuterium or tritium (also known, respectively, as heavy and superheavy hydrogen) a temperature measured in millions of degrees is required. This is attainable on earth only in the explosion of an A-bomb, and therefore the A-bomb would have to serve as the fuse to set off an explosion of deuterium, tritium, or a mixture of the two.

These facts, fundamental as they are, merely give us a general idea of the conditions required to make the H-bomb. All concerned, including Dr. Millikan, fully accept the validity of these facts. But there is one other factor at the very heart of the problem—the extremely short time at our disposal in which to kindle the hydrogen bomb with the A-bomb match. According to statements attributed to him in the press, Dr. Millikan believes that the time is too short; in other words, he seems to be convinced that the A-bomb match will be blown out before we have time to light the fire. Those of opposite view believe that methods can be devised for “shielding the match against the wind” for just long enough to light the fire. As we shall presently see, it is these methods for shielding the match that lead some to doubt whether the game would be worth the candle, or the match, if you will. These honest doubts are based on the possibility that, even if successful, the shielding might exact too high a price in terms of vital materials, particularly the stuff out of which A-bombs are made—plutonium. According to this view, we may at best be getting but a very small return for our investment in materials vitally important in war as well as in peace. Even though the price in dollars were to be brought down to a negligible amount.

A closer look at the details of the problem may enable us to penetrate the thick fog that now envelops the subject. We may begin with a quotation from Dr. Bacher, who outlined the principle involved with remarkable clarity. “The real problem in developing and constructing a hydrogen bomb,” he said in a notable address before the Los Angeles Town Hall,