Sleepwalking With the Bomb Page 3

  As this book went to press the furies were assembling in the Mid-east. It appears increasingly likely that Iran’s relentless progress towards nuclear weapon capability cannot be arrested by sanctions alone, and thus that Israel, perceiving a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, will take preventive military action. Israel’s determination to act has been reinforced by the Obama administration’s strong public opposition to launching a strike and by a notably unsympathetic international community. A nuclear-armed Iran, declared “unacceptable” by two American presidents, does suggest how ineffective, indeed dangerous, nuclear nonproliferation efforts tend to be.

  Finally, there is a fourth obstacle to abolitionism: it creates the dangerous situation in which the public’s gut sentiment favoring abolition can trump practical obstacles to verification and enforcement, and thus could push Western nations to disarm first. Were a nuke to detonate anywhere on the planet, momentum for unilateral disarmament could snowball. Many advocates fan such emotional flames. But embarking on a course of unilateral disarmament before devising the requisite diplomatic and military arrangements needed to effectively police a nuclear-zero world—a condition nowhere near to being achieved—would begin the slide down the slippery political slope. There is no definitive correct number of nuclear weapons that the United States needs at any given time; this would be true even if every other nation’s number were perfectly known. Thus there is no definitive stopping point for disarmament, and advocates can keep pressing Western democracies to cut their arsenals—pressures not felt by the world’s most dangerous nuclear-armed regimes.

  The president has shown an alarming willingness to trade a modest missile defense program—one that would hedge against clandestine nuclear breakout in event of countries violating nuclear-zero pledges—for the instantly revocable promises of an adversary. Ronald Reagan conditioned zeroing out nuclear missiles on keeping missile defense development, in order to erect a shield as a hedge against such cheating. But President Obama is manifestly eager to bargain away missile defense leverage—shown by the notorious “open mic” verbal exchange with a top Russian leader at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul.1 Leaving America defenseless even against small nuclear-armed missile attacks invites nuclear blackmail during a crisis.

  The president did announce in Prague two laudable initiatives: to curb black market smuggling of nuclear material and to secure all loose nuclear material within four years (by the end of 2013). But his optimism about negotiations follows a utopian model of resolving differences between nations, premised upon a presumed commonality of interest in mutual survival:

  When nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens. When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends.

  Put simply, the president mistakenly believes that all nations share a common interest in mutual survival. He thus rejects the idea of irreconcilable conflict. But such conflicts manifestly exist. In fact, what irreconcilably opposed governments share is a parallel desire to survive; neither has any interest in a mortal enemy’s surviving. Rather, each desires—and must aim for—the enemy’s destruction.

  The United States has no common interest in survival with al-Qaeda. The United States desires to survive; so does al-Qaeda. But parallel desires are not common interests. The United States has no interest in Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood surviving. It has no interest in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s militant Islamist republic surviving. It has no interest in the North Korean regime surviving. Nor would it have an interest in militant Islamists gaining control over Pakistan’s government, and thus its nuclear arsenal. Conversely, nothing would more greatly benefit militant Islamists of any stripe than the destruction of the United States. The United States, along with its allies, is the main obstacle to the global triumph of militant Islam.

  In the run-up to World War II, the Western democracies had mutual interests in one another’s survival, but hardly any security interest in the survival of Hitler’s Nazi regime or of the militarist regime in Japan. The United States formed an alliance of convenience with Soviet Russia, but U.S. interests ceased coinciding with Russia’s at war’s end, and only when in 1991 the former Soviet Union collapsed could the United States win the Cold War. While the United States and the Soviets both sought to survive, the Soviet project would have benefited most of all from the U.S.’s demise.

  Just as America had no common interest with past enemies in mutual survival, it would be a deadly mistake to think that it shares such an interest today, given growing nuclear threats from hostile states, some of whose leaders embrace a fanatical religious ideology that welcomes Armageddon. Such powers may not act on ideological imperatives, but we cannot assume they will decline to do so.

  Regrettably, many of Barack Obama’s policies make a war more likely. Rushing towards abolition of nuclear weapons will, on the fair historical evidence, not induce dangerous nuclear states to follow the U.S. lead. Instead, our adversaries will see greater benefit in increasing their own arsenals if America’s is pared to a few hundred.

  We make comfortable assumptions about how our adversaries will act at our potentially grave peril.

  __________________

  1. The text of the exchange appears in chapter 4.

  2.

  THE NUCLEAR AGE: FROM “TRINITY” TO TEHRAN

  Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

  PRIME MINISTER WINSTON CHURCHILL, HOUSE OF COMMONS, MARCH 1, 1955

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1924, READERS OF THE BRITISH LITERARY MAGAZINE Nash’s Pall Mall opened its pages to a chilling article by Winston Churchill. In “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Churchill—a statesman then out of political office—warned what was incubating in the embers of the recent world war. Beyond the horrors of the war he had observed on the Western Front, he wrote of the immense escalation the summer of 1919 would have seen had there been no armistice. With incredible prescience, Churchill intuited the direction towards which modern war technology was heading:

  Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?

  … Such, then, is the peril with which mankind menaces itself. Means of destruction incalculable in their effects, wholesale and frightful in their character, and unrelated to any form of human merit: the march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities; and the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world, fanned by continual provocation and unceasing fear and fed by the deepest sense of national wrong or national danger!

  Modern nuclear history began with discoveries by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century physicists looking into certain strange elements and mapping out the internal structure of the atom. By the time the first physicist grasped the potential of unlocking the energy contained there, the world was already on the path to a second global conflict. But the statesman who saw the future came first.

  Churchill’s foreboding 1924 prophecy encompassed the three components of the greatest threat humankind has faced since 1945: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and fanatics in possession of both. His remarks came when guided missiles were a pipe dream, rocketry consisted of sending tiny projectiles aloft for a few seconds or minutes to reach at most a few miles’ altitude, and scientists had yet to even discover the neutron particle, which made splittin
g the nucleus of an atom feasible. The element plutonium was still unknown, let alone the process of thermonuclear fusion that would ultimately allow the miniaturization of high-yield weapons. Though visionaries like the sci-fi writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had imaginatively seen ahead before Churchill spoke, among statesmen of his time Churchill’s prediction was uniquely farsighted.

  The First Bomb: Earliest Research through the Trinity Test

  ON A drizzly London day in September 1933, only months after his Hitler-induced exile from Germany, Leo Szilard had the crucial eureka moment. The great Hungarian grasped before any of his fellow physicists that a nuclear chain reaction would release enormous energy, sufficient to destroy a city. The next step came just before Christmas 1938, when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman stumbled upon an unexpected effect. The physicist member of their group, Lise Meitner, had just fled to Sweden. From there, she and her nephew, fellow refugee Otto Robert Frisch, interpreted what had happened—the central nucleus of a uranium atom was apparently unstable. The absorption of an extra neutron was enough to split it, resulting in two smaller atoms and an immense release of energy—a process Frisch dubbed “nuclear fission.”

  Tipped off by Meitner, Szilard saw that here could be the beginning of the chain reaction he had foreseen. He persuaded Albert Einstein to write his famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. “[T]he element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” Einstein wrote FDR, calling for “watchfulness, and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.” He explained:

  It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.… A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

  Szilard chose Einstein to deliver the message, to lend it the weight of his unmatched prestige. He had calculated well. On October 19 FDR convened an advisory panel to look into the matter, and by 1942 the Manhattan Project (so named to conceal its true purpose) was under way. Yet according to James B. Conant, a top FDR science adviser, FDR had “only fleeting interest in the atom,” and “the program never got very far past the threshold of his consciousness.”

  The discoveries made by Manhattan Project scientists first led to two types of atomic bombs (A-bombs), based upon uranium and plutonium, each a thousand times more powerful than bombs with conventional explosives. These atomic bombs, in turn, laid the foundation for the later development of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a thousand times more powerful than the A-bombs dropped on Japan.

  Forty-two months after the founding of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb was a reality. A flood of European scientists, refugees from Hitler, made this astonishing success possible. To Los Alamos flocked geniuses: two more Hungarians, the mathematics prodigy John von Neumann and the “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller; the great Danish founder of the atomic theory, Niels Bohr; the young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam; the brilliant German Hans Bethe, who explained how fusion energy powers the stars; and the Italian Enrico Fermi, considered by his peers the most deeply knowledgeable of them all. They joined Americans like J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose technical brilliance was complemented by his organizational ability and knack for picking the right people for each complex task; young physicist Glenn Seaborg, who created the devilish artificial element plutonium in 1941; and a contingent from Britain that included James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron particle essential for nuclear fission.

  Fear that Adolf Hitler would get the atom bomb first drove the Manhattan Project’s crash program. Szilard feared that by Christmas 1943 or New Year’s Day 1944, the Nazis would A-bomb Chicago. These scientists knew the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of Germany’s Napoleonic leader: “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast.” The Allies were certain that Hitler would not hesitate to use the bomb. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister, noted in his diary in spring 1942:

  I received a report about the latest development in German science. Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to the point where… tremendous destruction, it is claimed, can be wrought with a minimum of effort… It is essential that we be ahead of everybody.

  The Nazis were, in fact, not even close to developing the bomb, but the Allies understandably erred on the side of assuming the worst case, partly out of supreme respect for legendary German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Had they passed up development, and Hitler managed somehow to build the bomb, utter annihilation surely would have befallen the great democracies. That they were not close was proven by Heisenberg’s reaction upon being told about the Hiroshima bombing. He guessed that the bomb had not been a uranium weapon, but instead a superpowerful chemical explosive bomb.

  After the war, Einstein regretted having helped the Allies by persuading FDR to pursue A-bomb research. He lamented to his secretary: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!”

  The Nazis did, however, jump into a huge lead in another department during the war. The great German rocketeer Wernher von Braun led development of “vengeance weapons”—the German “V” series of rockets. V-1s—jet-powered low-flying subsonic missiles that usually can be steered in flight (what today we call cruise missiles, albeit the pioneering V-1 was not maneuverable)—began dropping on London in 1944. Later that year, the V-2, the world’s first true military ballistic missile, hit London. (A ballistic missile—from “ballista,” a medieval catapult of large stones—is set on its course by a few minutes of powered flight, then coasts until gravity pulls it back to earth.) Unlike the V-1, which flew at constant speed and altitude until its final plunge, and thus could be easily shot down by ground fire or by intercepting aircraft, the V-2 attained a velocity of nearly one mile per second and thus fell on its targets with no warning, arriving before the sound of its approach. Had Hitler’s warheads carried atom bombs of the kind dropped on Japan in August 1945, the heart of London could have been obliterated with but a few such hits.2

  The nuclear age formally began on the morning of July 16, 1945, when in the New Mexico desert the Trinity device was detonated. Its blinding brightness led Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, to famously recall a verse from the Indian epic, the Bhagavad-Gita (“The Song of God”):

  If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. For I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.

  Oppenheimer’s awe-induced invocation of ancient sacred poetry was spot-on: the glare from the blast would have been visible from the planet Jupiter, some one-half billion miles away from Earth.

  The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later changed warfare and global politics forever. The age that began two-thirds of a century ago has gone through several stages—from the all-out arms race of 1945 to 1967, to the arms control of the seventies and eighties, and finally to the era of rogue nuclear weapons proliferation we entered in the early nineties.

  Nuclear History, 1945–Present

  WITH A combination of wartime espionage at Los Alamos and its own scientists at Sarov (the monastery town turned closed city for the Russian bomb project), the Soviet Union lagged only four years behind the U.S. in nuclear bomb building.

  The end of the war found the former allies now armed with nuclear weapons, facing off in a struggle lasting nearly 50 years, with Europe divided by Soviet aggression. Though labeled “cold,” the war was very hot in several major regional proxy conflicts and numerous smaller fronts around the globe. Nuclear arsenals kept the two superpowers not only from a nuclear conflict, but from a major direct conventional-force conflict as well.<
br />
  The race to develop the “Super”—the H-bomb—began right after Russia exploded its first A-bomb. In 1952, the Americans vaporized an atoll in the South Pacific with a massive hydrogen device, one far too large to qualify as a true bomb. The Soviet H-bomb was tested in August 1953 on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The vast power of these hydrogen bombs made destruction not merely of cities, but of civilization itself, a plausible prospect.

  In December 1953 President Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace program, when only three powers—the U.S., Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—had gone nuclear. His idea was to provide a compelling reason for countries not to pursue nuclear energy for military purposes. In exchange for such forbearance they were to be guaranteed help in developing peaceful atomic energy uses. Under the aegis of Atoms for Peace, dozens of nations received economic and technical aid to develop commercial nuclear technology. Coupled with America’s precipitous 1946 disclosure of Manhattan Project technology, knowledge pertaining to nuclear weapons began spreading around the globe. As there is no bright line between commercial research and military use (see the “Interlude” at the end of chapter 7), out popped the proliferation genie.

  The year 1957 brought new urgency to the technology arms race with two dramatic Soviet triumphs. That August, the Soviet Union tested the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a ballistic missile with a range further than 5,500 kilometers—around 3,500 miles, roughly the distance from Nova Scotia to Portugal. Such a device was hardly inevitable: FDR’s wartime science adviser, Dr. Vannevar Bush, told Congress in December 1945 that such a machine could never work. But Stalin wanted it; in 1947 he was telling senior deputies that an ICBM “could be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Two months after the Soviets tested their ICBM, they had their second triumph: they launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik (“traveler”).