Making the Bomb — Excerpts
A big chunk of my month of June was spent reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986) an historically precise and yet dramatic telling of the story of the people and events that came together to unlease the power of nuclear fission at the end of World War II. Given my education as a physicist, the scientists protrayed on these pages have iconic significance, and I found it thrilling to see them come so alive through Rhodes' compelling writing.
This is the rare sort of book that changes my outlook on the world, and my understanding and approach to interpreting events. I knew this was happening through at least two indicators: 1) the excitement I felt while reading, the compulsion to read faster and turn pages faster; and 2) the number of passages I marked to save in some way as notes to myself in the future. Little slips of paper were sticking out out all over the book by the time I finished; I know I'm not unique because when I borrowed the book from a friend, he had already marked it with dozens of yellow Post-Its.
I've finally finished typing in all the passages I had made note of. I still don't know what to do with them. Each passage stimulates enough ideas for several essays, but I know that if I waited to write each one it would be months or years before I got around to it and had lost the notes. Regardless, these were the gems I wanted to save as souvenirs. For relative safe keeping, I put them here. If all goes according to plan, some will turn into essays as time passes. With that in mind, read through them or pick and choose as you like.
(Everything below this line is quoted from the book; all blockquoting is original to the book.)
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The best way to do the job, Polanyi argues, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. "Let them work on putting the puzzle together in the sight of the others, so that every time a piece is fitted in by one [worker], all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence." That way, even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group's achievement. The group works independently together; the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way. [p.34]
* * *
An important 1903 paper written [by Rutherford] with Soddy, "Radioactive Change", offered the first informed calculations of the amount of energy released by radioactive decay:
It may therefore be stated that the total energy of radiation during the disintegration of one gram of radium cannot be less than 108 [i.e., 100,000,000] gram-calories, and may be between 109 and 1010 gram-calories…. The union of hydrogen and oxygen liberates approximately 4 x 103 [i.e., 4,000] gram-calories per gram of water produced, and this reaction sets free more energy for a given weight than any other chemical change known. The energy of radioactive change must therefore be as least twenty-thousand tmes, and may be a million times, as great as the energy of any molecular [i.e., chemical] change. [p. 43]
* * *
An eyewitness to the [1908 Nobel Prize] ceremonies [at which Rutherford was given his prize in chemistry, not physics] said Rutherford looked ridiculously young — he was thirty-seven — and made the speech of the evening. He announced his recent confirmation, only briefly reported the month before, that the alpha particle was in fact helium. The confirming experiment was typically elegant. Rutherford had a glassblower make him a tube with extremely thin walls. He evacuated the tube and filled it with radon gas, a fertile source of alpha particles. The tube was gastight, but its thin walls allowed alpha particles to escape. Rutherford surrounded the radon tube with another glass tube, pumped out the air between the two tubes and sealed off the space. "After some days," he told his Stockholm audience triumphantly, "a bright spectrum of helium was observed in the outer vessel." Rutherford's experiments still stun with their simplicity. [p. 45]
* * *
It was also entirely in character, when Fermi came to Copenhagen [in the summer of 1938], that Bohr should lead him aside, take hold of his waistcoat button and whisper the message that his name had been mentioned for the Nobel Prize, a secret traditionally never foretold. Did Fermi wish his name withdrawn temporarily, given the political situation in Italy and the monetary restrictions, or would he like the selection process to go forward? Which was the same as telling Fermi he could have the Prize that year, 1938, if he wanted it and was welcome to use it to escape a homaland that threatened now despite the distinction he brought it to to tear his wife from citizenship. [pp. 243–244]
Laura Fermi woke to the telephone early on the morning of November 10 [1938]. A call would be placed from Stockholm, the operator advised her. Professor Fermi could expect it that evening at six.
[…]
Instantly awake to his wife's message, Fermi estimated the probability at 90 percent that the call would announce his Nobel Prize. As always he had planned conservatively, not counting on the award. The Fermis had prepared to leave for the United Sates from Italy shortly after the first of the year. Ostensibly Fermi was to lecture at Columbia for seven months and then return. For stays of longer than six months the United States required immigrant rather than tourist visas, and because Fermi was an academic he and his family could be granted such visas outside the Italian quota list. The ruse of a lecture series was devised to evade a drastic penalty: citizens leaving Italy permanently could take only the equivalent of fifty dollars with them out of the country. But the plan required circumspection. The Fermis could not sell their household goods or entirely empty their savings account without riskihng discovery. So the money from the Nobel Prize would be a godsend.
[…]
In the meantime they invested surreptitiously in what Fermi called "the refugee's trousseau." Laura's new coat was beaver and they distracted themselves on the day of the Stockholm call shopping for expensive watches. Diamonds, which had to be registered, they chose not to risk.
[Near six o'clock the phone rang, but it was friends with news that Italy has just that day announced harsh racial laws aimed at Jews. Fermi's wife was Jewish.] The passports of Jews had already been marked. Fermi had contrived to keep his wife's passport clear.
[…]
Fermi took the Stockholm call. The Nobel Prize, undivided, would be awarded for "your discovery of new radioactive substances belonging to the entire race of elements and for the discovery you made in the course of this work of the selective power of slow neutrons." In security the Fermis could leave the madness behind. [pp. 248–250]
* * *
When Tuve had first proposed the Van de Graaff [to be built at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism laboratory, in an early effort to observe the fission products resulting from bombarding Uranium with neutrons] to the zoning board of the prosperous Chevy Chase neighborhood [in Maryland, but still suburban DC] the board turned him down. Smashing atoms smacked of industrial process and the neighborhood had its property values to consider. Tuve noted the popularity of the Naval Observatory, across Connecticut Avenue a few miles west, and rechistened his project the Atomic Physics Observatory, which it was. As the APO it won approval. [p.272]
* * *
More crucial for Bohr was the issue of secrecy. He had worked for decades to shape physics into an international community, a model within its limited franchise of what a peaceful, politically united world might be. Openness was its fragile, essential charter, an operational necessity, as freedom of speech is an operational necessity to a democracy. Complete openness enforced absolute honesty: the scientist reported all his results, favorable and unfavorable, where all could read them, making possible the ongoing correction of error. Secrecy would revoke that charter and subordinate science as a political system — Polanyi's "republic" — to the anarchic competition of the nation-states." [p. 294]
* * *
From the New York Times of 30 April 1939 [quoted on p. 297]:
Tempers and temperatures increased visibly today among members of the American Physical Society as they closed their Spring meetings with arguments over the probability of some scientists blowing up a sizeable portion of the earth with a tiny bit of uranium, the element which produces radium.
Dr. Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, a colleague of Dr. Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., declared that bombardment of a small amount of the pure Isotope U235 with slow neutron particles of atoms would start a "chain reaction" or atomic explosion sufficiently great to blow up a laboratory and the surrounding country for many miles.
Many physicists declared, however, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate Isotope 235 from the more abundant Isotope 238. The Isotope 235 is only 1 per cent of the uranium element.
Dr. L. Onsager of Yale University described, however, a new apparatus in which, according to his calculations, the isotopes of elements can be separated in gaseous form in tubes which are cooled on one side and heated to high temperatures on the other.
Other physicists argued that such a process would be almost prohibitively expensive and that the yield of Isotope 235 would be infinitesimally small. Nevertheless, they pointed out that, if Dr. Onsager's process of separations should work, the creation of a nuclear explosion which would wreck as large an area as New York City would be comparatively easy. A single neutron particle, striking the nucleus of a uranium atom, they declared, would be sufficient to set off a chain reaction of millions of other atoms.
* * *
In a 1978 memoir [Carl Friedrich] von Weizsäcker [working in Germany] remembers … realizing in discussions with a friend [in 1938] "that this discovery [of Uranium fission] could not fail to radically change the political structure of the world":
To a person finding himself at the beginning of an era, its simple fundamental structures may become visible like a distant landscape in the flash of a single stroke of lightning. But the path toward them in the dark is long and confusing. At that time [i.e., 1939] we were faced with a very simple logic. Wars waged with atom bombs as regularly recurring events, that is to say, nuclear wars as institutions, do not seem reconcilable with the survival of the participating nations. But the atom bomb exists. It exists in the minds of some men. According to the historically known logic of armaments and power systems, it will soon make its physical appearance. If that is so, then the participating nations and ultimately mankind itself can only survive if war as an institution is abolished. [quoted on p. 312]
* * *
[At a meeting on 21 October 1939 of Szilard, Teller, & Wigner with military representatives] Adamson [the Army representative] had anticipated just such a raid on the public treasure [when Szilard asked for only $6,000]. "At this point," says Szilard, "the representative of the Army started a rather longish tirade":
He told us that it was naive to believe that we could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon. He said that if a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether the weapon is any good or not. Then he explained rather laboriously that it is in the end not weapons which win the wars, but the morale of the troops. He went on in this vein for a long time until suddenly Wigner, the most polite of us, interrupted him. [Wigner] said in his high-pitched voice that it was very intereting for him to hear this. He always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But he was very interested to hear that he was wrong; it's not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhpas one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget could be cut.
"All right, all right," Adamson snapped, "you'll get your money." [pp. 316–317]
* * *
[James Bryant] Conant emerged from the Great War with the rank of major for his work in poison-gas research at Edgewood. In his autobiography, written late in life, he justified his participation:
I did not see in 1917, and do not see in 1968, why tearing a man's guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin. All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position. Once that is abandoned, as it is when a nation becomes a belligerent, one can talk sensibly only in terms of the violation of agreements about the way war is conducted, or the consequences of a certain tactic or weapon. [quoted on p. 358]
* * *
[Fermi, talking about the building of the first Uranium test pile at Columbia in 1941:] "We were reasonably strong, but I mean we were, after all, thinkers. So Dean Pegram again looked around and said that seems to be a job a little bit beyond your feeble strength, but there is a football squad at Columbia that contains a dozen or so of very husky boys who take jobs by the hour just to carry them through college. Why don't you hire them?
"And it was a marvelous idea; it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of these husky boys, canning uranium — just shoving it in — handling packs of 50 or 100 pounds with the same ease as another person would have handled three or four pounds." [quoted on pp. 396–397.]
* * *
"We did not speak the same language," Bohr said afterward [his meeting with Churchill in 1944]. His son found him "somewhat downcast." He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: "It was terrible that no one over there" — England and America both [Bohr was Danish] — "had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared." And further, "It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can…. There never was any secret about nuclear energy." [p. 530]
* * *
Openness [about developments in nuclear physics and fission research] would accomplish more than forestalling an arms race. As it did in science, it would reveal error and expose abuse. Men performed in secrecy, behind closed doors and guarded borders and silenced printing presses, what they were ashamed or afraid to reveal to the world. Bohr talked to George Marshall after the war, when the Chief of Staff had advanced to Secretary of State. "What it would mean," he told him, "if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison, need hardly be enlarged upon." The great and deep difficulty that contained within itself its own solution was not, finally, the bomb. It was the inequality of men and nations. The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocauset, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death:
Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country. Likewise, real co-operation between nations on problems of common concern presupposes free access to all information of importance for their relations. Any argument for upholding barriers of information and intercourse, based on concern for national ideals or interests, must be weighted against the beneficial effects of common enlightenment and the relieved tension resulting from such openness.
That statement, from an open leter Bohr wrote to the United Nations in 1950, is preceded by another, a vision of a world evolved to the relative harmony of the nations of Scandinavia that once confronted each other and the rest of Eruope as aggressively and menacingly as the Soviet Union and the United Sates had come by 1950 to do. [p. 535]
* * *
The official Los Alamos history measures the significance of Frisch's Dragon-tickling [experiment in early 1945]: "These experiments gave direct evidence of an explosive chain reaction. They gave an energy production of up to twenty million watts, with a temperature rise in the hydride up to 2oC per millisecond. The strongest burst obtained produced 1015 neutrons. The dragon is of historical importance. It was the first controlled nuclear reaction which was supercritical with prompt neutons alone." [p. 612]
* * *
But the nation-state was not the only new political system invented in early modern times. Through the two centuries of the nation-state's evolution the republic of science had been evolving in parallel. Founded on openness, international in scope, science survived in the nation-state's midst by limiting its sovereignty to a part of the world which interested the larger system hardly at all: observable natural phenomena. Within that limited compass it proved spectacularly successful, lighting up the darkness, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes. And finally with the release of nuclear energy its success brought it into direct confrontation with the political system within which it operated. In 1945 science became the first living organic structure strong enough to challenge the nation-state itself.
The conflict between science and the nation-state that has continued and enlarged since 1945 is different from traditional forms of political conflict. Bohr visited the statesmen of his day to explain it but chose to be diplomatic rather than blunt. He explained that with the coming of nuclear weapons the world would arrive at an entirely new situation that could not be resolved by war. The situation might be resolved by statesmen sitting down together and negotiating for mutual security. If they did so, the inevitable outcome of such negotiations, given the understandable suspicion on every side, must be an open world. To Winston Chruchill and apparently also to Franklin Roosevelt Bohr's scenario appeared dangerously naïve. In his role as spokesman for the republic of science Bohr certainly carried news of danger, but he was never naïve. He was warning the statesmen that science was about to hand them control over a force of nature that would destroy their political system. Considering the slaughter that political system had perpetrated upon the twnentieth century, he was polite enough not to add, the mechanism of its dismantling had turned up none too soon. [pp. 782–783]
* * *
Science is sometimes blamed for the nuclear dilemma. Such blame confuses the messenger with the message. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann did not invent nuclear fission; they discovered it. It was there all along waiting for us, the turn of the screw. If the bomb seems brutal and scientists criminal for assisting at its birth, consider: would anything less absolute have convinced institutions capable of perpetrating the First and Second World Wars, of destroying wiht hardware and callous privation 100 million human beings, to cease and desist? Nor was escalation inevitable. To the contrary, it resulted from a series of deliberate choices the superpowers made in pursuit of national intersts. [p. 784]