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I Am Not Doctor Strangelove
Amoeba Protozoa writes "Here is an amusing and well written interview with Edward Teller, atomic science history's own real-life Dr. Strangelove." It's in Scientific American. And at one point, Teller threatens to throw the interviewer out of his office if he mentions Dr. Strangelove "three more times."
How crazy was Project Chariot? Consider the fact that Bikini Atoll is now one of the best sites for skin diving and sport fishing on the planet. (Read that as "lots of shipwrecks in pristine condition" and a nearly-undisturbed environment for the past 40 years.) The most serious radiological contaminant on Bikini is Cs-137, and the main reason it's a problem is because the local vegetation picks it up in place of potassium. It's a land problem, not a sea problem. Since a putative Alaskan harbor isn't a likely site for crop-growing, and since it would have been excavated with high-yielding thermonuclear devices designed to maximize explosive yield and minimize heavy radionuclide production, the residual radiation levels around the site would have dropped to habitable levels relatively quickly. (Of course, whether it would have cooled off in time to be economically viable compared to conventional construction, or even whether or not a harbor would have benefited the Alaskan economy is a question for economists, not physicists :)
IMHO the best use for nuclear explosions would have been Project Orion; a nuclear pulse engine. Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear.
Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.
Back to nukes. Anyone interested in the history of atomic weaponry should consider a visit to the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico. The timing is great - the first weekend of October also marks the date on which White Sands Missile Range opens up the Trinity Site to the general public, allowing tours of the site of the first fission explosion.
Finally - whatever your opinions on the horror of the bomb's use - the physics behind it was still beautiful. Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design is highly encouraged to read Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ - a 14-part document also available at the FAS High Energy Weapons archive.
The H-bomb, however, is an altogether different issue. It was developped after WW2 was won. It uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. The H-bomb never needed to exist other than a show of paranoia and power during the Cold War.
There's a large margin between Openheimer and Teller. Openheimer opposed the H-bomb's development, and Teller denounced him as a Communist. This goes to show what kind of man Teller is.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Teller is a brilliant and insightful person. But his insistence that scientists should not care about the consequences of their work is not a currently popular view. Personally I think he's half right -- you can't do science and worry whether you should know what you might find out. Too often science is serendipitous anyway, even if you tried not to, you could still discover the next horror weapon.
But scientists have a very real obligation to help politicians wisely evaluate the consequences of scientific and technological breakthroughs. You can't make the H-bomb go away, but you can help control its use and production intelligently.
When I hear of plans of h-bombing a new harbor into Alaska, to "mainline" it's economy, I have to think Teller is speaking as an expert in fields he knows next to nothing about. Bad advocacy -- creates two sorts of idiot -- those who are frightened of any use of nuclear energy, and those who really think it's a good idea to H-Bomb Alaska.
Once we get into space, nuclear energy is likely to become much more useful. Without the high concentrations of people around reactors, risks are far less in comparison to benefits. Easy disposal of waste in the Sun makes it more attractive yet. Even bombs may well be truly useful tools for excavating or moving asteroids.
Teller is nothing new in science. Someone who has truly contributed a lot to a difficult field, but whose opinions outside his field are somewhat inflammatory, if not arrogant. His work will be greatly appreciated next century, but his abrasive personality has cost him acceptance in his own lifetime.
"We probably have bombs now that have such diminised radioactive effects that you couldn't tell if it was nuclear or conventional the next day."
I doubt this very much.
Nuclear excavating may actually have been a good idea. However, I have never read any numerical reports of how much fallout there would be from the cleanest H-bomb. If it is really low enough that humans could live on the new shore line immediatly afterwards with only modestly higher background radiation, then the only thing stopping us is fear of misuse. (Note that i am defining modestly higher as an increase that could be found by moving to an area with natural sources of increased background radiation.)
How odd. This man seems more concerned about the issues he championed than himself. He seemed determined not to promote himself. That's a very rare quality in today's world, and it shows through vividly in this interview.
--
Notice NONE of his ideas for peacetime use of the hydrogen bomb were remotely useful.
The Soviets built a hydrogen bomb only because they knew the US was doing the same. While it's possible that building up a vast arsenal to wipe out all life may indeed have been the reason for the USSR's collapse, "vindicating" Teller's observation that we would all be speaking Russian and he would be in a concentration camp, it still seems that there could have been a more effective way to win the cold war then build up a vast arsenal capable of wiping us all out many times over.
And the threat isn't over yet.
Personally, I got the impression Teller was suffering in part from cognitive dissonance in an attempt to justify that his life wasn't completely wasted.
"The bomb WAS good."
"I thought of it, not Ulam."
"Alaska would be much improved if we blew up half a dozen hydrogen bombs just off shore."
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The article seems to make him sound like a crackpot obsessed with the power of the nuclear weapons he worked with, trying to use them for everything from geographical engineering to defense. The project chariot thing really disturbed me, though. If the account at the link above is true, then I worry that maybe he is a crazy scientist.
On the other hand, maybe this was his way of coping with a truly awful weapon that he had a hand in creating. Finding a successful peaceful use might make him feel better.
Sujal
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
There have been many plans for the use of atomic energy that seem unrealistic or needlessly dangerous today.
The man is 92 years old, in his heyday the Bomb was considered a great way to convert a small amount of matter into a large amount of energy, and it does that pretty well.
Any endeavor requiring large amounts of energy could possibly be converted to nuclear power. So he wanted to use bombs for excavating a bay, it's not all that crazy considering the time and place in which it was suggested (1958).
This man saved the free world, and saying "someone else would have done it sooner or later" is quite probably true -- but it may well have been a russian or german, and we'd all be dead, or at least never born. If you don't believe that, your school tought you some shitty history, go find some WW2 vets and ask them about it before they die.
The next 50 years should be pretty exciting. China has already sated publicly that they are going to take what we have, so let's hope our genetics research accelerates faster than theirs.
There may be a genetic war on the horizon, and if one side has to win while the other loses, it might as well be the West than wins, rather than the commies.
History repeating itself? nah....
- When Oppenheimer opposed the "Super" on the grounds that it was an unnecessary weapon of genocide, Teller skewered him. This was a very organized and deliberate maligning of another scientist only because he held an opposing opinion. Teller's words were used to undermine Oppenheimer's veracity in front of the AEC. In an era dominated by HUAC and Senator McCarthy, and in spite of all that Oppie had accomplished for the country, that was enough to destroy a very important person's life, career, etc. The impact of these events is incalculable.
- Teller's version of the Super probably would not have worked--it was a likely dud. So say the other physicists surrounding the project, including Hans Bethe.
- Teller wanted control of the Super project at Los Alamos, but nobody wanted to work with him. Norris Bradbury, the lab's director, had a choice. It was either Teller or two-thirds of his division leaders. Teller had to go. He refused to work under anybody and resigned in a huff in Sept., 1951 when Norris appointed Marshall Holloway to direct the project. This was right when the project got going. Teller wasn't even directly involved in development of the Super from that point on.
- In March, 1951, Ulam saved Teller's design with his staged implosion design. In spite of these facts, Teller continues to take sole credit. How many people have heard of Stanislaw Ulam?
- The Russians had a more advanced A-bomb on the drawing boards when they exploded their first A-bomb, a copy of the Nagasaki device. If spies hadn't turned over the design to the Russians they would have soon had an A-bomb anyway. They were working on the Super soon after their first atomic test in 1949.
Teller is almost totally driven by his hatred of the Russians. This is a hideous concept on which to base one's existence. In my opinion, Edward Teller deserves his reputation as the much maligned enfant terrible of science. Dr. Stranglove, indeed.References:
Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. 1995. Simon and Schuster.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 1986. Simon and Schuster. Pulitzer Prize winner. A great book.
Goodchild, Peter. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds. 1985. Fromm International Publishing Corp.
> We already knew what was possible before it was built.
So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM :-)
Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?
Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?
Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.
A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 and Page 2) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.
*grin* Just poking fun..
There's no such thing as a spiral orbit; barring perturbations from third bodies, all orbits follow conic sections (ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas) around the center of mass of the system. To send something into the sun, you need to put it into an elliptical orbit whose perihelion will be inside the sun's radius... which basically means killing most of it's initial velocity.
If you figure you're already in orbit around a planet, you can probably get a free couple miles per second by boosting on the right half of your orbit, and maybe you can do a gravity assist or two... but most of the 25 miles per second delta V you'd need to send something into the sun would have to come from your own engines.
But who wants to send nuclear waste into the sun anyway? If you've got cheap spaceflight, pick a spot on the moon, dump or bury it all there, and forget about it. It won't hurt anybody, and it'll be useful someday.
Of course Teller wasn't Dr. Strangelove. Strangelove was a parody of a combination of Werner von Braun (the ex-Nazi missile designer) and John von Neumann, who besides being one of the fathers of modern computers, was a rabid anti-Communist who believed that nuclear war was not only inevitable but winnable for the nation doing the first strike.
Teller has been treated extremely poorly by history and by the press. Just look at this interview for crying out loud! The fact of the matter is that he is a brilliant man. A lot of his proposals would work, and could really help our society if it wasn't for the fact that the general public is too afraid of something they don't understand to take advantage of it.
And if you're so concerned about nuclear weapons, here's a thought: nuclear weapons have saved far, far, more lives than they have taken. The only time they were actually used in combat was at the end of WWII, and while it is true that many were killed, and actual invasion would have cost many more lives on BOTH sides. And the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union were caused by political differences, not nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the reason it was a COLD war, if it wasn't for nuclear weapons it may very well have been WWIII between the two most powerful nations in the world. The death toll would have made WWII look like a day in the park.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
This article is typical modern solipsistic journalism. We get to hear about the author's own memories of the Cold War, and his musings as he walks down the street (is this why I would read SciAm?). Then there is the obligatory that-building-is-phallic comment about some tower at the Hoover Institute. (I'm glad to see our author took Psych 101 - 'Half-Assed Fruedian Commentary For The Poorly-Educated'. I wish that Isidore I. Rabi had instead mused that 'It would have been a better world without Freud')
The most absurd part of this article is the suggestion that the USSR lost the Cold War because the US makes Macintoshes, biotech, and Pentium computers. The Soviets could never compete with America's electronic weaponry he says, forgetting that a handful of Soviet ICBM's could wipe California off the planet. Teller was working to make that less likely. The Soviets never needed to surpass the US technologically, they just needed sufficient technology, which they happily stole.
This journalist doesn't know his ass from a Nuclear Crater in the ground.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Amazingly enough, the patent on radiative compression of thermonuclear bomb was filled by Klaus Fuchs (russian spy) and Von Neumann. The name of Teller is not mentioned in patent application. He however immediately saw the benefits of the idea and pushed for it real hard.
I'd recommend book by Richard Rhodes Dark Sun: The making of Hydrogen Bomb to everyone interested.
in an pseudo-interview with about 6 other students. I asked him if it ever bothered him to be the "Father of the H-Bomb" since his "baby" could be used for such evil and/or immoral purposes.
;)
I thought he was going to jump out of his chair at me.
He got very upset and angrily announced that a scientist's only responsibility is to science. The possible uses of a discovery should not even be considered by the researchers -- that is someone elses business. And because of this, he did not feel even the slightest bit of remorse for his work on the bomb.
And then he upbraided _me_ (since I was on my way to grad school to become a scientist at the time) for thinking that a scientist _should_ worry about the moral implications of his/her work.
Needless to say, I didn't ask any more questions.