The Curve of Binding Energy–I (1973)

To many people who have participated professionally in the advancement of the nuclear age, it seems not just possible but more and more apparent that nuclear explosions will again take place in cities. It seems to them likely, almost beyond quibbling, that more nations now have nuclear bombs than the five that have tested them, for it is hardly necessary to test a bomb in order to make one. There is also no particular reason the maker need be a nation. Smaller units could do it—groups of people with a common purpose or a common enemy. Just how few people could achieve the fabrication of an atomic bomb on their own is a question on which opinion divides, but there are physicists with experience in the weapons field who believe that the job could be done by one person, working alone, with nuclear material stolen from private industry.

What will happen when the explosions come—when a part of New York or Cairo or Adelaide has been hollowed out by a device in the kiloton range? Since even a so-called fizzle yield could kill a number of thousands of people, how many nuclear detonations can the world tolerate?

Answers—again from professional people—vary, but many will say that while there is necessarily a limit to the amount of nuclear destruction society can tolerate, the limit is certainly not zero. Remarks by, for example, contemporary chemists, physicists, and engineers go like this (the segments of dialogue are assembled but not invented):

“I think we have to live with the expectation that once every four or five years a nuclear explosion will take place and kill a lot of people.”

“What we are taking with the nuclear industry is a calculated risk.”

“It is simply a new fact of existence that this risk will exist. The problem can’t be solved. But it can be alleviated.”

“Bomb damage is vastly exaggerated.”

“What fraction of a society has to be knocked out to make it collapse? We have some benchmarks. None collapsed in the Second World War.”

“The largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane. We have lived with earthquakes and hurricanes for a long time.”

“It is often assumed true that a full-blown nuclear war would be the end of life on earth. That is far from the truth. To end life on earth would take at least a thousand times the total yield of all the nuclear explosives existing in the world, and probably a lot more.”

“After a bomb goes off, and the fire ends, quiet descends again, and life continues.”

“We continue in the direction we’re going, and take every precaution, or we go backward and outlaw the atom. I think the latter is a frivolous point of view. Man has never taken such a backward step. In the fourteenth century, people must have been against gunpowder, and people today might well say they were right. But you don’t move backward.”

“At the start of the First World War, the high-explosive shell was described as ‘the ultimate weapon.’ It was said that the war could not last more than two weeks. Then they discovered dirt. They found they could get away from the high-explosive shell in trenches. When hijackers start holding up whole nations and exploding nuclear bombs, we must again discover dirt. We can live with these bombs. The power of dirt will be reëxploited.”

“There is an intensity that society can tolerate. This means that x number could die with y frequency in nuclear blasts and society would absorb it. This is really true. Ten x and ten y might go beyond the intensity limit.”

“I can imagine a rash of these things happening. I can imagine—in the worst situation—hundreds of explosions a year.”

“I see no way of anything happening where the rubric of society would collapse, where the majority of the human race would just curl up its toes and not care what happens after that. The collective human spirit is more powerful than all the bombs we have. Even if quite a few nuclear explosions go off and they become part of our existence, civilization won’t collapse. We will adapt. We will go on. But the whole thing is so unpleasant. It is worth moving mountains, if we have to, to avoid it.”

“A homemade nuclear bomb would be a six-by-six-foot monster. It would take cranes to lift it. You’re not going to get a sophisticated little thing that fits into a desk drawer.”

“No. But you could get something that would fit under the hood of a Volkswagen.”

“If it is possible to build such a device, the situation will come up. We just should be prepared for it, and not sit around wringing our hands. You can’t solve this problem emotionally. No. 1: This is a hazard. No. 2: The strictest practicable measures have to be taken to prevent it.”

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What are we spending our money on, and what are we getting out of it?’ I don’t believe we can protect ourselves against every bogeyman in the closet. I think we have to take the calculated risk.”

Seven years ago, Theodore B. Taylor, who is a theoretical physicist, began to worry full time about this subject. He developed a sense of urgency that is shared by only a small proportion of other professionals in the nuclear world, where the general attitude seems to be that there is little to worry about, for almost no one could successfully make a nuclear bomb without retracing the Manhattan Project. Taylor completely disagrees. In the course of a series of travels I made with him to nuclear installations around the United States, he showed me how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and, step by step, make it into a bomb. Without revealing anything that is not readily available in print, he earnestly wishes to demonstrate to the public that the problem is immediate. His sense of urgency is enhanced by the knowledge that the nuclear-power industry is about to enter an era of considerable growth, and for every kilogram of weapons-grade nuclear material that exists now hundreds will exist in the not distant future. To give substance to his allegations, he feels he must go into ample detail—not enough to offer an exact blueprint to anyone, to cross any existing line of secrecy, or to assist criminals who have the requisite training by telling them anything they could not find out on their own, but enough to make clear beyond question what could happen.

The source and the reach of his worry result from his own experience. He knows how easy it would be to do what he fears will be done. Peers and superiors considered him stellar at it once, and used that word to describe him. When he was in his twenties and early thirties, he worked in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, where he was a conceptual designer of nuclear bombs. He designed Davy Crockett, which in its time was the lightest and smallest fission bomb ever made. It weighed less than fifty pounds. He designed Hamlet, which, of all things, was the most efficient fission bomb ever made in the kiloton range. And he designed the Super Oralloy Bomb, the largest-yield fission bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere.

When Ted Taylor was growing up, in Mexico City in the nineteen-thirties, he had three particular interests, and they were music, chemistry, and billiards. His father had been a widower with three sons who married a widow with a son of her own, so Ted had four older half brothers—so much older, though, that he was essentially raised an only child, in a home that was as quiet as it was religious. His maternal grandparents were Congregational missionaries in Guadalajara. His father, born on a farm in Kansas, was general secretary of the Y.M.C.A. in Mexico. His mother was the first American woman who ever earned a Ph.D. at the National University of Mexico. Her field was Mexican literature. The spirit of revolution, which had peaked in Mexico long before Ted was born, was still very much in the air, and his earliest impression of politicians was that they were people who carried silver-plated pearl-handled Colt .45s, wore cartridge belts the size of cummerbunds, and went around in Cadillacs firing random shots into crowds of people whose numbers were weighted toward the opposition. Elections, he decided, were a time to stay home. Moreover, politicians were not the only menace in the streets. One time, Ted went out—he was eight—and met a man who told him that he could have a new bicycle if he would go back inside and get something pretty. He went in and got his mother’s most precious ring and gave it to the man. Only too late did he realize what had happened, and he burst into tears. He went to the American School, where he started fourth grade one year and finished sixth grade at the end of the same year, thus finding himself about three years younger than most of his friends as he emerged into his teens. In the mornings, before school, he would sit for an hour and listen to music, occupying himself with nothing else while he did so. Years later, he would notice a difference among physicists with regard to music. Working in a scientific enclave at Cornell, where room after room had been equipped with speakers that were connected to a common source of classical music, he found that the theoretical physicists all embraced the music, while the experimental physicists uniformly shut it off. (He also would find that theoretical physicists tended to be loose-knit liberal Democrats, while experimental physicists—conservatives, Republicans—showed a closer weave.) In the afternoons after school, for a number of years, Ted played billiards almost every day, averaging about ten hours of billiards a week. He was, among his friends, exceptionally skillful. He knew nothing of particle physics—of capture cross-sections and neutron scattering, of infinite reflectors and fast-neutron-induced fission chain reactions—but in a sense he was beginning to learn it, because he understood empirically the behavior of the interacting balls on the table, and the nature of their elastic collisions, all within the confining framework of the reflector cushions. “It was a game of skill, dealing with predictable situations—an exact game. The reason it appealed to me was probably the same reason physics appeals to me. I like to be able to predict what will happen and have it come out that way. If you play billiards a lot, you find you can have a great deal of control over what happens. You can get all kinds of things to happen. I have thought of billiard balls as the examples in physics as long as I can remember—as examples of types of collisions from Newton’s mechanics to atomic particles. The balls made a satisfying click if they were new and expensive. Downtown, they were new and expensive. It was a treat to go downtown. You could try a twelve-cushion shot there.”

He developed a quiet and somewhat shy personality, and considerable self-sufficiency, but he overcame his shyness to dance through long weekends and drink his share of Cuba Libres. Sometimes, he and his friends went off to Acapulco, as many as fifteen teen-agers on the loose, and they took one hotel room, for the toilet and the shower, and slept on cots lined up in a long row on the beach. His family lived part of the time in Cuernavaca, which had almost no electricity then (a generator ran the Cuernavaca movie house), and Ted developed there a lifelong preference for candlelight. If the supply-and-demand ratio for electric power were based on him, there would be no power stations, nuclear or fossil. He remembers—almost more than any other image from Mexico—the bread bin, a small wooden box full of bread, in the middle of the table in Cuernavaca, surrounded by burning candles. His thoughts would wander then, as they do now, for remarkably long periods of time, and when he went off into other worlds in Cuernavaca his eyes must have glazed for hours, reflecting the candle flame.

At home in Mexico City—a streetcorner house, Atlixco 13—there were certain books that contained pages that could unfailingly cause in him a sensation of terror. They were atlases and geographies, mainly, and he knew just where they were—which book, which shelf. He would muse, and his eyes would wander to one of them, and he would go and get it. He would open to a picture of the full moon or of a planet—any disclike thing seen in full view—and his flesh would contract with fear. He could never look through a telescope without steeling himself against the thought of seeing a big white disc. He began to have recurrent dreams that would apparently last his lifetime, for he still has them, of worlds, planets, discs filling half his field of vision, filling all his nerves with terror. And yet he could not imagine anything more exciting than having travelled to and being about to land on Mars. He wanted to go there desperately. Years later, he would make intensive preparations to go to Mars in a ship of his design, driven by two thousand exploding nuclear bombs.

When he was ten, he was given a chemistry set for Christmas, and he steadily built it up, year after year, until Atlixco 13 had a laboratory that might have served a small and exclusive university. Things were available from local druggists that would not have been available to him in the United States. Corrosive chemicals. Explosive chemicals. Nitric acid. Sulphuric acid. He enjoyed putting potassium chlorate and sulphur under Mexico City streetcars. There was a flash, and a terrific bang. He made guncotton by the bale. He soaked cotton in nitric and sulphuric acid, thus producing nitrocellulose, then washed it in water, squeezed it, and hung it up to dry. The result looked just like cotton but would explode—poof—and leave almost no ash. It was pretty at night. He once wadded it into a .22 cartridge and hit the cartridge with a hammer. The cartridge went into his finger. He hunted through the 1913 New International Encyclopxdia, which contained lots of chemistry, and he found many things to make. He made urotropine (hexamethylenetetramine), a sleep-inducing drug, starting from a point very close to scratch. He first needed urea, and the nearest source was his own bladder, so he drained it out and went to work. He boiled a pint of urine until he had a half cup, then precipitated out the urea. He added nitric acid, and got urea nitrate. He added formaldehyde, and got a precipitate of urotropine. He tried it on his white rats, and put them to sleep for up to twelve hours at a time, but he brought the dose up slowly, and he killed no rats. He worked in his chem lab three hours a day in term, and all through the annual long vacations, which came in winter and lasted two and a half months. He liked the beauty of some precipitates, and the most beautiful by far, he thought, was lead iodide. It looked like gold dust being sprinkled into water when, with light behind a beaker, he dropped lead-acetate solution from an eyedropper into sodium iodide. Particulate flakes of gold drifted down, shimmering, sparkling with gold light. He made a yellow-and-red powder that was a combination of picric acid and red lead. It was a relatively stable material, but it would detonate, given sufficient heat. He would set a little pile of it on a piece of one-sixteenth-inch steel plate and heat the plate from below. Flash. Bang. One-quarter teaspoon of the mixture, unconfined, would blow a hole right through the steel. In repeated experiments, he figured out exactly how little powder was needed to penetrate the plate. He added ammonia to a concentrated solution of iodine crystals in alcohol. The resulting precipitate, filtered out, was a wet, blackish blob of nitrogen iodide. He dried it. Dry nitrogen iodide is stable with regard to heat but unstable with regard to motion. It can literally be exploded by tickling it with a feather. Ceilings were high in Mexico, and there were long feather dusters at Atlixco 13. Holding one like an épée, Ted would reach gingerly toward a mound of nitrogen iodide. Flash. Bang. A purplish-brown cloud. A miniature mushroom. His mother was incredibly tolerant of his chemical experimentation. He was graduated from high school when he was fifteen.

The material that destroyed Hiroshima was uranium-235. Some sixty kilograms of it were in the bomb. The uranium was in metallic form. Sixty kilograms, a hundred and thirty-two pounds, of uranium would be about the size of a football, for the metal is compact—almost twice as dense as lead. As a cube, sixty kilograms would be slightly less than six inches on a side. U-235 is radioactive but not intensely so. You could hold some in your lap for a month and not suffer any effects. Like any heavy metal, it is poisonous if you eat enough of it. Its critical mass—the point at which it will start a chain reaction that will not stop until a great deal of energy has been released—varies widely, depending on what surrounds it. If the uranium is wrapped in steel, for example, its critical mass is much lower than it would be if the uranium were standing free. A nuclear explosion is a chain reaction that goes so fast that pressures build up in the material and blow it apart. Depending on the capabilities of the designer, a given mass of U-235—say, twenty kilograms, an amount slightly smaller than a grapefruit—can yield an explosion equivalent to anything from a few tons of TNT up to hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT (hundreds of kilotons). The bomb of Hiroshima, which was not efficiently designed, fissioned only one per cent of its uranium and yielded only thirteen kilotons. There are various ways to make nuclear bombs, some of which require less material than others. It is theoretically possible to make a very destructive bomb with nuclear material the size of a pea, but that is beyond the practical capability of even the man of extraordinary skill in the art. Musing once over a little sliver of metallic U-235 about the size of a stick of chewing gum, Ted Taylor remarked, “If ten per cent of this were fissioned, it would be enough to knock down the World Trade Center.” The United States Atomic Energy Commission has set five kilograms of U-235 as the amount at and above which the material is “significant.” A bomb might be made with less. A crude bomb would require more. Five kilograms is an arbitrarily chosen figure—an amount which, if stolen, would be cause for concern. The Atomic Energy Commission, now much occupied with the growth and development of the peaceful nuclear-power industry, wants the atom to make a good impression on the general public. In the frankly bellicose days of the somewhat forgotten past, the term used was not “significant” but “strategic.” Unofficially—around the halls and over the water coolers—five kilos is known as “the trigger quantity.”

Uranium as found in nature, and mined, and milled, and extracted as metal, is worth about twenty-five dollars a kilogram. Uranium-235 is worth as much as twenty thousand dollars a kilogram. The reason for this great difference is that for each atom of U-235 that exists in natural uranium there are a hundred and forty atoms of U-238. It is U-235 that makes the fissions, makes the bombs, makes the heat in the power reactors; and the U-235 is extraordinarily difficult to separate from the rest of the uranium. A uranium atom—any uranium atom—has ninety-two protons: spheres bunched up in its nucleus. In there, too, like so much additional caviar, are many neutrons—a hundred and forty-six neutrons in an atom of U-238 (92 + 146 = 238), and a hundred and forty-three neutrons in an atom of U-235. Separating these two sisters, these two isotopes, was one of the hardest things human beings have ever tried to learn how to do, because, for one thing, U-235 and U-238 behave chemically in an identical way. So the isotopes had to be separated physically. It was necessary for the people who were trying to do this to get down on their knees, in effect, and sort into piles tiny spheres whose diameters were expressible in hundred-millionths of centimetres and whose only difference was that one kind weighed ever so slightly more than the other. This became, and has essentially remained, the most secret aspect of the development of nuclear material. Various methods were tried. The most cumbersome and, at least until recently, the most effective method was gaseous diffusion. Natural uranium was combined with fluorine and turned into a gas: uranium hexafluoride, UF₆. The gas was sent drifting through incredibly thin membranes. No one is saying exactly what the membranes consisted of, but they were successfully created and they are still in use. The gaseous-diffusion process was necessarily marginal in its efficiency. Both kinds of molecules went streaming through the membranes, but because the U-235 atoms were a little over one per cent lighter, and therefore were moving faster, a little extra U-235 went through in any given pass, and the uranium on the other side of the membrane was, as the technologists put it, enriched. The enrichment was so very slight, though, that the process had to be repeated again and again. The gas had to flow through several thousand membranes, which, cumulatively, became known as “the cascades.” Thousands of miles of tubes, pipes, and other conduits were needed to create a network of flow wherein the gas could now go through a membrane, now return to try again, now go on to a new membrane, gradually advancing, in a process of separation and elimination, until what had begun as seven-tenths of one per cent U-235 was more than ninety per cent U-235—fully enriched,. weapons-grade uranium.

Gaseous-diffusion plants cover hundreds of acres. They are so big that people drive automobiles and ride bicycles inside them, down long corridors among the cascades. There are three in the United States, all operated under A.E.C. contracts: one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; one in Portsmouth, Ohio; and one in Paducah, Kentucky. At least four more enrichment plants must be built in the United States alone before 1985. Nothing about them is cheap. It takes a big power plant-enough to serve a city—just to run one gaseous-diffusion plant. The existing ones get their energy from power plants that burn strip-mined coal. Some people used to wonder aloud when the nuclear industry was going to produce more power than it was using—a question that was regarded by the industry as “a sick joke.” Two billion dollars will buy a gaseous-diffusion plant. Britain has one. France has one. Needless to say, the Russians have however many they need. When the Chinese exploded a uranium bomb in 1964, it was assumed that the Chinese were not smart enough to have figured out the technology of isotopic separation. Therefore, the Chinese must have stolen the U-235. Where? No one could guess. Some months later, though, it was disclosed that sixty kilograms of U-235 was unaccounted for at a nuclear-fuel-fabricating plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Chinese had stolen the uranium in Pennsylvania. While this speculation was going on, the government revealed that a reconnaissance plane had made a high overflight above China and taken photographs that showed the presence of a gaseous-diffusion plant at Langchow, in Kansu Province.

The complexity of gaseous diffusion has importantly helped to confine the spread of nuclear weapons. Anybody could get hold of uranium, but it was another matter to get hold of a gaseous-diffusion plant. The development of other methods of isotopic separation has weakened that barricade, and there is a possibility now that it has broken down altogether. When prospectors screened ore for gold, they were doing something analogous to the gaseous-diffusion process. When they panned for gold, though, they did something quite different: they put an ore slurry in a pan and took what settled. Uranium isotopes can be separated that way, too—in centrifuges whirling around and flinging the heavier U-238 to the outside. There is so little U-235 to begin with that this also is a long and clumsy process, involving tens to hundreds of thousands of centrifuges; but, at least theoretically, it takes less power and less space, and since the centrifuges can be spread out geographically and not contained in one plant, a country (if not a group of people) could the more easily enrich uranium in a secret operation. South Africa has announced that it has developed an entirely new way of enriching uranium but will not give any clue to what it is, whether it is liquid or gaseous, centrifugal or centripetal, white or black. Simplest of all, in terms of space and equipment required, is a method under development by, among others, a team of Australian physicists, who have reported various approaches to separating uranium isotopes with a laser. If that proves possible, several skilled individuals could do it almost anywhere if they could assemble the right equipment. Thus, all the uranium on the near side of the enrichment plant—in the mine, in the mill, in the factory that turns it into UF₆—may soon be vulnerable to misuse. Meanwhile, in an attempt to serve the burgeoning growth of the nuclear-power industry, and to solve some of the economic problems attendant upon it, the Atomic Energy Commission has announced that it is giving up its enrichment monopoly and that it is going to license private corporations to build gaseous-diffusion plants of their own.

Power-plant reactors now making electricity for home use do not use fully enriched uranium. In their fuel elements (also called fuel assemblies), they use uranium that has been enriched only until it is about three per cent U-235. This includes the entire present generation of so-called light-water reactors, all the “nuclear plants” that belong to Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power, Jersey Central Power & Light, Pacific Gas & Electric, and so forth—thirty-nine now operable in the United States. A nuclear bomb could not be fashioned from the slightly enriched uranium that goes into their cores, nor could a nuclear explosion occur as a result of some sort of error or accident at such a plant. Where, then, is the more than half a million kilograms of weapons-grade uranium that has been produced in the United States since 1945? Roughly two per cent has been exploded. Something less than that has been consumed in various small reactors that use fully enriched uranium. Most of the rest is strewn around the world in the cellars and silos of the military-weapons program, in the form of bombs. Nuclear submarines burn fully enriched uranium. Several kinds of small test reactors—sold by American companies to nations and universities all over the world—use fully enriched uranium. There is a new kind of power reactor, known as the H.T.G.R., that uses a great deal of fully enriched uranium and is so promising that it may one day predominate over the type now in use.

The only American diffusion plant now producing fully enriched uranium is at Portsmouth, Ohio. The material, UF₆ in solid form, is shipped from Portsmouth in ten-litre steel bottles, generally by airplane or truck, to conversion plants that turn it into uranium oxide or uranium metal— whichever the customer wants. Each ten-litre bottle contains seven kilograms of U-235, and there may be, typically, twenty bottles in a shipment. Conversion facilities are in Hematite, Missouri; Apollo, Pennsylvania; Erwin, Tennessee. Then the oxide or the metal is shipped on, again by air or truck, to fuel-fabrication plants, which are in Crescent, Oklahoma; New Haven, Connecticut; San Diego, California; Lynchburg, Virginia. The oxide is a fine brown powder that looks like instant coffee. The metal comes in small chunks known as “broken buttons.” (William Higinbotham, a physicist at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, says that to fashion a nuclear explosive from broken buttons “all you’d have to do is hammer it into the right form and you’re ready to go.”) As oxide or metal, the material travels in small cans that are placed in a cylinder—a five-inch pipe—that is braced with welded struts in the center of an ordinary fifty-five-gallon steel drum. It is for criticality reasons that the uranium is held in the center with the airspace of the drum around it, for if too much U-235, in any form, were to come too close together it would go critical, Mart to fission, and irradiate the surrounding countryside. The fifty-five-gallon drums with interior weldings are called birdcages, because in a vague way they look like them. Loaded, they weigh a hundred pounds and can be handled by one person, easily by two. The ten-litre bottles of UF₆ travel in birdcages as well. Because of the criticality danger, such drums are clearly labelled “fissile material” or, synonymously, “fissionable material.” Anybody familiar with the labelling practices of the industry can tell that the contents are of weapons grade.

One place where nuclear-submarine fuel is made is on the corner of Gibbs and Shelton Streets in one of the less expensive neighborhoods of New Haven. The zoning is mixed there. Private homes and apartments are across the street from the plant—United Nuclear. The housing is sort of decayed. Turnover is frequent, many signs in the windows—“For Rent, 82 Shelton Street, 624-1200;” “For Sale, 33 Gibbs Street, Gatison Lenward Associates, Realtors, 562-2187.” Across the street, at any given time, is about a thousand kilograms of U-235, in metallic form, as pure uranium or as uranium-aluminum fuel plates—strips of metal, easily portable, each like the plate a doctor might screw to a door to announce his presence within. In any fabricating operation, there is considerable scrap, and no one is going to throw away something worth many thousands of dollars. So there are half a dozen scrap-recovery plants in the country, and United Nuclear’s, for example, is in Wood River Junction, Rhode Island, where birdcages containing about a thousand kilograms of U-235 go in and out each year. They sit outdoors waiting to be reprocessed. The New Haven plant consists of several buildings, one or two as shabby as the tenements opposite. The plant is surrounded by a chain-link-and-barbed-wire fence except where certain walls actually abut the public sidewalk. “New Haven is not well alarmed. You could get through that wall easily,” Higinbotham once observed. The uranium that is not actually being processed is stored in a vault. About six hundred and seventy workers come and go in the plant.

In Erwin, Tennessee, fully enriched uranium scrap from the military-weapons program is recovered.

At its Cimarron facility in Crescent, Oklahoma, Kerr-McGee does scrap recovery and also fabricates experimental reactor fuel, handling about five hundred kilograms of U-235 a year.

In Hematite, Missouri, Gulf United Nuclear has about seven hundred kilograms of U-235 on the premises at any given time, first in the form of UF₆, in bottles from Portsmouth, Ohio, and then, most notably, in oxide form prepared for shipment. Like metallic U-235, the U-235 oxide could be used in a bomb. Some people argue that this is not so—engineers, executives, people in the business—but if they were to carry the argument far enough they would have to argue with Ted Taylor. A great deal of fully enriched uranium oxide has travelled from Hematite to Kansas City in an ordinary common carrier (a truck), then on to Los Angeles as air cargo, then a hundred and twenty miles down the freeways in another ordinary truck to General Atomic, in San Diego. Something over a thousand kilograms that has come to San Diego this way has been turned into particles of uranium dicarbide, mixed with thorium dicarbide. In very small amounts, the mixture was encased in coatings of pyrocarbon and silicon carbide, making beads the size of round pinheads. The beads were used to fill holes that had been drilled in blocks of graphite thirty inches high. Roughly ninety blocks at a time (sixteen truckloads) travelled through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and finally to the Fort St. Vrain power station near Platteville, Colorado, where, as soon as the plant is licensed, they will be piled one atop another, held together by gravity and small dowels, in the innermost chamber of the H.T.G.R.—the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor. This new variant has been called “the reactor of the nineteen-eighties.” It differs vastly from the present generation. The fuel elements of present light-water reactors, for example, typically consist of long, thin rods of zirconium alloy packed with uranium oxide and sealed at the ends. The graphite blocks of the H.T.G.R. are something new in cost, efficiency, fissions per dollar. The High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor is thrifty with neutrons. It uses less uranium per megawatt. Most reactors operate at six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The H.T.G.R. functions at fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, a difference that obviously bears a payload, since heat (that makes steam that drives turbine generators that make electricity) is what all power reactors exist to produce. Property of the Public Service Company of Colorado, the H.T.G.R. will contain a little over a thousand kilograms of fully enriched weapons-grade uranium. Southern California Edison has ordered two that are twice as big. Philadelphia Electric has ordered two H.T.G.R.s, each three times the size of the one at Fort St. Vrain. Delmarva Power & Light has ordered two like the ones for Southern California. A Japanese industrial complex is considering one for the heat alone.

It would take an impressively sophisticated individual or group to achieve a nuclear explosive starting with the beads in the graphite of the H.T.G.R. The task would be at best laborious and difficult, for the pyro-carbon and silicon-carbide coatings were designed to withstand the temperatures and the pressures in the fissioning core of a reactor named for the high heat within it. So the H.T.G.R. itself is not particularly vulnerable to theft by potential bombmakers. What is relevant is that the H.T.G.R. uses great quantities of weapons-grade uranium, a sixth of its core will be replaced each year, and in order for the U-235 to make its way to the reactor it first has to travel in far more “significant” form from Ohio to the conversion plant in Missouri (or another one somewhere else) and then on to California. The H.T.G.R. is such a good reactor that the volume of this flow to new fabricating plants will before long be in the tens of thousands of kilograms, all over the United States. When that era arrives, a few kilograms will still be the trigger quantity.

General Atomic in San Diego, where the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor was conceived and developed, is a beautiful complex of buildings—two dozen or so, spaced over many acres—designed by Pereira and Luckman and landscaped with tiered pools, a footbridge, hibiscus, oleander, and jasmine. It stands in open country a few hundred yards from access to Interstate 5. Anyone who wanted to know the general layout of the place, to learn the whereabouts of the vaults in which the uranium is stored, or to learn when shipments might be expected to come and go need not infiltrate the plant or fake the requisite badges or wear a mask and a cloak. It is necessary only to go to a public reading room that the A.E.C. maintains at 1717 H Street in Washington, D.C. A card catalogue there contains General Atomic’s docket numbers. A clerk in an adjacent document room waits behind a kind of Dutch door, and a request for any docket number quickly yields a huge stack of papers that contains, among other things, the General Atomic license, in which are diagrams of the plant, capacities of the vaults. There is also voluminous correspondence about future plans (General Atomic is going to build another fuel-fabrication plant, near Youngsville, North Carolina) and about present shipments—more than enough for an analysis of material flow. Similar papers on all nuclear facilities in private hands are available at H Street. The Atomic Energy Act, as amended in 1954, says the public has the right to know about the private use of nuclear materials. H Street is one place where that right can be exercised. A Xerox machine is there for the reader’s convenience.

One vault at General Atomic is about thirty by thirty feet and contains stacks of shelves on which are coffee cans (that is what they are called, anyway, and they are that size) clearly labelled to show the amount of U-235 within—generally about three kilograms per can. The vault’s capacity is nine hundred and ninety kilograms, but five hundred is about as much as it ever contains. A vault man in white coveralls is the only person on any shift who can open the combination lock on the door. When the uranium moves out of the vault and around the plant, the coffee cans are set on rolling “move carts”—six cans on a cart. During a visit that Ted Taylor and I made there one day, three move carts, with fifty-four kilograms of U-235 on them, were standing near a big garage-type door that was open to the sunshine outside. We went through the door and found a triple fencing system and a guard in a small guardhouse. Three gates were open in the three fences, and an unmarked pickup truck came in and zipped past the guard, who was resting his chin on his hands and did not look up. “The vault has an intrusion alarm,” the plant manager told us. “A big bumblebee will set the son of a bitch off. If someone came in here and started shooting, though, he could get whatever he wanted. One man with the right attitude could do it. But what he was carrying out wouldn’t be worth a damn to him. Not that stuff. You can’t make a bomb out of that stuff.”

In the fall of 1941, Ted Taylor went to Exeter, for one year of additional secondary schooling, and in the New Hampshire winter he knew frozen ponds and rivers for the first time. He learned to skate. The feel of it energized him in the way that someone else his age might have been excited by a first chance to drive a car. He would skate alone in the afternoons ten miles up the Exeter River, through boggy woods, watching through ice as clear as window glass the rocks and pine needles on the bed of the river. He was taking “Modern Physics” under Elbert P. Little, a teacher of such ability that old Exonians thirty and forty years away from Exeter still remember him with particular and affectionate awe. He gave Ted a D, a flat and final D, and even in the winter term Ted could see that D was his status, and that it was unlikely to rise. He barely noticed, because with his D he was getting a look for the first time—and a vividly clear one—at what he would call “submicroscopic solar systems,” and he found that they had for him enormous appeal. One proton with an electron (about eighteen hundred and fifty times lighter) orbiting around it—hydrogen. One proton and one neutron together in a nucleus with an electron orbiting around it—heavy hydrogen (deuterium). Two protons and a number of neutrons with two electrons orbiting around them——helium. Three protons, some neutrons, three whirling electrons—lithium. One at a time, add a proton and an electron, and each element became another. Four protons, four electrons—beryllium. Five—boron. Six—carbon. Seven—nitrogen . . . Seventy—ytterbium . . . Seventy-eight—platinum. Seventy-nine protons—gold. Eighty protons—mercury (eighty protons massed together with anywhere from ninety-nine to a hundred and twenty-six neutrons into a body around which orbited eighty electrons, whose negative charges exactly balanced the eighty positive charges of the protons). Eighty-one protons—thallium. Eighty-two protons—lead. Bismuth. Polonium. Astatine. Radon. Francium. Radium. Actinium. Ninety protons—thorium. Ninety-one protons—protactinium. Neutrons had no charge and were neither attracted nor repelled by electrical forces and were thus the particles that could most easily be taken out of one atom and shot into the nucleus of another. Ninety-two protons, ninety-two electrons, a gross (more or less) of neutrons—uranium. The list, at the time, stopped there, having included everything that was found in nature. The transuranium elements were just beginning to be discovered and were not known in Exeter. Out on the river, skating, he pondered the root simplicity that all things he had ever seen—wood and water, bread and candle wax—were made of neutrons, protons, and electrons, separated by space. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live on an electron. What would the nucleus look like as a sun? There were a sextillion protons, a sextillion electrons, and a sextillion neutrons in one dead leaf on the bottom of the river. There was an island universe in a drop of water. His imagination outgrew his chemistry lab in Mexico City. He decided that he wanted to be a physicist.

At Exeter, he also learned to throw the discus. He was attracted to the shape and the flight of the thing (“It was the first and last sport in which in any sense I ever excelled”). He was a discus thrower in college as well—at the California Institute of Technology. Cal Tech was a dull and heavy grind for him. He lightened it somewhat by making nitrogen iodide, the stuff he liked to tickle in Mexico; and he would put it wet into the keyholes of the doors of friends who were off on weekends. The material would dry in there and become unstable with respect to motion. A friend would return to Cal Tech and put his key in his lock. Flash. Bang. The explosion was so designed that it would hurt neither the lock nor the man with the key. Charles Cutler, Ted’s roommate from those days, has said that what he remembers most about Ted as a college student was how self-contained he was. If they were walking along together and Cutler stopped to tie his shoe, Ted kept right on walking. He never seemed to notice. Cutler developed a similar set of responses, and when Ted stopped to tie one of his own shoelaces Ted stopped alone. They got along fine. Cutler is now Ted’s attorney in Washington.

Ted spent his second and third years at Cal Tech in the Navy’s V-12 program, accelerating the grind, cramming physics, graduating in June of 1945. He was nineteen. He was sent to midshipman’s school at Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, and he was there all summer. He began a letter home on August 8, 1945, but went on shore leave to New Jersey and did not finish the letter until August 13th:

Dear Folks,

. . . Things have been happening so fast the last twenty-four hours that everyone is in pretty much of a daze. I’m on the off-section of the watch now and have some time to take it easy and try to let what’s happened sink in.

The headlines about the success of the atom bomb are undoubtedly the biggest news of the century, if not an announcement of the most important single event in the history of the world. My first reaction to the news was one of almost horror, in spite of the fact that I think the end of the war is a matter of weeks. We’ve been on the threshold of discoveries enabling man to utilize the unlimited energy released by “exploded” atoms for several years, but I never dreamed that the first experiments would be so spectacularly successful—and so destructive. The effective destruction of an entire city by one bomb was unthinkable before the destruction of Hiroshima. Now it is quite possible that Japan may be literally wiped off the map if she doesn’t surrender soon.

Some of the revolutionary changes in our industrial systems which will be possible soon are obvious; my fear is that man has discovered something which, knowing so very little about it, may destroy him. This discovery will undoubtedly be common knowledge to all the governments of the world before long. Therefore, it seems to me that this must either be the last war or the nations of the world will completely destroy each other. And it will only be through radical changes in the world’s economic, social, and political systems that a complete catastrophe can be prevented. Mid-shipman’s school seems insignificant in the face of what’s happened, but we must plug on! We were sworn in yesterday, got the rest of our uniforms and devices, and I must say I’m relieved, although I had practically no doubts about making it. Forty of the three hundred who started were bilged. . . .

I met Bob and Rosemary at Grand Central Saturday afternoon, and we drove back to Plainfield that night. We spend most of the time hashing out the stupendous events of the week.

I called Cousin Mary, but no one answered, so I judge she’s gone to the shore for the summer.

. . . I don’t suppose the world situation has ever been so critical. With the proper leadership and coöperation of the United Nations, we could very easily be entering the greatest period of progress in our history. The atom bomb and what it represents may easily be the means to end all wars.

As for the effect of the end of the war on me, I can only say that I’ll probably have to serve the remaining two years I enlisted for in the Navy. I’m going to pull all the strings I can to get into naval research in atomic physics, now that recent developments have positively obviated the applications of atomic physics to warfare. At any rate, whatever I do the next two years, I’ll certainly be all set when I’m discharged. It was certainly a break to have started in early in a field which will undoubtedly be the most important scientific one for many years. . . .

Lots of love,

Ted

Listening to the radio in the Throgs Neck (Fort Schuyler) barracks, he had heard the announcement of the destruction of Hiroshima. The bomb was a total surprise to him. The announcer went on to tell about a great flash of light that had been seen in the American Southwest less than a month before, from a bomb that had “vaporized” a tower near Alamogordo. In the weeks that followed, Ted, of course, read every available line of gleaned scientific reportage. He had never before heard the word “fission.” When he saw his mother, he said that he felt even more strongly than he had at the time he wrote his letter that he would under no circumstances ever work on a nuclear explosive. In reading accounts of the Alamogordo and Nagasaki bombs, he also encountered for the first time in his life the word “plutonium.”

The material that destroyed Nagasaki was plutonium-239. Plutonium was the first man-made element produced in a quantity large enough to see. It was created in 1940 at the University of California at Berkeley. The idea of it had for many years been indicated by the periodic table of the elements, where a row of blanks paralleling the rare earths suggested the theoretical possibility of elements whose family characteristics—like the characteristics of thorium, protactinium, and uranium—would be similar to those of actinium. It was possible that unknown elements (with ninety-three protons, ninety-four protons, and so on) had long ago existed in our solar system but had vanished because of instability. A stable element is one that lasts a relatively long time compared to the age of the universe—now thought to be around ten billion years. So in order to “discover” the transuranium elements it was necessary to make them, and one way of doing this was neutron capture. When a free neutron enters the nucleus of an atom of uranium-238, for example, the atom becomes uranium-239. Now begins a struggle for stability within the atom, which has been made unstable by the new ratio of protons to neutrons. Spontaneously, a neutron changes into a proton and a new electron is created in the nucleus and goes shooting out with a concomitant display of energy. In this way, one element becomes another. In this instance, it takes about twenty-three minutes for half of a given quantity of uranium-239 (ninety-two protons, a hundred and forty-seven neutrons) to decay into neptunium-239.(ninety-three protons, a hundred and forty-six neutrons), and another twenty-three minutes for half of the remainder to change, and so on. Hence it is probable that any new atom of uranium-239 will have changed into neptunium-239 within an hour. Neptunium-239 is also unstable, and it repeats the process exactly, spontaneously changing a neutron into a proton and creating a new electron. In a day, or two, or three, the atom has become plutonium-239 (ninety-four protons, a hundred and forty-five neutrons), a relatively stable isotope, with a half-life of twenty-four thousand three hundred and sixty years. This sequence of events is happening continuously in all the nuclear power plants now operating in the world, for plutonium is an inherent by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor.

In great secrecy during the Second World War, big “production reactors” were built at Hanford, Washington, to fission uranium and produce plutonium-239, because, among other things, it had been calculated that two to three times less plutonium-239 than uranium-235 would be required in the making of nuclear explosions. Production was slow—milligrams a day, extracted chemically from spent fuel, in the form of plutonium nitrate in a water solution. As the war itself moved slowly along—from Leyte Gulf to Iwo Jima to Okinawa—the plutonium that would level Nagasaki literally dripped into bottles in Hanford, Washington. One day in 1944, shortly after the first of the reactors had been started up, a balloon appeared overhead in Hanford. It had been made in Japan, equipped with an incendiary device, and released into the wind. Many hundreds of balloons like this one had travelled all the way across the Pacific, and some had landed in the forests of the. American Northwest, where they started fires of considerable magnitude. The fire balloons were so successful, in fact, that papers were asked not to print news of them, because the United States did not want to encourage the Japanese to release more. The balloon that reached Hanford had crossed not only the Pacific but also the Olympic Mountains and the alpine glaciers of the Cascade Range. It now landed on an electric line that fed power to the building containing the reactor that was processing the Nagasaki plutonium, and shut the reactor down.

Once, in the early nineteen-forties, all the plutonium in the world was in a cigar box in a storeroom next to the office of Glenn Seaborg, one of the element’s four discoverers. After the advent of privately owned nuclear-power reactors, the United States government bought up—for nine dollars a gram—the plutonium they produced. The policy of buying it from the private power companies was ended, though, in 1970, and since then, for various economic reasons, the companies have been stockpiling their own plutonium. Private companies will soon own more plutonium than exists in all the bombs of nato. With the predictable growth and expansion of the nuclear industry, power companies will make a cumulative total of ten million kilograms of plutonium within the last quarter of the twentieth century. The trigger quantity is two kilograms. Enough plutonium to make a bomb could be carried in a paper bag.

The privately owned plants built to perform the chemical separation of plutonium from used nuclear fuel are near West Valley, New York, and Morris, Illinois. The West Valley plant recently shut down for improvements and will not reopen for several years. The plant at Morris is a new one and expects to be processing used fuel in a matter of months. Fuel elements from reactors come to these places in heavy steel casks on the beds of trucks and railway cars. The casks are lowered into deep, clear, demineralized water, and are opened down there by mechanical arms. The fuel assemblies are removed and are stored on end. A rich purple aurora glows several feet into the water around them—a radiation phenomenon known as the Cherenkov effect. Electrons that are created in the nuclei of decaying atoms are called beta rays, and it is these that emit the purple light. Beta rays are one of three forms of energy that have been grouped under the name radioactivity. The other two, also resulting from nuclear decay, are alpha particles and gamma rays. The deep water completely holds in the intense radioactivity, and people can walk around the edges of the storage pools with impunity. Should anyone fall in, there are ring-buoy life preservers on the walls.

Hydraulic arms move the fuel assemblies, one at a time, into a concrete labyrinth, where they are lifted out of the water and are moved on into a long central room called “the canyon.” The walls of the canyon are five feet thick, and contain windows that cost twenty-five thousand dollars apiece. If you hold a match before one of these windows, you see eight flames. The window, five feet thick, is made of eight panels of glass, with mineral oil between the panels. The glass itself contains considerable lead. Each window weighs twelve and a half tons. Inside the canyon, master-slave manipulators perform tasks no human being could do directly without dying almost then and there. Fuel rods are chopped up, like stalks of celery under a kitchen knife, by a mighty guillotine that cleanly severs steel. Now all the small cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid, and the resulting radioactive fluid begins to travel up and down through a series of tanks and tubes, arranged in tall columnar form, where the addition of reactive chemicals—tributyl phosphate, dodecane—effects the separation of plutonium and unconsumed uranium not only from each other but also from a variety of radioactive fission products, such as strontium-90, krypton-85, and cesium-137. At the far end of the canyon, uranium hexafluoride comes out through a hole in the wall. Plutonium-nitrate solution pours from a nearby spigot.

General Electric owns the chemicalreprocessing plant at Morris. It was built on a small plot of ground among fields of corn and soybeans not far from the confluence where the Kankakee and the Des Plaines form the Illinois River. Only sixty miles from Chicago, the plant is nonetheless surprisingly remote. Only about fifteen people are needed to run it, although that is the figure for nighttime ghost-shift operation, and more are there by day. By license requirement, the plant has a telephonic connection with the Illinois State Police and a radio connection with the Grundy County sheriff. The telephone lines are buried. The state police have assured General Electric that a distress call would bring a police car to the scene within fifteen minutes, another car, if needed, within half an hour, and thirty-eight more cars within two hours. At the plant, a guard is always on duty. He is supplied by a company called Advance Industrial Security. On his shirt are an American emblem and a white eagle. On a day when Taylor and I visited the plant, the incumbent on duty was a big man with a ruddy face and a huge belly. He appeared to be the sort of man who could run a hundred yards in four minutes.

The plant was surrounded by a seven-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Its doors were locked. Its more sensitive areas—for example, the plutonium-load-out cell, the plutonium-storage corridor, the laboratory (where samples are withdrawn from the canyon for assay)—were watched by fourteen closed-circuit-TV cameras, which, in turn, were monitored on two screens in the central control room. When the plant begins its spent-fuel reprocessing, the plutonium from the spigot— no longer contaminated with radioactive fission products—will go into slim stainless-steel flasks, about four feet tall, with a five-inch outside diameter. Each flask contains ten litres of plutonium-nitrate solution—roughly two and a half kilograms of plutonium. Richard Fine, a chemist who had worked at Hanford in 1944 and had stayed twenty years before coming to Morris, said to us, “Plutonium should be better protected than money. That fence out there could be gotten over easy as pie. You could back a car up to it. Along the back side, you could dig under it.”

Burton Judson, the plant manager, said, “If you want to, you can build scenarios straight through ‘Mission Impossible.’ Sure, you could storm this place. If twelve people drove up with guns and a truck, they could take it. Those double doors to the plutoniumstorage corridor are just doors. If somebody really wanted to batter them down, they could. They could, for that matter, come in with a bazooka. But once they have the plutonium, how far are they going to get?”

I asked him what would happen if he himself were to try to steal some plutonium.

He said he would need an accomplice in the control room. It was necessary to unlock two successive doors to open a way from the plutonium corridor to the outdoors. In the space between the two doorways was a telephone. Judson said he had a key to one door but would have to call the control room to ask that the other door be opened by a button on the panel. If the man in the control room were not his accomplice, he would become suspicious when Judson, on television, started manhandling birdcages full of plutonium.

Judson, rapid of speech, candid, was a chemical engineer, still in his forties, educated at M.I.T. He used phrases like “dad-gum complicated” to describe his amazing reprocessing plant, and on its complications he held a patent. Unlike most people in the private nuclear industry, he had thought a lot about the paramilitary implications of the material he was working with. He said, “The amount of plutonium needed for a bomb is a steady figure, whereas the figure for throughput of plutonium-239 in a place like this will go up and up and up.” His plant will perform a service for a fee. The nuclear material belongs to companies like Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power and Southern California Edison. So the work is done in batches. It is possible to estimate quite closely—using such known figures as average radiation exposure, reactor power levels, length of time in the core—how much plutonium is in the radioactive fuel assemblies that enter the plant. At the end of a run, the amount in the batch is measured and the small difference is noted. Someone in the plant who wanted to take plutonium home with him could probably do so without detection if he never became greedy but always operated so as not to widen alarmingly this margin of difference. It takes about twenty-five days for an average batch of fuel assemblies to be processed, and after that the plant shuts down to clean out the canyon and assay the plutonium. As the industry expands, pressure on reprocessing plants will undoubtedly grow until the batch system is too much of a luxury, and the customers will no longer be getting back their own uranium and plutonium but will be taking their share of what comes from a continuous operation that runs twenty-four hours a day. Within such a framework, it would be vastly more difficult to keep accurate books on the flowing plutonium. “It’s a serious matter,” Judson said. “The utilities are not interested in atom identification. They’re interested in money. We are interested, though. Once you’ve grabbed something like this, you can’t let go. You’re committed to a big responsibility for a long time.”

John Van Hoomissen was at the Morris plant when we were there. He is based in California and is in charge of nuclear-materials management for all of General Electric. Three people under him work at Morris, counting atoms. Judson is not their boss. So if Judson, or someone under him, were to start siphoning off some plutonium, Van Hoomissen’s men would not feel— would be less likely to feel—inhibited about reporting it. A heavyset man with an appraiser’s eye, Van Hoomissen seemed to take everyone present—Judson, Fine, me, Taylor—with a grain of doubt. “All sampling here is centralized in one gallery,” he said. “This safeguards against someone bleeding the sampling line. That could never happen here at Morris, but I’ll show you other places where it could happen, because funny little sampling lines are run in here and there, and on a given night someone could run a funny little sampling line off to a clandestine place. The thief wouldn’t have to worry much about radiation. The most vulnerable place is the nitrate point, where the plutonium comes out of the spigot. We know this. We are aware of it. A reprocessing plant used to be thought of only as the place where you got your uranium back and your plutonium credits. Now it’s seen as more than that. It is not an unattended problem.”

The solution, as Van Hoomissen sees it, is for the plutonium to be moved rapidly out of the reprocessing plant and back into a power reactor, where it could be burned as fuel. Plutonium is more fissionable than uranium, after all. With a single exception, no plutonium is used in present commercial reactors, although the companies that own it have a great deal of it in reserve. The reason for this is that plutonium is one of the most toxic substances ever known in the world. Cobra venom is nowhere near as toxic as plutonium suspended in an aerosol. You could hold an ingot of plutonium next to your heart or brain, fearing no consequences. But you can’t breathe it. A thousandth of a gram of plutonium taken into the lungs as invisible specks of dust will kill anyone—a death from massive fibrosis of the lungs in a matter of hours, or at most a few days. Even a millionth of a gram is likely, eventually, to cause lung or bone cancer. Plutonium that enters the bloodstream follows the path of calcium. Settling in bones, it gives off short-range alpha particles, a form of radioactivity, and these effectively destroy the ability of bone marrow to produce white blood cells. Plutonium is rendered generally in one of three forms: metal, nitrate, oxide. The oxide is a fluffy yellow-green powder. It can be fine enough to be inhaled. The oxide is the form in which plutonium would be used as reactor fuel. Therefore, it is both difficult and dangerous to make plutonium-uranium-oxide fuel pellets and slip them into zirconium-alloy fuel rods—the process necessary for use of plutonium in power reactors. Special fuel-fabricating plants would have to be built, equipped with .03-micron absolute filters, continuous air monitors, glove boxes (workers put their hands into gloves that are in effect segments of the walls of glass boxes, and handle plutonium within), and other costly equipment, nearly all of which is unnecessary in a plant that fabricates uranium fuel. So the plutonium piles up—good fuel, but uneconomical. Plutonium is worth about ten dollars a gram, and is many times as valuable as gold. As time goes by, the utilities are building up millions of dollars’ worth of plutonium in their stockpiles. Meanwhile, with ever-higher extraction costs and increasing demand, the price of uranium rises. In a present-day power reactor, only three per cent of the uranium fuel is used, because the uranium-235 fissions with unprofitable efficiency after that point. After uranium itself is reprocessed, it is supposedly enriched again and then refabricated as fuel and returned to the reactors, completing a closed circuit known as the nuclear-power fuel cycle. Actually, the isotopes U-232 and U-236 present in used reactor fuel are unwelcome in the enrichment cascades. As William Higinbotham, of Brookhaven, has put it, the U-232 and U-236 would “crap up” the uranium there. So the nuclear-power fuel cycle, much advertised for its conservational appeal, is not closed, and has never been closed. The reprocessed uranium is set aside. The uranium that goes into power reactors is new uranium. The result of all this is that two economic lines are moving toward each other, and soon they will cross—a uranium line and a plutonium line—and where they will cross is the point at which it will become economically sensible to build all the necessary expensive equipment and to begin adding plutonium to the fuel that keeps present-day reactors going. This new era, which will probably arrive in full force between 1975 and 1980, is known in the business as plutonium recycle.

Recycling might open more problems than it closes. While it is an obvious way to burn up accumulating plutonium, it will also cause that plutonium to come out of storage and be circulated throughout the United States. By truck or air, it will travel to fuel-fabricating plants as nitrate or oxide, fifty or so kilograms per shipment. Then it has to be transported, often many hundreds of miles, to the reactors that will use it. About four thousand kilograms of privately owned plutonium will be produced in 1974, ten thousand in 1976, fifteen thousand in 1978. By A.D. 2000, according to A.E.C. forecasts, something over a million kilograms of plutonium will annually be travelling to two or three thousand nuclear power plants in fifty-odd countries.

It is possible to design a reactor that will produce more plutonium than it uses. The Atomic Energy Commission has published a four-color poster advertising this. The poster says: “Johnny had 3 truckloads of plutonium. He used 3 of them to light New York for 1 year. How much plutonium did Johnny have left? Answer: 4 truckloads.” In this way, the A.E.C. has been introducing the public to breeder reactors. They are not new. The first power reactor that ever lighted a bulb was a small, experimental breeder in Idaho. A sixty-megawatt demonstration breeder reactor was built by Detroit Edison on the shore of Lake Erie, but it was beset with operating problems and eventually shut down. The idea of the breeder is to use a combination of fissionable and fertile material, making heat with the one and new fuel with the other. The fissionable material, for example, might be plutonium-239 and the fertile material uranium-238—ordinary, natural uranium. As the plutonium fissions, it throws off many more neutrons than are needed to keep the plutonium chain reaction going. The excess neutrons go into the nuclei of the U-238, which becomes U-239, which decays to become neptunium-239, which decays to become plutonium-239, ready now to get into the original chain reaction, ready to repeat the process and produce even more plutonium. Because the fissioning plutonium puts out many extra neutrons and because there is a high proportion of fertile U-238 in the reactor core, the breeder makes more plutonium than it uses up. Theoretically, the breeder can make forty times better use of uranium than present-day reactors. Moreover, it could use as fertile material the two hundred thousand tons or so of leftover U-238 that has been separated from U-235 since the military weapons program began. Breeders are variously cooled by salt, sodium, helium; and they have a fine set of names: the Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor, the Liquid-Metal Fast Breeder Reactor, the Gas-Cooled Fast Breeder Reactor. The Germans have one called SNEAK. The French have one called Rapsodie. They are research reactors. In July, the Soviet Union announced that it had begun commercial power production with a breeder at Shevchenko, on the Caspian Sea. Breeders as a working generation are still some time away, but when their time comes the figures for world flow of plutonium will be not so much increased as multiplied. So will the probabilities of the clandestine manufacture of atomic bombs.

Where is plutonium now—that is, plutonium owned by private companies? In greatly varying amounts, it is in Hanford, Washington; West Valley, New York; Pawling, New York; Morris, Illinois; Erwin, Tennessee; Pleasanton, California; Crescent, Oklahoma; Cheswick, Pennsylvania; Leechburg, Pennsylvania; and in transit among these places. It has ridden around the country sometimes with ordinary truck freight—linoleum, Congoleum, plutonium. New regulations forbid this. A ten-litre bottle of plutonium-nitrate solution in a birdcage—two and a half kilograms of plutonium—was shipped from Hanford to Crescent not long ago at the rear of a flatbed truck. Other cargo filled up the bed space, and the plutonium, the last thing on, was held by a single chain. It was clearly labelled “danger—plutonium.” Generally, the material goes by itself, in shipments of about fifty kilograms. Plutonium-uranium fuel pellets are made at Crescent by Kerr-McGee, and are put inside metal rods and sent back to Hanford, to the A.E.C.’s Fast Flux Test Facility—an experimental breeder reactor. Kerr-McGee handles about a thousand kilograms a year. So does numec (Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation), in Leechburg, which also makes fuel for the Hanford facility. Fuel rods for plutonium recycle are being made by General Electric at Pleasanton, by United Nuclear in Pawling, by Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, and by Westinghouse in Cheswick.

The Cheswick plant makes breeder fuel as well. Up to a hundred kilograms of plutonium may be there at any one time. Nine security police work every shift. They are armed and have been instructed in the use of weapons. An eight-foot fence surrounds the building. In one corner of the plutonium-oxide laboratory are forty safes; each safe is designed to contain two kilograms of plutonium in a can. If the continuous air monitors sound their alarm—oxide in the air—the entire building can be evacuated in sixty seconds. There are many doors, many of them coded red on one side. This is a pilot plant. It indicates the conditions under which the great abundance of future plutonium will have to be handled. Rooms are filled with assembly lines of glove boxes. Some contain tiny pellets of plutonium-uranium fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility. A half inch long, they look like horse feed. Others hold plain plutonium oxide. It has the consistency of flour. Dust. Yellow-green dust. Because of its fine consistency, it has a peculiar locomotion. Spontaneously, it creeps. It moves around. It spreads like lampblack. Drop a little of that in an air-conditioning system and a whole company will die. A man who works in Cheswick says, “We’re picking up a lot from the babyfood industry. They keep people away from the food. Here we keep the plutonium away from the people.” Looking through the glass walls of a glove box, another man says, “It would require a fair amount of skill to get that stuff out of here without crapping up the countryside.”

In 1971, the Kansai Electric Power Company removed some fuel assemblies from its Mihama No. 1 reactor, in Fukui, Honshu, Japan. The radioactive fuel rods contained fifty kilograms of plutonium. In heavy casks, the fuel assemblies were shipped to England. They went to Windscale—a reprocessing plant in Cumberland. Later that year, the fifty kilograms of separated plutonium, in oxide form, was shipped by BOAC to Kennedy International Airport. A courier rode along. At Kennedy, the material was met by a man from Westinghouse and was loaded onto a truck (Forest Hills Transfer) that carried no other cargo. It was driven, on the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Turnpikes, to Cheswick, which is a few miles east of Pittsburgh. In Cheswick, the fifty kilograms of Japanese plutonium has been fashioned into pellets of mixed plutonium and uranium oxides, and placed inside seven hundred and fifty zirconium-alloy rods. After the rods have been fitted into assemblies at another plant, in Columbia, South Carolina, they will be shipped back to Japan. Plutonium recycle will then begin in the Mihama reactor. Fifty kilograms is almost ten times the amount that was used in the Nagasaki bomb.

West Valley, New York, is a small town in Appalachian-foothill terrain, about forty miles east of Lake Erie. A sign tells approaching drivers, “seek ye the lord while he may be found.” A sign tells departing drivers, “believe in the lord jesus christ and thou shalt be saved” There is a blinking red overhead light, a chain-saw shop, a visiting bookmobile, and an old wooden hotel with rubber-booted clientele and both Schmidt’s and Schlitz on tap. Also in West Valley, there is enough plutonium to arm a nation.

For many years, West Valley was the only place in the country where fuel from commercial reactors was reprocessed. The plant there, which belongs to Nuclear Fuel Services, is much like the one at Morris, Illinois, with its canyon, its load-out cells, its plutonium-storage room—eighteen by thirty-six feet, sixty-eight birdcages maximum, a door with padlock and chain. I went there with Ted Taylor one day. “We’re sort of proud of our pickle works,” the plant manager told us. “We’re pioneers.” He noticed that my hand was resting on the rim of an empty plutonium birdcage. “I wouldn’t touch anything,” he said. “A little of that goes a long way.” His name was James Duckworth, and he was a chemical engineer who had worked for fourteen years at Hanford before coming to West Valley, in 1967. A thoughtful, practical, kindly person, he was worried about the international aspects of safeguarding so-called special nuclear materials (weapons-grade materials). He was worried about his sons at Syracuse and Cornell. He was worried about the great vortex of changes in the society. “We of the Establishment resist change,” he said. “But we do the very things that advance it.” Taylor asked him if he ever worried about the possibility that plutonium might be stolen from his plant.

“No. Honest to Pete, no,” he said. “I have so God-damned many real problems. I haven’t time to imagine them.” He agreed that a pickup truck containing two people and two guns would constitute a force sufficient to remove from the plant as much plutonium as the truck could carry—that is, about nine birdcages, or twenty-two and a half kilograms.

In 1967, in a Nick Carter paperback called “The Weapon of Night,” nine Chinese went to Duckworth’s plant and stole some plutonium. Their adventure ended in failure underneath Niagara Falls. Those Chinese went to the right place at the wrong time. They should have waited a few years. In 1967, when the government was buying plutonium from the private companies, plutonium nitrate was regularly shipped across the United States from West Valley to the A.E.C.’s storage tanks at Hanford. After 1970, when “plutonium buyback” came to an end, various utilities, like Consolidated Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, began wondering where they could stockpile their plutonium. They turned for help to the New York State Atomic and Space Development Authority, which owns the land on which the West Valley reprocessing plant was built. The Authority built a warehouse. It stands alone in a clearing in woodland, something over a mile cross-country from the reprocessing plant. No other buildings are close to the warehouse, or even visible from it. A broad, paved drive called Buttermilk Road—followed by an overhead power line—runs a half mile in from New York 240, a blacktopped country road. The warehouse is one of a kind. In purpose, there is nothing like it anywhere. Known as the asda Plutonium Storage Facility, it is made of steel panels painted pastel green. One man works there eight hours a day five days a week; otherwise no one is there. Its dimensions are eighty by a hundred and sixty-three feet. It has one window and three doors. It is surrounded by a seven-foot chain-link fence strung along the top with barbed wire. Its other protective devices, which are extensive, are not apparent to the outside observer. Its design capacity is two thousand kilograms of plutonium.

The nearest neighbor of the ASDA storage facility is an old general store on New York 240, with a row of decaying tourist cabins in back, a couple of gasoline pumps in front, and an outdoor clock whose hands don’t move. I went into the store, bought a Hershey bar, and asked the storekeeper what that green steel building was on Buttermilk Road. He was a white-haired man wearing rubber boots and a red checked shirt. “That? That’s where they keep the potent stuff,” he said.

In a chair opposite the candy counter sat another white-haired man wearing rubber boots and a red checked shirt. He said, “Yes, sir. That’s where they keep the potent stuff.”

A sign on the wall said, “Cows may come and cows may go, but the bull in this place goes on forever.”

The United States Navy, in 1945, did not choose to exploit Ensign Taylor as a physicist. His request for a billet in atomic research was overlooked. Instead, he was sent out to the Pacific on an attack-transport to collect and bring home personnel from outposts of the war. One such place was Eniwetok Atoll, in Micronesia. When the ship was loaded and was steaming away, he stood by the rail, looked back at the receding islands, and thought, I don’t know where my life will ever take me, but one thing certain is that I will never see this place again.

The Navy let him out in the summer of 1946, and he enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. To him, the academic world seemed almost purposefully designed to make subjects uninteresting. At least, this had been true at Cal Tech, where the art of teaching had seemed to consist entirely in pointing out errors, and now, at Berkeley, with only an exception or two, nothing much happened to change Ted’s basic view. Most courses were lecture courses. Most lecturers were functional gargoyles pouring forth unrelated facts. Ted chose not to listen. He did study. He studied hard, following his own interests without much regard for the broad and general picture. He was bored by some quite basic subjects. “Thermodynamics was dull. Sometimes I think I am incapable of understanding something I am not interested in. I studied it but did not learn. A lot of physics was a mystery to me, and still is.”

He went down to Claremont whenever he could, to Scripps College, to see a girl he knew. Her name was Caro Arnim, and she was majoring in Greek. She was writing her thesis on the “Electra”s of Sophocles and Euripides. She was athletic, dark-haired, blue-eyed. She wore glasses. If anything, she was even more shy than he was. She spoke in a voice so soft that it could almost disguise the acuity of what she had to say. She would someday be a librarian. They got along by whistling to each other. They whistled the themes of classical music. See if you know what this is. A kind of test. “Ted was really good at that sort of thing. I was surprised. We whistled themes from Beethoven symphonies, from Handel, from Bach. We tried to remember them. For people who are shy, that’s not a bad way to start, if you have trouble talking.”

She found him attractive—tall, gangling, with a broad forehead, a somewhat pointed chin, and great thoughtful brown eyes, which often seemed to be focussed on something no one else could see. “When we got married, he was going to be a college professor in a sleepy town. In those days, both of us were unsure. We were about the shiest people you ever met in the world. How we had the courage to talk to each other seemed a wonder sometimes. A sleepy college town was about our speed.” They went to the beach, sat on a sand dune, and talked immortality. Within his enthusiasms, he could persuade her of almost anything, but with immortality she was somewhat bored. Ted took some getting used to. In their apartment in Berkeley, he would sit and look straight at a wall for vast tracts of time. She feared that there was something wrong, and that she might be at fault; but he was simply thinking. Sometimes, she tried whistling. “Do you know what that is?”

“Oh . . . That? ‘Variations on a Theme of Frederick the Great.’ ”

(The Taylors now live part of the year in a house on top of a mountain in western New York. The record collection there contains a great deal of Bach, and one day last winter Ted was listening to “Variations on a Theme of Frederick the Great” while attempting to prepare himself a cup of instant coffee. A kettle was beginning to steam. He put some powdered coffee in a cup. He looked out a window into slowly falling snow. “Such a simple theme,” he said. “The variations must have been the product of a very clear thinker, because the patterns are such a systematic exploration of a lot of different possibilities. Up pyramids. Down pyramids. There’s a periodicity to it. Structural patterns like those are the kinds of things that appeal to a theoretical physicist—the combination of predictability and surprises. The measure of greatness of a composer is his ability to combine these. The way I like to think about physics is that there is an exact analogue to the composer, the creator—the knack that Bach had for putting the world together in a way that is somewhat predictable but also full of surprises. One of the reasons that Bach’s music is so satisfying in this respect is that he was a very religious man, and I suspect that he was getting some instructions in how to do this by simply listening to his Maker.” Steam was pouring from the spout of the kettle, but Ted had become so absorbed in what he was saying that he reached over and made his coffee with warm water from the kitchen tap.)

One of the people who taught him physics at Berkeley was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Ted found him “a good teacher for bright students.” Since Ted was not a bright student, he did not experience Oppenheimer’s talent. With several other students, he once went to Oppenheimer with a written proposal for a general strike of all physicists in the United States. Oppenheimer said, “Take this paper. Burn it. Never recall it. Anyone who knew of this would label you a Communist and you would have no end of trouble the rest of your life.” Ted worked part time at Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory, mainly on the cyclotron, also on a beta-ray spectrograph, for which, with other students, he designed some novel features. Noticing this effort, Ernest O. Lawrence, the laboratory director, decided that grad students should not be doing such work. The physicist Luis Alvarez said to Lawrence, “These young men are going to go very far.” Not on this project, they aren’t, said Lawrence, in effect, and a senior man finished what the students had begun. It had been quite a battle—Lawrence versus his subordinate colleagues. Ted, just a student, was bitter. He thought, If that is what experimental physics is, to hell with it. So he went into theoretical physics, and found it to be much more his natural milieu. He worked under Robert Serber, who had been an instrumental figure in the Manhattan Project, had helped construct the mathematical framework of the first bombs, and had written a compendium of the physics of atomic bombs—a work that was called “The Los Alamos Primer.” Ted took Serber’s course in neutron-diffusion theory, and he planned a doctoral thesis predicting the characteristics of the scattering and absorption of neutrons by nuclei. Oral preliminary examinations came along. He took one on mechanics and heat. The examiners—three senior professors—watched while he tried to derive on a blackboard a formula having to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He became confused and rattled. He simply did not know enough to do what he was being asked to do. He flunked. He took a second prelim, this one in modern physics, and he failed again. Low on self-discipline, high on enthusiasm, he had followed his interests (“I liked to do what I liked to do”), and had not spread himself sufficiently over the fields he was supposed to know. Moreover, he was nervous. He was numbed by the examination procedure, had always been afraid of exams. “We cannot in good conscience pass you,” he was told. “We realize this is the second time. You can’t remain here at Berkeley as a graduate student.”

Serber, though, thought of his student as a person of special and unusual ability; he pondered the loss of him to the world of physics, and he hoped that would not happen. There was no university worth the name that would welcome Ted at this particular moment in his academic performance. Where could he go? He was not a scholar, not a profound and thorough analyst. It did not take much perception to see that. He was more a conceiver of things. Serber picked up a telephone and called J. Carson Mark, director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Serber told Ted what nice country there was around Los Alamos—perfect for hikes; he would like it there. Mark had agreed to give Ted a try in New Mexico. Ted was grateful. His confidence was way down—as low, probably, as it would ever be in his lifetime. As he and Caro packed and left Berkeley, he did not even have a clear idea what he would he doing at Los Alamos. His work, as he understood it, was to be “in neutron-diffusion theory.” Twenty-four years old—it was November, 1949—he was a little taken aback when, soon after he was shown to his desk at Los Alamos, he was handed drawings of uranium and plutonium bombs.

“The Los Alamos Primer,” which contains the mathematical fundamentals of fission bombs, was declassified in 1964 and is now available from the Atomic Energy Commission for two dollars and six cents a copy. For four dollars, a book titled “Manhattan District History, Project Y, the Los Alamos Project” can be bought from the Office of Technical Services of the United States Department of Commerce. Written in 1946 and 1947, this was the supersecret technical description of the problems that came up during the building of the first atomic bombs. The book was declassified in 1961. On its inside front cover is a legal notice that says, in part, “Neither the United States, nor the Commission, nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission . . . assumes any liabilities with respect to the use of, or for damages resulting from the use of, any information, apparatus, method, or process disclosed in this report.” Long and various is the bibliography of works in public print that contain information that was once of the highest order of secrecy. The release of documents containing detailed information on the sizes, shapes, design, and construction of nuclear explosives—and on such topics as plutonium metallurgy and the chemistry of initiators—seemed to follow, over the years, a pattern of awareness of Russian knowledge. When it became clear that the Russians knew about something or other, what then was the point of keeping it secret?

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 included almost no role for private persons. In 1953, President Eisenhower introduced his program called Atoms for Peace, its idea being to share the atom with all the world for the benefit of mankind, for the development of emerging nations, for the making of what was described as “meterless power.” Much debate followed. Critics of the program called it Kilowatts for Hottentots and pointed out that a reactor exported to the African bush would not be particularly useful there unless a staggering amount of additional capital was exported with it. Others suggested that the United States, as the nation that had opened the nuclear era with more than a hundred thousand deaths from nuclear bombs, was now attempting to sublimate its guilt with a program that was styled to do good but could in the end bring evil, for every new reactor would be making plutonium, and plutonium atoms multiplying everywhere were hardly a guarantee of peace. After the debate, the Atomic Energy Act was amended, in 1954, and the way was now open not only to reactors in Bechuanaland but, on a much larger scale, to reactors in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California. As it happened, though, the electric companies were quite reluctant to go nuclear. Arithmetic revealed that “meterless” power would cost more than the kind the companies were already selling. The long-range safety of nuclear power plants was unknown. No insurance company would write a policy to cover a reactor. This put the Atomic Energy Commission in an interesting dual position. An energy crisis was obviously coming. A kind of mandate had been issued with the promulgation of Atoms for Peace. So it fell to the A.E.C., the agency that had been established to control atomic energy, to promote it as well. The apparent conflict of interest was quickly mitigated, though, because, as the agency rapidly expanded, it expanded principally in the direction of promotion. The United States government offered to become the insurer of power plants. The United States government would help build demonstration reactors. The United States government would lease slightly enriched uranium at an attractive price and buy back unwanted plutonium at an even more attractive price. Moreover, if the utilities really did not want to go nuclear, possibly the U.S. government would go utility. The electric companies went nuclear. Soon thereafter, the Atomic Energy Commission moved out of downtown Washington to rural headquarters near Germantown, Maryland—a marathon from the center of the city.

While most people within the A.E.C. were concerned with the development of the nuclear industry, some worried about the implications of proliferating plutonium. Finally, in the middle nineteen-sixties, a panel was set up to look into the matter, and two new divisions were established to deal with safeguards. Licenses that had been issued by the A.E.C. to private companies were renegotiated in order to spell out in a formal way requirements for safeguarding nuclear materials.

A semantic distinction developed between safeguards and safety. Safety meant environmentalists snapping about emergency core-cooling systems, thermal fish-kills, radiation clouds, “the China syndrome” (the reactor melts and starts down through the earth for China). Safeguards meant keeping track of and protecting the materials that could be turned into bombs. It meant vaults, alarms, fences, locks, guards, and German shepherds. And it meant accounting. By both chemical and nuclear means, it was becoming ever more possible to count atoms and, more or less, to balance books—to sense if material had been stolen or embezzled, and, with approximate accuracy, how much. People are now working on various aspects of safeguards at Germantown, M.I.T., Brookhaven, Los Alamos, and elsewhere. They develop, for example, instruments that can read the characteristics of fissile material—gamma emissivity, alpha emissivity, isotopic abundances (how much U-235? how much U-238?)—without having to destroy what contains it (fuel rods, waste-storage drums, or whatever). The idea is to enable a company to count its uranium or its plutonium and be able to say how much, after a given process, may be missing. An analogy is often drawn between special-nuclear-material balances and bank balances, but the analogy is imperfect. It is impossible to balance the books on nuclear material. While being machined or sintered or compacted into pellets, some inevitably gets lost. This is known as muf—Materials Unaccounted For. The cumulative muf at a large fuel-fabricating plant can amount to dozens of kilograms a year. The muf problem cannot be eliminated, but it can be minimized, which is what safeguards specialists are attempting to do.

Safeguards, ideally, are a series of frames around the nuclear industry, expanding with it through time. As the industry multiplies—as plutonium recycle comes in, and the breeders, and the fully enriched uranium of the H.T.G.R.s-ideal safeguards systems would pace the industry, a little ahead of it. These would be commensurate safeguards, and one would imagine that nothing less would do. But there are problems. To start with, it is not possible to say with precision what commensurate safeguards should be— not in general, and not even in a particular situation. Two people of equal training will judge differently what is adequate. One extreme recommendation is that the nuclear industry, as a source of bomb material, is too dangerous and should be shut down. The opposite extreme is to decide that no person or group would ever steal special nuclear material, and even if material were stolen it would require another Manhattan Project to produce a bomb, so such worry is groundless and safeguards are unnecessary. Dozens of slightly varying positions are taken along the bridge between these points of view. Subjective influences are obviously present. Someone who has spent a fair part of a career perfecting a Lithium-Drifted Germanium Gamma-Ray Spectrometer obviously believes in the need for such a machine in accounting for nuclear material. Someone who has given years to the development of the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor would not tend to begin a discussion of its features by pointing out that it uses weapons-grade fuel. If one can imagine commensurate safeguards, one can also imagine veneer safeguards—and different people might use the one word or the other to describe the same situation. As new A.E.C. safeguards requirements have come along—from early ones in 1967 to the most recent ones, this year—reactions have ranged from the complaints of industry (too much interference) to the dismay of people like Ted Taylor, who feel that the requirements are still little more than veneer, inadequate for the present, let alone the future. Difficulties mount. Safeguards cost money, which means a diminution of profit, putting kilowatts out of reach. Safeguards suggest dangers, which belie the promise of Atoms for Peace, and thus can be a hindrance to the promotion of nuclear commerce. The Atomic Energy Commission, as a whole, is profoundly dedicated to the growth and spread of nuclear power, and I have heard one of its commissioners (James Ramey), in addressing a large audience, say, “We in the atomic-energy industry . . .” Safeguards are inconvenient to an industry that does not want to frighten its corporate or individual customers, suggesting war instead of peace. Indications are that in the Soviet Union no nuclear material of any kind travels anywhere except under convoy by the Red Army. A suggestion that the United States Army be used in the same way was rejected because such military involvement would create a bad image for the industry. In the annual struggle for budget, people who concentrate on safeguards have to appeal for money, like everyone else. Since numerically they are less than two per cent, they constitute a voice that is somewhat muffled within the bureaucracy. I once asked Delmar Crowson, a retired Air Force general who was the A.E.C.’s director of Nuclear Materials Security, how difficult it was for him to implement new safeguards that he might consider essential. He shrugged, smiled at some colleagues, and said, “There’s the problem.”

Russell Wischow is a nuclear C.P.A., more or less. He is the president of the Nuclear Audit & Testing Company, which is based in Washington. His approach to the safeguards problem is, as he puts it, pragmatic, and he thinks that for many people it is, unfortunately, an emotional issue. He thinks the A.E.C. is too often “considered guilty until proved innocent.” He thinks the private nuclear industry is here to stay, that there can be no reversion to a government monopoly, and that industry—as a responsible unit of society, regulated by the A.E.C.—will do the best it can. “What else can you do? Put the material in a vault and turn the vault back to 1942?”

I had called on Wischow in a suite his firm had taken at the Hotel Shoreham in Washington during a meeting of the Atomic Industrial Forum and the American Nuclear Society. A tall, elegant, dark-haired man in his forties, in buckle shoes, a black suit, a shirt in stripes of pink and gray, he had once taught in the reactor school at Oak Ridge and had worked some years in West Valley. He spoke informally over bits of pineapple wrapped in bacon. These were some of the things he said:

“It’s not like a bank. You cannot balance the books. What’s wrong with a MUF of a few dozen kilograms of plutonium if your throughput is such that you can’t measure it closer than that?

“I guess this is a dangerous statement, but I’m going to make it anyhow. If there were real intent to divert material, you could get away with it. You can’t be greedy. You have to work within the limits of measurement.

“What are we trying to do—keep a bomb out of the hands of a country or a few grams out of the hands of a group? If you want a few grams of plutonium, you can steal that almost anyplace in the country. The safeguards problem is out of focus. No one is willing to state how much.

“I can’t believe that a company would divert. Individuals, yes. If any segment of the industry wanted to divert, it could—gram quantities, kilogram quantities. When you found it out, it would be too late.

“Guards in some places have guns but no bullets. No company pays its guards enough to ask them to throw down their lives for material.

“Somewhere between the intensity of Ted Taylor and the lackadaisical attitude of some in the industry is reality.

“Safeguards are frustrating. The stuff is difficult to quantify. You can’t put it into a vault and keep it there. Once it is in the manufacturing cycle, you open it up to pilferage. I’m very concerned about the end results of a safeguards system that doesn’t work.”

Before forming the Nuclear Audit & Testing Company, Wischow was director of Nuclear Materials Safeguards at the A.E.C. He was replaced by Charles Thornton, whose experience went back to the Manhattan Project. Thornton helped set up labs at Oak Ridge in 1943, and worked on isotopic separation there. I sought him out at the same convention in Washington. A small, thin, wiry man with white hair to his shoulders and rimless glasses, he looked to me remarkably like Benjamin Franklin, a condensed Benjamin Franklin, although he was wearing a plaid suit, a checkerboard shirt, a wide gold tie, and a snakeskin belt. These were some of the things Thornton said:

“All the guys who tell you that American industry is experienced in protecting its vital materials—that’s a crock. Mankind has never handled as dangerous a commodity as plutonium. We have never developed the skill.

“Plutonium is worse in its toxicity than as a bomb. Plutonium is worth, at most, ten dollars a gram. If the Black September organization had a hundred grams of this material they, could wreak havoc. The Fast Flux Test Facility will have two contracts handling seven hundred kilograms of plutonium each. That is more than ten million dollars’ worth of material. A thousand-dollar loss is thus insignificant.

“One gram equals one times ten to the sixth micrograms—a million micrograms—and if it were properly distributed it would bring one times ten to the sixth fatalities. A microgram inhaled can cause bone cancer. Take what people think they’re worth in terms of dead. At least twenty-five thousand dollars, right? One times ten to the sixth times twenty-five thousand dollars is twenty-five billion dollars. Such criteria might be used to determine the intensity of the constraints put on the industry.

“The aggregate muf from the three diffusion plants alone is expressible in tons. No one knows where it is. None of it may have been stolen, but the balances don’t close. You could divert from any plant in the world, in substantial amounts, and never be detected. In a diffusion plant, take any pipe and freeze out the material that is passing through. Set up a diversionary pipe. Cool it with liquid air, and get it into a bottle. Coca-Cola trucks go in and out of the restricted areas there all the time. All sorts of people.

“The statistical thief learns the sensitivity of the system and operates within it and is never detected. Scenarios to get stuff out of the cascades are as varied as the ingenuity of individuals. Put a saddle valve into a pipe. Cool the pipe with methyl chloride. Take a saltshaker each day in your lunch bucket. Take a hundred grams a day. A kilogram every ten days. Or hit the shipping point. Or doctor the record of sampling bottles. That would not be my choice, though. Fully enriched uranium in a conversion plant—a pale-yellow fluid—could be put in a hot-water bottle under your shirt.

“The A.E.C. can say officially that quantities of muf are not dangerous. This is not so. Tons have been lost. They can say they have impregnable barriers, sensitive modern instruments. Not that impregnable, not that sensitive. They can say, ‘The numbers are not good, but we don’t know how to do any better.’ If you admit that this industry is not controllable, then you shut down. You wait until it is controllable, and then start up.

“The incremental capital for an adequate safeguards system would not destroy the industry—if it were designed in.

“It’s late in the history of the world to go into the safeguards business.”

Thornton—whom William Higinbotham, of Brookhaven, has described as “a great undiplomatic breath of fresh air who rattled everybody”—lasted a year and a half in the safeguards job, and then, by his own description, was “fired.” His detractors called him a pedant. He was not actually fired. He was lateralled off the field. Remaining in the employ of the A.E.C., he became Special Assistant for Energy Policy, Office of Planning and Analysis.

India, Italy, and Japan have reprocessing plants capable of removing plutonium from spent reactor fuel on a laboratory scale. Big power reactors are on line and making plutonium in India, Pakistan, East and West Germany, Japan, Spain. Only several thousand kilograms of weapons-grade nuclear material exists now outside the five nations that have exploded bombs. The figure is steadily growing. Safeguarding special nuclear material is basically an international matter. Some thirty nations will have reactors and will be producing weapons-grade material by 1980. Furthermore, material stolen from one country could be used by a second country against a third. Because only a small quantity of material is needed to do immense damage, international safeguards are analogous to a simple chain, and until it is too late to do much in a preventive way it may be impossible to tell which of many links is the weakest. Responsibility for international safeguarding lies with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has its headquarters in Vienna and sends inspectors—nuclear auditors—to nations that have agreed to cooperate, either under the terms of the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty of 1968 or by some earlier arrangement already existing between a given nation and the I.A.E.A., which was established in 1957. Not all nations cooperate.

Henry D. Smyth, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton, was United States Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1961 until 1970. He has often been called a nuclear statesman. He worked on the Manhattan Project—among other places, in the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago—and it was he who was chosen to write a book to be published immediately after the war explaining publicly what had happened, what had led to the new phenomenon. From 1943 onward, his office on the Princeton campus had armed guards outside the door round the clock, because Smyth, some of the time, was in there describing the development of a type of weapon that would end the war, no matter who exploded it. His book, “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes,” remarkable for its concision and its lucidity, was published in 1945. It contained the basic physics but not what were then the secrets of the fabrication of the bombs. From 1949 to 1954, some years before he began to commute between Princeton and the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, he was one of the five commissioners of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. I went to see him one day not long ago at his office in Princeton. He is a tall and angular man with steel-gray hair, mildly formal in manner but without starch. I asked him if he found it possible to be optimistic that there could be effective international safeguards.

“Yes,” he said. “Let me explain. Anything is better than nothing.

“The safeguards aspects of the nonproliferation treaty were drawn up by a special committee, involving thirty or forty nations, that met on and off for a year. That such a committee could work for a year on a difficult technical and political problem and come out with a reasonable answer is in itself something of a triumph. I was surprised at the degree to which you could get cooperation from people, and the degree to which they developed national pride through being internationally minded. I think there are going to be a lot of people who are reluctant to break the club rules.

“International safeguards depend on national systems. A truly international safeguards system would be impossibly expensive. Nations would not go along with it anyway.

“Our most serious problem with regard to the nonproliferation treaty is that it emphasizes national safeguards systems—and if the United States is interested in the nonproliferation treaty, the United States safeguards system should he good and effective and orderly, and, as far as I can make out, it isn’t.

“What I am concerned about internationally is power reactors in countries that have unstable governments. The Pakistan reactor, for example, builds up a stockpile of plutonium. Suppose there’s a revolution. A totally new and crazy government comes in, and there’s the plutonium just sitting there asking to be made into a bomb.

“The A.E.C. production and reactor people couldn’t care less about these international problems.

“The A.E.C. approach is ‘Papa knows best. Papa is guarding against every possible danger.’ You look into it and find they are not.

“I think security in this country is important, particularly protection of weapons themselves, but I think illicit production of weapons is more likely to come as a national enterprise than as the enterprise of a gang.”

General Crowson agreed with that last point. “It requires a plot,” he said one day in Germantown. “To get all the people together without the plot leaking seems all but impossible. A dozen, maybe two dozen, would he needed—all highly trained individuals. One man could not do it. The scenario of the home bombmaker is overplayed. That piece has been highly overplayed. Suppose you have a set of plans for a gasoline engine. How many people do you know who could make one?”

When Ted Taylor first approached Los Alamos, in 1949, he climbed into the mountains from Santa Fe in his 1942 green Buick coupe. Caro steadied a basket that held a baby. In back, where a seat had once been, was a large part of their earthly goods. Los Alamos, seven thousand feet up into the ponderosas, and not far from the Continental Divide, is built on mesas that project from mountainsides. The laboratory is twice as large now as it was when Taylor first saw it. On that day in 1949, a big Army tank was beside the gate, its cannon pointing down the road at incoming cars. Ted stopped at the gate—a guard tower to his left, a building to his right full of guards and files on all personnel, even babies. ‘The Taylors were identified and given badges, and they went on through. Today, cars come and go. The tank is gone. The tower is empty. The guard building is a Mexican restaurant called Philomena’s. The road is open.

J. Carson Mark, the man who had agreed to have Taylor come work at Los Alamos, had been there since wartime, when he led the diffusion-theory group of Project Y, the code name of the Los Alamos project. A Canadian, as precise in his diction as in his physics, Mark was a subtle man—large of frame, a large head, a somewhat judicial demeanor. He had eventually become chief of the Theoretical Division, which now, in 1949, was about to enter its second era of extraordinary conceptual advance, its efforts directed mainly toward the perhaps insuperable problem of igniting a thermonuclear explosion. A quarter century later, Mark would still be at Los Alamos, still running the Theoretical Division, with an old Santa Fe Railroad clock on his wall; and he would look back with fondness to the days at the beginning of the nineteen-fifties when a group of young men came in from various universities to help conceive new bombs. “This was a tremendous group of people,” Mark would remember. “A constellation. Bob Thorn, Walter Goad, George Bell, Ted Taylor—all new to professional work, all enthusiastically collaborating. Bob Serber, at Berkeley, had known Ted well enough to be able to assure me that we would be quite well served if he came here. Serber said that Ted had gone to pieces in his oral examination. That was not a worry to me. While we had lots of things at Los Alamos that people could get anxious about, we did not have anything quite as crucial as an oral examination. Ted was a delightful, bright young man. He was not the best from the point of view of command-depth assurance in physics, but he was far above average; and what was really outstanding was his prying into corners, turning over stones—his enthusiasm, his eagerness, his curiosity, his restlessness. These things, combined with a very good level of physics, made something quite unusual.”

On December 10, 1949, Ted and Caro began what proved to be a long letter, written over several days, to Ted’s parents in Mexico. (“Working on the bomb was a difficult thing to write home about,” Caro would say in later years. “After all, Ted came from a family of missionaries and ministers. All through our time at Los Alamos, Ted’s mother made guarded statements about what he was doing. Ted had talked peace in college. It was a surprise to find him working on the bomb.”) In the letter, Caro wrote:

I’m getting more used to the looks and atmosphere of the town. At first it was a shock to see so many like houses set row on row. Some of the newer, postwar places are very nice looking, though of necessity they are all rectangular or square boxes. Some of the earliest places are like slums, with little or no lawn, and a general downtrodden look. Most of these are “sub-standard” and to be torn down. Ours is sort of in the middle. I guess it’s not a slum, and is very clean and adequate inside, though built with no imagination, and painted a horrid mustard and maroon on the outside. There is a patch of lawn in front which needs encouragement, and a hundred square yards of picket-fence-enclosed bare dirt in back, for laundry and mudpies. . . .

The nature of Ted’s work and its secrecy are sort of a family ghost, and a hindrance to companionship. Perhaps I’m too curious, or too dependent on his interests for mine, but it used to be fun to at least hear what he was doing.

Ted continued:

My work has been most interesting, and I’ve been learning a great deal. No doubt you remember how I felt, a couple of years ago, about ever working on anything directly connected with military applications of atomic energy. Since then my ideas of this have changed. I’m not certain when this change came; it’s been slow. (I do know that it was before I was offered the job at Los Alamos.) I’ve always thought that the very existence of a means by which men could conceivably completely destroy each other might be just the thing which would prevent any future world wars—and yet at one time I claimed that I would have nothing to do with development of the bomb. This now seems inconsistent. The way I feel now is this: A full-scale war between Russia and the U.S., in which A-bombs in their present form were used, would make this world unliveable, as far as I am concerned. And yet people in Congress (and, I suppose, in the Kremlin) talk about a future war as something indeed horrible—but they talk in terms of preparing to win it. I claim that these people don’t fully realize the destructive potentialities of atomic energy. The Bikini tests have been played down; Hiroshima is pointed at as the proof that a modern city can survive an atomic blast; comparison is made with the strategic bombing of Germany during the last war, and the conclusion is reached that atomic bombing would be little more decisive. This, I think, is all wishful thinking. It ignores the tens of thousands killed outright at Hiroshima, the effect on a nation of the destruction by conventional bombs in Germany if it had all been accomplished in one day, the fact that there was an immense amount of destruction at Bikini.

I think that there is only one realistic way to avoid war, and that is to make the world really afraid of it. I think the world should be afraid of it now, but apparently wishful thinking and ignorance (particularly on the part of those people who have some say in what goes on) have removed much of this fear. If A-bombs in their present form will make another war something which mankind cannot bear, and if most people don’t realize this, then, I say, there is only one thing to do: develop a bomb which will leave no doubt in anyone’s mind. This idea is repulsive to most people I know, and yet I feel, as strongly as I have ever felt anything, that it is the only way out. The basic physical principles of a superbomb are all there. If a war with conventional weapons did not effectively wipe out civilization (as I think it would), I am certain that a super-bomb would be developed during the war, as it was during the last, and would be used until civilization really was wiped out. So, again, I think that the thing to do is to find that horrible thing now, before a shooting war starts and people completely lose their ability to reason. Once fear of war removes the immediate threat, then my idealism takes over, and I think in terms of World Government.

Enough of all this, for now. I can just say that I firmly believe that what I am doing now is right, and that I will continue to do it until someone or something shows me a way in which I, personally, can do more to help prevent another war, or that I am wrong.

Lots of love,

Ted

When Ted spoke of a superbomb, he was still thinking about a fission bomb, because the feasibility of the fusion bomb—the hydrogen bomb—was by no means clear, and meanwhile he thought he saw ways to do fission bombs in yield ranges immensely exceeding the scale of anything yet exploded. There were about a hundred people in the Theoretical Division, and Ted’s confidence, at age twenty-four and after Berkeley, was not such that he thought his voice would ever amount to much among them. Established stars, like Stanislaw Ulam, the mathematician, and Edward Teller, the physicist, were at work on the enigma of the hydrogen bomb. Taylor’s first assignment, by contrast, had been to calculate the possibilities of making a somewhat smaller version of the old bomb that had been exploded over Nagasaki. He became absorbed with fission, with its possibilities, both great and small, and he was surprised by how much he seemed to see in his own mind in comparison with how little had been done at Los Alamos since the war. When he arrived, there were no good efficiency calculations, for example. Within the Theoretical Division, there was much more interest in hydrogen bombs than there was in fission bombs. The prevailing attitude was that fission bombs were conceptually more or less a finished chapter—an assembly-line matter, no longer of great interest to the designer. Their future would be just a question of paring them, trimming them, tidying them up. Contemplating in turn each of the components of a Nagasaki-type bomb, Ted calculated the relationship of one part to another to another—the various densities, alternative materials—and he began to think how scientifically crude it was to test new or varying components all at once. Yet that had been standard procedure. The bomb was a sphere within a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. The small sphere in the center was called the initiator and was designed to give off millions of neutrons when squeezed. Around the initiator was the ball of fissile material, metallic uranium-235 or plutonium-239, in which the neutrons from the initiator would make fissions. Around the uranium or plutonium was the reflector (also called the tamper). It was made of natural uranium or some other heavy metal to prevent neutrons from getting out and to contain the explosion just long enough to prolong the fission chain reaction and produce a greater yield. Around the tamper was ordinary high explosive, the bulk of the bomb. Basically TNT, its purpose was to squeeze the uranium or plutonium from a sub-critical density to a supercritical density, squeezing the initiator at the same time and creating an instant fireball. The high explosive had to be set off with something like absolute symmetry all around the sphere, or the squeeze, the implosion, would not be adequate. Two-thirds of the force of the high explosive went outward, and was lost anyway, so the implosive one-third had to be all the more nearly perfect. Mathematics had shown that charges shaped as lenses were best at starting such a process, so lenses formed the outer part of the sphere. The lenses looked like breasts, and each—there were dozens of them—had a kind of nipple to which a wire was attached. The wires ran to a common source of electricity, and this detonated the bomb. Timing was crucial. Differences of as little as a millionth of a second in the time at which lenses were detonated could affect the symmetry of the implosion, bringing it in too early on one side and thus failing to compress adequately the metal within. .  Timing, absolute densities of material, deviations from perfect symmetry—Ted explored each aspect of the art and decided that multiple small-yield nuclear explosions, each testing a separate aspect, would bring the level of conceptual design, as he put it, “closer and closer to the middle of things.”

The idea was, if nothing else, impractical—a whole series of nuclear explosions just for one bomb. Shyly, Ted talked it over with George Gamow—an expansive, garrulous, imagistic physicist, to whose Russian warmth Ted felt drawn, as did everyone else at Los Alamos. Gamow, a progenitor of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, had also postulated the mechanism for alpha-particle decay, and was the author of “Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland” and “Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom”—popular elucidations of such subjects as relativity and quantum theory, illustrated with his own drawings. Gamow had defected from Russia in the thirties. With growing interest, he listened to Ted’s idea, and he reviewed calculations Ted had made in contemplation of new sizes, new shapes, new yields—all within a whole new method of approach. Gamow spoke with Teller, and with Enrico Fermi. Eventually, a meeting was called of the senior members of the Theoretical Division and its consultants, and Ted was asked to explain his concept. Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos, was there, and so were Teller, Fermi, Gamow, Ulam, Konopinski—people whose names Ted had known for years, people he had wondered if he would ever meet. The situation was something like the oral examination, with the difference that Ted felt no apprehension whatever, although he was intensely excited. He was, above all, interested. He knew exactly what he wanted to say. He began by explaining that he was there to talk about experimental testing of individual phenomena inside implosion systems. He said it seemed clear that a whole task force couldn’t go out to the Pacific just to test a part, so a test site on the North American Continent would be necessary. He outlined the sorts of experiments he had in mind. The meeting reacted with enthusiasm, and, of course, was followed by much critical review. The result was the first series of nuclear tests in the United States—and the establishment of the A.E.C.’s test sites at Yucca Flats and Jackass Flats, Nevada. “You can imagine what this did for my ego,” Ted would say many years later. “After Berkeley, I had really been down in the dumps. That meeting, and one or two after that, brought me up to a level of confidence that has been maintained ever since. I’ve never lost it.”

After that meeting, Ted was given lots of time, open access to the computer, freedom of the imagination. Once in a while, he visited the divisions that actually built the bombs, and poked around in the shops there, but in his work he did not handle nuclear materials. He was a conceptual designer. All he needed was a hand calculator, a slide rule, pencils, some blank paper, some graph paper, and, from time to time, a computer output. Completing a new design, he would go to Carson Mark with a piece of graph paper in his hand—lines and numbers on it—and Mark would look at it and often say, in a way that was extremely rewarding to Ted, “Well, I’ll be damned!” Ted had a desk, but was not disposed to sit. He could not think sitting down. He walked around a lot, up and down the corridors of the rambling wooden building where the wartime bombs had been designed. As he walked, his eyes swam with calculations, and he lost touch with his surroundings while nuclear devices gradually took form within his mind. If he snapped his fingers with both hands, he was thinking particularly well. If his body wiggled, he was even closer to fresh solutions. At home, he moved around a lot, too. Caro by now was accustomed to this. “When we first got married, that had been the most difficult thing of all—to exchange confidences with a moving target.”

Ted loved to hike, not only indoors but out, and on weekends he would sometimes go to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, above Sante Fe, across the Valley of the Rio Grande. He walked on a trail on the ridgeline, at twelve thousand feet, conceiving bombs. Any number of them fell apart in his mind, or on the scraps of paper back at his desk, but when they did not fall apart they were shown first to Mark, then to Jane Hall, a physicist who served as the link to the military, then to Duncan MacDougall, leader of the GMX Division—the division that dealt with high-explosive components. A design that got past these three was then put on the agenda of a meeting of the Fission Weapons Committee. Ted was required to do what he called “a selling job” before the committee, flogging his new bomb. When he was successful, the metal core and the high-explosive components were made separately and shipped to Eniwetok or Nevada, where they were assembled.

Caro knew only in a general way what Ted was doing, and she was, in her words, “sort of shocked by it—considerably so—although Ted had found a way to see that it was a good thing.” She decided that she could do nothing about it, so she tried to put the matter out of her mind. This was somewhat difficult, because explosions occurred frequently at Los Alamos. The GMX Division, which had a huge machine that could X-ray an implosion, tested high-explosive systems in the canyons that splayed the town. Los Alamos was ringed with antic signs— “danger explosives keep out.”

Down a slope from the Taylors’ house was a culvert, and Ted decided that if a red alert should come and there was no time to seek better shelter his family would huddle in the culvert. In time, he discussed bomb attacks and civil defense with his children—radiation, fallout, shock waves, nuclear-weapons effects. This was too much for Caro. “Ted is a good talker. If he wants me to believe something is bad, I believe it. I still expect the worst when I hear a siren. We knew too much about all these things.” A forest fire once threatened Los Alamos, and Ted and others went out to fight it with shovels. The wind shifted and the fire crowned over their heads. Ted had never before been so frightened. He had to run for his life.

Los Alamos was set in a beautiful place, with its high altitude, its clear air, its big pines, and the forested mountainsides rising above its mesas. Ted and Caro looked out a window one morning and saw a black bear in a tree. There was plenty to do beyond the town gates—ski, climb, fish for trout, camp beside a stream beneath the ponderosas. Views from the streets of the town reached forty miles to the snow-covered Sangre de Cristos. Obviously, more than remoteness had drawn Robert Oppenheimer to establish a wartime scientific laboratory around a group of log buildings called the Los Alamos Ranch School, which he had often visited on his vacations in New Mexico. “Shut in by a gate, shut out by a gate, your perspective was limited, though,” Caro has recalled. “Los Alamos was a town inside a fence. At a dinner party, the men went off into a corner—more so than ordinarily. You didn’t think about it, but there was something that was missing. Not long after we arrived, churches and privately owned stores and such were for the first time permitted to come in there. Churches suddenly sprang up of all sizes and kinds—about every denomination you can think of. It must have been an indication of something. Los Alamos was a nervous collection of middle-aged young people. The average age there was eighteen. The average adult age was thirty-five. You were children of the government, paying subsidized rents and living in prefabricated homes. There were wild drinking parties, marriages ending, and so forth. Ted did not particularly notice this. For him, it was an exciting community. Hans Bethe came to dinner, in hiking boots. Sometimes, Ted would go with Mr. Fermi on hikes in the mountains above the town. It was hard for a person to know how Ted was coming along. A person’s confidence had been a little shaken, maybe. You worry just a little bit about your husband professionally, you know. If he could entertain Mr. Fermi for a whole walk, for a whole morning, I figured he must be a good listener or he must have something to say. On the evenings when we happened to go out, I was impressed by the people who seemed to want to talk to him in corners. Ted would say that a device of his was to be set off in Eniwetok, and I’d know he was doing O.K.”

In the fall of 1950, Ted made a long visit with two others to Washington as a kind of emissary to the Pentagon—to brief and to be briefed. He was twenty-five years old and had been a junior-grade lieutenant in the Navy, and now suddenly he found himself in the supreme palace of the military, being ushered around by fleet admirals and four-star generals who treated him with the kind of reverential respect they might have shown a legitimate son of Thor himself. Meals were served in the Flag and General Officers’ Mess. First, the Pentagon acquainted the scientists with a summary of what might happen if the United States were to attack the Soviet Union. Then an entire day was spent reviewing what would happen if Russia—whose first nuclear bomb had been exploded a year earlier—were to attack the United States. The generals making the presentation succeeded in frightening Ted. The drift of their argument was that Russia would win easily, that Russia had only a small nuclear stockpile but with conventional arms would overwhelm Western Europe, and meanwhile the Russians were safe enough at home, as a result of an intensive program of civil defense. For six weeks thereafter, Taylor looked through stereoscopic glasses at three-dimensional photographs of bits and pieces of the Soviet infrastructure—a refinery here, an assembly plant there. Pentagon target analysts drew circles with compasses around Soviet military bases, industries, cities. The pictures had been made by the Germans during the Second World War. Taylor’s role was to estimate how many kilotons would be required to remove something from a picture. The Pentagon wanted to figure out what, cumulatively, was needed to destroy the Soviet Union.

One result of these discussions was a military request for an extremely high-yield fission bomb. The generals thought that a hundred kilotons was the upper limit of possibility. Ted said he felt he could do a lot better than that. Really? The generals were under the impression that a fission bomb be-yond that limit would have to contain so much uranium or plutonium that it would go critical and fizzle before achieving detonation. Ted said he felt the problem could be avoided. The generals wished him luck, saying they hoped for a fission bomb with a yield high enough to enhance what they called the country’s deterrent posture. Ted went back to Los Alamos and designed the Super Oralloy Bomb.

At about the same time, work on the hydrogen bomb had reached a level of frustrating bafflement, if not paralysis. The theoretical potentialities were clear. The problem was how to ignite the thermonuclear material (liquid deuterium or whatever) in a way that would cause a fusion-reactive explosion. Very high temperatures were required, and these existed in an exploding fission bomb. But just to set one off inside a barrel of deuterium would not do, because the energy of the fission explosion would dissipate too fast as radiation or be drained off by electrons, which would simply whirl faster and accomplish nothing. One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb, George Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, “That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.”

S.O.B., the Super Oralloy Bomb, in time was detonated at Eniwetok, and—in Ted’s mind, anyway—S.O.B. solved permanently the problem of the high-yield bomb (of whatever type), for anything larger seemed redundant. It was exploded at high altitude. As soon as the generals saw the fireball, they knew they had got what they wanted. S.O.B. was—and it still is— by far the largest-yield pure-fission bomb ever constructed in the world. I once asked Taylor how much, if am, plutonium it had in it, and he said, “No comment.” I asked him how much nuclear material was in it, and he said, “A lot.”

“Can I say ‘toward a hundred kilograms’?”

“I wouldn’t say anything.”

“What can you say about the yield?”

“It was in the megaton range.”

In the parlance of weaponry, “the kiloton range” is the phrase used to describe fission bombs. “The megaton range” is the phrase used to describe hydrogen bombs. “Megaton range” has only been used once to describe a fission bomb.

A bomb test was an attractive aspect of work at Los Alamos—a business trip, sometimes to the South Pacific, the witnessing of an unforgettable spectacle—and there was a pecking order about who got to go. Ted did not see S.O.B. explode. He went to few bomb tests in the early years, because in the corporate scale of things he was so low. He was a forty-five-hundred-dollar-a-year designer with no Ph.D. He was a research assistant, not a member of the staff. Others, most of the others, came first. An exception was made for a test in Nevada. Ted had designed a bomb called Scorpion, which contained a component radically different from anything that had preceded it, and he was invited to be present at the explosion that would ratify or disprove his invention. The component was the reflector, which was ordinarily made of metals heavier than steel. The reflector traditionally added a considerable amount to the total weight of a bomb. Wandering around the corridors, musing about reflectors, Ted had begun to contemplate how light they might possibly be—how to make a single long stride toward a new generation of lightweight bombs—and his thoughts started through the periodic table from hydrogen, the lightest element, upward. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium . . . Beryllium was a compact, fairly dense collection of light atoms, lighter than oxygen, lighter than magnesium, lighter than aluminum. With regard to stray neutrons that might pass its way, beryllium had a high capacity to deflect them-a “high scattering cross-section.” Being a good neutron scatterer might be worth even more than being dense. Quite a lot more. Ted went back to his papers, his slide rule, and his calculator, and began to sketch out the mathematics of Scorpion. No question, you could get some sort of explosion, but how big would it be? Some people who reviewed the concept felt that trying such a reflector would result in nothing more than a fizzle yield. Nonetheless, the reflector was fabricated—an accomplishment in itself, since beryllium is both toxic and brittle. In all other respects, Scorpion would be a familiar implosion bomb, the reflector being its only component with unproved characteristics. Made in Los Alamos, wired up in Albuquerque, it was taken to Yucca Flats, and Ted was flown there to see it. Through long, flat distances, he could see mountains in every direction. The desert floor, a huge shallow basin, was covered with sage. Elevations gently rose toward the barren foothills of the mountains. The Air Force was already making a romantic film about the place, with a narrator saying, “This is the valley where the giant mushrooms grow, the atomic clouds, the towering angry ghosts of the fireballs.” Such presentations would eventually sicken Ted when he came upon them, just as he would be sickened, on visits to Strategic Air Command bases, by signs that said, “war is our business.” Now, though, it was all new to him, and he thought of Scorpion only as a device that would go off in a desert—an excitement, a spectacle, an investigation of physical phenomena. He spent what he remembers as “essentially no time” contemplating that Scorpion might be reproduced as a weapon for killing human beings. He marvelled instead at the exceptional clarity of the Nevada air and how the distances he could see were so great they were deceiving. Scorpion’s tower, from across the desert, looked like a wire stuck into the ground. The tower was three hundred feet high. The height had to be greater than the expected radius of the fireball, so that the shock wave breaking away from the fireball would bounce off the ground and push the fireball upward, preventing it from picking up debris and causing unnecessary fallout. The top of the tower was an eight-by-eight-foot cab that had sides of corrugated iron, a gable roof made of sheets of iron, and an iron-grating floor. Ted went up the tower to look at Scorpion before it was fired—a dark object in the center of the cab. The tower itself contained vertical piping that was used to conduct specific types of radiation to instruments that would measure their intensity milliseconds before the instruments themselves would be destroyed. The explosion was delayed a day while technicians tried to get a rat out of a pipe. Ted, in the course of the wait, found a parabolic mirror with a small hole in it at the bottom of its concavity. Facing it to the sun, he determined where, behind the mirror, the collected rays came to focus. He attached some stiff wires to the mirror and shaped them so that they would hold a Pall Mall with one end at the focal point. Finally, at dawn the next day, Scorpion was detonated. Dawn was good for photography. Yield was measured by the rate at which a fireball grew. Ted was far across the desert, watching— hoping (he would always be highly optimistic about his bombs) for twenty kilotons, while some others were prophesying a much smaller yield. People who have worked for decades at Los Alamos have said that you can read all there is about tanks, ships, and buildings disappearing in vapor but the experiential fact is that you don’t know what a kiloton is until you see and, in a sense, feel one. Los Alamos people were always taken aback when they first went to a test site and saw a bomb explode. The light came first, and then the waves and waves of heat. Many seconds later came the sound, which varied from a dull thud to a sharp crack. Scorpion, on its day, spread out into the sky in a way that indicated at once a yield in the range its designer wanted—a fantastic hint of how light and compact a nuclear-explosive device could ultimately be. Fifteen seconds after Scorpion flashed, Ted reached down to the parabolic mirror beside him and took from behind it a smoldering Pall Mall. He drew in a long, pleasing draught of smoke. He had lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb. ♦

(This is the first part of a three-part Profile.)