'Atomic John'

[AdamSmith]

In-depth profile of a civilian whose passionate avocation is figuring out and documenting every last detail of the first two atomic bombs.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/atomic-john?src=mp

[RA1]

What wonderful week this has been. Earlier I listened to an interview with Michio Kaku, then read this article and finally decided to support Jesse Ventura for president.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

The Jesse Ventura tie-in being that he is either a fallout-induced mutant or an extraterrestrial?

[AdamSmith]

Interesting Reddit online Q&A with this guy: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gey2l/iam_john_costermullen_the_atomic_trucker_who/

[AdamSmith]

His book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0006S2AJ0?pc_redir=1407311991&robot_redir=1

His user profile (subject-matter-relevant autobiography) on Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Atomicjohn

[RA1]

I believe that JV tells the truth as he knows it which is beyond a rarity among pols. That does not mean you do or should agree with his positions. I do not but I am willing to give credit to his modus operandi.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Ah! Agree his honest forthrightness is a delightful anomaly in public discourse.

In a number of respects he is a crank and a kook, but on the other hand many of his positions I share, and am glad for his voice in the mix.

[AdamSmith]

The 'Fat Man' plutonium bomb, according to Coster-Mullen:

http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fat_Man_Internal_Components.png

[AdamSmith]

Different person, related topic -- reminiscence by a bomb assembler.

Diary
by Mike Kirby

I have worked in an atomic weapons depot, a Veterans’ psychiatric hospital and a perfectly awful mental hospital for juveniles, and in all of these places I did what I was told to do, and gave my notice when I had had it with the life they offered. The fact that I was able to follow almost any order, I owe to my navy training. I am useful. I keep my mouth shut. Sometimes.

I got my ‘Q’ clearance, giving me access to atomic weapon secrets, in July 1958 and was sent to a depot in Nevada where atomic weapons were stored. We were still using the first generation of air-droppable bombs and warheads, though they were being phased out. They were the direct descendants of Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Real monsters. You saw the Mark 5 and Mark 7 bombs and you knew they weren’t fire-crackers. The Mark 7 was about two and a half feet in diameter, about 15 feet long and weighed 1700 pounds. We didn’t have to assemble the TNT sphere, but the detonators that triggered the implosion wave had to be put in one by one, and attached to the cables that came off the high-voltage capacitor bank. The detonators were sensitive: if you dropped them more than six inches they’d go off. A couple of times they took us out to the firing range and blew a couple up while we watched from twenty feet away. There was no question, it could blow a hole in you, and if you were in final preflight assembly and the shockwave hit the TNT sphere, you’d lose the assembly bay and everyone in it. Two hands at all times when you handled dets. Kohler, who liked to have his fun with people, sneaked a couple of dummy detonators into a case of live ones, and one day in the middle of the arming sequence, took what he knew was a dummy and tossed it to poor Horpstead, who bobbled it, dropped it and dived for cover, thinking this was it. Kohler just laughed, hah hah. Big joke.

We had special pliers to secure the electrical connectors. You torqued up the connectors tight but not too tight, matched up the holes on the connector to the holes on the receptacle, threaded a wire seal through the holes, and then used these pliers to spin the two ends of the wire together and make neat little seals. This was Standard Operating Procedure to prevent the connectors vibrating loose in the bomb bay. Today all these connections are sealed at the factory. No chance of the kind of mischief I spent too much time thinking about. It was brutally hot up there on the surface, but we had air-conditioning and the twin ordnance igloos we worked in were mostly underground; just their ends showed above the surface. Ten ton motor-driven doors sealed the entrances used to take weapons in and out. The whole area was heavily fortified. At night jack-rabbits electrocuted themselves against the security fences: distant pops and small blossoms of flame.

Inside, pretty much everything was green. Pea green for the walls with dark green trim and cement floors. Bulletins about security, sermons on the dangers of high voltage. A workbench with test equipment ran along the south wall. Two names came back to me this morning: Karlsven and Katchke. God knows how Katchke was really spelled. He wore glasses and I remember him as shy, the classic nerd. He didn’t understand my jokes. He tested the radars, the twin black cans we strapped into the fusing assemblies. In the old days when gunners and bosun mates were working in the programme, men going on leave used to stand in front of the radar transmitters. The legend was that five minutes in front of them made you sterile for 12 hours. I assume all those clowns died unpleasant deaths, or maybe it was just another sea story told to new guys.

Katchke was a high-class tech who knew about radar and advanced electronics; he even did some soldering now and then. I belonged to a lower caste: I swapped black boxes, ran testing protocols and checked the tyre pressure on the weapon carriers and wheeled them around on the forklift. I felt safe with this small group of technicians who clustered around the test equipment, running checks on the weapons they brought in from the storage igloos. I had a few buddies; I was off the streets; I was clean and sober and confined myself to one beer a day; I had my shoes spit-shined and wasn’t worried about where my next buck was coming from. Our main job was doing retrofits. Blizzards of retrofits, lots of factory recalls of new bombs and warheads. Bad batteries, malfunctioning radars and contact fuses, whatever. I had a crow on my dungarees which meant I had a little rank. I had an account in the base credit union where some money went every month towards my college education. I did well in advancement tests.

By 1960 I had been in the navy for two years, the traumatic effects of boot camp and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were starting to wear off, and I was waking up to certain possibilities in my life. Before boot camp I had been a street kid for about a year. Boot camp meant I could take a shower and wash my clothes. Putting up your hand and taking the oath got you ten weeks in San Diego, without rights, subject to constant abuse. You’re marched here; you’re marched there. You yell yes sir and no sir and try your damndest to fit in and do everything that is demanded of you. Be clean, stand up straight, roll your socks up into balls so that the stencilled initials show in the little window. After failing inspection one day I had my whole sea bag, all 132 pieces of clothing, thrown in the shower and was told I had until the next morning to get everything clean and pressed and ready for inspection at 08.00.

I sat in the shower room for a long time staring at that huge sodden heap of clothing before I roused myself and set to work. Fairly early in that long night of ironing, I found out that I wanted to survive; I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be a sailor; I didn’t want to get a general or medical discharge and go back to the streets and, more than anything else, I wanted the approval of my boot camp chief petty officer. And when I graduated with the rest of Company 341, one of eighty men standing in ranks at the San Diego Naval Training Center, I stood proud in my anonymity, staring fiercely ahead at nothing, coming to attention, coming to right face, told to stand at ease and finally mustered out, to get two weeks of leave before my first duty station.

All this merely meant that I had, like everyone else, a fierce wish to belong, to obey orders. It’s nothing to boast about. I had been programmed. Deprogramming myself was much harder. But maybe surviving boot camp is something to boast about, to be proud about.

When I enlisted, I said I wanted to be a hospital corpsman. I think this was an intelligent choice. I have never been that gung-ho. I enlisted not to fight a war but to get three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. And looking after people is what I ended up doing for most of my working life. Nurse’s aide, psychiatric aide, home health aide. I’m retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen clean, patient clean and medicated, wastebaskets empty, shift annotated.

In the later days of the boot camp, when some of the pressure was off, we were marched over to a building to talk about our future careers. Our test results were in, and I was already a pariah in my company for my high marks. The company commander made me stand at attention in front of the company while he talked about me. He walked around me, pointing to various parts of my anatomy. He wanted to reassure all the people in the company whose marks were low that they were good people and sound sailors. He wanted to tell them that if they were worried about their scores, to look at Kirby here, who got a 75 but couldn’t do anything right, who might singlehandedly, through all his fuckups, deny the company the performance pennants they deserved.

When it was my turn there was a chief petty officer looking at my file. ‘You want to be a hospital corpsman?’ I said I did. I think he sniggered. I could do better, he said. I could still be a hospital corpsman if I wanted, but anyone could be a corpsman. My test scores were very high. Especially for electronics, and mechanical ability. He wondered if I wanted to spend my four years emptying bedpans and making beds. He said I had a higher calling. The navy had a new rating that combined electronics and other sophisticated training in armaments. He said that some day I might have a real career in the defence industry. It was all highly classified, and until I got my top secret clearance, I would remain in the dark. And so I said yes, without too much internal struggle, I think. I was putty in the hands of anyone fatherly who told me I was underestimating myself.

So I signed on the line. Three months later I was on temporary duty in the holding barracks at Sandia Base, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We were waiting for our security clearance. One day 24 of us got our notices and marched to the ‘Q’ area gate, where all mysteries would be revealed. We had badges that let us get into most of the buildings beyond the barbed-wire fences. The first day we went to the museum. My God, it was love at first sight. All those bombs and missile warheads, and we were going to work on them. We all talked in whispers; there were models of Fat Man and Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I remember standing behind the yellow line, looking up at an absolutely massive hydrogen bomb. The first H-blast detonated a stationary refrigeration plant, the next came from a bomb like the one we were looking at – about the size of a 40-foot boxcar. It was delivered by a B-36 whose bomb bay had to be lengthened and widened. And then we walked through more recent exhibits, when the weapons got smaller and more powerful. There was the tiny ASROC, a nuclear depth charge, and warheads for the Polaris and other ICBMs. Pictures of the tests in Nevada and Bikini.

At classes for the next ten or so weeks, we practised procedures with dummy bombs, studied theory, saw plenty of movies and were taught radiation safety. One movie was shot in Los Alamos in the wake of a bad accident in the 1940s when a worker accidentally brought together two blocks of uranium and radiation inundated the area. They filmed his last hours. They asked him to talk about what he was feeling. I remember his face was beet red and his hair was falling out. He was polite and responsive to the last, apologising when he didn’t remember things or started coughing.

The Mark 7 was my favourite, an old-fashioned big bomb with all the big bomb’s glamour and allure. In the final testing phase, you simulated an airdrop. You unpacked the steel storage cans, bolted and assembled the pieces, cabling up the radome in the nose and the bomb’s fusing and firing units. After everything was double-checked and rigged up with the equipment that simulated a real drop, I would stand on a short step-ladder, and when the team leader gave the word, reach over and yank the two wires that in real life would stay with the plane. There would be a few seconds of silence, and then a roar from two power inverters pumping 115v AC into the system. The altimeters on the test gear would spin as the air pressure against the ports increased. Time would pass, then the radars would come on and start ranging at 5000 feet of altitude, then the main capacitor bank would come up to peak voltage, and eventually the radars would find the ground where it should be, and the weapon would fire. A big bang, needles hitting pegs followed by the sound of the inverters shutting down. The warhead was fifty feet away in the next bay, so all that happened was that the lightning bolt that would have blown the detonators was grounded out and dissipated. When we finished the checks, the warhead and the tail section were added, and the bomb was ready to load into a B-52 and incinerate some city.

But we didn’t talk or think like that. Everything was matter-of-fact and technical. Clean as a whisker. No blood or guts, no visions of Armageddon, except now and then when they would suddenly shut the place down and put us all on alert. Marines in the guard towers, sirens blowing, a lockdown for 48 hours. Planes would be loading down at the strip, and we were under the ground working with no way of knowing whether World War Three was on. One kid worked in our unit as a weapons handler for a couple of months and never knew what those weapons were that he was loading and positioning. He went crazy. He thought we were mad to take all these things for granted. No sooner had he started talking like that than he vanished, like I did later.

In the winter of 1961-62, things were slow in the electrical bay, and I was transferred to the mechanical bay, where I worked doing retrofits and supervised the library, checking weapon manuals in and out. I inevitably did quite a bit of reading in the process of updating manuals, and it was there, sitting at my desk, that I started to do a little research that might have made me very dangerous to everyone on the planet. But it didn’t. I went to the local community college and took a couple of evening classes, and avoided talking about what I was thinking and learning to Lt Commander Karlsven, the base commander. Karlsven was a taciturn Swede who always looked splendid in his uniform. He came to work in a green Department of Defense sedan; we came to work on a little grey school bus. There was gold on his collar buttons, gold in the braid on his hat that hung on the three-legged hat-stand, silver in his thinning hair that he wore combed straight back. When I left, Karlsven encouraged me to read the Bible. In the college library I found all these books and magazines I never knew existed: the New Republic, the Progressive, Partisan Review and Dissent. I went to see On the Beach, which portrayed the final days of life on Earth after a nuclear war. I started subscribing to the magazines and soon the base security officer wanted to talk to me.

Some time in the spring, a new warhead for the Polaris arrived, the first of many that were to be shipped to the submarine fleet. I went through the warhead manual and found a number of things that disturbed me. This particular warhead was designed for use against cities. It was very compact, a weapon with a small bang and a small cross-section, but its ablative shield was an alloy of uranium, and it produced very heavy alpha fallout downwind. I thought about the world laid waste by these warheads. I wondered if you could be a good soldier and have an imagination.

There was also this. When installed on the rocket, the main warhead connection was safety-wired in place and hidden. But in our bay and out in the storage depots these warheads were stored with an unlocked weapons connector. Unzip the weather cover, and it was right there. The safety mechanisms were in the fusing assembly, not in the warhead. Bang the right pins with the right voltage, and the warhead would blow. I wrote a technical change memo, suggesting a locked cover for the warhead connector while it was in storage.

I alerted the system, but the system wasn’t listening. This memo went into a drawer in my boss’s desk. I remember him looking at me quizzically. Never a word, but no trouble either. I think it made me angry, not being listened to. Anyone who has tried to buck the system understands how difficult it is for an enlisted man to tell an officer what to do. All I wanted was for them to put a lockable cap on the main warhead connection. I wanted them to protect these devices from me and my madness. Stop me from doing something foolish. And thinking of something foolish became an obsession. I saw myself holding the president and the programme hostage, single-handedly bringing about disarmament. People would finally understand how dangerous these weapons were.

I walked out in the desert nights dreaming of doomsday scenarios. I wrote my first poem about the bomb. One day I thought I was about to laugh and cried instead. I found my symptoms in one of my college books on psychology. World War One veterans exhibited it. Reversal of emotions. And so I wrote another memo, the memo that is probably buried in classified files in the Department of Defense, the memo that was hot enough for my boss to look at me with a startled expression and send it on to Karlsven, who sent it to the security officer. ‘I want out,’ I said. ‘Or else.’ And this ‘or else’ got through to them. ‘I will not be responsible for my actions if you keep me here in this programme.’

You write a good memo and there’s no taking it back; no stopping the bullet once it leaves the barrel. I lost my top secret clearance and was eventually transferred to Treasure Island near San Francisco. I cleaned urinals, swept the parade ground, and did guard duty at the brig. Every morning thousands of men were marshalled in the parade ground. Many of us were awaiting orders to ship out. My number was 3039, and every morning I was there waiting for it to be called. As the months went by, and all my shipmates came and went to other assignments, I began to understand that this was punishment duty, that I was going nowhere until my enlistment was up. San Francisco at that time was a hotbed of the peace movement. They couldn’t have thought of a worse place to put me in cold storage. There were demonstrations all the time against atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union had violated an informal test ban earlier that year, and the Department of Defense’s desire to test its modernised missile warheads resulted in the US conducting a series of dramatically stupid hydrogen bomb tests in the spring of 1962 near Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific.

Perhaps some of the guys I trained with in Albuquerque were on Johnston Island. Early-model Thor rockets, returned from years of deployment in England, were used to test out the feasibility of anti-ICBM defence by being detonated at high altitude. The range-safety officers had to abort four of them. The fallout came down. It wasn’t like other tests where the military were held back a decent distance from ground zero. One of the Thors blew up on the pad, making practically the whole island radioactive. There were barracks on that island, and probably a detachment of my fellow GMTs to install the W49 bombs on the Thors. Naval aviators flew seaplanes in and out of the fallout. They brought in an army detachment with bulldozers who pushed many acres of radioactive coral into the lagoon. After Vietnam the island was used to store thousands of barrels of Agent Orange, and then it became a disposal site for chemical munitions. Today it’s not used for anything and no one can visit without special permission.

I started going to the demonstrations against testing in civilian clothes, but I had my navy buzz-cut. These were my people. They were raggedy-ass kids like I used to be, and they were staging sit-ins and getting themselves arrested. I wanted to hold a sign and join them.

And then one day me and the master at arms had it out. I handed in my fifth or sixth chit asking for an early discharge and he told me that I was here for keeps. They weren’t going to discharge me until my four years was up. ‘You’re going to serve every goddamn day you enlisted for.’ So that was it.

‘Well, if you won’t let me out early, can I have this afternoon off?’ I said.

I got the afternoon off. I went to my locker and got out my dress whites. I never had the occasion to wear them because we were always in dungarees. I spit-shined my shoes. There was a sit-in that day at the Atomic Energy Commission building in Oakland. There were five or six people sitting on the front steps when I arrived, and a small crowd milling about. They looked at me with some puzzlement. I think one of them got up and moved out of the way, thinking I wanted to go inside. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Gimme a sign.’ There was one I really liked: ‘Why repeat Khrushchev’s crime?’

I sat down. The crowd got bigger, there were people at the windows looking down at me. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed me. Twenty minutes later, the shore patrol arrived. My leave was cancelled; I was placed in custody for conduct unbecoming. There was cheering from up above when I was picked up and tossed into the paddy wagon. And for the first time in my life I felt I was where I ought to be, in full rebellion against the existing order. I was told on numerous occasions that I was going to face a general court martial on six or seven charges. Then word came down from Washington to discharge me quietly. An honourable discharge. Maybe the thinking was that the peace movement didn’t need a martyr. On 16 June 1962 I was escorted to the administration building. The admiral’s office on the third floor looked over the great expanse of parade ground where we were marched and stood for inspection, and where the morning meat market was held. I stood braced at attention for twenty minutes while this two-star admiral told me what he would have done to me if he had his way. Shot as a goddamn traitor, keelhauled, condemned to life in a marine brig. And as he roared and belched fire and pounded his desk my orders were tucked safely in my pocket. I touched them every now and then to make sure they were still there, and stole a glimpse out of his window from time to time at the distant chequerboard where until three days ago I had stood in square number 3039. Maybe a small smile showed itself on my face and made him that much madder. I was young and a little arrogant then.

Mike Kirby lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and writes an investigative blog about local politics.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mike-kirby/diary

[AdamSmith]

Another nuclear reminiscence.

At Los Alamos
by Jeremy Bernstein

I graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics in 1951 and got my PhD in physics in 1955. I needed a job and a friend made a suggestion: on the Harvard campus there was a relatively modest cyclotron, simple enough for graduate students to operate. There was a position open for a ‘house theorist’. My friend recommended me and I got the job. My only formal duties were to try to answer questions put by the experimenters; otherwise I could do my own work. My main interest then was interpreting the recent findings at Stanford, where electrons were being scattered from protons, and from deuterons and other nuclei. I had written my thesis on the deuteron. But after two years my appointment was over and I had to look for a new job. I applied to the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton and was accepted for autumn 1957. This left the summer.

The Livermore and Los Alamos weapons laboratories were actively recruiting. In the spring of 1954, while I was still working on my thesis, I’d had an unsuccessful interview in Washington with Edward Teller, who was recruiting for Livermore. He made an odd comment about preferring physics to politics. It was only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know in 1957 was the very active role that many of the academics I knew had played in creating the bomb. At Harvard, Norman Ramsey had been involved in selecting the plane that delivered the bomb over Japan. He also signed off on the plutonium device that destroyed Nagasaki. Roy Glauber, an assistant professor when I first knew him, had been the youngest member of the technical staff at Los Alamos, recruited even before he got his bachelor’s degree. His roommate Ted Hall was the second youngest staff member. Hall was also one of the three known Russian spies at Los Alamos. Of course, the chemist James Conant, who was president of Harvard, had been one of the people who ran the whole enterprise. I was closer to Ken Bainbridge, who had selected the test site and was in charge of arming the device that was successfully tested at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945. Now he was chair of the Harvard physics department.

None of these people ever discussed their wartime activities so I was surprised when Bainbridge called me into his office and asked if I would like a summer job at Los Alamos. He said he would recommend me. Los Alamos for me had an almost mystic quality – and some extra money would come in handy when I got to Princeton. I spoke to a Los Alamos recruiter, who told me that I could have the job if I was able to get the relevant security clearance. In 1947 the Atomic Energy Commission introduced a Personnel Security Questionnaire to determine levels of clearance. The levels were ‘P’, then ‘S’, then ‘Q’. A person with Q clearance was entitled to information about nuclear weapons on a ‘need to know’ basis. I had to supply the FBI with a list of everywhere I’d lived for the last ten years. Much later I managed to get my file thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, but it was so heavily redacted that I didn’t learn anything. I’d been rather worried about a great-aunt. She was a subscriber to the Daily Worker and spoke in dark tones about the ‘bosses’. Either they overlooked her or decided she was harmless because I got my clearance.

I arrived at the guard station at Los Alamos and was fitted out with credentials. You needed a pass with your picture on it to enter any of the technical areas. The Los Alamos of 1957 was a much more closely guarded place than it had been during the war, when Oppenheimer had assigned Robert Serber and his wife to go into Santa Fe on a Saturday night and plant rumours at bars that what was happening on the hill had to do with submarines. No one showed the slightest interest. By 1957 everyone knew what was happening on the hill.

Being single, I was assigned quarters in a dormitory left over from the war. I acquired a bicycle, which became my principal means of transportation for the rest of the summer. The next day I rode it to the building where the T-Division – T for Theory – was located. I showed my pass to a series of guards and found my way to my office. I discovered that I was sharing it with Ken Johnson, whom I had known since graduate school. He had written a first-rate thesis and had been kept on as a post doc in the department. He was scheduled to go to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in the autumn. It soon became clear that no one had any work for us, so we were free to do whatever we wanted. I had come with a problem of how to determine the parity of the pi zero using aspects of its two photon decay. I was stuck on the mathematics, so we decided to do it together. Ken was a great mathematician and he proved results with a high degree of generality. We wrote a paper and submitted it to Carson Mark, the director of the theoretical division, to see if we could publish it with a Los Alamos imprimatur. Mark was pleased: he wanted Los Alamos to have a reputation as something other than a bomb factory.

Of course, it was a bomb factory. Los Alamos and Livermore were churning out designs for devices small enough to fit into intercontinental missiles. These were being tested above ground in Nevada in a series that was called Operation Plumbbob. We used to have afternoon tea – something Oppenheimer had introduced during the war – and I’m sure that most of the people who attended were working on weapons. Since I had no ‘need to know’, no one told me anything. I have one ineluctable memory of those teas. James Tuck was a physicist who had been part of the British delegation to Los Alamos during the war. He had come back to work on controlled nuclear fusion, a classified subject in 1957. The first time I saw him he said: ‘The days of the great Los Alamos teas are over.’ Once upon a time you could have tea with Niels Bohr or Fermi, and now he had to make do with the likes of us.

Francis Low was a consultant to the controlled nuclear fusion programme. I had met him briefly when he’d been a visiting professor at MIT; after the summer he was returning there permanently. He was a hero of mine. He and Murray Gell-Mann had made a study of quantum electrodynamics at short distances that introduced techniques which are still basic to quantum field theory. Francis was a devoted tennis player and we played regularly until the middle of August, when he announced he was going to be away watching bomb tests in Nevada. Surprised, I asked if he had been working on weapons. He said no but that Carson Mark had invited him to observe a test. I asked if there was any chance I could go too. Francis said I would have to ask Carson, who told me I could come along provided I paid my way. On the morning of 30 August the three of us took off from the small airstrip at Los Alamos on a commuter flight to Albuquerque.

I was about to enter the ‘need to know’ world. I decided that under no circumstances would I ask any questions. I had no legitimate need to know. I had no idea of our itinerary. I knew that we would have to get from Las Vegas to Mercury, Nevada, the location of the test site, some 65 miles north-west of Las Vegas. That nuclear weapons were being exploded above ground – dumping thousands of kilocuries of radiation into the atmosphere – so close to a major city shows the craziness of the time. I knew that blackjack was part of the Los Alamos culture. In 1956 four American soldiers stationed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground near Baltimore had published a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association entitled ‘The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack’. They explained how to optimise your chances by using the casino rules. The theorists at Los Alamos programmed the Maniac computer to run tens of thousands of hands to see if the strategy actually worked. They were satisfied that it did, and gave a little card showing how to play the game to Los Alamos people who went to Mercury. Francis had made a study of the method and concluded that if you were lucky you might match the federal minimum wage. After we landed at Las Vegas and were met by a small delegation of Los Alamos people in a government car, a casino was our first stop.

The casino must have had a lot of business from people at the test site because there was a light that was turned on if the test scheduled for the next morning was on. The light came on, and we drove to Mercury for a few hours’ sleep. The tests were scheduled for 5.30 a.m. Carson woke us up, and we walked over to a place where a meteorologist was checking the wind. That morning a device called Smoky was to be tested. Carson explained that it was a Livermore device. You could tell because they named their devices after mountains; Los Alamos devices were named after scientists. Galileo was in a tower being readied for a test in two days. The winds were strong so we went to a concrete bunker to await the explosion. I was surprised to find there an old friend of mine from graduate school called Al Peaslee. He had got his degree and then disappeared, but here he was at the test site. His job was to escort a British delegation. ‘We don’t tell them anything,’ he said. He advised me to face away from the explosion and count to ten. I was also given some very dark glass to put over my own glasses. Even the reflection from the bunker walls could damage your eyes. I don’t know how far away from the explosion we were but we were close enough to see the 700-foot tower that had the bomb on top of it. I noticed a hill behind the tower with a grove of Joshua trees. They looked as if they were praying. A loudspeaker counted out the minutes until the explosion and then counted down the last sixty seconds. I had turned my back and covered my eyes with the dark glass but the bright flash still made me shut them. I counted to ten and then turned round.

The horizon in front of me was in turmoil. In the centre was a livid red-orange cloud. The hugeness of it was what impressed me. I had had no idea of the sheer scale of a nuclear explosion. Peaslee had prepared me for the next step. I felt a sharp and slightly painful click in my ears. This was the supersonic shock wave. At Hiroshima it produced a wind stronger than any known typhoon: it knocked over the kerosene cookers the Japanese used to make breakfast and caused most of the fires at Hiroshima. Then came the sound: a sort of rolling thunder. The cloud had turned purple and black and hung in the air like a radioactive cobra about to strike. There was talk of taking cover, but it didn’t move in our direction. I stood there mute. We went back to the dormitory to get a little more sleep.

Sometime around mid-morning I heard the sound of helicopters. Carson had a government car at his disposal. He was going to drive to the 500-foot tower where the next device, the Los Alamos Galileo, was going to be exploded. We went along. On the way there were spots in the desert where the sand had fused into glass. Signs were posted warning of high radioactivity from previous tests. We got to the base of the tower. You could ride most of the way to the top in an open elevator. From that point on there was only a rickety steel ladder. The desert looked a long way down. I had a moment of panic but then it occurred to me that at the top of the ladder there was a nuclear device with a yield comparable to the bomb that flattened Hiroshima. And I was worried about climbing a ladder?

The top was a flat space with just about enough room for Galileo and its attendants. It was a big device with various wires coming out and looked more like a diving bell than a bomb. There was a clicking noise from a vacuum pump. I had no idea why it was there and didn’t ask. Carson spoke to the crew and we went back down the elevator. I thought the tour might be over, but Carson drove to a concrete blockhouse at the far edge of the site. He offered no explanation.

He walked in without knocking or ringing and we followed. Neatly arranged on shelves were the plutonium pits of a considerable number of atomic bombs, probably enough to destroy many cities. I stepped back towards the door. I had read enough about Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know what I was looking at. When he saw me retreat, Francis said that being a few feet further away wouldn’t make much difference if one of them went off. Carson picked up one of the pits, handed it to me, and told me not to drop it. It was warm to the touch – alpha particles – and about the size and weight of a bowling ball. I didn’t know enough to ask the obvious question: why was it so light? A solid sphere of plutonium this size would have weighed a couple of hundred pounds. I’m sure that had I asked I wouldn’t have got an answer. Even asking would have been viewed unfavourably. It was then that I noticed her.

At the other end of the building there was a large workbench where a man was filing something that looked to me like white putty. I had read enough to know that what looked like white putty was a high explosive which was going to be attached to the pit to cause the implosion of the plutonium sphere. Next to him a woman was knitting a green sweater. I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but I at once thought of Eliot’s ‘This is the way the world ends.’ What was she doing there? I didn’t dare ask. Some years later I wanted to write about this, so I sent what I had written to Francis. He said that there had been no woman: I had made it up. Then I wrote to Carson. All he said was that there had been more than one married couple on the site. I was distressed. A week later, Francis called. All he said was: ‘She was there.’

The next morning Galileo was tested. I now knew what to expect but was still overwhelmed. Then we returned to Los Alamos. None of us talked about the tests. Francis, who was on his way to Massachusetts, drove me as far as Lake Forest, Illinois, and I now regret that I didn’t talk to him then. He might have brought me to my senses. Somehow I felt the experience had made me part of the secret world. If you like, I had learned to love the bomb. During my visit to Lake Forest I was introduced to Adlai Stevenson. I somehow conveyed my feelings about the bomb to him. Before I could say much, he looked at me with contempt and walked away. A moratorium on nuclear tests had been part of his unsuccessful 1956 presidential campaign. Eisenhower rejected the idea publicly but was considering the possibility in private. I had said the wrong thing to the wrong man.

Over the next years I came to realise how foolish I had been. The Plumbbob series, to which Smoky and Galileo belonged, were the biggest and longest series of tests ever done in the continental United States. There were 29 tests beginning on 28 May and ending on 7 October. The highest explosive yield was Hood, the test that took place on 5 July – the equivalent of 74 kilotons of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb was about 20 kilotons. Smoky was the second highest, with 44 kilotons equivalent. The series, during which the total yield was about 306 kilotons – something like a tenth of the yield of one hydrogen bomb – released about 58,300 kilocuries of radioiodine into the atmosphere. This fallout was distributed all over the United States and is estimated to have caused about 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer. Twelve hundred pigs were exposed to the explosions in blast-effect studies, and 18,000 servicemen also participated. Roughly 1200 watched the Smoky explosion from a distance of about 13 kilometres. A unit was flown to ground zero some 15 minutes later. They declared that it was safe to occupy so the rest were flown in twenty minutes after the explosion. The exercise was completed at 9.45 a.m., which was when I heard the helicopters. Some of these men later contracted leukaemia.

The plutonium pit I was given to hold was so light because it was hollow. The weapons being tested that summer were ‘boosted’: deuterium and tritium gas were injected into the cavity just before the explosion. I believe the vacuum pump I heard when we visited Galileo was connected to this. When the pit is imploded, and the density is increased enough to reach a supercritical mass, the fission chain reaction begins. When about 1 per cent of the plutonium has been fissioned, the temperature is raised to the point where the fusion reactions of the deuterium and tritium take place. These produce a blast of very high energy neutrons which boost the subsequent fission efficiency. That is what accounted for the large yields in some of the bombs tested that summer. There is no end to the ingenuity that was being applied to weapons design.

The last above-ground test by the United States took place in 1962, and the last above-ground test anywhere was conducted by China in 1980. This is certainly a good thing. But I have only one misgiving. No one has seen a nuclear explosion in more than thirty years and the number of people who have ever seen one is dwindling. Of the people I was with in Nevada in 1957, Peaslee died in 1976, Carson died in 1997 and Francis died in 2007. For most people, nuclear weapons are an abstraction. Perhaps there should be one more explosion in the desert of Nevada to remind us.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n24/jeremy-bernstein/at-los-alamos