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By Root 1286 0

the Japanese fishing boat Fukuryu Maru— in unfortunate translation, ‘Lucky Dragon’. All twenty-three members of the crew developed radiation sickness, and one, Aikichi Kuboyama, later died. Lewis Strauss, now chair of the AEC, issued a series of denials, implausibilities, and prevarications concerning the conduct of the test, but there was no denying that the ever-more powerful weapons being tested were bound to produce radioactivity that did not respect international boundaries or innocent bystanders. Back to Semipalatinsk went Soviet physicists and engineers, goaded now by the new supreme leader, Nikita Khrushchev, and inspired, as before, by Sakharov. This time they would drop an H-bomb from a plane, the way it would be delivered in the event of war. When the drop came, on 22 November 1955, with flash and flame and unearthly roar, Yakov Zeldovich threw his arms around Sakharov and yelled, ‘It worked! It worked! Everything worked!’ Except that a baby was killed in a nearby bomb shelter, a soldier died when his trench collapsed, half a dozen people were badly injured when a hospital roof fell in, and, at a meat-packing plant in Semipalatinsk, shards of broken window glass were blown into the ground beef. The tit-for-tatting continued. The radioactive clouds, tainted soil, and toxic ground water all grew worse.

Bigger bombs were one way to go, especially so long as they could be delivered by aircraft. The history of nuclear weapons is closely connected to the development of air power and theories of strategic bombing. By the mid-1950s, though, much thought was given instead to other means of delivering nuclear weapons. It was never true, as Stanley Baldwin had predicted, that ‘the bomber will always get through’. Military science had increasingly caught up with air power; bomber delivery of explosives was relatively slow and vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire or attack from faster fighter planes. Some of the writers who had first imagined the atomic bomb—Harold Nicolson, for example—had speculated that the weapon would be carried by rockets, far more likely to get through than airplanes. The Germans experimented in the 1930s with rockets that they thought might carry poison gas. They developed instead a liquid fuel rocket called the V-2 equipped with a ton-weight explosive, which they launched at big cities (London, Antwerp) and which killed many thousands during the war. These were Hitler’s alternative to nuclear weapons. After the war, nations with nuclear bombs of course envisioned attaching them to rocket bodies and firing them at enemies, at great distance and speed. The induction of German scientists into the American and Soviet scientific communities moved such plans ahead. In August 1957 the Soviets fired a missile that, they boasted, had flown across Siberia. It was the first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Less than two months later came the launch of Sputnik, an unmanned satellite that orbited the earth, emitting a pinging or beeping sound as it transited the heavens. Sputnik suggested that Soviet rocket science had moved decisively ahead of American, for its boosters were evidently comparable to those needed for the launch of an ICBM.54

The American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was not especially worried about Sputnik, recognizing that it offered no military threat, but the American media bred panic, and Senator Henry Jackson called for a ‘National Week of Shame and Danger’. The first US attempt to launch a satellite that December ended abruptly when its rocket carrier blew up on the launch pad. But the Americans soon made up the technological deficit. A year after the Soviet ICBM test, the United States tested its first long-range missile, the Atlas, a much-enhanced version of the German V-2. It carried a megaton payload, flew up to 6,000 miles, and was reasonably accurate as these things went, falling within 5 miles of its intended target. Steady improvement modernized the American arsenal: heavier Titans (I and II) by the early 1960s, a clutch of intermediate-range (1,500 miles) missiles,