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By Root 569 0

measurement of blast power. It’s the equivalent to the bang you’d get from a ton of high explosive. A ton of trinitrotoluene, or TNT, which was the stuff in the bombs used during the Second World War. A ton of TNT will make a very big hole in the ground, or demolish a large factory, or erase a neighborhood. A kiloton produces an explosion equivalent to a thousand tons of TNT. The Hiroshima bomb was about thirteen kilotons. More than enough to convert a city into a furnace. But, as I say, it was a baby compared to what came later. A big, ugly baby. And quite primitive, really. It was ten feet long and weighed nine thousand pounds. It looked like a small whale with only tail fins. The humorous Americans called it Little Boy. (And the Nagasaki bomb Fat Man.) It took two dozen technicians three days to complete the nerve-racking task of assembling its various parts, arming it, locking in its safety devices, and loading it into the belly of a B-29 bomber. (The plane was called Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mum. Cute.) Then it took six and a half hours to fly it to its target from the Pacific island of Tinian. All very laborious and troublesome.

But such is the furious inventiveness of man when it comes to weapons of mass destruction that just twelve years later, the U.S. had built enormous rockets — one type called Thor, the other Jupiter — capable of carrying nuclear warheads of one and a half megatons. A megaton, as you will have worked out, explodes with the force of a million tons of TNT. So a single Thor or Jupiter could do as much damage as 115 Hiroshimas, or thereabouts. (You might want to check my figures. I enjoy math, but I’m not terribly good at it. Calculation would be easier for me if I had ten fingers, and I don’t.) If I’m right, that works out to 115 times as many deaths, grotesque disfigurements, deformed babies, cancers, etc., as Hiroshima.

All the same, it wasn’t good enough. Thors and Jupiters couldn’t quite reach America’s enemy, which was the Soviet Union. They certainly couldn’t reach all of the Soviet Union, which consisted of most of the far side of the world, from Germany in the west to Manchuria in the east. And then there was China, which was Communist, too. So, quietly, the Americans placed their huge missiles in friendly countries closer to Russia: England, Italy, Turkey. Places that put Moscow within half an hour of a rocket’s launch.

Even that was unsatisfactory. By the time I was delighted by the belated arrival of my pubic hair, the United States had developed rockets — called Atlases and Titans — that could travel seven thousand miles to dump four megatons of explosive onto Russia. Given the aftereffects of these multiple Hiroshimas — let alone the Soviet response — America had acquired the power to destroy the world several times over.

The Russians were not, of course, sitting idly by while all this was going on. They’d built and exploded an atomic bomb of their own by 1949. The Americans were shocked by how quickly the Communists had caught up. (They didn’t know, then, that Soviet spies were embedded in their weapons research projects.) By the 1950s, it seemed that, as far as rockets were concerned, the Soviet Union had pulled ahead in the arms race. Or at least in the space race, which, in the eyes of many Americans, was the same thing.

In early October 1957, the Russians fired the first man-made object to orbit Earth. It was a small satellite called Sputnik 1.

A month later they launched Sputnik 2. On board was the first living mammal to journey into space. She was a small, bright-eyed, black-and-white dog called Laika.

She didn’t make it back. She was already dead when Sputnik 2 burned up on reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The first man in space did make it back, however. He was a Russian called Yuri Gagarin. On April 12, 1961, his spacecraft made a single orbit of the planet in 108 minutes. He was the first human being to see Earth suspended in its dark and awful solitude. Afterward he said, “Earth was blue. There was no God.”

I think I was less impressed by these feats than I