Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [140]
29
Interestingly, Teller had warned of a coming “Plowshare gap” in 1962. “The Communists might develop Plowshare before we do,” he wrote. “The time may be near when the Russians will announce that they stand ready to help their friends with gigantic nuclear projects.”
30
In early 1951, the new Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, tried to nationalize Iranian oil. This was unacceptable to Britain and to the United States. Declared Time’s man of the year for 1951, Mossadegh was ousted in 1953 by a coup. Not surprisingly, the coup was engineered by Britain and America in a CIA operation known as TPAJAX. Out of the ashes was born a new company: British Petroleum.
31
The New York Times reporter wryly noted that “There seemed to be some puzzlement, however, over the President’s declaration that, while foreigners systematically lie, he always is a shining champion of the truth.”
32
Or Kelvin. Or even Fahrenheit, if you prefer. At these sorts of temperatures, it scarcely matters.
33
Just how much is a subject of debate. Contemporary reports put the cost of Huemul as low as $3.7 million and as high as $70 million. Of course, the international humiliation was priceless.
34
It is somewhat analogous to how the force of the stem that binds the apples to the branch of an apple tree gets overwhelmed if you shake the branch energetically enough. Pour enough energy into the branch and you will break the bonds, freeing the apples.
35
Possibly so named because they were raiding the Treasury on behalf of “Friar” Tuck.
36
This is about one quarter the power produced by a typical commercial power plant. Roughly speaking, a home consumes 1,000 watts on average, so 150 million watts would power 150,000 homes.
37
Making matters easier still, neutrons are easy to detect. Since they are neutral particles, they aren’t affected by the magnetic fields of the plasma and zoom right out of the reactor vessel.
38
The next morning, the puzzled cleaning staff, picking up all the bottles from the previous night’s celebration, wondered aloud whether the ZETA machine had begun running on pale ale.
39
The American press was defensive. The New York Times rather lamely attributed the delay to the “backlog of experimental results” from fusion reactors that needed to be declassified.
40
Of course, the Russians tried to get a share of the credit, too. “British scientists pointed out that the ZETA installation used a method of thermo-isolation employing a magnetic field,” read a dispatch in Tass, “which, as we all know, Soviet academicians I. E. Tamm and A. D. Sakharov first proposed in 1950.”
41
Even the expensive model-C Stellarator, whose price had swollen 50 percent since its proposal, wasn’t much of an improvement over the earlier models. When it first came on line in the early 1960s, it was only better than its predecessors by virtue of its larger physical size, which meant that it took longer for a particle to stray far enough to strike a wall.
42
Sakharov saw even deeper similarities between himself and Teller, going far beyond the physics and into their motivations for participating in the arms race. “One had only to substitute ‘USSR’ for ‘USA,’ ‘peace and national security’ for ‘defense against the communist menace,’” Sakharov later wrote. This was something of an exaggeration, though. Sakharov did not share Teller’s almost monomaniacal hatred of the enemy. Because of this, their paths would soon dramatically diverge, beginning with the debate over fallout. Sakharov would become a firm opponent of atmospheric nuclear testing and a fearless proponent of a test ban and international cooperation. While Teller was honored by his country and reviled by the Nobel committee for his actions, Sakharov went into internal exile in the Soviet Union and received the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his.
43
That this could be done at all baffled the people who funded the experiments.