Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [28]
The paranoid, anti-Communist Edward Teller was the man who most desperately tried to bring us to the promised land. He and his allies lobbied for more and more money to figure out how to harness the immense power of fusion. Lewis Strauss, the AEC chairman and Teller backer, promised the world a future where the energy of the atom would power cities, cure diseases, and grow foods. Nuclear power would reshape the planet. God willed it. The Almighty had decided that humans should unlock the power of the atom, and He would keep us from self-annihilation. “A Higher Intelligence decided that man was ready to receive it,” Strauss wrote in 1955. “My faith tells me that the Creator did not intend man to evolve through the ages to this stage of civilization only now to devise something that would destroy life on this earth.”20
Unfortunately for Teller and the other fusion aficionados, it wasn’t easy to use fusion for peace. Fission, not fusion, was the obvious choice for nuclear energy. Ever since Enrico Fermi built a nuclear reactor in the Chicago squash courts, scientists have been able to use uranium to generate power. By controlling the rate of the fission in a reactor, engineers could generate as little as half a watt of power, barely enough to light a Christmas light, or as much as a few hundred million watts of power, enough for a small city. Engineers were drafting plans to build nuclear ships, nuclear submarines, nuclear locomotives, and even nuclear airplanes. But the potential of fission seemed microscopic compared to the unlimited power of fusion, and this is what excited Edward Teller so much. Fusion couldn’t just generate energy, it could move mountains. Literally. Teller was going to make it happen. “If your mountain is not in the right place,” he once said at a press conference, “drop us a card.” He meant it. He was hoping for the chance to show what fusion could do.
In 1956, world politics provided just such an opportunity. In July, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, sparking an international crisis. Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt, and the situation threatened to spin out of control. Thanks to the intervention of the United Nations, the crisis was resolved, but Western strategists were clearly frightened. The prospect of a crucial waterway in the hands of a nationalist Arab government seemed like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode into a major war. Even though the Suez crisis had been brought under control, the threat of a Suez blockade remained.
Teller and his Livermore colleagues immediately seized upon Suez as an opportunity; they announced that fusion could solve the Egyptian problem. A promising young Livermore scientist, Harold Brown, argued that engineers could use the power of fusion to dig a second canal, eliminating the Suez threat once and for all. Brown—who would later become the secretary of defense in President Jimmy Carter’s administration—figured that if a chain of hydrogen bombs, exploding across Israel’s Negev desert, cut a second channel from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, Egypt would no longer have a monopoly. Fusion energy would build a canal in the territory of a Western-friendly power. Teller realized that a new Suez was just the beginning. Fusion weapons could move great volumes of earth, completely reshaping the world’s topography to benefit mankind. In February 1957, Livermore hosted a conference to develop the idea of peaceful nuclear explosions and to solicit ideas for nuclear engineering projects.
Of course, many scientists were skeptical of the whole concept; the idea of using hydrogen bombs for peaceful