Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [29]
Brown—and Teller—turned Rabi’s irony into pure optimism, and embraced Isaiah’s vision. Project Plowshare was born. Fusion power, even in a vessel as crude as a hydrogen bomb, could make the world a better place. The Livermore scientists quickly set to work figuring out what engineering projects were suitable for nuclear ditch-digging.
The ideas started coming. Build a new Suez. Dig a new Panama Canal. Cut a waterway across Thailand. Excavate a harbor in North Africa or in Alaska. Blow up rapids to make rivers navigable. Cut trenches to help irrigate crops. Straighten the route of the Santa Fe Railroad. Mine coal and rare minerals. Free oil and gas reserves. “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us,” Teller wrote. Mines and trenches were just the obvious applications. Teller also suggested using hydrogen bombs to change the weather, to melt ice to yield fresh water, and to mass-produce diamonds. (Another unconventional suggestion attributed to him was to close off the Strait of Gibraltar, making the Mediterranean a lake suitable for irrigating crops.) Ted Taylor, a bomb designer, argued that nuclear bombs would be able to drive a rocket into deep space, even to other stars.21 Teller even found the idea of bombing the moon incredibly enticing. “One will probably not resist for long the temptation to shoot at the moon . . . to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause,” he wrote.
By 1957, scientists had scads of ideas for peaceful uses of hydrogen bombs. The next step was to figure out whether these grand schemes could possibly work. Could fusion bombs carve canals and harbors, much less turn the Mediterranean into a freshwater lake? They could only find out by running experiments.
In September 1957, the United States performed an underground weapons test: Plumbbob Rainier. A small nuclear bomb, only 1.7 kilotons, was buried under the surface of the Nevada desert. When the device went off, the earth jumped a few inches and then settled. Scientists later saw that the bomb had vaporized rock to make a one-hundred-foot hole underground. From the Plowshare scientists’ point of view, it was a stunning success: nuclear bombs could indeed break up rock and change the landscape, with little release of radiation into the environment. It was time to try to change the Earth.
During the summer of 1958, Edward Teller flew to Alaska to unveil a new “nuclear engineering” project: Project Chariot. Using two large one-megaton bombs and four smaller hundred-kiloton ones, Teller hoped to carve a large harbor on the northwestern coast of Alaska. He pitched the project as an economic boon: the harbor would help Alaskans with fishing and with transporting Alaskan coal by sea. Locals were very skeptical. They had good reason to be.
Despite Teller’s slick sales job, the harbor made little economic sense. It would be icebound for most of the year, no substantial fishing was done nearby that would be helped by a harbor, and the coal would have to be transported by rail to the docks—via a railroad that would cost a staggering $100 million to build. Alaskans were wary of Teller’s grand scheme for another reason, too. Fallout.
Ever since Hiroshima, scientists had known of the deadly aftereffects of nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb had left thousands crippled—burned and blighted by the invisible radiation that streamed from the bomb, harboring cancers and genetic defects that would linger for years after the war had ended.
An exploding nuclear bomb is a veritable treasure trove of radioactive debris: the unfissioned uranium and plutonium from a bomb’s primary as well