Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [32]
Teller believed the moratorium was a huge mistake. He felt that with the ban in place the United States was getting weaker and the Soviet Union was getting stronger, and he repeatedly accused the USSR of cheating on the moratorium, of testing weapons underground or in space during the temporary test ban.27 He concluded that U.S. adherence to the test ban had squandered the American nuclear advantage, and that his country was woefully unprepared for a coming “limited war” with the Soviet Union, a limited war that would almost certainly include the use of nuclear weapons. And developing new nuclear weapons required nuclear testing.
The mask had come off. Teller’s opposition to the test ban had little to do with a vision of a fusion utopia. His future was not a future of peace, but of war. He had tried to stop the test ban because he wanted the United States to be prepared for tactical nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He had used the promise of peaceful nuclear explosions as a tool to ensure continued military research—and to make sure that weaponeers had more bombs to design. Teller’s Plowshare was not a vision from the prophet Isaiah, but one from the prophet Joel: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.”
As it turns out, the test ban was only a temporary inconvenience to Teller. Throughout the moratorium, he made plans, so he could quickly resume his work when the agreement finally fell apart. Through 1959 and 1960, even as the moratorium held, he pushed Project Chariot—the Alaskan harbor—despite increasing resistance from the locals. When the moratorium ended after a Russian test in August 1961,28 Teller was ready.
Within weeks, the United States was testing again, above and below the ground. The first new test series, Nougat, began on September 15. The seventh shot of Nougat, code-named Gnome, was a Plowshare test of nuclear excavation. A relatively small nuclear bomb, 3.1 kilotons, was placed deep in a shaft in a salt dome. When it went off, it instantly vaporized more than two thousand tons of rock and created a huge spherical cavern about 160 feet across. (It also vented a plume of radioactive smoke and steam, even though the radioactivity was supposed to be entirely contained.) The next Plowshare test came a few months later, in July 1962. It was the first shot of Operation Storax. Code-named Sedan, it used a 100-kiloton warhead buried 600 feet underground. Sedan carved an enormous crater—1,200 feet across and 300 feet deep—into the Nevada landscape. (Sedan, like Gnome, spewed radioactive ash into the air.) It was exactly the sort of test Teller needed: he proved that fusion weapons could move earth on a huge scale.
Unfortunately for Teller, shortly after Sedan the Alaska harbor project slipped out of his grasp. Local opposition was too great for the Atomic Energy Commission to overcome, and in 1962 the plan was scrapped. But that did not stop Plowshare from marching forward. If anything, it gained momentum. In May 1962, even before the Sedan test was complete, President Kennedy ordered the AEC to tackle the problem of building a second Panama canal with fusion devices.
Such plans were becoming increasingly harder to make, though. During the moratorium and after it, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had been negotiating a formal test ban treaty with Khrushchev. The so-called Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963; this was the agreement that banned anything but underground nuclear explosions. It also forbade any tests that allowed radioactivity to leak beyond national borders.
Teller bitterly fought the treaty. He and his allies attempted to undermine it at every turn. He did it directly, warning Congress of “grave consequences for the security of the United States and the free world” should they decide to ratify it: “you will have given away the future safety of our country.” Teller also tried to sink