Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [33]
When, in January 1965, American planes first sniffed the cloud of radiation drifting over Japan, they had little idea that it was the first test of Project No. 7, the Soviet answer to Project Plowshare.29 A Sedan-like explosion, 140 kilotons’ worth, carved the crater that became Lake Chagan.The radiation that was released by the blast violated the new treaty, as did the radiation that vented from the April 1965 Palanquin shot in Nevada. Palanquin was a Plowshare test meant to see how nuclear weapons cratered dry rock, material similar to what would be encountered in digging a second Panama canal. (The radioactive plume from Palanquin rapidly crossed the northern border of the United States into Canada and beyond.) Soon the Americans and Russians were accusing each other of violating the new treaty. Peaceful nuclear explosions were not exactly maintaining the peace.
Despite all the effort and money poured into peaceful fusion explosions, the United States never got any nonmilitary benefit from Project Plowshare. No gigantic earth-moving projects ever materialized; neither the Alaska harbor nor the second Panama canal ever got beyond the planning phase. (President Nixon formally abandoned the latter project in 1970.) Of all the marvelous applications suggested by Teller and his colleagues, only one was actually tested. Three nuclear tests carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, code-named Gasbuggy, Rulison, and Rio Blanco, attempted to use nuclear explosions to release natural gas. (The theory was that a big enough explosion would fracture the rocks trapping the gas.) But the three tests were not terribly successful. Rio Blanco failed because the bomb didn’t produce caverns of the expected shape. At first, Gasbuggy and Rulison seemed to work. The nuclear bombs shattered rocks around the test site and natural gas poured out of the wells. Unfortunately, the gas was radioactive, and no utility would buy it. After twelve years of trying and twenty-seven nuclear tests, Project Plowshare sputtered to a halt without ever having proved the usefulness of peaceful nuclear bombs.
Thirty years after Teller first dreamed of liberating the power of the sun upon the Earth, Project Plowshare was dead. Even the discovery of oil in Alaska in the late 1960s didn’t make his proposal of a bomb-carved harbor any more palatable. In his waning years, Teller turned away from peaceful nuclear explosions and back toward using fusion as a tool of war, dreaming up unworkable schemes to defend the United States from a Soviet missile attack. He was behind President Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” program, which, in its first incarnation, would have seeded the heavens with fusion bombs. If the Communists launched their missiles, Teller’s orbiting bombs would detonate, shooting out beams of x-rays that would destroy the incoming warheads. The project was abandoned as unworkable after just a few years, another example of Teller’s manic optimism.
Throughout his career, Teller schemed and plotted to prevent any sort of hiatus in his quest for nuclear supremacy. Treaties with the Soviet Union were signs of weakness; detente and peacemaking would just lead to the destruction of America. Project Plowshare was a lie; to Teller, it was not a tool of peace but a means to undermine treaties with the Soviet Union. Teller was a man of swords, not plowshares. “I’ve never seen [Teller] take a position where there was the slightest chance in the interest of peace,” said Isidor Rabi.