Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [45]
After weighing the evidence and crunching the numbers, the physicists at Harwell concluded that the plasma in the ZETA machine was reaching a temperature of five million degrees with every pinch, creating thermonuclear reactions and producing neutrons. If so, this was big news. It would be the first time that scientists had achieved fusion in a controlled environment. The British team naturally wanted to release their initial results right away, revealing the brilliant future of limitless energy to the public. But the Americans balked.
Earlier in the year, the British and Americans had decided to share data on fusion reactors with each other, and they were to decide jointly when and how to declassify the data and release it to the public. This last point became a source of contention. The Americans were reluctant to make an announcement about ZETA, in part because Project Sherwood had no signal achievements to brag about at the time. It looked as though the Brits had beaten the pants off the Yanks, so the Yanks needed some time to catch up. Thus, citing security issues, the United States tried to delay the announcement for a year. A second United Nations conference was scheduled for 1958, and what better place was there, U.S. officials argued, to release the results?
The British were unhappy about the American insistence on secrecy, and it is hard to keep a secret if one party wants to reveal it. Naturally, the secret didn’t stay secret for very long. By early September, news of ZETA’s success was leaking out. The English press was buzzing with rumors of successful nuclear fusion in the ZETA machine. By October, British scientists—including the Nobel laureate and Harwell lab head, John Cockcroft—hinted at encouraging results from the device. However, in deference to the Americans, nobody made an official pronouncement.
Hints about ZETA’s success got harder and harder to ignore. In November, a spokesperson for the British Atomic Energy Authority (BAEA) stated, “The indications are that fusion has been achieved” at ZETA, but gave no further details. English scientists briefed the House of Commons on their achievement. But the weeks ticked away without any description of what, exactly, had happened at Harwell.
The mystery deepened in December. Even as the BAEA denied that the United States was deliberately “gagging” ZETA scientists, preventing them from releasing their results, a BAEA spokesman admitted that Britain was awaiting American approval to publish the details of the Harwell experiment. The British press was infuriated and accused the United States of playing politics with a crucial scientific achievement, of needlessly delaying publication of an important experimental result. The British had beaten the Americans at their own game, and Lewis Strauss and the Project Sherwood crew seemed to be holding up the declassification process to give themselves time to catch up to the Brits.39
To the ZETA scientists, it was more than merely frustrating. Without a publication, it was as if the experiment had never happened. In science, publication is everything; without it, an experiment is worthless. It is easy for anybody to make an outrageous scientific-sounding claim. If you use the right buzzwords, you can make it extremely convincing; you can easily make the public believe that your claim is true. That’s what happened with Ronald Richter. Given a platform by Juan Perón, Richter trumpeted a remarkable achievement—based on pseudoscience—around the globe. Important people, including Perón, believed him. But very few scientists did. That is because Richter did not publish any scientific data that would have allowed specialists to verify his claim. To a scientist, an experiment is not believable without the precise details of how it was run and what the researchers involved observed. Only when scientists