The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [140]
Teller has been a major force in preventing a comprehensive treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. He made it much more difficult to accomplish the 1963 Limited (above-ground) Test Ban Treaty. His argument that above-ground testing was essential to maintain and ‘improve’ the nuclear arsenals, that ratifying the treaty would ‘give away the future safety of our country’ has proven specious. He has also been a vigorous proponent of the safety and cost-effectiveness of fission power plants, claiming himself to be the only casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979; he had a heart attack, he says, debating the issue.
Teller advocated exploding nuclear weapons from Alaska to South Africa, to dredge harbours and canals, to obliterate troublesome mountains, to do heavy earth-moving. When he proposed such a scheme to Queen Frederika of Greece, she is said to have responded, ‘Thank you, Dr Teller, but Greece has enough quaint ruins already.’ Want to test Einstein’s general relativity? Then explode a nuclear weapon on the far side of the Sun, Teller proposed. Want to understand the chemical composition of the Moon? Then fly a hydrogen bomb to the Moon, explode it, and examine the spectrum of the flash and fireball.
Also in the 1980s, Teller sold President Ronald Reagan the notion of Star Wars, called by them the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’, SDI. Reagan seems to have believed a highly imaginative story of Teller’s that it was possible to build a desk-sized orbiting hydrogen-bomb-driven X-ray laser that would destroy 10,000 Soviet warheads in flight, and provide genuine protection for the citizens of the United States in case of global thermonuclear war.
It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an outcome - Gorbachev’s promotion of glasnost, or openness.
Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.
Teller has also advocated the development of burrowing nuclear warheads, so that underground command centres and deeply buried shelters for the leadership (and their families) of an adversary nation might be dug down to and wiped out; and 0.1-kiloton nuclear warheads that would saturate an enemy country, obliterating its infrastructure ‘without a single casualty’. Civilians would be alerted in advance.