¡Colores!; 1301; A Commitment to Peace; Richard Rhodes, Interview 3

It looks great just to because I've been using these 30 minute tapes because we're at the end of the tape, I would suggest having him redo that last bit just because some of this drop out at the end of the tape. I'll ask him to do it one more time. If it's such a good one, I'll suggest him right now. Give us a few seconds and we'll just do that one more time. You can even do the Fizzing Deficient and then so if we can do it one more time. You want that part too? Yeah, let's just start right from the beginning. Oolam had been worrying about something that everyone believed at the time that there wasn't a lot of you took 35 around. So he'd been trying to see how you could make a more efficient Fizzing Bomb.

And he realized that if you could use all the enormous force that comes off of an exploding Fizzing Bomb to implode a second core, that that core wouldn't have to be very large at all because the implosion would be so efficient. It was from that conception Fizzing Bomb stacked on Fizzing Bomb that he one day realized that the same idea, a primary that would set off a secondary, might apply to a thermonuclear when the secondary would be a hydrogen package of hydrogen. His wife, Francois, describes coming into the room at their house and seeing him staring out the window into the garden and he turned to her and said, I've figured out a way to make it work. She said, what work? And he said, it's a really different scheme and it will change the course of history. Very very nice.

The town of the museum that got all that room stuff too. Oh, that's new since I was there. I shouldn't say room, maybe this is an old wall. Let's move on. All right. Broadway chooses certain guys to leave the thermonuclear program. Guys, I wish I knew and we had a chance interview. Didn't choose Tyler. Everyone knew that Tyler was a wildman. Teller's great gift has always been his inventiveness. If you look at his papers and physics, they're all over the place. It's very hard to understand and he just didn't ever really focus except on making hydrogen bombs. This is not the sort of person you want to lead a team to build a specific device that has all sorts of engineering questions about it because he'll be coming in every week with a different bomb. So not for any reasons of personal hostility or anything else, but because Bradbury was a good manager who had a problem and he needed to solve it and solve it fast, he appointed someone whom he knew was a good manager, Marshall Holloway.

Unfortunately, Teller and Holloway didn't get along and Teller hated Holloway. To teller, this was generally true with Teller. This was a personal issue and a slap in the face and it was shortly after Holloway's appointment that Teller resigned and left in a hop. But the men who were left were men who were very good at figuring out how to turn an idea into a machine which was their responsibility and their job. I can't imagine what it would have been like if Teller had been running that project. You know, it's one thing to think that Teller and Eulam invented the hydrogen bomb. They certainly invented the concept, but they didn't make the device. Their invention didn't tell these guys whether the channel that the radiation was going to flow down to reach the secondary in the device. Should be a cylinder or a funnel or a schmoo as indeed they called it at one point because they had a sort of a pinball shape.

So those issues were matters of not just engineering, also it had to have a real gift for the physics and a kind of intuitive gift for the physics. Teller was the kind of man who came into his office in 1942 and said if you need to know anything about the qualities of plutonium, I'll just calculate them for you. See, work was astonished at the statement. You don't calculate the qualities of a chemical element you sit down in your chemistry laboratory and worked them out. So it's hard to imagine that Mike would have been done and would have worked when it was if Teller had been in charge. Why was Edward so interested in the thermo-region? Why was Edward Teller so interested in the thermonuclear? I mean, ultimately, I don't think he's ever said. So you'd have to ask him.

But it was his baby. Ponsbeta said once about the only caddy thing I've ever heard Honsbeta say is that Edward Teller wasn't so much the father of the hydrogen bomb as the mother. He bore it in his womb for a long time. Teller had heard the idea first from Fermi in 1942. And from that, because Fermi had said, you know, if we make one of these fusion bonds, you ought to be able to use that to ignite some hydrogen and have an hydrogen bomb. And once you get it started, all you have to do is add more fuel. It's like a fire. It's not like a critical mass that blows itself apart at a certain limit. So you can make these things as big as you want to. Teller once thought about making a thousand megaton hydrogen bomb.

This was his history, if you will. It's probably not too trivial to say that for both Oppenheimer and Teller. These weapons were their Nobel prizes. Neither man won a Nobel prize. They were a little bit too unfocused for that, I think, from what physicists have told me who did. But this was at least the equivalent. This was their mark on history. And I think Teller was especially resentful of what he perceived to be Oppenheimer's unwillingness to develop or support the hydrogen bomb. Because, as he said once, they got theirs. Oppenheimer had his bomb. What's he talking about? Killing lots of people. One of my little teller thing, and then we'll move on. You mentioned in your book that what the real hold up to the hydrogen bomb was in all practicality.

And we talked about Teller's inability to focus, to stay with a program and follow through and so on and forth. Is there a way that we could talk about that? Well, I'm not sure that's what the delay was. I think the Teller was good. Teller delayed the hydrogen bomb by, let me start over. I think Edward Teller, ultimately, was the man who delayed the hydrogen bomb, not Robert Oppenheimer. The reason I say that is, Teller was focused on a megaton scale weapon. And his design for a super was his way to that megaton scale weapon, and he had no other way. The Russians built the alarm clock, the layer cake. He had thought of that idea shortly after the end of the war, but never really evidently interested in him, because it wasn't big enough.

You couldn't, since it was an implosion device, it blots up the part. Maybe you could get a megaton, but certainly no more. So, the grandiosity of his dream, if you will, got in the way of looking for other possibilities, perhaps scaling up slowly from a simpler idea, whatever. It was his insistence on this particular design, and also his consideration that for calculating purposes, they needed digital computers, for example, that were the real reasons for the delay. Ultimately, I suppose the delay goes back to the simple fact that as long as we had a monopoly on vision bombs, there was no great urgency in developing something bigger. I know, I'm sorry.

I have this gosh darn theory. Maybe it's just coming from an amateur's point of view, but I think of Mike as one of the greatest physics experiments in the history of the world. The man actually kind of reached up into the sky and was able to grab a little bit of the universe and set it on fire here. Mike was a great physics experiment, no question about it. And only perhaps a large nation state could have afforded it. It was a very expensive piece of work. It had the largest uranium castings ever done. It had a tank of maybe 500 kilograms of liquid deterium and so forth. It was a very expensive machine, but it really was an experiment. It was not the sort of thing you could easily militarize and turn into a weapon, although we did actually make some Mike-type weapons. We never actually got too far with it, but just along the way.

So, yes, it was an amazing physics experiment, but of course one must remember what it was for. I think this is a tough one again, but Mike, my point of view is we have an atomic bomb and that revolutionizes everything. The ceremony to the bomb is equally important or equal at the same level of revolution to some degree. Do you think that the success of Mike revolutionized weapons development besides the fire? Boosted efficient weapons, as the Israelis have. So, I'm not so sure it was a revolution. I think in fact it was, but in another sense, perhaps it was, and we can do that.

Was Mike a revolution or did Mike successfully change the answer? I think the development of these huge megaton scale weapons brought home to the leaders on both sides that these weapons couldn't be used. And that's an important change. In terms of distractiveness, it's really just a question whether you wanted to destroy a place with 10 fission bombs or one hydrogen bomb. So, in that sense, it's no great change militarily, but because they could be so huge, and the early ones were so huge. I mean, 15 megaton devices is what our B-52s were carrying in the 1950s and up to, I think, the time of the given missile crisis. Once we got to intercontinental rockets, then we had to scale them down. So, they were smaller after that, and then that changed. But during that crucial time, when everybody was, if you will, learning the fundamental lesson, which is these things are too dangerous, duct destructive, suicidal to use.

It was important, perhaps, to go from city busters to country busters, which is basically what we did. It seems to me also that it changed the arms race of the missile, I'm sorry. Did you want to, are you hungry? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Are you hearing all that? It's just a little bit, yeah. Well, that's why I... You might want to look back from just a little bit higher. No, I am. Okay. The U.S. lights off at a town-of-bomb. The Russians go away. The U.S. lights off at a terminal. The Russians go away. This creates the Russians go into rockets, see this good. I mean, I guess what I was doing a little fishing expedition there, and to me, it seems like the similar nuclear upstate arm, which was raised to the point where it just starts a trend towards all-out weapons development to some degree.

And that's going to try to try to make Eisenhower's administration better. I just see, there's a pivotal point in weapons development. I think what was crucial to the arms race was developing the industrial capacity to turn these things out like sausages. So it's not so much that the hydrogen bomb suddenly makes the big ones possible, although that was important. Certainly it was important to turn it to the May and the strategic air command, because they only had so many planes. So the bigger the bomb, the bigger the boom, if you will. But we already, even by the joint chief's own estimates, had more megatonnids or kilatonnids, more weapons, than we could possibly use to destroy the Soviet Union. We were already by the early fifties at the point of making the rubble bounce, as they said.

So it isn't so much the size as the ability to crank them out, and to have what the bomb boys call wooden bombs. The bombs that could sit on the shelf, you needed them, and then go off when you wanted them to, which certainly wasn't true with the first devices, which were handmade, and only had batteries good for three days, and so forth. So that was the change, and there, actually, what was crucial was something that hardly anyone is even aware of, which was realizing there was plenty of uranium around. Once we were able to turn out the bomb cores and so forth, then we were rolling, and the arms race followed, because everybody wanted a piece of it. If the Air Force has some bombs, then the Navy has to have some bombs, and if the Navy has some bombs, the Army has to have some bombs, and if they have bombs, the Marines have to have some bombs, and if you have a rocket on the wing of your plane, we must have a rocket on the wing of our plane. That's what the arms race was about. It wasn't about matching the Russians one for one.

The other countries in the world, the smaller countries in the world that are nuclear powers, are quite clear that 200 weapons is plenty. They don't need 30,000, but everybody wanted a piece of the action. We covered some of this, but we're getting back into that area about the hammering game. One of the things that's interesting to me is you have up and hangers, security clearance, trial, come to a conclusion about three or four months before, as in hammered as items for peace. Why do you think Arpenheimer was ten blue at that point? Arpenheimer's troubles began the day Admiral Lewis Strauss became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss was a devious paranoid man, very, very conservative, I mean a true Dick Cheney. He believed that Arpenheimer had been and was a savvy at spy, and he also hated him personally because Arpenheimer had made Strauss who was not even a high school graduate who fancied himself to be a physicist.

Arpenheimer had made him look foolish as Arpenheimer did so many people in the course of his life. So Strauss started the clock on Arpenheimer's security clearance problems the day he took office. He of course remembered that Arpenheimer had in his eyes resisted the hydrogen bomb, and he thought that was because Arpenheimer was a spy, and that's what Moscow told him to do. So for all these various reasons, I think it's really fortuitous. The other part, although Arpenheimer's for peace, was partly conceived as a way of dealing with the tragedy of the lucky dragon and all of that. It was America trying to do some good PR. What do you think Arpenheimer just avoided the whole Arpenheimer deal? When Arpenheimer was told that Arpenheimer might be a spy by Strauss, he wrote a memo to himself. He said, then everything is destroyed. The Russians would know everything, meaning Arpenheimer was that central, new everything.

That's Arpenheimer, one set of fuchs. If you had the smallest security circle possible, fuchs would have been inside because he worked on the bomb core. Similarly, Arpenheimer was at the center. Eisenhower didn't know he had to trust his advisors to some degree, and this is what Strauss told him. So he stayed pretty clear of that. What do you think of Eisenhower? He had that whole early buildup under Truman, but Eisenhower seems to blossom. Buildup, buildup of what? I mean, you have 10,000 people working at Hanford. You have the two big editions at Oak Ridge. Why Eisenhower was one of five or six brothers? He learned very early that if you can get all six brothers to beat on someone, you're sure to win the battle. That's the way he fought Second World War. The reason we didn't invade Europe till 1944 was because he wanted to be sure we had enough force, sheer massive force to prevail.

The Russians were furious at us. They were fighting the Second World War for us. Similarly, when he took office, as far as he was concerned, he wanted to build up the military to where it was an impregnable force. But as time went on, I think he saw what everyone saw. Christchurch saw, too, other leaders in both sides, that these things were so destructive you couldn't use them. At that point, I think his attitude toward the whole business changed. It's as if his first administration was about preparing for war, and his second administration was about trying to find peace. That's the way he characterized himself. This is so great. This is so pleased.

I'm going to skip over the open hammer stuff. Eisenhower invites Christchurch forward. I think along pretty well, all of Christchurch really thinks Wall Street is a very funny place. But he's there. The ice is broken. It looks like things are going well. The YouTube comes down, hear some of this cancel. How does Eisenhower leave his administration? I think Eisenhower was deeply disappointed that he had not been able to somehow forge some kind of peace between us and the Soviet Union. I don't think he ever really said much about it, at least none at his writings. But he somehow felt that there was no one, and I think he was right in this, that there was no one who knew the world better, knew the leadership of the world better, knew the way the game was played better than he. I mean, he really was a colossus. Even with the reputation he has, I think he's been undervalued as an historic figure.

And it really bothered him a great deal, mixed in with his heart attacks and the loss of his own physical strength that he couldn't somehow make the whole thing work. That was too soon. Somehow forge some kind of peace in the world. I don't know what he would have meant by that. Would it have been nuclear disarmament or at least reduction? I don't know. They had the atmospheric test band treaty and its basic form on the table of Paris. They couldn't sit down for it. So I said by almost interpret that that would have been signed at that point as opposed to three years later. What do you think he meant with the goodness of time? His final statement at his farewell speech says in the goodness of time. Both Eisenhower and Truman laid in their administrations essentially made very prophetic statements about the way the Cold War was going to run, which was fundamentally for both men.

If we can hold fast, maintain deterrence. The Soviet Union eventually has to collapse in its own way. They were absolutely right, of course. The rest of us sort of forgot the way, but they saw that very clearly. Do you consider the test band treaty of 63 our first step towards peace? Absolutely. The test band treaty was a first step toward peace. What would peace be in a nuclear world? Since we know the knowledge will never go away. How do you get rid of the nuclear weapons? This has been the big dilemma. But I think it's very clear. You don't think of getting rid of them so much as you think of increasing the time of delivery from base to target. Back in the 50s when we had bombers that was 12, 24 hours with ICBMs that got down and is today down to perhaps 30 minutes.

But if all you had were mothball factories, where you make these weapons, then delivery time from base to target would be what? Three months. And you'd have a lot more time for negotiation before you got to that point again. Paradoxically, something like that is what was envisioned in the ashes of Lolliam thought report in 1946. It was a somewhat different world because there would not have been nuclear weapons in the first place. But it was a world that they perceived to be a place where the minds and the factories and the nuclear power reactors would be pretty uniformly distributed around the world among the leading powers. Bernard Baruch looked at the planet and said, well, where is the army? How do you enforce this treaty? Oppenheimer said, well, digging for uranium, doing anything to move toward making a bomb would be an act of war.

And all the other countries would know and they could do the same. So in a curious and wonderful way, except that we now have the weapons and all the risk of accident and so forth. We're back to that state today, that is to say, the knowledge and the capabilities for building nuclear weapons is pretty much distributed around the world. Some 25 nations have already looked at building bombs and have chosen not to. And that means Canada and Switzerland and probably Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, relatively few nations have actually decided to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons. One of them was even dismantled their weapons. They live in that sort of world. So now if we could just get the nuclear powers to realize that they'd be safer if their weapons were, if you will, virtual latent rather than real and overt and in silos and on hair trigger launch times, that would be abolition. Unless we can ever hope for, unless the whole thing falls apart and we forget how to build these things.

I'm going to be a little dogmatic here. I'm going to go back to my question. You immediately agreed with me, which is great. I love being a question. Oh, I left out the treaty part. Sure. Okay. That's a great answer. I could use a lot of what you gave me. Just more on the lines of dealing specifically with that. You have the whole Japanese peace movement thing. We need new paths to live by. We are a vanguard. We are a new vanguard for civilization, but we need to have a revolution of thought to some degree. Good luck. Good luck, but God, we've got to try. Well, we should do this on camera and not off because I do have clear thoughts about that. Let me ask the question. Was that for, was the MSF testing treaty a very, very important first step for peace and why? Well, the atmospheric test band treaty put nuclear testing underground. That limited the scale of testing. That's the good side.

The bad side is it took it off the radar screen to a degree. The reason the test band treaty that treaty was finally negotiated, I think, was because people all over the world were afraid of fallout. I remember as a child. I wasn't a child at that time. I remember at that time. The talk about fallout and strontium, 90 and the milk supply and so forth. If there was any part of the arms race that was limited by popular action, it seems to me that was the time. But you could still test weapons underground and the kinds of weapons we were moving into building that could be delivered by a rocket were the kinds of weapons that you'd want to test underground. That sense it really was a stall in the part of the nuclear powers. Still, any sense of limitation from this period of Florida abundance when we had been cranking out the weapons as fast as we could crank them out on both sides.

And adjusting our target requirements to meet the factory schedules rather than the other way around, which would be logical. Any limitation was at least the beginning of something possibly of more limitation later. And in that sense I think it was a great step forward. I'm not quite sure how familiar you are with the Japanese piece move, but it's something I've been inspired by. I'm not sure this country is ready to listen to it or ever will be. Every time I'm bringing up, they'll say, oh well, it was overrun by communists or lost all my friends during the war or whatever. But here are people who went through nuclear war. It wasn't nuclear war and they were the victims of it.

By surviving, having been taking responsibility for their actions in it.