Anyone familiar with what I have written in the past is may be aware of
the nature of my work, those who are familiar with my physical form are
aware of my inexorable link to the Manhattan Project. Just as a fair
warning this is the Manhattan Project from the other side of the fence.
I.e. this may not be the most fact filled thing I have ever written. You
see I am a child of the bomb, so to speak.
When I was a born my father was in the last throes of graduate school and
facing a life of certain academia and the endless debate over how the
universe works. The little pieces like quantum electrodynamics and other
areas of small particle physics that make everything from Everything2 to the
fact that you are sitting possible. Things change.
Fourteen years later we would move from Livermore, California to Los
Alamos, New Mexico and what was to be home. The memory of driving up the
back canyon road at twilight for the first time has not dimmed. The
desolation and sparsely wooded ash cliffs pink in the sunset of early June
and a single lane highway into White Rock. Scrub Piñon pines gnarled like
arthritic hands under the dry desert sun; bark the same slate gray of a
winter storm's sky. The Jemez caldera in the background and it's own
forests of Fir interrupted occasionally by lighter Aspen groves marking
the site of fires caused by lightning strikes five hundred years ago. Up
unto that time I had been aware of the fact that this was where it all
began, where men would become obsessed to the point where it would consume
their souls by something called 'the Dragon.' Enrico Fermei, Robert
Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Richard Feynman all worked here when the
streets were dirt and the only physical address was a house just off of the
plaza in Santa Fe. Working for a government and a society at war over the
last dregs of imperial monarchies that had dominated the face of the Earth
for the last two thousand years. The half-moon shapes of Anasazi cliff
dwellings hanging just under the rim of the mesas, abandoned homes of a
society that the Navaho speak of in a term of deference. The name means
'Ancient Ones.'
The town was built around a boys school that had hosted the affluent and
'ill' when it was believed that the thin mountain air would do them some
good, make men of them. The Army Corps of Engineers invaded and one of the
oldest Boy Scout troops in the United States (Troop 22, of which I was a
member for several years,) faded into the background until the fences
finally came down. When they came they brought the best of the best, the
cutting edge of physics unified in one place and then set to a specific
task. Build something that would change the face of our world forever.
Their humanity and the lives of every victim, every casualty of the Cold
War, would forever be linked.
To this day there are ties that bind all of us together into a single
catalogue of experiences. People who were there then still talk of 'Oppie'
as a sort of martyr to the world of physics. The Son crucified by the
fallen Teller and his twisted sense of nationalism, Feynman to later
become the Holy Ghost with his work in QED, Einstein acting as
untouchable God weeping in the background over the sins committed by his
children. Einstein hated the hydrogen bomb and believed that one weapon was
enough. Accurately predicting what he foresaw as a war of proliferation
several others (Oppenheimer included) gravitated to his side and opposed
Teller's push to develop the next generation of hydrogen weapons. The ties
to communism through a mistress confirmed, Oppenheimer would be the first
victim of a now very well known political fury in its fifth decade of active
operation as of this writing. (My own family moved to Los Alamos because
of Teller, different story for a different day though.) Then, the Army laid
the razor wire, put up the guard posts, put the land mines in the ground
that are there to this day and then watched carefully as Manhattan did
everything intended.
The tragedy lies not in the fact that the weapons were developed, that
the people who were there succeeded or even that the device was actually
used to stop something far more horrible from happening. I do not belong to
the revisionist camp that does a nice job of deluding themselves into
thinking that we are at fault for what happened during the Second World
War. Mistakes were made, good people on both sides died horribly and
miserably thousands of miles from their homes screaming the names of their
loved ones. War is an atrocious act by nature. I will not condone,
endorse or approve of the actions undertaken by either side as everyone
acted stupidly. Both Imperial Japan and the United States knew very
well what they were getting into. I would recommend that anyone under the
impression that Japan had not been preparing for an expansionist campaign in
the Pacific since before the First World War should go look into something
called the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent sociopolitical effects.
These politics were at the very heart of the Manhattan Project whose sole
end goal was to stop the war sooner with fewer American casualties than what
we were prepared for with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
The point of waging a war (in case anyone has forgotten,) is to kill more
of your enemy faster than they kill you in such quantity that the enemy
leaders will eventually give up. Whether waging tactical, operational
or strategic warfare the point is to kill everyone on the other side in a
uniform. Now if the people of your nation are galvanized toward something
called a 'Total War Society' then this technically makes everyone the enemy.
Think about that, what it means when your whole country is concerned with
the tools and trade of killing, maiming or otherwise brutalizing
humanity. The necessity of forcing anyone you can find to "endure the
unendurable" quickens the end of a war or at least this is the way that the
theory goes. It never works so neatly; the origami of diplomacy
catastrophically unfolds and makes a mess of anyone's hands caught in the
way. I understand what war is, what war means, what nuclear war would do
to this planet and the people living on its surface. I never, read this
if nothing else, never want to see that happen.
Deterrence and the presence of a real and credible threat provide a means
to make that previous statement a reality. The nuclear arsenal developed at
the cost of uncountable lives has provided this country with the ability to
dictate policy chapter and verse to a large number of institutions and
national governments that would have otherwise taken hostile action against
the United States. The Cold War was brought to an end because the
Russians simply did not possess the financial or technological means to
advance as fast as the United States and its allies were. Once the genie
was released from the bottle we could not have put it back even if we had
wanted. The specters of weapons systems so powerful as to render
conventional infantry tactics obsolete are a powerful thing for any defense
planner at the national level. Just as one spear would not be enough, one
bullet, one rifle, one nuclear weapon does not slake the lust for
destruction on an incomprehensible scale. Einstein was right, no doubt
about that at all. We engineered a victory through the threat of untold
horror and patted ourselves on the back the entire time. Deterrence and
proliferation are inseparable cousins conjoined at birth by the reflexive
instinct to raze those who would threaten "Our American Way of Life" or
"Great Mother Russia." Once we started we were aware that the Soviets
would follow and anyone that followed them should we win would have to
develop an arsenal as awesome as our own in order to scare us into
defeat.
Tactics imitating poker in a way only the problem is we do not quite know
when it is time to fold and go home for the evening. Stuck at the table
like junkies the pot will continue to grow regardless of policy changes at
any national level. Defense policy is impossible to separate from the
nuclear deterrent because it is defense policy at an extreme level. The
threat of a shotgun in a knife fight is enough to stop the other
participants from even drawing a blade. Painful as it is we as a species
crossed that line with our first weapon. Not Trinity, no, not July 16,
1945, the first time Homo Sapiens picked up a rock in anger and went
into the world spoiling for blood. The Manhattan Project started then.
Nuclear weapons are incredibly complex devices that require intense
education followed by at least a decade of practical experience in the
design field before any real results can be expected. Some of the largest
proponents of censorship on the internet have stated numerous times that
there are the plans for nuclear weapons available to the public. What
they are not aware of is that the information that is available is
approximately equivalent a blindfolded child's crayon rendition of an object
being described to them second hand.
There are segments of society that
draw in broad strokes grandiose and (admittedly) altruistic plans for the
total disarmament of every country on this planet. Humanity is not ready
to put down the guns and forget the genocide, remember we made a nice mess
of ourselves for a few thousand years with stones, sticks, ropes and knives.
Exchanging one weapon for another solves no problem in that the difficulty
lies with the people and their thousand year old 'Holy Wars,' 'Ethnic
Cleansings,' 'Purifications,' and 'Low Intensity Conflicts.' I cannot
stress enough that the real and credible threat of overwhelming response
stop an attempt by any nation on this Earth from using nuclear weapons in
a strategic setting. The safety that they provide is invaluable despite the
fact that these devices are some of the most vilified objects known. The
debate over the national security issues behind deterrence and the
employment of nuclear weapons as a primary vehicle for that is a serious and
rabid one. Environmental groups and most extreme liberal politicians would
like to see at a minimum a drastic reduction if not total elimination of
this nation's nuclear arsenal. The Union of Concerned Scientists has said
in the past that the United States could maintain sufficient conventional
forces as an acceptable substitute for the security provided by a nuclear
arsenal. Do not mistake stupidity for security.
In the back wall of the Los Alamos Science Museum there is an exhibit
placed there at several people's behest entitled 'Why the Bomb?' As an
examination of why the Enola Gay took off from Tinian, (part of the Northern
Marianas Islands and approximately fifty miles from Saipan,) and dropped Fat
Man and then Little Boy onto the citizens and terrain of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and an attempt at healing. Most of the people working in Los
Alamos understand what it is that they are doing to the degree that it lives
in haunted eyes and late night conversations.
There are pictures, prayers,
attempts by scores of relatives and actual survivors of the bomb to bring
closure to what happened in the final days of the Second World War. Both
sides have a chance to speak there, both opponents and proponents of 'the
Bomb' speak through volumes of visitor's logs that tell the tales of the
hands slowly wearing away at the exhibit walls. There are pictures of
counter protests staged by Los Alamos residents during a 'Peace Celebration'
that made a valiant attempt at besieging the town several years ago. There
are the vain and stupid words WHY WHY WHY scribbled in large letters no more
than a few pages away no matter how many times the books have been filled
and replaced, the ineffectual and abused peace symbol now corrupted for
consumer market salesmanship. Thin lines of kirigana or kanji, signatures
of veterans from various military services and numerous nationalities who
were there or came after.
The Plutonium Facility sits atop one of the larger mesas in Los
Alamos up a steep slope off of one side of Pajarito Road behind three razor
wire fences and a barren box of land. Guards at tank traps sit behind
aquamarine bulletproof glass armed with 7.62 M249's and M-16's with attached
M79 40mm grenade launchers with orders to shoot first and ask questions
later. You do not go near this building without good reason; you do not
stop and take pictures of the sniper towers and arc sodium lights that
create an eerie artificial daylight at the darkest hours of a snowy night.
You drive on your way to high school or work past the nexus of this nation's
weapons program distorted in glass reflections. Nothing goes into this
building and nothing comes out of it for any reason. Moving material to or
from the Plutonium Facility means that all of Pajarito road is closed for
two to three hours. The armored trucks turn anyone at either end around,
the traffic goes to SR-4 and life goes on as usual.
The lab now has other foci including geothermal power research, medical
technologies, practical fusion power and the everyday grinding work
involved in the science powering one of the greatest scientific institutions
in existing today.
With little to distract attention from work aside from
backpacking through the Jemez, occasional trips to Santa Fe and the Pajarito
Ski Area during the winter, Los Alamos is a model environment for these
people to work inside. Physicists are very easily amused; I think having
been raised by a pair of them I am somewhat qualified to make that
statement. These people buy beer, watch television, live in houses, eat
food and go places other than New Mexico on vacation. (Getting a
theoretician to actually go on a vacation is something of a different
matter.) They are not monsters and they do not hate irrationally.
The weapons designers that I have met in the past are somewhat troubled by
the mechanics of what it is they have wrought upon the world. I have eaten
dinner with some of the principle designers of the first Russian weapons, my
enemy now my friend sat across the table of the dining room in my house and
ate off of plates I remember my mother picking out some years earlier. She
made the food, set the places, I simply observed and made pleasant
conversation as I slowly came to the realization that these people were just
that. They had a job to do, they did what they were supposed to and it
worked very well in the end. In their eyes I saw the same sadness I had
become used to in the haunted look of the black and white pictures of
Oppenheimer shortly after Trinity. Over Mom's cooking we all look the
same, we all wish to exorcise the same demons and rid ourselves of the old
ghosts. All the gates, the security, all of it still there under the
unblinking stare of the Dragon. The legacy of the Manhattan Project is still
very much alive and well.
"OPPIE LIVES." -Guest register, Los Alamos Science Museum