by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
For the last two days PBS has been showing an interesting
group of movies about nuclear weapons and the atomic age in general. On Tuesday
they showed a two-hour special called The Bomb, which begins in 1938 with the famous letter physicist Leo Szilard
drafted urging the U.S. in general and President Franklin Roosevelt in
particular to get cracking on creating an atomic bomb before Germany got it
first and the Nazis were able to win World War II and do far more damage than
the formidable amount they actually did with what they had. Szilard realized
that he didn’t have enough clout to get the U.S. president to read a letter
from him, so he enlisted a physicist who did: Albert Einstein, then living on
the East Coast and teaching and doing research at Princeton University and just
as scared about the Nazis getting the atomic bomb as Szilard was. Roosevelt
ordered the U.S. Army to start a research project on the feasibility of nuclear
weapons, and he assigned it to the Manhattan Engineering District of the Army
Corps of Engineers. Then, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941, the U.S. declared war on Japan a day later and Hitler declared war on
the U.S. two days after that, Roosevelt ordered the “Manhattan Engineering District
Project” to set up a full-scale effort to design and build a workable atomic
weapon as soon as possible, and to do so in out-of-the-way secret locations:
Oak Ridge, Tennessee to produce enough fissile uranium to fuel the bomb;
Hanford, Washington to make plutonium in case the effort to enrich enough
uranium for a bomb didn’t work; and, most importantly, Los Alamos, New Mexico,
where the top scientists in the field were recruited to work under military
direction on what was essentially an engineering problem.
The basic physics
behind the bomb were known at the start and had been ever since 1938, when a
German physicist named Lise Meitner published a paper in Nature establishing that by bombarding it with neutrons,
she and her boss, Otto Hahn, had actually split a uranium atom into smaller
fragments, thereby releasing great quantities of energy. If enough fissile
uranium could be concentrated in what came to be called a “critical mass,” the
fission would release more neutrons, which would strike more nuclei of fissile
uranium, which would release more neutrons, start more fission, and so on and
so on until the resulting energy created a nuclear explosion through which an
entire city could be destroyed by a single bomb. (Interestingly, a number of
the early atomic scientists had read a novel by H. G. Wells published in 1914
called The World Set Free,
apparently the first work of fiction featuring atomic weapons, which he
dedicated to Frederick Soddy — a little-known British physicist who worked as
an assistant to Ernest Rutherford; the two were also instrumental in
documenting the incredible energy of radioactive substances like uranium and
the possible military uses of it — and at least some of the early scientists
involved in building the bomb had first thought it might be practical because
of Wells’ book.) The fact that the early work establishing the possibility of
nuclear fission had been done in Germany scared the shit out of Szilard,
Einstein and the many other physicists, quite a few of them Jewish, who had
fled the Nazis and settled in the U.S. The story of the Manhattan Project has
been told quite often — in books, in documentaries (including a 1970’s PBS
production called The Day After Trinity which I remember as even better than The Bomb) and even a dramatic fiction film, Fat Man
and Little Boy (named after the two sorts
of bomb the Manhattan Project produced — the uranium-fueled “gun” bomb used on
Hiroshima and the plutonium implosion bomb used on Nagasaki — and also evoking
the relationship between the two people in charge of the project, Army general
Leslie Groves, played by Paul Newman, and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer) —
and it’s often treated as a sort of real-life Götterdämmerung in which an old world dies and a new one waits to be
born. (The famous lines from the Bhagavad-Gita Oppenheimer quoted after the Trinity test in July
1945 — “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” — do tend to reinforce that impression.)
But these
programs — both The Bomb and a
two-part program PBS aired after it called Uranium: Twisting the
Dragon’s Tail — suggest that atomic energy
in general and atomic weaponry in particular just fit neatly into humanity’s
long and all too fruitful quest for newer, more efficient and more lethal ways
to destroy large chunks of itself. Both of them suggested that the atomic bomb
became a cultural icon relatively quickly in its history — Uranium even includes some of the 1950’s songs about or
referencing the Bomb that were included in the marvelous 1983 documentary The
Atomic Café, though they appeared to be
re-recordings by modern artists rather than the originals used in The
Atomic Café (and I’d still like a chance to
hear again the beautiful country ballad “The Cold War Over You” by Floyd
Tillman, which anticipates Elvis Costello’s early songs equating disputes
between lovers in a relationship with tensions between entire countries, used
by the makers of The Atomic Café over
the closing credits of their film). PBS showed the first part of Uranium on Tuesday and the second part last night,
Wednesday, after yet another nuclear-themed show — one about the horrendous
disaster that destroyed two nuclear reactors in Japan during the earthquake and
tsunami at Fukushima, and the increasingly desperate jury-rigging the reactor
crew had to do to try to stop the reactor cores from melting down and/or the
containment vessels from exploding under pressure from the hydrogen released as
part of a meltdown (a problem nuclear engineers weren’t even aware of until it happened at Three Mile Island in 1979).
The shows covered much of the same material but the presentations were
dramatically different: The Bomb,
written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer, used an off-screen omniscient
narrator, Jonathan Adams, who sounded to me too annoyingly chipper (PBS’s
resident narrator, Will Lyman, would have been a better choice), while Uranium was written and directed by Wain Fimeri for
Australian TV and hosted on-screen by a quite attractive young man — Charles
called him a “physitwink” — named Derek Muller, who in the second half did the
Michael Moore number and got into the so-called “exclusion zones” around
Chernobyl and Fukushima (places where people were given emergency evacuations
after the nuclear accidents and have not been allowed to return since, though
the Fukushima survivors are at least allowed to return to their homes for
occasional short visits to savor what they had to leave behind, which is
probably an emotional wrench for some because all too many of the former
Fukushimans are still living in the “temporary” emergency trailers they were
put into while the accident was still happening).
Uranium tells a somewhat broader story than The
Bomb, beginning with the discovery of
uranium in a played-out gold mine in what is now the Czech Republic (the name
for uranium ore, “pitchblende,” is apparently a play on the Czech word for
“played out,” and conveyed the sentiment among the miners that when they
started finding that stuff instead of gold, it was bad news because it meant
there was no longer any recoverable gold in that mine and their jobs would soon
end). Uranium was considered a useless metal until French professor Henri
Becquerel made his famous experiments, exposing uranium to sunlight (though,
contrary to Fimeri’s film, he actually did his experiments with compounds —
so-called “uranium salts” — rather than pure metallic uranium because uranium
salts could acquire fluorescent properties if exposed to sunlight) and seeing
that there was an energy inside it that could “fog” a piece of photographic plate
put under the uranium and wrapped in lightproof paper. One day Becquerel
accidentally brought the uranium and his paper-wrapped plate into contact and
found that, even without the intervention of sunlight, the uranium fogged the
plate — indicating that whatever was exposing the film was an energy source
from the uranium itself. Today we call this “radioactivity” and don’t think
it’s that big a deal. Muller explained on-screen how uranium atoms transform
themselves by shedding what are called alpha particles from their nuclei —
these are combinations of two protons and two neutrons, and since the number of
protons in an atomic nucleus is what determines what element it is, each time a
uranium nucleus sheds an alpha particle it becomes a different element, which
is itself radioactive until, after five transitions, it reaches down from
atomic number 92, uranium, to 82, lead, which is not radioactive. (At least most lead isn’t; it wouldn’t
surprise me if an atomic physicist somewhere hasn’t either discovered or
created a radioactive isotope of lead.) Muller argued (as a lot of writers
about this history have before him) that uranium fulfilled the dream of the
ancient alchemists of “transmutation” of one element into another, and he even
told a story of an argument between Rutherford and Soddy in which Soddy
suggested using the term “transmutation” for this property of uranium and
Rutherford saying, “Don’t dare
call it that! We’ll be hanged if we do!”
This also leads to the often
misunderstood concept of “half-life” to mean just how radioactive a substance is; a half-life is simply
the length of time it takes for half your original sample to decay from
radioactive to non-radioactive. The Bomb, after a pretty in-depth depiction of the Manhattan Project and what
they were up against in trying to create a bomb — which makes the interesting
contention that the reason Joseph Stalin was so disinterested in the news when
Harry Truman told him at Potsdam, Germany that the U.S. had invented an atomic
weapon was he already knew about it. Though the alleged “atom spy ring”
involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, her brother David Greenglass, Harry Gold
and Morton Sobell was a joke, the Russians did have a real atom spy at Los Alamos, expatriate
German physicist and Communist Dr. Klaus Fuchs, and The Bomb named another Russian spy among the scientists at
Los Alamos of whom I’d never heard before; Fuchs was eventually caught but,
since he was a British national — he’d fled there from Germany and naturalized
as a British citizen before coming to the U.S. to work on the bomb — he was
punished by the British court
system and was thereby spared the McCarthyite hysteria that engulfed the
Rosenbergs and got them executed. Still, it was a surprising (though not
unbelievable) contention that the information the Russians were getting from
Los Alamos had reached all the way to the top. The Bomb rather races through the aftermath of the story —
the development of the hydrogen bomb, the firing of J. Robert Oppenheimer from
any further role in U.S. atomic research for refusing to work on it
(masterminded, according to these films, not by Dr. Edward Teller but by Lewis
Strauss, Eisenhower’s appointee as the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission) and the high hopes for “atoms for peace” — for nuclear power as a
cheap, inexhaustible source of electricity and other forms of energy — which a
number of the scientists who had worked on the bomb hoped would absolve them
from their responsibility for creating a weapon with the potential to destroy
all humanity.
Uranium ends with
some bizarre scenes attempting to argue that nuclear energy isn’t all that dangerous — the show makes the claim that no one
died from long-term exposure to the radiation at Chernobyl or Fukushima (though
it does concede that the Russian
firefighters sent into Chernobyl immediately after the disaster to put the
fires out — and dressed, the archive footage shows, in ridiculously
unprotective clothes that look like the sorts of things worn by the extras in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail — died from
short-term radiation sickness, and as Muller strolls through the room at
Chernobyl where those clothes are still stored, his Geiger counter readings literally go off the chart) and even repeats the Big Lie from
the modern-day nuclear industry that nuclear power is “clean” because it
doesn’t emit carbon. This ignores not only the vivid dangers of nuclear power
in the real world (I can’t imagine anyone could watch the NOVA episode on Fukushima sandwiched between these two
shows and argue that nuclear power is a good thing; if nothing else, the margin
of error for this unforgiving technology and the myriad ways in which both
accidents and human mistakes can cascade into events threatening the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people argues for the abolition of nuclear power
forever) but also the huge contributions to global warming, climate change and
carbon production by the other elements in the nuclear fuel cycle, from the
huge amounts of energy expended in mining pitchblende, extracting the uranium
from it, running it through gas-diffusion centrifuges (which involves turning
the uranium into a highly caustic gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spinning it so
the uranium hexafluoride molecules containing the fissile U-235 isotope from
the non-fissile and far more common U-238 separate and can be turned back into
uranium metal with a high enough U-235 concentration: 3 to 5 percent for a
power reactor, 20 percent for a research reactor or to produce nuclear
medicines, 80 to 95 percent for a bomb) and forming it into fuel rods; also the
enormous amount of heat nuclear power plants release into the ocean because
that’s where the hot water is pumped after it has, in the form of steam, turned
the turbines that power the generators that actually create electricity. To me,
there is fundamentally no moral, ethical or practical difference between
nuclear weapons and nuclear power: both are evil technologies and should be abolished (though I might make an
exception and allow a few small reactors to remain for health purposes only — Uranium contains a heart-rending story about a radioactive
medicine used in Australia to help diagnose cancers — which, of course,
radiation can also cause). I argued in the pages of Zenger’s
Newsmagazine that there were at least two technologies
whose basic premises were so fundamentally evil in terms of the dangers they
pose to life on earth that they should be banned: one was nuclear energy and
the other was genetic engineering of living organisms, which seems to me to be
“twisting the dragon’s tail” of evolution and potentially laying waste to the
biosphere in ways that make even the greatest potential nuclear disasters look
like nothing by comparison.
