The Age of Radiance Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  PART ONE: THE OLD WORLD

  1. Radiation: What’s in It for Me?

  2. The Astonished Owner of a New and Mysterious Power

  3. Rome: November 10, 1938

  4. The Mysteries of Budapest

  PART TWO: THE NEW WORLD

  5. The Birth of Radiance

  6. The Secret of All Secrets

  7. The First Cry of a Newborn World

  8. My God, What Have We Done?

  PART THREE: WORLD’S END

  9. How Do You Keep a Cold War Cold?

  10. A Totally Different Scheme, and It Will Change the Course of History

  11. The Origins of Modern Swimwear

  12. The Delicate Balance of Terror

  PART FOUR: POWER AND CATACLYSM

  13. Too Cheap to Meter

  14. There Fell a Great Star from Heaven, Burning as It Were a Lamp

  15. Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet

  16. On the Shores of Fortunate Island

  17. Under the Thrall of a Two-Faced God

  Photographs

  Heartfelt Thanks

  About Craig Nelson

  Notes

  Sources

  Photo Credits

  Index

  For Stuart—You are the best in the world at what you do.

  The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we fear less.

  —MARIE CURIE

  1

  Radiation: What’s in It for Me?

  YESTERDAY you dashed your breakfast eggs with dried spices that had been irradiated against bacteria, germination, and spoilage. The secret ingredient in the microwave oven reheating that morning’s to-go coffee was radioactive thorium, first isolated from hearty Scandinavian minerals and named for their tempestuous lord. Your kitchen’s smoke + CO2 detector then started beeping every thirty seconds since it had to be replaced—its 0.9 micrograms of americium-241 had expired. The Brazil nuts in your cereal, meanwhile, had a thousand times more radium than any other food eaten by modern humans. Your banana’s potassium was radioactive, as was the body of the person you slept next to the night before. All night long you returned the favor, two lovers irradiating each other across snores, dreams, and twitching REM eyes.

  Since you live at sea level, you get an annual cosmic-ray shower of thirty millirems (roentgen equivalent man (or mammal), a measure of the cancerous effects of radiant emanations, with one rem meaning .055 percent chance of cancer), but moving to Denver with its increased elevation will double that, while an aviation career equals 1 mrem for every thousand miles soaring at thirty thousand feet. Living in a home of masonry—stone, brick, adobe—doses you with 7 mrems annually, and in a city of buildings made from those same types of earth, 10 mrems, with an extra shot every time you pass through halls of granite, such as New York’s Grand Central Terminal or Washington’s Capitol (which is so vibrant it would fail the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing conditions for a reactor site).

  Visiting the dentist, you are draped in a lead apron but, even so, get another 80 mrems, as you would with a chest X-ray, CAT scan, or nuclear stress test. There’s uranium in your dental work, added to porcelain for long-lasting whiteness and fluorescence, and if you walk too closely by certain policemen after a dental or medical procedure, you’ll set off their Geiger counters (otherwise engaged in the hunt for mythic dirty bombs). On the way home, you bought a balloon for your daughter, the helium that made it float produced by all-natural, all-organic radioactivity within the planet’s mantle. Your delinquent nephew still smokes, inhaling 12,000 to 16,000 mrem every year from radon isotopes trapped in tobacco’s delicious leaves. As you watch the glittering skyline of New York City on your way home that night, 30 percent of its power draws from a nuclear reactor that, if it suffered a Chernobyl-like failure, would mean the evacuation of 10 million people.

  Your family is radioactive; your friends are radioactive; your pets are radioactive; and the earth itself throws off a gaseous froth of radon, 200 mrem for each of us, as uranium and thorium decay within the planet’s restive loam. Your vacation at a health spa includes daily bathing in mineral waters, but doesn’t include the information that hot springs are hot in two senses—the water is heated by rocks burning from those same uranium and thorium emissions, the force that also powers earthquakes to tremor, and volcanoes to erupt. Physicist Paul Preuss: “What spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables the Earth’s magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth’s interior into space. Where does it come from? Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s crust and mantle is a principal source.”

  Radiation is so organic that in 1972, geologic evidence of fourteen naturally occurring nuclear reactors, 1.5 billion years old, were found in the Oklo mines of Gabon, Central Africa. When groundwater leaked into a radiant vein of pitchblende ore unusually dense with that rare and quick-to-fission isotope uranium-235, the water slowed the energies of the free-range neutrons that make uranium radioactive, until their bouncing around like multiple strikes on a hundred-ball pool table triggered a chain reaction of neutrons splitting nuclei, which creates more free-range neutrons, splitting more nuclei. When the water boiled away, the natural ore reactors shut down . . . until more seeped back in, and they started up all over again.

  In real life, though, you are not imperiled by Brazil nuts, bananas, microwave ovens, smoke detectors, going to the dentist, working as a flight attendant, sleeping with a lover, visiting Gabon, or living in Denver. Even with these daily accumulations, a scientific majority believes that you would need over 10,000 mrem to get any increased cancer risk, and 200,000 for radiation sickness—so only your smoking nephew is in trouble. Though tobacco companies knew as early as 1959 that cigarettes were rife with polonium-210, they kept that fact quiet for over four decades, even after discovering that acid-washing could remove 99 percent of the problem—but deciding that it wasn’t worth the cost—resulting in 138 deaths per 1,000 smokers per twenty-five years. And for those concerned about Denver, even though elevated Colorado gets between two and three times the cosmic-shower radiation of New Jersey, cancer rates in New Jersey are higher than they are in Colorado.

  Irrational. Confusing. Conflicted. These are hallmarks of the whole of nuclear history. What was once an era heralded by Curie, Einstein, and Oppenheimer became degraded to Dr. Strangelove, $50 billion wasted on Reagan’s failed Star Wars, the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, and the 2011 crisis at Fukushima. We are now living in the twilight of the Atomic Age, the end of both nuclear arsenals and nuclear power, yet, simultaneously, radiation has become so ubiquitous in contemporary life that it is nearly invisible, at once everywhere and unnoticed. It is the source of medical diagnostics from X-rays to PET scans and barium tracers, as well as a significant weapon in vanquishing certain c
ancers; it powers submarines and aircraft carriers; provides 20 percent of America’s domestic energy (and 80 percent of France’s); is used by anthropologists and forensic scientists to date biological remains, and by farmers to destroy bacteria; it remains a Pentagon mainstay and a weapon held dear by a club of developing nations who see it both as a route to global prestige . . . and the ultimate in defense against that same Pentagon.

  At its root, radioactivity is wholly irrational to the human mind, appearing to exist somewhere between the quick and the dead. Uranium, thorium, and their ilk aren’t biological, yet they have half-lives, the amount of time it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its radiant force, which is followed by a loss of a quarter, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, then a thirty-second, and on and on . . . mathematically immortal. That seemingly “dead” rocks can send out powerful rays without external stimulus is counterintuitive, reminiscent of quicksilver, the half-liquid, half-metal state of room-temperature mercury that so transfixed Isaac Newton, he died, poisoned by it. This fundamental condition is nothing less than magical—matter spontaneously converting itself into energy; atoms flying apart all of their own volition; a process disturbing to our common sense of the world.

  Radiation’s powers rise from a simple condition: fat atoms. Uranium, thorium, and their radiant cousins are built from atoms so morbidly obese that they burst the laws of attraction—the fundamental building block of matter—and spit out a little piece of themselves, radiating subatomic alpha particles (two neutrons and two protons); beta particles (electrons); and energy waves of gamma rays (similar to X-rays). Imagine a giant blob of Ping-Pong balls, held together with rubber bands, but there are slightly more balls than the bands have the strength to cohere—fat atoms. Years may pass, but sooner or later, the rubber ties that don’t bind enough will falter, and the blob will spit out a ball. The changes in atomic structure caused by the spit induces alchemy, a transformation into an isotope, or into a different element altogether.

  When uranium ore is left atop photographic paper, it leaves the image of a rock veined in energy, of matter seeming to pulse with life. Hold silvery plutonium in your hand and it feels warm as a puppy . . . a big enough lump will boil its own water. The meltdown of runaway nuclear reactors, meanwhile, results in what physicist Robert Socolow describes as “afterheat, the fire that you can’t put out, the generation of heat from fission fragments now and weeks from now and months from now.” A fire that, unchecked, becomes eternal. And say what you will about the less than pleasant qualities of nuclear weapons . . . their detonations are rapturously beautiful.

  Formed by stars that exploded into the gas and dust of supernovas, radiance is the main source of heat within the earth, and its force propels the tectonic shift of the continents. Its invisible rays trigger biological damage, birth defects, tumors, and cellular mayhem. Hiroshima; Godzilla; Dr. Strangelove; Nagasaki; Bikini; Spider-Man. What other history combines unimaginable horrors with genetic monstrosities, Armageddon fantasies, Hollywood tentpole grandees, and a revolution in swimwear? No wonder it’s rare today for someone not to be at least a little bit radiophobic, alarmed by this omnipresent, invisible, mythic force. Yet the same rays that cause cancer can be used to cure cancer—drink the poison, or die—and the development of the most hideous weapon in the history of humankind has wholly eroded that same humankind’s ability to wage global war against itself. Every time another country with erratic political leaders—Pakistan, North Korea, Iran—develops the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, the world responds with grave fear. Yet, two of the greatest mass murderers in human history—Stalin and Mao—were nuclear armed and never used their atomic weapons. Sixty-five years and counting, and still the only country to ever drop the Bomb is the United States of America. The deterrent benefits have led more than one expert on this history, after detailed analysis, to propose awarding the atomic bomb with the Nobel Peace Prize.

  Before this research, you and I probably had similar thoughts about atomic energy (an eternal, potential menace) and nuclear weapons (a moral and mortal hazard). Then I found out that Chernobyl has become something of a human-free Eden, that the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in much better health than any of us could ever have imagined, that except for the radiating blanket of fallout, nothing can be accomplished with atomic weapons that can’t be done with conventional explosives, and that Marie Curie was one hell of a broad. The very term atomic bomb originated with science fiction writer H. G. Wells and was taken up by the physicists of Los Alamos as something of a joke. Since everything in the material world is composed of atoms, not just nuclear weapons are atomic—all weapons are atomic, this book is atomic, and you are atomic. But when it comes to radioactivity in the modern world, this “atomic everything” paradox makes a piquant kind of sense. For example, the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was triggered by a power failure when the emergency backup batteries, stored foolishly in the basement, were destroyed by a tsunami. That oceanic flood originated with an earthquake, which was the result of crashing tectonic plates, which moved from the pressure and heat created by radiation rising from the earth’s iron core. In the end, the Fukushima nuclear disaster was triggered by organic atomic forces . . . so in today’s world, the “joke” has reverberated back on Los Alamos. Nuclear in power, in medicine, and in weaponry has become so pervasive that it might as well be “atomic,” and the story of its birth, of nuclear’s startling rise and slow-motion collapse, of the men and women who changed our lives in ways they could never imagine, from Curie to Oppenheimer, Teller to Reagan, and “duck and cover” to Fukushima, defies belief.

  2

  The Astonished Owner of a New and Mysterious Power

  THE cataract of discovery that inaugurated the Atomic Age was a fifty-year revolution that transformed our scientific comprehension of matter, energy, and the essential ingredients of all that we know of the material world. Nearly every one of these great leaps forward was made, astonishingly enough, by an academic nonentity.

  On the late afternoon of November 8, 1895, at the University of Würzburg, a fifty-year-old scientist who had been expelled from the Utrecht Technical School (and had never received a diploma) was investigating the electrostatic properties of various glass vacuum tubes, fitted with metal posts at each end. At the turn of the century, physicists were obsessed with electricity; their laboratory’s stature was determined by battery power and the size of their sparks, with an appearance that has been re-created on a more epic scale in the movies of Frankenstein. Everything in a scientist’s lab was handmade in this, the “sealing wax and string” era, as red Bank of England wax was liberally used to seal up leaking vacuum apparatuses, and delicate blown-glass tubes were held up with strings.

  The Tesla coil of 1891 provided electrical investigators with their first generator of lightning-quality bolts, but the most popular turn-of-the-century sparker was the Rühmkorff—a widely admired London Rühmkorff had a 280-mile-long coil that could throw forty-two-inch jolts. These induction coils were powered by sulfuric and nitric acid batteries with zinc anodes that had to be cleaned with mercury, a combination that produced a constant gust of unsavory odors. By 1895, physicists were attaching each end of a vacuum tube to these coils, and trying to understand why throwing the switch would make the insides glow in blues and greens, a philosophic conundrum as these were “vacuum” tubes with presumably nothing inside them (though the mechanical methods of producing vacuums at the time rarely achieved perfect zero emptiness). The more advanced of these men and women thought that the revelation of the source of these glows might reveal the mysteries of electricity . . . and they were right. English chemist William Crookes insisted that the evanescences within cathode tubes, these cathode rays, must be a new form of “radiant matter” in a “fourth state”—neither solid, liquid, nor gas. French physicist Jean Perrin theorized that they were “corpuscles” carrying a negative charge . . . eventually known as electrons.


  Wilhelm Röntgen (RUNT-gun)—described by a McClure’s magazine profile as “a tall, slender, and loose-limbed man, whose whole appearance bespeaks enthusiasm and energy”—was director of the Physical Science Institute at the University of Würzburg and lived with his wife, Anna Bertha, upstairs from his two-room office, “a laboratory which, though in all ways modest, is destined to be enduringly historical. There was a wide table shelf running along the farther side, in front of the two windows, which were high, and gave plenty of light. In the centre was a stove; on the left, a small cabinet, whose shelves held the small objects which the professor had been using. There was a table in the left-hand corner; and another small table . . . was near the stove, and a Rühmkorff coil was on the right. The lesson of the laboratory was eloquent. Compared, for instance, with the elaborate, expensive, and complete apparatus of, say, the University of London, or of any of the great American universities, it was bare and unassuming to a degree.” Today the site of this lab is easy for medical-imaging enthusiasts to find, as it’s directly behind the Würzburg bus station.

  Röntgen used a Raps pump to vacuum out the pear-shaped Hittorf-Crookes and zeppelin-like Lenard tubes, which he then connected to a Rühmkorff that could throw sparks of four to six inches. On November 8, 1895, he covered a Lenard with black cardboard, drew the curtains to completely darken the room and ensure that the cardboard jacket was light-tight, and flipped the current. He then did the same with a different style of tube, a Crookes, but this time, though the cardboard still kept all light within, he noticed an odd, green glow coming from a lab bench, about a meter away. He turned the current off . . . the glow from the bench faded . . . then clicked the switch back . . . and once again the glow resumed. Lighting a match, he went over and found a piece of cardboard coated in barium platinocyanide—a standard fluorescent screen called a Leuchtschirm—and realized that, somehow, invisible rays from the cathode tube had to be passing through the black cardboard sheath and igniting this distant screen: “A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny.”