Chapter 1
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, JULY 16, 1945, ON THE DETONATION OF THE FIRST A-BOMB, NEW MEXICO
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, MAY 24, 1946, TELEGRAM SENT TO PROMINENT AMERICANS
The first hint that the Pacific would be tragically transformed into the world’s first and only atomic ocean came at lunchtime on January 4, when President Harry S. Truman uttered a single cryptic sentence during his State of the Union address for 1950, to this effect: “Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers.” He never mentioned the Pacific by name; nor did he mention it two weeks later, on January 19, when he finally made the fateful decision to which his congressional speech had alluded. Nor did he, two further weeks on, when he issued a formal directive and announced publicly what he had decided.
He didn’t have to. So far as the United States was concerned, the sixty-four-million-square-mile expanse of the Pacific Ocean was the only place big enough and empty enough, and American enough, to allow the testing of the thermonuclear weapons the president had now finally committed his country to create.
The ocean already had had a taste of what was to come. Since 1946 the U.S. government had been secretly testing simple atomic fission bombs in the blue lagoons of its tropics. But these were quite modest weapons—deadly and terrible, to be sure, but nothing compared with what was to come next. The decision Truman made on that third Thursday of January, as well as his formal order to the Atomic Energy Commission that followed, was to start a program of work on a very different kind of device, and of a type both of unimaginable deadliness and theoretically limitless destructive power. It was a bomb that would forever change the nature of warfare, and would forever change the world. And its potential power was such that it could now be tried out, displayed, and demonstrated only in the empty middle of the Pacific.
Until the mid-1940s the ocean had been, in the popular imagination, just as Ferdinand Magellan described it four hundred years earlier. It had seemed a truly pacific sea, a place of maritime languor and quiet, of warm ultramarine waters and gentle trade winds. It suffered its ferocious storms, true, and its island peoples had not always lived lives of placid serenity, but it had not been a battle-scarred sea of churning and salt-stained gray, as the Atlantic was known. Just recently the war between the United States and Japan had seen violence on a gargantuan scale. But what was about to happen now was quite different, and by many orders of magnitude.
When President Truman authorized the 1950 budget of three hundred million dollars for the AEC to begin work on these quite different weapons (the “supers,” as they were lightly called, the fusion bombs, the thermonuclear devices), they were little more than the blackboard musings of physicists’ dreams—but musings well worth bringing to the attention of the Oval Office.
It had been several weeks earlier, on October 6, 1949, that the director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Sidney Souers, told Truman about some physicists’ remarkable claims: that it might well be possible to employ the nuclear fusion of light gases to create explosions of tremendous force, unlike anything known before. Truman’s interest was instantly piqued—driven in part by his knowledge that the Russians had exploded their first crude atomic fission bomb just a few weeks earlier. This had led to bitter and ferocious argument in the United States, principally between the military and the scientific communities, over the morality of making a new kind of weapon that could and probably would have the power to obliterate not merely thousands but millions. Many of the leading figures in the Pentagon, well aware that the now nuclear-capable Soviets would soon also be able to construct such bombs, insisted that the United States develop them, either to keep up or to keep ahead. But many scientists, more aware than most of the terrible powers of the proposed weapons, found the idea of their development utterly abhorrent. Many were gripped with a profound sense of guilt, even shame, for having ever provided the theoretical basis for their construction in the first place. Fission bombs were bad enough; fusion bombs were unimaginable in their potential for horror.
However, and so far as the U.S. government was concerned, this particular debate was officially ended on January 19, when Truman summoned Admiral Souers to the White House to tell him, in person, of what would come to be seen as one of the truly momentous decisions of his presidency. Developing the new superbomb, Truman told him, finally “made a lot of sense . . . that was what we should do” (my emphasis).
On January 31 the president made the necessary formal pronouncement that he had commanded the AEC to begin the necessary research. Enough money had been made available in the budget. America had to have the bomb, he said to his cabinet colleagues, because although no one ever wanted to use it, its possession would offer a bargaining chip during future negotiations with the Soviets. That alone was the pitiless rationale that finally squared the circle, at least for President Truman, in the moral debate.
The AEC duly began its work, in secret, and with great speed. Within a year the musings had become material. The technical challenges of fashioning a thermonuclear bomb were essentially solved. A first, small prototype device, known as George, was exploded three months later, on May 8, 1951. Then, on November 1, 1952, the first true thermonuclear test weapon, known as Mike, was detonated. Then the largest of them all—a weapon that was tested despite a memorable miscalculation that triggered results both unforgivable and unforgiven—was detonated sixteen months after that.
And owing to their daunting size, all these thermonuclear devices were exploded in the middle of the once pacific Pacific Ocean.
So far as the ocean was concerned, the journey to this point began in 1946, on the mid-sea atoll that shares its name with the much-reduced new style of bathing costume introduced that same year. A costume that a disconcerted Le Monde editorial archly described as displaying “the extreme minimization of modesty” and, rather presciently, as “quite as shocking as an explosion.” The swimsuit’s creator, Louis Réard, had said much the same thing, though intending his remark to be more PR than pejorative: “Like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating.”
As was the island story.
There was in the Pacific an Arcadian time, of course, when all its islands belonged, if belonged is the proper word, to those who had made their livings there for generations. But one by one, group by group, European discoverers happened upon these islands, and one by one, group by group, they lost their easy innocence. The islands that in due time would interest the American bomb testers were first spotted in the eighteenth century by an English seafarer named John Marshall: his fleet came across a vast scattering of atolls in an otherwise empty sea a thousand miles north of the great island of New Guinea. The island inhabitants—Micronesians, as they came to be called by anthropologists—were part Malay, part Polynesian. For thirty previous centuries, they had lived peaceably enough on the atolls that would soon be called the Marshall Islands. They had fished and gathered coconuts, and aside from occasional tussles and skirmishes among one another, they had seldom troubled anyone beyond.
But then came their “discovery,” and in turn a bewildering succession of outsiders who claimed to own and then to rule them, and the Elysian order of old was rudely and permanently interrupted.
As
