“Telegram 940 was sent in December 1944,” he said. “It listed seventeen scientists who were working on what it called ‘the problem.’ The names included Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Nils Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Arthur Compton—some of the top brains of the Manhattan Project.”
I held up a hand, which I practically had to wave directly between Thornton and Miranda to catch his attention. “I know some of those names,” I said, “but not all. Fermi was the guy who cobbled together the little reactor under the stadium in Chicago. But Bethe and Bohr—remind me. Physicists?”
“Right,” he said. “They were in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. Bohr was a Nobel laureate—so were Lawrence and Fermi, of course. Bohr escaped from Denmark under the noses of the Nazis, who were hoping to recruit him. He made it to London, then he and his son were flown to the States in an army transport plane.”
“Edward Teller,” said Miranda. “I’m not a fan of his.”
“No, I wouldn’t expect you to be,” he said. “Teller’s big claim to fame came in the late forties and fifties, of course, when he pushed for the hydrogen bomb—the ‘super,’ he called it—over the objections of Oppenheimer. Back during the Manhattan Project, Teller and von Neumann helped develop the implosion trigger for the plutonium bomb, the one used on Nagasaki.” I saw Miranda’s eyes cloud at the mention of Nagasaki; I’d noticed that anytime a discussion turned from the herculean labors of the Manhattan Project to the explosive fruits of those labors, it troubled her.
I tossed in another question, hoping to lead us away from Nagasaki. “How about Kistiakowsky? I never heard of him.”
“Interesting guy,” said Thornton. “Explosives expert. He cleared the first ski slope in Los Alamos by using rings of explosives to cut down trees.”
“Cool dude,” said Miranda. “See, that’s a use of explosives I can really get behind.” I was just congratulating myself on asking about Kistiakowsky when Thornton dropped the other, unfortunate shoe.
“Kistiakowsky was one of the unsung heroes of the project, if you ask me,” he said. “He was the bridge between the pie-in-the-sky theoretical physics and the nuts-and-bolts realities of building the bomb—the ‘Gadget,’ they called it in Los Alamos—and making it actually explode. Kistiakowsky came up with what’s called the implosion lenses for the plutonium.”
“Lenses?” I hadn’t known the atomic bomb involved optics.
“Not really lenses,” he said. “That was the term they used for wedges they formed out of conventional high explosives. The lenses surrounded the spherical core of plutonium. The theory was, when the lenses exploded, they’d create a very focused shock wave, which would compress the plutonium enough to cause critical mass.”
“And kablooey?” The edge on Miranda’s question was so fine as to be nearly invisible. I noticed it, but Thornton didn’t.
“Kablooey,” he said, with unfortunate cheerfulness. “But the wedges, the lenses, had to be machined with incredible precision—like, accurate to zillionths of an inch. Nobody thought Kistiakowsky could do it, including Oppenheimer. In fact,” he went on, warming to the story, “one reason they did the Trinity test with a plutonium bomb was because they were confident the uranium bomb would work but afraid the plutonium bomb would be a dud. Poor Kistiakowsky was already being set up as the scapegoat for failure. He finally got so fed up with the skepticism that he bet Oppenheimer a whole month’s pay—against just ten bucks from Oppenheimer—that it would work. And of course it did.”
“So Kistiakowsky got his ten bucks,” said Miranda, “and Nagasaki got vaporized.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “A real win-win.”
“Could’ve been worse,” said Thornton, finally punching back. “Fermi could’ve won his bet.”
Oh hell, I thought, here we go.
“And what was Fermi betting,” she snapped, “that maybe we’d come to our senses and not use the damn thing on innocent civilians?”
“Guys, guys,” I said, trying to de-escalate the conflict, but the chain reaction had gotten out of hand.
“No,” shot back Thornton. “Fermi was betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere. He was taking side bets, too: Would it incinerate the whole world, or just New Mexico?”
“Jesus,” said Miranda. “That is sickening.”