BOOK IV
29.
The thought that propelled the United States into the race for the ultimate weapon—nuclear-armed ballistic missiles hurtling across continents at 16,000 miles per hour through the vastness of space—occurred to Bernard Schriever toward the end of March 1953 at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, nearly three months before his promotion to brigadier general. He was in Alabama to present the concept for the intermediate strategic bomber he was attempting to create for SAC to a meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Many men would have found the thought fantastical, but not Schriever. His mind was receptive because he was so caught up in the opening years of the sinister arms competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, a rivalry that would help to bankrupt and dissolve the immense Soviet empire and bequeath America a national debt of colossal proportions.
Two members of the Advisory Board at the meeting were exceptional men even among the generation of exceptional European minds who had transformed American science and learning in the decades since their arrival in the 1930s. One of the men was John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematical genius, possibly the finest intelligence of the twentieth century after Albert Einstein. The second was another Hungarian, Edward Teller, a physicist of great talent and monomaniacal ambition who claimed to be the sole parent of the hydrogen bomb. The flight of this wealth of intellectual talent across the Atlantic had been a born-in-sorrow gift to America from Europe’s economic and social turmoil after the First World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler and his virulent anti-Semitism. Both men had participated in the building of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the Second World War. Both had then taken part in the creation of the awesome thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon that followed the initial unleashing of the atom.
The first of these hydrogen bombs, as they were commonly called, code-named Mike, had been detonated at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific on November 1, 1952, only three years before the Soviet Union was to acquire its hydrogen weapon. Mike erupted with a force of 10.4 megatons, 832 times the power of Little Boy at Hiroshima. It vaporized the island on which it was tested and left a crater under the sea. Mike was not really a bomb in the sense that it could be dropped from an airplane, although the Air Force attempted for a time to obtain a lighter version that it could drop. Mike was an eighty-two-ton device, laboriously constructed, of giant metal containers called dewars, after James Dewar, the Scottish physicist who in 1892 had invented the thermos bottle, from which these highly sophisticated receptacles were descended. Mike’s doomsday contents were in liquid form, flowing into the dewars through connected piping, and had to be cooled down to cryogenic levels. Von Neumann and Teller had, nonetheless, labored sufficiently long in the devil’s workshop of nuclear weapons design to be able to calculate rapidly how to transform unwieldy monsters into practical devices of mass destruction. In their briefings to the Advisory Board meeting, they predicted that by 1960 the United States would be able to build a hydrogen bomb that would weigh less than a ton but would explode with the force of a megaton, i.e., eighty times the power of the simple atomic or fission bomb that had blown away Hiroshima.
Schriever pondered the prediction for a moment and immediately understood its implication. The barrier to the construction of the weapon against which there was no defense had always been the excessive weight of the warhead required. Von Neumann and Teller had just told him that it was now possible to devise a warhead of acceptable weight and thus to build this weapon—a rocket that could catapult up into space, hurl its thermonuclear projectile nearly 6,330 miles, and fling this bomb of eighty Hiroshimas down on any city in the Soviet Union.
On May 8, 1953, the earliest he could obtain an appointment, Schriever went up to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to see von Neumann. He wanted to be certain he had interpreted correctly what von Neumann and Teller had said. He needed to have von Neumann, the mathematician and mathematical physicist wizard who held the research chair in mathematics at the institute, confirm that it really would be possible by 1960 to downsize a hydrogen bomb with a megaton’s blast to less than a ton in weight. These two attributes were the sine qua non for the building of a practical intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. If the warhead was a great deal heavier, a rocket of mammoth porportions, difficult to transport and field at dispersed launching sites, would be required to lift the warhead into space and hurl it the approximately 6,330 statute miles that was the desired range. (The Air Force and Navy normally measure distance in nautical miles. One nautical mile is equivalent to approximately 2,025 yards. Civilians, however, measure distance in statute miles, one of which is equivalent to 1,760 yards. Because this book has been written for lay readership, statute miles, with some exceptions, have been used here and throughout.) Yet the yield had to be high, given the relatively primitive guidance technology of the day and thus the difficulty of hitting a target, even one as large as a city, thousands of miles away. A thermonuclear warhead exploding with a million tons of TNT would allow the average accuracy requirement (technically called CEP for circular error probable) to be eased to two to three miles from the center of the target, because the blast would be sufficient to destroy or severely damage anything within that radius and beyond.
No one had told Bennie Schriever to go to Princeton, nor had anyone instructed him to find out how to build an ICBM. His previous initiatives, such as his confrontations with LeMay, had all occurred in the course of carrying out the duties of his job. This time was different. This time, for the first time, he was initiating something entirely on his own. If anyone was responsible for sending him to Princeton to see von Neumann it was Hap Arnold, who, the better part of a decade before, had inspired him to set off down a visionary’s road. Schriever had arranged the meeting through his friend Teddy Walkowicz, who knew von Neumann well from his years of working with von Kármán, first on the Toward New Horizons task force, then as secretary of the Scientific Advisory Board, and subsequently as executive assistant to Jimmy Doolittle. (During the SAB meeting at Maxwell there had been no opportunity for Bennie to do more than introduce himself briefly to von Neumann.) Worried that he might not be able to understand the intricacies of nuclear physics, a subject with which Walkowicz would have no difficulty, Schriever had asked his friend to join him. Walkowicz was by this time a civilian living in New York. He had resigned from the Air Force in disgust and gone to the big city to work for Laurance Rockefeller in venture capital finance. Despite the Ph.D. he had gained at MIT at considerable sacrifice, Walkowicz had been unable to gain promotion beyond lieutenant colonel because he had never gone to Flying School and become a pilot. In the terminology of the profession, he was a “nonrated officer.” As far as the airplane drivers, the bomber generals who then dominated the Air Force, were concerned, that barred him from the higher ranks, whatever his technical prowess. To these men an officer who could not fly lacked the essential qualification for admission to the brotherhood—he would never be able to exercise command in the air.
While they were waiting for their appointment with von Neumann in a combined lounge and small library at the institute, Schriever was surprised by an elderly figure who walked in, apparently on the way to his office. The wildly unkempt mane of white hair and the untidy mustache could belong to only one man—Albert Einstein. Bennie got up and introduced himself and Einstein shook his hand and said a few polite words before moving on. There was a certain irony in the encounter, however fleeting. Einstein, then in his seventy-fourth year, had two years left to live and, as he reflected on his extraordinary life, the act he regretted most was signing the famous 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt that was the genesis of the American atomic bomb project. He had done so at the behest of fellow émigré physicists out of fear that the Nazis would build the bomb first and win the Second World War with it. He had then been horrified when the United States had used the bomb to massacre the civilian populations of two Japanese cities. He was now equally upset over the postwar arms race that had sprung up between the United States and the Soviet Union, because he regarded the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a threat to the existence of humankind. One wonders what he might have said had he known he was shaking the hand of a man who was making it his mission to put not a mere atomic bomb, but rather a hydrogen bomb of eighty Hiroshimas, on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
At the agreed time, 10:30 A.M., von Neumann’s secretary, a friendly, middle-aged woman named Elizabeth Gorman, appeared and led them into the eminent Hungarian’s office. He was standing behind his desk, a portly figure of modest height, as ever dressed correctly in a business suit (he usually wore the full three-piece model with matching vest), white shirt, and tie, and white handkerchief ironed and folded precisely into two points and tucked into his lapel pocket. His hand was held out in greeting and he was smiling, the smile redoubling the double chin in his wide, friendly face. The deep brown eyes also seemed to smile a greeting, emphasized as they and the brows above them were by the high forehead, growing higher all the time because of the receding line of his equally dark brown curly hair. Schriever had come to the right man. “Johnny” von Neumann, as he referred to himself and as his friends called him, was always pleased to welcome members of the American military establishment and to put himself at their service.