Excerpts
The Gadget
From: Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World, Chapter One, “The Bomb Stops Here.”
We, the children of Celia Clinton Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, enjoyed the air raid drills of 1954. We stood in lines on the playground and goofed off. We watched the bald-headed principal come out in his shiny grey suit and herd the teachers as they herded us. The classroom version of the drill had us under our desks, little seven-year-old fingers clasped behind our heads, elbows at the ears, like the fingers and elbows of thousands of other children in Moscow, Frankfurt, New York, and Winnipeg. An alternative strategy was to take the position under the windows. Not away from the windows, our teacher explained, but under them, so when the glass was blown out, it would sail harmlessly over our heads. I doubted the tactic. I wanted to be far away from any bomb that would blow out our windows and I resolved that when the real one came, I would escape and run home. Then, I thought about my older sister. I would pick her up in grade three. But where was that?
Although I had no sense of it during my childhood, between 1945 and 1965 the world was stitched together like a great quilt. The more obvious threads in that stitching were new technologies like telecommunications, electronic media, and jet air travel. Less obvious threads were ideas like human rights and images like the blue Earth turning in space. One thread remained invisible, yet it touched everyone, rich and poor, all creeds and races, touched people to the marrow of their bones and made them global siblings. That thread was strontium-90.
In August 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt from his home on Long Island explaining how uranium fission might create a nuclear chain reaction that could unleash more energy than ever before contemplated. Einstein warned Roosevelt that this process was known in Nazi Germany and that uranium research was underway at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The scientist told the president that the United States had poor uranium deposits and cited Canada, Czechoslovakia, and the Congo as the best-known sources. Germany, however, had stopped the sale of uranium from Czechoslovakia. The primary supply for the United States was in Canada. Einstein was morally distressed by the prospect of building a nuclear bomb, but he feared the horror that might result if Hitler achieved the weapon first.
On December 2, 1942, Einstein’s colleagues, Hungarian Leo Szilard and Italian Enrico Fermi created the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction on a volleyball court in Chicago. The work chilled the bones of many scientists. Szilard wrote to physicists around the world: “[I]t is within our power to construct atomic bombs. What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know.” Had they not been confronted by the extraordinary malevolence of Hitler, the small community of nuclear physicists who knew what was about to happen might have convened a meeting with world leaders and dissuaded them. But fear of Hitler provoked the urgency to produce a nuclear bomb. In response to Einstein’s letter, Roosevelt sought the advice of American businessman Alexander Sachs, who convinced the president that if a nuclear bomb was going to be built, America should be first.
Roosevelt gave the order: Build it.
After Hitler’s demise in the spring of 1945, Polish physicist Joseph Rotblatt quit the US bomb project and became known as the first anti-nuclear “peacenik.” But the momentum could not be stopped. By July, the physicists and technicians under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer had built the bomb. The first test went by the code-name Trinity, a reference to Christian theology that unsettled some insiders. The official schedule of events referred to the bomb as “the Sphere.” The scientists themselves never referred to a bomb. They called their creation, “the gadget.”