Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free Page B

bomb. Indeed, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister, noted in his diary in spring 1942:
I received a report about the latest development in German science. Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to the point where… tremendous destruction, it is claimed, can be wrought with a minimum of effort… It is essential that we be ahead of everybody.
     
    The Nazis were, in fact, not even close to developing the bomb, but the Allies understandably erred on the side of assuming the worst case, partly out of supreme respect for legendary German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Had they passed up development, and Hitler managed somehow to build the bomb, utter annihilation surely would have befallen the great democracies. That they were not close was proven by Heisenberg’s reaction upon being told about the Hiroshima bombing. He guessed that the bomb had not been a uranium weapon, but instead a superpowerful chemical explosive bomb.
    After the war, Einstein regretted having helped the Allies by persuading FDR to pursue A-bomb research. He lamented to his secretary: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!”
    The Nazis did, however, jump into a huge lead in another department during the war. The great German rocketeer Wernher von Braun led development of “vengeance weapons”—the German “V” series of rockets. V-1s—jet-powered low-flying subsonic missiles that usually can be steered in flight (what today we call cruise missiles, albeit the pioneering V-1 was not maneuverable)—began dropping on London in 1944. Later that year, the V-2, the world’s first true military ballistic missile, hit London. (A ballistic missile—from “ballista,” a medieval catapult of large stones—is set on its course by a few minutes of powered flight, then coasts until gravity pulls it back to earth.) Unlike the V-1, which flew at constant speed and altitude until its final plunge, and thus could be easily shot down by ground fire or by intercepting aircraft, the V-2 attained a velocity of nearly one mile per second and thus fell on its targets with no warning, arriving before the sound of its approach. Had Hitler’s warheads carried atom bombs of the kind dropped on Japan in August 1945, the heart of London could have been obliterated with but a few such hits. 2
    The nuclear age formally began on the morning of July 16, 1945, when in the New Mexico desert the Trinity device was detonated. Its blinding brightness led Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, to famously recall a verse from the Indian epic, the
Bhagavad-Gita
(“The Song of God”):
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. For I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.
     
    Oppenheimer’s awe-induced invocation of ancient sacred poetry was spot-on: the glare from the blast would have been visible from the planet Jupiter, some one-half billion miles away from Earth.
    The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later changed warfare and global politics forever. The age that began two-thirds of a century ago has gone through several stages—from the all-out arms race of 1945 to 1967, to the arms control of the seventies and eighties, and finally to the era of rogue nuclear weapons proliferation we entered in the early nineties.
Nuclear History, 1945–Present
    W ITH A combination of wartime espionage at Los Alamos and its own scientists at Sarov (the monastery town turned closed city for the Russian bomb project), the Soviet Union lagged only four years behind the U.S. in nuclear bomb building.
    The end of the war found the former allies now armed with nuclear weapons, facing off in a struggle lasting nearly 50 years, with Europe divided by Soviet aggression. Though labeled “cold,” the war was very hot in several major regional proxy