From my point of view, the consequences of global nuclear war became much more dangerous with the invention of the hydrogen bomb, because airbursts of thermonuclear weapons are much more capable of burning cities, generating vast amounts of smoke, cooling and darkening the Earth, and inducing global-scale nuclear winter. This was perhaps the most controversial scientific debate I’ve been involved in (from about 1983-90). Much of the debate was politically driven. The strategic implications of nuclear winter were disquieting to those wedded to a policy of massive retaliation to deter a nuclear attack, or to those wishing to preserve the option of a massive first strike. In either case, the environmental consequences work the self-destruction of any nation launching large numbers of thermonuclear weapons even with no retaliation from the adversary. A major segment of the strategic policy of decades, and the reason for accumulating tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, suddenly became much less credible.
The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983) nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates are 10-15°C. The two values are in good agreement considering the irreducible uncertainties in the calculations. Both temperature declines are much greater than the difference between current global temperatures and those of the last Ice Age. The long-term consequences of global thermonuclear war have been estimated by an international team of 200 scientists, who concluded that through nuclear winter the global civilization and most of the people on Earth, including those far from the northern mid-latitude target zone, would be at risk, mainly from starvation. If large-scale nuclear war ever occurs, with cities targeted, the effort of Edward Teller and his colleagues in the United States (and the counterpart team headed by Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union) might be responsible for lowering the curtain on the human future. The hydrogen bomb is by far the most horrific weapon ever invented.
When nuclear winter was discovered in 1983, Teller was quick to argue both (1) that the physics was mistaken, and (2) that the discovery had been made years earlier under his tutelage at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There is in fact no evidence for such a prior discovery, and considerable evidence that those in every nation charged to inform their national leaders of the effects of nuclear weapons had consistently overlooked nuclear winter. But if Teller is right, then it was unconscionable of him not to have disclosed the purported discovery to the affected parties – the citizens and leaders of his nation and the world. As in the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove, classifying the ultimate weapon – so no one knows that it exists or what it can do – is the ultimate absurdity.
It seems to me impossible for any normal human being to be untroubled by helping to make such an invention, even putting nuclear winter aside. The stresses, conscious or unconscious, on those who take credit for the contrivance must be considerable. Whatever his actual contributions, Edward Teller has been widely described as the ‘father’ of the hydrogen bomb. In an admiring 1954 article, Life magazine described his ‘almost fanatic determination’ to build the hydrogen bomb. Much of his subsequent career can, I think, be understood as an attempt to justify what he begat. Teller has contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven’t had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous.
Teller has been a major force in preventing a comprehensive treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. He made it much more difficult to accomplish the 1963 Limited (above-ground) Test Ban Treaty. His argument that above-ground testing was essential to maintain and ‘improve’ the nuclear arsenals, that ratifying the treaty would ‘give away the future safety of our country’ has proven specious. He has also been a vigorous proponent of the safety and cost-effectiveness of fission power plants, claiming himself to be the only casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979; he had a heart attack, he says, debating the issue.
Teller advocated exploding nuclear weapons from Alaska to South Africa, to dredge harbours and canals, to obliterate troublesome mountains, to do heavy earth-moving. When he proposed such a scheme to Queen Frederika of Greece, she is said to have responded, ‘Thank you, Dr Teller, but Greece has enough quaint ruins already.’ Want to test Einstein’s general relativity? Then explode a nuclear weapon on the far side of the Sun, Teller proposed. Want to understand the chemical composition of the Moon? Then fly a hydrogen bomb to the Moon, explode it, and examine the spectrum of the flash and fireball.
Also in the 1980s, Teller sold President Ronald Reagan the notion of Star Wars, called by them the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’, SDI. Reagan seems to have believed a highly imaginative story of Teller’s that it was possible to build a desk-sized orbiting hydrogen-bomb-driven X-ray laser that would destroy 10,000 Soviet warheads in flight, and provide genuine protection for the citizens of the United States in case of global thermonuclear war.
It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and – although he did not intend such an outcome – Gorbachev’s promotion of glasnost, or openness.
Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.
Teller has also advocated the development of burrowing nuclear warheads, so that underground command centres and deeply buried shelters for the leadership (and their families) of an adversary nation might be dug down to and wiped out; and 0.1-kiloton nuclear warheads that would saturate an enemy country, obliterating its infrastructure ‘without a single casualty’. Civilians would be alerted in advance. Nuclear war would be humane.
As I write, Edward Teller – still vigorous and retaining considerable intellectual powers into his late eighties – has mounted a campaign, with his counterpart in the former Soviet nuclear weapons establishment, to develop and explode new generations of high-yield thermonuclear weapons in space, in order to destroy or deflect asteroids that might be on collision trajectories with the Earth. I worry that premature experimentation with the orbits of nearby asteroids may involve extreme dangers for our species.
Dr Teller and I have met privately. We’ve debated at scientific meetings, in the national media, and in a closed rump session of Congress. We’ve had strong disagreements, especially on Star Wars, nuclear winter and asteroid defence. Perhaps all this has hopelessly coloured my view of him. Although he has always been a fervent anticommunist and technophile, as I look back over his life it seems to me I see something more in his desperate attempt to justify the hydrogen bomb: its effects aren’t as bad as you might think. It can be used to defend the world from other hydrogen bombs, for science, for civil engineering, to protect the population of the United States against an enemy’s thermonuclear weapons, to wage war humanely, to save the planet from random hazards from space. Somehow, somewhere, he wants to believe that thermonuclear weapons, and he, will be acknowledged by the human species as its saviour and not its destroyer.
When scientific research provides fallible nations and political leaders with formidable, indeed awesome powers, many dangers present themselves: one is that some of the scientists involved may lose all but a superficial semblance of objectivity. As always, power tends to corrupt. In this circumstance, the institution of secrecy is especially pernicious, and the checks and balances of a democracy become especially valuable. (Teller, who has flourished in the secrecy culture, has also repeatedly attacked it.) The CIA Inspector General commented in 1995 that ‘absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely’. The most open and vigorous debate is often the only protection against the most perilous misuse of technology. The critical piece of the counterargument may be something obvious that many scientists or even lay people could come up with provided there were no penalties for speaking out. Or it might be something more subtle, something that would be noted by an obscure graduate student in some locale remote from Washington, DC, who, if the arguments were closely held and highly secret, would never have the opportunity to address the issue.