Five Good Reasons (or at Least Five Reasons) to Work on Nuclear Weapons.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
Robert Oppenheimer, Quoting the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first atomic explosion

 

     July 16 marks the anniversary of the first nuclear detonation of the Trinity device in the New Mexico desert in 1945. I have been witness to some very passionate discourse by friends who are appalled that anyone would want to work on weapons of mass destruction.  I have also been given some thought provoking views by friends and acquaintances who have worked on these weapons.  It is quite obvious why a rational person would oppose any work on these devices, but the views presented by people who actually work on them give us pause.

Copa Room showgirl Lee Merlin poses in a cotton mushroom cloud swimsuit as she is crowned Miss Atomic Bomb in this 1957 photograph. Above-ground nuclear testing was a major public attraction during the late 1950s, and hotels capitalized on the craze by hosting nuclear bomb watch parties, which usually included the dubbing of a chorus girl as Miss Atomic Bomb. Merlin was the last and most famous of the Miss Atomic Bomb girls.
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2012/oct/04/40-years-nuclear-tests-filled-nevada-skies-and-sho/

      
 The arguments against nuclear weapons are easy to understand and persuasive.  Few would disagree that these weapons are a terrible manifestation of human inventiveness.  Who could be in favor of the destruction of all humankind?  Opposition to their further development and deployment was widespread from the moment the world became aware of their existence.  The destructive potential of agents like mustard gas that the world recoiled from are insignificant compared to the potential of nuclear weapons to destroy all civilization on the planet.

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/tag/atom-bomb/  Mushroom Clouds over Las Vegas

Atomic bomb test - mushroom cloud with Fremont Street Casinos in foreground. April 18, 1953 (Las Vegas News Bureau Coll # 0049, Photo # 0414)

   However this is not the opinion of most people.  The universal but elusive average American would say “if they’ve got’em we’ve gotta to have them too."  Even those who lived through the height of the era of nuclear development and lived with the fear of an impending nuclear holocaust don't have a realistic conception of the enormous scale of the development and testing effort of these weapons.

A nuclear detonation about seventy five miles from downtown Las Vegas
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/tag/atom-bomb/

     The scale of the effort that went into nuclear weapons development is truly mind boggling.  A modern and historical perspective on nuclear weapons testing can be seen on youtube:| Google Earth Tour of Nevada Test Site (with DoE photos and video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a458omc3GJI

Operation Plumbob was one of the larger nuclear testing sequences performed in this country.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYQOfs98ljM

1951: For the first time, television viewers witness the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcasts the blinding light produced by a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0201ktla-atomic-test/

     
   The reasons for working on nuclear weapons for the engineers and scientists I have spoken fall into five general categories.

    The first is the least circumspect, and what folks across every stripe of opinion on nuclear arsenal maintenance would think that weapons scientists think, so I will dispose of it first.  Working on nuclear weapons is fun.  It is as challenging and difficult as it is fun.  This makes it even more fun.  There are few human endeavors where abstract math and physics have such far reaching and chillingly practical consequences.  Furthermore, the toys allocated to work in this area are amongst the most expensive and most advanced available.  The skills required to be one of the chosen few capable of doing this work confer one incontestable status of a high priest of technology.  One limitation of this rationale is, as will become apparent with the subtler rationales below, this one has a limited shelf life.  It is, in fact, somewhat contradicted by other rationales given by the same people who might find a portion of their motivation here.

   A second rationale is that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.  Hence, the best and brightest are needed to manage this mammoth burden of the inevitable and cataclysmic.  Nothing less than the fate of the Earth is at stake, but only because a die has already been cast and is irreversible.  Once the knowledge to produce these unimaginably powerful weapons is out, there is no way to stop everyone from developing some version.  The ethical and rational forces must stay in the forefront of this technology or all is lost.  To pretend that if one participant of the nuclear club renounces these weapons everyone else will follow suit is not just folly but sheer insanity.  Even any hope of disarmament requires the maintenance of the basic knowledge and capability to produce these weapons by all if any one power decides to.

   A third somewhat paradoxical rationale of nuclear weapons developers is that nuclear weapons are obsolete.  This is not a new perspective.  I first heard this argument as a student in the latter 1960s, from a project manager at Atomics International.  Even at that early time in the atomic age, there were people in the nuclear industry and nuclear weapons industry who saw their product as an antiquated one, soon to be wholly replaced by biological weapons much as nuclear bombs and nuclear tipped missiles had displaced conventional bombs.  They viewed themselves as the caretakers of an esteemed historical museum, scholars of a lost age soon to rise from the ashes of authority and awe as a phoenix of lofty nostalgia.

   The fourth rationale is one of exquisite paradox.  The world is a much safer place because of nuclear weapons, and furthermore only because nuclear weapons that everyone knows will work and are deployed.  Only by the inescapable presence of Armageddon is war preventable.  This is strangely similar to what many religious zealots have preached through the ages.

   A fifth and more modern rationale is perhaps the most obvious and common at this time.  University jobs are drying up, funding for research is scarce and jobs for physicists with good benefits are hard to come by.  Furthermore, in these more complex times a portion of the work of the labs is on nonproliferation, especially in the area of monitoring, and preventing terrorists from gaining access to nuclear weapons.  It is an entirely plausible scenario that someone who was actually very excited about working on nuclear weapons is assigned to nonproliferation methods instead, and stays at the job in order to keep health insurance for his or her family. 

   This is quite a contrast to the early attitude to nuclear weapons as portrayed in the civil defense film Declassified U.S. Nuclear Test Film #55  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8z94MXo9M  The motivation and the obligation of all individuals, and in particular talented scientists to help with this effort is a completely foreign perception in our current environment.  We cannot conceive of the psychological world people lived in with the expectation that destruction could reign down on us at any moment.

 

   The twentieth century saw a world immersed in two world wars a scarce thirty-one years apart.  With the advent of nuclear weapons there hasn’t been another world war.  War is simply not possible when annihilation of the whole Earth’s population would result.  The human species is flawed in that we will fight wars anytime we can if there is something to be gained.  Nuclear weapons have taken the option of a world war off the table as there will be no winners, only losers. The consequences of a war that goes nuclear negates any conceivable gain.

    War on an international scale is simply too costly.  The world has the developers and caretakers of nuclear weapons to thank for wars being limited to one or two countries.  The rules for war now are excruciatingly subtle and complex, and although wars are still widespread, they are exceptionally rare compared to what their occurrence would be without the omnipresent specter of total annihilation.

   It is a credit to many of the  leaders of the nuclear development effort that they questioned what they did and agonized over the consequences.  For many of them such as Robert Oppenheimer the struggle with the moral dilemma was of equal magnitude to the challenge of figuring out how to coordinate the design of the bomb.  Oppenheimer's ambivalence over these weapons led to the loss of his security clearance and subsequent removal from the development effort after World War II..
  

    A friend who worked at Los Alamos pointed out that for all the rationality and moral contemplation of those who dedicate their lives to the development, maintenance and production of nuclear weapons, “we hedge our bets.”  There is, or at least was, a church or synagogue on every corner of the town of Los Alamos.  The best and the brightest are reduced to supplicants, if surreptitiously, in the face of the same specter of total annihilation that humbles the rest of us.