INTRODUCTION
moderator: A couple of months ago, we were considering a minute in Meeting for Business about our people's responsibility for nuclear weapons and advocating a moral stance that at least some of us feel it is necessary to take in order to bring about abolition of nuclear weapons. In our discussions, we decided that we need to find out more, we needed to deliberate more on it. So we contacted the Peace Committee at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and developed these two sessions. Theresa Fitzgibbons was very helpful in finding and arranging for our speaker tonight.
Our speaker is very appropriate to this discussion, because he has been involved with nuclear weapons, on both sides of the issue, in a variety of ways. Currently, Theodore Taylor is a visiting professor at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, where he's been working on such projects as disposal of nuclear wastes and renewable energy sources. Prior to that, he was head of a corporation that he founded that did consulting both to the United States government and to other private and public concerns on these issues. Prior to that, he was a nuclear weapon designer, specializing in developing smaller and smaller fission weapons. Prior to that, well, in the summer of 1945, he was in midshipman school, having enlisted in the United States Navy.
In these various roles, Ted has confronted the issues and looked at the reasons and rationales that we've had for developing and even using nuclear weapons. And with that, I'd like to invite Ted to recount some of the milestones that he went through on that.
ADDICTION
Ted Taylor: Let me start by saying, my name is Ted, and I'm an addict. My addiction is to nuclear weaponeering. It's something I sometimes think I was born with. It's incurable; the only thing that can be done about it is to control it. The only control that works is total abstinence, and I feel as sure about that as I am of anything, that a large number of human beings have become sufferers of this addictive disease for more and more immense power to destroy.
It's not always been that way with me. I went through a period in which the symptoms of the disease were very strong and very active. I first heard the news of our entering into the Nuclear Age publicly on August 6th, 1945, when I was in midshipman school. I was completely bowled over by the news, excited so much so that I wrote more than my just scattered, irregular letters home to my family in Mexico City, where I was born. I went on and on about humanity reaching a turning point in its history, and I didn't know what was going to happen, but one thing I was sure of was that I would never work on these things. Four years later, 1949, I found myself totally immersed in the absolute thrill of working on these devices in which one was focusing one's mind on something smaller than a baseball, which for an instant contained an amount of energy equivalent to a pile of high explosives as big as the White House - all adjoining buildings included. In something no bigger than my fist.
The excitement was beyond belief to people not directly involved with it. The pressures, the temperatures - which were bigger by far than the pressures and temperatures in the middle of the Sun - were the basis for a sense of power over global events on the part of anybody intimately involved in exploring what could be done with this new - to Earth, new - form of cosmic energy, which we had released explosively over Hiroshima and then, a few days later, over Nagasaki.
It's a long and dreary story, those twenty years or so of working on nuclear weapons. How that happened to take place after my writing home and saying I'm never going to work on these things was, I think, the kind of rationalization that anybody goes through when they are facing an addiction of some kind. That is, you have to make excuses for why you're doing this.
After some student activism at the University of California at Berkeley, in which three of us got very intense about calling for a general strike of all nuclear physicists worldwide, until the bombs were gone, we presented that to [J. Robert] Oppenheimer, who said, "Take it, burn it, forget you ever had anything to do with it, because you're going to be labeled as Communists the rest of your lives if you don't do what I say." Well, we didn't burn it, we didn't forget it, but we didn't pursue it.
Not long after that, I found myself very interested in the work I was doing, which at that time wasn't on bombs, it was high-energy physics at the University of California laboratory. In that situation, I did very well at the laboratory, but I did very poorly preparing for my oral exams on various subjects. I wasn't interested in those subjects. To make a somewhat long story short, I flunked out of graduate school. Although I was reinstated later if I wanted to, my boss at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, Robert Serber, calmed me down. He was very happy with some work I had been doing for him and with other theoretical physicists, and he said, "Don't worry; I'll get you a job at Los Alamos." And so, he called a person who, slightly later, became my boss, Carson Mark, and said, "There's this fellow, here, who's very good at what he's interested and very bad at what he's not interested in. Why don't you hire him? I'll bet he'll do something very helpful to the laboratory."
So Caro - my wife - and I and a four-month-old baby arrived at Los Alamos, November 1949. I suddenly just got so high within a week on what I was doing - finding out there were some real secrets about how these things work, things I had never imagined - but more important to me, as it turned out later, was there were a lot of things not yet followed through. My job was to look for extremes, things that people hadn't really tried before, to answer the question, can you make a bomb that can be fired out of a cannon, can you make a bomb that can be fired out of something more like a rifle, how big can you make a bomb, can you make a bomb that would destroy all of Moscow - which the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima would not do, by a long shot. So I got caught up in extremes. That went on for almost 20 years, not all of it at Los Alamos. I then changed jobs, because I wanted to try my hand at designing nuclear power systems, for peaceful purposes.
Throughout that time, my mother particularly, and to some extent my wife, objected to what I was doing. With my mother mostly in letters home, she kept persistently asking me, "Why are you working on these things, the purpose of which is to kill as many people as possible? How can you do that?" So I had to make up an answer. It wasn't difficult; I just used the same answer that was given by the rest of us at Los Alamos, by the vocal part of the U.S. Congress, by the President of the United States, and by people in other countries: that we, and at that time our counterparts in the Soviet Union, were the world's front line of peacemakers. Well, how can that be? We were making war so extreme as to make it impossible even to contemplate. The bombs were stopping all wars. Well, that didn't fly with my mother at all. As far as my wife was concerned, we just buried the issue in the closet; it became a skeleton in the closet. She found my justifications - as President Truman's and later a long string of other presidents - she found that not a way to get comfortable with the age of nuclear bombs.
Then, a big transformation - which happened suddenly and, I think, in very simple ways - and familiar to people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol or various things that are clearly harmful but one can't seem to stop doing - that is, you have to bottom out. That means in all cases: stop, or die. One way or another. That happened to me in the middle of a job in the Pentagon where I, in 1965, was given charge for a couple of years of tending the nuclear weapons that we had. There was another person who shared the responsibility for that: monitoring, keeping track of our stockpile of, then, 37,000 nuclear weapons. I thought maybe at most we might have 2000, possibly, which was already more than enough to destroy most of the big cities in the world. The Soviet Union had, maybe, 20,000, so there were over 50,000 warheads at that time, in five countries. Not long after, they started appearing in other countries, starting with Israel.
The craziness of what we were doing, the extremism, not just bombs of all different kinds - dozens and dozens of different types, to the point where we even started running out of names: Viper, Cobra, Rattlesnake, usually not nice animals - the net result was, I did make a vow on the basis of which I resigned from the Pentagon, and the vow was never to undertake any promotion of any nuclear weapons for any purpose, ever. And I've kept that.
I know that the addiction is still there. This was in 1966, actually, that I left the Pentagon. For example, 20 years after that, I wrote an article for the Scientific American, called "Third-Generation Nuclear Weapons," and I got pulled back in again. It was unclassified; it was being done for public information; it was to give people an idea of how dangerous the arms race was, what awful things people could come up with. And I found myself designing nuclear weapons of various kinds - again - and being disappointed when some flash of insight in the middle of the night turned out not to work on paper. So I know it's still there, and in talking to people who have overcome addiction, particularly to alcohol, it's a little bit like saying, "I'm never going to drink again, and to display that, I'm going to take a nice, heavy glass, put in some ice, mix in some Old Granddad bourbon, and smell it, and put it aside, and then smell it again." That's exceedingly dangerous. On any scale, let alone nuclear weapons big enough to destroy a city.
Since that time, I've done a variety of things, I think it's fair to say all of them aimed at abolition of all nuclear weapons for all time, as soon as possible.
SPECTRUM OF
WEAPONS
[Audience question, about nuclear weapons that can be mounted on a jeep.]
Well, if it was mounted on the back, it probably was an eight-inch howitzer, which is a gun. It could also have been something a lot lighter, that is, something that anyone in this room could carry on their back. [Comment.] No, like a bomb. [Comment.] Which, the howitzer? Twenty (kilotons), the same as destroyed Hiroshima. [Comment.] On the back of a person, a backpack, that big. That is, with the same total energy as was in something the size of a big car that weighed five tons, which was the one that was dropped on Hiroshima. One was dropped on Hiroshima, one was dropped on Nagasaki. That's what I mean by "full range"; if you go to the nuclear weapon museum at Scandia base in Albuquerque, you'll see the progression downward in size and upward in yield.
[Audience question, about missile silos.]
No, those were intercontinental ballistic missiles. Now, on some missiles, on a single missile, there are as many as a dozen different warheads, clustered together. They go up together, and then they seek out individual targets. The biggest number per missile has been the type that the Russians now have. And also, submarines carry, arguably, seven to 12 or 14 individual nuclear warheads on each missile, and there are about a dozen missiles on a submarine; some, more. So, there's enough to destroy a whole region. Finally, at the press of one button, if all of the arrangements for doing so have been followed, one person could make the final push of the button, and two people could make the decision.
NATIONAL
IGNITION FACILITY
So, that's what's been happening since the peak of the Cold War. People say now, the Cold War is over. The danger of nuclear war has dropped considerably on people's priority lists. The reason is not because the world is suddenly much further away from these dangers, but because people generally don't know what's going on.
What's going on is pursuit of new types of weapons, the most troublesome of which, to me, is weapons that don't require any of these artificial materials that are needed for bombs: plutonium, or uranium enriched in the very-low-concentration uranium known as U-235, which exists in nature but is very dilute. Concentrating that into a form where it can be used for a bomb -- and the first bomb dropped on a city was a uranium bomb, not a plutonium bomb -- those substances in high concentration don't exist in nature. They have to be either concentrated or produced in a nuclear reactor. What is being pursued now ... we don't know how much, it's extremely secret. We do know that they are building facilities of just the right kind to explore the possibilities, and that is to use pure fusion, not fission, not splitting apart, but the coming together of light elements. The light elements that supply this energy are the heavy isotope of hydrogen. It's in water; it's not radioactive; it's a natural substance that can be concentrated very easily. The other substance is ordinary lithium, which exists all over the world. If we do learn how to make pure fusion weapons, we lose control over those key materials that are needed now to make nuclear weapons.
moderator: This would be without using a fission bomb to trigger the fusion reaction?
Ted Taylor: This is without using a fission bomb at all. There is a device, called the National Ignition Facility, which is publicly disclosed, which is a machine designed for the first time in human history, to produce micro-explosions. Each one of these explosions that people are trying to achieve, inside this machine, would blow up this meetinghouse. Not city blocks, but this building. That's not a spark.
The idea is to get that amount of energy by creating the conditions of temperature and pressure in a tiny bit of heavy hydrogen and superheavy hydrogen - tritium - which can be gotten from lithium. Put those in little, tiny capsules, about the size of a BB, and then focus the energy from a lot of different lasers, in a huge facility the size of a football stadium, which we can go and pick up and drop on someone. The aim is to get more energy out of the explosions than is required to create the conditions to make the explosions. That's the National Ignition Facility's goal, and it's stated as that by everybody from the President on down.
At the same time, and much less publicized but also not secret, there is work going on at Los Alamos Laboratory to produce that convergent energy onto a little, smaller than a pea, capsule of fusion material, using a high explosive that makes a magnetic field by going off inside a coil, and then using that magnetic energy to substitute for something much bigger than this building. How small? As far as basic physics is concerned, ten pounds. Something you could hold in your hand. Now, that's extreme. But it's much less extreme to think of something to replace what's out there now, about the size of this table, enough to release about ten times as much energy, in each warhead, as destroyed Hiroshima.
Success on these two fronts is not guaranteed. I think it's fair to say that people don't know quite how to do this now. It's going to take a lot of extremely accurate laboratory work, measurements, test explosions over and over again inside this test facility at Livermore, not at the Nevada test site. So, we're not there yet, and many of us are saying, let's not get there. Let's prevent that; let's stop it right now, dead in its tracks. The short command is, "Kill NIF - the National Ignition Facility."
moderator: What you've been talking about for the past few minutes is the part of the game that you still need to be a superpower to participate in, but there are also smaller fission bombs that are well within the means of much smaller players.
Ted Taylor: That's certainly true, that a small ...
[Audience question, about fission.]
Fusion is the fusing together, the coming together of light elements - hydrogen, in particular - in a nuclear reaction, not just burning hydrogen, which is wonderful. Fission is a splitting apart. When that happens in very heavy elements, then one gets a nuclear explosion. We don't yet, as a species, as far as I can tell, don't know how to make pure fusion.
Fusion ignited by fission is the basis for hydrogen bombs. The United States now has at least 10,000 - today, right now, out there, on alert. Not necessarily aimed at Moscow, but arguably. The details of this, I can't find out, but it's on the scale of a minute or two to change from "nowhere" to "Red Square." It's just taking aim, which can be done very fast.
NUCLEAR TEST BAN
TREATY
[Audience question, regarding the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.]
It's contradictory to the letter, as well as the spirit. The letter says, in Article I, that all nuclear explosions are forbidden, period. The question is, what's an explosion? Is it an explosion if, without a container, it would blow up this whole meetinghouse? Is that an explosion? I don't have to look in a dictionary to settle that question; it's an explosion. Is it nuclear? If they succeed in their goal, it certainly is, because the source of energy for that explosion is nuclear energy. Trying to do that, and building a facility which, over its first five years of life, is going to cost $4 billion ... that looks like serious work to make nuclear explosions that are prohibited by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Now, what happened? There's been a side agreement, not agreed to by all the countries that signed the treaty. These mini-explosions in principle could be used to make power for whatever purpose, electricity, in principle; in practice, I don't know of anyone who believes that is going to turn out to be practical, but in principle, yes. So why are we doing this? The answer is pretty clear: it's a sort of a bargaining gift. You stop fighting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - "you" being the laboratories that design these things - and we'll give you this toy to keep you excited, interested, working at the very center of nuclear things. Little tiny things the size of a pea that would be the spark to destroy a city.
So, it's a very dangerous world that we're in. There's still lots of nuclear weapons out there, in the hands of at least ten countries, of which only five are openly "nuclear weapons states," in the terms of the treaty.
ARSENAL
MAINTENANCE
[Audience question, regarding weapons maintenance.]
There are at least two things that happen with time that make the bombs deteriorate. One is the natural decay of tritium, which is the superheavy isotope of hydrogen. That has a half-life of about 11 years, which means that in 11 years half of it is gone; 11 more years and half of what's left is gone. Since you can put in quite a bit more than you need in the beginning, [you can't] say that bombs are disappearing without replenishment of the tritium, which is not forbidden by treaty of any kind. Tritium is made in nuclear reactors. If one insists on maintaining a constant number of nuclear weapons, you'd have to produce an amount of tritium that amounts to about 5% per year of what is in your nuclear weapons. That's part of their plan, to keep that going. That doesn't require any nuclear testing; that requires only supplying tritium.
Now a thing that has been said to require testing is the fissionable materials and/or the high explosives that squeezes them together. Even the high explosives can, in ways that people are not too sure about, change its composition and become unreliable. What do you do about that? Take it away, throw it away, and put in another high explosives system. We just keep making the kinds of nuclear weapons we've been making, refabricating them if necessary. But, for heaven's sake, instead of saying we're going to maintain 10,000 reliable, guaranteed-to-go-off-with-a-big-explosion bombs, why are we set on maintaining thousands of those, or hundreds of them, or any? Instead, [we could be] saying the world has been led into the Nuclear Age by the United States, which we certainly did, and now we find that that is infinitely dangerous to all the human species. This situation has never existed before on Earth. So let us lead - "us" being the United States - let's lead us out of the Nuclear Age. That, to most of us, is what abolition is about. Some, more extreme than others.
POTENTIAL FOR PROLIFERATION
Nuclear power plants automatically produce plutonium as a by-product; whether you want it or not, it's there. Nuclear power plants, of which we now have about 450 worldwide, have already produced about a million kilograms of plutonium. If you're really good at it, not too fancy, that can be roughly the same number of bombs. If you're not too good at it and are simply using information that's out in the public in encyclopedias and so on, and sort of cobble something up that would be, maybe, a tenth or so of the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima but would kill everybody in the U.S. Capitol if it were set off several blocks away - that kind of weapon could be put together easily by people who know what to do, and what to do could be described on a piece of paper. And it has been described on a piece of paper by a lot of different people.
There is no safety in its being high technology, inaccessible to less developed countries. India set off a nuclear explosion in 1974, total success. China set one off ten years earlier. Well, China's a huge country and India's a huge country, and there are specialists in both countries, even though the average is still pre-industrial.
But how about other countries? How about Sweden? How about Switzerland? I mention those two because they had very secret, active nuclear weapon development programs, both Switzerland and Sweden, until about the mid-1980s. Sweden was the first to announce that they had this development project going to answer the question, "What would we have to do, precisely, if we decided that we wanted quite a few nuclear weapons and we wanted them fast? What would we do?" They started getting those answers in the late 1940s, about the time that we were building the bombs ourselves.
The information has spread, worldwide, about how to make simple, simple-minded, unreliable, fairly heavy but transportable, and very fancy, sophisticated, double-stage weapons that can blow up a big city or a part of a big city. That's all been happening. It's the broader picture of proliferation, which is not just, "Oh, we've tested a bomb, we're now a nuclear power." The hard part is making the plutonium or the highly-enriched uranium; that's the really difficult part, and that's what many countries have figured out how to do.
Switzerland and Sweden have announced that they are not going to make nuclear weapons. They know how, and they know how to do it quickly, but they've said that they would not. Not so - so far as most other people believe - certainly not so in Israel. Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, officially. There's no doubt whatsoever that they do. That's partly because of spying, and partly because of Mordecai Vanunu, a young technician who blew the whistle about the facility in Israel being used to produce the plutonium and other things to make these bombs. He had pictures of bombs. The proliferation has been widespread, and it's been secret and/or ambiguous since the last announcement, which was by China.
No, I'm sorry: by South Africa. South Africa, for a time, said they had made, and had, a few nuclear weapons. Then, after Nelson Mandela became president, although partly as a result of decisions made before he became the head of state, South Africa as a state announced that they were getting rid of them. And I see no reason to disbelieve them.
moderator: Is there anything that we can learn from South Africa, from the one nation on Earth that has openly declared having nuclear weapons and then openly declared getting rid of them?
Ted Taylor: I think it was for lots of each one, not very compelling reasons. We now know that a country can do that, and that's good news. Why not us? They did it; why don't we? We started the whole business.
NEED FOR NUCLEAR TABOO
[Audience comment, regarding putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle.]
Two comments about that: Every genie story, of which there are several that I've read, the genie was put back in the bottle. It's a nice story, but that's all it is. The question is, so far as the analogy of putting the genie back in the bottle, we can't destroy the information. But there are all kinds of ugly, ugly things that are forbidden by law, that very few people do. How many people have ever heard of terrorists releasing botulism toxin to kill a lot of people? I've never heard of that. Why not? It's a kind of human activity that is so repugnant, a matter of taboo to so many people, that terrorists intent on killing a lot of people use what people are used to: gunfire, fire, and high explosives. Now that doesn't prove anything, except as a matter of history, to say that forbidding some things - because they're disgusting, they're murderous, they're foul, they stink - does work, up to a point.
What we're doing now is, we don't forbid that at all. It's not a matter of international law that's accepted by any domestic court that I've heard of in the United States, that it's unlawful for us to continue to have nuclear weapons. The International Court of Justice has found it unlawful, the World Court, but that's very debatable. So I would turn it around and say, in the sense that I think you were getting at, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, you can't remove the knowledge, you can't make people not think about them, but you can destroy the devices. You can destroy the things that explode. You can't make nasty people turn into nice people necessarily, but you can try. Many people have said this - Ghandi said it, Martin Luther King said it - we can't prevent people from doing nasty things to each other, but we can make it unlawful, and try to make it a matter of justice, which on Martin Luther King's issues has not been accomplished. A system of human justice, which is fair and reasonable; not one which, by default, because there is no law, allows five countries to have nuclear weapons but none others. Why is it that we can have them, but they can't?
CONTROL OF
FISSILE MATERIAL
[Audience comment, regarding missing plutonium from power plants.]
I don't have any access to numbers or to information that would tell that, because the security with which it is looked after ... First of all, it is very secret, and I've not been privy to secrets since 1966, when I left the Pentagon. I don't know; it could be tons. There are, as I say, a million kilograms, a thousand tons of plutonium and there are roughly the same number of kilograms of highly-enriched uranium that have been produced. They were produced not for nuclear power plants, but for weapons, and more than half of that, two-thirds of that has been produced by the Soviets. They've been more intent on building up a huge capacity for enriching uranium to high enrichment than we have. So, the numbers of kilograms of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium worldwide are roughly the same, maybe one-and-a-half times more uranium. The reason for that is the critical mass for highly-enriched uranium is about three times as big as the critical mass of plutonium. So to get the same criticality, which is one measure of how big an explosion you'll get, you need a lot more uranium-235, and they have it. The difference is in design and emphasis and so on, but roughly they are about the same. How much of that has already been put into the black market, I certainly have no way of knowing. To be really very scary, 20 pounds of plutonium in the hands of one group of people is very scary.
ACHIEVING
NUCLEAR TABOO
moderator: To follow up on what was said earlier about putting the genie back in the bottle, we, and other countries, have had that sort of experience. I think, for instance, of slavery. There was a time when the practice of slavery was the norm. Now, it would be repugnant, unthinkable. In this country, it took quite a lot of violence to achieve that; in other countries, it was done more peacefully. But that sort of change of thinking can be done, and it can make foregoing of a morally repugnant act stick. Ted, you started your presentation talking about nuclear weapons addiction. What would it take to turn the addiction around to repugnance?
Ted Taylor: Talk.
A lot of it. Talk between people of different persuasions - different spiritual persuasions, particularly - to find areas of common ground and agreement. What most of my friends say it will take, would be for a lot of people to get killed by nuclear explosions in the hands of people who want to use them. I don't accept that. I'm not saying anything about what is most probable; all I'm saying is it is worth trying to move mountains to prevent anybody from setting off nuclear explosives in a city. But all is not lost if that doesn't work, any more than all is lost if somebody blows up a building and kills 170 people. It's not the end of the world. It's awful, the worst act of terrorism in the United States, but it's not the end of the United States.
I think it's quite likely, quite possible - I don't know, 50/50, 30/70, it doesn't really matter - that nuclear explosions will again kill quite a few people. But it's not the end of the world. It is, if everybody's got them and they become as routine as the heavy bombardment with conventional explosives started to become in World War I and then became full blown in World War II. A nuclear version of that probably would not make all life on Earth extinct, but it would make it for generations a very awful place to live, because of the extreme hurt that would be felt by huge populations that were bombed that then get desperate. Look what has happened in countries that have been ravaged by war in the past. Very often, it's been help from neighbors that has gotten countries back on their feet. Germany and Japan, as a result of World War II, were devastated, and with our help they came back. I'm not promoting fear of that; I think it was a very good thing to have done, to be good to other people.
[Audience comment, regarding the necessity of the atom bombings of World War II.]
I completely agree that going back and reviewing history may teach us some things about the future, but I don't think they'll teach us much that would make the case for continuing to have, or not continuing to have nuclear weapons. But that keeps being done all the time. People say we must get rid of the bombs because we did a terrible thing at Hiroshima; there are other people who say we must get rid of the bombs because it's a bad thing to do now. We're not at war, and if they've kept the peace for the last 50 years, nobody can prove whether they did or they didn't.
But which is better: to go after a world without nuclear weapons, in which we do our best to enforce the outlawing of them, probably not perfectly, so every now and then maybe some bombs will go off. If we make it a way of life, then it won't be Japan, United States and, a few months earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union in a war that then arguably gets stopped by one of the countries having a much more powerful weapon than anyone else. There are other ways that war can happen, like World War I, World War II, the war between Pakistan and India that may come, and on and on. But in a world that is bristling with nuclear weapons, or has just a few, but feels justified - allowed, somehow - to use them: which world is more dangerous?
Just from a practical point of view, let alone morally, which I guess I would stress not just because we are sitting in a meetinghouse, but because what gets to me is the idea of having anything whatever to do with mass murder of innocent people for any reason of any kind. I just can't take that. And I think that's true of most people, if they really somehow got forced, maybe by events, by people they know in their own city getting killed with nuclear weapons. Whatever it is, those people that don't pay attention and say, "I don't want to think about that, I don't want to press for this or that, I won't support this, don't give me anything to sign," - I get that quite often and I'm sure some of you here have, too - I think that is wrong.
I think we as a species are in the process of destroying our planet environmentally and maintaining the capacity to destroy our planet by war. The idea that more is better, that growth of power of any kind is good, I think really is not deep within us. In fact, I think now quite the opposite. We, our inner selves, love peace - "peace" being not just freedom to do anything you please, but a deeper inner peace that is full of good feelings for other people and no bad feelings for anyone.
[Audience comment, regarding the root of strife in arrogance.]
I guess I agree with everything you've just said, and all I can think of to do is to find other people, other groups of people that are like-minded, and sort of help each other. But so far as some great man in particular somehow leading us all in the right way ... [Comment - "It has to come from inside the individual."] Inside the individuals, and deep inside. Yes, deep inside, as long as there is real caring about the outside, caring about what happens to other people, and I don't necessarily mean by watching the gory details of infants dying under gas attack by Saddham Hussein or whomever. But every now and then, it seems we have to say to ourselves and to each other what a gift it is to be human, I mean, as we perceive it. I sort of stumbled over the words, because you can have the same attachment for a tree, and it's important.
EXPENSE OF A
NUCLEAR ARSENAL
[Audience comment, regarding the cost of a nuclear arsenal.]
There's a whole other side to that, and that is, to many people - and I certainly have felt this way ever since I can remember finding out anything about these things - the attraction to nuclear weapons is they're the cheapest source of energy explosively released that there is. By a huge factor. Cheap. Look at the defense budget; I don't know what it is now, but it was around $300 billion, $267 billion. Now, how much of that is for our nuclear forces, in all? It's about $35 billion. It's a published figure.
But the whole point to nuclear weapons is that kept us from doing what we would otherwise have had to do in Europe to make sure that if the Russians - as it was described, and it was wrong - at that time, they were ready to take over Europe with land armies and tanks and guns and mortars in about six weeks. That cost them everything they had. That's part of the reason that the Soviet Union started really going downhill fast; they didn't build up any civilian infrastructure. [More audience comment.] That is the argument that's been used; that's the argument that President Clinton will use right now. I've heard him say this as recently as three weeks ago, on television. Not that it's the cheap way out, but the words were that the threat of deterrence has to be maintained, and that's why he accepted the actual budgeting of what is now more money per year on nuclear weapon development, including maintaining so-called reliability and safety, than we have ever spent, with adjustment for inflation put in, since the start of the Manhattan Project.
The budget for nuclear weapon technology is now about $4.5 billion per year. Ten years, call it $45 billion; 50 years, $200 billion. Compared to the overall defense budget, that's cheap; but in terms of focus, it's more that we've focused people's minds on how to make nuclear weapons than ever in our history. I think that is a recipe for an arms race, by any countries that have access to these facilities. And most of them do; that's what Sweden and Switzerland taught us, that they got these facilities, and they described them in some detail. They're real sort of Cadillacs of nuclear designing and testing, without going to real nuclear explosions.
FALLOUT &
WASTE
[Audience comment, regarding fallout and environmental effects.]
Not from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because we did set off in the atmosphere 100 megatons ... Well over a thousand times as much radioactivity was set off from testing in the atmosphere than was set off at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Furthermore, they didn't pick stuff up from the ground; they were high-level and the radiation coming from them was largely stopped in the air. Not entirely; I mean, they did kill some people with radiation, but they were high-level, which are much less dirty radioactively than surface bursts, of which Russia did a great deal in what was then the province of Kazakhstan. [Andrei] Sakarov, who was a principal person in the development of the Soviet H-bomb, Sakarov calculated much later that something like 20 million people will die over a number of generations from the fallout from the nuclear tests they did in Kazakhstan. And he was sick about that. But that's done; I don't think anyone is proposing to repeat that. Your question is, what do we do now? I guess that's what I keep asking.
[Audience comment, regarding what to do with nuclear waste.]
Nobody has really gotten a convincing answer to that, anyone. We don't know. Many of us are arguing, partly for that reason, that we should stop. We don't know what to do with the waste; it doesn't make it easier to handle waste to make more, so let's stop. With what sense of urgency is very debatable.
[Audience comment, suggesting disposal of nuclear waste in the sun.]
moderator: Let me just slip in one comment here. You're talking to a person [Taylor] who, not too long ago, gave a seminar at Princeton on the very topic of shooting plutonium into the sun.
Ted Taylor: Well, it's a very complicated and long subject. Let me just sum it up by saying, most people I've run into - experts, non-experts, general interested members of the public - say, "Dump it into the sun? That's the scariest thing I've ever hear of. We'll have another Challenger accident, everything will blow up, and we'll contaminate the western half of the United States." That's without having given the subject any thought. If you give it thought, it looks better and better and better. I am not an advocate of doing this; I would not say this is what we should do, but only to say we should look at it carefully, which people have not done.
Some very close friends of mine in the National Academy of Sciences have written it off with one sentence; they say it's clearly too dangerous, but they've done no work on trying to make it not dangerous. One example: is it necessary to make an absolutely explosion- and crash-proof container, which cannot release any radioactive material if the worst thing imaginable happens to it? So far, the answer looks like, yes, such a container can be designed, and built, and tested over and over and over again. That's one little part of it; now, there are others, like ... it doesn't go up into a low orbit and fly parallel to the surface, [instead] it goes straight up to escape velocity and then just barely hangs on, and it's taken off from a remote - and that's a real tough word - a remote island, let's say, in the Atlantic. It goes straight up so that, if it explodes, it falls back down because it's so heavy that no open-fuel explosion could make it land much further away than within a hundred miles or so of where it was launched. And it's designed to float, and then it also has things on it that say, "Mommy, come get me." It all sounds kind of crazy, but it's even more crazy to just sit and do nothing. We need to get rid of the stuff so that it's gone.
[Audience comment, regarding the cost of such a plan.]
I went through that in detail, and the cost is much less than the cost of doing anything else.
[Audience comment, about breeder reactors getting more energy for less waste.]
You make just as much waste, first of all, because the waste of fission products ... for the same fission, you get the same energy and, therefore, for the same energy, you get the same fission. What that does is create more plutonium. If we go into a "plutonium economy," that plutonium becomes accessible more and more to more countries in more forms in more places than it was.
[Audience comment, about the U.S. government taking responsibility from the states for nuclear waste management.]
And the United States government doesn't know what to do with it.
[Audience comment, about burying the waste.]
Sure, and I say send it to the sun. [Comment that burying would be cheaper.] That's not clear, because it has to be protected - many people will argue - for tens of thousands of years. No one yet lives that long, cultures don't live that long, nothing has lived that long, including the Pyramids. So, is that a bad thing for us to be leaving behind? My guess is that we probably have done worst things than that already.
[Inaudible comment.]
The thing is, we don't know enough to be able to convince people who really, honestly are trying to find a solution. There are a lot of people who are desperate to find out what to do with this stuff. Not because they want to make nuclear power; they want to get rid of it, they want to get rid of nuclear power as much as I do, but they also want to get rid of the waste in a way that is the least dangerous. Of what? Well, there's an infinite number of ways to think of for getting rid of it. But we try to channel our efforts on a very complicated problem too narrowly, so we don't look at a lot of different alternatives. That's my complaint about nuclear waste: we don't look at alternatives enough.
[Audience comment, regarding peaceful use of atomic energy.]
I would say, with one exception - and that's for medical applications, for which you don't need any chain reaction anywhere in the system; you can make what's called an accelerator that accelerates particles up to high speeds and produces any of these radioactive materials that are useful for medical diagnosis or treatment or both - but everything else - nuclear power, nuclear airplanes, nuclear spaceships ... no, none, forbidden. One reason for that is that you can then make it internationally illegal, in every country, to have any plutonium or any highly-enriched uranium, because you don't need that for making isotopes and - at the moment, at least - you can't make bombs without it. So the rule is, zero plutonium. And if anybody has a gram, they are violating, with some pretty severe penalty - not death, but a severe penalty. A penalty so severe, such that if somebody's spouse is discovered to be working secretly on cheating, it will cause tension, whistleblowing to some extent, because there's a higher law. People will have to agree to it generally, or else it won't work at all.
(Medical isotopes) can be made in a different process. They can be made, first of all, in tiny quantities as compared with one day of operating of a nuclear reactor, which would supply all the isotopes for a very long time in the United States. And that can be done in a specialized way under close international supervision, for which there is already an agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
moderator: To slip in another footnote, to give another example of peaceful uses of the bomb that were being contemplated: during the 1960s, there was a well developed project for using nuclear explosives as a propulsion device for interplanetary travel. The theory was to construct a ship that would be about the size of a city, and use bombs to move the thing along so that shuttling back and forth between the Earth and Mars would be relatively simple. Along the way, the project got subverted by folks in the Pentagon who had visions of a super-dreadnought circling the Earth. That project was Orion, I believe the title was, and the father of it was Ted Taylor.
Ted Taylor: In another life.
[Audience comment, recalling the pilot in Dr. Strangelove riding a bomb.]
Right, right. Strangelove was a good movie in that sense; the exhibition of individual, personal power was superb, including the guy waving his hat.
[Audience comment, skeptical about the toxicity of plutonium.]
It's dangerous to breathe. Whenever it's made into pacemakers, it's fabricated under very closely controlled hoods and, if there's a fire in there, it can cause a mess. Witness the fire in the plutonium facility at Rocky Flats, 15 years ago. It was awful. A lot of that was kept from the public in terms of what came out and what went downwind and where it went. It burns like magnesium and makes an oxide powder, which is quite toxic if it's the right size. Most plutonium particles - sort of at random in a machine shop - are not the right size. But if they are the right size, the lethal dose - in the sense that one is practically certain to get cancer within a few years - the lethal dose of ordinary plutonium, of the sort used in bombs, is about 10 micrograms, 10 millionths of a gram. That's not as toxic as botulism toxin, of which a microgram will almost certainly kill you, breathed in or eaten. Eating plutonium ... in fact, there are some plutonium enthusiasts who have said they would be willing publicly to take a spoonful of plutonium, but so far there have been no takers.
TURNING AWAY,
SECURITY, GENETIC EFFECTS
[Audience comment, inaudible.]
I'm much more sure about Sweden. It was a sense from the government legislature - now, whether it was actually a vote of all the legislators or not, I think the answer is yes - but it was the possibility, the technical things they would have to do to get so many bombs of such and such a type. That was very secret, and I imagine the majority of the legislature didn't know it was happening, as is true now in the U.S. There's a lot about nuclear bombs that is not public to most members of Congress.
[Audience comment, inaudible.]
Open them up? I do know this. As a matter of Swiss policy for a long time, their military forces are all purely for defense, not for offense at all. Now, you can use an airplane to go in the opposite direction for some distance, but they are not optimized in any way. They are optimized for defense, and it is very heavy, very expensive per person. Switzerland is a small country, but they've got an extremely powerful defensive system, probably more so than any other country in the world.
If we get into a situation of trying to defend ourselves against little, tiny objects coming from 6,000 miles away, that can get very expensive, even on the scale of the buildup of large numbers of weapons during World War II. So, many argue that it is just too expensive. The other thing is that one easy way to defeat it is just don't come in by air at all. Drive in, park, and go boom. So far as deterrence goes, if we really mean that, it takes only a few nuclear weapons to kill a lot of people, most of whom have nothing to do with the arguement. Defending against bombs being put somewhere is extremely hard to imagine, in any way that works and doesn't look as though it might work and provoke the other side to do the same thing. So, the domestic problems of reining in the tension don't get it.
[Audience comment, inaudible.]
Quite a lot, actually. It looks quite possible to do that. No detailed information about the design of the weapons has to be released to the other side or to the world, if it's everybody, which is what it should be. That really is doable, and to a large extent is going on with those thousands of nuclear weapons that are being dismantled. There have been about 1500 a year in Russia that have been taken apart, so that they don't exist as weapons anymore. But the question about what to do with the plutonium is the same everywhere.
[Audience comment, about Russian fissile materials being brought to the U.S.]
The enriched uranium, yes. Not the plutonium, but the enriched uranium. That has come back; we brought it back. Why? To mix it with other uranium. They need cash, we are safer if that material isn't floating around with poor security. The poor security has been very public in Russia. You've probably all seen kind of incredible films of plutonium lying around with nobody guarding it.
There's a lot now coming out of former security employees with the Department of Energy - not that it's as bad in the U.S. as it is in Russia - but it's still pretty bad. There's a small panel of us who are going to be looking at this at Rocky Flats this summer, under something organized by the local congressman, to find out what's going on in Rocky Flats, which is now going to be shut down. What's there? 20,000 kilograms of plutonium. In vents, in the ground, in pits, in fabricated parts of weapons that are in vaults and presumably well looked after. But the people in charge of security there, a lot of them resigned a year ago January, saying, "I can't do my job; the budget's are cut in half." So, his descriptions of how easy it is to get in there with a truck ... to get out with material is harder, but that's gotten easier than it was a year ago, or five years ago.
Rocky Flats is about 15 miles northwest of Denver. It's right in the foothills.
[Audience comment, about effects on health in neighboring communities.]
Well, in some ways it's like the "downwinders" from Kazakhstan, where so much big fission yield testing was done, where the downwinders have been bringing in for examination live and dead children with all kinds of abnormalities, some of which they have been suffering for centuries, some of which they think they have a lot more of, now. The difficulty is finding out what is the connection. Those who have been afflicted think the connection is entirely nuclear, and those like Sakarov, who is very upset about a lot of what was going on, saying maybe it wasn't that bad. The 20 million people was not those downwinders; that was world progeny over many centuries.
moderator: Another part of the security issue - as you mentioned before with Rocky Flats, about it being more easy to bring the truck in than to get the truck out - still, if you've got a determined force, terrorists for instance, or other people whom we would call fanatics, who are willing to die for their cause, it's kind of hard to find security guards who would be willing to die for their cause of making the stuff secure.
[Audience comments, inaudible.]
Well, you can detect even the light x-rays from plutonium through a good counter, even with some shielding, so that a passageway can monitor for illicit plutonium on the scale of grams going through. And they don't cost much, so the question is, are those adequately distributed. I don't know. I am looking forward to ...
[Audience comment, inaudible.]
Nuclear things have a bad name, for understandable reasons. One difficulty is that the nuclear industry is very upset with visible security measures, because of the image of this being a dangerous technology. Is it really a dangerous technology? Which is more dangerous: nuclear technology or coal? The count is not out on that, and I think really of the greenhouse effect. That could upset the world's weather in ways that are totally disturbing, if these theories about the instability in things like the Gulf Stream are right, where all of a sudden, without warning, over a period of three or four years, the Gulf Stream could change its course. Then, the whole climate of Europe changes. People aren't making those things up for any self-serving reason; they're just finding out more and more.
Well, what do we do? I think the answer's quite clear, and you'll know tomorrow morning when there are no clouds. Just look outside and you'll see the biggest reactor in the solar system.
SOLAR ENERGY & TRUST
moderator: I'm aware that we are late into the evening. I'm wondering if there is one particular message that you would like to emphasize before we break for the evening?
Ted Taylor: Well, this is the message that I think will become clearly correct in the next couple of years. And that is that the source of energy that humans have used most of our lives as a species will be what we'll really continue to use, to the exclusion pretty much of all the others, and that's the sun. I'm saying that because there are now emerging a lot of very specific things that people are doing, using sunlight anywhere in the world to meet any energy demand of any sort, and to meet it at lower cost than any other way. That's a basis for hope: capital letters, triple underline. Because if that is correct - and these are things that are being found out right now, government involvement or not - if that happens, nuclear stuff of all kinds, except maybe for some of the medical diagnostic applications, will get pushed off the table. We've got to make sure that we catch this stuff in some really good disposal bin. But I think, in a sentence, that there's a good possibility, being looked at very hard by lots of people, that solar energy will push nuclear and fossil fuel energy off the table and into the bin, and we'll have a whole new era. But the bombs must go - not into cold storage, but into the fiery, fiery furnace or the equivalent, some way to get rid of the stuff and not just bury it and hope for the best. Burying it with some other things may actually satisfy most people, but a lot more has got to be done.
[Audience comment, inaudible.]
Trust. I think, more than anything else, what this world needs is trust. Trust between people - not belief about wrongdoing, I mean real trust. "I know what you're doing and I like it."
[Audience comment, about the value of cross-cultural visitation.]
I'm totally responsive to that. Just one little reaction: A little Episcopal church my family and I were members of in Damascus, Maryland, invited two Russian Orthodox priests to spend a couple of weeks with us. They came and stayed with us, and they said, both of them, that the fastest growing religion, in 1986 this was, in the Soviet Union - one of them was from Kiev, which is outside Russia, Ukraine - they said the fastest growing church in the Soviet Union was the Baptist church. This was particularly young people. The older people were very intent on maintaining the Russian Orthodox churches. The churches were open, and they had regular services every Sunday. And at the insistence of the congregation by popular vote, the services, which were all standing as was the custom in that particular church, went for four hours. Things like that came through in conversations with these people, that none of us had ever heard of, and they found out things by being part of our community for just a couple of weeks that they never would have gotten any other way. So, I think it's immensely valuable - people understanding each other, and knowing through someone else's eyes what goes on.
From a scientist's point of view, the biggest example I know, in terms of the numbers of people involved, of the benefits of continued contact, no matter what war is going on - cold war, hot war, in-between war - is the Pugwash conferences, which were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. They were started by two people, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, saying that, whatever happens, some physicists in the United States should talk to some physicists in the Soviet Union, no matter what. They convinced a wealthy person to set up the first meeting, in the town of Pugwash in 1957. Einstein died a couple of years before that, but he and Bertrand Russell figured that out. And, it's paid off in a lot of close friends that touch various parts of government, which is important if you're talking about weapons.
And the more the better, I think, without saying, "Come on; become modern United States economies, all of you! Boom, we've won!" That does not work. But individuals can work in sharing their problems and solutions; that's wonderful.
moderator: That would be a good note to end on. Thank you very much for coming out tonight.
