The Exodus Path, My Struggle.
Although I really did find a way to power the rockets to take hundreds of us throughout the solar system, the only product of my entire career struggle working in so-called "rocket science," was that people wanted to hear the story.
As the "Featured Evening Speaker", again and again, they would keep me long after I was finished talking, asking me questions. What was so captivating? Was it the stories about how we can actually leave the Earth? Or was it just that I was telling them stories and entertaining them? Or was it my struggle against the real world and reality? I can't tell, so I am telling the story
The struggle to make a Vision come alive, a kind of Exodus Path to Leave Earth, became intense, compelling, overpowering, and took on a single purpose at the moment when I first found out there was water in space. I knew immediately I could use it.
At the end of that career, after I "retired" and started another, I had discovered comparatively simple ways to do it:
We would inhabit, occupy, move minor planets and other celestial objects.
After all the effort, all the Visions, I got old instead of making it happen.
This is no science lesson. This autobiographic story describes my struggle, about US government laboratories where I worked, about how I found, and how I tried to tell but was too autistic to tell effectively. I have Asperger's syndrome. And then I got too old, too soon.
I had become excited because everything we would need to inhabit the "neospace", the places between here and the edge of the Solar System, had just become known. Some was already there and telescopes and space probes just revealed it. Some was just developed because of the failed efforts to develop manned Mars missions.
This is not sci-fi. The names are real and the stories happened.
Nature seduced me with the excitement. She let my colleagues and me discover water objects in the space near Earth, in "neospace", the space almost near enough for us to get to and use, between here and Jupiter, Saturn.
Water in space turned out to be everywhere, from the planet Mercury in its the forever dark craters, in the moon, and in mostly everything to way past at least Pluto,
Long ago, when people landed on the moon and when Star Trek inspired us, we thought we could just go there, to space, to the moon, to other planets like Mars or Mercury. But at every turn, we discovered another bad thing to stop us.
We did not find what we needed to live, like water. Our rocket ships were too feeble, too huge, too expensive, and blew up too often. Low gravity in space would float poop, snot and vomit in the air, stinking up the ship and forcing us to breathe it. Low gravity drained our bones of calcium and disabled our lymph system. Space was more radioactive than sitting on pile of old fallout from an atomic bomb. Mars had a little bit of a poison, carbon monoxide, in its carbon dioxide air. Mars would be a poison planet.
So, we gave up. No one even went back to the moon.
Mother Nature only tricked me a little, but she did it again and again. A new problem would suddenly appear just when an old problem was solved.
Mother Nature fooled me. She showed me how it seems there is enough water for us to start leaving Earth. She teased me to think we could be explorers who could inhabit what we explore.
But, she knew I won't get to go there. I am old already. And the world went broke.
More annoying: Mama Nature told us clearly that we were the wrong species for space and she would not let us have the "clear profit" we would need to start The Exodus. She seemed to point to her bulging stomach, pregnant with the new species, her digi-sapiens children, cyborgs, robots, androids.
-------------
It's about the water
More than anything, we needed to have water in space. Every time we looked, we would not see any water.
We simply could not afford to launch the Gulf of Mexico into space. We could not even launch a small fishing lake into space. But that was what we needed. Everything we do to live our lives requires not just water but a lot of it.
We needed Warp Drive. Instead, all we got were feeble toys, little rockets that could barely shove a porta-potty space-can to the moon and back.
We needed strong legs and powerful wings, so to speak. Instead, we were oozing and sliming like snails and clams. Our space ships needed to be more like ocean cruise ships and aircraft carriers, not like NASA's space jails.
Everything in space was mostly too far apart. Whatever rocks, moons or planets were there, were so far apart that a very short trip, like to the Moon, would take many days, not hours like an airplane trip. A quick trip to Mars would take 6 months or longer. A trip to Jupiter or Saturn would take years.
I thought the 14 hour plane trip to Australia was a very long ride, in a cramped seat, rubber cardboard food, kids running up and down the aisle, engine noise, white knuckle fear of flying.
Most places in neospace seemed to be barren rock-deserts, harder than sidewalks and as dry as a fireplace.
The other places seemed to be giant oceans with no surface, just gas, poison gas, that got thicker and thicker and thicker, and with hyper-hurricanes the size of the world, and lightning everywhere. That's Jupiter, Saturn and such.
Nothing seemed to work. We would be stuck here with the terrorists and tax collectors, forever. Instead of space travel, we would be stuck here with the Liberals fighting Creationists, all fighting beheaders and rogue atomic bombers, with high unemployment, inflation, a Carbon Usage Tax, and Global Warming.
And it was all about the water.
I should have quit, but it was too exciting.
I don't know of anyone who put it all together. That is why I am telling my part of the story. I put it all together.
---
Autistic, Like Mongoloids and other Weird People
I was also recently diagnosed to be born with a common and peculiar form of autism: Asperger's syndrome. My genetic breed of human focuses hyper-intensely and takes people literally. We are sometimes called "Aspies".
Most of us Aspies are a bit like Spock, of Start Trek. It makes us a bit difficult to work with or understand. Often we blurt out what's on our mind and interrupt you. We often act inappropriately when we do and say things.
Some Aspies can not look you in the eye. Not me. I stare, deep. I will hit on pretty ladies and stare deep into their eyes every chance I get. I only do that if their person is totally captivating, and not necessarily for neurotypical reasons.
One of my psychologists said he never met an Aspie with less than 130 IQ. This weird combination of inappropriate behavior, smarts and focus makes me and Aspies like me sometimes hard to follow. More than sometimes. In that aspect, we are like those with Downs syndrome, or Tourette's syndrome, or with other types of autism that favor intelligence. Mongoloids (Down's people) can sometimes figure big prime numbers in their heads. I can't to that.
I will sometimes go too fast. I will sometimes say things that are simply not supposed to be said that way. Because I am an Aspie, I can't see what's wrong with doing these things at all. If I went too fast or confused you, tell me and I will try to fix it. Maybe not.
If I use inappropriate language or say things that are too graphic and just not proper in mixed company, or that are insulting or too mean,
too bad.
I'm an Aspie.
You are supposed to treat me nice, like we treat mongoloids and other weird people.
CHAPTER 2
· 1968 physics grad student and Dyson Starship
Someone Inspired Me
Physics Graduate Student, Anxious for Escape
The rocket science part of my career was a like a fanciful journey by someone too naive to know the difference. I started on this journey when I was a graduate student in physics and read the words in a physics trade journal:
".... take a town the size Princeton New Jersey
to the nearest star ..... cattle and livestock ..... "
The article described a starship propelled by nuclear explosions, atomic bombs.
. 
\ M:\azinc\PROZX\To Inhabit The Solar System\- CHAPTERS drafts\to_occupy_the_solar_system GRAPHICS\Cromeo3.jpg
Nuclear explosions would power Dyson's "Orion Starship"
When we discovered and detonated the atomic bomb, it unleashed a powerful Virus Of Change upon the world. It infected us with visions of really leaving the planet, and not just as ghosts. For the first time, we could see how we could someday inhabit space. The energy released was extreme.
How could we use this? Could we make cars that never need gas? All cars need gasoline. Could we make airplanes that just keep flying and never need to refuel? Could we heat our homes without ever needing to chop wood or shovel coal into the stoves?
When I heard of the atomic bombs, I was little, 7 years old, and had to shovel heavy coal into buckets and carry them in. My father had to lift the heavy buckets and dump the coal into the mouth of the pot belly stove in the dining room. Could I use nuclear heat to escape this? Even at 7 yrs old, I thought of it personally, as in "Could I use...".
The world was locked in a Cold War and the United States was fighting a real war in Vietnam. At the same time, the USA was preparing to send people to the moon. These were confusing times and depressing times.
Could we use the atomic bomb energy to make rockets? The Germans used rockets to send bombs to England during World War II, to kill civilians, on purpose. Both the Russians and the Americans were making rockets that would kill all the civilians in the whole city all at once, on purpose.
If we would use the nuclear energy to power the rockets, could we go to Mars or Venus, instead? Flash Gordon went to Mars in the movies.
It had been a dismal time, a dark and stormy time, a confusing time. Blacks were Negroes and had to sit in the back of the bus. People shot the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King. The Democratic Parties of Chicago and Kent State beat us up and killed us because we did not want to go to Viet Nam to kill Vietnamese for them.
And there I was in Cleveland, Ohio, back in the fall of 1968, a graduate student studying solid state physics, nothing at all related to space. I was stuck doing a worthless Ph.D. thesis on "magnetic thin films".
I saw how Physicists with Ph.D.'s were pumping gas and selling shoes instead of getting jobs. Meanwhile the Electrical Engineer PhDs were getting multiple job offers. Not one single professor told me "thin films" were something of extreme value in Silicon Valley.
I was stupid. I had chosen to study Physics in Graduate school, instead of Engineering.
No one had taken close up pictures of anything in space other than the moon. In sharp contrast, the article in the trade journal told us how to propel a rocket ship with people and livestock to the nearest star. The article shocked me.
In those days, most people somewhat expected that kind of shock. The world had just discovered
atomic bombs and nuclear power, and transistors, and color TV, and jet airplanes, and penicillin, and cars, and radio, and plastics, and DNA, and computers, and rockets,
all in one breath,
all within about 40 years,
all within half a lifetime.
It was a shock hurricane of knowledge.
The nuclear devices were extremely powerful compared to anything. The nukes were at least 10 million times more powerful than anything our Life Form had ever seen. It was about 10 million times more powerful than chemicals such as high explosive, food or gasoline. Not a 1000 million, not a zillion, but about 10 million. The nuclear energy made it possible to think about space travel. This was the first realistic proposal on how to do it. It captivated me.
This was the start for me, 40 years ago. Was it Fanciful? Of course. But I was a graduate student. What did you expect? That's what you get when you are a student or a professor. When you are young and a graduate student, anything is possible, even the impossible.
I did not know it was fanciful. "Fanciful" can mean having a curiously intricate quality, or it can also mean unreal, not based on fact. This one, single, fanciful article inspired me to spend an entire career trying to make and power the space ships for us to inhabit outer space.
The starship powered by nuclear explosions was credible because a famous, very respected scientist showed how to do it. The scientist, Dr. Freeman Dyson, showed how to propel a space ship with people on board that could travel far beyond the solar system, and even to the nearest star.
When I first picked up the article I was walking to the physics lab in which I was an instructor. It was October 1968. There was only time for a few fleeting glances at the tempting pages. All I could skim was that Dr. Freeman Dyson, the physicist author, had detailed his proposal to use atomic bombs to propel a very large space ship to the nearest star, and, at a Flash Gordon speed of up to 1% the speed of light. We did have Star Trek then, so Dyson's ship was just Flash Gordon speed, extremely fast for us, but sci-fi slow.
Quickly skim-reading the article in quick glimpses the whole afternoon, I saw how Dyson would propel his space ship by pounding the back of it with atomic bombs. One huge bomb would explode about a mile behind the huge space ship, one bomb every 3 seconds. The atomic blast would pound a bomb-blast-catcher into shock absorbers and springs. The shock absorbers and springs would cushion the blast and accelerate the huge space ship.
Dyson's description was so simple, it seemed to me we could just go make it tomorrow, if we wanted to.
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copied directly from : Physics Today, October 1968
Freeman Dyson would propel the spaceship to the nearest star
by pounding it with repeating atomic bombs. It was atomic bomb blast propulsion.
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Most scientists familiar with the proposal thought it was a bit impractical. Most engineers thought it would not have worked like he said. Dyson was a physicist, not an engineer. A physicist figures the principle of things. An engineer makes things work.
There was a joke:
If it stinks, it’s Chem Lab.
If it’s green and slimy it’s Biology Lab.
If it doesn’t work, it’s Physics Lab.
If you ever tried to do what someone else said was easy and that you should go do it, then you know. You know it was always much easier said than done. Any engineer would tell you how difficult it would be to make Dyson's starship. But, I was a student then and did not know what the "big kids" did.
I do remember this epochal event, that day I got the article, because it really was epochal, for me. It changed everything. Like when someone shot Martin Luther King. I remember where I was, watching the 14 inch round screen color TV in our apartment just before supper. Devastating.
It tattooed my brain cells like when Jack Kennedy was shot. I remember what boards I was walking across to keep my feet dry between the construction site mud-mess on the university campus. Or when the first Shuttle blew up. Or when Princes Dianna died.
This Dyson Starship day is a slowly fading brand in my memory.
In those days, using atomic bombs was ok. The Communists were the terrorists then, with real atomic bombs really pointed at every city in the USA, for real. They built an Iron Curtain and they shot people.
Physicists, like some of my professors, invented good atomic bombs, because God was on our side and gave us the bomb first and let us stop World War II with them. Ours were good. Theirs were evil. The Commies were Atheists. That made the Commies bad in the USA, Cleveland and Texas. But, my professors did not talk about it much because it was all Top Secret.
USA atomic bomb
I knew what atomic bombs looked like. Pictures were everywhere.
The communists were going to bomb us with them unless we made our atomic bombs bigger and better than theirs.
atomic bomb
I was ready for escape. We were all ready for escape. Just like now.
I had wanted to find a way to leave the planet from the moment I read the article on Interstellar Transport.
The Interstellar Transport article seemed to be real.
Later that evening I read more. Dyson was presenting calculations. I read how Dyson really did write how he learned from the secret, atomic bomb tests how to make a starship that could go to the nearest star. What especially caught my eye were the words in his simple figure: "... people and livestock ..."
I read the trip would apparently only take hundreds of years.
"What?" I thought.
The "hundreds of years" was nuts. But I ignored that part.
---------------------------------------------------------------
===================
Credits: Charlou Dolan prompted me as a co-author to write an early version, coaching me carefully on how to write like a neurotypical and not like an Aspie. Neither of us knew "Aspie" at that time. This version is considerably different. Her influence persists.
===================
other interesting chapters/sections recently more refined:
NASA meeting on space and asteroids
First International Meeting On Killer Asteroids
seriously crazy rocket science meeting
Hazard meeting with Carl Sagan
Clear Cutting the Kuiper Belt Comets
space aliens 10 miles under ...
The Iceship And The NASA Space Meeting
===================
CHAPTER 3
First Job at the AEC, and the Dyson Starship
When I finally got my Ph.D., Physics doctor degree, I deliberately got a job working for the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). I did that because I wanted to know how to make a starship just like the one Dr. Freeman Dyson described. Also, they were the only ones hiring.
The Dyson Starship would use megaton atomic bombs to propel it. The AEC made just such atomic bombs.
My boss's boss's boss, who hired me, at the AEC laboratory also knew about the Dyson Starship and also wondered how to make one. His name was Dr. Tom Burford. Burford and I talked about it. As soon as I started work, he got me access to the Top Secret documents associated with the work of Freeman Dyson.
In those days the agency was called the AEC. It is now called "Department of Energy.", the DOE. Some parts of the DOE are another space agency of the United States. There are at least several, not so well known space agencies of the United States. NASA is not the only one. NASA is the adventure one. They do somesaults in space bubble, plant flags and brag. The other ones have to do real work.
You don't like my exaggeration? Too bad. I'm an Aspie.
It seems that most people who don't know me or what I did tell me the only real work NASA does is the deep space science observations. Most people love the Hubble pictures. They really love the robots on Mars. They despise the zero gravity somersault antics and extremely expensive joy rides. The first time I heard such heresy was on a plane to Seattle for a rocket science meeting. The high paid computer geek young guy sitting next to me loved the robots on Mars. He hated the entire manned program. He shocked me. I did not tell him my job was to develop engines for a manned Mars mission.
One always has a "day job" that you do to get money. One also has a fantasy, a hobby daydream you think about all the time. It's the daydreams that make magic happen. And that is what happened. However, it took a while and was mostly disappointing the entire time. I never got rich either. And I got fired a couple of times. Aspies just have a hard time with social situations, like a boss.
Back in the early 1970's, my first job with the AEC was to analyze beam weapons, like "phasor beams", to shoot atomic bomb-tipped missiles out of the sky. My second job was to work on spy satellites to catch other nations testing or shooting atomic bombs. As a side project, I had quickly maneuvered for one of my first projects to use a kind of Dyson starship propulsion.
My incidental job also included finding ways to get and use energy, such as solar power, fuel cells, geothermal things. That is a totally different story. That one was more profitable.
· Beam Weapons ... Laser and the Lesson
Laser Beams and Phasor Banks
The beam weapons were a daydream fantasy that many of us had, because the scientists had just perfected lasers and the engineers had just built large subatomic particle accelerators. Both of them appeared to have what you need to make a phasor beam.
"Phasors" were Star Trek language, of course. All the younger scientists and engineers watched Star Trek, even though it was somewhat trite and childish and the acting was bad. We loved it. I related to Spock immediately.
We referred to our work as "directed energy weapons" when we were giving official presentations.
The laser beam weapon started out to be fun, but quickly disappointed me. My boss's boss's boss arranged for me to get a briefing by a Major Axelman regarding a laser phasor beam that would shoot down a fighter jet. That would be really neat. As it turned out, the laser was mounted inside a building as big as 3 houses on a little hilltop in the desert. The little hill was about 2 miles from the side of a small mountain.
Already it was not sounding good. Phasors were little things Captain Kirk and Spock and I could carry with us in our pockets when we land on some alien planet. Something as big as 3 houses would not even fit on an airplane.
Major Axelman said he would put on a face guard helmet and fly the fighter jet between the little hilltop and the small mountain. They would put a target on his airplane and the laser would try to shoot at him.
"What?" I thought, "This guy is nuts."
After they described the laser a bit more, it was clear this would not be a very good phasor beam. The laser was powered by some chemicals. But the chemicals were deadly poison. The laser was only a small prototype and would only heat up the target, not vaporize it, not melt it immediately, not even knock it down. And the engineering details would show that it would not be so easy at all. It was easier said than done.
The laser beam also had to be aimed and focused on the target. My boss's boss paid for a trip for me to see the aimer telescope. At first it was captivating.
We were in one room, watching through a big window. The workers were in the other room on the other side of the big window, working with the telescope and doing things that looked important. It was a backwards telescope. Instead of looking into the eyepiece, they would shoot the laser beam into the eyepiece. That was clever. The beam came out of the big part of the telescope. Then whatever was at the end of the beam should be vaporized.
The engineers had designed a telescope that would swivel and point fast enough to track a fast fighter jet flying by. The telescope would focus the laser on the fighter jet, and then melt a small, one foot diameter spot on the jet.
"Melt?" I thought, "That's all it will do is melt a small hole?"
This was disappointing. Unfortunately, the laser would never be able to do much more than that, melt the skin of the airplane. And worse yet, during my career, the laser would never be as powerful as the competition.
The competition was just simple, small rockets using real, physical high explosives. Even a terrorist could fire one from his shoulder. That was the competition, some rag head with a Stinger missile.
It was fundamental science that stopped it. My boss's boss's colleague, a laser scientist named Dr. Garth Gobeli pointed out that a simple, 1 pound of high explosive would deliver 2.2 million joules of energy in about 5 thousandths of a second to a 3 inch diameter spot on the airplane, and blow an airplane to bits.
Blow it to bits, Vaporize It. That's what we wanted.
The laser power was too small, by comparison. Even 20 years later, the laser would not even be able to deliver 1 million joules. That would be just the energy of less than half of a pound of high explosive. And the laser would take one second to do so, which would be about 200 times slower than the explosive.
In other words, "no blowing anything to bits."
The laser would be as heavy as the heaviest bomb the airplane could ever deliver. The laser was as heavy as a small airplane, was half as energetic and 200 times weaker than a small rocket fired from a fighter jet, or from one of Osama’s buddies.
It was even worse than that. The laser beam had to be focused and aimed by something, an aiming telescope. But the laser was not supposed to blow up that aiming telescope. The telescope would be made of some magical something.
Spock would say that was illogical, hard to figure. If they could find that magical something that a laser won't blow up, then the bad guys could coat their airplane with that same magical something and not be blown up. This was quite illogical.
And there was more bad news. The laser beam also had to go through the air between the laser and the airplane, and not blow up the air. If the laser was powerful enough to blow up airplane skin, then it would also blow up the air in between. The air would flash and !bam! like lightning, and would sap and drain laser energy.
There did not seem to be any way around it. It just was not working out.
This first phasor beam fantasy was down the drain, for me
Weaponization of Nuclear Explosives
------- Tom Burford and the Orion Documents -------
Our mission: make weapons out of nuclear explosives.
Sandia gave everyone I knew who worked here least one safe certified to hold atomic secrets. Like every new hire, I got to choose what kind of safe I wanted when I got my dictionary, ruler and scissors. I picked two secret safes, a big, cabinet-style metal document safe and a little cabinet safe. You had to buy your own slide rule.
The small safe was like a two drawer file cabinet, but with 2 inch steel sides, front, top and bottom, and a big, 4 inch combination lock wheel, with a handle thing to open it. It made me feel important.
The big safe was just a metal file cabinet with metal doors. Two metal bars and a pair of fat, 2 pound, combination locks kept the metal file doors from opening. This safe was taller than me and wider than a big refrigerator, but only one document deep.
I fully expected to have both safes filled to bursting with Atomic Bomb secrets very soon. Then I could make a Starship.
It was the politics protocol I didn't follow, and was too naive to realize it.
The obvious protocol was that one does not just go visit with the boss's boss's boss. One is not supposed to go over each of the in-between guy's heads.
Rather instantly, in the first few days Dr. Tom Burford, the boss's boss's boss, and I started talking. He was the only one in the chain of command who thought about things, strategically, philosophically.
The other guys just didn't know that much, I thought. They didn't act like they were driven by any vision or strategy. So I intellectually ignored them.
Burford and I were standing and looking out his second floor, north facing office windows at the Sandia mountains to the east. Burford was a "Director" working for a Vice President, so he got a 25 foot long run of window, stretching the entire length of his office.
Because he came from Bell Labs, the famous AT&T Bell Labs where transistors were invented and where people won Nobel Prizes often, and because he did some really important work with U.S. Navy underwater acoustics, his long window also faced the best view.
Whenever I visited him, which was many times a week, we both could not resist stopping a second or two to look out those windows.
You think Big Thoughts better when you see Big Things, mountains, The Layers of Time in the rock strata.
We could see the February snow outlining the rock layers on both the southern and northern Sandia mountain peaks, and we could see ridges along the 15 mile long desert mountain range rising a mile above the already mile-high floor of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mountains marked the east boundary of the city.
The cold outside was so desert-dry and clear we could almost see the branches on old, stubborn ancient pinon trees clinging to sheer, 500 foot rock faces 10 miles away at the top of the mountain.
Burford would most often hold his head down a little and to the side, and slightly manipulate his Pall Mall cigarette, mostly without smoking it. Slightly thin, darker hair, black rimmed glasses, and clean shaven, he always wore a pressed darker suit, never looked disheveled and always seemed to be smiling.
"Did anybody ask you yet if they have to get a passport to visit you?" he joked.
Apparently, some people from back east really were that stupid. Some acted like Albuquerque was in Mexico, which is a whole different country starting a few hundred miles south of here.
Burford, the person who made the decision to hire me, seemed to be the only one who had that intense, intellectual curiosity, like the people at the university. The rest of the people I met here were smart enough, but they just seem to plod and do work. They didn't think about things.
He smiled and raised his eyebrows. "You know, you can see the geological layers quite well, with the snow outlining them." he said. "That top layer on South Peak is Late Pleistocene." he asserted. He knew I liked fossils. He seemed to understand the timelessness and infinity of existence one can see in the fossils.
Actually, I suspected he was planning a neat field trip to that prehistoric-human cave on the other side of the mountain, with a parking area just off the road and 500 feet from the cave entrance. This was a cave that we could actually crawl into, legally. The pollen in the dust on the cave floor and the fire pit way deep inside had enough layers to be dated to something like 14,000 years ago. That was pre-historic man, long before the Indians.
The tip of South peak exposed a 500,000 year record in the Late Pleistocene rock layers.
"Humans were just learning to make good spears and fire pits when that layer was laid down." he said.
Our silent, 1 second stares at the mountain clearly expressed our deep, thoughts. At least I thought they were deep. I was thinking about Starships and 1000 year trips in space.
He was probably thinking he could not get his Mercedes Benz close enough to the South Peak to walk to the peak in a half hour on a Sunday afternoon. There was no road to South Peak like there was to North Peak.
It was a nice break, with the timelessness of the layers of rock in the formation on the mountain, like tree rings capturing 500,000 years of time.
We were supposed to be making weapons of mass destruction. Instead, we were watching snow fall on a mountainside, and talking about fossils. Feeling guilty, we always got back to work pretty fast. Work was mostly exciting.
This laboratory weaponized nuclear explosives. We took the nuclear explosives the Los Alamos scientists invented and made weapons out of them.
"What do you think we can do with a nuclear explosive?" he asked, posing the general concept of trying to figure out how to do something really AT&T-like, Nobel-prize like.
He stared out his window again, holding that cigarette, with the fire end pointed away from him and like he was about to flick the ash off.
"Did you ever hear of the Orion Program? The Atomic bomb powered starship?" I asked.
It was an outlandish question, quite a bit out of the blue, and completely unrelated to ballistic missiles or weapon effects.
I fully expected he would just not care, and that he would know nothing of the program at all. But I had to try.
"Oh yes, quite impressive. You heard about that, eh?" he replied, smiling, grinning almost.
"What?" shouted a loud surprised voice in my head, receiving an instant reward for asking a bold, outlandish question.
"You did?" I answered. This is the first time I met anyone in two years who even heard of it.
"It was really quite impressive. They actually did some experiments to find out how it could work, with high explosives. It was kind of cute how the tiny rocket actually worked." he explained.
"Really," I responded, my neuron circuits jammed, not knowing which of many questions to ask next. He started talking about Dyson's Orion Starship all on his own. I did not have to prod him or coach him about it.
Burford continued, motioning with steady and very mildly graphic, Italian-like gestures how the rapid fire explosives pushed the rocket. I never heard of this before.
Explosives??
His gestures and mannerisms were the opposite of emotional. My gestures and mannerisms were typically the opposite of his.
As Burford was telling me about the "Orion Test" I realized that instead of real atomic bombs at the real Nevada Test Site, with a real fireball hitting a real atomic bomb catcher, he was talking about a toy rocket loaded with sticks of dynamite.
Instant disappointment.
I thought he was going to tell me they fired some real atomic bombs at a real atomic bomb catcher. But he didn't. All he described were just non-nuclear tests, with high explosives.
All I could think of while he was talking was "bunch of boys shooting firecrackers under tin cans." Their excuse to waste the money was that they were demonstrating that you could blow up a bunch of bombs behind a rocket and push it.
! Dumb. Stupid !
He was describing some kind of engineering effort, but I was seeing a cartoon story. Every word he said created another picture. A small, toy rocket, a basket of hand grenades, sticks of dynamite. First dynamite stick blasts it into the sky. Whacks the toy rocket into the air, like it was hit with a hypersonic baseball bat.
Rocket flies off in some direction; like a fly ball; not like a rocket that goes in a well defined direction, but just somewhere. "Rocket" disappears. Just like I would expect something to be if it were on top of a stick of dynamite. Split second just after the first stick: the second stick goes off. Whacks the rocket in some other random, wild direction.
Then they all sit around a dark room playing a movie where we see the toy rocket disappear, and they all clap.
What a disappointment. All I could feel was:
Not impressive at all.
What horribly un-visionary experiments.
But Tom Burford calmly and casually kept on talking, "General Atomics did it. You can get the Secret documents from the Classified library."
"Are they about nuclear things?" I asked, meaning "are they about atomic bombs, or just dynamite firecrackers," and anticipated he would say "No," meaning "just firecrackers."
I already knew I would go away disappointed and would drop the topic forever. He had just destroyed my Vision of Dyson's Orion Starship.
"Oh yes," he replied.
??What??
"You can go over to that double story building, attached to the library, and get the documents from the Classified library," he said, looking out his window and pointing to the small building across the sidewalk and main road between the buildings. "You can look them over in your office."
He made it very clear: he was telling me that I should definitely go right now and get the classified documents and definitely read about it.
Not only did he know about the Orion program, he knew where to get the nuclear, secret part of the story. He understood.
This was completely unexpected.
He knew very well that our Sandia Lab could implement the atomic bomb propulsion if we needed to. He could decide to make something of it if he wanted.
"You think we could find a way to use it? um?" he smiled as he posed his question like a comment.
I was elated. I thought how wonderful it was that he did not pontificate or mandate that we do it, like some arrogant, aggressive boss. Instead, he commented it, softly. He often ended his sentences with a combination "um?" phrase, a light chuckle and a smile.
Wow.
He just told me to go learn about Dyson’s Orion Starship. I knew I had gone to work at the right place.
I walked around his dark wood conference table.
“You know, the Orion really could take us to the nearest star. It’s amazing. We actually did put someone on the moon." I emoted, like a wide eyed graduate student, almost stuttering.
"I didn't really think we would be able to do it." I blurted again, meaning "go to the moon."
He smiled and replied "Yeah, it is pretty amazing. Exciting."
As I walked out of his office I almost talked to myself embarrassingly aloud. "I can and I will just march across the street and get super secret Orion Starship documents."
I thought this almost audibly, moving my lips. I almost forgot to say "bye" to Helen, his secretary. I always acknowledged her.
"Burford will tell them to give them to me," I almost audibly said again, almost aloud talking to myself some more, perseverating and staring at the sidewalk, walking with a side to side wagging of my head in step with my gait, unaware of anyone around me, as I headed straight for the library.
I really was just a young kid. Bright, but quite Aspie.
-------------------------------------
Classified Library
The classified library was just a bunch of memos and documents in a big, two floor room. I expected a "LIBRARY," with mysterious books. I expected high-secret protocol, with a deep underground chamber, protected from atomic bomb blasts and bad guys. I expected something intimidating, with serious credential checking and military uniforms.
I imagined how I would very importantly tell them "Burford told me to get these documents." And then they would obediently and very reverently go get them.
Instead, I walked into a brightly lit room about the size of two gasoline station garages, and just as spacious. The metal second floor was clearly visible from the metal first floor, and all I saw was rows of metal bookshelves.
Some of the metal was painted that light creamy color and not that poo green or military gray, so it looked somewhat like office space and not a garage or a military depot. That was the positive feature. This was a very bright room.
Not many books. Just documents. All kinds of documents. There were about 6 female helpers who knew where all the documents were and how to find out if I had access to them.
This place was not a library at all. It was a storage room for all kinds of studies plain old regular people wrote.
I found it quite simple to get the documents on the classified version of the Orion Starship. The intelligent females helped. They even knew I had the right access without asking me.
The one nice thing about the classified library I really liked was that I didn't have to carry the classified documents myself. They carried them for me. Special couriers delivered whatever secret documents anyone wanted to the important person's office.
The couriers transported the documents in a special, metal, classified courier cart from wherever to wherever, inside the guarded area. The couriers checked to make sure the document-taker had the correct secret access. They would not give up the documents until whoever took them personally signed that they took them out of their hands.
All I had to do was tell the smart ladies what I wanted, and it would be delivered to my desk.
When I got back from the Classified Library I blabbed and blabbed to Marylee, our 40 year old, smart secretary, about what these documents could mean.
"That's pretty impressive." she remarked, looking directly at me with a bright smile through glasses that made her eyes seem bigger than they were. I liked her from the moment she looked at me on my first interview. You might say I hit on her every chance I got. I could really feel her intense intellectual stimulation.
------- The Orion Documents ----------------
It seemed like this whole pile of "Secret Restricted Data" documents about the Orion space ship didn't take up more than a foot or so of my metal cabinet safe. I really expected more.
A foot of documents is not very much space in that metal cabinet safe. My save was mostly empty. A mere foot of documents was not very many for a topic so important.
Once I started talking in the open about Dyson's Orion, another guy appeared and said he heard of it. "In The Open", of course, meant in a secret building and with people having Secret , Restricted Data clearances. What he told me, however, was no secret, according to him.
I forgot his name as he was telling me who he was. He told me there was a secret military program based on the Orion, and they were so serious, he even read about some of the detail on how they would assign a Career Officer, for the people who would be on the space base. ¿ No secret? Ok.
After talking to him, I expected these documents would describe a Permanent Space Station military base, between here and the moon, just like he said.
I was looking for it. I couldn't find it. I looked again. I still couldn't find it or any reference to it or any reference to conversations to it. I looked again the next day. I couldn't find anything interesting at all in these documents.
I skimmed them a few times over, stopping at the pictures and figures. I was confident I didn't miss anything, and puzzled that I just couldn't find the Great Plans for a Great Spaceship Battle Station between the Moon and Earth, like that fellow told me. I couldn't even find a picture or drawing of a big space station or spaceship propelled by bombs. The best I could find was depressingly completely feeble. All I saw were a bunch of detailed, boring things. There were almost no secret things that I would have to forget if I ever left this Secret environment.
I imagined what I would think 30 years from now. Most of this would be too boring to remember. There wasn't anything interesting here to remember.
I was completely disappointed. The most imaginative thing I could find in the documents was a cartoon-like engineer's sketch of a guy sitting in one of two chairs in some kind of roomy cabin. The chair was not even drawn very well. It was just a sketch and nothing like a John Glenn space chair. The driver fellow was shown in a simple sketch drawing to be sitting on the top floor. The two floors below him looked like empty small rooms in the back of a big truck. And the basement was full of barrel shaped containers stacked on top of each other like beer kegs, representing atomic bombs to power the ship.
I was scrutinizing this drawing. It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew. In fact, it seemed to be drawn in a truly childlike way. The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up in between periods of getting drunk. This design looked like the whole set of secret documents were created by a non-believer, non-interested engineer doing a quick project for some marketer who snockered a dumb government bureaucrat out of some money. It looked like the guy in charge needed somebody, anybody, to do the work. It looked like the designer considered the whole concept to be something that some impractical professors suggested.
Why did the designers make it so inefficient? I calculated a horrible small percent efficiency. Didn't they understand?
¿¿Secret?? Every paragraph in a classified document began with some code for its classification. Unclassified. Confidential. Secret. Something.
Not a single thing I cared about or needed or wanted was marked secret or classified or confidential in any way. Huh???
Burford liked the idea that I wanted to look into it. He liked the concept of creating a technology that would enable people go to the nearest star. Bell Labs expected this kind of "imaginative." Bell Labs' ATT were in charge of this place. Burford was clearly a bit Visionary.
But this document was just plain deficient. I wondered if I really did have all the documents. I visited the classified library again, and a very wide-awake and competent lady re-assured me: this is everything on the topic and everything related to it.
This was not the only disappointment.
The Sandia Lab was an atomic weapon factory. I was definitely sure I did not like it here. Dr. Tom Burford was the only guy in my chain of command who came from Bell Labs. It was quickly clear that Burford was the only one up the entire chain of command who knew anything.
Bell Labs was the place where people earned Nobel Prizes, for inventing things like the transistor. Burford treated me like someone from Bell Labs and expected me to invent things worthy of such a prize. He understood.
And the rest of these guys were just war mongers.
---
Tom Burford asked me "would you like to visit a mountain full of atomic bombs?" He was talking about one of the places where the United States stored some of them. Burford knew that if we wanted to make an Orion Starship propelled by megaton atomic bombs, we ought to at least see what a megaton bomb looked like. He arranged for us to visit an air base where the United States stored some of the old time bombs. This was our job, to work with the bombs and talk to those who deploy them. Since that was an important job, we were given unlimited air fare and travel allowance to visit wherever we need. We were Important.
The location of the old time atomic bomb mountain was close to a city whose name I am not supposed to reveal, confirm or deny. The mountain seemed to be so close to the city that if just one of them would blow up, it would completely wipe it out.
When I asked a person who was pumping gas into our car if he thought there were any atomic bombs in that mountain, he said "Sure, big ones, lots of them."
I thought it was a secret, so I didn't confirm or deny what I had not yet seen.
His face expressions and his comments scared me just like he wanted. I think he could tell I was a young, gullible out-of-towner.
All I could think of on my way to the mountain was what it would be like: first a flash, then being dead. I could not stop pondering how it would be to be living normal lives, walking around, talking to someone, and then
--- suddenly without warning
--- Nothing, Vaporized, Dead. Totally Gone.
No commotion, no screaming, no moment of terror, just suddenly becoming white hot vapor. These were megaton bombs we were talking about.
We went to the air base in suits, and we were greeted by layers of full-uniform U.S. Air Force officers checking to be sure who we were.
I expected careful protocol, and they complied. Confident teenagers with machine guns surrounded us, everywhere. I don't know if they were teenagers, but they looked like it and were certainly younger than me, and they were all seriously armed and in their full battle fatigues.
We also had to go through layers of guards and multiple, clearly marked, clearly scary electric fences in a somewhat desert area where if we looked carefully we could see mountain tops 100 miles away all along the horizon. We finally arrived at the entrance of one of the mountains. We passed the final identification test, and the armed teenagers let us inside the tunnel entrance.
Now more teenagers with machine guns and more officers with important looks on their faces escorted us. Inside the mountain we went through several more gates and secret doors. Deep inside we finally got to a rather poorly lit room with a low ceiling and the floor space of perhaps the size of 10 garages. I could not really see how big. It was inside a tunnel, so it could not be that big. The room was full, stuffed, with what look like very long bombs, big bombs on carts with 6 or 8 inch metal wheels. The atomic bombs seemed to be so big they looked like they would not fit underneath a B-52 bomber. There could have been 10 bombs in there, or 3, or 30. I won't say, even if there were 100 in there. And, I could not brag that I knew because I only saw one next to me. I was not able not count them because the whole place was so cramped and people were talking.
None of this part was secret, but I won't tell, either. I might even try to deceive, just to play the game the way it is supposed to be played, the way some of Burford's people taught me. One of them came with us. And one thing I would say to impress people: there were at least a couple of those big bombs in there.
I just could not resist doing something that I knew I would certainly remember. No, I would not pee on a bomb. We were in suits and escorted, and I didn't know what those teenagers with guns would do to a bomb pee-er.
It was just instinct. I put my cheek against one of the more-than-one megaton bombs. I listened carefully for ticking or humming. "I don't hear any ticking," I said to Tom Burford. He chuckled. It was a line from a movie "The Mouse That Roared". Then I tried to measure bomb by wrapping my arms around it. Of course, I couldn't. It seemed wider than a pickup truck. I jokingly asked one of the guides "This thing looks so big it won't fit in the bomb bay of the B-52, will it?"
He laughed and said "No, it doesn't."
I was totally surprised. I was only guessing when I asked him the question.
"They attach it on the outside, and they can't close the bomb bay doors, even to take off." he asserted.
"So, what do you do with it?" I asked, quite seriously.
"We count it." he laughed, quite seriously.
This was the Cold War, and Megatons counted. Here was a room with many, many Mega-tons to count.
These things are too damn big to put 3 million of them into a rocket ship like Freeman Dyson had in that article I read in Physics Graduate School. I don't know if Freeman Dyson ever got to visit this room. He should have. They should bring him here.
Burford did say this visit would be interesting.
The emotion I felt somewhat discouraged me. I could feel it nagging me:
The bombs are too big.
---
------------ An Evil Weapon ---------------
I guess it was really obvious I didn't think my boss's boss, who worked for Burford, knew very much. I was young. I was 26 and I had a brand new Ph.D. in Physics. My behavior was a bit more obvious, a bit less transparent than I thought, and I didn't realize it. I was not as smart as I thought.
Since I talked directly to our boss's boss's boss at random, the guys in between gave me a long leash and let me do whatever Burford and I talked about. My boss, Bill Goodlaffer, listened carefully to what I claimed the Orion rocket could do. Goodlaffer could figure pretty well. He listened well, too. He remembered important, key facts.
He told his boss, Bob Kadiddlehopper, what I said. The both of them wanted to have someone in their group design a super fast missile, so they could look smart. They wanted some weapon delivery system that could reach some far-away enemy target faster than the Commie Pinko Rapist Atheists at the other end could get out of bed to push their retaliation missile buttons.
But I didn't like what I heard.
Bill Goodlaffer kept saying things about the Vietnamese and the war that disturbed me. His actions and words verified to me that he was one of those Vietnam War Monger murderers, a Nazi. I thought Goodlaffer was a mobster helping that thug Mayor Daley of Chicago and his completely Un-American police riot at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. I believed that Goodlaffer was an accomplice in the same gang as those National Guard murderers at Kent State,.
Goodlaffer clinched it with the task he told me to perform. He wanted me to analyze a way to drag an unshielded nuclear reactor behind an airplane. He said we could "kill the gooks with radiation, " they would fly by, dangling this gamma neutron sparkler behind.
He drew this picture on his chalk board of an airplane with a nuclear reactor dragging on a long cable. He said I should imagine a little biplane towing a banner saying "Eat at Joe's Bar," only the biplane was a B52 bomber and the banner would read "Eat this, you Commie Bastard" as it would spew killer radiation on the ground as it moved along. He laughed.
"Can you imagine," he chuckled. "The gooks would just fall over. Can't you just see it?" he fantasized out loud, with a bit of glee at how clean the battle would be and how we, he and his guys, what he thought were the good guys, would get to fly away victorious. He daydreamed out loud, assuming I would be like the four other guys in his group who I could see also had this Nazi tendency. They heard him talking about this and laughed with him.
Maybe the view out his window affected his mind. His second story window had no view at all. His north-facing window viewed the painted, light blue-white and dirty, open-to-the-sky eating area in the center the building, next to where they sold cold-fat, flat, soft French fries and shoe leather hamburgers at noon.
He was standing between me and the window, holding his coffee cup at chest height like he often did, almost blocking the door, with Marylee behind me. I didn't like it. He said I should analyze towing an unshielded nuclear reactor connected to a glider towed by a long cable behind some suitable airplane.
"Figure a way to make it work. Write a nice report about it." he instructed me, his subordinate.
I could not do it. I just seemed to never getting around to finishing that evil analysis. I was ignoring it. It was too awful. I kept stressing out, about how Goodlaffer was evil.
I guess he wasn't evil. But the Viet Nam war was going on. Traitors did have control of the USA. He was lining up with the wrong guys, guys at the top ordering war crimes just like Hitler and Mussolini.
I found it curious how on the one hand I thought we should stop killing Vietnamese immediately, and on the other hand, at the same time, that we should nuke that Commie city of Hanoi, and make the murderers quit, right now, instantly. I was stressing, and kept thinking, almost aloud as my face puckered, "And we should try President Lyndon Johnson for Treason. And his accomplices, with him. We should try these traitors in charge of our government like we tried the Nazi's at Nuremberg. Same thing. These government right wing extremist traitors are killing 30,000 guys my age, for no reason."
Goodlaffer was a friendly, professional, and sincere fellow. He was actually a good person. And he liked nuclear explosives, like I did. But he happened to be on the side of those anti-Constitution, evil thugs.
But to me an Aspie, this was perfectly logical.
I think it's an Aspberger, "Aspie" trait, to be able to hold contradictory, mutually exclusive concepts together. My thinking would be illogical to Neurotypicals (NT's). I could keep elements containing apparent contradictions separate. NT's could not.
Dr. Spock of Star Trek would understand completely. It was logical.
I am a tree hugger, and I love wood furniture and wood decks and hardwood floors. Stop the war immediately, stop killing people in another country that is not attacking you, and nuke their capital. My boss talks like a Nazi war criminal, and I think he is a good person. Aspie's can do this.
That is probably why I can be a Democrat and a Republican at the same time, a hippie and a conservative at the same time.
But this Atomic Bomb Weaponization Facility was not my place. I felt it. I knew it. I suffered anxiety attacks over it. A recurring emotion came over me every day as I drove to work, every time I entered the gate:
These guys are Nazi's. I want out.
---
CHAPTER 4
----- Beat your Plowshares into Weapons --------
"Could you deliver a big enough bomb to blow up the whole Commie Evil Kingdom all at once?" he asked me, seriously curious. He liked those kinds of phrases. He laughed. I laughed too. It was kind of funny. If we weren't in Viet Nam and the evil traitors were not in charge of the USA, I might like the guy. Goodlaffer had a likeability, even if his office was rather small.
"How fast does it have to go?" I asked.
"Faster than they can push the button." he snapped back. Fast mind.
We all laughed. Goodlaffer was practical, and had a good sense of humor. He was still a Nazi. He was on Mayor Daly's side. Those fellows were Pigs, traitors, and bad. But he was sharp.
We had just finished a loud, hallway conversation where I boasted about atomic bomb propulsion that would make a space ship go "0.1 c," a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. I asserted how we humans could send a space ship to the nearest star, with atomic bombs pushing the ship. Huge payloads. A whole town, with livestock.
"I've got the documents in my safe," I asserted. I had hoped that there was still something buried, something I had not gotten to read about yet in the foot of documents, something that would show me how Dyson figured it.
Marylee Brighteye, our secretary, whose voice seemed to go straight into a particular primitive part of my mind whenever I heard her say anything, and whose body made me have involuntary lust thoughts the from first day I saw her, she laughed at Goodlaffer's quick wit. She seemed impressed. This was Big Time Inventions.
She was 40. I was 26. My wife Terri was way hotter than Marylee, so this was all mind twitter.
I could see how much Marylee was digging it, being there and part of the group of us talking about fast rockets and space ships, and humans leaving earth to populate another solar system. She was smiling and standing up from her desk and looking at us all like that was more fun than any of these guys have had in a while.
This place was usually a pretty boring, sleepy System Analysis Division.
I knew personally how it was a sleepy, boring place. Goodlaffer's guys did a lot of Really Boring detailed analyses here. They did the kinds of analyses that made one nod and bob one's head with a strong need to sleep, in one's office in front of one's desk in one's warm room all by yourself in the middle of the afternoon. I knew first hand.
We would be answering questions of deeply head-nodding significance, like "How often should you replace the vacuum tubes on a spare nuclear bomb part you keep in storage, given that you never use it and only intend to use it to blow up Commie missile silos, but only if they shoot first, and only if you had to use the spare vacuum tube thing?"
Eh??
Another Systems Analysis question: "What is the best way to bomb a Commie navy harbor if you only have 12 atomic bombs and 3 different, somewhat unreliable rockets that can lob up to 8 bombs apiece?"
All I could think of for that stuff was "It's warm in this room. I ate too much for lunch."
Bob Kadiddlehopper, Goodlaffer's boss, was standing by Marylee's desk. He often stood around here and would casually ask key questions. He didn't know any answers. He just asked if we could do this or that, or if some other thing was possible. Most of his questions were Top Secret. He didn't know very much science and the only kinds of questions he asked were just sanity checks. He only remembered what people told him about engineering answers.
On the other hand, he really did know how to ask those damn pointed questions.
Kadiddlehopper always made it a point to talk to smart guys. I guess that is why he got to be boss. So he stood there, looking at me, and then asked the question.
"Could you deliver a nuclear weapon to Russia in 2 minutes?" he asked me.
My brain wheels were turning.
Kadiddlehopper's question translated into a need for something that went through the sky at just about ten times faster than any rocket anyone knew how to make. Everything else took 20 minutes, he wanted 2.
"Yep. That's what Orion does. Faster than anything," I said, blurting it out immediately, thinking "Dyson Starship."
I thought those words in a flash, and I immediately blurted them out, with my mouth engaged before my brain even thought about it.
"Can you really do that?," Kadiddlehopper asked.
Hesitating, my involuntary face expressions revealing that I just blurted it out without thinking first, because I knew I stepped right into it, I answered "I don't know. I 'd have to figure it."
I was at least smart enough to ask for more time.
"What would it take to find out?" Kadiddlehopper asked me.
"Oh, some figuring. I have all the Orion documents in my safe," I replied, pointing to my office and the big metal cabinet safe with a foot of puzzling analyses.
"Ok, why don't you go calculate what kind of payload you could deliver," Goodlaffer broke in.
As my direct boss, he commanded me to do it. This might have been a set-up, but I was too Ph.D. to notice.
Goodlaffer's question of "Faster than they can push the button." should have caused me to slow down and think a bit. But I didn't listen to my mind. I really should have thought about this.
But all I could think of when Kadiddlehopper asked me the question was an excuse to work on Dyson's Orion Starship Propulsion, for real.
Another excuse to do this is that that a super fast rocket to kill murdering, Totalitarian Communists would be a very good thing.
In a flash, I emoted, I felt the images of how those Stalinist Pigs had hundreds of multi-megaton bombs aimed at us, right now, right at my home in Albuquerque. I felt how they were evil. I recalled the images of how the communists killed people all the time, for no reason. I thought of what they did in China, and Russia, wherever they occupied.
The fact was, I would do anything to get to work on the Starship engine.
"See if you can get there faster than they can respond," he clarified. Goodlaffer was somewhat smiling.
He had studied physics at some point. So, you could understand how he really would propose far out, totally impractical things.
"How fast is that?" I asked.
"Two minutes," he replied.
"Damn," I thought. Now I had to do it. Fourty years later I wondered if these guys were playing with me. I am still a bit slow.
But, this was my excuse, and I was going to use it. I proceeded to figure how to make a weapon powered by Dyson's Orion rocket. I would have to learn how big and how small one could make an atomic bomb. I had a perfect reason to go find out all I ever wanted to know about atomic bomb propulsion. I could feel the excitement of what I had a good excuse to do. All I could feel was "Boy is this neat."
This project allowed me to ask any secret question I wanted. I had a Q Clearance, Sigma 3. Heavy Duty. Off I went.
Goodlaffer opened up his metal phone number indexer thing and gave me the names of a handful of people.
He authorized me to talk to them, "anything I wanted to know," he said. This was a blank check.
All I had to do was figure out how to deliver a bomb big enough to wipe out the entire Evil Empire all at once, and do so faster than they could respond.
How big a bomb? As much as we had in silos, probably, all in one bomb.
Within hours of my asking, someone showed me how we could almost certainly make a 5000 Megaton bomb -- a Gigaton bomb. When I asked how big it would be, physically big, I didn't like the answer. It would be so big that no airplane could even budge it, let alone fly it.
"I see, you can make an atomic bomb bigger a whole lot more easily than you can make it smaller" I remarked, summarizing.
After a lot of secret talking and figuring and documents and estimates, I thought I might have insulted the guys when I summarized all that serious work. My statement sounded like just plain common sense to me, I thought.
I learned that small atomic bombs waste precious atomic explosive, like plutonium. Everybody knew that. Even bad guys. But I did not know that it was unclassified that bombs waste a lot.
The minor nuance here was that "small" meant "megaton."
Whoa.
"Megaton" blows up the whole city of Albuquerque, all at once. It was no wonder people like me were scared out of our minds about atomic war.
Focus. This was all about Starships. Focus. The whole exercise was about starships, space ships. I had to keep reminding me of that.
I had to learn about spy satellite procedures first. I had to learn what the Bad Guys would need to go through to decide to push the Kill-The-World Launch-Button, if they saw us launch.
It was fun doing this. I sketched the scenario, trying to figure out how much time I had to deliver the weapon.
The Bad Guys, the Commie Atheists, would be sitting there by their secret TV consoles deep inside one of those Russian police states, watching the U.S.A. from space, with special, heat sensitive TV cameras. The heat-sensing space spy TV would see the bright, white hot plume of our rocket launch, immediately. Even the worst spy satellite, one that a backward nation could launch, would immediately be able to see a rocket launch.
This was easy technology, especially for the Bad Guys.
Our rocket exhaust was really bright. The rocket had to be that powerful to lift the payload to 100 miles above earth. The exhaust from anybody's rocket was typically brighter than 100 million watts. So, the Bad Guys would easily and definitely see it on their spy TV. It's a 100 Million watt light bulb.
The Bad Guys are my target people. As soon as the Target People sitting by their secret consoles would get the message from the spy satellite TV that the Attackers, the Good Guys, are launching, the Target People have to decide: Is the Attacker launching a moon rocket, a spy satellite, a communication satellite, or are they launching an attack on us, the Victims?
Since the Attacker's rocket, ICBM's, won't arrive at their target for another 20 minutes, the Victims have about that long to decide whether or not to push their Retaliation Button.
If they push the Retaliation Button when all we were doing is launching a communication satellite, then they would start a nuclear war that would blow up the world. Big Decision.
On the other hand, if there were some kind of Crisis, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they did NOT press the retaliation button, they would be destroyed by atomic bombs and we would get away with it. That would be a Tough Decision.
After an hour of worrying about that, I gave up all that what-if-ing this or what-about-ing that and just asked Goodlaffer.
"What is the longest time I have to deliver the weapon?" I asked Bill Goodlaffer. I wanted as much time as he would let me have. That would let me make a slower rocket.
"Are you going to blow up all of Western Russia all at once?" he joked.
"Yeah," I answered, because that was the whole idea for this exercise. It also meant I would have to deliver a 5,000 megaton bomb.
Incidentally, the bomb would weigh as much as a big space ship with 100 people in it, headed for Neptune.
"2 minutes." he replied, authoritatively. "2 minutes from us to Russia. Special gift delivered super fast." he joked, nodding his head. He really liked the idea of a super fast, super Top Secret super weapon. They kept saying "2 minutes". Fourty years later I realize I was the fool who agreed to the stupid "2 minutes," and they were playing it back to me, sticking it to me every chance they got.
"If you take any longer than that, it won't be a surprise. They might launch their rockets and blow us up," he explained, just like any good Systems Analyst would figure.
As I look back on this interaction, nearly 40 years later, I recall it really was exactly like this. Strange that I would remember snippets of the words he used, the way he said them.
The emotion of working on things that could wipe out entire nations in a flash, was real. It was intense. No one took it lightly. Perhaps that is why I remembered it so vividly.
In any case, that was fine. The fact was that if we wanted to be sure the Bad Guys could not fight back, then Goodlaffer's "faster than they can push the button" could mean "faster than the time it takes for their spy satellite to radio down the data."
That would be faster than anything, and faster than Freeman Dyson and his Orion can deliver and faster than anything I can think of. That's as fast as the speed of light.
I decided to stick with Goodlaffer's "2 minutes to Russia."
This was all about Starships. I had to keep reminding myself.
The payload bomb that I was supposed to deliver would be a bit big, I figured. I was estimating the payload size. To blow up all of the Commie missile fields all at once meant the bomb had to be 5000 Megatons, at least, maybe bigger. Actually, that 5000 Megatons would not be big enough. The unclassified manual shows how bigger bombs get less and less effective. But I had never read anything about bombs.
When I estimated how big, physically, this bomb might be, I got "about the size of a big house" The 5000 megaton bomb would be at least that big. Maybe as big as an auditorium, like where the high school basketball game is held. Maybe that would be about the right size.
Nobody much figured my bomb, the details. It was just a paper exercise, and everybody knew it. I could somewhat tell. We were just "the Systems Analysts" to the serious engineers who actually did real things like weaponize nuclear ordnance. I did not realize they were just tossinig me random numbers.
But I could feel the excitement, because this payload was the same weight as a starship space ship.
I started talking to myself. Whispers actually came out of my mouth as I sat at my desk. My emotions clearly enunciated. I stared at the desk, looked at my work, and quietly talked:
""But I can't tell anyone the details.
This is secret work.
I'm screwed.""
""I gotta find out if it works.""
I saw myself standing at the head of Burford's heavy desk, with Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer sitting there listening reverently to every word I say. And then very, very authoritatively I tell them the true clue.
At my desk, staring at my work, but daydreaming vividly of us in Burford's office, whispers came out of my mouth.
""We're the only guys who will know how this works.
All we can tell the people is
"This is a space ship that can take us to Saturn.""
They all knew that's the way it is when you are doing Top Secret work. They nodded their heads, agreeing.
Snap. Back to figuring. "A megaton atomic bomb weighs about 1000 lbs," according to Freeman Dyson in his "Interstellar Transport" paper. I learned an accurate weight of one bomb in one of the secret documents. But "1000" was easier to figure, especially since Dyson used it. It did not matter.
I talked to myself some more, but this time only the voice in my head was speaking.
""If I tell anyone any real number, I might get me into big trouble.
I don't want trouble.
I want to make an Orion Starship."
Secrets dominated. How could I tell everyone and still not tell secrets?
I just could not keep myself from fantasizing, getting distracted. I recalled a stimulating interaction I just had with a crew cut, bearded mathematician, Dr. Gustavus Simmons. Gus told me "Bad guys will talk to you all day just to get one number from you."
I blankly stared at the dull wall, as if looking right through the metal door with no window. I was promoted an all metal office by myself, lit with bright fluorescent lights, with a North-facing window outshining the lights. My window was way worse than Goodlaffer's. Mine was narrow and dirty, really dirty.
The situation of me telling people only what I would be allowed to tell them, and no more, took over the daydream fantasy.
""A 1000 pounds to make a megaton.
You can go look up that one yourself.""
I was on a podium, answering questions from some Journalists. Some were friendly. Some were not.
"You, commie."
I said, with emotion.
"You're a third world terrorist.," I said, looking right at the bastard.
"You can just go find all kinds of official and unofficial numbers about nuclear weapons yourself.
I'm not telling you." I said.
I was authoritatively sparing with the evil spies.
I sure told them off.
I knew I really could not talk about this outside of the security area. And I had to talk to someone, an intellectual someone. So I took a break and went to talk with Gus Simmons. He always came up with outrageous, surprising comments.
There he was, the mischievous Dr. Gustavus Simmons, with a crew cut and smiling through a grey-streaked beard that reached nearly down to his belt buckle. This time he wore a bolo tie and some drab gray suit pants, and no suit. He was the leader of a small math group under Burford. He was a magician, mathematician and a locksmith who broke into guaranteed-secure Secret safes to taunt the head of Security.
I started in with a strategy question. I asked Gus, directly "When I find out some secrets, what do I say when someone asks me about it?"
I fully expected him to tell me some interesting game theory, like he started to one time before.
"That's easy. Deceive the Bad Guys. Don't lie to them," he replied, clearly happy that I asked him something he could boast about.
"Deceive?" I said. That's lying. I didn't lie very well.
"If you can count on someone to lie, then that guy gives away the secrets because they are bound to lie," he said, expecting me to understand.
"Deceivers are crafty bastards," he emphasized, chuckling a bit.
Gus liked that phrase, "crafty bastards." He used it every time he could make it fit.
"The liars are honor bound to lie. You can often force them to give away a secret just by forcing them to lie." he told me, looking right at me, to appreciate my response and knowing me well enough to see that I would see right away.
He was the crafty bastard himself, full of gleeful mischief. His crew cut hair and very long grey-white beard sent deceiving, opposite messages. Never, ever sloppy, and almost never in a suit, he always played the part of a crafty character. But he wasn't playing it. He was crafty and he was a character.
"Just look at Russian propaganda. When Pravda writes that the reports of a crop failure in the Ukraine are absolutely untrue, everybody there knows they are about to go hungry," Gus narrated, like a story.
"But a deceiver sometimes lies and sometimes doesn't. You can bet that the bad guy has better odds flipping a coin than trying to get the facts from a deceiver."
Gus was a mathematician. But he also kept a current locksmith license complete with expensive lock-picking tools. He also practiced magic tricks. It was all the same topic to him.
He used the grade school phrase "Bad Guys," and I liked it. He is the one who taught me to use it.
Gus did pick locks. He would defeat the lock everybody had on the steel cabinet safes. He deliberately did that about every two or 3 years to get attention. He would always carefully show the guys in charge of Top Secret Security how he did it.
He did this knowing full well it would force the security guys to change all the locks on all the safes in the whole place. Then Gus proudly and very publicly took the credit for finding a security weakness.
The Security guys didn't really mind, too much. They got to blame Gus for all the expense and trouble of improving security. However, they then got to do work they liked, changing locks.
They didn't have anything else to do. There had not been any spies here in 20 years.
Gus was so anxious he manipulated the topic of conversation immediately and proceeded to show me exactly how he broke into the high security locks this time. He reached into his desk and took out one of the older locks that the Security guys had specified for all safes. He set it in front of me.
I recognized the lock. I had one on my safe when I first hired on. Then pretty quickly, they changed it. I wondered why they changed the locks for no reason.
"You have to make this a highly credible threat," he told me, as he fiddled with some metal things. "If a bad guy can make the tools at home, that's a highly credible threat."
He emphasized the phrase "highly credible threat" with a knowing nod, to make sure I understood.
Sitting around his metal conference table on the first floor office with a south facing window of the type one can not see through, Gus explained the process one must use to get the undivided attention of the Security guys. Gus liked how I appreciated that those guys in Security were surely not as clever as the Mathematicians, like Gus.
He explained this like a master chef describing how to prepare a gourmet meal.
"One must present them with a weakness so glaring even minor scoundrels can succeed at it." He used the word "scoundrel" often, too. He reached for some other metal things from his desk drawer.
"What is it?" I asked as I touched one of his metal things welded to a 4 inch rod thing.
"Like a shim." he mumbled, as he focused everything he had on a combination lock as big as an orange and 3 times as heavy. It didn't open right away. All the safes once had that lock on them because of Gus, from a previous episode, before I hired on.
He was fiddling and fuddling around, poking and twisting metal parts and things into that lock. He was shoving and pushing hard. And it looked like the demonstration was not going to work. Physics experiments do that. They don't work in public.
This was like the joke about one student telling the other how you could tell what lab you were in: "If it stinks, its chem lab. If it's slimy and green, it's biology lab. If it doesn't work, it's Physics."
It was about to look like Physics, so I told Gus "It's ok, I believe you can do it. I used to open combination locks in college. I would show a person who locked their bike with that cable combination lock thing how I could open their lock and steal their bike in less than a minute. So they would go buy a good lock. I know how sometimes it doesn't work."
Gus stopped. But he wasn't listening to me. Or if he was, all I did was challenge him. He pulled and yanked and untwisted and unshimmmed all his tools from the lock, and started over. He was pushing so hard on the metal things I thought he was going to break them. "Don't break them just for me" I blurted out. He was banging on something and forcing a shim thing into the lock. He said he made the shim at home.
"It took a couple of weeks to get it right." he admitted.
And the lock opened up.
I left with a new feeling about security, and that I should be extra proud if I succeed at being a deceiving little crafty bastard.
----------------- Too Many Bombs -----------------
Back at my desk, the Secret Restricted Data about atomic bombs, was open on my desk. These were some pieces we would need to make a Starship. I knew I would have to practice telling the Orion weapon story because we would all want to know the answer. Just the answer. Almost no one would care about the details. Only the Bad Guys would care. The trick was to give the answer in such a way that a Bad Guy could not shim his way into the lock, so to speak, and get the Secret Restricted Data.
Instead of figuring the Orion weapon like I was supposed to, I started figuring the Starship. Deep in a trance of figuring and staring through the metal wall of my office, I concluded that the way to explain the Orion rocket in public would be to use public numbers, and to forget the secret, real numbers.
Anyone could figure this one for themselves. One could read in unclassified publications that a megaton bomb weighs less than about 1000 pounds.
The bomb needed to blow up the whole of Western Russia all at once had to be at least 5000 megatons. Nobody figured that number. It was just "more than we had in the missile fields." It didn't matter. It was the mass of a starship.
So the bomb would weigh less than about 5000 x 1000 lbs, or 2500 tons of payload. That's as much as 25 fully loaded, modern railroad cars, end to end. That's one Big Mother Atomic Bomb. If the thing has the density of cement, about 3 tons per cubic yard, then the Monster Bomb is 10 meters across, or 30 feet across and 30 feet high, which is as big as a rich guy's house.
Now I had to figure out how to push this huge payload of 2500 tons hard enough to deliver it to Western Russia from somewhere in the USA, in 2 minutes. That was not too hard to figure.
But my answer demanded a rocket that was way too big. The rocket would be bigger than a few aircraft carriers. This was not small.
A faceless voice in my thoughts emoted the draining feeling:
too damn big.
Two fundamental physics issues were getting in the way of our making a starship. First, the bomb designers showed how an efficient bomb can not be made small. I could not start out with a small propulsion system.
Second, to go fast still required too many bombs. Putting "not small" and "too many bombs" together meant that I could not make a small Dyson's starship. "Small" meant "as small as an aircraft carrier." The starship had to be made big, maybe as big as a small asteroid.
This was not good. This meant we could not start out with something we could afford, like some space ship to take a dozen of us to Jupiter. We would have to start out with something that would cost as much as the entire USA Gross National Product.
I didn't know how much money that would be. I was not figuring cost right now.
The speed I would achieve, about 50 km per second, would be fast enough to go from Earth to Jupiter in about 150 days, or to Mars in about 17 days.
It took only 5 minutes to figure that this small ship carrying people might really work. All I had to do was just relax the ridiculous mandate that we have to accelerate the space ship in 2 minutes, like Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer wanted.
If I made a people ship, everything would get easier.
I could see that if we just accelerated more gently, take 2000 minutes to accelerate instead of 2 minutes, then it could work out.
Remember, a Physicist will dream up impractical things that don't work.
I had to stop this space ship fantasy and figure something about the bomb. They were paying me to do bombs, not starships.
My atomic bomb propulsion system would putt along in space like a lawn mower engine. Every "putt" meant an atomic bomb went off near an atomic bomb catcher. The atomic bomb catcher would be attached to some mighty strong shock absorber springs, which pushed on the payload. Every "putt" would make a flash in the dark black of space. We would see the trail of flashes as it went through the dark night sky, as we looked up.
Some details were starting to crop up. I knew that every radio and every TV set and every stereo in the world would hear the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) static, loud clicks coming out of the loudspeaker, as the brilliant, flashing pulsing, too-many-atomic-bombs-at-a-time propulsion hammered the atomic bomb catcher, accelerating the Big Bomb through the sky.
I imagined and saw it clearly in the sky above me: faster than a speeding shooting star and brighter than flashbulbs directly on your eye.
I wondered if the atomic bomb really blew the living daylights out of everything. I was learning secret things here. Those who create the images of atomic bombs made them omnipotent, irresistible forces, totally vaporizing. But I learned something different about those atomic bombs. Not everything gets vaporized. Almost like a betrayal. The bomb was not an infinite force. This was curious.
When I figured out how hard I was bashing the payload, I discovered I was banging the daylights out of it. The average acceleration was around 42 times more than gravity, enough to turn a person into manburger in one whack.
The peak acceleration on the hardware would be thousands of times higher. This was not good. Everything would almost certainly get smashed to pieces. Not vaporized, but smashed to pieces.
None of this was in any document. I was figuring it with just Dyson's paper.
I escaped back into fantasy. If we were going to Mars in 17 days, we could avoid the crushing accelerations. We could take our time setting off the bombs, and take 2000 minutes instead of 2 minutes to shoot them off. We would not mind at all that we would be accelerating 1000 times less. That would only be 0.042 G, 4 times less than the gravity of the moon. Even the peak g's would be piece of cake for the hardware.
"Hey," I thought, as I figured furiously in my all metal office, a cage with a tiny, mud-dirty window with no view, trying to make it work out, "this is just numbers to me."
It was not working out, and I had invested deep emotion in it, and blabbed how well it would work before I ever figured a thing.
I designed up a rocket that should take the whole payload to another part of the world, fast, two minutes, just like Kadiddlehopper wanted and powered by such and such many atomic bombs going off such and such often. But my design would not work.
I never bothered to ask how much of the sky would light up when more than one atomic bomb every second went off 200 miles above earth.
I had all the figuring in my classified notebook, and I wrote up a one page summary for the file. I did not need to put "unclas" in front of each paragraph. Let them discover it. I found something else to do.
After a week or two went by, Kadiddlehopper was standing in our office area as he usually does, casually talking to us about different things, and he asked me about that fast weapon delivery system. "How many bombs does it take to make it go?" He always seemed to ask the damn pointy, embarrassing question. It was like he read my mind.
"Uh, xxxxx bombs per second." I mumbled. I had to tell him the truth. (Today, not revealing, affirming or denying any classified number, too large or not)
"Oh. How fast does it get there?" Kadiddlehopper was still probing, poker face, with no reaction at all on the ridiculously large number of bombs.
"Two minutes." I said, my hands dangling, as I looked down at the floor. I could not look him in the face.
I didn't want to tell anybody about any of this conversation, or about what I figured. I could see on Kadiddlehopper's face that he saw how stupid and impractical it was. He didn't say it was stupid. He just knew. We both communicated the conclusion "too many bombs" by the way we shuffled our feet and turned our bodies as we stood, not saying much.
For Kadiddlehopper and Goodlaffer, myself and Burford, my figuring was just a quick calculation. I was just trying to figure how well it might work, to see if we wanted to spend real time and money figuring this.
"Maybe I figured something wrong," I thought, as I shelved the whole thing.
Damn Crafty Bastard. That Kadiddlehopper was clever. He didn't give a damn if we could do it.
All he wanted to know was how hard it would be for the other guys, the Commie Pinko Rapist Atheists, to do it.
He wanted to know what to look for. When he found out, then he and Burford would go over to the spy fellows in that other bland looking, nondescript building and tell them what to look for. Then there would not be any surprises, and everybody would go home safe. He didn't care what the answer was, he just wanted to know it.
I just wanted to learn about Dyson's Orion starship.
My calculations showed that the Russians could NOT make a bomb travel faster than our response time. And if they tried, everyone in the world could easily find out they were merely trying to, because the test rocket would be so monstrously visible, exceptionally expensive, and really REALLY BIG.
The rest of my design would definitely not work. But it didn't matter. As soon as we found out it took too many bombs, we didn't' need to go any farther. I never did figure how much shielding one would need, to keep the atomic bomb from getting blown up by the other atomic bombs pushing the rocket.
I know I did not figure the shock absorber part correctly. Now I see why Freeman Dyson didn't cause much of a stir.
Some guy like Kadiddlehopper might have asked him "How stiff a box would you need to hold the your payload, and what kind of shock absorbers are you using, to keep the payload from being smashed to pieces?"
I presume Freeman's answer was "Duhhh."
I learned something embarrassing and something disappointing:
It turned out, "too many bombs" is what everyone everywhere who ever worked on Dyson's crazy rocket figured.
Takes too many bombs.
And I learned something really scary:
-----------------------------------------------------
· atomic bombs weaker
S1 CH 08 A Bombs Weaker 2001.07.02p518.doc
CHAPTER 5
Atomic Bombs Not Almighty Powerful
This was a Top Secret, Systems Analysis Division. We analyzed atomic bombs. And I came here to analyze how to make an atomic bomb-powered Starship work, somehow or another.
New to the real world of real work, I saw the 2 foot diameter clock directly above the entrance on the inside wall above the door of the Systems Analysis Division prove I was not that late. It shot the time message right over Marylee's desk, directly into Bill Goodlaffer's office and directly into his face. Goodlaffer's eyes stared directly at me when I came through the door. He stared hard and looked at his watch. And then at the clock. Back and forth, he was using sign language.
I was only 3 minutes late, for the 3rd or 4th time in a row. He reminded the 3 of us, the new Ph.D.'s, that "we start at 8 and we quit at 5."
His 2 ft wide, 3ft high, metal window and its metal frame let in a small patch of a bright blue sky. He had such a low a status, his window only saw a bit of sky, no view of the mountain, and the eating area in the center of the building. The bright light behind his face magnified his position as The Boss. It gave him a kind of a halo.
Marylee, our secretary, always arrived punctually enough before 8 am to open her several, metal cabinet safes, and always at least one minute before we got there. She was proud that the 6 ft high, 3 ft wide metal cabinet safes were chock full of nuclear weapon, Secret Restricted Data "SRD" documents. The “SRD” is the same as Top Secret in the Department of Defense.
This was the Atomic Energy Commission, the Famous AEC.
She would leave punctually just after 5 pm, after a prescribed, religious ritual of locking the metal cabinet safes. She inserted two, solid aluminum metal bars, taller than her, into the top and bottom slots of every metal cabinet, and then clicked a heavy combination lock into each bar. Then she had someone else, a "monitor," check to make sure she didn't leave a Secret Restricted Data document anywhere, on top of anything, and that she actually locked the locks. Then the monitor signed the monitor sheet.
I would try to inconspicuously watch her put those bars in. As she reached high above her head, on her toes, her short skirt would move up a bit towards her thin waste, revealing curvy legs. I was 26. She was 40. What did you expect?
Al Beckman, the white haired older engineer had the nice office next to Goodlaffer. Al Beckman had the biggest desk and also had a window to nowhere. He had the room all to himself. He kept lots of books in multiple bookshelves.
He kept his room and his desk perfectly clean and carefully neat. His pictures of is wife and family, tastefully arranged all over his wall and on top of his desk, showed off what he thought was the most modern, ultimate dream of suburban life. What looked like his wife's wedding picture showed a pretty lady in a pose like an actress, out of a 1940's movie.
The rest of his pictures were picture-perfect, and stuck in the early 1950's. So out of date, I thought. 20 years out of date. Ancient. But he seemed to be content. I thought he acted like he earned it and was proud of it all. He smiled, and didn't get excited about the little things the rest of us got emotional about.
His diplomacy and extreme courtesy in how he answered and interacted with me raised a shield between his inner person and me. He seemed to block my entry into his emotion world. That mannerism prevented me from empathizing or relating to him. His diplomatic barrier made me see him as old and distant.
He did not have a Ph.D., so he obviously didn't know anything.
Dr. Bill Teague and I, new Ph.D.'s, were talking in the 4 foot wide walk-space between his office and mine about the effects of a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Teague liked the mountains, and I asserted that a bomb on the other side of the mountain would vaporize all the snow, boil it to steam, and fry his playground mountain, immediately. I was trying to tease him.
Al Beckman heard us and courteously waited until the correct moment to interject himself into our conversation. With a slight smile he asked "you think the weapon will melt all the snow on the other side of the mountain?"
An atomic bomb vaporizes anything, no matter what. I know this. I have a Ph.D. So I blurted out with a knowing laugh
"Sure, a one megaton bomb will melt all the snow on the mountain, all at once."
The Little Boy in my head saw the fireball explode 15 miles away from us, on the other side of the mountain ridge The peak was 7 miles to the east of us. The bomb would be on the other side, with the heavy snow and tall trees.
As a Little Boy I had once pretended that if somebody from outer space came by in a flying saucer and tried to hurt us, we would shoot an atomic bomb at them and they could not shield against it.
"Nobody can shield against an atomic bomb," the Little Boy's voice in my mind asserted.
So I said with all the certainty of a brand new Ph.D.
"It'll vaporize everything."
And I authoritatively finished my reply to Al Beckman.
"No, I don't think that's what happens." he said, asserting himself carefully, without bending on his point. Insistent, unyielding, but exceptionally courteous.
"No. Why not?" I blurted back. I had just told him what the answer was, and he didn't have a Ph.D., so he should bow down and accept it.
"Just check the numbers." he said, slowly.
Al Beckman startled me when he contradicted my claim that a vaporizing, purple-hot megaton bomb, hotter than blue hot and much hotter than white hot, would certainly vaporize the snow.
"You need to read this book," he said, with a clear and knowing authority. He reached into his office shelf and handed me a copy of "Glasstone," the bible of the effects of nuclear weapons.
"You can figure it for yourself. You will see. I don't think it would melt all the snow."
I took the book, opened it, skimmed it for 10 seconds and there it was. Real data, detailed, everywhere. A solid book of atomic bomb data.
"Wow, this is real data. It tells you what happens," I said, oblivious that I said it aloud.
I took the book like a dog who grabbed a bone and ran off.
The whole book was so simple a high school kid could have understood it. And it was jammed full of charts and tables and figures and rather simple, power law equations, all telling the effects of an atomic bomb.
I didn't realize this was the unclassified version, and that a much better version even existed. But this unclassified Glasstone had all I needed to know.
This was Starship data.
After just a little figuring, I got Al Beckman's answer. Sure enough, the bomb would not melt all the ice on the other side of the mountain.
Glasstone detailed how the bomb would make a noise loud enough to break my ear drum instantly, like a 44 Magnum pistol going off next to my head. The little round plastic calculator in the sleeve of the book made it really easy to calculate. I could read off just how far away I would need to be from the bomb so that it would only break my eardrums, and no more. Wow.
I read off how far away the intense heat would instantly start the trees on fire and fry skin to charcoal.
"It would cause your face to boil and turn black, and blast the living daylights out of windows and houses, blow everything to bits" I thought after reading on.
However, it would only **blow** the snow all over the place.
Melt the snow? No. Just the top few inches. The bomb had plenty enough energy. But it didn't penetrate the snow deep enough.
I saw a movie of it all in my mind. Bomb going off. Intense white hot fireball. Top layer of snow instantly heated into boiling steam. Under-layers of snow blasted and blown around, a second or 3 later. Twirling around, and then a shock wave would hit.
And Al Beckman was right. And he did not even have a Ph.D.! Amazing!
This was not an Aspie deficiency or failure to read Neurotypical clues. It was the arrogance of a new Ph.D.
And I had no clue. All I felt was the excitement:
"Wow. that's magic. You can live through being hit directly by an atomic bomb!"
This must have been one reason Dyson's atomic bomb starship was not so crazy.
And these atomic bombs were also firecrackers, BIG Firecrackers.
I'm a boy. It's a boy thing.
I really wanted to see an atomic bomb detonate in the atmosphere. It would really be 4th of July, a real spectacle.
I would make up excuses, like, "I want to watch one in the Pacific somewhere.” My excuse: they had done about a decade earlier.
Or maybe "at the Nevada Test Site", where the Nevada-uns didn’t care when the radioactive fallout covered on their sheep, because the government bought all their sheep at the high market price, immediately, for cash.
“Somewhere where it doesn't hurt anything.”
The Power of the Universe, unleashed. I just had to find a way to see where they were exploding atomic bombs, underground. If we were ever going to be interested in using the Power of the Universe to travel the Galaxy, at least I could see just one of them, myself.
I didn't quite know how to get to see one. I decided to ask everyone who had contact with anyone who shot atomic bombs. Those people were the bomb testers, and I started by pestering my boss Goodlaffer.
-------------- Underground Atomic Bomb Tests ------------
It was a sad time for atmospheric atomic bomb shooters. Both the Russians and the U.S.A. agreed to quit exploding atomic bombs in the air. It was a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Evil Russians and the Free World, which meant us and the Europeans except France, all agreed we would only test the bombs underneath the ground and never in space anymore.
The last few atomic bombs they, and we, shot off in space, scared everyone. The whole nighttime sky lit up and glowed, for hours, and especially over Hawaii. Power lines unexpectedly intercepted an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP), created a power spike over the electric utility grid, blew the fuses and shut off the electricity in some places. I hear the satellites in space got disrupted. The Van Allen belts got energized. It was a scary thing. It was a bit like we were blowing up the sky.
We both agreed to cork up the entire explosion.
Cork an Atomic Bomb?
We would not let it leak, not even a little. And if it leaked, we broke the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Bad dog.
I never saw the treaty. However, someone else said how evil the Russians were because their version read different from our version. The USA version of the treaty said we could not dump radioactivity into the atmosphere. The Russian version of the same Treaty said they could squirt their own people with radioactivity all they wanted. They only violated the Treaty if the radioactivity got past their borders.
I expected that from those commie bastards.
The Chinese Communists kept right on shooting big bombs in the atmosphere, Multi-Megaton bombs. They just did not give a damn about the Earth or anyone else. They were really evil. They didn’t shoot very many, so their big evil was balanced by their almost never doing it. I suspected they were doing it for show.
The French were almost as mean, and kept right on shooting smaller atomic bombs in the atmosphere, too. They didn't give a damn about their allies. Typical arrogant French.
The French were so mean they would delay their atmospheric atomic bomb test until they knew our spy airplanes trying to peek at what they were doing would run out of fuel and crash in the ocean. Then they would shoot their bomb. They were mean, to us, their Saviors.
"So, how do they do an underground test?" I asked Goodlaffer.
"Well, you dig a tunnel straight into the base of a mountain, a mile or two into it, then you dig a side tunnel a thousand feet or 2, and shoot the bomb at the end of the tunnel," he explained, ever so characteristically clearly,
"What???"
"What? The long tunnel would still be there after the atomic bomb went off? Almost as if nothing happened? Wow." I said.
"And then go back and do it again." he continued with a smile and a laugh.
He told Marylee to pull out a document. She knew which one, automatically, because she was a smart one. It had a double-long fold-out picture of the test site, complete with pastel coloring.
I talked to Goodlaffer and myself out loud, like he was part of the voices in my head.
"Amazing" I said, a moment later, as he was paging through it, trying to find something in particular.
My curiosity and delight at dusty dirty tunnels sprinkled with atomic bomb debris seemed to delight him. I knew it would be just like him to direct me to talk with someone who does that for a living. I knew he would want me to learn more. I wanted to trick him into it.
It was just a nice coincidence that his boss, Kadiddlehopper, and another division leader, Dr. Curtis Hines, were in the office area talking about something atomic bomb-ish and got sucked into the bomb test site topic with Goodlaffer and me.
They also got excited that someone else, myself, actually liked this down and dirty, scary, messy part of atomic bombs. Apparently, almost no one else at Sandia would get excited like these guys about bomb tunnels.
Kadiddlehopper and Curtis Hines got a real kick out of my amazement that you could put hardware that close to an atomic bomb and not vaporize it, or at least blow everything to pieces.
Curtis taunted me with a smile, the kind of smile where he knows the answer and wants to tell you about it. That behavior was his inviting peculiarity.
"How would you block off the fireball and all that debris, after the bomb goes off?" he asked.
"I know the answer to that" said Me the Little Boy, waving his hand so the teacher would call on him.
Me the Ph.D. Physics Graduate Student took over as I answered Curtis: "I would use some huge doors and slam them shut with high explosives," I said, responding like a confident, recent Ph.D. with the right answer, and almost using an authority voice.
Then I meekly asked for approval with the question "Would that work?"
"Yep." Three of them all smiled. I was quite surprised that my bold guess would work.
They all knew the answer, and now someone finally came along and really appreciated how really clever and smart they were, in making those slamming-shut doors.
"They slam the door shut with high explosive pistons," Kadiddlehopper said.
"You light off the high explosives just before the bomb goes off, to get the doors moving." he explained.
When the doors smashed shut, they would pinch off and stop any vaporized dirt and bomb parts gushing towards the experiments. And our experiments would not be destroyed. Wonderful. Amazing.
The bomb would make a cavity, a bubble, deep in the ground about a 100 feet across. After the bomb cavity deep underground had cooled off, a few weeks later, somebody would put on a space suit-like set of sealed coveralls and hood, and crawl back in there and retrieve the experiments. It wasn't really safe at all. But nobody really cared.
I had to ask them to tell me again, to make sure I heard them right.
"A Door?" I asked. "A door stopping an atomic bomb?" I repeated, with honest emotion.
"Sure." said Curtis Hines, smirking like crazy. The three of them were so anxious to tell me about it they could just pee. Hines was rocking back and forth just unable to wait to tell the story.
"Well, yeah." said Bill Goodlaffer. "They have this big, 50 ton steel and concrete sliding door," he said, eyeballs white, teeth smiling from earlobe to earlobe, using his hands to show "big."
"And they get it moving with an explosive just before the bomb goes off. They time it just right." he repeated.
Using his hands again, talking like an Italian he repeated one more time, "Just when the bomb goes off, it slams shut."
And his hands slammed shut.
"Holy Cow." I said, using that phrase once again, too often.
"And a split second after it goes off and the door closes, everything caves in around the pipe," Curtis Hines said. "All that exploding dirt squeezes off the pipe and shuts off the hole," he continued.
I didn't know what "pipe" he was talking about, but the whole thing sounded little-boy neat.
I could just feel the excitement:
slam a door on an atomic bomb!
"You need to go see the guys that do this," Goodlaffer commanded, smiling. He completely surprised me. I really did want to see one of those tunnels. He was offering to send me on a field trip to a whole atomic bomb test site, and without even having some project as the reason.
He looked into his phone notebook, found three guys I should go see, and even told me where their offices were. Goodlaffer knew every person who ever did anything in the whole lab and had their name in that little metal, snap-shut phone book.
The Test Director for an Atomic Bomb test and I had an appointment. The cold winter day in Albuquerque didn’t seem to hurt as much as a same kind of day in Cleveland. Maybe the dry cold and constant sunshine made the cold feel warmer. Maybe it wasn’t as cold here as it was in Cleveland, but it was cold enough to freeze water. I saw some thin, very high wispy clouds in the mostly deep blue sky. Those clouds were often there.
I walked up a few wood steps into a group of what seemed like connected-together mobile homes designed with offices instead of kitchens and bedrooms.
This was the first time I had ever seen offices like this. Somewhat shabby. They were definitely warm enough, and the rooms had everything one would need for an office. A set of toilets in some of them, and windows, bookcases, doors one could actually close shut. They were sure not very luxurious. They were drab, in fact.
They looked like graduate student quarters. The white-ish paint was dull. The windows were plain, a little dirty with what seemed like white-ish mud, like some of the dirt in Albuquerque. The desks and tables were metal and covered with that darker, hard plastic.
Two of the three secretaries had those modern typewriters, the ones with the little ball instead of typewriter keys. I saw electrical engineering equations on the blackboards. It seemed like there were lots of buildings here that were left over from the old days, World War II, when they first worked on the atomic bomb.
Dr. James R. A. J. Castro, Deputy Test Director, was one of those in charge of testing our hardware. The object was to make hardware so tough it would survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. The hardware was supposed to survive. We would use that kind of hardware in our bombs.
How close to an atomic bombs were these supposed to survive?
Devices and experiments that Sandia scientists and engineers would place directly at the edge of and actually inside the fireball of an atomic bomb actually did survive. Amazing, I thought.
“You shoot atomic bombs at hardware?” I asked Jim.
“Some of these guys are stupid. They just want to blow something up.” He replied, two moves ahead of me, answering my question like a chess game.
He knew what I was thinking. He answered the question I would certainly ask later, saving me the trouble of having to go through each question one at a time.
This is classic Aspie. Step 1, Step 10, skip the middle. Aspie brains are fast.
The mistake we Aspies make with others is that we assume they are just as fast as we are. The NT's are slow-brained.
J.R.A.J. Castro was fast-brained, probably an Aspie.
"What do they do?” I asked in a clumsy way, wondering why else would you put something in front of an atomic bomb unless you wanted to blow it up.
“They don't calculate whether they are going to learn anything.” he said. “it’s pretty tricky when the thing can turn into vapor in a millisecond.” he said with a laugh.
He showed me what he called a dumb experiment. Some engineer was trying to convince Castro and his group to let the fellow blow something up.
The engineer's whole experiment was only as big as my finger. After a few sentences of atomic bomb physics, requiring a Q Clearance, Secret Restricted Data access to hear about, Castro said "see?"
I saw. That guy just wanted to blow something up and get credit for "nuclear weapons effects testing."
"These guys don't understand. There's only so much space available." he explained.
"Space?" I said.
"You only get a small peek at the bomb." he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You put a bomb at the far end of the tunnel. You connect a 1000 foot long pipe, shaped like a cone, like a really long megaphone, all the way out of the tunnel. People put their experiments all along the pipe." he explained, using hand motions to speak, like animated Sicilian Italians often do.
"You get to see this yourself?" I asked, hoping he would say yes and let me go along.
"Yeah, it's exceptionally interesting." he replied, putting on the professional stare, to minimize any hint that he dug the hell out of it.
"There's some really interesting physics that goes on here."
He likes to use precise English, such as "exceptionally interesting."
"Can I go see?" I asked.
Castro, a Sicilian physicist about a year or two older than me and who went to the same graduate school I did, he also loved the bomb. Only he was smarter than me because he jumped over to electrical engineering. He liked the complex plasma physics that only happens when huge energy densities apply, like at the interior of the Sun or an atomic bomb. He was the Deputy Test Director for some of the tests.
"I'll take you out there and show you," he said. He was just as excited about these things as I was, except that he acted far more mature, and probably was,.
So off we went. We flew out to Las Vegas, checked into our rooms downtown, and had a nice evening meal.
All the restaurants and casinos had girls dancing with no bra, no matter where we went. He drove. That's what I liked about Las Vegas. All restaurants had interesting dancers.
I saw him put a single quarter in a slot machine once, because I kept stopping and pulling the handle as we walked around. He would not put money in. I would not put any money in either. Slot machines were everywhere, absolutely everywhere.
"Here." he said. "Have some fun." as he put in a quarter for me.
I pulled the handle and watched with glee as the wheels turned. "Wow." I said, barely audible. He shook his head at me and laughed.
Part of the fascination with a slot machine is that it only costs a quarter to be allowed to pull the handle and watch the wheels turn. Sometimes the machine gives you some free pulls, when it gives you a little money you can use to pull the handle again.
And that was it, no more gambling. According to Castro, that was stupid.
"It does not compute," he said, with a smirk and shaking his head. He figured things a lot. He loved complex plasma physics calculations.
After walking around a bit amidst the pretty colored neon lights, and bells and a light flashing indicating somebody winning, in what seemed to be endless, connected gambling casinos, we went to watch a show for 15 minutes where the girls danced with no underwear. We only had to buy two beers to be allowed to sit there. Then we went back to our rooms and got a good rest for the next day's work.
Contrary to what everyone thought, when we go through Las Vegas on the way to the Atomic Bomb test site, it's no party.
Next morning we drove out 70 miles to "Mercury," the name of the compound for the test site. After passing through a moderately simple security system, we drove up to an old tunnel, "G Tunnel" it was called. It seemed to be recently abandoned.
A few big heavy chains and locks and gates gave only a very mild message to stay out. A portable trailer with a few people 300 feet away were the guardians. We had to check with them to enter the tunnel. And since Castro was the Deputy Test Director, everyone said "Hi Jim," and we went in, no paperwork.
But first, we put on some free coveralls, over our suits and ties. Just in case we rub some radioactive dust, it would stay on the coveralls. We also put on hard hats, because sometimes a piece of the roof falls on you. Now that would be dangerous. You could get hurt without a hard hat.
We were walking in a tunnel with no lights. Just flashlights. And I was talking and talking and talking. About philosophy of life, about physics, about atomic bombs, re-entry vehicles, phasor banks.
As we were walking, Castro pointed to my left "We shot something-or-other bomb here" as he pointed to a sealed-off side tunnel. I forgot the name of the something-or-other bomb as soon as he said it. Every atomic bomb test had some kind of cute name.
A side tunnel was just that. A tunnel would appear off to the side. Just like Goodlaffer said.
This was really amazing. Tunnels in a mountain, to corked-up bombs, atomic bombs.
"Atomic bombs really went off in this tunnel, didn't they. This is amazing. You would think the ceiling would fall in." I said to Jim, aloud. I acted like a little 4th grader on this tour.
Castro pointed up to the ceiling with the flashlight. "See the rock bolts."
This was even more amazing. They bolted the ceiling so it would not fall in when the atomic bomb went off just a couple thousand feet away, down a side tunnel. They screwed a 3 foot rod into the ceiling and then bolted on a steel plate the size of a big book to hold the ceiling rocks in place. They also attached a wire mesh to the ceiling. Just in case a piece fell off when you were walking by, it wouldn't hurt you too much.
And we were walking and walking. And I was talking and talking.
We were standing by the 3rd or 4th side tunnel entrance, about a mile deep into the mine shaft. I looked at the 15 foot metal hatch, like the hatch on a submarine, and I kept on talking, trying to explain something, and going on and on, and Castro was laughing.
And I kept talking, and talking. He was trying to say something, but I wouldn't let him. I was not done with my point yet. He laughed and kept trying to interrupt, to say something.
Finally I asked him "Why are you laughing at me? What are you laughing at?" I thought I was saying something profound, and maybe he thought it was silly. Or maybe my fly was open.
"What?" I asked.
He pointed the flashlight to the right of my pocket and with a smirk said "Look at that sign. I been trying to tell you."
The sign, at about zipper height, said in so many official words, "Don't stand here. This spot is radioactive."
"This was Camphor. The hatch leaked," he explained, using his typical shortest possible sentence.
"What?" I asked. I was acting stupid.
"The radiation blew all over the wall. You got some," he asserted.
He could often think like me and knew what I was going to ask next. He would answer what I would ask, two questions in the future. Maybe he was related to my ancestors back there in Sicily. Who could tell?
But, with radioactivity, you can't feel it or see it or hear it or smell it. So it must be ok. That's what I thought about that radioactivity. Must not be that bad.
The atom bomb shot named "Camphor" didn't quite work right. The high pressure, vaporized rock gas had pressurized the big hatch-door. That big hatch-door we were standing next to didn't quite seal. It leaked a little. Nothing much leaked. Only some radioactivity leaked into the bomb tunnel. The clean up crew removed enough of it so people could walk by somewhat safely.
The wall I was standing next to was where it squirted, apparently enough to warrant a warning sign.
I didn't know how much radiation actually leaked. I suppose I could have looked it up, or asked someone. At least two people I know would definitely tell me the truth if I would have asked.
Dr. Wendell Weart told me how the shot named "Baynberry" leaked, really leaked, into the atmosphere. He said the fire coming out the leak into the desert really looked like a bomb went off. "We actually might have violated the Treaty with that one," he said, surprising me with his frankness. He was one of the geologists on the team in charge of corking the explosions.
"It leaked off sideways, along a fault. We didn't expect it to do that," he explained.
At the end of the day, my radiation badge blared and shouted to everyone that I got some radiation. Nobody noticed or seemed to care. It was not enough to raise the alarm.
It was my initiation.
I suppose it was no worse than one of those foot x-rays I remember getting in the shoe shop back during the late 1940's. Now we know those foot x-rays were dangerous.
I just had to see more. But this time this was all we had time to see.
The Sedan Crater
We got back to Albuquerque and I pestered Goodlaffer for more access.
"Did you ever see anything interesting out there?" I asked, hoping he would volunteer something new. Then I would ask him to describe it in detail. That would get him all excited. And then I would pull the punch line: "How would I get to see it?"
"The thing that really demonstrates the awesome power of a nuclear device is the Sedan Crater," he replied, very officially, nodding his head for emphasis and affirmation.
"Really? What does it look like? Did you see it?" I asked, prodding him.
With an excited smile, holding his coffee cup in his hand, he told me "God, I couldn't believe it when I saw it. This is a huge crater."
"Huge." he said again, with hand motions, and almost spilling coffee out of the cup. "It digs a h-u-uge hole." He really got excited. "You gotta see it. It is like the Grand Canyon."
Wow. I didn't have to prod him. He volunteered that I should go back to the test site again.
He asserted how awesome it was, over an over, and assured me that I would see something that sounded like it would be half a mile across.
Then Al Beckman, overhearing stories about the bomb, came out of his office, which was next to Goodlaffer's, and told his version.
"I was really impressed when I saw that hole," he said. "It's really impressive. Big." he asserted.
"It makes you really think about how powerful these things are that we work with," he said, switching the flavor of the conversation. "It makes you kinda wonder if we are mature enough to have all that power over nature," he said, trying to be philosophical.
I expected to see something like a Grand Canyon. And Goodlaffer volunteered to pay for another trip.
This was exciting.
-------------
Ben Saw the First One
Ben Benjamin saw the first atomic bomb go off, at the Trinity site in New Mexico. Taller than me and heavier, and so mild mannered and gentle, a real gentleman. Light hair, fuller face, fair-skinned like a Swede I believe he was. I could prod him so easily to tell stories about people. He would volunteer them at the slightest excuse. The gentle smile of his soothing voice became tattooed in my mind.
His office was in a big bull pen building, as long as two football fields. The dozen north south hallways made a simple grid against the 4 east west highway hallways. The building was jammed with offices and rooms full of electronic devices and fabrication shops. He was in the north east end. He and Dr. George Hansche, his boss, were in charge of taking the pictures of the bombs.
We were in Ben's office and I prodded him to tell me what it was like. He said he was there at Los Alamos when the possibility of the Bomb was a super secret. He said famous physicists had done some measurements that indicated it might work. Ben was there before they tested the first atomic bomb, and they didn't know for sure if it really would work.
"I was just a teenager then." Ben paused and then started to boast, in a nice way.
"I was a very smart technician, so they abducted me into the New Mexico desert instead of letting me carry a gun and fight World War II."
"I was glad I didn't have to get shot at."
"I was just a kid. When I signed up, volunteered, I was ready to go fight the Nazi's."
"They abducted me and would not tell me where I was going. They just said 'you will find out when you get there.' "
"I wasn't allowed to write my family where I was. They changed the postmark on my letters." he said. "I was living in Los Alamos, but the letters were postmarked Santa Fe."
" They didn't' tell me what the secret was for 6 months." he said.
"Do you remember anything about the first bomb going off?" I asked.
"Oh yeah. We were all huddled there, curled over, in the dark, waiting." he said.
"Then I heard somebody ask Hans Bethe "Are you scared?" just before it was supposed to detonate."
Hans was a famous physicist, one of the inventors of the bomb, one of the two or three Maximum Bosses of the entire atomic bomb project.
"And then I heard Hans say "yes, I'm scared." with that deep accent of his. "
"We didn't know whether it was going to blow up or be a dud. And then it went off."
Ben knew about atomic bombs. He was there for almost every shot the United States did, including the atmospheric shots.
"We built houses and planted trees in the desert, Frenchman's Flat, and then we blew em away," he said, chuckling slightly.
"I got to run the camera's." That was Ben's specialty then. The optics. Cameras. Fast cameras.
I had begged him to take me along on one of his NTS trips and show me what he was talking about.
So, Ben Benjamin took me on a field trip to the Nevada Test Site and Bill Goodlaffer paid for it.
Ben and I flew into Las Vegas, had a typical steak supper where we could have a drink while we watched some ladies dance with no underwear. The usual thing.
He saw how curious I was, as I stared at the naked lady, and how she looked at me, smiling at me, almost dancing just for me, I thought. Apparently the lady knew him.
But Ben got us out of there rather abruptly.
"Why did we have to leave so fast?" I asked, not wanting him to know how much I wanted to gawk some more.
"Next thing you know, she'll come out here and get very friendly," he said, without much emotion.
Now that part I understood. I could not spare the cash. Terri and I were scrimping to pay back the loan we took to get a down payment for our new home.
And, Terri would know. She would just know, by the guilty look on my face. She would be very pissed.
I never did anything like that. But I was saving up. "Maybe someday when I am older" I thought.
We expected the next day would be a long day, so we really couldn't stay. We needed sleep to get up early.
The next morning, driving on the way out of town to the Nevada Test Site, we stopped at about 8 am for a hearty double hamburger breakfast at a well lit, rather big hamburger joint. The girls were already dancing topless. The hamburger was big, seemed about a pound, and tasted very good.
I was anxious to see the main attraction: the site where we detonate atomic bombs, test nuclear weapons, blow up nuclear explosives. My main reason for going here this trip is to examine the monstrous big hole an atomic bomb made, the Sedan Crater.
On the way to the crater, we drove by one after another, circular, collapsed dimples on the Nevada Test Site desert. Each dimple was about at big across as a football field. This was the tell-tale sign of the other way to do underground testing.
For this "other" way, they dig a 12 or 20 foot across hole, and then dig it a mile or two deep. Different holes, different sizes.
The hole they dig gets smaller as you go down. They line the hole with steel and concrete. They put the bomb at the bottom.
Along some of the pipe on the way up they put the electronics and things to illuminate with the bomb. Finally, they fill the rest of the hole all the way to the top with concrete and rocks.
Then they detonate the weapon. I don't know what happens if it doesn't detonate. Rumor has it that one or two didn't.
At the bottom of the hole, the bomb creates a 100 foot-across bubble, called a cavity, where it detonates. A 100 foot across hole doesn't just stay there. It's roof collapses. As the roof falls to the floor, it is like the bubble floats up. This keeps happening until the "bubble" gets to the surface.
The subsidence craters are the collapsed dimple left over when a deep underground cavity created by an underground nuclear weapon test collapses. The craters were shaped like a shallow cereal bowl, or the saucer under a coffee cup. But they are about 1 or 2 football fields across. The caked dirt cracked inside the bowl. We drove by one after another.
The scrub plants seemed to grow better in the bowl than on the desert. Ben said the plants probably grow better because the ground water moves through the soil better, after the bomb cracks the soil. The Sci-Fi movie people claimed the radiation did it, and would also make monster ants. I did not see any giant bugs. They were hiding and only came out at night, when everyone was in a bar watching naked ladies.
All of Nevada seemed to be parched, burnt, barren, but it wasn't. When we got out of the car I saw grasses, twig plants, stiff micro-bushes growing, slowly, but obviously growing. It was hot outside, and it was cold in the morning. The sky here was always blue. But the sky in the distance was always pale blue because one could see so far. Fifty miles was nothing.
Ntscrater3.jpg
http://www.enviroweb.org/issues/nuketesting/hew/Usa/Tests/Ntscrater3.jpg
We were standing in the hot sun.
I started to dart, but Ben Benjamin would not let me just run over to the crater edge and walk.
"Too dangerous." he said.
"Radioactive?" I asked.
He raised the level of his voice with alarm: "No. It can still collapse."
"Really?" I ask, like a dumbbell.
"You can drop 40 feet straight down and get hurt." he snapped back, trying to keep me from being impulsive like he has seen me do before.
"These things will collapse for no reason, years after the shot," he added as he stared somewhat off into the distance, as if remembering his old days here. His mind was clearly off somewhere.
"Like falling off the roof of a 4 story building and landing on the sidewalk. You go splat," he said, bluntly.
We got back in the car and he took a detour from the plan and drove me to the site of the "ground zero" for some of the first airburst shots he helped photograph.
He drove the car right up to the flat, target area in the desert. He knew just where to drive to get around the metal cable barriers hanging across the dirt roads to the ground zero areas, to keep other people out.
Around the ground zero they had set up buildings and houses and vehicles at various distances away. And then they detonated an atomic bomb in the atmosphere and watched what happened.
"It blew it all away," he said, as we wandered around, somewhat aimlessly.
He didn't complain or stop me when I touched the bent rebar of a broken concrete building. There wasn't much to see or touch. I had seen a whole lot more debris in some New Mexico ghost towns I had visited. I guess that is what the bomb did. Cleared things out.
"Is this radioactive here?" I asked.
"Probably a little. Not much," he said slowly, as an afterthought. From the way he walked and wandered, I could feel how this had once been a site of excitement, exhilaration, commotion, activity, voices, people doing things, Grand Things, earth-shaking things of cosmic proportion.
And now, it was just dust on a desert.
He drove us off towards another canyon with more tunnels where they had shot off more bombs. On the way I saw a green splotch in the hills to the North. It looked like a mile away, but it was about 8 miles. We took another detour.
"That's a natural spring. Artesian. It always runs." he said.
"You mean in this desert?" I asked.
"There's water here. Every once in a while. The natives knew exactly where it was." he said.
Sure enough, as we got up closer we saw the green up close, a spot with a dozen green bushes as tall as Ben, and a trickle of water oozing along a 50 foot stretch of an otherwise dry gully. Green water-plants hugged the ground along the water.
About a 100 feet from the water was a 1920's vehicle engine attached to the front part of a vehicle.
"I was gonna come back and get that engine some day," Ben mumbled. He liked antiques.
We left the water hole and headed back to the canyon that had some used-up bomb tunnels.
In the car, Ben explained to me how one can even be 3 meters, 10 feet, from an atomic bomb and not even get much radiation.
"It only takes 10 feet of dirt between you and the bomb to shield the radiation." he asserted.
Then he casually commented "of course the shock wave is pretty strong."
He always got a kick out of using the same phrases the physicists used: He said "It turns into plasma."
Me The Graduate Student explained it to me, silently, as we drove to the next destination. Silently I said to myself, "Of course it does. The 10 feet of dirt between you and an atomic bomb does not mean you live through it. As soon as the bomb goes off, concrete and dirt moves outward at about Mach 10 and compresses, squeezes, almost instantly. The super friction heats it up so much it turns into white - purple hot more-than-boiling white hot vapor. Vapor more dense than rock. Sure, for the first few microseconds there is no radiation."
His words were still a surprise: a few yards of dirt stops atomic bomb radiation.
The bomb tunnel in the canyon was locked up tight. We were not suited to go in anyway. We never even got out of the car to see it.
Our driving out of that canyon reminded Ben of an atomic bomb that deliberately blew out of a tunnel.
"They used an atomic bomb to make an atomic bomb cannon." he said, one hand on the steering wheel, pointing to the side of the canyon we were in with the other.
"What did they do?" I asked, expecting a short story.
"Well, they shot off a small atomic bomb inside the tunnel on one side of this canyon." he started to explain, slowing his words as he looked around, to find just where it had been.
"I don't see exactly where they did it here." he continued, looking around at what was clearly not familiar anymore.
"It's been a while," explained, excusing the fact of his not being able to point right to the tunnel.
"It shot the projectile out the tunnel and hit the other side of the canyon." he said.
"Of course. what you expect?" I asserted. I believed him and could not imagine what else an atomic bomb would do.
"What scared the hell out of them was that the didn't curve like an arc, it went straight, straight across the canyon." he explained.
"Did they ever make a cannon out of it?" I asked.
"Well, if you like dragging a Mountain along." he replied.
"The problem is that you have to use a mountain to contain it." he explained. His clear and simple explanatory sentence lacked that sarcasm his Ph.D. colleagues liked to use.
He left me to figure for myself that a one-shot gun that weighs as much as a mountain would not be worth much.
Ben was finally taking me to the SEDAN crater, like I wanted.
SEDAN was an atomic bomb test to learn how to dig the biggest possible hole with an atomic bomb. Both the Russians and the USA bragged how our newly discovered atomic explosives could dig huge canals cheaply. Bigger than the Panama Canal. Fast. Easy.
The old ones actually thought they had discovered something better than dynamite with which to dig earth. They did not consider the radioactivity. Small detail.
For this SEDAN test, they buried an atomic bomb as deep as the calculations said they should. It was buried just deep enough to dig the biggest hole possible using a typical nuclear explosive. This was the big event.
I almost couldn't wait.
There wasn't anybody else here on this desert that we could see. It seemed we could see 20 miles of road easy. This was the Nevada desert, and this day's visibility was something like 100 miles. We were the only ones driving around this part.
Ben casually drove up to what looked like a hitching post for horses at an unpaved, sandy parking lot. Apparently this site was so unimportant that they just left it unpaved, just sand. I could not see any real signs, professional signs, anywhere to guide anyone. I saw only one professionally painted sign that told how deep the bomb was, how powerful it was, how big across the hole was and how much dirt was blown out. Raw engineering data.
"Well, here we are," he said, blandly.
Ben's bland comment matched my first impression of this site.
Some sand dunes surrounded the crater, so I could not see into it even after we drove up. All I saw were sand dunes. We walked past a metal cable rope designed to keep a car from driving too close.
We peered over the dunes and into the crater. It was a puny hole no bigger than a couple hundred yards across. It was only a few football fields across and only 1 or 2 football fields deep. It seemed like someone had driven a caterpillar tractor down into it and left it there. Ben said that was an accident.
Terri and I and some fellow graduate students had walked into a bigger hole in Toledo, Ohio, looking for fossils, where they were excavating Silurian and Devonian mud to make cement.
sedan3.jpg
http://www.nv.doe.gov/news&pubs/publications/historyreports/news&views/sedan.htm
This was no big hole at all.
I guessed the reason Freeman Dyson proposed to use atomic bombs to propel space ships was that he saw everything I just saw, all these tests. I wondered if he was impressed or not at SEDAN. I wasn't. This was no big deal at all.
I found out from my radiation badge reading after we got back to Albuquerque that I got a radiation dose from the dirt, but apparently not much.
As we left and for weeks after I got back, I felt it and didn't say it:
"The bomb is not that Almighty Powerful."
CHAPTER 6
Make No Long Term Plans
\ s1_ch_09_epochal_events 20090220_1017.doc
M:\azinc\PROZX\To Inhabit The Solar System\- CHAPTERS
It was early 1970's in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The nuclear weaponization facility hired some highly perceptive, truly smart people who thought completely outrageous things and said them. I was taking a break and had walked down the hall to visit one of them, Gus Simmons. My office was now in the building where Physicists worked, and where the important Vice President had his office. My status had gone up.
One fourth Native American, three fourths Outrageous, Iben Browning, another one of them, was there with Gus. Iben startled me by opening a conversation with a characteristic punch line:
"If we bomb the center of Russian cities, we destroy their whole economy. If they bomb the center of our cities, they do us a favor and clean it out."
"What?" I retorted, taken by surprise.
"In the US, all the productive people flee the city and move to the suburbs. The center of the city is left to the ghetto poor who can't afford to move. Then the city passes absolutely fair and equitable laws to share the wealth with all the non-producers, the poor and stupid. Any productive person who stays, pays for it"
"I didn't know that's what happened. I thought it was the ghetto that made the city a bad place." I said.
When I was a pre-teen, union workers and businesses moved out of Cleveland and went to the suburbs, like Parma and Berea and Chardon. The Ford and Chevy plants moved out there, too. Everything productive fled the center city.
"Well, isn't the center of the city where you find all the hospitals for the destitute and penniless. Isn't that where the bums go for free food?" he remarked.
"In Russia, the Communists have to control everything, so they put everyone in the center of the city." Iben went on.
I meekly commented I thought it was because of the Siberian cold. I thought the Russians lived as close as possible to each other because they wanted the shortest distance between warm spots.
This was the first time I ever heard such heresy about the fair and humane social programs, and nuclear war, or about how or why Russians were concentrated in shabby apartments in the center of cities.
"They will never have a nuclear war with us," Iben assured me.
"The ultimate decay of a culture is civilization," he had said in his office in the suburbs when I had visited him there on some kind of official business.
"All the great invasions of history were caused by hungry people from the North going south, for food," he had said. "Climate drove history."
I never checked it out, but I guess it was true.
On another different day he had said "You have to let the diseased part die." He was asserting the ultimate in anti-bureaucracy.
He was referring to social programs for animals and people who are in a bind for some reason of their own doing. Skills becoming obsolete, like taking care of horses, making typewriters, taking dictation for the boss. Or like persisting to live in places where hurricanes flood you, rivers overflow into your house, or ghost towns from the coal mining era where there is no work and won't be.
"A bureaucracy is designed to keep all the diseased parts alive," he explained, in more detail, "no matter what the cost, even if it kills the organism."
"The Ultimate Act Against Nature is keeping a species from going extinct."
"Interesting," I thought, as I mumbled the words loud enough he could hear, and as I stared aside for a moment, realizing what he had just said.
"I like the Condors," I said. "I'm glad we didn't kill off all the buffalo." I didn't agree with him every time. But he sure made me think.
Iben Browning was there, working with Gus on something. They both took a break to talk with me.
He must have saved up sound bytes to startle me. Every time I met him he had a new one.
---------- Epochal Events ----------
The most intriguing concept Iben and Gus ever came up with was the story about Epochal Events.
Gus had just been promoted to a Department Manager of the Math Department. Bob Kadiddlehopper, my boss and also Department Manager, had an office next to Gus.
Having wandered into Gus's office because Iben was there, I had remarked to Iben and Gus how the exponential explosion of discoveries and technology during our lifetimes had changed everything, forever.
"No. Discoveries aren't going exponential at all. They're constant, but very frequent," Iben said.
Gus smirked, tracking my facial expressions as Iben baited me.
"Don't make any long term plans," Iben warned, as if he knew something, and poking me in a direction of ominous fear.
They were up to something. I could tell by their faces. I had come in and interrupted just when they had become excited about something.
"Epochal discoveries are happening so fast that everyone alive is destined to be as mixed up and confused as teenagers for their whole lives, and I can prove it." Iben asserted.
"And it will be that way unless almost everyone dies," he continued.
"What does everyone dying have to do with discoveries?" I asked.
"Discoveries change all the rules," he replied, with a smirk.
"I know that. What's it got to do with everybody dying?" I pressed him.
Now both he and Gus Simmons were both smiling, watching me get hooked. They had discovered something and they just had to tell me so bad they were about to pee their pants.
"It's not exponential. It's a constant number of man-years between discoveries," said Gus Simmons, the newly-promoted-to-manager, right wing crew-cut, left wing beard-to-the-belt-buckle mathematician magician lock-picker.
Now that was different. They were talking about the rate of discoveries. Whenever it would come up, everyone, without exception, would say "Its accelerating, exponential."
But, the pace of discoveries is actually a constant, they say. I had thought that we were in a truly unique period of human history, an absolutely new era of sudden, exponentially growing, explosive world changing discoveries. But not quite, they said. They captured my attention.
"If you plot the number of man-years between discoveries, it's a constant, something of order 50 to 100 Billion man years," said Gus, very mathematically, precisely.
"Man-years?" I asked.
A man working for a year is a unit of management-speak. That is like "hours" to a mechanic, like "4.5 hours to fix the brakes."
For people in the technical business it typically takes a team of people to do things, and it typically takes lots of people and many months or a year or two to do a multi-million dollar project.
Gus just learned about the unit to measure the human effort needed to do something. Being newly exalted and anointed as "Manager" of the Math Department at Sandia Laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission, he learned "man-years."
Iben Browning was a Zoologist by training, so he had a propensity to classify things. "I was walking up the stairs of the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and along the railing on the wall up the stairs they had a chart showing the 'Ascent of Man' from the beginning of human history till now." he explained.
"At the bottom of the stairs they had the invention of fire. Then they had the wheel, the discovery of agriculture, writing, and on up the stairs. Under each invention they had the number of humans alive at the time. So I just wrote down the events and the number of people on a piece of paper. When I got to the top of the stairs there were a lot of events, like the printing press, steam engine, telephone, telegraph, computers."
Gus then said "I wondered how many man-years it took to discover something that changed everything. I expected it would take fewer man years the more we knew. So I plotted the number of man-years it took to discover an epochal event."
Then he paused, looking right at me, waiting for me to calculate the answer.
We are technical types. We will all calculate, as a reflex action. We all expect that the more we know, the less work it will take to discover things, and get rich.
"It's exponential," I blurted out without thinking. Then I realized they had just told me it wasn't. I looked somewhat stupid.
Gus kept looking right at me, didn't flinch, and stated the observation:
"The number is something like
50 to 100 Billion man-years."
"Amazing," I exclaimed. A constant, I thought, not exponential. The discoveries aren't exponential, like we thought. They are a constant.
"So when is the next one?" I asked. And they both laughed out loud.
"Everybody ask that question." said Iben.
"Well, it's pretty hard to predict the future. You never know." said Gus, with a tone of voice that revealed he was not a sure as he was before.
"Can't you tell from what we see burbling up now?" I asked, a bit clumsily. "Like computers?"
Slightly frustrated, I asked a different question:
“How do you precisely know what an epochal event is and when it happens?”
One of them said "You can't tell until you look back and see that it really changed the culture. When all the rules are changed, then you can look back."
"Ok, what was the last one?" I asked.
Either I found a weak point, or they were being scoundrels. Neither of them could come up with anything definitive. Atomic bombs? Nuclear power? DNA molecules? Computers? Jet airplanes? They were arguing between each other about what was and what wasn't.
The Transistor stood out. A Man on the Moon stood out. Those were recent. I don't know how the Man on the Moon changed things, but I agreed it sure was magical.
TV only came up as a progression from the telegraph, the telephone, radio and movies.
I said "Drugs, I bet that's the next one."
The druggies all seemed to be having a really culture-changing good time. Timothy Leary started a revolution where people were having 4 dimensional experiences, synesthesia experiences, experiences that we only read about when Catholics described what the Saints experience, and 12 hour orgasms.
They didn't even respond. Neither Iben or Gus gave a damn about drugs.
Then I said "The Pill," because it totally changed the rules of family, dating, behavior. Pregnancy was the thing that forced people to be monogamous for at least as long as it took to raise the children.
"The Pill and Penicillin," I quickly followed up. Penicillin kept the venereal diseases from causing a problem with sex.
None of us could pinpoint the very most recent epochal event.
Then Gus explained his mathematical point again:
"There are about 4 Billion people on the Earth. At 50 Billion man-years between epochal events, that means every 12 years something happens to totally change the rules. At 100 Billion man-years, it's every 25 years."
I could see this in a flash. All 4 billion people on Earth working a living for 25 years is 100 billion man-years.
I could see why cultural and religious "truths" would seemed to be true for so long.
When there were only 10 million people on the entire earth, like there were during Roman times, during Jesus or Buddha or Confucius times, and 25 billion man-years per Epochal Event, one could wait 2500 years before something would make Jesus and the Bible wrong, or Confucius wrong.
One could wait 10 lifetimes with no challenges to our way of life, and no changes to Truth.
That seems to be exactly what happened.
"So just when you get things figured out, everything changes." Gus said, referring to right now, today, his life now, and dismissing any historical significance.
If you care about right now and not history, then the Epochal Event theory explains why we are destined to become mixed up every time between 12 and 25 years go by.
If you care about history, then you see why Epochal Events like DNA, radioactive dating, 500,000 years of ice layers, microscopes and telescopes flatly contradict the Bible. You would see how nothing contradicted the Bible or the Pope or religions at all for the first 1,500 years after Jesus. But epochal events eventually changed the rules.
Iben and Gus, focused only on "right now" and not on the principles and philosophy of Life like I was, had just explained mathematically why we would be destined to be just like a teenager who "can't seem to figure out the rules."
"Wow." I said, bright eyed. "Every 12 to 25 years you have to start over figuring things out."
"So if you don't keep looking out for the change, you will be hopelessly out of touch. It's never-ending," Iben explained.
He sat there looking right at me and explained like he was explaining the workings of a car.
Gus said "Those who don't change become complete anachronisms.".
That seemed to explain preachers and Italian grandparents pretty well. They all seemed to hold fast to the principles they learned when they were young, to their Rosaries and Bibles, Saints, devils and angels, or whatever their stern and overbearing parents taught them long ago.
I could see for myself how even only moderately old smart people were even getting things dead wrong a lot lately.
My grandparents sure didn't know very much. They sure thought they did. And those old and arrogant, authoritarian Catholic priests and the Bishop of Cleveland didn't know much either. When we moved to New Mexico, we listened on the radio to those Bible Thumpers out of Texas. What they said sounded just simply uneducated. And they talked like they had a speech impediment.
My father thought he knew a lot, and he was only 2 generations out of step. He never changed from his youth. When I was a rebellious young teenager he and I got into an argument and he told me "When you get older you will see that I was right."
I was waiting, waiting for him to be right, and it never happened.
"So that means, you will be mixed up every 20 years, or 5 times per lifetime." I said.
It was startling. Everyone around me did seem to be mixed up. This explained it all. I saw it in a flash.
when it became
less than one lifetime ...
Great turmoil happened all over the world when the time between rule-changes got down to one human lifetime. Sometime during the last century or two, something fundamental happened. The time between epochal events decreased to less than about one or two lifetimes.
It was not that way at all, just 300 years ago. All those old cultures, like China's, Japan's, India's, Russia's culture. All focused on long term plans. Plans that could take 100 years. It was not that way 1000 years ago.
And they were Dead Right, as long as the time between epochal events was 100 years or longer, the longest human lifetime. But the time between epochal changes isn't greater than 100 years. It's 12 or 25 years. Their time constant is now wrong. Dead wrong.
During the mid 1800's any half-awake person could experience for himself that the basis for some fundamental rule of his culture was no longer true at all, completely wrong, period.
Revolutions appeared, everywhere. American Revolution. The French Revolution. Bolshevik. Communist. It even started earlier, with the Protestant revolution.
This Epochal Event thing wasn't just a science thing. It related directly to Right and Wrong.
---
How did this relate to their job of weaponization of nuclear explosives?
They were deciders in one of the most prestigious laboratory systems in the world. They were in the Think Tank. Their job was to figure what to do next. That's what Tom Burford's whole Systems Analysis Directorate was all about. They got paid when we figured correctly on what to do next.
Strategy above everything. That was one of Gus Simmons's principles. We were getting paid for Strategy.
All of us, Gus Simmons, Iben Browning, my boss Bob Kadiddlehopper, his boss Burford, we were all part of planning long term research projects. Like Fusion. Or Space. Or engineering projects, like spy satellites, or hyperfast missiles, or android robot-delivered atomic bombs.
The Lesson was:
"Make no long term plans."
Never plan a project that takes longer than an Epochal Event.
If you do a project that takes 40 years to finish,
no one will give a damn
when you actually succeed
beyond your wildest dreams.
There goes lifelong visions.
The Epochal Discovery is that the Short Term gains win over Long Term strategies, nowadays.
Short term only. New. Terrible. Troubling. Upsetting. Heresy.
"Make no long term plans."
If I would succeed at some long term plan, nobody might even care, because some epochal event would happen between now and when I got there.
"Holy Cow," I thought. "That's Epochal."
---------
Many times after that little Epochal Event get together I would try to reproduce their data. I would get a fact here, a data there, but I never got enough to check their math. I wondered: how right were they?
It did not matter how right they were about the exponential part. All that mattered was that multiple epochal changes are occurring during my lifetime.
The epochal changes
make every lesson of History
and every Truth of Religion
suspect.
That is epochal.
· NERVA at Jackass Flats
Encounter With A Nuclear Rocket
a personal epochal event
As a side benefit for being so interested in space travel, my boss's boss's boss, Dr. Tom Burford, encouraged the atomic bomb testers tell me anything and everything related to making and using atomic explosives for propulsion, including the Top Secret things. Burford know I might use them in a starship. The word somewhat got around.
An atomic bomb test director named Dr. Mell Merrit introduced me and another bright eyed, bushytailed Ph.D. named Dr. Bill Bishop to a rocket that would take people to Mars. He gave the two of us a personal tour of Jackass Flats, Nevada, where the key, nuclear rocket work was done. It was just down the street a bit, so to speak, from where they had detonated gigantic atomic bombs in the atmosphere and deep in underground tunnels and holes at the Nevada Test Site.
The nuclear rocket project had just been abandoned and stopped. The nuclear rocket building had just been closed down. Mell Merrit got us into the abandoned building and let us see the rocket.
Mel's exact words to Bill and me were
"that's the rocket that could take us to Mars."
When I saw the rocket on the test stand, I ignored the "radioactivity" warning sign and ran up to the rocket itself. I tried to wrap my arms around this nuclear rocket. It appeared to be so small I actually imagined I might be able to get my arms at least half way around it.
I should not have run past the radioactivity sign like that. I got a small dose of radiation. But it was worth it. I was a bit eccentric anyway, before that. After all, that rocket could have taken us to Mars.
The rocket was called "NERVA". People talk about this rocket program to this day. This rocket used hydrogen propellant. A nuclear reactor heats the propellant to a temperature where things would glow brighter than the filament of an old fashioned, incandescent light bulb. The propellant boils furiously and almost explodes into a hot vapor. The propellant vapor is guided directly into a rocket nozzle directly attached to the nuclear boiler.
This was simple.
A small nuclear reactor powered this NERVA rocket. NERVA used liquid hydrogen propellant.
Instead of atomic bombs, this rocket used a more tame form of atomic energy, a nuclear reactor. The engineers made this rocket and made it work. This was practical. This would not take us to the nearest star, but it would take us through the solar system. The NERVA really could be practical because they actually tested it at full power.
Never mind that there was zero liquid hydrogen in space, rendering it not practical enough for us to inhabit the solar system. with it. No gas stations for it. Ignore that.
Seeing and touching this NERVA rocket was an Epochal Event for me. Typical for Epochal Events, it would not be obvious for a long time.
CHAPTER 6
e-beam phasor
Getting Fired Into A Real Day Job
Another Phasor Beam
They kept wanting me to work on phasor beams. The second phasor beam was a particle beam. The engineers who made the particle beam accelerators thought they had a better idea than the scientists who made the lasers. I got to analyze that one as well. But it did not work out either. For all kinds of reasons, the beam was too weak, the beam would not go straight, and the beam would not do as much damage as they wanted. I had to laugh when I heard that a beam generator would take so much power to operate that the lights would dim in the part of the state they would test it.
When we wanted to put the thing into space, the power supply would be heavier than at least 10 space shuttles. It would be 100 space shuttles heavy if you believed the engineers instead of the scientists. And the beam would not go straight, either.
However, I did learn a valuable lesson. The lesson would be so valuable that it would be the key to making a simple rocket to let us inhabit the solar system. I would use the extremely valuable lesson for knocking killer asteroids and comets from colliding with Earth.
I did not know that it was a valuable lesson then. No one likes to learn a lesson. We want things to work out, not to give us a lesson.
The lesson was that if you are delivering a blast of energy to something, to make it blow up and knock the target to bits, then there is an optimum way you should do it. This part was obvious.
More precisely, you don't want to do heat up the target too slowly, or it will just slowly boil and not blow the target up. Like the face doctor using a laser to burn off a mole or pimple: the mole comes off but your face does not blow up. This was obvious as well.
Not so obvious and most important, you don't want to heat up the target to fast. The answer is not like the rocket equation at all. It was supposed to be, but wasn't. That lesson was contrary to intuition and unexpected.
If you heat up the target too fast, the surface blows off at very high speed. However, too little of the surface blows off. The blast is too small, and the bad guy gets away. And the bad guy shoots back with a real rocket that blows you to bits.
Eye doctors do this when they do Lasik eye surgery. Their eye surgery laser deliberately heats up the target with too much energy too fast. The laser blows off just a layer of molecules off your eye lens surface. The molecules become very energetic and move very fast when they leave your eye, but they don't blow out your eye. They don't even bump your eye. You don't even feel it. For you, that's good. For a rocket, that's bad.
The lesson is that if you use your precious energy packet to blow up just the right amount of target, then you cause the biggest motion and commotion in the unfortunate target. Contrary to rocket scientist intuition, you get the biggest bonk with only a medium atom ejection speed, and not the maximum speed.
Another thing I learned was a good trick if you need to shove an asteroid out of a collision path with Earth. The clever trick was to use the target itself as the blasting mass. All you need to deliver is a blast of energy. The fast version of Dyson's starship did that. All the phasor beam weapons deliver just a precious blast of energy, but not mass. The energy can travel at very high speed, such as the speed of light. But if you could afford a slower speed to deliver the energy, you could use energetic mass to deliver the energy.
If you were a space cadet, you could use this to save the world. You would use the mass from near earth asteroids and near earth comets, already in highly energetic orbits in the sky, as your energy source. You will move them a little, and then save the Earth from total disaster. It will be much easier said than done, of course, because I am a physicist who is telling you what you should do.
The phasor beam projects were going so badly that I wanted to quit. I was so vocal about it and such a complainer, and did my job so poorly, that my boss's boss fired me off the job. His boss, Dr. Tom Burford, had gone back to Bell Labs and could not rescue me.
Even though I had been nominated to and voted in as the President of the New Mexico Academy of Science, I was still fired. I did a bad job at that as well. I was simply too much of an Aspie.
I went away completely depressed and believed I had no skills and was worthless.
· spy satellites
· \ S1 CH 12-spysatellites-Nf-.doc
I finally got a regular day job, as a spy from space.
His nose was big and wrinkled. His coarse laugh and blunt smile fit well with his thoroughly bland, plain, ordinary clothes, no tie, with absolutely no fashion anywhere in his appearance. No pretensions at all. Thinner, taller, just like an old fashioned engineer doing a job.
Dave Henry's Spartan metal desk in a small office with no windows, with documents and papers piled neatly everywhere, all suggested no signs of any highly intellectual activities. No interesting trinkets of space hardware on his shelves. No fancy wood conference tables. I sat in the uncomfortable, metal visitor-chair next to his desk. His office was so small office only a single chair fit next to his desk.
This geek engineer was completely unlike those highly intellectual physicists I was in the process of abandoning.
He was interviewing me for a job.
We were deep inside a single story metal building the size of a football field. The light-beige-painted, metal wall hallways went north and south, east and west. A perfect grid. I had been working at the southwest end somewhere. This was at the north east middle end, somewhere.
He posted a job for something related to spy satellites, little robot space ships that monitor treaties and watch atomic bomb tests.
The job description he posted wanted someone who could figure algorithms, computer procedures, for a space system. I knew about these guys. I had met their boss, and I knew rumors about their satellites that spied from space on communist atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere.
"Are you the same guy that did those algorithms?" he asked, with his loud, deep voice. He reached into the bottom right metal drawer of his desk and pulled out a document I had written about 8 years earlier.
"Yes, that's my document." I replied. I knew we had distributed it to everyone we could think of who could possibly use the algorithms.
In the document he pulled out I showed how to compute sine's, cosines, tangents, logarithms and exponentials without having to use long chains of multiplications and divisions. That is quite a trick. All you had to do was use a handful of simple additions and subtractions, and you would get a 10 decimal accurate trigonometry function. This was something one could do very easily with simple integrated circuits.
In my document I had explained how to use simple electronics to implement the these methods into portable devices. It was very similar to what I thought the Hewlett Packard "hp-35" calculator did. I didn't know what the calculator did. My algorithms where sure easy to implement.
But it seemed that nobody ever used the algorithms, or cared. People thought it was elegant. That's all. I always thought it was a shame nobody used them.
"We used some of those algorithms on a piece of hardware." he said.
"What?"
He stunned me.
"Wow weeeee." screeched several voices in my head. Elated was the only thing I could feel. Nobody ever gave me credit for using anything I had ever done or written in my entire life, except here.
And they didn't even tell me or ask me about them. They just used them.
I knew immediately it meant I did such a good job and wrote it so clearly that they could just go and do it, like they did.
I wanted him to give me the job.
I didn't understand that all he wanted to do was get a real job done, with a pressing deadline.
I never encountered his type before, one who did not want to talk about it or ponder its significance. I never met a physicist who had a deadline to do something real.
But I started in on him anyway, the only way I knew how, to make him feel proud about his work.
"You know, Curtis Hines said that the satellites are the reason we don't have an atomic war." I remarked.
"Yeah? Why ' zat?" he responded, in his dullest known mode.
Dave Henry was just not very interested in philosophy or feeling good. He was a man with 2 first names.
It just didn't register that he didn't care.
"No Surprises." I started with the conclusion. "You don't have to worry about any surprises." I began to explain.
He was supposed to be thinking strategically. I assumed he was trying to think of ways to keep the super powers from starting a battle. I wanted to have a conversation about how this is really a wonderful, good, positive endeavor he is engaged in. But he just didn't give a damn.
"We got a launch date to meet. Do you mind overtime?" he responded.
His team had a satellite that had a real launch date, and Dave Henry needed some people to finish programming for its data stream.
I still didn't get it.
"The other guys don't have to defend against the maximum threat if they can see your real threat and how it isn't that bad." I explained, speaking directly into an intellectual vacuum.
"We have to launch this
thing on a pretty tight schedule." he replied, as if I didn't say
anything.
"You can get comp time. We can't pay you over time, you're salaried." he explained.
I finally got it. "Comp" time is "compensatory time," where you take off on vacation for the same number of hours you worked extra. We all know, that never happens. My kind and his kind think work is play, a hobby. We forget which is when.
"I work all the time anyway." I mumbled.
"It'll be fun to do something real." I commented without thinking first, and unintentionally revealing that all the other things I had done were not real.
He didn't get that part, or, he didn't care. I could see that he felt like he was scoring a high-powered physicist.
He quickly led our conversation back to discus something that required Secret Restricted Data, Q Clearance, where we talked about the details of what an atomic bombs exploding in the atmosphere looked like to a satellite.
I commented about "catching commie pinko rapist atheists trying to pollute our atmosphere," with atomic bombs, hoping he would laugh.
His only reaction was to ask
"How soon could you start work?"
Then he said "You want this job?"
"Of course, yes, immediately, right now, can I start tomorrow?" screamed the ecstatic voices in my head. But all I could do was mumble: "Yes. It looks interesting."
Of course I wanted the job. It was the only thing the whole of Sandia labs did that really stopped atomic wars.
I could not believe it. I got the job, just like that. And, they actually already used something I had done.
All the way back to my office I was fantasizing. "This is real, a real job."
An emotion rattled repeatedly in my mind that was the feeling of finally doing something instead of nothing, thinking, figuring, showing how things don't work.
I could hear my voice saying to me "This is real, with a real deadline and real hardware that really has to work."
It was also a huge compliment to me. They implemented some algorithms I wrote about.
I was elated that something I did was actually worth something. All that time with the Star Wars guys and with the phasor banks and laser photochemistry guys was all bull. All the space travel stuff was fantasy.
This was real.
I finally found what I had been looking for.
I learned something, too.
Question: How do you pick a topic that people beg to hire you for?
Answer: Pick something they really want done now.
---
I felt so good about this job. A couple of years earlier I had helped trying to find ways to monitor atomic testing treaties. I really did know something about what we were trying to do. I wasn't just a physics nerd, I thought.
One time Dr. Sam Stearns connected his PDP-8I computer up to an "analog to digital converter." His computer was really compact. It was only as big as a refrigerator.
"It converts the computer signals back into sound." he told me. I had never seen a device like this before. That is what I like about working at a National Laboratory. They get modern devices like this to play with.
I had helped him get some digital tape recordings of seismic signals of earthquakes and some digital seismic signals of nuclear weapon tests.
"If we can tell the difference between an underground nuclear test and an earthquake, we can put that into the treaty." he said. "Perhaps we could limit underground tests."
"What do you think they would sound like?" he asked.
"I don't know." I replied, not realizing I was acting on queue.
"Listen to this." he said, as he played an hour of the Valparaiso Chile earthquake seismic record, digitally speeded up so the whole thing played in 8 seconds.
"Wow!" I blurted..
He played it over and over several times.
It sounded like some plop sound mixed with the sound you get when you bend a long wood saw, sort of a long boing. And then, near the end of the digital record, we heard it start to repeat. The signal had gone around the world once and was repeating itself. During the time while this signal was happening, people were dying in the earthquake.
Every time I heard it I imagined people being buried and smashed, crushed by a roof beam on their chest, not able to breath, slowly suffocating, dying in extreme pain, maybe with blood dripping out of a pressurized leg sticking out of a crushed building too heavy for emergency crews to lift.
Never before had anyone heard the sound of an earthquake, speeded up.
Then he played the sound of an underground nuclear weapon test.
"Bang!" it went. Exactly like a shotgun blast.
He played a few other nuclear weapon underground test signals.
"Bang!" they sounded, every time.
"Sure is easy to tell the difference." I commented the obvious to Sam.
"How would you make a program to recognize the difference?" he asked me. That was the challenge.
"I don't know." I replied.
Neither did he.
The 1960 Valparaiso Chile earthquake was a magnitude 9.5, the biggest ever recorded.
"That was an order of magnitude more energy than any nuclear weapon we've ever tested." Sam said. It was also the largest earthquake ever recorded. It was trivial to tell the difference.
"Do you think you can tell the difference between a very small earthquake and a small nuclear test in Nevada?" he asked me.
"I don't know." I replied. That was a hard problem.
I went and did other things. He gave me a copy of the sounds on a reel to reel tape. The tape got lost in a move.
This spy satellite job was definitely different because we knew exactly how to make it work.
But I did go away from Sam Stearn's digital earthquake sound with a mild emotion permanently embedded in my feelings:
an earthquake bigger than any atomic bomb,
really happened to Valparaiso, Chile.
-----
My office was an isolated desk in the middle of a long, old, trailer that was just one, long room. Airtight against the weather, obviously very used, but clean. Nancy Ruiz had a desk at the north end, with a filing cabinet and one of those smaller, metal leg, dark plastic top tables behind her. This trailer was connected to another trailer like just like it, with Dean and his secretary as the only occupants. Dean did something related to the Nevada Test Site.
Both of our trailers were out there in the mud patch just outside the main building. Wood boards over the mud made a path. Mud happened nearly every other day during the late afternoon summer rain.
Emery Whitlow was at the other end of our trailer. He had another whole table for tool boxes. On another big table he was working on real space hardware.
Each space hardware box was about as big as a microwave oven. Each box of things, mostly electronics, seemed to have wires and slotted cards and tiny electrical parts jammed full. There seemed to be no extra space in any box for anything more. I guessed that was space stuff for you. Every nook and cranny counts.
On the big table between he and I was a single element heater plate, designed for the chemistry lab. It was perfectly flat and about 6 inches on edge and half an inch thick. It had a dial on it, for very accurate temperature control. That's where Emery cooked his lunch.
Nancy and I were waiting for our new offices in the main building, 30 feet to the east. But Emery was exiled here, literally.
"I'm exiled out here, you know," he said, with a forced smile, but confiding in me. I had befriended him immediately. I liked the way he worked, so meticulously.
"Why are you exiled?" I asked.
"I mouthed off to one of Brick's high level colonels," he said, now somewhat boasting.
He actually told a U.S. Air Force officer, customer, some honest, highly critical but inappropriately timed truths about how the hardware was put together, the management, the Air Force "weenies" as he called them, and general disgruntling.
"Wow, you didn't get fired," I said, astounded, and revealing a fear typical for Sicilians.
No full blooded Sicilian (myself) would dare confront the bullheaded, stupid, loud mouthed violent despot elders, authorities, who would break your arm or shoot you for that kind of insolence.
"Besides, it was true," he asserted, this time gritting his teeth, wincing, still angry.
It wasn't the first time. He mouthed off for the N-th time, one too many times. Brick Dumore, the boss-boss, told him he had to stay out of sight, period.
"So, why didn't they fire you?" I asked, wondering how he got away with it.
"They need me to put the hardware together and make it work," he replied, calmly.
They couldn't fire Emery because
1. he was too skilled,
2. there weren't others to replace him, and
3. he climbed a pole to defuse a live atomic bomb for them.
A live atomic bomb? Defused it?
¿ ¿ ¿What???
Nancy was supposed to be putting the whole software picture together for this satellite we are working on. I was supposed to figure out how to calculate the location and size of the atomic bombs our new spaceship hardware would see from space.
And Emory Whitlow defused an atomic bomb.
Emery's nickname was "Shorty." I knew he was short. But I didn't like those derogatory nicknames. I never did. That is something out of the cruel past.
I always called him Emery, and he liked it. Respect. He really liked that.
Emery Whitlow saw 152, atomic bombs go off. He was there. Doing all kinds of things for the tests. At the Nevada Test Site and in the South Pacific. Underground tests, atmospheric tests, tests in space. He saw big ones, monster Megaton bombs, and small ones.
He told me how one time an atomic bomb at the top of the thin, radio antenna-like metal tower wasn't quite working right. It would not detonate.
??? Atomic Bomb did not Detonate ???
When they pushed the button, nothing happened. The Atomic Bomb did not go off.
When you push the button, at least the high explosive in the Atomic Bomb should explode. But it did not. That means the wires are not connected right or shorted.
Somebody had to go up to the top of the tower to find out why, and fix it.
So, Emery got into the small metal cage and the electric pulley hoisted him up. At the top, the automatic turn-off switch that stops the electric pulley motor didn't work. The switch was broken or stuck.
The motor tried to keep pulling the cage. The tower started to bend.
"I was yelling at the top of my lungs down to the crew, to shut it off." he said.
Eventually they did. Then he got out of the cage, high up in the air, one foot in, one foot out, stretching to do something.
The 4 prong connector to connect the "fire" cable was rotated 90 degrees. The wires were wrong.
Somebody had jammed the connector in even though the holes were the wrong size. He un-jammed it, put it in correctly and got back down.
Then they detonated the atomic bomb.
"Weren't you scared?" I asked, suspecting Emery was pulling my leg and telling me a tall tale.
"Nah. You wouldn't feel a thing." he casually replied.
From the way he said this, I was sure he practiced this a hundred times on a 1000 wide eyed people just like me.
I figured it was true, if the atomic bomb goes off, you don't even know it.
I figured that you are vaporized within microseconds. It takes about 1000 times longer for the nerves to send any signals through your brain. Your head would turn into vapor before your nerves could begin to send a nerve signal that something hot just turned on.
So, you would be there, and then suddenly, not.
That was unexpected, but interesting:
"They aren't going to fire someone
who re-connected a dud Atomic Bomb for them,
and, on top of a skinny metal tower."
One day before lunch he told me about how they were in some tents in the South Pacific, getting ready for a multi-megaton atomic bomb test.
"Was it fun out there?" I asked, hoping he would say "naked women, free sex."
"We sure ate good," he said.
"We were in these tents, big enough for at least 4 cots and 3 hanging lanterns, getting ready for a test." he said.
"How far away from the bomb?" I asked.
"Far enough," he said, and continued on because he had a story and wasn't going to let me distract him this time. I had distracted him many times before.
"During the middle of the night we heard a loud screeching," he began, starting to smile, and clearly recalling something he liked.
"Repeated, loud screeching all over the place," he said, with a bit of glee.
"I turned on the flashlight and all me and my tent-mate see are these big, monster rats, crawling up whatever they could as high as they could, inside our tent," he said, the punch line, as he watched my eyes get big and my expression reward him for persisting.
"What did you do?" I asked, wondering if he got bit, or his tent mate got injured.
"Aw, we grabbed a broom handle or something and whacked em." he said, somewhat ignoring the question.
"Outside, the rats were trying to escape huge attack crabs, crawling all over the beach, with legs covering 3 feet across," he exclaimed, showing me with his arms how big the crabs were. His arms indicated 3 or 4 feet across.
"These damn crabs were grabbing live rats in their claws, crushing them, and the rats were screaming." he said, asserting another good punch line.
I could not believe it. The crabs were eating rats.
"We ate some of those crabs," Emery said, using a satisfied hunter look as he told me.
"The guys on the ship wanted some, and we gave 'em some," he said.
"They tasted pretty good," he said, concluding his South Pacific, terror-in-the-night sci fi story about atomic bombs and killer crabs.
His Nevada Test Site story scared me.
"Did you ever see an atomic bomb up close?" I asked. I asked every one I could about their atomic bomb experience.
"Closer than you would ever want to be," he replied.
I expected he would say he was one of the guys they put in trenches, too close to the bomb, during the early test days.
"We were in a pickup truck at the Nevada Test site just after they set off one of the smaller A-bombs," he started to explain.
"I was in the passenger seat. I noticed the Geiger Counter was 'pegged.' " he explained.
"Pegged" meant that the needle of the meter was all the way to the right, like a speedometer at maximum. The Geiger Counter was a device about the size of a quart of milk and clicked when a radioactive decay particle happened to go through the Geiger Tube. The meter told them how many "rads" per hour, or per minute, or per second, depending on the sensitivity "gain" setting of a dial on the little box.
"Hey, this thing is pegged, I told the driver." he said.
"What did the driver say?" I asked, on cue. He set me up.
"Turn down the "gain". It's too sensitive." he replied.
That's no way to run things, I thought. This is radioactivity, not noise or fumes.
"So we kept driving. Then I looked down and the thing was still pegged. I said 'it's still pegged.' He said 'turn down the gain.' ok, I said."
"Then what?" I responded, on cue again. Even I can understand this. The meter is reading more radiation than the Geiger counter is able to measure. That's way too much. They are in real danger.
"It's still pegged. So I asked him, 'What do we do?' And he said 'step on it.' "
Emery said that with a laugh, as he delivered the punch line. He must have rehearsed one a hundred times, too, on gullibles like me.
"Step on it" means "step on the accelerator and go faster" to get out of there.
Marvelous delivery, marvelous punch line. But I didn't laugh. He expected me to laugh.
"So, did you get any radioactivity?" I asked. I was as serious as hell. This was not funny.
He saw I was more interested in him than in the adventure. Apparently, this was not the response most people gave him. I cared about him, not his misfortune.
His face turned serious. He paused. He leaned to the side a little. His gritted his teeth, something like a forced wide smile, and I think he didn't know he was showing his teeth like that.
The joke left his face and something distant took its place. With a sadness and frankness and a low tone he said "Yeah, we got some." That was unrehearsed.
He then told me what happened.
"Well, the wind shifted. We were in the fallout."
"They lost the records," he continued, then smiled a half joke, half dead serious, "probably on purpose."
He looked down, he looked up and he said "They figured I got 75 rads."
There was some silence between us. I recalled that 150 rads is the beginning of lethal doses.
"Did it do anything to you?" I asked.
"I don't know. I was always mean." he laughed.
Then his face got that distant look again. He looked down and then back at me. He involuntarily showed his teeth again.
"My daughter ... " he explained, calmly, frankly, because he said something that made me stop, cry inside, and want to yell to everyone what he told me.
We didn't talk about it much more.
Emery lost his only son, a volunteer, front line medic, in Vietnam. He died as he was trying to carry a wounded soldier away. Tears kept coming to his eyes. My eyes, too.
On a different day in the Exile Trailer Emery told me another Nevada Test Site story, about the crows.
"They were about to shoot an atomic bomb and we started the camera's rolling. At the same time some crows were flying toward the camera box. Then the bomb went off. This one crow looks back, and you could see he was wondering 'what the hell is that.' You could see his tail feathers go up."
"What happened?" I asked, like a dummy that I am. I don't follow jokes that well. I'm and Aspie. I take things literally.
Emery smirked a little, stopped, and then loudly clapped his hands,
"And then splat!"
he laughed.
After the hand-clap, well rehearsed part, he answered my question, wondering why I asked:
"Well, he smashed into the camera. They were gonna sit on it."
Everybody who hears this knows that bird gets smashed into the camera.
"You know we launched atomic bombs from Kauai," he said, smiling the way he often did when he was about to tell a 3 sentence short story with a sarcastic punch line.
I had been to Kauai, and even passed by Barking Sands. I had heard Sandia had some people there doing something-or-other.
"Did you see that one go off, too?" I asked, because Emery Whitlow had seen 150-something atomic bombs go off.
"Naw. It blew up on the launch pad," he said, laughing.
He was so irreverent. But, rockets would blow up on the launch pad all the time. Most of the rockets we watched on TV when I was in college blew up on the launch pad. It was always exciting to watch. Fire and excitement all over the screen. Reporters getting all excited at the excitement. Rockets always tended to blow up on the launch pad.
"One of our chicken-shit, scardy-cat engineers was so frightened when they pushed the button to destroy the rocket on the pad that he started crying."
He paused for a second, carefully looking at me to relish every surprised expression I might emote, and then added, laughing like a seasoned atomic bomb worker,
"The atomic bomb fell on the ground and started burning up."
Emery paused a moment to let me picture how an atomic bomb the size of a color TV set would drop on to the launch pad and catch fire. He expected me to get scared. But I knew better. If an atomic bomb is asymmetric, it will fizzle 100 percent of the time. It has to remain painfully and precisely the way the designer designed it, or it won't work at all. But Emery didn't know that I knew that.
He expected me to be all afraid. He expected how I would imagine how it could turned the entire launch area into a hole the size of 3 football fields and could have vaporized the control room and all the scardy-cats in it.
"He was crying and sobbing like a baby." Emery continued, mocking the guy.
"He was so afraid he was going to be blown up and killed."
I thought it was a bit funny and laughed.
When Emery saw me laugh instead of getting scared, he remembered I knew about bombs, and immediately added, laughing even more, "He wouldn't have felt a thing."
Emery must have recalled when he told me about the time he was on that tower all by himself and fixed the connector that was supposed to trigger the atomic bomb that didn't fire.
----
Six months later, as I walked from my office to my VW in the brisk evening cool of the New Mexico desert, a blank voice in my mind said
"They didn't fire him because he sat with atomic bombs."
-------------
I had grown to like the seclusion of the old trailer. But was moved to another .
Dave Henry was in the hiring mode. Everyone he hired had to wait in the unclassified area, outside a tall fence, until their clearance came in. Their desks were packed together in an old trailer on the other side of the building.
He hired a new Ph.D. fellow with a strange name, "Round Tree." I thought the fellow would be a Native American when Dave asked me to interview the guy. Some American Indians were supposed to have names like that. And I could not imagine a Native American wanting to work on computers, let alone get a Ph.D. in it. But he was a regular Texan with no accent.
Dave also hired some technicians. One of them, Stan Dutler, was assigned to work with me. Other people in the Lab had hired some female computer people. All new hire female's desks were packed in the same, old trailer while they waited for their clearances. They were young, thin and pretty. And they were smart. I tried to talk with them every chance I could. Too soon they all moved to somewhere in the Lab.
And then we all moved, including Stan, to nice offices on the inside. Everyone except Emery Whitlow.
Our whole team moved into nice, pleasantly crude office spaces inside the building. The room was big enough for 10 or 15 of us to share. Some of us, those with higher status, had a sturdy, new, chin-high wall to separate our desk areas. The room was warm in the winter, cool in the summer. My desk was a nice metal desk, with a clean plastic surface.
I liked the secluded hiding place around the corner I had chosen, deep in the rear of the room and around the bend. No one could see me if they wandered into any of the 3 doors to the area. I could focus entirely on the spy task: the flash location transformations. Those transformations were as tricky to solve as it sounded.
Dave Henry's office was out in the main area. Dave had lots of room in his office, compared to his other offices. Now he moved up to an office with no windows, big enough for a small metal table and three chairs. Neither his table nor desk nor walls were cluttered with anything.
Lena Valerio, his secretary, had her desk just outside his door. She took care of all of us.
A door connected our space hardware guys and their lab to our room. I always enjoyed walking past oscilloscopes and wires and tiny parts being put together on tiny boards, like a miniature city.
Dr. Don Rountree was furiously making software around the corner from me. Rountree was a very competent software Ph.D. His part of the satellite would unpack the bundles of data into neat little time-stamped bins, so the rest of us could work with them.
Stan Dutler was working furiously, implementing a fast computer code I designed to keep track of bright spots, such as the huge number of sun glints and reflections shining into our spy satellite view.
Don Summers, the mathematician, was helping me with the location transformations. He and I had to do the math to assign a location to any bright spots in the field of view.
Don Summers printed in the old fashioned style, on that wide computer paper with the holes on each side. He wrote those equations starting all the way from the left margin and continued all the way to the right margin, 15 inches away, and then continued on the next line, and kept on writing equations till he filled two or three sheets. Never made a mistake. Stunning work.
Sometimes, some said "always," he would not use deodorant or take a bath. I didn't ask. I didn't know. His soiled shirt overflowing his belt, his soiled pants with a nail-sized hole above the knee, his dirty mustache and his awkward, sometimes crude, blunt humor annoyed my wife and most females. But I didn't mind. He did stunning work.
Don Summers was worth 3 or 5 times what I was worth, and he only as a Masters Degree. He owned airplanes and hangars and threw people out his airplane half a dozen times on most clear Sundays.
I was happy. We were working with a real deadline, a real launch of a real robot space ship. The space ship hardware would look for real atmospheric explosions in the very atmosphere we really lived in. Our software would locate the fireball, calculate how big the bomb was, and tell on them. Someone in the Pentagon would eventually get our data.
If it wasn't too classified, our classification people would release the data and someone would tell the Media, Jane Fonda and the rest of the anti-war people that some bad people were shooting dirty nuclear weapons in the air we breathe.
This was important stuff.
Most of all, it was real. When we would issue an event report, Dave Henry told me it could go directly into the Pentagon and wake up a General in the middle of the night. If it were a real nuclear weapon detonating somewhere it shouldn't be detonating, like in anger, we would sound the alarm. Testing big atomic bombs at a nuclear test site is one thing, but using them in anger, blowing up cities, is completely different.
This was quite different from the research things and wild idea things I had been part of. I had abandoned working on the reaction initiators for external burning hypersonic vehicles. Those vehicles would look and act like flying saucers in the distant sky, if they would only ever work.
I had abandoned phasor banks, which I showed would not work.
I had abandoned doing anything for the New Mexico Academy of Science, of which I had been President.
Nobody seemed to bother us with such nonsense. We were working furiously on the software.
Computer terminals appeared. One terminal was near me. I got to use it any time and any way I wanted, my own personal computer terminal. I felt important. I could program the main computer instantly. This was real luxury.
We were really doing it, getting ready for a launch.
---
Dave Henry at ground zero
"Did you ever see an atomic bomb go off?" I asked Dave Henry. I was turning over every rock, asking every older guy I met at this lab the same question. I wanted them to tell me stories about atomic bombs. We will never see these things again, I hoped. So everyone who ever saw one was walking history.
"I was at ground zero." he boasted, and smiled.
"How can you do that?" I asked, knowing that there must be some trick. I never heard of any bunkers directly under the atmospheric tests. The ground motion would smash him against the ceiling or wall. I imagined him sitting at his desk, and then the concrete ceiling would be going 200 miles per hour, straight down at him. And then splat.
"I was on a ship. Directly under ground zero." he asserted, teasing me.
"Ok, how?" I asked, stumped. I knew it was a trick. It had to be.
"It was 70 km overhead. In space." he said. It was a nuclear bomb test shot in space.
"Wow. Did you hear anything? What did you see?" I asked. Instinctively I started in, looking for any description one can get from these him. All the oddball things. Anything.
"Yeah. As soon as it went off. I heard a pop." he said, as he flicked his finger off his thumb, like a "pop."
"I got to watch it. Nobody else did." he boasted.
"How was that?" I asked.
"The sailors were instructed to go inside, under cover. But I was not in the military. I told them I had an experiment on that test and I was going to go out there and watch. I was a civilian. So I went out."
"Then what?" I asked.
"The sky lit up."
"It filled the whole sky." he said. At 70 km altitude, there was no fireball. The whole sky above him did light up, especially because he was directly below.
The atomic bomb was in space. There was no fireball and there was not shock wave. Just light.
That's why his nose was crooked. He was directly underneath an atomic bomb.
He didn't get any radiation, either. The air between the ground and space was about the same mass as 15 yards of water.
I remembered what Ben Benjamin told me: "Only 3 yards of stuff and you get no radiation."
Dave Henry was completely safe, and he knew it.
"Did you see any others?" I asked.
"Yep." he said, with a smile.
"I watched the atomic cannon go off." he continued. The other guys were ordered to stay inside the trailers. They were military. I wasn't. So I stood outside."
"What did you see?" I asked.
"I was three miles away from the detonation." he responded.
"You don't want to watch when it first goes off. So I kept my back to it. Then I turned around and watched." he said.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Nothing much. I saw the fireball."
Three miles away seemed a bit close. I bet he was farther than that, but the AEC was definitely known to put people too close to those bombs. Or, that atomic cannon must have shot a very small atomic bomb.
The Greenpeace and anti-nuke friends had something wrong. It was like they could not figure or compute. They got the radiation part wrong.
I needed to know the truth about radiation. I needed to know to get off this planet.
They cheated us with radiation scares. Where were the monsters? Where were the sick people dying all over the place?
This was after Chernobyl. And it was after Three Mile Island. The anti-war people I felt aligned with failed me.
This guy was at ground zero twice, and he had the crooked nose before either.
I felt cheated and resentful:
Greenpeace lied to me.
I know many people who prospered after getting scary close to nuclear things.
-------
He was so proud. Dave Henry pulled out a beautiful, full-color, pretty-color map of details of somewhere in the swamps along a South American equator. He unfolded it across a conference table near my desk His crooked finger landed "right there" on a lake, such a pretty blue lake, on that expensive map
"You don't want to wake up the Pentagon with a sun glint." Dave said, beaming.
"That lake was reflecting right into the sensor," he said, crunching his vowels and consonants as if the sun's reflection were alive and the lake was helping it.
"If we didn't do our job so well, this would look like a 200 megaton bomb."
That was not some random big number he quoted. It was the real number that our sensor would have shouted.
He was really proud.
"You just make your algorithm exclude anything that comes from where the sun is making glints," he said, holding out his left hand's crooked long fingers like he was holding an imaginary earth and pointing at an imaginary point with the other hand's crooked index finger, jabbing at the glint region.
I tried to imagine the earth like a smooth, blue, shiny small basketball held in my hands at arms length, with our satellite about where my eye was. That was about the right distance.
I started to panic. This was not an easy geometry problem.
"It's kind of tricky," he declared, smirking a bit, with the satisfaction of knowing that he beat the glints.
Well, I knew damn well it was tricky. I knew he was smart, and that he did figure it out all by himself, for a different satellite. It was one of those geometry problems that could keep me up way too late.
All sorts of mathematical transformations relating the angle of the sun, the space craft rotating in the black of space, and the somewhat pear shaped Earth somewhere underneath, with the curved oceans, all had to be figured so we could tell where glints would be.
To Dave and I, this was a puzzle. How do you make sure you don't report a sun glint?
To us, every bright flash could be some evil terrorists trying to hide their test of a nuclear weapon. So, we better not miss one.
On the other hand, we had to make sure we didn't wake up the Pentagon with a false alarm.
Those glints created buckets full of false alarm candidates every day, all the time.
I realized I didn't much care about the false alarms.
I thought to myself, hoping Dave would not see my lack of real interest, "If a 200 megaton bomb hit, we would not need a satellite to tell us."
"After all, the sun is a Trillion-Zillion ton atomic fusion bomb." Dave Henry would say, repeating the description that cast our beloved, Greenpeace Sun, the Mother of Life, as a dirty, war-mongering nuclear fission bomb spewing killer subatomic radiation all over Earth.
"Of course, the bhang meter will tell you for sure if it was a nuke," he said.
"So, why don't we just let the bang meter do the work?" I asked.
"Go see Gary Masters. He'll tell you what to put into the software," Dave instructed.
I didn't quite understand.
Gary Masters was the expert on a particular sensor that triggered the satellite to wake up when someone shot an atomic bomb, and would determine if it was a nuclear weapon or not.
So, I went out to the engineer trailers to go find Gary Masters.
The satellite hardware guys worked in the trailers. The steps were muddy and dirty. The trailers were attached together to make bigger offices. They had been painted white once, probably 15 years ago. But these were trailers for engineers, so half broken steps and dirt and unpainted boards for a sidewalk over dried mud puddles were ok.
On the other hand, on every shelf, on every desk, in every cabinet, I saw at least one and typically several, clearly expensive, interesting-looking pieces of hardware, carefully resting or waiting for more work. All the hardware was absolutely professional and perfectly engineered.
The engineers handiwork was truly fine art. This was Sandia National Laboratory.
Most of the hardware things were box shaped, and most had metal box shaped parts attached to more box shaped parts. Wires and expensive looking connector cables and sockets were attached. Some had shiny plates and obvious 1 inch square windows attached with shiny brass or stainless steel screws and carefully milled stainless steel or aluminum puzzle pieces.
Sometimes the sensors were round like a quarter or dime. Sometimes they were flat sheets on what looked like dark glass.
Some cone-shaped things were painted the blackest black I ever saw and were just there as sun shades. They looked like totally black megaphones covering a hole in the dark bottom of the box.
I ran into John Mitchell first. His office was just as primitive as the other engineer offices. The floor was worn down to the wood in the often-walked-on places. The plastic and rubber floor mats were worn and dirty. The windows were almost as dirty, splashed with dried mud from the dust carried by wind and wetted by summer rains.
John collected refined trinkets in his office. He had more space hardware relics and paper posters of space programs than most others. He got around more than others. He got to talk with the Air Force brass.
Some of the poster pictures had our hardware drawn in.
"Why is it called a "bang meter?" I asked John.
Immediately I realized this was a dumb question. It measured the "bang." So they call it the "bang meter."
John Mitchell smirked.
"It's not "bang, it's bhang." he said.
"Long ago, during the days when the AEC shot atomic bombs in the atmosphere, some weird scientist weenies just like you invented a "Bhangmeter," " he joked, poking fun at physicists.
"When they first made this device their bosses said it was so crazy they must have been smoking bhang." he explained.
Bhang was the India-person slang word for marijuana.
He described something secret about it.
And the UNCLAS part was that a Bhangmeter measured squiggles and blips on the light signal. If one looked at the signal carefully enough, all the real atomic bombs had a certain set of almost unique squiggles and blips. High explosives, sun glints, and meteors did not have those blips.
There were meteors and sun glints, and both could look like atomic bombs to a satellite camera.
"We stare at the whole earth, waiting for a bomb to go off," he said.
"As soon as a bomb goes off, the light triggers the Bhangmeter."
"So it's straightforward," I blurted out. I wasn't quite sure why they sent me here.
"But you probably won't see the bomb going off. The earth is too bright," he said.
???Earth brighter than an Atomic Bomb???
Confused, I asked, "So how do we know when to start the Bhangmeter?"
"You gotta talk to Gary," he said.
I guess everyone knew that Gary Masters knew everything about it.
I continued on into Gary's office. It was primitive, too. Same engineering surroundings as the rest, but neat. Perfectly neat. Clean. Not one thing out of place. And he had some kind of art tastefully placed on the wall.
"Is it really that hard to see a bomb go off from space?" I asked Gary.
To Gary Masters, the question itself was stupid.
"Of course it's hard. The earth is bright."
"But a nuclear weapon makes an extremely bright flash. Can't the satellite see the flash?" I asked, puzzled even more.
Even modern school children know that the flash of an atomic bomb can blind you instantly. Everyone I ever talked to who saw a bomb goes out of their way to explain how bright the light is. Everyone knows how the light of a nuclear weapon is so bright it even makes mountains in the distance look white.
"Sun's pretty bright in the daytime," he said.
Gary Masters saw that I was intrigued by the whole idea that an atomic bomb is nothing, compared to the whole Earth. But he still seemed a little annoyed, maybe interrupted from something important.
"The sensor that alerts us to trigger the rest of the hardware has a hard time deciding that someone just detonated an atomic bomb" he asserted, making sure he forced me to swallow this strange new fact.
"When you're staring at the whole earth, a measly megaton bomb is not a lot of extra light."
Gary knew how to make the light sensor that would trigger only when a sudden flash happened, even if it was just a little flash somewhere inconspicuous on a bright earth.
"So, how do I know the flash is not a bomb?" I asked.
"The Bhangmeter signal tells you it's not a weapon."
"So, why don't we just use your sensor every time. Forget about figuring where the sun glints are," I asked.
I really didn't want to do that geometry problem of figuring where the sun glints were. Dave thought that was fun. Not me.
In the driest tones of voice, with the least amount of glee, and with the "why are you asking such a dumb question" nuance in his facial expressions and word inflections, Gary told me "The Bhangmeter doesn't work so well when the bomb is too small or too big, and when it explodes high in the atmosphere."
That's all there was to it.
He had the problem all worked out. I took the data and the Bhangmeter lesson and went away.
Even though I thought the flash of an atomic bomb would be extremely bright, it wasn't.
From a satellite in space looking at a daytime earth, the light of an atomic bomb, or a meteor, or the sun shining off the ocean, they all looked close enough alike that I had to do hard work.
I had to go back and talk to Gary again a few times, to get it right. He always seemed to be more difficult to approach. He seemed defensive. He didn't seem to emote that glee that Tommy Thompson had.
He lacked that puzzle-solving smile that Dave Henry had. The tone of his voice seemed to say "why are you asking me?" and "why are you interrupting me?" or "what do you want?"
That was curious, because he was one of the most cordial engineers I knew.
And he would help whenever he could. His mannerisms were a puzzle.
The bomb light was a puzzle. All the movies and all the TV pictures of an atomic bomb going off portrayed it as the brightest thing anyone ever saw in their entire life.
Everyone I talked with, no exceptions, personally told me they saw things even when their eyelids were closed when they watched an atomic bomb go off. Everyone said the light was extremely bright.
It was a Secret how well Gary could detect atomic bombs, during the early 1980's.
I thought it should be a secret forever.
"We're trying to catch a sneakin bomb tester," joked John Mitchell.
Obviously. We didn't need a satellite to tell us if someone used a bomb like that during a war.
TV news camera's were everywhere in the world, and so were telephones. The satellite would be the last one to dial 911.
The lesson of the puny bomb flash stuck.
I was learning. What is big to us, is puny to Nature. The bright flash was not so bright, by comparison.
Walking down the hall, for a drink of water and a break to the bathroom I talked quietly to myself:
All that rattle and babble about the flashing light of a bomb, the sun glints, meteors.
"Dumb question" he says, with his face and his voice. Maybe.
200 megatons goes off in the jungle and nobody phones it in? Bull.
I guess only one thing's for sure:
if something as big as a nuclear weapon goes off, you might not see it from space.
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UFO's of Several Kinds
Charlie Zaffery told me "We see things we can't explain all the time."
Charlie's real name was Efstratios.
"Why do they call you Charlie?" I asked.
"Because nobody can speak Greek. That's my Greek name."
In a trailer full of paper, volumes of computer printout paper, bound in thick, really thick, 6 inch thick reams, with several desks and several tables and many bookshelves full of paper, and with charts everywhere. This was Charlie's place. He shared it.
Such a nice fellow, so friendly. And smart.
This was a most shabby trailer. It seemed that the clothes these engineers wore and the places they worked in matched exactly what people said about them.
Dirty floor. Torn floor coverings. Wires everywhere. Lamps held on the desk with C-clamps and tape. Power cords. computer terminals. Broken window latches. Torn mats on the stairs. Wood walkway boards dipping slightly into the mud path between trailers. Amazingly crude.
Most of what Charlie did was Secret.
"When they don't know what to do with the data, they give it to me." he said.
"I put them into the Zoo."
"What kinds of things?" I asked.
"Some of it is just space radiation." he replied.
Radiation? From space? He surprised me. I thought space was friendly, except that it had no air to breathe.
I began to focus on a new concept, and repeated it to myself as I walked down the hall:
"Sometimes it's the Van Allen Belts." he explained, referring to what disrupted some satellites and data.
"Sometimes the sun showers the satellites with high energy electrons."
"Can't you shield it?" I asked.
"Apparently not. That's not my job."
"How bad is it?" I asked.
"I don't know. Ask Brick." he said.
So I did, as soon as the opportunity came by.
One week Merry Peterson and I watched as a computer group working for some other project in another building connected the first 1024 hypercube parallel computer ever.
That nubmer,1024, is exactly 2, doubled 10 times.
They had connected together 1024 little computers. Each one was soldered on to printed circuit cards. Each circuit was about the size of a playing card and as thick as 3 stacked quarters.
Astounding though it seemed, each card was the equivalent to an entire PDP 8 I computer. Just a few years earlier, that computer would not fit into a microwave oven.
The computer cards were jammed into a box the size of an old fashioned, living room, tube TV, and wires were sticking out of the box connecting them to each other, so many wires that it looked like hair.
Rather amazing to us. So much computer power in so small a space.
Merry Petersen and I both got the idea that we should use a few of these in our space craft.
The occasion to see Brick Dumore arose. Brick Dumore was the boss of all the space satellite groups.
They called him "Brick" because his face would get red as a brick when he would get even a little excited. Herbert was his real name. His nickname was obviously a vestige of the cruel times when people called each other by nicknames, like "Shorty." He was shorter than me and walked straight as a rock statue.
He walked like the boss. Even though he acted firm about all kinds of things, he would still smile a lot and made common sense every time he opened his mouth.
I found him very easy to approach. His arrogance factor was missing. "Firm as hell, but not arrogant," I thought.
He was the Department Manager, the Boss's Boss and the guy who gets Big Bucks. Emery whispered to me one time "He is getting $83,000 a year." That's when the rest of us were only making $32,000, so that was a heck of a lot of money.
Brick Dumore took us aside and made absolutely sure we understood The Word. He was being very stern and unyielding, almost unwilling to think of new ideas. This was not like him.
I knew it would be ok because his face did not turn red as a brick at all. Brick said that shielding these things was too hard.
"Can't I just wrap some tantalum foil around them?" I asked.
During physics lab I had stopped some x-rays with just a thick tantalum foil.
"Now let me just tell you ... ." he started in, with the stern and clear intention.
I could just feel the intensity of the message he was about to lay on us.
"To shield that radiation," he started, pausing between carefully composed phrases,
"You need massive tantalum," he said, heavily emphasizing "massive" by saying it slowly and dramatically.
"the hardware will need to be completely surrounded," he continued, and paused,
"by heavy lead bricks."
Surprised, we got the message clearly. The shielding would weigh a whole lot more than the satellite.
Back in physics lab I played with lead bricks and made lead brick houses to shield radioactive bottles. Lead bricks are very heavy.
"Space radiation is just powerful stuff, very penetrating." he explained, like a physics teacher.
He was explaining, not scolding. And he was adamant.
"Space radiation is very penetrating." he repeated, using different words.
We went away deflated, but not depressed.
I liked the way he handled us. I thought we were some of his best thinkers. He just told us the facts.
Once we found out how intensely radioactive space was, we began to understand why our engineers used what we thought were primitive parts, old parts, electronics that seemed to be at least 10 or 15 years out of date.
I recalled how I had been puzzled about why I could go to Radio Shack and get higher performance electronic parts than what they used in the satellite.
We went to visit the engineers again. They always had interesting things to touch and marvel at.
"Of course they have to be rad-hard," said the red haired engineer who caught rattlesnakes for a hobby and tanned their hides for his belt.
"Rad" meant "radiation." "Hard" meant hardened against the effects of radiation.
The red-haired one was designing an elegant thermoelectric cooler for a space sensor.
The other engineer in the room, a relatively young, maybe 30 year old, computer hardware designer told us "the charged particle causes a short circuit in the computer chip."
He was talking about the cosmic ray charged particle that went right through the satellite, and through his hardware. The one that goes through the whole spacecraft.
"You get a micro explosion. The burnt parts cause an electrical short. The chip's power supply makes a spark through that short that burns out a piece of the chip."
And that was that.
"So, what do you do about it?" I asked. I could guess. Redundant parts, probably.
"You have to have multiple, redundant parts on the computer chip, and a way to check to see which parts died." he said.
Strange. And both of them would not let me go. They wanted to tell me about why they could not use regular old parts like everyone els