In 1987 I moved to the small town of Livermore, California, home to one of the two main nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States. I was a graduate student in anthropology who had abandoned plans to do fieldwork in Africa for a more “relevant” topic—understanding what kinds of people chose to work on nuclear weapons, and why. I came to this project, to the trepidation of some faculty in my department, as someone who had been active in the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the early 1980s.
My initial fieldwork in Livermore lasted from 1987 to 1989 and established my strange relationship to weapons scientists as, simultaneously, friends and objects of study. During those two years I moved three times, always sharing housing with someone who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I joined a singles group, a baseball team, and a basketball team attached to the laboratory. I spent my Sunday mornings at different churches in town as a way of getting to meet lab employees (and was even invited to preach a sermon at the Unitarian Church). I spent many evenings at the Livermore Saloon and Casino, where the anthropologist writing his field notes over a beer while sitting at the bar was an object of some curiosity. Above all, I investigated the cultural world of the laboratory by asking each weapons scientist I met to introduce me to colleagues, then visiting these scientists in their homes to collect their life histories and explore with them the meaning of their work as weapons scientists. I ended up doing formal interviews with sixty-four employees of the laboratory as well as a number of local ministers, reporters, city officials, and spouses (actually, often, ex-spouses) of weapons scientists. Ultimately, I wrote two books about the scientists: Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb.
Although this initial intense period of fieldwork ended in 1989, I have never really withdrawn from the weapons scientists’ lives. I returned to Livermore for much of 1994–95, and I have spent many summers either back at Livermore or in Santa Fe, near the other nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, seeking to understand the ways the two weapons labs have adapted to the end of the Cold War and to the most devastating twist in their history in recent decades—the end of nuclear testing in 1992. I follow the weapons labs in the media and exchange e-mails and occasional phone calls with people I have come to know in Livermore and Los Alamos. And, whenever I publish something about the labs, I brace for the e-mails that inevitably follow. Sometimes they are appreciative and sometimes they are not.
When I first arrived in Livermore, I found that nuclear weapons scientists often had quite mistaken stereotypes of antinuclear activists. By the time I left Livermore, two years later, I realized that antinuclear activists often had misleading preconceptions about nuclear weapons scientists as well.
Weapons scientists had decided opinions about antinuclear activists, especially in the wake of the nuclear freeze movement and big protests at the laboratory in 1982 and 1983, which mobilized thousands of antinuclear activists, many of whom committed civil disobedience. Many weapons scientists assumed that activists were unemployed—how else would they be able to spend the day protesting?—and quite a few suggested that they were communists, or were in the pay of the Soviet Union. It was largely taken for granted at the lab that protestors were ill-informed about nuclear weapons. In fact, as I knew from my time in the nuclear freeze movement and from interviews I was doing with antinuclear activists in a parallel research endeavor, most protestors were middle-class people with university degrees and jobs. They may not, in most cases, have been experts on arms control, but many had taken time to educate themselves by attending lectures and reading books and pamphlets on the arms race. They often had overcrowded lives, devoting what spare time was left after work and family commitments to activism, and taking time off work to attend protests. (Maybe the most “respectable” protestor was a Methodist bishop who saw civil disobedience at the laboratory gates, for which she was arrested, as a vocational obligation.) The overwhelming majority were just as critical of the Soviet Union as of the United States, feeling that their lives were endangered equally by the policies of both superpowers. When I worked with the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in San Francisco, in 1984, we got a surprise office visit from the political attaché of the Soviet consulate, bringing us comradely greetings. He did not get a friendly reception.
But if antinuclear activists were victims of hostile stereotyping by weapons scientists, the reverse was also true. Many antinuclear activists assumed that weapons scientists were all politically conservative and that they did not think at all about the ethics of their work. After all, if they thought about ethics, how could they work on weapons of mass destruction? But, although it may be attractive to think of nuclear weapons scientists as ethically challenged right-wing ideologues, the truth is more interesting and more complicated.
To be sure, I did meet nuclear weapons scientists who voted Republican and, along with Ronald Reagan, saw the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” But I was surprised by how many weapons scientists were liberals who had donated time and money on behalf of progressive causes. (In retrospect, I should not have been so surprised given the FBI’s alarm at the number of scientists who were communist fellow travelers and radicals in the original bomb project at wartime Los Alamos.) Thus I met weapons scientists who actively supported women’s rights, gay rights, gun control, and environmental causes. I interviewed a weapons scientist who had risked his body as a freedom rider in the civil rights movement in the south. And I interviewed another weapons scientist, now a senior manager at Livermore, who had been very active in protests against the Vietnam War on his university campus. Lab scientists formed the backbone of the local antigrowth campaign that successfully reserved large swaths of open space in Livermore as off-limits to local developers who sought to cram generic subdivisions into every nook and cranny of open space. According to the informal straw poll I took among lab employees in 1988, more supported Michael Dukakis than Ronald Reagan in the presidential election.
So why did such people—about two-thirds of them active churchgoers—want to make nuclear weapons their life’s work? Some did give ideological reasons—most notably an older man who referred repeatedly to his “monolithic anticommunism” as a reason for coming to Livermore in the 1950s—but most spoke more about Livermore as an attractive environment for doing scientific research. They appreciated the lab’s reputation for excellence, the state-of-the-art supercomputer and laser technology the lab offered its researchers, and the emphasis on teamwork. One physics professor at an elite university commented privately to me on the irony that his most aggressive “alpha male” graduate students tended to become professors, while the “kinder, gentler” students with less-sharp elbows were more likely to go to the weapons labs where they would not have to constantly compete for funding and students.
Scientists were also drawn to the weapons labs by strong salaries. A recent article about Los Alamos, for example, reveals that the average salary there is over $100,000 a year, and Los Alamos County consistently places in the top five wealthiest counties in the country.1 However, if wealth was their primary objective, many Livermore scientists could have earned more in the private sector and, when I asked them to reconstruct for me their decision to come to Livermore, most talked primarily about a well-resourced workplace that tackled exciting scientific challenges collegially.
Weapons scientists grew comfortable with this career choice in a context where they believed that nuclear weapons would not be used. What I call the central axiom of laboratory scientists is that nuclear weapons in the hands of advanced nations are a stabilizing force in the world that has prevented a third world war and kept the United States safe. While antinuclear activists see nuclear weapons as a genocidal threat looming over humankind, many weapons scientists told me they felt proud to have worked on weapons that had surely saved millions of lives by preventing World War III. One scientist, turning upside down the way antiwar activists look at the world, told me that he felt morally comfortable working on nuclear weapons, because they would never be used, but could not imagine working on, say, a conventional cruise missile or a land mine that would be used to kill people. When I asked weapons scientists if they could imagine a situation in which they would endorse using a nuclear weapon, quite a few said they could not. They said that if the United States was under nuclear attack, then the weapons they had designed would already have failed and it would be pointless to use them against others.
If we want to understand what makes it possible for scientists to work together on nuclear weapons, and to feel satisfaction in doing so, it is their shared commitment to this central axiom that nuclear deterrence really works, not a shared party political orientation and not a zombielike mass refusal to consider the ethics of their vocation. In fact, when I asked nuclear weapons scientists about the ethics of their work, I often got lengthy and forceful responses. I was told that if a democratically elected government has decided to stockpile nuclear weapons, it is ethical to give one’s fellow citizens what they have voted for; that in a world where other countries have nuclear weapons, it would be unethical to leave one’s own country undefended; that the weapons already exist and it might be an ethical obligation for those with the requisite skills to try to make them less likely to detonate by accident; and that weapons scientists are like designers of automobiles, who are not the ones responsible if drunk drivers get into accidents. Above all, I was told that the weapons were not classic weapons because they existed to deter war, not to fight it, and that the prevention of war was surely an ethical imperative. I did note that many scientists told me that they thought about the ethics of their work while their colleagues did not, so it was clear that much of this ethical thinking was being done alone.
For critics of nuclear weapons interested in entering into dialogue with weapons scientists with a view to changing their minds, it is surely more profitable to engage with the scientists’ own central axiom than it is to accuse them of ethical blindness. Quite apart from the fact that the ethical accusation does not take full account of the fact that weapons scientists do have ethical arguments in support of their work, accusing one’s political opponents of a lack of ethics, or of being in a state of denial, while undoubtedly a source of solidarity for the accusers, is inherently polarizing. Furthermore, recent revelations by the journalists Eric Schlosser, who recounts how a routine maintenance accident almost caused a hydrogen bomb to explode in Arkansas, and David Hoffman, who reveals a formerly unknown automated launch system in the former Soviet Union, surely invite everyone, pro- and antinuclear alike, to reconsider the safety of nuclear deterrence as it has been practiced, as does the chilling revelation in the documentary film The Man Who Saved the World that a handful of Soviet weapons control officers came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear attack on the United States in 1983 when their new early warning system generated a false alert that several American nuclear missiles were hurtling toward Soviet targets.2 Such revelations change our empirical understanding of the risks and benefits of nuclear weapons and surely put a new onus on those who foresee indefinite reliance on nuclear weapons for our safety to defend that vision.
I arrived at Livermore at a particular moment in time—just as the Cold War and the era of nuclear testing was drawing to a close. For one to better understand the place of nuclear weapons scientists in the world, and their understanding of it, it will help to sketch out how the world of nuclear weapons scientists has changed over sixty years. Adapting a schema put forward by the anthropologist Joseph Masco, who writes about Los Alamos, I divide those sixty years into three periods, which I call the era of onrush, the era of normalization, and the era of simulation.
The Era of Onrush, 1945–62
The United States initiated the nuclear age when it tested an atomic bomb, designed at Los Alamos, in July 1945, and dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb and an all-out nuclear arms race ensued. By 1952, thanks to the energetic advocacy of Edward Teller, the United States had established a second nuclear weapons laboratory in Livermore, and by 1955 the Soviets had a second nuclear weapons laboratory of their own at Chelyabinsk-70. In these years the pace of nuclear testing accelerated, climaxing in 1962 when the United States conducted almost one hundred nuclear tests and the Soviet Union seventy-eight. By that year the United States had accumulated an inventory of over 27,000 nuclear weapons while the Soviets had about 3,300.
This arms race was qualitative as well as quantitative, and it was in these years that the two superpower communities of weapons scientists had their great technical breakthroughs. They devised two different kinds of atomic bombs, one powered by the fissioning of uranium and the other by the fissioning of plutonium. They discovered how to use atomic bombs as triggers within hydrogen bombs that harnessed processes of nuclear fusion to generate much larger explosions. They also invented “boosted” weapons that, by means of capsules of tritium, used fusion processes to “boost” the yield of atomic bombs. And they figured out how to shrink nuclear weapons so they would fit atop intercontinental missiles that could traverse the globe in less than half an hour. These breakthroughs were achieved by some of the great names in the pantheon of nuclear weapons design. On the American side they included such figures as Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Stan Ulam, Ted Taylor, Richard Garwin, Hans Bethe, Seth Neddermeyer, Herb York, and Seymour Sack.
These technical developments took place within a framework of unrestrained competition with the Soviets. Except for a brief informal moratorium on nuclear testing at the end of the 1950s, there were no arms control treaties constraining the arms race between the superpowers. In the early 1950s General Curtis LeMay was urging a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, and nuclear war felt like a real possibility. As the U.S. government made citizens rehearse “duck and cover” routines, some weapons scientists built bomb shelters in anticipation of the worst. (One of the three homes in which I lived in Livermore, which had formerly belonged to the legendary weapons scientist Stirling Colgate, had a bomb shelter that, by the late 1980s, had been converted into a wine cellar. And a retired laboratory manager I interviewed told me about the bomb shelter he built with several other families, and about their extensive debates over whether or not to shoot intruders who had not contributed toward the shelter but tried to enter it in the event of a nuclear attack.)
Many scientists had a vivid sense of what a nuclear war would be like because they had personally witnessed explosions of nuclear bombs that were tested either at the Nevada Test Site or, if they were larger hydrogen bombs, in the Pacific. Here is a description of one of those tests given to me by an old-timer from Livermore (who, admittedly, is not typical, since he eventually decided he could no longer work on such weapons). The test he described was, at “a few kilotons,” quite small:
There is this incredible flash of light, and you always go back to thinking how Oppenheimer describes this incredible flash of light. He described it as brighter than a thousand suns. Just incredibly intense. And it’s very frightening. Just terrifying. Just absolutely terrifying. I was crouched over. I’m sure that I urinated in my pants at the time as a result . . . And then while you’re watching you see the difference in the index of refraction. You could actually see the shock wave traveling toward you. You know, there’s a difference in the index of refraction. And so you prepare to keep yourself from being blown over by this blast, because it’s a phenomenon. You just see this thing coming, and it just takes forever to come, and so you’re sort of crouched, and finally the thing gets to you, and the wind whips past you, and there’s a lot of dust and, yeah, your heart’s beating a lot faster and you just, you never forget it.
This first era in nuclear weapons science drew to a close with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In the midst of that crisis President John F. Kennedy privately estimated the odds of nuclear war between the superpowers as one in three. Such a close brush with Armageddon induced the two superpowers to channel and constrain—but not end—their nuclear competition in significant ways.
The Era of Normalization, 1963–91
In the last three decades of the Cold War the two superpowers negotiated a set of arms control treaties that regulated and channeled their nuclear rivalry while also normalizing it. These treaties stabilized deterrence, turning the arms race into an institutionalized competition that was as much symbolic as it was a race for actual military supremacy. These treaties included the SALT I and SALT II treaties, elaborate texts that limited the numbers of weapons the two nations could deploy in various categories. They also included the ABM Treaty of 1972, which foreclosed the possibility of a destabilizing race in antimissile technology, and the INF Treaty of 1987, which banned all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. If such treaties provided reassurance to weapons scientists that the arms race was not dangerously out of control, they did not much affect the laboratories’ livelihood: once the laboratories had designed and tested a weapon, the mass production of the weapon was passed on to other facilities, and it made little difference to Livermore and Los Alamos whether fifty or five hundred copies of the weapon were made.
What did matter to the weapons laboratories were restraints on nuclear testing—their bread and butter. In 1963, and then again in the late 1970s, American and Soviet negotiators discussed a complete ban on nuclear testing. In 1963 negotiators could not agree on an inspection regime for a test ban, and so they settled for the more modest Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned testing aboveground. (This treaty, negotiated in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, was partly a response to the protests of the late 1950s against the public health risk posed by radiation from atmospheric nuclear testing.) In 1974, the Partial Test Ban Treaty limited the permissible size of underground tests to 150 kilotons. By the late 1970s Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were again discussing a complete ban on nuclear testing. Harold Agnew, the director of Los Alamos at the time, has claimed that he talked Jimmy Carter out of such a ban during a meeting at the White House.3
In this era (toward the end of which I arrived to do my initial fieldwork) weapons design became routinized. The major design breakthroughs—the development of fusion and boosting and the miniaturization of warheads—lay in the past, and weapons designers were simply refining existing designs to improve their efficiency and safety. They were squeezing higher yields out of weapons with less plutonium, making the weapons a little lighter and smaller, developing designs that were less likely to detonate by accident, and substituting less toxic materials into the weapons. One university physicist who had a clearance and tracked the weapons labs told me that weapons design in these years required little in the way of brilliance. Showing a disdain for weapons science that was not uncommon among university physicists, he scoffed that it was like “polishing turds.”
Meanwhile the force of the weapons, now tested underground, had become more difficult for their designers to grasp. Here is an account of an underground test at the Nevada Test Site described for me by the bomb’s lead designer:
And everything went smooth, and it went off and they show a picture on the TV screens there of a helicopter hovering above the site and you could actually see dust rising. I mean it’s not like you’re watching the old atmospheric tests. I mean it’s pretty benign really. You can see a shock wave ripple across the earth. It’s a couple thousand feet under the ground. Nevertheless you see a ripple, and under the ground there’s still a fireball and that material gets molten. . . . That leads to the formation of the crater at the top. And so you’re not allowed out to the site until the crater is actually formed, and that can happen in 30 seconds, it can happen in 10 hours. Turned out with mine that it happened in about an hour, and so then we could drive out to the site. And that was really awesome, standing there with this thing that was at least 100 yards across, and see what I had been looking at on my computer screen for years show up in this gigantic movement of the earth. It was as close as I’ve been to personal contact with what the force of the nuclear weapon is like, because I’ve never been present at an atmospheric burst, nor has anybody else in my generation. . . . And then some of the data starts to come in and by the end of the day it was clear that it was going to be a success. It was a very complicated shot, so I knew that would be good for my career.
This account illustrates the ways in which, by this time, nuclear testing had become normalized. The test is described in terms of a routinized set of rules and the designer compares his own test, and the crater it creates, with his colleagues’. He also notes the implications for his career. We might also note that the bomb’s blast, experienced indirectly, is more abstract. The designer, who watches the test on TV, experiences the blast through signs of its displaced power: rising dust, a sinking crater, and scientific measurements. He sees no mushroom cloud, feels no heat, feels no blast. Instead, he struggles to grasp the relationship between the massive crater and calculations on his computer.
The Era of Simulation, 1992–?
The last U.S nuclear test was in 1992. After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell apart, the U.S. government was faced with mounting opposition to nuclear testing both within the U.S. Congress and in the international community. Believing that there was little need to develop new nuclear weapons in the absence of a rival superpower, and concerned that the nonproliferation regime was in danger without a concession from the nuclear powers of the world to the nonnuclear powers, the George H.W. Bush administration agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing, which became the basis for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of 1996, signed by President Bill Clinton (but still not ratified). In the meantime, the number of U.S. nuclear weapons fell from a Cold War high of over thirty thousand to a little under five thousand warheads deployed or in active reserve today (with several thousand more awaiting dismantlement). The current number of Russian nuclear weapons, falling from a Cold War peak of around forty thousand, is roughly comparable. Under the New START Treaty of 2010, the two countries have agreed to reduce their deployed arsenals further, to 1,550 weapons each.
When the CTBT was signed in 1996, many antinuclear activists dismissed it as a meaningless gesture that would not stop nuclear weapons scientists from continuing to modernize nuclear weapons. But this is certainly not how the CTBT was seen within the weapons labs. The lab directors fought hard (and lost) to protect nuclear testing, even if this meant acquiescing to new restrictions on the permissible size or number of nuclear tests. The weapons labs were concerned that, in a world without nuclear testing, the U.S. stockpile would forever be confined to designs whose reliability had been demonstrated by testing, with only minor modifications possible. The evolution of the weapons scientists’ dark art would be unnaturally frozen. They also wondered how disputes about the reliability of aging weapons would be resolved if, as a final resort, they could not test one to see if it worked. They worried that this was like asking a mechanic to certify that a car will work while forbidding turning the key in the ignition.
Laboratory managers also had other reasons for concern, grounded in the organizational culture of the labs. Traditionally, experienced designers had apprenticed novices by working with them on nuclear tests, and young designers were evaluated according to the skill they showed in designing components of test devices and, finally, in executing their own tests. The reader will recall that the weapons designer quoted earlier said that he felt relieved at the success of his nuclear test because it would be good for his career. Shorn of nuclear testing, the laboratories would have to find another way for older scientists to train their juniors and to evaluate their skill and judgment.
This other way was a program called “Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship,” a lavishly funded ensemble of simulation technologies distributed across the laboratories. These technologies included: Livermore’s $4.5 billion National Ignition Facility, the most powerful laser in the world, capable of transiently creating temperatures and pressures greater than those in the sun just a few hundred yards from a suburban housing estate; the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrotest Facility (DARHT) at Los Alamos, used to test the compression dynamics of atomic bombs from which the fissile material has been removed; the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories, an engineering laboratory supporting Livermore and Los Alamos, which uses magnetic fields to produce intense bursts of radiation; underground tests of small amounts of plutonium, at the Nevada Test Site, that stopped short of inducing a chain reaction; and supercomputers such as Livermore’s Sequoia computer, which was the fastest in the world when it was unveiled in 2012.
The experimental facilities are used to simulate component processes within an exploding nuclear weapon. Scientists then use the results from these experiments to refine the supercomputer codes that model and predict the performance of a nuclear weapon. At Los Alamos the processes that make up a nuclear explosion can be turned into visual representations that are projected onto the walls of a facility called the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), and scientists can stand “inside” a nuclear explosion, magnifying and rewinding its component elements. If the first generation of weapons scientists witnessed firsthand the ferocious power of nuclear explosions and, in some cases, built themselves underground shelters—man-made caves if you like—in which to shelter from nuclear war, today’s weapons designers have a more playful relationship to nuclear explosions, now sometimes rendered as psychedelia, and have designed a cave that allows them to step inside the explosion without harm.
Many weapons scientists have commented to me that, in the years of the Cold War, the pace of nuclear testing was such that new weapons were being designed and tested at breakneck speed, but the lab scientists were not allowed the time to probe the underlying science systematically. Although at some level knowledge and design are obviously connected, design was privileged over knowledge. In the era of simulation, the situation is reversed. Thanks to the stockpile stewardship program, weapons scientists have been able to refine their understanding of the physical processes underlying a nuclear explosion, but the design of the weapons themselves is broadly frozen. Anthropologist Joseph Masco writes that nuclear weapons scientists have become weapons gerontologists, seeking “to slow down time, to prevent nothing less than aging itself. . . . The arms race may be on hold in post–Cold War Los Alamos, but a new race against time is at the center of the Laboratory’s nuclear mission, a programmatic effort to endlessly defer a future of aged, and perhaps derelict, U.S. nuclear machines.” Weapons scientists worry about “the bomb itself as fragile body, exposed to the elements, aging, and increasingly infirm.”4
I have tried to suggest here that nuclear weapons scientists have a set of beliefs about the meaning of their work, and that these beliefs have shifted over time in keeping with wider geopolitical changes. In the first nuclear era, up until the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear weapons scientists operated in a context where nuclear weapons had recently been used in war, thus conferring on them a degree of normalcy; two new superpowers, animated by mutually hostile global ideologies, each trying to push into the other’s sphere, were competing without established rules of the road; one of those superpowers was, for part of this period, led by a dictator with the blood of millions of his own citizens on his hands; and the two superpowers’ nuclear stockpiles, unregulated by arms control agreements, were growing rapidly in size and capability. It should hardly surprise us that an older generation of weapons scientists, living in the aftermath of the bloodletting of World War II, would have, in this context, seen the weapons they designed as the best means to hand for deterring the rival superpower, even though this posed the risk of nuclear war.
The generation of weapons scientists that followed after the Cuban Missile Crisis worked in a context where the arms race had become normalized in terms of both work practices and the matrix of treaties in the international system that regulated the nuclear competition. These scientists were doing a job as much as they were responding to an urgent call. The weapons were still designed to deter the Soviets, but the Soviets were now becoming a comfortable enemy. Whether they were right or not, it seemed to these scientists, much more than to those who had trained them, that the weapons were unlikely to be used.
The latest generation of scientists labors in a strangely liminal situation where the Russians hover between enemy and friend and the purpose of nuclear weapons is increasingly self-referential. Rather than existing to deter an actual enemy, the weapons exist because, in a world where the weapons exist, they must be deterred. They exist because the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. The weapons are more about habit and less about mission. They exist because we cannot imagine a world without them, and yet we are no longer sure precisely what to do with them.
At the same time, in a way that I have characterized elsewhere as “orientalist,” Americans are quite sure that the weapons are safe in their hands but not in the hands of those Third World countries that, it is presumed, will not know how to store them properly, or will not protect them from hotheaded military officers, or will be overtaken by religious fundamentalists. Apparently no revelations about our own history of near misses with nuclear disaster, no newspaper stories about fanatics and death cults within America’s borders, can shake this sense of rationalist superiority. This dichotomy between advanced nations who can be trusted with nuclear weapons and Third World countries who cannot, legitimates the maintenance of the U.S. stockpile while anchoring the faith in rationality that undergirds the weapons scientists’ conviction that our weapons will never be used.
For the youngest generation of weapons scientists this sense that nuclear weapons are benign in our rational hands is further enabled by the increasing abstraction of the weapons. Los Alamos director Harold Agnew said that “he would require every world leader to witness an atomic blast every five years while standing in his underwear ‘so he feels the heat and understands just what he’s screwing around with . . . because we’re approaching an era where there aren’t any of us left that have ever seen a megaton bomb go off. And once you’ve seen one, it’s rather sobering.’”5 Instead, we have moved to an opposite world where even the weapons designers are imaginatively estranged from the force they have brought forth. The destructive power that can destroy a city with an object the size of a grapefruit is now a cascade of numbers in a computer, a swirl of colors in the CAVE, a short black-and-white movie clip with a quaintly anachronistic soundtrack. And, as Agnew knew, there is a danger in this.
Meanwhile the weapons themselves, these obdurate physical artifacts, age. The weapons scientists and the technicians periodically inspect them, open them up and replace parts they believe to be failing, perform upgrades, test the behavior of small samples of aging plutonium, fire up their lasers, and refine their supercomputer codes. And the weapons keep aging. So do the weapons scientists. Eventually there will be none left who have actually designed and tested a nuclear weapon. Weapons science will become increasingly like Latin in the university: a dead knowledge preserved by a priesthood poring over ancient texts. The weapons scientists themselves say that nuclear testing will never come back. They also say, with chagrin, that the weapons designs we are stuck with, the so-called “legacy designs,” were designed to push yield-to-weight ratios to the limit and to be replaced within a couple of decades as the design production lines of the labs kept moving. They are temperamental nuclear Lamborghinis designed for extreme performance, not the dull Hondas you would want if long-term reliability were your priority.
One day—we do not know when, but the day will surely come—a group of weapons scientists will grow to doubt the reliability of one of the designs in the stockpile. What will happen then? Every year the lab directors write a letter to the president certifying the labs’ continuing faith in the reliability of each weapons design. When President Bill Clinton signed the test ban treaty, he added a proviso that the United States reserved the right to resume testing if it lost technical confidence in its stockpile. Some activists worry that this makes us hostage to the weapons labs, giving them a private lever they can pull whenever they want to get testing back. Many weapons scientists have the opposite concern: they fear that the pressure not to resume testing would be so intense that the lab directors would continue to certify a design that was no longer deemed reliable by actual designers. But, in terms of the professional ethics of a scientist or engineer, keeping quiet while a superior asserts the reliability of an unreliable product is deeply problematic. Would they, some weapons scientists wonder, then have an obligation to step outside the chain of command, risking loss of their security clearance and even imprisonment, to share their concerns with members of Congress or with the media? Those scientists who told me many years ago that they thought it pointless to launch nuclear weapons if the United States were under nuclear attack might say that it does not matter if the weapons work; their only job is to deter. But they have many colleagues who will say that they cannot deter unless they are known to work.
But maybe nuclear weapons can be abolished before we reach this point. Most weapons scientists are skeptical that this would be politically feasible, or even desirable. Still, some years ago one highly regarded Livermore designer, now on the verge of retirement, told me that he had become a nuclear abolitionist. Wide-eyed, I asked how this could be possible. “Because a world without nuclear weapons is a world in which the U.S. would have uncontested military domination,” he announced with a grin.
As always, be careful what you wish for.