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We were a bunch of crazies, in a certain way, and it was an unusual time when crazy people were actually given a chance to do their stuff.
—Freeman Dyson
Eighteen years, thought Oppie. Time enough for a boy to become a man. Oh, the anniversary wasn’t technically until tomorrow, but that was only an error of 0.015 percent—good enough, as the saying went, for government work. But the coincidence of dates was too tasty a morsel for any newscaster to pass up: eighteen years between August 6, 1945, when Enola Gay had dropped the first Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima, and today, August 5, 1963, when, at last, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom became the initial signatories to the world’s first nuclear treaty—with, it was hoped, all other nations soon following suit. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was in Moscow right now, putting the eight letters of his name on the document, signing next to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Foreign Secretary Alexander Douglas-Home.
Oppie knew he should be elated. Since Day One, since Hiroshima burned, he had pushed and fought for nuclear-arms control, for rational men and women to pledge never again to use the weapons he’d made possible. And now, at last, it was here—a treaty! Oh, there was much, much more to be done before the world would be safe from nuclear bombs—as President Kennedy said in announcing the treaty, “According to the ancient Chinese proverb, ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’ And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”
Yes, he should be thrilled for this—this thing that the news-readers were variously referring to as the Limited Test-Ban Treaty and the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, all because its full title had more syllables than the American public would sit still for: Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water. Without a Q clearance, Oppie had gotten wind only of the title long before he’d had a chance, along with the rest of the general public, to see the full text, and he’d hoped for a loophole. Yes, tests would be outlawed, but practical uses might still be permitted. But, in fact, article one of the treaty explicitly dashed that hope: “Each of the Parties to this Treaty undertakes to prohibit, to prevent, and not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion, at any place under its jurisdiction or control in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”
And that, as the saying went, was that. Oppie thought again of his favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, who had been a visiting artist at the Institute for Advanced Study for thirteen months starting in October 1947; of Eliot’s master work, “The Hollow Men;” and of its concluding stanza:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
No, not with a single explosive bang, and not with the tens of thousands of nuclear blasts that would have propelled a spaceship full of refugees to humanity’s new home. With a trio of autographs, two in the Roman alphabet and one in Cyrillic, Project Orion had inadvertently been killed.
#
Although Princeton never got as hot as Los Alamos in summer, it attained much greater levels of humidity, and, as Oppie walked along the grounds of the Institute, he felt sweat beneath the brim of his hat.
He hadn’t been paying much attention to what was up ahead; his gaze was mostly downward at the earth, a prisoner of gravity whose escape tunnel, carved out a spoonful at a time, had collapsed. And so he was startled when suddenly Leo Szilard, in a three-piece blue suit and a jaunty fedora, was in front of him.
“Why so glum, Robert?”
“Oh, hi, Leo.” He told him about the impact the test-ban treaty would have on Orion.
Leo surprised him by not seeming concerned. The Hungarian had been wandering aimlessly about the grounds, as usual, and reversed his course, falling in next to Oppie and walking beside him. “Bah, it never would have flown anyway,” he said.
“Why not?” asked Oppie. “You saw the test yourself, and as far as I could tell the physics was elegant.”
“It never would have flown anyway,” Szilard repeated, “because you killed it years before it even got started.”
Oppie raised his eyebrows, astonished. “Me? How?”
“That closed-door Senate hearing, remember? Not long after Hiroshima, back in 1946.”
“What about it?”
“You were asked if three or four men could smuggle atomic bombs into New York and blow up the whole city, remember? And what did you say?”
“I said, sure, of course it could be done.”
“And when a senator asked you what instrument you’d use to detect an atomic bomb somewhere in a city, what did you say to that?”
Oppie smiled slightly. “A screwdriver, to pry open each and every suitcase.”
“There, you see!” crowed Szilard. “You were talking about tiny bombs thirteen years ago—and those were fission bombs, atomic bombs. But Orion would have used thousands—millions!—of tiny fusion super bombs. Tiny, delivered by a souped-up Coca-Cola machine! Von Braun isn’t going to lose an entire rocket, but the Orion people, keeping track of countless bombs? If a handful of them, or even one, ended up in the hands of a crazy individual or the next Hitler—ka-boom!”
Oppie felt his smile slip into a frown. Leo was right. In fact, after that Senate session, at Oppie’s recommendation, physicists Robert Hofstadter and Wolfgang Panofsky were commissioned to prepare a study, inevitably nicknamed the “Screwdriver Report,” enumerating methods to prevent such an act of atomic terrorism. At least up until when Oppie had lost his Q clearance, that report had still been classified—because, of course, it had shown there were no effective ways.
Szilard continued: “No matter how important Orion might have been to getting humans off earth in the next century, we never would have survived even to the end of this century if we started cranking out tiny supers. Someone, somewhere, somehow would have gotten his hands on them and that, my friend, would have been the end of us all.”
#
Dick Feynman picked up the magazine on the table in Oppie’s secretary’s office. It was the October 1963 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, just out. As it often did, the cover depicted the doomsday clock, showing how close humanity was to nuclear annihilation. The clock face was dusty rose this issue, a shade Dick knew well from Los Alamos sunsets. As always, there were no numerals on the face, and no minutes and only four hours were marked, each by a black circle: nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. But, unusually, there were three hands on the clock: a short black hour one pointing, as it always did, at midnight; a longer white minute hand aimed at the forty-eight spot—in other words, at twelve minutes to midnight; and also a black outline of a minute hand, filled with the same color as the rest of the clock, pointing at seven minutes to midnight.
Dick snorted slightly. You’d think the inventor of the Feynman diagrams, a system that could explicate any reaction in quantum electrodynamics, could figure out what such a simple graphic was trying to convey but, for the life of him, he couldn’t. He opened the cover and there was the explanation, beginning right on page two. The editorial began:
Conclusion of a limited test-ban treaty is an encouraging event. It strengthens the slim hope that mankind will escape destruction in a nuclear war, and justifies the moving of the Bulletin’s clock a few minutes back from the hour of doom.
The lord giveth, Feynman the atheist thought, and, as he knew all too well, the lord taketh away. Of course, the treaty was an important breakthrough, but it had killed Project Orion. In any event, the Bulletin’s graphic designer could certainly take a lesson from Feynman diagrams. A simple arrowhead going counter-clockwise from the outlined minute hand to the solid white one would have made the intended meaning clear: that we’d backed off five more minutes from midnight.
Apparently, the clock had last been reset, with its hands positioned at seven to midnight, in 1960. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board met only twice a year to assess whether fiddling with the minute hand was appropriate, and so the Cuban Missile Crisis of a year ago, for all that the hand probably should have jumped to one minute before doom, began and ended in its entirety between two board meetings and therefore had had no effect on the clock.
Dick hated serving on committees but the one that set the clock intrigued him. What an interesting notion: that we didn’t know what time it is until we had a group consensus. And what of the dissenters? Just as—who was it now? That guy who’d sent him to the dictionary to look up “escutcheon.” Ward Evans, that was it: just as Ward Evans had dissented at Oppenheimer’s security-board show trial those many years ago, what if the majority of the Bulletin’s committee voted for, say, three minutes to midnight, but the remainder felt two minutes was the more appropriate setting?
It was somewhat like the observation phenomenon in quantum physics—the cat alive and dead until someone checked on the poor beast’s health—but, instead of the first observer creating a reality all subsequent ones were stuck with, the minority view meant that, although for most it was this time, for some it could instead be that time, and—
And, Jesus H. Christ, where the H doubtless stood for Heisenberg, that was it! That was exactly what was needed: an experiment, a device, an instrument, a machine that collapsed not into one reality but into two, being both this and that, or, more precisely, more importantly, more powerfully, being both now and then, simultaneously the present and the past.
A buzzer sounded from Verna Hobson’s black phone and she picked up the handset. When she’d put it down again, she turned to Feynman and said, “Dr. Oppenheimer will see you now.”
Dick got to his feet but headed not toward the inner door that led to the director’s office but to the one that led out into the ground floor of Fuld Hall. “No,” said Feynman, “he’ll see me then!” And he sprinted into the corridor and up the stairs, heading for Kurt Gödel’s office.