Proposed Orion vehicle parameters, late 1958 or early 1959.
Theodore B. Taylor was born in Mexico City, to American parents, in 1925. His mother, the daughter of Congregational missionaries, obtained a Ph.D. in Mexican literature and his father was general secretary of the YMCA. When Charles Lindbergh landed in Mexico City in 1927, two-year-old Ted, still in his father's arms, was among the delegation who assembled at the airfield, foreshadowing Lindbergh's support for Project Orion as a member of the Air Force's Space Advisory Committee in 1961. Few families owe as much to the Old Testament as Ted's. "My grandfather oversaw the building of a Congregational church in the middle of Guadalajara, which is still there," Ted explains. "In the midst of delivering a sermon in this small church in Guadalajara, a Mexican came running down the aisle with a big long knife and lunged at him at the pulpit. And he just automatically held his big Bible up against his chest, and the knife penetrated the Bible from Genesis to Leviticus, and stopped."
Ted attended the American School in Mexico City until his graduation at age fifteen in 1941. It was outside of school that his future avocation became known. "I was attracted to explosions from the very beginning," he says. "I was given a chemistry set when I was seven or eight and that rapidly turned into a laboratory for making explosives, with one restriction set down by my mother: never, never under any circumstances was I allowed to make nitroglycerine. So I didn't. Just picric acid and nitrogen iodide and so on. I was fascinated by explosions. I still am. I love to watch them and be responsible for them and set them off. Without any attraction to the damage. It's the act of the exploding, putting a little sack full of potassium chlorate and sulfur on a streetcar track in Mexico City. And no one got hurt." Ted's destiny as the leader of Project Orion was already at work. "I hated to just fiddle around," he remembers. "I wanted to go to extremes. Even one cherry bomb under a fifty-gallon drum, it goes up about fifteen feet."
Ted showed no particular interest in physics, but an intuitive grasp of elastic scattering, chain reactions, and reflected shock waves was sharpened by the billiards he played after school. With three or four friends who found themselves "at loose ends," he started hanging out at a nearby chess-and-billiards parlor after classes were dismissed at one in the afternoon. "There were other places, not so close to the school, where the billiard balls were really spherical and the tables were very heavy and the balls would bounce very nicely," says Ted. "We found that there were various degrees of accuracy with which you could call a shot depending on how heavy and flat and rigid the table was."
Finished with high school in Mexico City but too young for college in the United States, Ted was sent to Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for a year. A class taught by Mr. Little sparked his interest in physics. "I spent all my time on Millikan's oil drop experiment, trying to find ways to reduce die number of electrons that were isolated in each droplet, trying to get it down close to one. I got fascinated with that and didn't do anything else," recalls Ted, who received a D.
In 1942, after a year at Exeter, Ted enrolled at Caltech, joining the Navy V-12 program that obligated students to a postgraduate commission after having their way paid through school. "I flipped a coin and one side was Army and one side was Navy, and it turned up Navy," he says. "If it had been Army I would have been at the front in six months." He received his degree in physics in 1945 and was at midshipman's school in Fort Schuyler, New York, in August when reports of Hiroshima came in. "When I heard the news I was totally shocked. I had no intimations of anything remotely like the Manhattan Project, even though I was a physicist." His fellow midshipmen looked to Ted for an explanation of the atomic bomb. "I couldn't even make up anything credible. Oliver Selfridge, hardly a model midshipman but a very bright mathematician from MIT, had picked up some information about nuclear fission before it was covered by the Manhattan Project's cloak of secrecy, and instantly became our battalion's expert on the awesome events."[71]
Ted wrote to his mother that same afternoon. "I said that I didn't know what was going to happen to me, but I did know one thing, and that was that I would never work on nuclear weapons. Four years later I was not only working on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, but doing so with considerable enthusiasm. It turned out I was really good at it." With the war over and his year of sea duty fulfilled, Ted resigned from the Navy in June 1946, returning home to Mexico City before enrolling in the physics department at UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. With two fellow graduate students, he drafted a proposal for a worldwide strike of nuclear physicists against nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer, sensing danger, persuaded him to destroy the document and advised him never to mention it again.
Ted collaborated with Robert Serber, coauthoring a paper on nuclear structure and securing a part-time job at the Radiation Laboratory in the Berkeley hills. He married Caro Arnim, started a family, and all was going well, until he flunked his preliminary exams—twice. This disqualified him as a candidate for a Ph.D. "I just wasn't interested in mechanics and heat, and the modern physics thing I really fouled up." No one in the physics department could bend the university's rules. "Dreams of settling down with Caro and some children to teach physics in some agreeable place vanished. I thought I had no qualifications to do anything else. Our future looked grim."[72] Robert Serber, who had given the first lectures on how to build an atomic bomb—issued (secretly) in April of 1943 as Los Alamos Laboratory Document No. 1, The Los Alamos Primer—contacted Carson Mark at Los Alamos and recommended Taylor for a job. In August of 1949 Ted was offered a position, pending security clearance, to work on "problems in neutron diffusion theory" in the Theoretical Division at a salary of $375 a month. "I didn't know whether I was going to be working on nuclear weapons, and didn't ask."[73]
Ted, Caro, and four-month-old Clare drove their 1941 Buick to Los Alamos in November of 1949. "Within twenty-four hours of our arrival at Los Alamos I was deeply immersed in the nuclear weapons program. I was doing exactly what I had vowed four years earlier I would never do."[74] Although T-Division was in high gear attempting to build the Super, Carson Mark assigned Ted to work under Jack Smith, a former student of Hans Bcthe's who was investigating implosion assemblies for conventional fission bombs. "Within a week I was hooked on understanding what went on at these enormously high energy densities, clear off any human scale. I was getting stacks of IBM printouts of implosion systems and looking at them, what columns are pressures, what were densities, and so on. I found myself right off the bat asking questions: 'Why do we do this? Why do we do that? Why do we just take a full stockpile bomb out to Eniwetok—we didn't have the Nevada test site yet—and always test the whole thing? Why don't we find out a lot more, about what's going on in the middle particularly, where there are uncertainties in how well things converge?' By January of 1950 I had done a lot of calculations that people had not done before, with relatively small amounts of plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the cores."
While others were consumed with developing the Super, Ted devoted his attention to fission bombs. Within four years Ted's designs included the smallest, the largest, and the most efficient fission devices ever exploded. At least one of these records still stands. This was the Super Oralloy Bomb (SOB), which yielded 500 kilotons in the Ivy King test at Eniwetok on November 15, 1952. The SOB went into production as the Mark 18 stockpile warhead of which about ninety were eventually deployed. Ted's goal had been to produce a fission weapon so powerful that there would be no need to deploy the hydrogen bomb. He went to the Pentagon for two weeks in November 1950, spending much of the time "drawing circles on photographs, of Baikul and Moscow and so on, looking to see what a 500-kiloton fission bomb would do, and always being disappointed when it didn't wipe out everything." Thirty-six years later he would find himself in Red Square, thinking back to placing the sharp point of a compass exactly where I was now standing, and drawing circles corresponding to distances at which moderate and severe damage would result from our dropping a 500-kiloton bomb several thousand feet above that point." By this time Ted was working to dismantle the stockpile he had helped design. "I suddenly came back to the present, looked around, saw perhaps a couple of thousand happy-looking people, including several wedding parties, walking about enjoying the sights. There came over me an overpowering sense of the insanity of what I was doing more than thirty-six years ago."[75]
In 1950 Ted's fascination was unrestrained. "I had complete freedom to work on any new weapon concept I chose," he says.[76] "It's an exhilarating experience to look at what's going on theoretically, on paper, inside something the size of a baseball that has the same amount of energy as a pile of high explosive as big as the White House—all that in a little handful. I went crazy over that. A big high. The highs needed fixes. And we got those twice a year easily. The fix was a combination of seeing one of these things go off—'Aha! It worked!'—and seeing how the next one might be even more spectacular."
Little bureaucracy stood in the way. "In my seven years at the laboratory I never had to participate in the writing of a single proposal," says Ted.[77] "In Los Alamos in the '50s somebody would get an idea and go down the hall and get Preston Hammer to put it on the computer and six weeks later you get printouts and find out whether the guess was right. If the results came out interesting you go up and talk to Carson Mark and he often would find some flaw. Or he'd say something like 'Well, I'll be damned' and then you'd cut across the overpass to the middle of the laboratory, and find MacDougall, the head of the explosives division, and he'd say, 'That sounds great! We'll put it on the fission committee agenda.' A week, two weeks later we'd have a fission-weapon committee meeting, and sometimes flaws turned up there. When they didn't, OK, we'll put it on the list. List for what? List for testing, either in Nevada or out in Eniwetok, quite often in less than a year from the initial concept to the successful test." There was some official paperwork, but it was not much. "The laboratory's director, Norris Bradbury, had to get authorization from Washington for each test, but I had the impression this was usually pro forma. He would in effect say 'Here is something new we have come up with. Do you want it?' The answer almost invariably was 'You bet!' "[78]
The race for smaller and more clever bomb designs was not only against the Soviets, but between the two competing weapons labs in the United States. "Ted and I were friendly competitors while he was at Los Alamos," says Morris (Moe) Scharff, a weapons physicist who joined Ted at General Atomic in 1959 to work on Orion when "there just wasn't as much doing, as much excitement, at Livermore" during the temporary bomb-test moratorium of 1958-1961. "I had been Livermore's Ted Taylor," he explains. "They would try to build smaller and better bombs and we would try to build even smaller and even better ones." Most of them worked. In contrast to the string of failures in rocketry, there were no duds until the United States' eighteenth nuclear test. Ted remembers witnessing only one failure, Redwing Yuma at Eniwetok in 1956, that "scarcely blew off the top of the supporting tower, and drew some cheers from those of us at Los Alamos because it had been designed at Livermore."[79]
By the early 1950s, says Freeman, "a large part of Los Alamos was working on one or another of Ted's ideas. At this point it became rather embarrassing that he still was in a junior position and without any degree."[80] In 1953 Ted was given paid leave to obtain a Ph.D. from Hans Bethe at Cornell. Ted's designs continued to be built and tested while he was gone. He remembers it being "unbearably exciting," as a graduate student, to receive an occasional cryptic phone call from Carson Mark: "Well, how did the wasp go?—Just great!" In 1954 Ted submitted his thesis, on an optical model of nuclei, and underwent his final oral exam. After the exam, he was asked to leave the room and return in an hour, when mathematician Mark Kac, one-third of his committee, announced, "We'll tell you right now before you decide to jump out the window that you passed." Bethe commented, diplomatically, that Ted's performance was not of the quality that his thesis had led them to expect.
With Ph.D. in hand, the Taylors, now with three children, returned to Los Alamos in May of 1954. Ted resumed designing bombs. "A great part of the small-bomb development of the last five years was directly due to Ted," Freeman acknowledged in 1958.[81] Ted's designs were not only smaller but also more powerful. He helped develop the concept of boosting, now a standard feature in all United States stockpile fission-weapon designs. Adding a few grams of deuterium and tritium to the core of a fission weapon—in effect a small fusion spark plug—could release a burst of high-energy neutrons at just the right instant, giving a spectacular boost in efficiency and yield. The mere existence of boosting was kept secret until 1972, and the fact that gaseous deuterium and tritium is utilized was declassified only in 1983. Ted attributes the idea to the encouragement he received from Carson Mark. "I was playing around with the middle of implosions, the last millimeter or two, and Carson said, 'Keep your eyes open for high temperatures.' Because there's always a possibility that you could put some deuterium inside, and get neutrons out. Which had all kinds of implications."
Greenhouse Item, yielding 45.5 kilotons at Eniwetok on May 24, 1951, was the first proof of the boosting principle, following Greenhouse George on May 8, whose 225-kiloton yield was the first thermonuclear fusion on a measurable scale. Greenhouse Dog, yielding 81 kilotons on April 7, 1951, in a mock-up of a radiation implosion, was the first test in the series and the first test witnessed firsthand by Ted—from fifteen miles away. "The explosion was every bit as awesome as I had expected—roughly five times as big as the one that destroyed Hiroshima. The countdown started close to dawn... one minute... thirty seconds (put on your dark goggles)... fifteen... four, three, two, one: instant light, almost blinding through the goggles, and heat that persisted for a time that seemed interminable. I was sure I was getting instant sun-bum, and the back of my neck felt hot from heat reflected off the beach house behind us. Goggles came off after a few seconds. The fireball was still glowing like a setting sun over a clear horizon, a purple and brown cloud rising so fast that in less than a minute we had to crane our necks to see the top. I had forgotten about the shock wave, a surprisingly sharp, loud crack that broke several martini glasses on the shelf of the beach house bar. The sight was beautiful at first, in an awesome way, then turned ugly and seemed threatening as the gray-brown cloud spread and began drifting toward us. I tried hard to shake off the feelings of exhilaration, and think about the deeper meanings of all this, without success. It was just plain thrilling."[82] The test produced some severe fallout over the support facilities, but, says Ted, "the only formal protective action I remember about the incident was cancellation of the outdoor movie that night."
In 1958, few within the nuclear or military establishment would have taken Project Orion seriously if not for Ted Taylor's track record at designing very small bombs. Plutonium and highly enriched uranium were far too expensive and strategically important to consider using thousands of bombs' worth for voyages in space. "We didn't have an infinite amount of plutonium," says Freeman. "Now of course we do." According to Ted, the amount of plutonium needed to produce a useful explosion was far less than anyone had thought. The same curiosity that drove Ted to design the SOB also drove him to think about really, really small atomic bombs. "It was curiosity rather than some talent I had for calculating. It was wondering, 'What's the limit?' I wanted a panoramic view." Ted's interest in low-yield explosions was not because he perceived a need for them—he had no inkling of Orion at that time—but because you could learn more by exploring the delicate balances involved. "I said, why don't we build things with much less plutonium in there and see what's going on in the middle with much more sensitivity. We can do things at around a kiloton instead of what was then the predicted yield of a stockpile bomb, 80 kilotons—it was that for years. To make small yields with big implosion assemblies, that got fascinating. I was focusing my attention on the inner 50 grams, 100 grams, kilogram, etc., pushing things as far as one could go, never mind that you wind up in some cases with shells less than a millimeter thick. Who's going to make those? As it turned out it was very worthwhile to find some way to make those."
"Pursuing these limits became an obsession," Ted admitted in 1986. "What is the absolute lower limit to the total weight of a complete fission explosive? What is the smallest amount of plutonium or uranium 235 that can be made to explode? What is the smallest possible diameter of a nuclear weapon that could be fired out of a gun?"[83] The answers were surprising. "I was narrowing my focus, getting the quantities of plutonium that one could use to make nuclear explosions, down into less than a kilogram. Quite a bit less." This is golf hall, not baseball, size. When John McPhee profiled Ted and his warnings about nuclear terrorism for The New Yorker in 1973, Ted could reveal much less than can be revealed today. At that time the smallest known warhead was the Davy Crockett, something less than 12 inches in diameter with a weight of about 60 pounds. McPhee credited Ted with its design, although Ted had been working on much smaller bombs. "I tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce, and it was a lot smaller than Davy Crockett, but it was never built in those years," says Ted. "It certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about six inches in diameter."
Whether anyone wanted nuclear field artillery, nuclear demolition charges, or a nuclear-equipped infantry was not a concern of Ted's—though he did collaborate, with George Gamow, on an informal study titled "What the World Needs Is a Good Two-Kiloton Bomb." The prospect of small, tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons was greeted with enthusiasm by the AEC and the Pentagon, and, says Ted, "less than three years later, after astonishingly creative actions by a variety of groups of people at Los Alamos, Gamow's original goals had been considerably surpassed."[84] When Orion raised the possibility of using low-yield bombs for constructive purposes, it was a long-awaited opportunity for Ted. "With that sort of background, the idea of thousands of explosions, up close and personal, was extremely attractive," he says.
Proposed
Orion vehicle parameters,
late 1958 or early 1959.
"Ted Taylor spent a lot of time thinking about small-yield nuclear weapons," recalls his Los Alamos colleague Harris Mayer. " 'What's the smallest bomb we can make?' And he knew a great deal about these and how to make them. He also knew all about the economics of the nuclear bomb business at the time. As to having one thousand bombs, nobody else would think of that, but Ted Taylor would say, 'Why stop at a thousand bombs? Make them with very small amounts of fissile material. Make them very intelligently so you could get reasonable yield out of very small amounts.' So he's talking about something in which one thousand bombs wasn't too much drain on a stockpile."
"One of the big questions, a large part of the whole project which I cannot talk about freely, is just how much plutonium you need," Freeman explains. "One of the things that made Orion very attractive is the trade-off between plutonium and high explosive. In the ordinary bombs we use for the stockpile, all kinds, it doesn't matter whether they are high yield or low yield, the military likes minimum weight and minimum volume, so you tend to use a rather small amount of high explosive because high explosive quickly becomes the dominating mass. For what we wanted to do it was an advantage to have a huge amount of high explosive because that would also absorb neutrons and be the shielding for the ship. Then you need a lot less plutonium. And the question how much less I cannot discuss. The whole economy of the thing depended on that. These were all very nonstandard bombs, which meant nobody believed us; the numbers clearly didn't add up if you took the standard kind of bombs. This is also an interesting question from the point of view of the terrorist bomb problem. If you have a bunch of people wanting to blow up the World Trade Center or something, they might have no difficulty getting large amounts of high explosive. So it is important not to declassify all that stuff."
Ted was the first to raise the alarm. "The use of small numbers of covertly delivered nuclear explosives by groups of people that are not clearly identified with a national government is more probable, in the near future, than the open use of nuclear weapons by a nation for military purposes," he warned in 1966. Retaliation offered no deterrent to foreign subnational groups, or to "an extremist group of U.S. citizens who believe they are trying to save the U.S."[85] Sent by the AEC on a tour of nuclear facilities to evaluate nonproliferation safeguards, he had been profoundly shocked. "At Nuclear Fuel Services' commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in West Valley, New York," he reported, "several containers with separated plutonium nitrate solution, enough in the aggregate for at least two atomic bombs, were in a small shack a few feet from an ordinary chain-link fence and more than 100 yards from the plant entrance, where the 'guard' had no weapon of any kind."[86] The same tenacious imagination that drove Ted's hopes for using bombs in space would later drive his fears about their falling into the wrong hands on the ground.
Ted met Freeman Dyson for the first time when he arrived at Cornell in January 1953, where Freeman had been teaching since 1951. Freeman and Ted, both without Ph.D.s, possessed different yet complementary skills. When they joined forces, first on TRIGA and then on Orion, it had the effect of bringing two subcritical masses together and forming a critical assembly that suddenly ignites. "The year that Freeman spent at La Jolla was the happiest in his life," says Harris Mayer. "This was a confluence of people and time and spirit. And Ted Taylor was the essential part of that. Freeman was almost in love with Ted Taylor. Ted had a fantastic imagination. So did Freeman. But Ted had more of an instinct than Freeman for how mechanical things worked. Freeman appreciated that. He saw in Ted not only imagination but this sort of a feeling for practical things."
"Ted Taylor had a unique approach," explains Moe Scharff. "It wasn't the usual moving ahead by small consecutive steps. He'd look for the ideal way of doing something. Then he would figure out how nature would constrain things, and back off just a little. And then he'd push for that result, even if it meant taking a huge step."