expected, producing a fireball more than three have to test them to be sure that they will explode. miles across. But this favors potential adversaries as much as it

“I had seen up until that time maybe 50 shots at favors us. The danger of not testing nuclear weapons least, atmospheric shots out at the test site, so I is that we no longer know who has what. wasn’t really startled,” said Prickett, describing how, “I had a dream last night, about a new form of with Navy Capt. George Malumphy, he maneuvered nuclear weapon, and I’m not telling anybody what a remote-controlled merchant ship into the path of this is, because I’m really scared of it,” Taylor told the fallout to test an automatic wash-down system me in 1999. “I have tried, I thought successfully, to being developed for decontamination of surface craft. hold on to a vow of just not thinking about new types

“I knew it was going to be big, but Malumphy and I of nuclear weapons any more. And what’s happened, were at least 30 miles from ground zero. And so when to put it simply, is that it has gone from my conscious the order came on for countdown, we put on our dark to my unconscious, and it’s emerging as a dream; I goggles. And sure enough it went off, and it was a full cannot shut it off. I woke up at 2 a.m. and went back two minutes anyway before we took off our goggles, to bed at about 6 o’clock, and wound up filling up a and then it was so awesome that all Malumphy could page with notes. It makes me think of the prototypical say was, ‘My God, my God, my God!’” example of what directed energy can do, making

Prickett, who died in 2004, wants us to remember the transition from a pile of high explosive to a gun, what he could not forget. “I wish people could as the Chinese did, after they invented it. What I am understand what would happen if one of these megatons ever got over to these cities. I wish to hell these people could see something like that.

You’re going to have to keep indoctrinating people to what these things are. Or they will forget.”

On May 28, 1998, I was spending the day with Ted Taylor when news came in that Pakistan had conducted a series of nuclear tests. I expected a somber response. But Taylor was unable to conceal the old excitement: “Aha! It worked!” Over dinner, he kept drifting away from the conversation and coming back with some new insight, based on the sketchy news reports that had come in during the day, as to what his Pakistani colleagues had tested, and what they might do next.

Pakistan wanted to show the world (and India) that they had joined the nuclear club. Before the countdown, they disconnected all seismographs, not to conceal a successful test but to conceal their failure in the event the devices fizzled out.

The latest advance in the United States nuclear arsenal is the stockpile stewardship program, which Further reading: Curve of Blinding Energy by claims to predict, purely from computer simula- John McPhee, and Project Orion by George Dyson. tions and non-nuclear tests, whether our stockpile weapons will work or not. The next step in this arms race is a new generation of weapons whose designs are so simple, and so completely modeled using powerful computer simulations, that we do not

“I wish to hell these people could see something like

that. You’re going to have to keep indoctrinating

people to what these things are. Or they will forget.”

 

afraid is in the offing is people figuring out how to make a transition that’s as spectacular as trying to kill a deer at 200 yards with a pile of high explosive, or by shooting at it.”

Taylor had the time of his life designing bombs, and spent the remainder of it trying to get the madness of threatening to use them stopped. His final words to me: “I am searching for the truth as long as I can.”

We are now relinquishing control of our nuclear arsenal, for the first time, to a generation that has never seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. There are no more Ted Taylors. The new generation of nuclear weaponeers grew up with video games, but was not allowed to have chemistry sets. Are we any safer as a result?

 

George Dyson, a kayak designer and historian of technology, is also the author of Baidarka and Darwin Among the Machines.