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.
