The result of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos’s early research was a bomb the scientists dubbed the Gadget. No one knew for sure whether— or exactly how— it would work. We still don’t understand exactly how it or any of the thousands of other bombs we’ve since made function. The only thing that mattered, back then, was that they worked.
The day of its test, an event dubbed Trinity, many of the lab’s scientists trekked out to the site, near the New Mexico town of Alamogordo, to watch their creation (hopefully) destroy itself. Colorful tales of the day abound: Physicist Edward Teller passed around suntan lotion, anticipating the radiation they’d receive like a day at the beach. Enrico Fermi got ready to drop scraps of paper to estimate the strength of the blast wave, as they flew away on the wind. A broadcast of the countdown crossed frequencies with a local radio station, and the Nutcracker suite superimposed itself over the Trinity test’s “three . . . two . . . one.”
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When the clock reached zero, the orchestra played on. But at the Trinity test site, a fireball erupted, blinding the researchers in the first microseconds. The closest observers were just six miles away. A column of smoke soon rose into a roiling mushroom cloud. The cloud, levitating higher and higher, seemed to suck up the earth itself, siphoning resources as it ascended toward heaven. It was purple, blue, red, violet. Violent. Glowing. Thundering. Awesome. Terrifying.
People saw the effects of the blast in three states. Those living close by wondered whether this was some kind of apocalypse. The army informed them— lying— that it was just an accidental explosion at a munitions storage area.
But the residents weren’t wrong in their assessment. As chemist George Kistiakowsky said after witnessing Trinity, “I am sure that at the end of the world— in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence— the last man will see what we saw!”
The subatomic particles ruling the bomb follow the laws of quantum mechanics, which in popular, if slightly incorrect, understanding means that they are uncertain: in multiple places at once, doing multiple things, only settling into one state when you look at them directly— like Schrödinger’s cat, a being both alive and dead.
The scientists, too, occupied several states simultaneously that day, a mix of feelings sluicing through their bodies when the Gadget erupted as intended: Pride. Fear. Regret. Joy. Anticipation.
“Countdown”
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Most of all, power. They had taken a theoretical, abstract science and alchemized it into something devastatingly concrete. In the minds of some of the researchers, this ultimate weapon would bring with it ultimate peace, because it was too horrible to ever use (after, of course, their country used it twice), especially if you knew a similar weapon could be deployed against you in response. That’s part of the basic ideology of deterrence: we have the weapons so that no one will horribly attack us, or our allies, because they know we could attack horribly back. And other countries’ weapons keep us from the temptation to horribly attack them. Nuclear weapons, then, keep large- scale wars from breaking out.
Similar deterrent ideals echo like a hymnal chorus, in eerily similar language, from scientists and engineers across LANL and the other weapons labs, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. Workers at these sites sometimes clutch the words like verbal talismans: “always, never,” “a credible deterrent.” But deterrence, like any other philosophy, is a belief, and one that is impossible to test, because you cannot wind back the doomsday clock and see how various conflicts and dynamics would have played out if fission and fusion had remained scientifically opaque.
For the record, the inventor of dynamite also thought its existence would halt huge conflict, for similar reasons. And yet here these Manhattan scientists were, decades later, devising something much worse, repeating history as humans seem wired to do.
Those scientists have said a lot of quotable things about Trinity in the decades since the test. But in the actual aftermath of the detonation, most, according to Oppenheimer, were silent. Oppenheimer himself thought, famously, of the line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” a quote from Hindu scripture.
Less poetic and more to the point was Kenneth Bainbridge, who intoned, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
For almost two decades following Trinity, the spot was marked by a wooden sign labeled “Zero.” As in Ground Zero. As if time and space started here.
If you watch nuclear explosions in archival videos today, including footage from Trinity, it’s easy to understand how those mid-century scientists could feel their work was that cosmically significant and how they could be both completely undone by seeing such an explosion and obsessed with the idea of it. How they could love it while hating it. These weapons are the raw power of the universe— harnessed, targeted, let loose. They are also beautiful. Staring as the seconds pass, you may feel like you do when standing on the edge of a cliff: A still, small impulse urges you to jump. You’re not depressed, and you’re not actually going to jump, just like you don’t wish for nuclear war. You’re simply drawn to the abyss, precisely because of its abyssal nature. That’s the pull of a nuclear detonation.
Three weeks after the Trinity test, the United States dropped a replica of the Gadget on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, a few days after dropping a different type of nuclear weapon on Hiroshima. The number of casualties is still unknown, but the high- end estimate holds that around 210,000 people died as a result of both explosions. Some were simply vaporized.
Of the bombing of Hiroshima, the White House’s press release said, “We have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.”
Almost eighty years later, NNSA’s national laboratories are still engaged in a forever-war version of that same battle: the fight for nuclear supremacy. Yesterday’s United States wanted to have the first nuclear weapon, and today’s desires the best radioactive arsenal on earth. Then, the thinking goes, the country can most effectively scare other states with their own arsenals— and those without— away from conflict. The scaring doesn’t work, though, unless the other side believes you’d actually pull the trigger. Which functionally means you must be willing to do just that— to “win” if you must, even though this is contrary to Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan’s famous joint statement: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Nuclear war has crept closer to the front of the public mind lately. But the American arsenal has never left the minds of many officials, who worry about the expansion and modernization of China’s and Russia’s weapons, about Russia’s aggression and unpredictability, about Iran and its alliances, about North Korea’s roguishness, about terrorists with dirty bombs, and about the geriatric nature of this country’s own radioactive arsenal. The cost of giving the US nuclear complex a makeover would be around $1.7 trillion over thirty years, according to a 2017 projection from the Congressional Budget Office. There will be a newly designed weapon and alterations and upgraded components for old ones. The Cold War objects will be shined up and readied for a journey through the twenty- first century. Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site, an NNSA facility in South Carolina, will soon restart production of plutonium “pits”— hollow spheres of radioactive metal that form the heart of nuclear weapons.
The country hasn’t made new plutonium pits on a large scale since the late 1980s.
Some say those developments are necessary, even actively peace promoting, because they uphold deterrence: the weapons as they exist now—aged— aren’t as credible or reliable as they could be, so updating and upgrading them may forestall war by more effectively keeping others at bay. Some, meanwhile, say the modernization program and pit production are hawkish and could foment a never- ending arms race.
The truth is probably a bit of both, like Schrödinger’s cat.
Arguably the most important part of nuclear weapons, plutonium pits are hollow, eerily silver spheres made of the actinide element 94. They look like some indecipherable artifact from an ancient alien civilization—the kind that tries, and fails, to communicate a message to humanity in an action movie. Their name calls to mind the hard middle of a fruit or a dark hole.
In a bomb, a conventional explosive surrounds the pit. That combustible material goes boom, squeezing the radioactive material together. When the atoms get tight enough, they start to split, initiating fission.
With the right conditions, the nuclear reaction sustains itself. And when it gets amped up enough— as it does in modern thermonuclear weapons—that triggers more fission and a lot of fusion, or the combining of atoms, in a secondary part of the bomb. There are many more details, but that’s the gist of their inner workings.
The last place the United States made plutonium pits at any sort of scale was the Rocky Flats production plant in Colorado. Situated between Denver and Boulder, today it’s known as the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and it boasts a wide-open view of both the pancake plains and the saw-toothed Rockies. If you want, you can hike around ten miles of trails on its 5,237 acres. You can also ride a horse or a bike. And in your meanderings, you’ll almost certainly see wildlife: mule deer, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, porcupines, hawks, elk, suburbanites in outfits entirely produced by Patagonia. But it took a lot of rehabilitation to bring that friendly outdoor space into being, because the production plant left a serious mark on the land while making those Cold War pits.
During the Cold War, the Rocky Flats Plant, operated by a contractor called Rockwell, whipped up between one and two thousand pits per year. It was thusly productive, until June 6, 1989. On that fateful day, plainclothes FBI agents, whose agency helps enforce some environmental laws, showed up and claimed they wanted to talk to the leadership about an ecoterrorist threat— a believable scenario, given the widespread protesting and activist trespassing by a population of activists who included the likes of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker. But no threat actually existed that day: the agents were simply stalling so that dozens of vehicles and more than seventy armed agents could get to Rocky Flats. As soon as they arrived, the FBI agents told the facility officials why they were really there: to investigate rampant environmental violations. Rockwell later pleaded guilty to charges stemming from violations of the federal Clean Water Act and the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act.
Gotcha.
Soon enough, the feds shut Rocky Flats down and transformed it into a Superfund site. Ten years and $7 billion later, the environmental restoration was finished. And in 2018, the land became the somewhat controversial haven for hikers and hawks that it is today.
Since the site’s shutdown, the United States has been missing what Rocky Flats once provided: no other place has produced plutonium pits at scale. The country has relied on existing pits, which have been steadily aging for decades.
That missing capability is why Congress has required NNSA to be able to whip up eighty plutonium pits per year by 2030: to replace the geriatric pits and to create new ones more suitable for modern warheads.
“An eighty-pit-per-year capability is a modest and prudent approach to sustaining something as important as maintaining confidence in the US nuclear deterrent,” says NNSA’s Michael Thompson, a principal assistant deputy administrator.
The pit-production gig is being split between Los Alamos, tasked with making thirty pits per year, and the Savannah River Site, which will shoulder the other fifty. This effort will cost billions of dollars. And it is currently behind schedule by around five years on Savannah River’s part. LANL, meanwhile, fell about a year behind during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The plutonium for the project will come from decommissioned weapons whose impotent cores together weigh tens of tons. Here, swords turn not into plowshares but into better swords. The role those swords play, however, and how effectively, is shifting.
The nuclear threats of the twenty-first century are different from those of previous eras, with more competition between more big peer countries, more concerns about smaller countries, and attention to new varieties of radiological terrorism, among other fractious developments. We also have many ways to watch what everyone else is up to: the world is more faceted and more knowable. The war game has changed.
These modern dangers are not lesser than those of the air-raid-drill era: in fact, many experts believe the risk of an international nuclear catastrophe is as high as it has ever been, even during the chilliest temperatures of the Cold War.
If nuclear danger is so clear and present, we could all better understand the culture, science, politics, and people of the current nuclear era—not just those of Dr. Strangelove’s.
Sarah Scoles is a journalist and author based in Westcliffe, Colorado. She is a contributing editor at Scientific American and a senior contributor at Undark, and her work has also appeared in publications like the New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, and The Atlantic.
