On Sept. 16, 1954, an ebullient Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss at a dinner meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City told the National Association of Science Writers, “Transmutation of the elements – unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered – these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter – will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history – will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds – and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.”[1]
Wow! The optimism of Strauss (pronounced “Straws”), appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission by President Truman in 1946 and President Eisenhower’s choice as chairman in 1952, was hardly unique. In the years following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan by U.S. atomic bombs, the phenomenal success of the Manhattan Project (which Americans had never heard of prior to the dropping of the bombs on Japan) in building the bombs, and the ensuing enthusiasm about nuclear power produced a social tidal wave of enthusiasm for anything and everything atomic.
The popular president Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower touted what he dubbed “Atoms for Peace,” and the Post Office issued a 3 cents Atoms for Peace first class stamp in 1955. Some 133 million of the stamps came off government printing presses.
If it was radioactive, if it involved nuclear energy, it was the magic wand, the rage of the age. Worldwide, the
Partly a result of guilt over what happened to
The Ford Motor Co. in 1958 rolled out – at 3/8 scale – the Ford Nucleon, a concept car designed to be powered by a small nuclear reactor. The car had a rear reactor engine compartment (no engine, of course) and an extreme cab-forward design, to put as much distance as possible between the passengers and the engine’s radiation.
The car, of course, couldn’t be built until small reactor technology and better shielding from radioactivity became available. So the car was never built. However, according to movie producer Bob Gale, the Nucleon’s reactor-in-the-rear inspired his DeLorean time-traveling sports car in the 1980s movie Back to the Future. The mock-up of the Nucleon sits in the
Given a bit of thought, it’s obvious that a nuclear powered car was a very bad idea. Imagine a 50-car pileup on a foggy, icy stretch of Interstate 5 at the
The atom would generate electricity to light American light bulbs, and heat and cool homes. It would turn salt water into fresh and destroy nasty deposits of toxic pollutants. This was a time, few remember, when millions of American homes got their heat directly from coal, delivered down chutes from trucks to furnaces that burned the mineral and either delivered heat through grates or made hot water that went through steam registers. Cooling came from electric-powered fans. The homeowner had to deal with the slag, known as “clinkers,” and the ash that resulted. A lot of that went into vegetable garden soil, at a time when many folks had gardens to supplement their store purchases.
The atom would also revolutionize medicine, a promise that science was often able to deliver. Medical isotopes dramatically improved the treatment of some of the most terrifying of diseases, including – the curse that few spoke out loud in those days – the big C, cancer.
The vision of nuclear perfection was a direct product of the success of the Manhattan Project’s bomb-making prowess. Two characteristics that grew out of the
The Manhattan Project was unknown to most Americans until well after the war. It was named for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’
Truman then made the controversial decision to drop the bomb on
Regardless of that dispute, the Manhattan Project spawned the post-war civilian nuclear energy program, and an inherent view that the bomb project validated the model of big science. Without the bombs developed in the 1940s, the civilian projects would not have been possible in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Without doubt, the bomb also altered the balance of power in the post-war period, and established the Cold War nuclear equilibrium between the
A key to the development of nuclear energy in the
The
As historians of the government’s nuclear energy program have noted, the project to develop and build an atomic bomb flew in the face of the traditions of science in general and physics in particular. Traditional science relied on open discussion, give-and-take, argument, and sharing of experimental data and research results. But that went entirely counter to the needs of the military to compartmentalize data, restrict access to research, and stifle public scientific debate. The fear was that open science would arm our enemies, initially the Germans, but increasingly, after the war, the
How did the military architects of the atomic bomb project reconcile the need for secrecy with the tradition of science for open debate and unfettered replication of scientific claims? The federal government created an open, but extremely limited, environment for nuclear physicists and other bomb scientists to hash out their diverse views in a remote, and completely controlled environment, in the beautiful
Perched on a large mesa north of
Free scientific discussion was the order of the day at
Los Alamos was also the province of the brilliant and quixotic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the laboratory, and his nemesis, the saturnine Edward Teller, who wished he ran
By the end of the war, the Manhattan Project was a vast enterprise, run from a remote site near
The post-war battle between Oppenheimer and Teller, which came to a head in 1954, was a crucial element in the evolution of the Atomic Energy Commission. It contributed to the agency’s history of failure in almost everything beyond its original mission of developing a
Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 to acknowledge the heretofore secret existence of the nation’s atomic weapons program and put it under civilian control. The AEC was a civilian agency charged after the war with managing the nation’s nuclear energy program, including bomb testing, building, and stockpiling of weapons. Civilian control of the major residue of the military’s nuclear weapons program, it turned out, wasn’t an easy act.[5]
For the first eight years of its life, the AEC was essentially a faux military agency. Congress, when it created the AEC in the aftermath of the war and the success of the Manhattan Project, mandated government ownership of nuclear materials, technology, and know-how. There was no civilian nuclear power industry in the
Congress turned the military program into nominal civilian hands. That action verified the doctrine of unintended consequences, creating an institutional and bureaucratic monster. Congress built a structure that proved perfect for intrigue, politics, pork-barrel spending, and low-level (and sometimes higher) bureaucratic warfare among competing power centers. The Atomic Energy Commission; the White House and its Bureau of the Budget; the Pentagon; industry lobbyists; and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy all participated in a bureaucratic scrum of program authorizations, funding, schedules, and allocations of resources, involving sharp elbows, eye-gouging, and anonymous back-biting and back-stabbing. It provided an unfortunate model for Congressional behavior in the future, up to today.
While the 1946 law established the AEC to manage what had been the military’s nuclear weapons program, the generals and admirals remained intimately involved. Military decisions drove the shape of the AEC weapons program, in terms of the kinds of bombs, the numbers, and even major decisions on nuclear technology. Adm. Hyman Rickover, for example, the father of the nuclear submarine, kept both his Navy military rank and a position as civilian head of a major reactor office at the AEC, from the days of the development of the Nautilus nuclear submarine in the 1950s well into the 1970s.[6]
A five-member commission, appointed by the president, governed the AEC. Offering independent advice to the commission was a nine-member General Advisory Committee, consisting of presidentially-appointed civilians, generally important scientists, to give the commissioners – who often had little or no scientific background – technical advice. The GAC often turned out to be a critic, and sometimes a scold and goad to AEC projects, particularly when contrarian physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was its chairman.
Most important, Congress created the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which became the political sun around which the other atomic institutions revolved. Who had the original idea for the joint committee is not really known, but it quickly evolved into an independent power center, a group of congressional atomic mandarins that controlled the programs of the AEC, as well as dictating to congressional appropriations committees what the AEC’s budget should be. The JCAE was, in its time, the most powerful committee in Congress, and perhaps the most powerful in congressional history. These guys had radioactive muscles, and they flexed them. Often, and often in behalf of half-baked, irrational nuclear schemes.
Unlike other joint (House and Senate together) congressional committees, the JCAE was established by law, not by the rules of the House and Senate. One of the histories of the AEC notes, “Moreover, it was the only joint committee of Congress authorized to receive proposed legislation and recommend it to the Congress.”[7] In the wacky world of
What’s more, the JCAE developed great staff expertise, and based its decisions on secret testimony, so that it was able to dictate to the money-writing congressional committees how much to spend on AEC programs. The power of the purse in
The joint committee had 18 members (nine from the House and nine from the Senate). No more than five of the nine could be from the same party, and the leadership rotated by chamber and party control of Congress. When the Republicans controlled Congress – not often in the post-war years – the committee leaders were Republicans. When the Democrats held the Congressional leadership, Democrats led the JCAE. But it didn’t make much who ran the committee. Members were almost always enthusiastic boosters of nuclear energy. Members of the committee tended to have safe electoral seats, so they spent years and decades on the committee.
While often critical of the AEC, all of the members of the JCAE were enthusiastic about the prospects for nuclear energy. Their disputes with the AEC were typically complaints that the commission wasn’t moving fast enough. Partisanship was not a major factor in the JCAE’s legislative life. Radioactive pork was most in mind, as the committee members concentrated on delivering AEC projects to their states and congressional districts. The AEC was usually willing to go along, if its own pet projects were protected.
The JCAE became the trump card to the other institutions involved in playing nuclear politics. When the AEC thought the White House’s Bureau of the Budget was being too stingy with funds, the committee would pressure the executive branch budgeteers, unusually getting more money for the nukes. Members of the committee watched AEC spending programs closely, making sure that contracts went to home state and districts concerns.
Industry lobbied the joint committee when it thought the AEC wasn’t serving its needs, or when it wanted to mold AEC policies in a particular direction. When an executive branch administration of either party wanted to redirect money or shut down a failing AEC program, the commission invariably enlisted the JCAE on its side, either for or against the administration initiative.
Strauss[8], Eisenhower’s appointed messenger for the promise of the atom, was well suited for the job. First named to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, Strauss was a fabulously successful investment banker who started out in life modestly selling shoes wholesale for his
In 1917, the supremely confident Strauss traveled from
In 1919, the now well-connected Strauss joined the investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb in New York. Over the next two decades, he made a considerable fortune and became active in Republican politics as a
The
Strauss’s successes in business and the military, and his Republican connections, led Truman in 1946, after the passage of the Atomic Energy Act, to name the Virginian to the Atomic Energy Commission. Truman prided himself on his non-partisan approach to government, and Strauss was evidence.
Strauss, the wannabe physicist, also possessed an optimistic, even romantic, view of the role of the atom in the
Eisenhower and Strauss became close, sharing the vision of turning the incredibly-destructive power of the atom into a tool for peace. But Strauss had a prickly, difficult personality. He was abrasive and dismissive of dissent. Once he made up his mind, he refused to brook opposition. He apparently went out of his way to irritate members of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), a pivotal player in the politics of nuclear power, particularly New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson, a stalwart of the JCAE.
Strauss and Anderson clashed repeatedly over management of the Atomic Energy Commission and Strauss’s priorities for research and development.
Anderson, the long-serving New Mexican Democrat, scuttled Eisenhower’s nomination of Strauss to be Commerce Secretary in 1959, a classic version of
Overall, Strauss’s vision of the atomic future was ludicrously flawed. That’s no surprise. So it has been with most futuristic nuclear forecasts, particularly those coming from government.
The intriguing idea of small nukes that could heat homes and provide onsite electricity proved to be a pipedream. The military pursued this with its SL1 program at the
The practical result was the worst personal disaster in
The pundits and politicians generally had more big-muscled roles in mind for nuclear power than how to heat Alaskan military outposts. They pursued the larger picture. Ships would ply the surface of the seas and underneath the waves, powered by heat released from splitting atoms. Nuclear explosives would move mountains, dig channels, carve out new harbors, and liberate vast untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Nuclear power plants would make steam, generating vast amounts of electricity, displacing coal, oil, natural gas, and water power as the engines of electric generation.
The results would be revolutionary. Nuclear power would be clean, cheap, convenient, and commonplace.
Radioactivity? Not a real problem, said the nuclear evangelists. Science could keep the radioactive emissions from nuclear energy at bay, they assured us. The friendly atom would transform American society entirely for the better.
None were more enthusiastic than the grey lady of American journalism, the New York Times. The newspaper’s editorial page, in characteristically stilted and stiffly-arrogant prose, was a consistent goad in the 1950s and 1960s in support of nuclear energy programs. The newspaper bought into the cult of the atom, and would remain a devotee throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Insular, isolated, phenomenally successful, the men (and they were almost entirely men) who unleashed nuclear energy truly thought of themselves as masters of the universe, unable to fail at anything atomic. They were well-meaning and patriotic. How wrong they were; how unwilling to acknowledge failure over the years.
Are we about to repeat some of those excesses of enthusiasm? For the past four or five years, the nuclear industry has been pushing for what it calls a “nuclear renaissance.” The peg on which they hang their hat is climate change. Clearly, no serious attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants can bypass nuclear power. Renewables, such as wind and solar, are important, but can’t begin to make the impact that new nuclear generating units would have on CO2 emission.
But nuclear hubris is again creeping up on the debate. The nuclear advocates are making claims they can’t back up, particularly about the expected performance of new, and promising, but untested, reactor designs. Hype often seems to be the order of the day.
If we don’t study the lessons of the radioactive past, there is every reason to believe we might stumble again. Some of the failed flights of fancy, such as the nuclear airplane and landscaping by bombs (although there have been some suggestions that
Overall, we should learn that putting the military and the bureaucrats into a secret alliance, with no oversight from outside and a congressional fan club inside, is a recipe for fantasy, failure, and folly. Guess what we had in
Ironically, as one nuclear lobbyist told me not long ago, “We’ve had the most pro-nuclear administration in recent history. But for eight years, not a spade had turned on a new nuclear plant.” The Bush administration, when it came to civilian power, he said, was, as they say in Bush’s Texas, “all hat and not cattle.”
The early post-World War II days of the atomic enterprise produced some projects that seemed to have been drawn from fiction, or even hallucination. Indeed, life in the nuclear world of the
In 1954, publishing house Grosset & Dunlap launched a second series of books aimed at boys intrigued with technology, following up on an earlier success. The target audience was the 10-14 age group. The books were the second generation of Tom Swift kids’ novels, named the Tom Swift Jr. line.
Both the first Tom Swift books, which began early in the 20th Century and lasted until 1941, and the post-WWII generation of the 1950s through 1971, were aimed at similar post-war young readers hooked on science and technology.
The putative author of the of the post-World War II books was Victor Appleton II, a concocted moniker for a group of writers, working on a rigid formula that carried the series through a dozen books. Their inspiration was the phenomenal advancement of nuclear and military science that characterized the end of the war, as the public became intoxicated with the prospects of science and technology in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project.
When Tom Swift Jr. stepped onto the fictional stage, everything seemed possible in the world of technology.
The same was true of the original Tom Swift series, which ran from 1910 to 1941, under the paternally pseudonymous Victor Appleton, another collection of various authors writing to formula. The first Tom Swift invented the picture telephone, vertical takeoff aircraft, and a giant military tank. All of those were prescient, although not all of Tom Senior’s inventions eventually saw the light of day.
Tom Senior also gave us the delightful Tom Swifties puns, which remain a parlor game among aging pop literature raconteurs today. In the game, one is asked to come up with adverbial, adjectival, or other puns with Tom quotes, mimicking the original Tom form. For example:
* "Who would want to steal modern art?" asked Tom abstractedly.
* "Fire!" yelled Tom alarmingly.
* "It's a unit of electric current," said Tom amply.
* “Why invade
* "Another batch of shells for me!" Tom clamored.
* “George W. Bush?” asked a dumbfounded Tom.
The successor, Tom Swift Jr.’s escapades exemplified the technological optimism of the nuclear world after the end of World War II. Tom was the son of the original, fictional post WWI inventor, Tom Swift Sr.
An ebullient 18-year-old, Tom Jr. and his friends, relying on their own inventiveness, his dad’s advice, and the money from his father’s engineering enterprises, were able to come up with, and develop to fruition, a slew of new technologies, quickly, and without the use of government funds. In fact, they ran technological rings around the government.
These inventions inevitably saved the nation from the nefarious plots of foreign governments. Our adversaries in the books were always bogymen from eastern Europe or
All this, of course, played into the fears of the day. In the wake of the Second World War, Soviet power advanced to conquer central and eastern Europe. Communism captured
But while the alleged traitors in our government, proclaimed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others, were said to be selling the nation down the drain, technology would save the day. No one was as good as the
Into the political context came the first of the second generation Tom Swift books, Tom Swift and His Flying Lab.[10] Tom was the young engineering genius (who never aged throughout the 17-year run of the series), lanky, sporting a blond crew-cut, almost always wearing a T-shirt with blue and white horizontal stripes, and blue jeans. True to formula, he had a sidekick, Bud Barclay, who was darker, shorter, and stockier than Tom. A good athlete, Bud was not nearly as intellectually gifted as Tom (who was?). He often came to Tom’s rescue when the hero was captured by the enemy. Also in tune with the formula, Tom had a comic hanger-on, Charles “Chow” Winkler, a former cowboy chuck-wagon cook who had become the Emeril Legasse of Swift Enterprises. He was prone to loud clothes and loopy outbursts such as “brand my fuselage” and “brand my space biscuits” that are as charming as the earlier Tom Swifties.
In the first book, Tom designed and built a gigantic, nuclear-powered flying laboratory that included a full-scale nuclear and chemical lab, sleeping quarters for a large crew, a gourmet galley, and the ability, using jet technology, for vertical takeoff and landing. The supersonic aircraft also was able to house and launch a small, jet-powered aircraft and a helicopter. It took Tom about three months from conception to flight to build the nuclear flying laboratory. Dubbed the “Sky Queen,” (no doubt a bounce off the popular “Sky King” radio show of the day), Tom’s nuclear craft could fly for months at a time at 1,000 miles per hour, at altitudes just short of outer space.
That’s just what the Army Air Corps had in mind in 1946, in the most ambitious and disastrous nuclear project in U.S. military history, the nuclear-powered bomber. Tom won the race.
[1] U.S. Atomic Energy Commission press release, September 16, 1954
[2] Hersey, Hiroshima, (ISBN 0-679-72103-7), originally appeared at an article in the New Yorker magazine in August 1946
[4] See Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller the Real Dr. Strangelove, Harvard University Press, 2004.
[5] See Mazuzam and Walker, Controlling the Atom, The beginnings of nuclear regulation 1946-1962, University of California Press, 1984.
[6] See Francis Duncan, Rickover, The Struggle for Excellence, Naval Institute Press, 2001. This is a splendid biography of Rickover by one of his closest associates. See also Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover Effect How One Man Made a Difference, Naval Institute Press, 1992.
[7] Mazuzan and Walker, p. 12.
[8] See Richard Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great the Life of Lewis L. Strauss, University Press of Virginia, 1984, a well-balanced biography of a great but difficult man.
[9] See Susan M. Stacy, Proving the Principle A History of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory 1949-1999, U.S. Department of Energy, 2000.
[10] Victor Appleton II, Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Grosset & Dunlap, 1954.
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