Physics Science

I read this book in 1975 and have subsequently reread it several times. The possibilities imagined in this book haven’t yet come to pass, mainly, I think, because Ted Taylor is a genius and the terrorists are actually pretty stupid. Dr. Taylor, or someone like him, could build a home-made bomb that would make the events of 9/11 look like a tea party. However, the people motivated to actually carry out events like 9/11 are fortunately not so technically inclined.

The book spells out in chilling detail how it is actually pretty simple to put together an atomic bomb that could rival a Hiroshima-class explosion, IF, and it is a big IF, you have enriched uranium or plutonium.

The book does into enough detail to prove the point that bomb construction is fairly simple, but it contains several deliberate mistakes (one in chemistry and one in physics, that I could find) that keep this book from being a “blueprint” for bomb construction.

Like “The Hot Zone” about ebolla, this book may keep you awake nights if you read it carefully and really think about the implications.
Rating: 5 / 5

John McPhee is a writer for the New Yorker with a particular focus on science and nature. His heroes tend not to be the pure scientists but the engineers, the doers. His 1987 profile of the Old River Control Structure, the enormously complex and epic-scale engineering works that prevent the main body of the waters of the Mississippi from spilling down the Atchafalaya as they really want to, was widely linked at the time of the New Orleans floods last year and deservedly so — search for “McPhee Old River Control” to read it, it’s well worth it. He has a love for the concrete that doesn’t prevent him having a good understanding of the underlying science that his engineers use and writes clearly and with energy.

The Curve of Binding Energy is about Ted Taylor, a physicist from Los Alamos, his efforts to develop the lightest fission bomb that he possibly could, and how his research pushed him in the direction of proper oversight of post-fission materials. The writing is excellent, pacey and readable, though at times tending too much to the New Yorker structure of “At facility Y I was ushered in to meet Expert X. He had shrewd eyes and an expansive, welcoming half-smile at the corners of his mouth. He said Z.” The basic message is: (1) plutonium is easy to get access to; (2) with current (1974) practices and volumes the amount necessary to produce a bomb (15 kg) would be lost in the statistical noise; (3) this will only get worse as volumes produced go up, and they’re projected to go up massively.

This is all from the perspective of 1974, of course. Since then, prompted in part by the concerns this book raised (and in part by independent factors such as a fall in the price of oil), the US cut back hugely on reactor starts. Nevertheless, nuclear power in the US grew from 114.0 billion MwH (out of a total of of 1867.1 billion MwH) in 1974 to 763 out of 3721 in 2004, in other words from 6% to 21%. Global annual plutonium production has gone up by a factor of 4, which granted is a lot but isn’t the exponential increase predicted by the book. This is in part because the US contributes much less plutonium than you’d expect, in part because it hasn’t adopted fast breeder reactors.

So the good news is that the US seems to have taken the issue relatively seriously. The bad news is that the UK and France between them hold 50% of the civilian plutonium in the world. I’m shocked by the lack of serious public awareness and serious official response in those two countries — the protests seem to have died down a lot since the 80s but the problems have just got worse. The other bad news is that nuclear material keeps going missing in Russia, though under a 1994 agreement the US is continuing to pay some of the costs of shutting the relevant reactors down and moving to fossil fuels.

Ultimately, given that deterrence works against states, the question is how to prevent terrorists from getting the bomb? One part of the answer is simply increased vigilance, which has the advantage of protecting against all attacks: the terrorists don’t necessarily need the bomb, after all. Another part is increased spending on counter-proliferation measures like the Russia program. Another part, perhaps, is engaging with countries that want to develop nuclear power to make sure that their plants are efficient and safe. And another part, unfortunately, is probably to accept that in the future there will be the occasional bomb in a major city and people will die but life will go on. All of these conclusions are reached in the book: they haven’t dated, and in an important sense neither has the book itself.
Rating: 5 / 5