In an existential if bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question about the safety of testing nuclear weapons.
At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.
“I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test.
A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.
Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.the journal published “The ultimate catastrophe,” a shocking essay by H.C. Dudley, a professor of radiation physics at University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. Dudley reported that during World War II, “eminent scientists” had offered President Franklin D.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists printed letters critical of the essay, then a full rebuttal from Bethe himself, in which the physicist quickly dismissed the idea that an atomic blast could ignite the atmosphere or ocean as “nonsense.” He wrote that “Buck had completely misunderstood” Compton.
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