A Thousand Suns

Author’s Note

There’s an old tale I was told, a long long time ago. It concerned one Enrico Fermi, if I recall correctly, an Italian-born physicist who had emigrated to America during the war and produced the first artificial nuclear fission chain reaction. The story goes that, as he readied himself to initiate the experiment, he turned to his assistant and nervously confessed he wasn’t sure whether the chain reaction would go on indefinitely or quickly come to a halt.

And then, of course, he went and hit the button anyway.

I’ve never been able to confirm that story, and perhaps it’s urban myth, but it’s a story that stuck in my mind for many years afterwards… that a scientist might theoretically gamble the world on the back of an experiment.

In 1945 when J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team prepared Trinity, the first American atom bomb, to let rip with a test blast in the deserts of New Mexico on 16 July, it was known that he was intensely wary of what would happen at the moment of detonation. And as the mushroom cloud of flame and churning destruction rose up into the sky, he was seen to exhale a long-held breath and mutter those few words, ‘I am Vishnu, become death, Destroyer of worlds, Shatterer of worlds, The Mighty One… A thousand suns Bursting in the sky.’

At the time they were dabbling with this new technology, nothing was certain, and until the day of Trinity, over two months after Germany’s surrender, there was a chance, in their minds, a remote chance, that they were meddling with something they might not be able to control.

With regard to Schenkelmann’s fast-cycle emitter, as any physics student will know, the idea is mere fancy. Fission only continues as long as there is fissionable material to burn up. Perhaps back in 1945 a theory like that might have sounded convincing; after all, there was some disagreement amongst the leading minds in this field as to how much U-235 would need to be in one place to initiate a chain reaction.

A good example of this uncertainty amongst brilliant minds is Werner Heisenberg, the man in charge of the German attempt to build an atom bomb. He initially miscalculated the amount of pure, refined uranium needed as being in the hundreds of tons, as opposed to ounces! When Heisenberg made that miscalculation and reported his findings to the German Army Weapons Department, the Nazis effectively back-pedalled their efforts to produce an atom bomb, thinking that it was impractical if not impossible to refine enough uranium to produce even a solitary bomb. The German nuclear effort was further hampered by Adolf Hitler’s lack of enthusiasm for what he called the ‘Jewish science’.

It was worryingly close, though. If Heisenberg had done the maths correctly, the Germans might well have beaten the Americans to the bomb.

After the war Heisenberg maintained that he understood the principles of the atomic bomb, but that he had deliberately misled the German programme into concentrating on reactors instead of building a weapon. Shortly after the war, Heisenberg and nine of his colleagues were being held and debriefed at Farm Hall, a British country house, when news of the bombing of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb was relayed to them. Hidden microphones recorded their reactions, and Heisenberg condemned his reputation when he exclaimed that the Hiroshima announcement was simply not possible.

On a completely separate note, Chris Roland was based entirely on a bloke I used to work with — the mannerisms, his description, the way he talked. I liked the guy, his self-effacing charm, his gangly frame and unflattering ginger hair, buzz-cut like a marine’s. The last I heard, he’s doing really well in the computer games industry. But he’ll never know I used him as a character, and hopefully no one will ever spot my character is him.