Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

by Eric Schlosser

Before leaving Los Alamos, two hundred miles to the north, some of the Manhattan Project’s physicists had placed bets on the outcome of the upcoming test, code-named Trinity. Norman F. Ramsey bet the device would be a dud. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s scientific director, predicted a yield equal to 300 tons of TNT; Edward Teller thought the yield would be closer to 45,000 tons. In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A year’s worth of calculations suggested that was unlikely, and the physicist Hans Bethe dismissed the idea, arguing that heat from the explosion would rapidly dissipate in the air, not ignite it. But nobody could be sure. During the drive down from Los Alamos on Friday the thirteenth, Enrico Fermi, who’d already won a Nobel for his discoveries in physics, suggested that the odds of the atmosphere’s catching fire were about one in ten. Victor Weisskopf couldn’t tell if Fermi was joking. Weisskopf had done some of the calculations with Teller and still worried about the risk.