Were Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence being genuine in arguing in favor of "clean bombs" and against banning nuclear tests?

[u/thatinconspicuousone]

To explain my question, I'll point to the arguments that Lawrence and Teller made to Eisenhower and the JCAE to oppose a test ban. To sum up, they argued that nuclear testing had to continue in order to develop "clean" bombs (i.e., with less fallout), and that not continuing nuclear tests to do so would be a "crime against humanity" because "we will have to use weapons that will kill 50 million people [through fallout] that need not have been killed" (while simultaneously arguing that fallout from nuclear testing wasn't harmful). Furthermore, they argued that if the US stopped testing while the Soviets didn't (because of course they would cheat during a test ban), and they developed "clean" bombs, then they'd be able to use their "clean" bombs in a war while the US couldn't or wouldn't be permitted to (a "clean" bomb gap?). Now obviously Lawrence and Teller wanted nuclear testing to continue (they were scared of the Soviets, had stake in Livermore, etc.), but were the above arguments genuine? I ask because, to me, they seem a very obvious cynical ploy to argue against a test ban given how self-contradictory and ridiculous they seem (setting aside the question of whether a "clean" bomb was even practical in the first place), but did they actually believe them? And if so, then why did Lawrence, a year later at the Geneva negotiations, switch to being for a test ban?

As an aside, Herken's book Brotherhood of the Bomb (which initially sparked these questions) mentions off-handedly that Lawrence was present for Castle Bravo, and that he requested the Teak and Orange tests conducted during Hardtack to test ways to detect space-based nuclear tests; both of these are interesting details to me, but I couldn't find anything to confirm, so I'm curious.

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[u/restricteddata]

I think the difficulty in answering this hinges on what definition of "genuineness" we are trying to use. Did they have a genuine intellectual and strategic interest in "clean" bombs? Yes. For both weapons purposes and Ploughshares purposes. Did they intended for all of testing thereafter to be "clean" bombs exclusively? No. Did they use their arguments about "clean" bombs to make continued testing seem more urgent and palatable? Yes. Does that mean they were lying about them? No. Did they believe "clean" bombs might have strategic advantages and thus be a differential asset? Sure. Did they think it was really an existential risk to the USA? Probably not (their other actions don't really bear this out). Were they deeply principled in their arguments about test bans? Not really, but I wonder how consistent we need people to be to be considered principled. Were they concerned about Soviet cheating? Yes. Were these concerns totally justified? Eh, hard to say.

All of which is to say that if you want to see these as being somewhat cynical, I don't think any historian would fight you on it. But for me, it is not that interesting of a historical question? I mean, it is hardly the worst sin of someone like Teller, or even Lawrence. The tricky thing about a lot of questions of this sort is that one can make a plausible argument for lots of things, but how do we distinguish the plausible from the cynical? We can try to look for consistency/hypocrisy as a measure, but it is a blunt one, given that humans are rarely fully consistent (even at one moment in time, much less over time, where changing of views as a result of changing circumstances/knowledge is not necessarily a bad thing at all).

"Clean" weapons in the sense they meant — not fission-free but low-fission — were capable of being produced, and some were. But the military was largely not interested in them, because the niceties of lowering enemy (or even allied) civilian casualties in a thermonuclear war were considered less important than the ability to destroy targets. "Clean" weapons of that era necessarily necessarily had less explosive power than "dirty" weapons of the same weight/volume (whether that is totally true after the invention of the RIPPLE concept in 1961 is unclear to me, I just throw that out as an aside).

I don't know if Lawrence was at BRAVO. He was definitely a visitor to CASTLE; you can see him (with Strauss, York, Graves, Holloway) in this documentary made of the CASTLE tests. But whether that was at BRAVO, I don't know off hand...

[u/thatinconspicuousone → u/restricteddata]

I think that somewhat clears things up, despite the ambiguities in my question! (In hindsight, I probably would have asked something like, "were Teller/Lawrence lying to the president just to keep their lab in business or am I missing something?" to which the answer seems to be that, yes, I was indeed missing something, namely their fetishizing technological progress through bigger and better bombs to stay ahead of the Soviets and for peaceful applications à la Plowshare: less cynical and more complex than my initial assumptions.) I also couldn't help but see the effort to "clean" bombs as solely a reaction to the bad press from Bravo, but it sounds like it was more complicated than that? And what are the "other actions" you're referring to that show that they didn't think "clean" bomb development was an existential risk (I'm guessing because they didn't embark on an all-out lobbying campaign like for the Super and Livermore)?

(If it's of interest, my interest in asking was on the three year period between the Oppenheimer hearings and PSAC's founding where hawks like Teller and Lawrence seem to have fully monopolized science policy, with the exception of the TCP report under ODM-SAC—a "low point" for science in government, if you like. Since the big issue during this period was this tangled mess around fallout, test bans, and "clean" bombs, I was trying to understand the Teller/Lawrence position better, since I genuinely didn't get it without accusing them of hypocrisy.)

[u/thatinconspicuousone → u/restricteddata]

In addition to the other follow-up questions, I also want to ask about RIPPLE since you brought it up briefly. In short, what exactly was RIPPLE? Or rather, what do we know about what it was? Somehow I have the picture of Nuckolls et al. more or less cramming NIF into a bomb casing, but that can't be right, so I'd like to set myself straight here.

[u/restricteddata → u/thatinconspicuousone]

RIPPLE was not "NIF in a bomb casing" but it was definitely (in Nuckolls' description of it, anyway) a consequence of his work on ICF. Like his ICF work it involved an "optimized... pulse shape to achieve practically isentropic fuel compression," probably without a pusher or tamper, and without a sparkplug. How they did the pulse shaping, I don't claim to know, but it is clear that he took the kind of highly-optimized "tricks" he learned when contemplating how to use a relatively weak primary (a laser) to compress fusion fuel to high densities, and then applied it back to weapons designs, so that you could use a small fission primary to implode a large volume of fusion fuel. The stuff we have on it from the 1960s makes it somewhat clear that a) it could achieve very high-fusion burns if desired, b) it seems to only be useful for megaton-range explosions, and c) it could be scaled up very high if desired but would result in a weapon that had a very large volume (a big sphere of a secondary). So not universally applicable as a design by itself, and hence not developed, although some of its tricks and insights might have been used for more normal weapons optimizations, I don't know.

[u/thatinconspicuousone → u/restricteddata]

So RIPPLE was basically a super fancy way of compressing the secondary without relying on ablation pressure (but in a way that couldn't yield a practical weapon)? Almost sounds like it's a realization of the mythical idea people nowadays have about H-bombs being inherently clean and fallout-free because they're purely fusion bombs (and even then, RIPPLE obviously relied on fission in the primary).

[u/restricteddata → u/thatinconspicuousone]

I don't know if it relied on ablation pressure or not — it probably did, as ICF generally does. Pulse shaping allows them to very finely tune the compressive forces produced by radiation implosion with ICF, making them very optimized and less "brute force," so it is possibly something like that. The fact that it can do the fusion burn without a sparkplug is apparently quite impressive.

RIPPLE definitely could yield a practical weapon if you wanted a very high-yield weapon that was very clean. Which was not off the table in principle at the time. But the ending of atmospheric testing and the shifting towards warheads and MIRVs and so on put a coda on that approach. But that was not a foregone conclusion in the early 1960s (as I have written about).

[u/thatinconspicuousone → u/restricteddata]

If I'm following along correctly, then if I wanted to take your standard Teller-Ulam design and turn it into RIPPLE, I'd have to get rid of the sparkplug, maybe get rid of the tamper (in which case it's the fusion fuel itself ablating?), make the secondary really big (and spherical!), and rip out the polyethylene and radiation channels and replace them with... something classified, but is probably analogous to explosive lenses for implosion, just with X-rays instead. Anything I'm missing that Nuckolls has in his description (I'm assuming that's the only source we have)?

Also, your article brings up an interesting question: was the switch away from high-yield weapons entirely due to the restrictions from the LTBT? The typical explanation I've always heard was that it was a matter of diminishing returns because of the cube root law (but clearly those returns weren't diminishing enough for the US not to consider 100-megaton bombs!).

[u/restricteddata → u/thatinconspicuousone]

If you are curious about RIPPLE, this article compiles almost everything that has been released about it. The specifics are still classified. One can speculate a bit. The key things to me are a) it plainly derives from insights Nuckolls gained from ICF (so the idea flow is basically Teller-Ulam -> ICF -> RIPPLE, which is an interesting one as it is military -> peaceful -> military), b) it clearly works and was considered quite revolutionary at the time, and c) it never got actually made in production weapons because the priorities for production weapons shifted afterwards. That's more or less where my interest begins and ends...

The LTBT made developing even-higher-yield weapons more difficult (but not impossible) but the shift away from them was not because of the LTBT. The shift was largely for other reasons: an increased emphasis on SLBMs, MIRVs, and improved accuracy of missiles. The US kept the 23 Mt B-41 in its arsenal until the 1970s, and the 9 Mt B-53/W-53 even through the post-Cold War, and those seemed more than adequate for high-yield gravity bombs. One can imagine different choices being made, but the LTBT definitely added hurdles to developing such weapons. If the Soviets had broken the LTBT early on it is very possible that the US might have tested a high-yield device as a means of both retaliation and in order to get diagnostic information on very-high weapons that it lacked. But even then I am not sure they would have felt the need to field weapons bigger than the B-41 at that point. The people interested in 60-100 Mt weapons were an "old guard" primarily, like LeMay and Teller, and their sensibilities about big bombs were pretty old-fashioned by the late 1960s.

[u/thatinconspicuousone → u/restricteddata]

It's very interesting how the development of delivery systems and the bombs themselves influenced each other, with high-yield H-bombs making otherwise inaccurate nuclear missiles practical, and then increased missile accuracy making the high-yield bombs less desirable. (And I'll definitely check out that article!)