City at World’s End, Edmond Hamilton (serialized 1950, book reprint 1951)
On March 1st, 1954, on the Bikini atoll of the Marshall Islands, U.S. scientists detonated a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb called Castle Bravo. The expected yield of Bravo was five megatons TNT, but the scientists had missed a crucial fusion reaction that took place in this particular bomb design. As one scientist described it to the historian Richard Rhodes, “They really didn’t know that with lithium7 there was an n, 2n reaction [i.e., one neutron entering a lithium nucleus knocked two neutrons out]. They missed it entirely.” The actual yield of Bravo was three times the expected yield, measuring in at fifteen megatons. The blast blew a 6,500 ft diameter hole through the coral and trapped people in observation bunkers that were supposed to be situated far from the blast zone. Japanese fishermen aboard the vessel Lucky Dragon were exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout, leading to the death of one member of the crew and sparking an international incident between the US and the country that less than nine years before had been the world’s first nation to be attacked with nuclear weapons.
Recent popular fears that physicists would destroy the world through miniature black holes created in the Large Hadron Collider are just the latest manifestation of the difficulty people have long had in deciding whether to view scientists as the sorcerer or the apprentice. Continue reading
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