Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age by Frank Close; Basic Books, 352 pp., $32
In any book about the evolution of nuclear weapons, a few pages are always dedicated to the discovery of fission and other early developments in nuclear physics. These words often seem to have been written more out of duty than from ardor. And yet the authorial obligation is a necessary one. Understanding the science that underlies the invention of the atomic bomb is a prerequisite to following the more dramatic events to come. After all, how else is one to understand the etymology of “curie” as a unit of measure? Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds makes a surprising choice: What if the prerequisite pages were the entire book? What if the author simply told the story of the science itself, from the beginning to the invention of thermonuclear weapons?
The result is a narrative that revisits familiar territory in an engaging way. Close has chosen to trace the science behind nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in a linear fashion, starting with the discoveries of French physician Antoine Henri Becquerel around the turn of the 20th century through the first successful test of a thermonuclear weapon near Enewetak Atoll in 1952. The balance works in part because Close, himself a theoretical physicist, is a gifted explainer of science. He has written almost two dozen books. He was also, for a time, head of communications at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. Close has clearly thought a lot about how to explain science to nonscientists with clarity and integrity. Some authors might gloss over technical details for fear that readers would lose interest. Others might dwell on biographical drama and personal conflicts to sustain the interest of a casual reader not invested in following the intellectual development of an idea. Close does neither in Destroyer of Worlds. He displays genuine respect for his reader.
Close relies heavily on secondary sources for his narrative. This may raise an eyebrow, but in Destroyer of Worlds, he focuses on the science, having reread the original scientific studies. This is where the book’s center of gravity is to be found—not in the corridors of power or the public sphere, but in the laboratory, in the details of crucial experiments. Characters are introduced and given brief biographical sketches, but wisely, Close is sparing about the details of their lives and personalities. The politics and controversies surrounding nuclear weapons are likewise kept largely offstage. Only at the end does Close dwell on the policy issues, when he raises the doubts expressed by Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, and Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-British physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, both of whom received Nobel Prizes for their efforts in furtherance of nuclear disarmament.
Despite the book’s many strengths, I have some minor quibbles. Like any author, Close was compelled to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. But some of his omissions rankle. Perhaps the most glaring is any mention of American physicist Dick Garwin, who bears as much responsibility as anyone, including Edward Teller, for the existence of thermonuclear weapons. Close describes at length the Ulam-Teller idea, developed in 1951, that inaugurated the age of modern, multistage thermonuclear weapons—an emphasis that is one of the book’s strengths. He gives particular credit to John von Neumann, whose pioneering work in computers was an outgrowth of his work on thermonuclear weapons. But until Garwin, the Ulam-Teller idea was just that—an idea. It was Garwin who turned it into a workable object, designing the first thermonuclear explosive as a demonstration of the concept. As Teller himself said, “That first design was made by Dick Garwin.” Of course, Teller revealed Garwin’s role, at least in part, to diminish that of Stanislaw Ulam because of his apparent resentment at having to share credit for the idea. Yet Garwin’s work was essential—as crucial as von Neumann’s contributions.
And though its omissions disappoint, the book gives more attention than necessary to the British thermonuclear bomb program. Close writes more than 1,000 words on the UK effort, or about half as much as he devotes to the Soviet program, which by any measure was far more important. The British effort, in my view, is more like that of China, France, India, or North Korea. But Close is British and can be forgiven for thinking that his readers will care more about British physicists like John Ward, Bryan Taylor, Keith Roberts, and Ken Allen than about Chinese physicist Yu Min.
Today, there are more than 10,000 thermonuclear weapons in the world, not just in the United States and Russia but also in India and North Korea. How did we get here? No one set out to create this world, exactly. History, after all, is just one damned thing after another. And those things, first and foremost, were ideas and experiments. Destroyer of Worlds is a readable, engaging history of that process.
