Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers and Opportunities

by Edward Teller; Albert L. Latter

Atomic bombs may be used against cities. But there will be no military advantage in destroying cities. In a short and highly mobile war neither centers of supply and communication nor massive means of production will count. If cities are bombed, this will be done primarily for reasons of psychological warfare. We must be and we are prepared for this kind of war but only as a measure of retaliation. There is good reason to believe that as long as we are prepared for all-out war, our civilian population will not suffer from a nuclear attack.

The certainty of a counterblow gives real protection against all-out war. No such protection exists against wars limited in territory and in aims. In the history of mankind such wars have been most frequent. There is no indication that these limited wars have ended. We must be prepared for these conflicts with effective and mobile units, and this requires the use of nuclear firepower.

Nuclear weapons will certainly have a profound effect upon such limited warfare. Not all of this effect need be and indeed it must not be in the direction of greater devastation.

In a nuclear war it will not make sense to use massed manpower. Any such concentration will provide too good a target for atomic weapons. To use big, costly and conspicuous machines of war will be unwise. Such machines will be defeated by nuclear explosions in the same way as the mailed knight went down before firearms.

Any fighting unit in a nuclear war will have to be small, mobile, inconspicuous and capable of independent action. Such units whether on sea, land or in the air cannot rely and will not rely on fixed lines of supply. There will be no possibility and no need to occupy territory and to fight at fixed and definite fronts. If a war should be fought for military reasons and for military advantage, it will consist of short and sharp local engagements involving skill and advanced techniques and not involving masses that slaughter and are being slaughtered.

If an invader adopts extreme dispersion, it will become impossible to defeat him with atomic weapons. But a very highly dispersed army can be defeated by a determined local population. Therefore the main role of nuclear weapons might well be to disperse any striking force so that the resistance of people defending their homes can become decisive. Nuclear weapons may well become the answer to massed armies and may put back the power into the hands where we believe it belongs: the hands of the people.

At this point we are brought back to the main topic of this book: radioactivity. In a limited nuclear war the radioactive fallout will probably kill many of the innocent bystanders. We have seen that the testing program gives rise to a danger which is much smaller than many risks which we take in our stride without any worry. In a nuclear war, even in a limited one, the situation will probably be quite different. That noncombatants suffer in wars is not new. In a nuclear war, this suffering may well be increased further due to the radioactive poisons which kill friend and foe, soldier and civilian alike.

Fortunately there exists a way out. Our early nuclear explosives have used fission. In the fission process a great array of radioactive products are formed, some of them intensely poisonous. More recently we have learned how to produce energy by fusion. Fusion produces fewer and very much less dangerous radioactivities. Actually the neutrons which are a by-product of the fusion reaction may be absorbed in almost any material and may again produce an assortment of radioactive nuclei. However, by placing only certain materials near the thermonuclear explosion, one may obtain a weapon in which the radioactivity is harmless. Thus the possibility of clean nuclear explosions lies before us.

Clean, flexible and easily delivered weapons of all sizes would make it possible to use these bombs as we want to use them: as tools of defense. When stopping an aggressor we would not let loose great quantities of radioactive atoms which would spread death where we wanted to defend freedom. Clean nuclear weapons would be the same as conveniently packaged high explosives. They would be nothing more.

The possibility of clean explosions opens up another development: the use of nuclear explosives for the purposes of peace. Conventional high explosives have been used in peace fully as much as in war. From mining to the building of dams there is a great variety of important jobs that dynamite has performed. Nuclear explosives have not been used in a similar way. The reason is the danger from radioactivity. Once we fully master the art of clean explosions peaceful applications will follow and another step will be made in controlling the forces of nature.