Back in '69, the official news releases were still boasting how much bigger was each new toy we rolled out of the workshop, how much more terrible destruction it would wreak than the last one. That was hogwash dished out by our PR boys (and, on the other side, by the Reds' Propaganda Ministry) simply because people didn't know any better. Actually, our toys that made the biggest bang were the worst flops as weapons.
You don't conquer an enemy by exterminating him. A hundred million corpses are no problem—just use bulldozers and they're out of the way. But a hundred million living, breathing, freezing, starving, filthy and ragged human beings can raise one hell of an uproar. And they usually do. Some of us felt that we wouldn't need to knock off even a third of Russia's major cities. Much less, in fact.
Dr. Charles Whitney made the mistake of saying so. And they canned him. The scuttlebutt was that Doc's conscience backfired. I know better; I saw the explosion. It was his patience, not his conscience.
Anyway, I turned in my resignation two weeks later. I walked out, kept my mouth shut and settled down to a small college professorship. I mention these events now simply because I believe it was there that the development of the Cooling gun actually started.
I had begun to see what devastating weapons could never achieve. They had deterred warfare, at least up to that August of 1969, by their threat of utter destruction—and perhaps Whitney deserved to get canned—but they offered no guarantee for the future. And they couldn't liberate a conquered nation or protect people from a dictator's secret police.
It was time we had something better. (We did, of course, but only a small part of the AEC was in on the development of atomic rockets.) Until we did, I could sense that we were simply going through the motions.
But it all began to go places fast with that cold research we were dabbling in, last semester. In fact, it was my fault that General Atomics tossed that little problem into our Cold Lab here at Webster Tech—my own past service in the AEC, my rather unusual background combining nuclear physics and biochemistry, and the post-grad crew I've managed to accumulate under my professorial wing.
The whole deal was shoveled obligingly into my Christmas stocking and the rest of the faculty obligingly left me to play with it—providing I continued to conduct my regular classes, of course.
Perhaps it's just as well I kept my hand in, though, because that line of research got rapidly nowhere. We found that materials which have their temperatures reduced to near-absolute zero are just plain cold. Bring them into room temperature and strange things happen sometimes that isn't just them trying to warm up. It isn't friction-loss and it isn't radiation damage and it isn't entropy.