Just what is President George Bush鈥檚 missile defense plan for? Could it ever usher in an era of global peace? Or merely line the coffers of the US鈥檚 giant military-industrial complex? Richard L. Garwin has access, as they say in Washington circles. The top physicist has only just been named as the designer of the first hydrogen test bomb, which vaporised a Pacific island in 1952. He鈥檚 also been an adviser to several administrations in the US. Which makes his critique even more powerful. Dan Charles asked him why his name has been hidden for so long, if he鈥檚 proud of his achievement-and whether he thinks history is being repeated.
Exactly what is President Bush proposing with this missile defence shield?
When Ronald Reagan鈥檚 Strategic Defense Initiative went underground and became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Star Wars folk never went away. So when BMDO was trying to do short-range missile defence, they were always there making the technologies as useful as possible for national missile defence, extending the requirement of protecting US troops to include the protection of Allied capitals. The argument was that if you couldn鈥檛 protect the capitals, people wouldn鈥檛 let the US use their territory. But the real reason was that if you build in the requirement for defending whole countries, you鈥檙e on your way to defending the US. Then, in 1999, Congress passed the National Missile Defense Act and Clinton signed it, and said it was the policy of the US to deploy missile defence as soon as technologically feasible. But that system would never have worked because of countermeasures such as simple decoy warheads, as I鈥檝e argued in many speeches and articles.
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But you鈥檙e in favour of something that鈥檚 technically more feasible?
This NMD system ostensibly had the goal of destroying a few missiles that might be launched from North Korea, Iran or Iraq-these 鈥渞ogue states鈥�. I鈥檝e been trying to get them to recognise that the only way to handle those missiles is not through mid-course intercept, which is too readily countered, but through boost-phase intercept. And there we are in luck. Because Iraq and North Korea are tiny-you could intercept any potential Iraqi ICBM from a single site in eastern Turkey. Russia might even agree to permit such a limited system under the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans 鈥渋nterfering with strategic ballistic missiles in flight trajectory鈥�. The system I propose poses no threat to Russian or US strategic missiles, so we could agree to interpret 鈥渟trategic鈥� as applying only to the forces of a party to the treaty. So why should we upset the apple cart and eliminate the treaty? This, of course, is the intention of some of the supporters of NMD. If they got only that, they鈥檇 be satisfied.
What was your motivation for speaking out so strongly against the original plans for Star Wars?
Well, I knew something about it. And people who know something about something have a responsibility to inform other people. So I did. I also thought SDI was a bad thing because it was destabilising, it was deceptive, it was bad for democracy. Here you had a president-Reagan-who really didn鈥檛 know about these things, introducing in his 1983 speech, with no prior consultation with the Secretary of State or Defense Secretary or the technical people in the defence department, this concept of eliminating nuclear weapons only by having a missile defence system, which is itself logical error, because nuclear weapons can be delivered by aircraft, boat, or cruise missiles-none of which the SDI could counter.
Do scientists speak out too seldom?
Both too seldom and too often. It鈥檚 often said, particularly in France, that those who know don鈥檛 say and those who say don鈥檛 know. But that鈥檚 simplistic. The fact is, those who know, often really don鈥檛 know. They have a view, but often their views have not been tempered by discussions with those of different views. And those who say, but don鈥檛 know-well, unfortunately that鈥檚 true in many cases because scientists may have political views, and think that they know about something when they really don鈥檛.
Should scientists refuse to work on something they think will be used for ill?
It鈥檚 a matter of individual conscience. They may say, I won鈥檛 work on it and I鈥檒l try to encourage other people not to work on it because I fear bad uses. They may be right.
You didn鈥檛 take that view with the H-bomb. How has your involvement just come to light?
Edward Teller, who鈥檚 often called the father of the H-bomb, had a heart attack in 1979 and felt he needed to get his recollections on paper, so he called in his friend Jay Keyworth, who was at Los Alamos and who was to become Reagan鈥檚 science adviser. He brought a tape recorder with him. For some reason, around February or March 2001, Keyworth sent the transcript to Bill Broad, a reporter at The New York Times.
Did you know anything about the 鈥淭eller testament鈥�?
No. But my role was no secret. In 1981, at a conference in Erice, Sicily, Teller said exactly the same thing. He said: 鈥淭he shot [the first test of a true H-bomb] was fired almost precisely according to Garwin鈥檚 design.鈥� But a lot of people didn鈥檛 know of my role, that鈥檚 absolutely true.
So what was your role?
In 1950, Enrico Fermi, my thesis sponsor, asked if I might be interested in being a summer consultant to Los Alamos. And so they took me on. Teller had been pushing to work on the H-bomb even before the creation of Los Alamos in 1943, and a lot of people had been turned off by his enthusiasm, because the bomb never worked on paper. Teller had been doing optimistic estimates and calculations for years: the more you calculated, and the more accurately, the less feasible it seemed. In early 1951, Stanislaw Ulam, a creative mathematician at Los Alamos, had the idea of using an auxiliary nuclear explosion to prepare a main charge, to compress deuterium so it would burn faster. Teller鈥檚 testament states that he told Ulam the best approach was to use the radiant heat from the auxiliary. That鈥檚 the origin of radiation implosion, and there is a famous paper from 9 March 1951 at Los Alamos, called 鈥淗ydrodynamic lenses and radiation mirrors鈥�, by Ulam and Teller.
Famous within a small circle . . .
It鈥檚 a famous paper, but it hasn鈥檛 been read by all that many, because it鈥檚 still classified. People discussed this and decided it really was the way to go. And that鈥檚 when I came in. When Teller asked me how to set up a convincing experiment, I asked myself, 鈥淲ell, what is a convincing experiment?鈥� I decided that it would be to build the whole thing. So that was my task. I was a particle physicist at the University of Chicago and in my experiments there I had made liquid hydrogen and liquid deuterium targets, so I knew about such designs. I designed what was really a large Dewar flask to hold the liquid deuterium and maybe liquid hydrogen around it. And there was also a 鈥渞adiation case鈥� that contains the radiation from the primary nuclear explosion so its pressure squeezes the 鈥渟econdary鈥�, the fusion bomb. That鈥檚 what was built, and that鈥檚 what worked.
That sounds like professional pride?
Yes. I鈥檝e talked with people in Russia and elsewhere, and they鈥檙e proud of what they did, too, in their atomic bombs and their missiles. It really is good to have people who are interested in their work. Of course, the fact that this work involves weapons sort of reduces one鈥檚 enthusiasm. I wasn鈥檛 politically inspired. I didn鈥檛 have a big antipathy toward-or for that matter, sympathy for-the Soviet Union. But this was what the government was doing, and I thought that if the government has a programme, and it鈥檚 legal, then scientists as a group have an obligation to help. Individual scientists don鈥檛 if they don鈥檛 want to do it. But I found it interesting, and I could contribute.
Do you remember how you felt when you heard about its success?
I was back at the University of Chicago and heard by telephone from Los Alamos. I never saw a nuclear explosion, and never had an interest in doing so.
You鈥檙e one of the few scientists around who was there at the start of atomic science. Did your generation bring something unique to debates about scientists and society that is being lost?
The combination of having actually done these things and then feeling the responsibility of informing the public-that鈥檚 going to be lost. We have people like me and others who will try to carry it on. But it鈥檚 not easy, and things are much more hectic now than they used to be.
You helped create something that you wish, in some ideal world, couldn鈥檛 exist?
Couldn鈥檛 exist. Right. Nobody imagined that there would ever be 40,000 H-bombs in the world. So if a fusion bomb hadn鈥檛 been possible, I think that would have been good. I鈥檓 not sure whether it would be to our advantage for fission to be impossible, though. First, this would make lower-level conflict more likely, and as we know from the Second World War, you can kill 50 million people without using nuclear weapons. The other point is the availability of nuclear power, which I favour.