March - Back to the Nuclear Future

I have a minor revelation at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. It happens after I’ve walked past the information boards chock-full of names such as Einstein, Meitner, Hahn, Strassman, Curie and long paragraphs explaining the details of the first era of nuclear history—back when the theoretical impossibility of nuclear fission became a reality. Back when no one knew how dangerous radioactive material was. Don’t touch that manuscript with your radioactive hands, Marie Curie!

It happens after I’ve past the information board telling of the success of Enrico Fermi’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Which was called Chicago Pile-1 partly because it was created in Chicago and partly because it was the first. To be imaginative about it, the pile was like a gigantic Lego block built on the outside with graphite bricks and with the reactive core housed inside. The fissioning parts were inserted very carefully as rods into the center and at some point, if there were enough put in there together, it was believed, something would happen. Theoretically, the physicists thought they had an idea of what that something would be. It looked good on paper (long lines of equations). But, really, no one knew if it would actually work. No one knew exactly what would happen if it worked. Eventually, after a lot of math and physics, the thing was done and Chicago Pile-1 became the first nuclear reactor. Mazel-tov, Fermi.

My revelation comes after I’ve gone past (and come back for a second look at) the very cool installation sculpted by Jim Sanborn showing a laboratory with all the equipment (some fabricated and some collected from former lab employees and others) that was used to develop a device powered by nuclear fission. The physicists called their end result the “gadget” and it later was known more formally as the Trinity Bomb. I’d read in detail about this device (and others) in Richard Rhodes excellent books covering the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Seeing these replicas brings that history to life for me. A sculpture is worth a thousand words, as they say. I stand and stare. I take a lot of pictures. I think, the science is cool, it’s often the application that goes awry.

 The most high-profile associated names with this device are; Oppenheimer, Teller, and Lawrence. Lawrence who developed the Calutron which separated uranium isotopes which made the whole complicated system of nuclear tampering possible. Teller who madly, irrationally, and desperately pushed for the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb after the success of the A-bomb. And Oppenheimer who was considered the father of the atomic bomb and who quoted the Bhagavad-Gita saying, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” after the first atomic device was detonated on July 16, 1945. As with Chicago Pile-1, no one knew then either, on that day, what exactly would happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe the end of the world. Maybe precisely what their mathematical calculations were predicting. Cross your fingers, hold your breath, say a prayer.

Imprints of some killed by the A-Bomb

It comes after I’ve gone past the replica bomb casings of the bombs America dropped on Japan, made cute by their names only and by nothing else. Fat Man and Little Boy were weapons of mass destruction no matter what they might have done to end the war. I find myself angry as I look at them. My arms crossed over the camera I’m holding. My jaw tight.

It comes, this little revelation, after I’ve walked by too many military weapons showcasing the many ways to kill one another, to maim, to destroy. I barely glance at the sleek missiles, stationed upward like monuments, hung from the ceiling and pointing this way and that like deadly arrows. Though I do stand and stare at an MK 5 RV for a while. This actual one was shot into outer space in the 1960s to test the heat shield. Fascinated as I am by space things, I want to reach out and touch it. But I don’t. Instead, I take zoomed pictures of the blistering the capsule obtained in its journey up and then back home again.

It comes after I’ve gone by the Cold War exhibition replete with paranoia, gas masks, and Bomb Shelter pamphlets with their catchy titles:

“Escape from the H-Bomb”

“A Family Action Program: Home Protection Exercises”

“The Family Fallout Shelter” (Whose cover shows a man, trowel in hand, building a brick structure)

“If an enemy attacks Los Angeles you will be needed Stay Alive!”

My revelation comes after I’ve breezed through the more fun room with posters of movies such as The Iron Curtain which boasts “The most amazing plot in 3300 years of recorded espionage!!” I’m sorry they’re not showing it in a separate screening room. I might sit and watch that. Another poster shows off The House on 92^nd Street. Another, Broken Arrow starring John Travolta and Christian Slater. Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner. Crimson Tide with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. And, of course, Back to the Future starring Michael J. Fox. For, the plutonium that Doc Brown used to power the car backward and forward in time is a radioactive chemical element and, in the form of plutonium-239, can be used for nuclear weapons and for energy.

There’s a Delorean parked in the middle of the poster decorated room. It’s roped off to prevent people from trying to get inside (or back to the past or to the future, I presume) but the museum has provided a red puffy vest for visitors to put on and take pictures in. “Feel free to put on the red vest to become Marty McFly from Back to the Future!” the sign above the hanging vest encourages. For the fun of it, I have my picture taken by a fellow museum visitor who hands me the puffy vest when he’s finished with it, and then go outside to view the airplanes and bombs and rockets and missiles in the part of the museum called Heritage Park.

My revelation comes after I’ve finished my outside tour and am heading back inside and thinking of Back to the Future rather than the giant airplanes, nuclear submarine sail, missiles, detonation tower, “devices”, and cannons I’ve just seen. Rather than staying angry about 340,000 people dead because of two specific American bombs. Rather than being upset by the inanity of war.

See, the thing that bothers me about Back to the Future is this. Before Marty McFly goes to the past and changes things, his father George McFly is bullied by Biff Tannen. Apparently, George has always been bullied by Biff. Since high school and probably before that as well. The precedent set, and with no reason for Biff to stop, George, even as a grown man and Marty’s father, is made to do whatever Biff wants (like write his work reports for him), to grovel, and to be the brunt of his jokes.

Of course, this is bad. Of course, Marty would see his father’s weakness and resent Biff. Of course, no one likes a bully. So, when Marty goes back in time to his father and mother’s high school senior year, he begins to alter the past just by being there. When he realizes that he might inadvertently erase his own future, he has to intentionally manipulate relationships between his mother, father, and Biff. And all before the clock strikes 10:04 P.M. on November 12, 1955. There’s nothing like a ticking clock and a faulty flux capacitor to add some tension to a story.

Anyway, spoiler alert: after Marty’s messing around in the past and after he’s successfully returned to the future, the power dynamic is shifted. In the new future, Biff now grovels to George (Biff works for George now), waxes his car, basically, he kowtows in every which way. When I saw this movie again recently that shift bothered me. Although Marty made things better for his own family, in the end, how is it better that the bully shifted from being Biff to being George? Bullying is just plain out mean.

I mean, if someone is going to go back to the past and change things why not make the future better for everyone?

As I go back to the room with the Delorean, I sit on a convenient bench and write, “Reverses the power dynamic but doesn’t change the outcome.” That’s my revelation. As powerful to me in this moment as the two halves of a reactive core put together and reaching criticality. It’s a radioactive thought with a half life that will give me time to think it over.

What good is it to shift the balance of power? To only shift it? In Back to the Future, the outcome still has one bully and one bullied. Why not take the bully out of the equation altogether? Why not turn adversaries into, if not friends, at least into peers? It’s no good to simply shift the balance of power. It’s no good to go from victim to aggressor. What good was it for us to drop the atomic bombs on Japan? Was it just to pay back in kind for the 2403 deaths at Pearl Harbor with 340,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? After all, Truman did say, “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet.”

Maybe humans demented by war can’t see any other way than the most damaging one.

Maybe, even in fiction, Biff’s very nature couldn’t be changed without an exertion of power. But still, why change George’s “gentler” nature into a domineering one? Why not leave Biff to live his own life?

Really, the bothersome thing about Back to the Future is the bothersome thing about war too.

Only with war, we can’t go back and change what’s happened. Not even if we have all the plutonium in the world and a Delorean outfitted with a flux capacitor to process it. We can only mourn our deathly mistakes and learn from them.

We can only hope we learn from them.

Surrounded by the proof of nuclear might and power, of human ingenuity and perseverance, sitting on a bench in the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History with my little revelation of, “Reverses the power dynamic but doesn’t change the outcome,” I think we can be much better than we have been. We can be better. Nuclear disarmament would be one really good way to do that. Certainly, that would be one way to show what we’ve learned. That we have learned.