bomb to trigger an earthquake.
“Seems to me you could control it better than you could by injecting millions of gallons of contaminated water at a depth like the Army did out there near Denver in the sixties,” Booker said. He slapped a hand on the blackboard. “Talk about playing cowboy. You got some poison you want to get rid of? No problem. You just shoot it deep into the ground and don’t worry if it starts setting off a whole flock of magnitude 5 earthquakes.”
Booker shook his head derisively. “We can do better, a lot better. I know we can. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” It was as if his entire career, all of his professional experience designing and exploding weapons, suddenly made a difference that he could feel. He absolutely knew he was right about this. Understood it completely. Understood that he was the one person trained to do it and make it work. “You sink a drill shaft two or three thousand feet, set a bogey tower over it, and lower your bomb.” He smiled. “Then bingo! You explode it.” At the NTS, the six-story movable “bogey” tower was used to lower the bomb into place and to conduct preliminary tests of the firing and recording systems.
Booker rapidly sketched out the shaft and bomb configuration on the blackboard. He wanted the other two men to follow him exactly.
“What size would you use, how many kilotons?” Graves asked.
“That would depend on the size of the quake you wanted. Benham was in the 2-or 3-megaton range. It was a beautiful shot.”
“And how much radioactive debris did you blow into the atmosphere?” Miller asked, an edge of derision in his voice.
Booker frowned. “I was there for maybe two hundred shots in the sixties. We never had any venting. Not once. After I left, they messed up the Baneberry shot. It was a 10-kiloton bomb. Two days after the detonation the pent-up gases blew a hole in the ground. Sent three million curies ten thousand feet into the sky.”
“Hell, man. That’s what I was talking about,” Miller said.
“That wasn’t much radiation at all. You should know that, Les,” Booker said. “It pretty well dissipated within twenty-four hours. But I’ll agree it shouldn’t have happened.” Venting was the most serious risk of exploding nuclear bombs underground. It happened when the blast produced more energy than expected and created a kind of chimney in the earth that literally blew its stack, spewing radioactive debris into the atmosphere. Ventings had been exceedingly rare.
“They never found out what went wrong,” Booker said.
“My guess is the earth probably shifted after the initial blast,” Graves said. “When the pressure built up sufficiently, it ruptured.”
“There was one other major venting, but I almost hesitate to include it because it was such an inexcusable screw up,” Booker said. “Remember the Sedan shot?”
The two geophysicists shook their heads.
“Back in 1962, some folks set off a 100-kilo device and only buried it 635 feet. When it went off, the dust cloud hit 12,000 feet. Dug a crater 1,200 feet wide and 320 feet deep. The hole’s still there. It’s become a major NTS tourist attraction.”
Booker remembered the sight of that explosion. He’d watched videos of it dozens of times. The towering columns of radioactive dirt and stone arching out of the ground like rockets. Spectacular and so very stupid.
“We used a bigger device—1.2 megatons—for the Boxcar shot in 1968,” he continued. “We didn’t have any venting at all. Just the usual subsidence. You ever get a chance to fly over Yucca Flats? Looks like the moon. There are hundreds of craters, depressions that formed after the shots. Some of them are a couple thousand feet in diameter.”
Miller grinned. “Fred, we’re talking about a major fault up here. You explode a bomb on it, there’s no telling what would happen.” The smile and tone were playful. He wasn’t taking Booker’s idea seriously.
“You’d get an earthquake and that’s what you want, right?” Booker said, working out the possibilities in his head even as he described them. “A small earthquake that could turn off a bigger one. Isn’t that the idea? Or am I missing something important here? You set off a smaller earthquake to turn off a larger one. I think that’s an idea we damn well better put on the table and discuss.”
“It’s only a theory,” Miller said. “No one would ever seriously consider doing it. It’s too damn dangerous. You might set off the very thing you were trying to avoid.”
“Or you might stop it,” Booker said. “We’re starting to get hit with some heavy aftershocks. I know enough seismology to know that a big quake can keep resonating in the ground for weeks, months, sending out hundreds of aftershocks. Do either of you think we’ve got that kind of time? There won’t be anything left of the Mississippi Valley.” He was pushing hard to make them see it his way. He realized how much was at stake and he thought he’d come up with a valid approach, at least one that had to be brought to the proper authorities for discussion. He could see it with a sharp, hard-edged clarity that was almost prescient. He’d never felt that way before in his life. He’d never been so certain of anything.
“You two were just talking about lubricating a fault. Well, what do you think happens underground when you detonate a nuclear weapon? For starters, you get a hot ball of gas that completely vaporizes the rock. Hollows it out and forms a cavern. Just like water would, dripping through the limestone for, say, a couple million years. You want to lubricate a fault? Reduce the friction on the rock and maybe cause some movement? All that hot gas might do the job for you. It’s just a matter of crunching some numbers, running a few algorithms. Then you’d know how large a device you’d need to get the size earthquake you wanted.”
“How long would it take to reach the kind of depth you’d need?” Graves asked.
“I’m not sure how far down you’d have to go. That’s up to you seismologists to figure out. I can tell you this, you get fifty men who know what they’re doing on a drill and you could hit five thousand feet in a couple weeks. I wouldn’t want to do it much above two thousand feet for fear of venting.”
He continued walking back and forth across the wide living room as he talked, stopping only to make more notes and calculations on the blackboard. Another thought occurred to him.
“An interesting side issue here would be to assign a hierarchy of risks,” Booker said. He’d come alive in a way the other two had never seen him. “People might be willing to accept some radiation in the atmosphere if they thought they could avoid another earthquake like the one we just had. The one that doesn’t show any signs of going away.”
It was a radical thought. In the antinuclear era, the idea that the risk of radiation might actually be worth it if you could avert an even greater disaster was an extreme position.
“That’s an entirely hypothetical question,” Miller said. “The issue had never been examined in any meaningful way.”
“But what if it wasn’t hypothetical?” Booker wondered aloud. What if it’s a matter of life or death as it is now? “We’ve got people dying in six states and the aftershocks are showing no indication of abating. Many of these have been very strong. A high enough body count would radically alter the risk assessment.”
Booker sketched out a fault and where he’d position the bomb underground, the two lines practically intersecting. He was doing everything he could to connect with these two younger scientists, to make them see the possibility that was burning inside him. The idea had literally taken possession of him.
Graves seemed moderately interested. “How far away would you need to place the bomb from the fault?”
Miller kept shaking his head. He’d walked over to the window, which offered a sweeping view of the Clinch River and, in the distance, the Y-12 plant. “I think this is insane,” he said.
“Ed, you’d have to run some numbers to figure that out,” Booker said. He walked to the large picture window and stared out at the burning ORNL. “My guess is you’ve got people down in Memphis who could do it. Based on what I saw happen at the NTS, you can’t achieve maximum seismic effect much beyond thirty miles of the detonation site. But anywhere within that range you could really make the ground rattle.”
MEMPHIS
JANUARY 14
11:35 P.M.
