The work of the nuclear physicists was classified, but Vernon had had little difficulty obtaining his clearance. Unlike most of his colleagues, who’d come from academic—or worse, European—families, sullied by socialist flirtations on the part of siblings, parents, spouses, or even their past selves, Vernon’s and his wife Imogen’s backgrounds (excepting one loose-lipped homo from whom Vernon was convincingly estranged) was a pristine phalanx of incurious dirt farmers, appliance salesmen, insurance agents, racists, mountain moonshiners, and a lone college graduate (Imogen’s father, a civil engineer and deep-dyed Republican), most of whom would have lynched any Commie of their acquaintance faster than the House Un-American Activities Committee could say, “Are you now, or have you ever been . . . ?”
The RAND offices were open around the clock, to allow self-styled geniuses their 3:00 a.m. brainstorms, but Vernon kept regular hours. Maybe that was the Navy Pier in him. Imogen had his breakfast ready at 7:30; he left the house at 8:00 and reached his office half an hour later. Taking an hour for lunch, he left at 5:30 and arrived home for dinner at 6:00. On weekends he relaxed at the house, listening to a record or a ball game on the radio, fiddling with the antenna for the black-and-white TV set he’d recently bought, watching Dragnet or Playhouse 90 with Imogen after she’d put stubborn, squally Susan to bed.
Every now and then his colleagues would get it into their heads to stay in the offices late to finish some project. One enthusiast would rub his hands and say, “We’ll have to work through the night!” and another would catch the bug and chirp, “Let’s brew coffee and set up cots!” RAND encouraged that sort of malarkey: fortifying whiskey in the bottom desk drawer, camaraderie around the urinal, cheek stubble glinting in the morning light, pats all around, “We’ve done it, boys!” Maybe it was from growing up in the swampy South, but Vernon felt in his bones that slow and deliberate was the smarter way to go. He’d call Imogen, give her the bad news, work through the night, at least maybe hear a good joke or two, then walk home bleary-eyed in the leaden morning. Once, half asleep, he stepped in front of a car and RAND nearly lost one of its geniuses.
For the first year or so, though, he believed in the work. In 1956, the hydrogen bomb was three years old. The original theoretical insights that made it possible were not something Vernon would ever have been able to figure out on his own, but now it was tinkerers’ time. The first Atlas missiles were under development and would enter production within a year or two. Preliminary tests had indicated—surprise!—that their accuracy wasn’t as good as the military had promised. It was therefore desirable to raise yield without increasing the size or weight of the physics package. And once you had your clearance and got a look at the basic design of a two-stage weapon, you saw it was a fiddler’s dream come true. Scores of slightly different configurations of slightly different materials were possible, each requiring reams of calculations to produce semi-educated guesses about yields. Vernon chose to study the interstage, the part of the warhead that transmitted the radiation from the fission primary in a (one hoped) efficient way so as to implode and ignite the fusion-fission secondary. As with most dynamic processes, the physics was complicated, the engineering problems fantastically finicky, and Vernon spent a happy eight months immersed in the details.
Years later, people would occasionally ask him how he could have worked on the Bomb. Since those who had the simplicity of mind to ask essentially knew nothing, he didn’t dignify them with an answer. But after he’d left RAND he pondered the question himself from time to time. The August 7, 1945, newspaper article telling him he would live a while longer had identified Hiroshima as an important army base. Later, it became a little clearer that it was an army base surrounded by 300,000 civilians. Still later, Vernon read Hersey’s Hiroshima, and that account bothered him enough that he read others. Somewhere among all the horror he picked up a detail he couldn’t get out of his head. On August 5, 1945, the city of Hiroshima had ordered schoolgirls to help raze houses in order to create firebreaks in case of an incendiary raid. So when Little Boy threw a tantrum at 1900 feet on August 6 there were more than eight thousand of these young girls working outside under the clear sky. Most were killed instantly, but survivors’ accounts kept mentioning seeing girls tottering blindly, their faces burned featureless, holding their boiled arms out in front of them with their hands dangling down—like kangaroos, one witness said—the skin of their hands slipping off like rubber gloves.
Yes, the fire-bombing of Tokyo killed as many people as the Hiroshima bomb. But that was the result of a decision to use those bombs in a particular way, a decision a society could abjure, while retaining incendiary bombs for other uses. That is, you didn’t have to “uninvent” the incendiary bomb. But atomic weapons were different. There was no conceivable use for them that did not involve the indiscriminate slaughter of populations. And now here was the H-bomb, which made Little Boy look like a firecracker. As a physicist, Vernon
