Pacific: The Ocean of the Future

It is the most turbulent ocean in the world, and an expanse of sea that should be central to all our thoughts. Is the ocean to be a place of coming war? Is it to be our eventual savior, a place so beautiful and fragile that its sheer vastness will one day demand that we pause in our careless and foolish behavior in the rest of the world? Or will it be something in between: a pillar of hope and example and good sense poised between East and West, on which, for good or ill, we construct humanity’s future?

The book that follows is an account of this modern Pacific, the story of the development of the ocean in the sixty-five tumultuous years that began on January 1, 1950.

1 Statistics bear out the easily forgotten reality that whites—haoli, in the vernacular, a word uttered with some disdain—are a minority on the Hawaiian Islands. Their 336,000 (in 2010) are matched by almost half a million from countries around or within the Pacific Ocean, including 200,000 Filipinos and 185,000 Japanese. Eighty thousand only are native Hawaiians.

2 Tsingtao beer, its brewery long overseen by a German brewmaster, remains the most visible reminder of the kaiser’s historic influence in eastern China. While the beer retains the old Wade-Giles transliteration of its name, the city itself is now restyled Qingdao.

3 There can be few more impressive examples of German engineering than this eighteen-thousand-ton, thirty-two-knot (and exceptionally beautiful) warship, since she survived not only innumerable strikes by RAF bombers during the war, but also two nuclear tests in the Bikini atoll lagoon, where she was placed as a target for one air-dropped bomb and for a massive underwater weapon called Helen of Bikini. Still floating after the second test, but fiercely radioactive—all her crew would have died—she was towed to Kwajalein, developed a leak, and capsized, her enormous guns falling out of their barbettes and onto the seafloor. One of her screws has now been placed in a museum; the others remain visible at low tide. Prinz Eugen will never be salvaged, however, since her steel is still lethally contaminated.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: ON CARBON

New Year’s Day 1950 was a Sunday, and by and large, as the clocks ticked and chimed and boomed their way into the first year of the century’s fifth decade, the world seemed to have settled into a fairly stable place, with memories of the Second World War starting to fade, and scant suggestion of any of the turmoil soon to come.

The Japanese, still busily repairing their country and still occupied by American forces, had some small reason for good cheer that day, with the ending of their custom of declaring children to be one year old at birth and of everyone adding a year to his or her age each January 1. This change meant that all eighty million Japanese would not become numerically older on this day: a forty-year-old would wait until his next actual birthday before becoming forty-one. For a brief while that morning, all Japanese were said to have suddenly felt younger.

There was smaller cheer for New Yorkers. The canned music that had flooded the concourse of Grand Central Terminal for the previous three months, and that had whipped silence-loving commuters into a mutinous fury, was turned off, and forever. Riders on the New York Central regained their sanity; the calm of the everyday hubbub was resumed. For a while, some relieved New Yorkers were said to feel suddenly younger, too.

And in England, a teapot lid maker named Elizabeth Hulme and a man from Lancashire named James Jackson, whose job was listed as “mule spinner,” said to be a textile-related occupation, were each given awards for the contributions they had made to these crafts, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In Britain nothing else of great significance occurred, according to the day’s newspaper accounts.

Beyond, in the outside world, most of the men of note then charged with running the world could count on remaining some time yet in power. Truman, Atlee, Stalin, Adenauer, Franco, Tito, Perón—even comparative newcomers such as Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong—were all, for now, lying easy in their beds. There were similarly complacent kings and queens and princes in abundance, from Egypt to Tonga and Kathmandu, together with an emperor in Japan, a shah in Persia, and a grand duchess in Luxembourg, mostly respected, occasionally revered, and all, for now, reigning in comparative comfort.

Yet there were shifts in the wind. The grandest of the world’s monarchies was still England’s, with the incumbent, King George VI, still technically able to say that he reigned over a quarter of the world’s population, with his empire still in rude good health. Except that just three weeks into the New Year, his hold on one of those dominions would weaken when, as expected, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed India to be a republic. And farther still around the world, a little-known Vietnamese Communist named Ho Chi Minh would, at the year’s beginning, commence a series of negotiations with China and the Soviet Union that would eventually ensure that the French would be turfed wholesale out of Indochina, and would leave Asia forever.

But these small hints aside, if cracks were beginning to appear in the settled order of the world, they were only hairline, visible to few, and troubling to almost no one.

Except, that is, for one development that is still marked indelibly on that New Year’s Day of 1950, and that came to be regarded in a pair of ways: as being, first, of the gravest moment and, second, of lasting, perhaps even everlasting, scientific significance.

Three months previously, on September 3, 1949, a Geiger counter mounted in the nose of an American B-29 weather-monitoring plane that was flying reconnaissance missions in the western Pacific between Yokota in Japan and Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, began to chatter furiously. Puzzled technicians swarmed to examine the records and soon determined that atomic radiation seemed to be pouring into the sky, from somewhere.

Two days later a second plane, based in Guam, flew over the same route and picked up signs of even more radioactivity: barium, cesium, and molybdenum fission isotopes were found in the upper atmosphere, signatures that suggested that either there had been a nuclear accident somewhere to the east of the plane’s track or someone had exploded an atomic weapon.

It turned out to be the latter. An atomic bomb known in Russia as First Lightning and elsewhere, eventually, as Joe 1, had been exploded by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union five days before, in an experiment conducted at a hitherto unknown and subsequently top-secret nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan. The successful exploding of the bomb, which was modeled on, looked uncannily like, and was in fact slightly more powerful than the plutonium weapon dropped by the Americans four years previously over Nagasaki, stunned the outside world. Few Americans and few of their allies thought the Soviets would be able to catch up with the United States in terms of nuclear capability for many more years. But as was discovered a decade later, Moscow had a spy in Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs; and though debate continues to this day about how valuable the information was that this brilliant young Briton passed to the Soviets, it is generally agreed that, perhaps more than any other spy before or since, Klaus Fuchs changed world history.

For by allowing the Soviet Union to construct nuclear weapons, and ultimately to make hydrogen bombs and all the other terrible paraphernalia of the nuclear age, his gift of secrets permitted the Cold War between East and West officially to commence—with the consequence that for the next half century, and perhaps for longer still, the planet lived in the shadow of the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation.

There was another consequence of this development, however—that to this day is of great significance to the scientific community and, as it happens, has some bearing on the structure of this book. It concerns radioactive pollution.

The explosion in the atmosphere over the coming Cold War years of hundreds upon hundreds of atomic bombs—big and small; fission and fusion; to be launched by missiles or dropped by aircraft or fired from guns; made by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, or perhaps Iran—would contribute to the pollution of the earth’s atmosphere by myriad poisonous and radioactive decay products. Until atmospheric testing was banned in 1963, the world was living under a blanket of increasingly radio-polluted air, with effects that would be likely to last for thousands of years.

Crucially, one of the many products created by atomic explosions is the unstable radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon-14.

This isotope is already naturally present in the world (its presence caused by cosmic ray bombardment), in extremely tiny but measurable amounts. Compared with the amount of normal, nonradioactive carbon-12 in the air, about one part in a trillion is carbon-14.

Plants absorb this carbon during photosynthesis, and animals that consume the plants absorb it, too. So while an animal or a plant is alive, its cells contain both carbon-12 and carbon-14, and in the same ratio as exists in the atmosphere.

However, once the plant or animal dies, its cells stop absorbing carbon—and at that precise moment, the ratio of the two isotopes begins to change, for the simple reason that carbon-14 is unstable, and begins to decay. The isotope has a half-life of 5,730 years, meaning that after that period, half of it will have vanished. After another 5,730 years, half of what remains will have disappeared, and so on and so on. And, it is important to note, the changing ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in the dead animal or plant can be very accurately measured.

What followed this discovery—first made in 1946 by a University of Chicago chemist named Willard Libby, who would win the Nobel Prize for it—was the realization that by measuring the amount of carbon-14 remaining in a dead creature or plant, it should be possible to date, and with some precision, just when that plant or animal died. Thus was born the technique of carbon dating, and it has been in use ever since, a vital tool of archaeologists and geologists in determining the age of found organic materials.

The technique requires one constant, though: for any age calculation to be accurate, the baseline ratio of naturally occurring carbon-12 and carbon-14 has to be a real baseline—it must, in other words, stay the same as it always has been. The figure accepted by Libby and his colleagues and used as the base was the aforementioned one to a trillion: one atom of carbon-14 to one trillion atoms of carbon-12. With that figure firmly in place, the age calculations could be made, and reliably.

But then came the unexpected. As soon as the testing of atomic bombs began in earnest in the 1950s, that baseline figure suddenly began to change. The bombs created immense mushroom clouds of lethal chemistry. They thrust, among other things, a sizable amount of extra carbon-14 into the atmosphere, upsetting the baseline figure and causing the dating calculations suddenly to go awry.

Radiochemists around the world monitored the situation, and as the levels of new carbon kept increasing, test by test, year by year, they kept on writing algorithms to correct the distortions caused by the bombs. But as more and more bombs produced more and more unstable carbon, the situation was fast becoming complicated, irritating; and for a world that placed value on near-absolute precision, it threatened to render age determinations so inaccurate as to be useless.

To address this problem, a decision was reached that would unscramble matters. A date was chosen before which radiocarbon dating could be regarded as accurate, because the baseline was constant. Radiocarbon results that were achieved after that selected date would continue to be regarded with suspicion.

And the date selected—of what is now known as the start of the standard reference year, or the Index Year—was January 1, 1950. Before January 1950 the atmosphere was radiochemically pure. After January 1950 it was sullied, fouled by bomb-created isotopes. So this date, this otherwise unexceptional Sunday when Ho Chi Minh began his campaign in Vietnam, when the Japanese started recalculating how old they were, the day the music died in Grand Central Terminal, would become for scientists a new Year Zero.

The choice of the date was scientifically elegant, logical, and precise. And it would soon spread beyond the world of science alone. For it would have an impact on the entire question of what was meant by the use of the simple word ago.

Science had until this point never been involved in the creation of human calendars. The fact that these words are being written in the year 2015 has to do, not at all with science, but with the decidedly nonscientific and imprecise concepts of myth, faith, and belief. For, in refining the meaning of ago, most of the Western world would employ the initials BC and AD. It was said that something occurred a number of years “before Christ,” or in the Year of the Lord, “Anno Domini,” as in AD 2015.

But this was, of course, contentious to non-Westerners, to nonbelievers. It was a kind of notation that would fall foul of those for whom Jesus Christ meant little; and so in recent times other circumlocutions were offered to help soothe hurt feelings. There was BCE, most commonly, which referred to “before Christian Era” or, for the secular-minded, “before Common Era.”

Yet even this was still a fudge, still woefully imprecise, still essentially based on myth. And BCE did not appeal to scientists, especially once carbon dating and other, more precise atomic dating techniques had been discovered. So they eventually came up with the idea of using the initials BP, “before present.” The Wisconsin ice age, for instance, had its culmination fifty thousand years BP.

All that the acceptance of this new notation required was an agreement on just when was present? So, in the early 1960s, a pair of radiochemists came up with an answer. They suggested the use of the same standard reference year, the Year Zero moment of January 1, 1950.

Their suggestion seemed logical, neat, appropriate. Everyone, more or less, agreed. So that date is now accepted well-nigh universally among scientists for the ephemeral concept that is fleetingly known as the present. And the present begins at the start of January 1950.

And it seemed to me also the ideal date to use for beginning a description of the modern Pacific Ocean.

Other dates were briefly beguiling, to be sure. It could be argued that the new Pacific truly began its unfolding at the end of the Second World War—so I could have chosen the date of the Japanese surrender, September 2, 1945. Or else I could have selected Mao Zedong’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a momentous and solemn occasion that was staged on October 1, 1949, and that would eventually turn the Pacific into a cauldron of contention. I briefly also thought of using the date of the detonation of America’s most powerful hydrogen bomb, the so-called Castle Bravo test of March 1, 1954, a moment of some symbolism.

Yet I kept coming back to the idea of the “beginning of present,” which just seemed to have an elegant simplicity about it. The date has a strict scientific neutrality to it. It is an agnostic moment, agreed to and understood by all. And for this book, it turned out to have an added geographical bonus, a coincidence.

For nearly all the carbon-14 pollution that was sent up into the skies and that caused the scientific community to create the concept of “present” and “before present” in the first place came as the result of explosions that occurred in the Pacific. Bombs that went off in Bikini and Enewetak, Christmas Island and Woomera, Semipalatinsk and Lop Nor, Mururoa and Fangataufa, all in or around the ocean, were the prime pollutants, the original cause of the problem.

This made it all the more appropriate, it seemed to me, to choose that moment—the hinge, the dividing line, between purity and impurity—as the start line for this account. The story of the ocean of tomorrow, in other words, begins at the start of the present.

Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.

Chapter 1

THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, JULY 16, 1945, ON THE DETONATION OF THE FIRST A-BOMB, NEW MEXICO

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN, MAY 24, 1946, TELEGRAM SENT TO PROMINENT AMERICANS

The first hint that the Pacific would be tragically transformed into the world’s first and only atomic ocean came at lunchtime on January 4, when President Harry S. Truman uttered a single cryptic sentence during his State of the Union address for 1950, to this effect: “Man has opened the secrets of nature and mastered new powers.” He never mentioned the Pacific by name; nor did he mention it two weeks later, on January 19, when he finally made the fateful decision to which his congressional speech had alluded. Nor did he, two further weeks on, when he issued a formal directive and announced publicly what he had decided.

He didn’t have to. So far as the United States was concerned, the sixty-four-million-square-mile expanse of the Pacific Ocean was the only place big enough and empty enough, and American enough, to allow the testing of the thermonuclear weapons the president had now finally committed his country to create.

The ocean already had had a taste of what was to come. Since 1946 the U.S. government had been secretly testing simple atomic fission bombs in the blue lagoons of its tropics. But these were quite modest weapons—deadly and terrible, to be sure, but nothing compared with what was to come next. The decision Truman made on that third Thursday of January, as well as his formal order to the Atomic Energy Commission that followed, was to start a program of work on a very different kind of device, and of a type both of unimaginable deadliness and theoretically limitless destructive power. It was a bomb that would forever change the nature of warfare, and would forever change the world. And its potential power was such that it could now be tried out, displayed, and demonstrated only in the empty middle of the Pacific.

Until the mid-1940s the ocean had been, in the popular imagination, just as Ferdinand Magellan described it four hundred years earlier. It had seemed a truly pacific sea, a place of maritime languor and quiet, of warm ultramarine waters and gentle trade winds. It suffered its ferocious storms, true, and its island peoples had not always lived lives of placid serenity, but it had not been a battle-scarred sea of churning and salt-stained gray, as the Atlantic was known. Just recently the war between the United States and Japan had seen violence on a gargantuan scale. But what was about to happen now was quite different, and by many orders of magnitude.

When President Truman authorized the 1950 budget of three hundred million dollars for the AEC to begin work on these quite different weapons (the “supers,” as they were lightly called, the fusion bombs, the thermonuclear devices), they were little more than the blackboard musings of physicists’ dreams—but musings well worth bringing to the attention of the Oval Office.

It had been several weeks earlier, on October 6, 1949, that the director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Sidney Souers, told Truman about some physicists’ remarkable claims: that it might well be possible to employ the nuclear fusion of light gases to create explosions of tremendous force, unlike anything known before. Truman’s interest was instantly piqued—driven in part by his knowledge that the Russians had exploded their first crude atomic fission bomb just a few weeks earlier. This had led to bitter and ferocious argument in the United States, principally between the military and the scientific communities, over the morality of making a new kind of weapon that could and probably would have the power to obliterate not merely thousands but millions. Many of the leading figures in the Pentagon, well aware that the now nuclear-capable Soviets would soon also be able to construct such bombs, insisted that the United States develop them, either to keep up or to keep ahead. But many scientists, more aware than most of the terrible powers of the proposed weapons, found the idea of their development utterly abhorrent. Many were gripped with a profound sense of guilt, even shame, for having ever provided the theoretical basis for their construction in the first place. Fission bombs were bad enough; fusion bombs were unimaginable in their potential for horror.

However, and so far as the U.S. government was concerned, this particular debate was officially ended on January 19, when Truman summoned Admiral Souers to the White House to tell him, in person, of what would come to be seen as one of the truly momentous decisions of his presidency. Developing the new superbomb, Truman told him, finally “made a lot of sense . . . that was what we should do” (my emphasis).

On January 31 the president made the necessary formal pronouncement that he had commanded the AEC to begin the necessary research. Enough money had been made available in the budget. America had to have the bomb, he said to his cabinet colleagues, because although no one ever wanted to use it, its possession would offer a bargaining chip during future negotiations with the Soviets. That alone was the pitiless rationale that finally squared the circle, at least for President Truman, in the moral debate.

The AEC duly began its work, in secret, and with great speed. Within a year the musings had become material. The technical challenges of fashioning a thermonuclear bomb were essentially solved. A first, small prototype device, known as George, was exploded three months later, on May 8, 1951. Then, on November 1, 1952, the first true thermonuclear test weapon, known as Mike, was detonated. Then the largest of them all—a weapon that was tested despite a memorable miscalculation that triggered results both unforgivable and unforgiven—was detonated sixteen months after that.

And owing to their daunting size, all these thermonuclear devices were exploded in the middle of the once pacific Pacific Ocean.

So far as the ocean was concerned, the journey to this point began in 1946, on the mid-sea atoll that shares its name with the much-reduced new style of bathing costume introduced that same year. A costume that a disconcerted Le Monde editorial archly described as displaying “the extreme minimization of modesty” and, rather presciently, as “quite as shocking as an explosion.” The swimsuit’s creator, Louis Réard, had said much the same thing, though intending his remark to be more PR than pejorative: “Like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating.”

As was the island story.

There was in the Pacific an Arcadian time, of course, when all its islands belonged, if belonged is the proper word, to those who had made their livings there for generations. But one by one, group by group, European discoverers happened upon these islands, and one by one, group by group, they lost their easy innocence. The islands that in due time would interest the American bomb testers were first spotted in the eighteenth century by an English seafarer named John Marshall: his fleet came across a vast scattering of atolls in an otherwise empty sea a thousand miles north of the great island of New Guinea. The island inhabitants—Micronesians, as they came to be called by anthropologists—were part Malay, part Polynesian. For thirty previous centuries, they had lived peaceably enough on the atolls that would soon be called the Marshall Islands. They had fished and gathered coconuts, and aside from occasional tussles and skirmishes among one another, they had seldom troubled anyone beyond.

But then came their “discovery,” and in turn a bewildering succession of outsiders who claimed to own and then to rule them, and the Elysian order of old was rudely and permanently interrupted.

As mentioned in the prologue, the Spaniards were the first to arrive, and though they ruled large tracts of the western Pacific from Manila in the Philippines from the sixteenth century onward, they considered the Marshalls too far away to be of much interest. Moreover, the Spaniards’ eventual loss of the Philippines to the United States in the Spanish-American War left their administration of these more distant islands well-nigh impossible—there were an estimated six thousand of them, and it was quite impractical to try to rule them from faraway Madrid.

A few American missionaries, who were busy converting the Hawaiians to Christianity, had stopped by the Marshalls earlier in the nineteenth century, en route to Japan. They left the islanders with a smattering of English, some vague awareness of biblical teachings, and the occasional use of the all-covering Christian version of the Muslim niqab, the Mother Hubbard dress—all influences that remain today. (The Marshalls are overwhelmingly Christian, and Protestant.) These missionaries were not acting as stalking horses for American colonists; that would come later. Instead, it was left to the then more adventurous and imperially inclined Germans, who arrived in the ocean in the later nineteenth century—stout Hamburg traders who discovered goods of one kind and another that could be sent back home to Germany.

Unlike the Spaniards, the Germans believed it was practical and commercially advantageous to try to rule here. They first set up commercial trading stations on the atolls, then established settlements, and finally, with the help of Lutheran missionaries, so entirely convinced the Marshallese that their future would be brighter under the kaiser’s rule that the islands became German colonies. A simple treaty, signed in 1899 with the Spanish and accompanied by a payment of twenty-five million pesetas, transferred ownership of all Spain’s Pacific islands from Madrid to Berlin.1 So, from 1906 onward, the islanders enjoyed an entirely new status. They were no longer overlooked outposts of Spain, but subjects of the Imperial German Pacific Protectorate; were ruled from a Papuan city named Herbertshöhe, fifteen hundred miles away to the southwest; had governors who sported names such as Rudiger, Hahl, and Skopnik; and were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget any Spanish they might have known, and learn German instead.

It would have been a somewhat wasted effort. Just eight years later, in 1914, and though few locally were aware of the Great War raging on the far side of the world, its effects became immediately apparent. Japanese warships suddenly appeared on the horizon, Japanese troops—who at the time were allied to the faraway British—marched ashore, and all the Germans were commanded to leave. They were replaced this time by administrators plucked from the ministries in Tokyo. Once the Germans had been properly vanquished in Europe in 1918, an official League of Nations mandate allowed Japan to run the islands entirely, making the Marshall Islanders “subjects of the Empire of Japan resident in the South Seas Mandate.” They were now to be ruled not from Papua, but from a new colonial headquarters in Saipan, fifteen hundred miles away to the northwest, and run by governors who sported names such as Tawara, Matsuda, and Hiyashi. The islanders were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget all their Spanish and German, and learn Japanese.

Then came the Second World War, and everything changed yet again. So far as the Marshall Islands were concerned, it did so most violently, during the last days of January 1944 and the Battle of Kwajalein, when a large force of American marines killed all but fifty-one of the thirty-five hundred Japanese in the garrison. That spring, governance of the Marshall Islands changed hands once more, with the puzzled locals accepting the rule of a third set of masters in forty years. They were now subjects of the faraway United States of America; were ruled in theory from Washington, DC; paid some kind of notional fealty to President Roosevelt (and soon to Truman); and were advised that to get on in the world, they had best forget all the Spanish and German and Japanese they might have remembered, and learn how to speak English.

They might have supposed that this was to be the final chapter. In fact, it was only the beginning. A new nightmare was about to unfold.

At the end of the war—though the Soviet Union was well on the way—the United States was the only nation to possess atomic weapons, and it had exploded three of them. All had exploited the physics of the fissioning of heavy metals. The first had been a test weapon in the New Mexico desert; the second and third were the live weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given the utter devastation of the two bombs that had been dropped in anger, and how quickly they helped end Japan’s war-fighting abilities, President Truman had no doubts: these new devices, terrible though they might be, should now become a core element in America’s arsenal. He instructed his Pentagon chiefs to make more of them, to test them, to perfect them, and to create ever better and more lethal versions—and so make quite certain that in matters atomic, the United States retained an absolute military lead over the rest of the world.