If you’re like me, and you only just picked up last week’s New Yorker, then you’re in for a pleasant surprise in the form of David Samuels’ epic, 10,000-word story about an amateur atomic age historian and engineer named John Coster-Mullen who figured out how the original atomic bombs were built while running routes with his big rig. It is one of those increasingly infrequent reminders of the New Yorker’s onetime determination to publish massive inquiries on esoteric subjects, current events be damned. Like when the Brooklyn Bridge’s 100th anniversary was met in the New Yorker by a long piece on the Holland Tunnel. Back then, this piece might have been 30,000 words, in two parts, but in today’s magazine climate, I’ll settle for this story and raise a glass to Remnick for keeping the flame alive.
Also to be commended is the purity of the story. Another magazine would have succumbed to the glossy editorial instinct to turn this article into a warning about terrorism, or dirty bombs, or state secrets, or a fearful combination of all three. Instead, it’s a profile of a meticulous obsessive, who also happens to have to reverse engineered and published, in exhaustive detail, the still classified details on how Little Boy and Fat Man were put together. It’s a detective story, basically, and Samuels recounts some of the eureka moments, big and small:
Coster-Mullen’s next big breakthrough on Little Boy came in 1995, when he obtained a curved fragment of the tungsten-carbide tamper from one of the dozens of test units built by the Manhattan Project. An engineer had saved the fragment from the Anchor Ranch test site, in Los Alamos. The purpose of the cylindrical tamper was to reflect neutrons back into the critical assembly, thus containing the chain reaction for a fraction of a second, until enough matter was converted into energy to destroy Hiroshima. The tamper fragment was half an inch wide, an inch long, and two inches deep. It bore a notable resemblance to the State of Illinois.
“It occurred to me that perhaps I could get some dimensional information by analyzing the fragment’s curvature,” Coster-Mullen recalled. He took the piece to a friend’s brother, who worked in the quality-control department of a large manufacturing facility in Milwaukee. “They have huge granite-block tables for making precise measurements of finished machine pieces,” he said. A spring-loaded probe touched the curved surface at twenty different points. Thirty seconds later, a number popped up on a screen indicating that the original diameter of the tungsten-carbide cylinder was 13.1513 inches. “That was a big clue,” Coster-Mullen explained. The diameter of the cylinder gave him a maximum distance of one inch between the cylinder and the outer casing. He was getting closer and closer to a full understanding of the inner workings of the atomic bomb.
David Samuels, whom I’ve met via his sister, a friend of mine, is one of my favorite magazine writers. I’m not breaking new ground there; everyone else loves his stuff too. Recently, he made waves by putting a story about Britney’s paparazzi on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly, but I would point to his story a few years back, also in the New Yorker, about how one goes about becoming a dirigible captain. (It is available now in Samuels’ own anthology.)
What I love about this particular piece is the motivational parallels between Coster-Mullen and the origins of the bomb he wants to recreate. It was the pure pursuit of knowledge that led to the atom bomb. Physicists wanted to understand how the universe worked at the atomic level, and there happened to be some very serious consequences to unlocking the secrets of the grand watchworks. Now, Coster-Mullen, has dedicated himself to understanding the secret mechanical watchworks of Little Boy. There is no motivation beyond knowing, but that pursuit too has some potentially serious consequences. And so it turns out to be, as with all science stories, that ultimately Samuels’ (or Coster-Mullen’s) tale is a parable about our old friend Faust and his verdammte bargain. You can’t undo the human drive towards scientific knowledge and technology. And you can’t undo those discoveries once they are made. Especially when the world is full of meticulous truck drivers.
