The Curve of Binding Energy

First edition.
In the latest of his inimitable works of reportage, John McPhee has written the story of the life and career of Theodore B. Taylor, a relatively unknown man who has been one of the most inventive nuclear scientists of our time. Ted Taylor is a theoretical physicist who was for many years a conceptual designer of atomic bombs. At Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, he conceived and designed the largest-yield fission bomb ever exploded by any nation. Another of his bombs was, in its time, the lightest and smallest ever made.
Taylor later became the leader of a secret scientific effort, financed by the federal government, to make a spaceship the size of a sixteen-story build-ing. The ship was of his invention and was to be called Orion. Powered by two thousand atomic bombs, exploding one at a time, it would move very rapidly to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto.The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 ended the project (but if human beings ever achieve travel much beyond the moon, some such vehicle will carry them).
For many years now, Taylor has spent most of his time trying to effect improvements in the protection of certain nuclear materials that could be stolen or “diverted” from companies that handle nuclear fuel. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239-the materials that destroyed Hiroshima and Naga-saki-are now privately owned in quantities sufficient for the making of many thousands of bombs, and these amounts will prodigiously increase as the nuclear-power industry grows. So much de-classified information is available that the fabrication of a homemade atomic bomb would be, in Taylor’s view, relatively easy. A bomb could, in fact, be made by one person working alone.
The course of Taylor’s own career-beginning in 1949 in Los Alamos, continuing through Orion, and eventually coming round to the attempt to protect millions of kilograms of bomb material from catastrophic misuse-closely follows the perhaps boomeranging history of the use of atomic energy.