Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre

Cydonia

Prologue: The Outer Bridge

For now we see through a glass darkly, but someday, face to face.

The Apostle Paul: 1st Cor. 13: 25

It is Thanksgiving Day when I begin to write this account of this great and terrible discovery of the age. On Thanksgiving Day we examine our lives and existence and give thanks to God and our fellow human beings for our many blessings, one of which is life itself.

Like the day on which I begin this tale, this book is actually a prayer, a prayer that humankind will realize how fortunate they are to have this Earth and each other and, in realizing their good fortune, will move forward to secure those fortunes. For beyond the fair circle of the Earth lies the abyss of space, and across that abyss lies the Red Planet, Mars. On Mars, as desolate as the Earth is rich in life, is a story carved and burned into its rocks, whose telling is both wondrous and terrifying. It is a tale of abundant life and catastrophic death, a tale of scientific discovery as epic as any seen in history, and a warning as astonishing as it is chilling.

My story begins in picturesque Albuquerque, set in the painted desert of the southwest in the icy depths of the Cold War, near one of the many ‘ground-zeroes’ of that conflict. There, I had assumed a job working on directed energy weapons at a great national research Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, named for the red hued Mountains to the east of Albuquerque. I was working in the nation’s defense trying to perfect a new beam of destruction to rival the laser beam. I had always been a very patriotic individual, and my father and uncles were combat veterans of World War II. My father had survived the loss of three-quarters of the bomber squadron he flew with, but he would only ever attribute this fact to dumb luck.¹ Accordingly, contributing to the nation’s defense was second nature to me. But the Cold War, with its threat of mutual nuclear holocaust, seemed to me an intellectual nightmare, and I was on its intellectual front lines. I had been to Russia and toured it for two weeks as a college student. I had returned from there even more patriotic, but also with a deep love of the Russian land and people. Now the sight of Russian mothers weeping over their dead sons, killed in Afghanistan, on the news, filled me with deep sadness.

At Sandia we were trying to launch beams of high energy electrons through the air, a sort of directed lightning bolt. The electrons would come hurtling out of an accelerator, which happened to be of Russian design, and, in theory, were to fly straight toward a target at nearly the speed of light, strike it and deposit there energy all through it like x-rays, so that it would explode into white hot vapor. However, the powerful electron beams, like the lightning bolts that graced the skies over Albuquerque so abundantly, refused to fly straight. The electrons, like a flock of nervous sparrows, would dart this way and that, and end up flying in a random sinusoidal path, in defiance of any attempt to aim them precisely. The electrons were reacting dynamically to the electrically conducting plasma they created while boring a hole through the air. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, an electrically conducting glowing gas that makes up the stars, the aurora, the neon sign, the lightning, and 99% of the universe. The problem was that the plasma forming in the air around the electron beams, being an electrical conductor like polished metal, was creating a reflection or image current to the electron beam, and the electron beam was being repelled by its own image. So the beams would penetrate the air, forming a plasma sheath around themselves, see their own reflection in it, and thrash around furiously trying to escape it. I had been hired by Sandia labs, in effect, to be a psychiatrist to the electrons, and teach them, if possible, not to be afraid of their own reflections. So they would fly straight and do their grim work on the targets we directed them to. Plasmas are what I was trained to work on as a scientist.

I had been trained to work on plasmas to solve the great problem facing humanity, the problem of energy. I completed my Doctoral Thesis on the problem of confining plasmas, hotter than the center of a star, so humanity could enjoy controlled fusion energy, a safer and cleaner form of nuclear power. That is, I and my colleagues had tried to bring the power of the stars to Earth. I had done my doctoral work under the brilliant Richard F. Post at another government research laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We had made enormous progress on the problem of controlled fusion while I had been working there. However, with the change of administrations from Carter to Reagan had come a change in priorities. Controlled fusion research was to receive less funding. The icy flames of the Cold War were to be stoked instead. So my dreams of helping to ensure a bright warm future for humanity had been crushed as I had searched vainly for a job in controlled fusion in a time of tightening budgets. Instead, in order to fulfill my promise to my wife of a good job, nice house, and affluence after the privations of graduate school, I had taken a job in directed energy weapons research. It was a tough intellectual transition for me, but I had always tried to be tough. I was lucky to have gotten the job I had, but it came at a cost.

At Livermore, administered as part of the University of California, science had been conducted in a mostly academic manner, as far as I could tell, buried deep in the Magnetic fusion energy section. But I knew that at the other end of the vast laboratory, the physics and basic design of hydrogen bombs were being researched for the nation’s arsenal. The graduate school I attended had the informal name of Teller Tech, after its founder Edward Teller, a man I deeply respected. Teller had helped convince Einstein to sign a letter warning Franklin Roosevelt about the danger of Adolf Hitler gaining an atomic bomb ahead of the U.S. and Britain in World War II- a very real threat. Edward Teller had later invented the Hydrogen Bomb, staying just one step ahead of Andrei Sakharov, who was developing it for Joseph Stalin. So I was proud to be a graduate of his school.

I had spent some time in the highly classified end of the Livermore laboratory working on Laser Fusion, which was an attempt to miniaturize the hydrogen bomb so its energy could be released in a series of controlled micro-explosions. This effort required a great deal of knowledge gained from nuclear weapons design. I gained a basic knowledge of nuclear weapons design and operation at that time. The tenor of work in Laser Fusion was less academic and more results driven. The science was measured more in its impact on the world rather than being part of some vast quest for knowledge. My thesis advisor on that project, the brilliant Dr. Harry Sahlin, died tragically of heart failure during the period I was working for him, so I transferred back to the Magnetic Fusion end of the laboratory. Working on a new thesis in the more relaxed and scholarly magnetic fusion energy section, where fusion energy was to be released like a gentle gas flame, the Cold War had seemed more like an abstraction, and scientific inquiry was taken as an end in itself. All of that changed when I finished my doctorate and took a job at Sandia. Livermore Laboratory was a small college town devoted to science that would benefit humanity, Sandia Laboratory was then a desert fortress.

Sandia National Laboratories was a vast complex surrounded by a double security fence near the base of the russet mountains that gave it its name. It lay at the Southeast edge of beautiful Albuquerque and its southern expanse stretched off into the reddish colored high desert that surrounded Albuquerque. The Sandia Laboratory security fence was in turn surrounded by a security fence of the vast and sprawling Kirtland Air Force base, which also housed the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and Manzano Mountain Nuclear Weapons Depot. Manzano Mountain was a hollowed out mountain far out in the desert to the south surrounded by a triple fence of gleaming razor wire, where it was rumored, thousands of nuclear weapons were stored. In case of a nuclear war, that nuclear weapons depot-it was said by my colleagues at Sandia-would attract probably a hundred Soviet Nuclear warheads from the sky and turn Manzano Mountain, Sandia Labs and Albuquerque into a vast glowing crater.

It is difficult to understand the mind-set of the times, especially the mind-set of those of us involved in national defense in those days of the early 1980’s, when the Cold War raged in icy intensity. We have mostly forgotten those days, mercifully, when the nuclear extinction of the human race was always 30 minutes away. Sandia Laboratories was a more engineering oriented laboratory than Livermore and specialized primarily in the detailed engineering of building nuclear weapons and making sure they worked properly when deployed, that is, on doomsday. They wanted all of our bombs to function perfectly on that fateful day. ‘No duds on doomsday’ was the unofficial motto of Sandia Laboratories. They did their job well and professionally.

The Cold War, just an abstraction back in the magnetic fusion section at Livermore, roiled naked around me every morning at Sandia Laboratory as I arrived at work. The Cold War was a conflict between those who lived in freedom and those who did not, and having visited Russia as a college student, I knew this well. The Cold War was also however, a vast Mexican standoff between the United States and its NATO Allies and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact. Both bands of nations had nuclear guns drawn and pointed at each other, fingers on the triggers, and were exchanging curses. Everyone, especially in the defense field, knew that one noise mistaken for a gunshot, and everyone was going to start shooting nuclear missiles at each other. That life went on normally during those times was a triumph of the human capacity to compartmentalize problems such as the prospect of doomsday, from the everyday problems of a shopping list for the grocery store and finding the right route to work. In my case, my trip to work carried me by a bearded former employee at Sandia, who now stood outside the main gate and waved a sign that asked Would Jesus work in this death factory?

Of course he wouldn’t, joked one of my colleagues at lunch, He couldn’t get a security clearance.

My first year at Sandia National Laboratories, 1982, had gone well and I had achieved the good job, fine house and prosperous life that I had promised my wife. I remember walking in my backyard in the beautiful northeast heights of Albuquerque, watering dry areas in my nice green lawn with a garden hose in the summer twilight of 1983, and saying to God my cup runneth over. I then remember praying a fateful prayer: I said,

God, if you need a trained scientist for some task, I am your man

Little did I realize then the glorious, epic and terrible task that God would set before me. Shortly afterwards, the shadow of Mars came to lie upon all of us, my family, my colleagues, and myself.

Mars, the Planet of War, the Red Planet, had been a source of fascination from ancient times when it figured large in royal astrological tables. Being the planet that foretold the fortunes of battle, kingdoms paid large sums to astrologers to track its movements carefully. One such royal astrologer was Tycho Brahe, who was aware of the new Copernican Model of the Universe. Copernicus had proposed, following the model of Aristarchus of Samos, a millennium before him, that the Sun and not the Earth was the center of the Universe. Copernicus had further proposed that the planets, including the Earth, moved in circles around the Sun. This had been a very unpopular view with the religious authorities and had gotten Copernicus’s book a prominent place on the Catholic Church’s list of banned books. Galileo, mastering the art of making glass lenses for telescopes, found proof of the basic Copernican Model and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life for saying so. To disturb the Earth from the center of the Cosmos was to disturb the human race and its institutions of authority from the center of the Cosmos, an act of demotion the authorities did not appreciate. The same thing had happened to Aristarchus of Samos, except the angry priesthood of those days served Mars and Jupiter. Tycho Brahe, knowing where his bread was buttered, publically rejected the Copernican Model, while privately checking its accuracy. It was actually a good model, he told his assistant Johanne Kepler, except that the orbit of Mars was clearly not a precise circle centered on the Sun. With that fateful comment had begun the scientific revolution that would eventually produce nuclear weapons, rockets to deliver them to targets on Earth, and my job at Sandia Laboratories.

It all had begun with the orbit of Mars, which was clearly not a circle. Kepler, in studying the orbit of Mars, using Tycho Brahe’s carefully recorded and highly accurate observations, found that Mars moved on an ellipse, a slightly oval circle, and worked out mathematically the laws of planetary motion. Later, Newton would seize upon Kepler’s work to explain the elliptical orbit of Mars by his theory of gravitation, and in the process invent Newton’s laws of motion, and calculus. Newton would publish this all in a book called The Principia Mathematica, and in doing so revolutionize the world and how it solved problems. Newton’s laws of motion would lead to the work of Tsiolkovsky, who found the equation for rocket motion and found that liquid fuels, with their light molecules, would be best for journeys into space.

Mars further beckoned humanity as the practice of science grew. A better understanding of optics enabled much better telescopes than those made by Galileo to be turned towards the Red Planet.

Mars had since become the scientific outer-bridge of the human realm, our slender connection with what was Earthlike in the rest of the cosmos. Through a glass darkly, brilliant Mars swam in a field of boiling Earthly atmospheric turbulence. Its white polar caps were easily visible, as were dust storms in its windswept atmosphere. Mars demonstrated clearly an Earth-like planet apart from Earth and showed that other Earths probably existed around other stars. Perched high in the deserts around Flagstaff Arizona, with their clear skies, Percival Lowell’s telescope with its great glass lenses probably had the best views of Mars of any telescope on Earth. In the moments when the atmosphere was quiet, thousands of subtle spidery details on Mars surface would become clearly visible, only to disappear when the Earth’s atmosphere resumed its roiling movement. During those periods Percival Lowell would sketch what he saw, the human eyes being the best optical recording instrument available at the time. Tirelessly he worked all night, filling pads of paper with sketches during the apparitions of Mars, when the orbits of Mars and Earth brought them closest together. From these exhausting nights came material and maps, for books about Mars. Lowell, agreeing with other observers, thought he saw canals on Mars suggesting intelligent life and showed maps of them in his books. Many observers also recorded an apparent wave of darkening as the polar caps shrunk in the local summers on Mars, and this suggested a summer bloom of plant life on Mars. All of this together made Mars the stuff of dreams and an attractive destination for human explorers. But how to get there? That was the problem. However, others thought, perhaps, an inhabited Mars might present its own set of problems.

In 1906, Mars became the source for the first extraterrestrial invasion of Earth in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. In the brutal depiction of the Martian invasion of Victorian England, the Martian war machines overwhelmed the human military with laserlike heat rays and poison gas and utilized humans as a food source. However, this made Mars all the more fascinating to Robert Goddard, who read the book when he was 16 and at 17, while ascending a tall cherry tree to prune it, was overcome with inspiration. As he wrote:

"On this day I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn…and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet. I have several photographs of the tree, taken since, with the little ladder I made to climb it, leaning against it.

It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive."

Robert Goddard would go on to design, build and launch the first liquid fueled rocket. Later, as his rockets grew larger and traveled further, he decided in 1934, to move his rocket research to some out-of-the-way place where nothing ever happened: Roswell, New Mexico. There the modern rocket that would one day put satellites in orbit and send probes to Mars was born, and flew.

That Mars was an abode of life, like Earth, had become a widely accepted idea. But all that was to change when the first space probes, the products of the scientific revolution inspired by Mars, reached the planet and imaged it at close range and without the turbulent atmosphere of Earth in the way.

The Mars that the robotic eyes of Marnier 4 saw was a desolate wasteland, a cratered Moon-like orb. To the eyes of humanity, locked deeply in the Cold War- a war that could flash to nuclear heat at any time- the Mars they beheld was the Earth of their worst fears. It was a Mars that looked like Earth would look long after a nuclear war had wiped out humanity. Mars had become the outer-bridge of humanity to the stars, but it showed us, rather than hope, a glimpse of our possible fate. So it was that Mars had been the specter of war to the ancients, then the spark of the scientific revolution, then the father of the rocket that could bridge the abyss between Mars and Earth, and now, a dark vision of our future.

But the rocket could also carry nuclear warheads to any place on Earth, and hence my job at Sandia, in the Temple of Mars. I was deep now inside the perimeter of Kirtland Air Force base, where every morning jet fighters of the New Mexico Air National Guard would take off right over the building where I worked. They would fly south to weapons ranges in White Sands to practice strafing and rocket and bombing drills on targets in the Mars-like desert. It was said that should the long-feared NATO-Warsaw Pact war breakout in Europe, they would be the first National Guard units to be sent from the US, so they practiced constantly.

Outside, at a nearby facility called the Trestle, the electromagnetic pulse produced by nuclear weapon explosions was simulated and every conceivable piece of US or allied military equipment, from tanks to ambulances, was tested to see if they would still function after a nuclear attack.

I joked that soon they would test racks of bayonets to make sure even they could function after a nuclear attack and continue the war after even its last bullets were spent. This was all the perfection of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), which relied on the assurance that we would respond in kind to any nuclear attack, even if it meant everything we cared about was burned to ashes. To be perfect, our madness had to be absolutely convincing.

While I had long ago decided that I did not want to survive a nuclear war, others in the military and at Sandia were dutifully working to make sure that military equipment would still function, to continue the war long after most of the human race was dead. I was to find out that many of my colleagues at Sandia, fellow physicists and engineers, differed from me in that they preserved a hope they could survive a nuclear war with their families. I was to find out that this forlorn hope existed when news from the desolate planet Mars extinguished this hope utterly.

In the fall of 1983, the shadow of a dust storm on Mars in 1971 cast a pall over Sandia Laboratories and all who worked there. In 1971, when the Mariner 9 spacecraft had reached Mars and begun orbiting it, a dust storm of global size had broken out and covered the planet from pole to pole for months. Analysis had later shown that the dust in the Mars atmosphere had blocked all sunlight from the Martian surface so