Can Dr. Evil Save The World?

Teller, who fled his native Hungary as a young man to escape the Nazis, helped build the first hydrogen bomb and co-founded the Lawrence Livermore lab. With enormous dark eyebrows, a prosthetic foot and an unshakable belief in the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire, Teller was one of the most influential scientists of the nuclear age -- and an inspiration for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film. Teller was impressed enough by Wood to invite him to join the Livermore lab. At first, Wood explored nuclear fission and supernova astrophysics; by the early 1970s, he was hard at work designing nuclear weaponry.

In their partnership, Teller was the big-picture guy, Wood the detail man. "Lowell is a much better engineer than Teller was," says Freeman Dyson, a physicist who knew both men well. "Teller loved big ideas but was not so interested in how to actually implement them." But as the Cold War cranked up and fear of mushroom clouds shadowed the world, both men became symbols of the unholy marriage of science and war. In 1971, torch-carrying antiwar protesters in Berkeley marched on Teller's home and threatened to burn him alive. Wood found death threats pinned to the gate of his home.

To Teller, nuclear bombs were not just instruments of war but tools of progress. He embarked on "Project Plowshare," a perverse scheme to promote the use of nukes to excavate harbors, canals and mines. ("We will change the Earth's surface to suit us," Teller proclaimed.) Despite the idea's insanity, he nearly gained approval to use five nuclear bombs to dig a harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska, until the plans were halted by an international outcry. Teller even proposed setting off a nuclear blast several hundred feet beneath the surface of the moon, predicting that it would unleash a great fountain of water and enable humanity to colonize the lunar surface.

But the fullest expression of Teller's apocalyptic vision came in the 1980s, when he and Wood developed the idea of nuke-powered X-ray lasers in space that could vaporize Soviet missiles before they reached the U.S. It was a fantastically costly and complex scheme, but Teller managed to sell it to President Reagan, who was eager to fund anything that might rattle the Soviets. Officially dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative but known to everyone as Star Wars, the project became the centerpiece of Reagan's defense policy. Billions of dollars in research money flowed to Livermore -- much of it to support the "O Group," a ragtag bunch of Berkeley and Stanford grads assembled by Wood to build the X-ray laser.

Members of the O Group worked insane hours, fueled mostly by soft drinks and ice cream, driven by a sense of mission and pride in the fact that they were the smartest weapons builders on the planet. Richard Gabriel, a software-industry pioneer who worked at the lab in the early 1980s, recalls that one team member kept two maps above his desk -- one of the Soviet Union and one of the moon -- labeled "before" and "after." Some of the scientists carried weapons in their cars to protect them from the KGB. In their rare moments of free time, the group would hang out at the enormous log home that Wood had built by hand in the hills above the lab, where they'd goof off by cranking open a gas line that ran through the property and lighting it, creating a thirty-foot-high tower of fire.

But the X-ray laser turned out to be a debacle, done in by engineering problems, cost overruns and the fall of the Soviet Union. All told, $60 billion was blown on the Star Wars program -- with little to show for it. Wood, however, believes that those billions helped make the world a safer place. When I asked him what he was most proud of in his career, he e-mailed back, "I'm most proud of the assuredly small but perhaps non-negligible role which my many colleagues and I played in the downfall of the Soviet Union, the mainstay of 'Red fascism' and the dominant geopoliticomilitary threat to large-scale human welfare of our time."

By the time Star Wars collapsed, Teller was in his mid-eighties, increasingly reclusive, shunned and bitter. But he had not quit applying his brain to big problems. One that interested him: What would happen to the human race during the next ice age? At the time, most scientists believed that climate cycles would inevitably return the planet to a deep freeze, and Teller and Wood began to hash out ways to modulate the planet's reflectivity -- effectively enabling humans to raise or lower the Earth's temperature at will.

They were not breaking new ground. In the 1940s, American and Soviet scientists began exploring high-tech methods of manipulating the weather and, eventually, the planet's climate. In 1992, a report by the National Academy of Sciences found that increasing the reflectivity of the Earth by just one percent would be enough to compensate for doubling levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The report examined various ways to achieve the goal, from placing a giant screen in front of the sun to launching zillions of tiny space balloons to redirect sunlight. But the most intriguing approach, first suggested by Russian geophysicist Mikhail Budyko in the 1970s, was that of filling the stratosphere with particles to reflect sunlight. Humans could essentially create a device to mimic nature's own climate-cooling system: volcanoes. The largest eruption on record, Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815, caused such drastic cooling that the aftermath was known as the "year without summer." In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, it dropped the region's average temperature by nearly one degree. Moreover, the climatic effects of an eruption can last a long time, cooling the oceans for decades.

Teller and Wood simply took a dreamy idea and engineered it for real life. They determined that tiny particles -- only one-tenth the diameter of the smallest dust mote visible to the human eye -- would be most effective at scattering sunlight. These particles could be engineered out of some nonreactive metallic substance, such as aluminum, or generated from sulfur, a substance readily available as a byproduct of oil refining. As Wood and Teller pointed out, cooling the entire planet with aerosolized particles would cost only $1 billion a year -- nearly 100 times cheaper than the cost of cutting CO2 emissions. What was not to like?