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.
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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