Ball Lightning

“Once I got there, I told my supervisor that I wanted to work on something completely new, something with no foundation whatsoever, regardless of the difficulty. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll join Project 3141.’ Later I found out that the project code had been chosen based on the value of pi. For days after first meeting the person in charge of the project, the academician Nikolai Niernov, I didn’t know what it was about. Niernov was a very unusual person, fanatical even given the politics of the time, someone who secretly read Trotsky and was enamored with the idea of global revolution. When I asked him about the nature of Project 3141, this is what he said: ‘Comrade Gemow, I know that recent accomplishments in space flight are particularly attractive to you, but what do they matter? From orbit, Gagarin wasn’t able to toss so much as a rock down onto the heads of those capitalists in Washington. But our project is different. If we succeed, it will turn all the conventional weapons of the imperialists into toys, and make their air force flight groups as fragile as butterflies, and make their fleets as flimsy as cardboard boxes floating on the water!’

“And then I came here, with the first group of scientists, and it looked like what you just saw outside. It was snowing that day, and this open area had just been cleared out, and there were still stumps on the ground.

“I won’t go into detail about what happened later. Even if we had time, I don’t think my mind could take it. All you need to know is that right where we’re standing was the world’s largest ball lightning research center. The study of ball lightning took place here for thirty years, employing, at its height, more than five thousand people. The Soviet Union’s greatest physicists and mathematicians were all involved to varying extents.

“To demonstrate just how much was invested into this project, I’ll give you one example. Look at this.”

Gemow shone his flashlight behind us, and just beside the tunnel we had come out of we saw another massive tunnel entrance.

“That tunnel is twenty miles long, but for secrecy, all shipments to the base were unloaded on the other end and then brought here through the tunnel. This led to large quantities of goods unaccountably disappearing over there. To keep this fact from attracting attention and questions from the outside world, they built a small city there. Only—likewise for secrecy—the city was not inhabited. It was just a useless ghost town.

“To hide the radiation produced during artificial lightning research, the entire base was constructed underground. We’re standing in a medium-sized lab. The rest of the base has been sealed up or demolished, and there’s no way to get to it now.

“Large experimental equipment was once installed here, like the world’s largest lightning simulator, a complex field generator, and a large-scale wind tunnel, to model the environment producing ball lightning on the largest possible scale and from every angle. Take a look at this.”

We had arrived at a massive trapezoidal cement platform.

“Can you imagine a platinum electrode several stories high? There used to be one installed on this platform.”

He bent down to pick something up and passed it to me. It was heavy, a metal ball. “It looks like it’s from a ball mill,” I said.

Gemow shook his head. “During testing of the lightning simulator, metal structures at the top of the tunnel were melted by the lightning, and the drips cooled to form these.” I examined the ground with a flashlight and found many of the metal balls. “The lightning produced by the massive simulator in the central lab was an order of magnitude more powerful than natural lightning in the wild, enough for NATO’s nuclear monitoring system to detect the shock wave. NATO believed that it was from an underground nuclear test, and the Soviet government admitted to that, taking a major hit in nuclear disarmament talks. When the lightning tests were in progress, the mountains shook, and the ozone produced by underground lightning vented above ground, giving the air within a hundred-kilometer radius an unusually fresh scent. While the simulations were ongoing, the electric field generator, microwave emitter, and large-scale wind tunnels were run to simulate lightning under every condition, and then the results were input into a huge computer system for analysis. Parameters for some of the tests far exceeded the most extreme natural conditions: super-powerful lightning was triggered in a complicated maze of electric fields, or amid microwaves capable of boiling away a pond in a brief period of time…. Lightning research continued here for three decades.”