JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 369
This odd graphic appeared as the entire front cover of the National Geographic Society's Lecture Program pamphlet for 1946. It is strange to me, the use of the photo and its cropping, its brightness--weirdly, the image seems to me to be almost "happy". The lead lecture for the series was Admiral William P. Blandy, who was one of the only leading military men (along with Dwight Eisenhower) to voice disapproval on the military use of the atomic bomb. Blandy (28 June 1890 – 12 January 1954, first in his class at USNA, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance from 1941 to 1943; then Commander, Group 1, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet.) went on after the war to become the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons, most notably in the early periods at Operation Crossroads.
Crossroads was the nuclear weapons tests conducted during the summer of 1946 at the Marshall Islands, and included the fourth and fifth (Able and Baker) tests of atomic bombs (the first being at Trinity, the other two at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The picture on the front cover of the NGS pamphlet is for Test Able—the Japanese battleship Nagato (shown in the painting below, listing, 1946), the ship in command of the Japanese forces for the attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the ships used in this blast for test purposes. It was not sunk in the explosion, nor was it sunk immediately afterwards when charges were detonated on her sides. The ship did eventually list and sink.
The choice of this image for Bandy’s lecture bothers me. He never liked the bomb, being more dissatisfied with “the breath of death” from the weapon—its radioactivity—than its immediate destructive power. He referred to it as “a form of poison warfare”.
I don’t think he was much satisfied with his position. Of his work there in the Marshalls he said:
"The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim."
Just so there is no confusion:
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