A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
Self- and purposefully-deceptive belief in spectacular
and unsupportable scenarios espoused by governmental leaders which affect the
lives of hundreds of millions of people deserve their own Dante-esque categorization:and that’s one that I haven’t come up with
yet.This post is one of a continuing thread on the history of atomic weapons.
I wonder how it was that we humans didn’t blow ourselves
into melty dissolving bits during the Cold War.Somehow all of those thousands of megatons of disastrously radioactive
explosives that were completely and reliably deliverable didn’t get
launched—not even by accident, not even during all of those hot itchy-finger
DEFCON 2situations.Did MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction )
actually work?Did the attempt at making
a winnable nuclear confrontation keep people from actually trying to do
so?Did the overwhelming and insane
buildup of weaponry actually have so much enormous and foul intellectual weight
that no one could actually make the decision to use the weapons for fear of
snuffing out all human life?
Here’s an embarrassingly shining case in point: Dr. Joseph D. Coker’s paper to the Population
Association of America representing the thinking of the Office of Emergency
Planning and the Executive Branch in general, which freely discussed the survivability
of the United States
following even a post-massive nuclear exchange. Dr.
Coker was the director of the NationalResourceEvaluationCenter, which tried mightily to figure
out how/where /what/how the essential 'stuff” of America could be saved/stored/allocated
after the end of the world.Actually,
Dr. Coker said that the big attack wouldn’t be the end of the world, so we needed
to plan for surviving.
A few cases in point, some of which, I must warn you, are
breathtaking and Strangelovian in their myopia:
Since Dr. Coker was addressing the Population Studies people, he
related much of what he had to say (regarding national resources) to the
American people.He found that millions
of people could be saved if they built a blast shelter (not a fallout shelter)
that was covered with mounds of heavy material and outfitted for an extended
stay of two to 22 days.The unfortunate
part of this scenario, Coker says, is that these shelters work best when 10
miles or more away from a detonation zone.And since these zones were all over the country targeted by thousands of
warheads, very few people (especially in cities) would be outside the 10-mile
ring, which made the blast shelter basically useless.
Coker notes that if an attack of 1000 megatons
[a limited exchange] was aimed exclusively at U.S.air bases, “total fatalities
will approximate 10% of the U.S.
population”.If this attack was aimed at
population centers rather than the air bases, it would kill 40% of the
population. A 5,000 megaton attack on air bases would produce 50% overall
fatalities in the U.S.;
if that amount was centered on large populations, the number would jump to 80%
of the population.10,000 megatons would
yield 75% and 95%, respectively.“A
50,000 megaton attack would kill almost all U.S. citizens under either
targeting assumption”.These figures
didn’t include radiation deaths.
A big variable here not controlled for was the distribution
of population at the time of attack.The
numbers that were used were compiled by the census and counted folks who would
be at home.So, the numbers above worked
if and only if the Soviets attacked after dinner when everyone was at home for
the night.Since it would make sense to
attack when people were at work at their industry or job or whatever during the
day—thus maximizing the effect of the bomb—the casualties would actually be higher.
And what does that mean?Dr. Coker relates this gem (on page 21): “The post-attack labor force
available thirty days after the attack probably will represent a significantly
lower fraction of the population than does the preattack labor force….” And
this: “A nuclear attack can be expected to alter the occupational composition
of the labor force.”
This sort of thinking overtakes the factual aspects of
massive attack, with Coker stating on page 24 “I wish to sayemphatically that it [post-attack America] will
not be anything like that depicted in Neville Shute’s On the Beach.It will be bad enough, but not that
hopeless.”
And this absolutely incredible/horrendous and perhaps worst-use-ever
of the word “awkward”:
For the love of King Neptune’s Pants:Awkward?How in the name of _______ could someone in such a high position and
authority relate massive attacks on every major American population center
which would cover the area in fire and thousands of gigantic highly radioactive
craters in which a city used to exist be called “awkward”?How great a sin was this, to influence
opinion on holocaust via pathetic and unreasonable means?
And then this, on the survivability of our governmental and
economic institutions:
“The post attack institutional environment will depend on
the continuity, resourcefulness and general effectiveness of our leadership and
the survival and resilience of pre-attack institutions…”
Hm?The post-attack
institutions will depend on themselves?
This of course is followed by a major plug for Dr. Coker’s own
work, because the preparations undertaken by the NREC will directly affect the
survivability of post-attack America.So don’t stop the funding.“The more complete and realistic our
preattack [sic] planning and preparations have been and the more effectively
the government is at all levels in inspiring and retaining the confidence and
support of the population, the less drastic institutional changes will
be.”So it is the mealy aspect of
inspiration that will direct the survivability of whatever it is that makes America
so.
I should point out that Coker’s use of “post attack” and
“pre attack” appear as two words, one word and a hyphenated word, depending on
nothing. This is only a forty-page document.
Another nugget on the post-Armageddon future on the
distribution of wealth, mostly hinging on blast shelters:“Per capita wealth in material terms may or
may not be reduced by attack.”There
will be a relatively proportional number ofpeople who emerge from the smoking holes to staff surviving industry,
and so per capita wealth will stay about
the same.If, on the other hand,
people build more blast shelters, then the proportion of surviving workers to
factories will increase, and “the surviving plant capacity will be spread more
thinly among them”. It is left unstated, but what that means is that more successful implementation of blast
shelters would mean a reduction in per capita wealth. Dr. Coker also
forgets what he said earlier that the blast shelters really didn’t work unless
they were more than ten miles from a target.Considering that the industrial workers would be living close to, um,
industry, they will no doubt be (in 1962) in a ten-mile radius to where the
blast would be.Then of course there
would probably be more than one bomb, so the blast area would be more than a
ten-mile circle, and so on and so forth.
In the following paragraph, Dr. Coker somehow draws all
manner of feel-good high-probables around him, encasing himself like a sandman
in a thin layer of improbability, to come to the following conclusion:
“…few of the analysts who have studied carefully these
post-attack [sic] survival and recovery problems take any stock in the
oft-repeated theory that the survivors will envy the dead.On the contrary, after a very rough year or
two, the surviving population, if it so
chooses, can begin to enjoy the advantages of a social structure and a
physical environment not so very different from those which prevailed before the
attack.” [Emphasis mine.]
This is an astonishing work of incredible deceit, and may be
the worst quote of the lot.But it is so
difficult to choose between unacceptable bits of thinking like this, raking out the horrible from the terrible.
Here’s another deceit that was absolutely better understood in 1962
than the writer acknowledges:“The
long-term effects of radiation are subject to much less understanding and
certainty than are the short term effects.There is some evidence that increased radiation exposure results in
reduced life expectancy and increased evidence of leukemia and various
degenerative diseases…”And this:“Genetic effects are more
controversial.”Than what?! And this: “Studies
of the Hiroshima and Nagasakiexperience are said thus far
to be inconclusive.” Honestly this was
very well understood in 1962, and statements like these were enormously
irresponsible if the data were actually misunderstood and criminal if they weren’t.
There are many more examples—I’d say actually that the
entire paper was at the level of Apocalypse Fairy Tale—but I’d like to
close with just one more, this one using another fanciful version of the
possible post-nuclear future and another highly insulting euphemism.On transportation:“We hope in the near future to develop a
family of network and transportation models to estimate capabilities to move
surpluses into deficit areas in
order to cover deficits during each time period and to support the use of more
ambitious resource management techniques focussed [sic] on recovery problems.”Aside from bad sentence structure and
misspellings I could hardly imagine sitting through a presentation where a
person thought this stolen undercooked tripe.What we have arrived at here at the end of the paper is references to
smoke-in-a-hole cities being “deficit areas”, and the successful removal of
human consideration from the conversation—strange as Dr. Coker was addressing the
Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America.(I’d love to know what the association
members thought of the talk afterwards.)
And so what can we draw from the experience of knowing
thinking like this?Is it as sterile as
it might seem, so distant from our experience?The scenarios have changed, as have the leaders and delivery systems,
but the insatiable stupidities have evolved and morphedinto our own time.Its easy to raise our eyebrows now on the
whole MAD approach and the writings of people like Dr. Coker.The truth of the matter is that we have
plenty of this sort of thinking going on right now, big head-waggers that will
loom in our futures with the attached questions of “how could this have happened?”.WMD is one of the many examples of this, a
Big Lie that was repeated for years and which ultimately cost the lives of many
thousands of people and a great perpetuator of the culture of fear.President Bush
drove that one into the ground and so far as I know still employs it when
necessary, threatening listeners with fear of those three letters like they
were a practice hand grenade.(I recall
that a far-right radio personality filled with afterbirth
blood and urine eyes said that he would resign his show “in a year” if WMD were not found in
Iraq; that was five years ago, and of course he is still there, bloated and
ponderous and mostly violently wrong as ever.)The Savings and Loan debacle.The
deathly ambitious practices leading to our recent depression.The billion malnourished and desperate children in the world.And so on. The point is that there is no
paucity of thinking displayed by Dr. Coker in the past, and there is definitely
no lack of it right at this very moment.The
problem is seeing it for what it is in the present and to not have to wait for the future to get to the truth of the matter.
[And how can I end this discussion without a bit more of Stanley Kubrick's magnificent Dr. Strangelove.., who pointed out these absurdities better than,perhaps, anyone?]
Ah, don't fret! The ending is just below (and just when you are about to laugh ("Mein Fuhrer, I can WALK" the other and last shoe drops.).
The
RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank
originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the
Douglas Aircraft Company.After 1948
RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and
governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.)It still did enormous
amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have
been their chieftheoreticians during
this period.It was also the time that
the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road
Robert McNamara.And of course much
else.
This
publication is an internal RAND document, not
meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957.I own a number of these reports, and I must
say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly
(dare I say it?) funny.It is also short
(four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately.The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR
will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no
sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the
possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “.The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in
and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next
kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore
postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of
nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been
called the cold war.”
The tools of war in this non-violent war, the report
speculates, included: (1) the State Department as a Weapon, issuing “an
aggressive, imaginative foreign policy”. (2) Economic Weapons, which
interestingly included “inflate USSR economy by surreptitiously flooding the country with undetectable counterfeit
currency”.(I remember that the late
Sen. John Moynihan suggested in the first Iraq
war, televise don the floor of the U.S. Senate in the final debate on
engagement, that we do this exact thing in Iraq…especially
since the Iraqi dinar was being printed in London.) The third section was “Psychological
Weapons”, and was very tongue-in-cheek short (?), suggesting “ideas a la
Hitchcock, e.g., turn Stalin [dead in 1953] over in his grave some dark night,
etc.” I’m not sure what to make of that, especially as the paper finishes on
this line: “This list is open for additions and suggestion.”Indeed. Out of all of the internal reports that I've read from RAND this is the only one that approached its topic with such dark familiarity and removed humor.
I'd like to say that this was a class-of-its-own sort of work, but as it goes this is hardly the case. If I cared a little I guess I could establish a collecting sub-category in the nuclear fission--atomic--nuclear <continue>
This indelible image has two big residences
for this blog, as follows:
Perspective 1:Waiting to Say Goodbye Department, part
2.
Yucca Flat
is a big, wide place in the desert,
about 65 wide-landscape miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.As part of the Rhode-Island-sized Nevada Test Site (NTS) it is also the
most irradiated and radiation-polluted place in the country.It was the site of some 749 nuclear tests--about
80% of all the nuclear tests carried out at NTS. And it shows, and will show,
pretty much forever.
This remarkable photo of a test shot
was made at Yucca in the mid-1950’s—in the dark.Actually it was dark, pre-dawn before the
viewing station of observers was completely, Georgia-O’Keefe-like illuminated
by the brilliant explosion.The people
here were gathered at “News Knob”, about seven miles away from the detonation
point, and all wearing dark, welder-strength goggles to prevent the blindness
that would’ve occurred if they looked at the explosion without protection—best
yet was to wear the goggles and have your back turned to the flash (as some in
this picture did).
This is perhaps the greatest single photo demonstrating the power of nuclear
explosions. You can see the devastating effects, and the giant rising mushroom
clouds and all, but they’re like photos of the Grand
Canyon—nothing really captures the essence of the thing.This image makes the entire idea somewhat “habitable”,
graspable, in a weird, visceral way, placing the power of the event in an
imaginable context.
Perspective 2: Where to be and Where to Look Department; Turning Around.
This is another monumental photographic image in the turning-completely-away-from-what-everyone-else-is-looking-at
department, following such massive images as Ed Clark’s iconic FDR
photo.Just as Mr. Clark pointed (see my
post from last year), the picture to be made was not the newsreel shot of the
President’s casket being borne to the train, but it was in the face of the
accordionist, who Mr. Clark found by turning away from the scene being recorded
by a hundred other photographers.It was
his picture that told the emotional story of that evident.Just as is the case with this anonymous,
undated photo from the test shot at Yucca, bringing the unimaginable back to some degree of human understanding.
Notes:
Photo from Frances Fralin, The Indelible Image, Photographs of War, 1846 to
the Present, based on a show at the Corcoran Art Museum, Washington DC, 1985,
and published by Harry Abrams.
It is interesting to visit William Shockley again (after having seen his
work on the economics of the atomic bomb here), this time weighing in on the
prospects of an atomic bomb-less WWII Pacific endgame.The results are not pretty, and weigh the number of casualties as seen
in past invasions of widely-interpreted type.Shockley describes his work in a letter (21 July 1945, "Proposal
for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies") to Edward L. Bowles, an MIT Radlab guy who was
brought to D.C. in 1942 to help develop RADAR.The content is summarized in the following three paragraphs taken in
their entirety from CASUALTY
PROJECTIONS FOR THE U.S. INVASIONS OF JAPAN, 1945-1946: PLANNING AND POLICY
IMPLICATIONSby D. M. Giangreco in the Journal of Military History, 61
(July 1997). pages 521-82
“As for Dr. Shockley's initial report to Dr. Bowles, it was not submitted
until after Stimson had left for Potsdam.
He proposed that a study be initiated "to determine to what extent the
behavior of a nation in war can be predicted from the behavior of her troops in
individual battles." Shockley utilized the analyses of Dr. DeBakey and Dr.
Beebe, and discussed the matter in depth with Professor Quincy Wright from the University of Chicago, author of the highly-respected A
Study of War; and Colonel James McCormack, Jr., a Military Intelligence
officer and former Rhodes Scholar who served in the OPD's small but influential
Strategic Policy Section with another former Rhodes Scholar, Colonel Dean Rusk.
Shockley said:
"If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical
cases comparable to Japan's has in fact been invariably consistent with the
behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and
ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for
the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10
million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties
including [between] 400,000 and 800,000 killed."
“W. B. Shockley to Edward L. Bowles, 21 July 1945,
"Proposal for Increasing the Scope of Casualties Studies," Edward L.
Bowles Papers, box 34, Library of Congress. Attached: "Historical Study of
Casualties," by Quincy Wright. Dr. Shockley extrapolated these numbers from earlier analyses
summarized in Health and others compiled by the Military Intelligence Division
from field reports. No accurate total of German military and civilian deaths
was available at the time he prepared his report, but the number was eventually
set at roughly 11,000,000. Japan was not invaded and finished the war with just over 7,000,000 casualties, most
of them from its armed services on the Asian mainland in fighting from
September 1931 to September 1945.”
The War Department was very busy trying to figure out the
American casualties for the final invasion of Japan.In one famous paper, Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: Amplifying Details on Planners'
Paper for Presentation to the President. (17/18 June 1945). prepared by General Hull,
estimates for American casualties invading Kyushu (on the way to the mainland) were
based somewhat on the very recent experiences at Okinawa.
Kyushu was the site of an enormous Japanese military build-up in a final
preparation for the defense of the homeland—there were more than six times the
number of soldiers here than at Okinawa, totaling some 550,000.By August 8, today, the American casualties
at Okinawa were about 49,000.There would still be a very long and bloody
war to wage had not the Empire of Japan finally surrendered four days after the
use of the second atomic weapon at Nagasaki.Estimates are as follows (this taken from
Douglas MacEachin, The Final Months of
the War with Japan : US Signal Detection, Invasion Planning and the
Atomic Bomb Decision, CIA, 1999):
MacEachin continues:
“In an apparent effort to close or narrow the gap between
presenting no casualty figures at all and presenting numbers that the Joint
Planning Staff was unwilling to use with the President, the Army's Director of
Operations, Maj. Gen. J. E. Hull, asked his staff for casualty figures for
operations on Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Leyte and Luzon (both in the Philippines), and
"overall figures on MacArthur's operations to date." He said these
could be used as background at the upcoming meeting with the President, whom Hull described as "very much disturbed over losses on
Okinawa." Hull then incorporated the following casualty
figures into a summary of the longer report that had been prepared for the
President's meeting.
Islands Invaded Earlier US
Killed/Wounded/MIA
Japanese Killed/Prisoners
(Not including wounded) Ratio (US to Japanese)
Leyte 17,000 78,000 1:4.6
Luzon 31,000 156,000 1:5
Iwo Jima 20,000 25,000 1:1.25
Okinawa 34,000(ground) 7,700(Navy) 81,000 (Not a final count) 1:2”
And so what on earth are we left with, really? 200,000+ American and 2 million Japanese casualties, plus untold destruction, in an atom bombless attack on the Empire. This is not part of an argument about using the bomb--there wasn't an argument to be made at virtually any high-level command structure about not using the bomb militarily...it just wasn't on the table. (There were people who--like Eisenhower--were appalled with the military use of the weapon, but they weren't part of the groups whose charge was to figure out the bomb's deployment.) I'm just trying to illustrate the effects of war had there been no bomb at all, or if the impossible decision was made not to use it. As it was, the bomb existed, it was used with virtually no hesitation, twice, and it brought the war to a close. It must be remembered that even after Nagasaki, it still took the Japanese command three more days to decide to surrender, with the final acceptance occuring three days after that, on 15 August.
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 708 (Continuing #192) Blog Bookstore For another project I’ve been reading through the Manzanar Free Press Newspaper
(volume 7, no. 12) and came upon this slight coverage of the bombing of
Nagasaki, printed 11 August 1945. What’s unusual here is that this
newspaper was published by the “internees” at the Japanese Relocation
Center (officially “The Manzanar War Relocation Center” and also called
a "relocation camp," "relocation center," "internment camp," and
"concentration camp",) at Manzanar, California. 110,000 people of
Japanese origin (including a large percentage of American citizens)
were forcibly removed and imprisoned via the U.S. Executive Order 9066,
issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. Manzanar
was a semi-dead town 220 miles NE of Los Angeles, located in high
desert with huge swings of temperature and unrelenting and challenging
weather—semi-killed by the city of Los Angeles, which purchased the
water rights to the region in 1929, forcing out the remaining
inhabitants. Manzanar had a peak population of about 11,000 before the
Japanese were returned to what remained of their previous lives.
In this quick coverage, a report is made on the Japanese
accepting the terms of the Potsdam Ultimatum, putting an end to the
war. The next part is of the reporting is very subdued, announcing the
dropping of the second bomb, theorizing that as many as
200,000-300,000 people may have perished in the bombing of Japan’s
seventh largest city. And not much more than that. Two hundred words
were I’m guessing all that was allowed by the powers-that-be at
Manzanar.
Elsewhere in this same issue is a report on the meeting of the
Manzanar Boy Scout troop. And something on the graduating class of the
Manzanar High School (the high school yearbook for 1945, the last class
at Manzanar, was called “Valediction”). Familiar trappings in an
unfamiliar trap.
Manzanar is located near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley, which today
suffers terrible environmental problems brought on by water-dependent
LA sucking out all of the water in the region.
Interested in responding to the poll yourself? Answer the Metallurgical Lab (July 1945) Pollhere--the results are immediately available.
In
late June 1945, the Interim Committee (a secret, blue chip group
established by Secretary of War Stimson with the approval of President
Harry S. Truman to examine the problems that could result from the
creation of the atomic bomb). decided what exactly to do with the
weapons. The group (also including James F. Byrnes, former US Senator
soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman's personal
representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L.
Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the
Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field
Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and
president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant,
Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of
Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and
president of New York Life Insurance Company) found the following: The
opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these
weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely
technical demonstration to that of the military application best
designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical
demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have
feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future
negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of
saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such
use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more
concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this
specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can
propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war;
we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.
AND ...that the weapon be used against Japan at the
earliest opportunity, that it be used without warning, and that it be
used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant
surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible
to damage.
Slightly later, in July 1945 (but before Trinity), Arthur H. Compton
asked Farrington Daniels (Director of the Metallurgical Lab section
(at Chicago) of the Manhattan Project) to poll the 250 or so scientists
at work under Farrington on the coming immediate use of the atomic
bombs. (The results of the poll, answered by 150 of the 250 people,
were originally published as “A Poll of Scientists at Chicago, July
1945,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1948, 44, page 63. and again published in Compton’s own book, Atomic Quest, in 1956. The images below come from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for October 1958, p 304.)
Here are the questions and the results of the responses:
The results of the poll were widely interpreted, and seemed to fit
the needs of whomever was stretching the statistical canvas. On the
one hand, for example, 87% of the anonymous respondents favored some
sort of military use of the bombs, though just 15% of all of the
scientists thought that the bombs should be dropped straight-away.
Almost half thought that the bombs were best used in demonstration to
the Japanese first, followed by renewed negotiating efforts for
unconditional surrender, before the bombs were employed on targets;
another 26% felt that the Japanese be invited for a demonstration in
the US of the weapon. So even though 87% believed that a military use
was prescribed, 72% felt that the military use was best first as a
demonstration device. 2% (3 of the 150) felt that the bomb should
basically be buried and not used at all.
Compton’s response to it all and to the immediate demands presented
to him on 23rd July (Washington wants to know what you think”) was
hardly quintessential: “My vote is with the majority….it seems to me
that as the war stands the bomb should be used , but no more
drastically than needed to bring surrender>” (Reported in Lewis
Morton’s "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”, Foreign Affairs, 35, January 1957, pp 334-353).
(Click image to enlarge; the other four pages are located in the "Continue Reading" section, below.) William Shockley on the Economics of the “Atomic Bomb Art”
This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and
proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the
control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American
position regarding the use and control of atomic weapons, October
1945-February 1946. This archive consists of 38 documents relating to
the development of U.S. atomic policy, with contributions by President
Harry Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Dr. Vannevar Bush, (future AEC director) Carroll Wilson, Alger Hiss, I.I. Rabi, William Shockley, Frederick Dunn, Joseph E. Johnson, Leo Pasvolsky, Philip Morrison, Col. Nichols, William McRae, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, George L. Harrison, and others.
Sylvian Kindall's Total Atomic Defense (published
by a very severely right-wing publisher in 1952) is one of a series of
books made for a deceived American population, offering the general
reader both fear and hope, often from the same, exact source. But
Kindall has a somewhat diffident approach, offering his belief that
the country and its population can largely survive an all-out nuclear
war--intact. Of course the "intactness" is dependent upon massive
internal change of the social and industrial fabric of the country,
which would have to transform in ways as to make it largely
unidentifiable from that which we would quickly recognize. A quick
look at the table of contents tells the story in miniature, with the
exception of the solution to the problem, which was generally to build
underground. (The neutron bomb would soon complicate this solution.)
Suffice to say that Dr. Strangelove would approve of the publication of
such a work though would hardly believe in any of it for himself... [read the rest of the story here]
Would it have made a difference to Watergate if, years later, Woodward & Bernstein had reported on the prosperity of Cambodia and the largess of Pol Pot? Perhaps it would cause you to wonder about their interpretation and judgment, overall, but becoming a lickspittle to the atrocious Pol Pot wouldn't have changed the facts surrounding Nixon's abysmal behavior. Such is partially the case with the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983), who enjoyed an interesting, combative, contrarian and occasionally awful carreer around moments of great insight, courage and brilliance.
It is Burchett’s
reporting from Hiroshima that attracted my attention--his was the first report made by an Allied reporter.Against explicit and direct orders, Burchett
traveled south from Tokyo to Hiroshima to bear witness to the bombing.Noting could prepare him for what he saw in
the devastated ruins—or in the people who survived the blast.What he found to his great shock was that one
month after the explosion was that people were still dying—slow, tortured, horrific
deaths, a toxic visual tableauxHe saw that they were dying of
the effects of the explosion, though not from the blast itself.The interviews he did with medical personnel
on the scene confirmed his own confusion—no one knew what was killing these
thousands of people.Burchett called it
“the atomic plague”.What he was
witnessing was lethal radiation sickness. He published his observations in a story
called“Atomic Plague”in the Daily
Express, on 5 September 1945.
The official government
position was that there was no lethal radiation generated by the atomic
bomb.The government and the sixth
column (in general) came down very hard on Burchett, saying that he was an
agent of the Japanese working to win sympathy for that country.That, or he was a Communist spy. Or that he
was just wrong.Or crazy.
The New York Times
published a story on 12 September, 1945, rebuking Burchett’s account of
“plague” as “Japanese propaganda”:"US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New Mexico Range
Confirm that Blast and Not Radiation Took Toll” ran the story. The article was
written by William Laurence, a future Pulitzer Prize winner.
At about the same time
another journalist—the American George Weller—made his own harrowing way to Nagasaki
(again against orders from General MacArthur) to report on the damage done by
the bomb.Although Weller’s
interpretations of the bomb and its use were diametrically opposed to Burchett’s
("The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used
indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as
merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.”), his story was
censored and seized when submitted for publication.
It would take several years for the story of radiation poisoning to reach the general public, and for the government to reverse its earlier position.
In the meantime Burchett moved on to other provocative and unfortunate things. After covering the war for four years through the Pacific and Europe, he moved on to middle Europe, reporting on the ghastly show trials of the Soviet regime, and for the most part taking the sides of the prosecuting agents. He also covered the Korean War for a far-left leftie publication, taking the side of the Chinese. (In one infamous bit, Burchett reported from North Korean and Chinese POW camps, saying that they were like comfortable Swiss retreats.) And then on the some eye-squinting, not-so-great observations from the North Vietnamese viewpoint in the 1960's. And then of course there was the whole Khmer Rouge pro-Pol Pot romance--which I just can't see any way around. I don't know what happened to him on this one. (I should say that Pol Pot was brought into power by a CIA-backed coup and received support and largesse from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Thailand and Australia, among others. The detestable, scumbag genocidist died in his sleep only a few years ago, another totalitarianist gone terribly wrong after receiving arms and money from my country.)
But there was a time when Burchett did deliver a story and delivered it well. His reporting from Hiroshima is a classic of pursuing the logic of observations--and it stands still in light of all of his future missteps.
I guess the immediate response to this question would the U-235. This is the stuff (an isotope of Uranium-238, a fissile element that causes a rapidly expanding fission chain reaction), the heart of the atomic bombs that were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On 6 August, 1945, the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, killing as many as 140,000 people, many of those dying lingering deaths over the course of the next few months; the bomb “Fat Man” was detonated over Nagasaki three days latter, and killed 80,000 over the same period. Most people died of radiation and its extended influences than were killed in the initial moments of the bombs’ explosions.(Below is an image of Nagasaki, before and after.)
It is M-69 though that may be the larger killer.
[Image source: Roger Williams University Archives]
The components of M-69 were naphthemic acid, palmitic acid, aluminum soap, oleic acid, and gasoline. They were placed in tubes about two inches in diameter and 20 inches long, then placed in a 19-unit hexagonal, bound, and located in a bomb shell with a three-foot long paper tail (to slow its descent)..
When this bomb was exploded about a hundred feet over the ground, it was dispersed like a burning, sticky aerosol, and attached itself to anything that it could find. It burned more furiously than any other incendiary device, exhausting as fuel whatever flammable thing it contacted. It could also be dropped all the way to the ground, where it would lay for some number of seconds before exploding, sending dozens of flaming fragments (embedded in cheesecloth) flying in all direction, for a hundred yards or more, looking for flammable things to eat. One such bomb—a 6-pound unit—could start dozens of fires.
This was a product of the US Army Chemical Warfare Services, and manufactured by Nuodex Products and the Arthur D. Little Company. (The Arthur D. Little Company--today an international management firm--was also instrumental, at the same period of time, in producing the first massively-available dosages of penicillin.) The flammable element is more commonly known now as napalm. In a popular article in Collier's Magazine (14 April, 1945), the M-69 was dubbed “Tokyo Calling Cards”
On March 9-10, 1945, 339 B-29’s dropped 2000 tons (4 million pounds, about 496,000 bombs) of M-69 on Tokyo. Two initial passes were made on the city, marking a large, burning “X” in the city. Each plane had the capacity to cover a drop area of 350 feet by 2000 feet, which means a much greater area was affected. The citizens of Tokyo met their ends with buckets of water and brooms in defense. Hours later fifteen square miles of the city were destroyed. In the months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 66 cities were bombed with M-69, killing about a million people, and wounding more. (Photo below shows Tokyo, before and after.)
[Tokyo images via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo]
Its easy to remember the destruction of the atomic bombs of August, mainly I think because of what those bombs became. I don’t know why the 1945 series of firebombings of Japan aren't recalled as often, especially given the continuing employment of the heart of the weapon that caused that destruction. Perhaps it is the sheer inconceivable nature of what the atomic bombs became, while napalm, as terrible as it was/is, is knowable, somehow.I’m not at all sure. But I think the M-69 should be brought up for discussion every now and then, and remembered.
Today is the 64th anniversary of the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the pre-dawn New Mexico desert. I've made a number of posts about that event, as well as the decision to use the bomb along with its consequences and subsequent control. Mostly the posts can be found here. I've reposted parts of the beginnings of two of those posts relating to 16 July below. [That's Oppenheimer and Groves standing at the remnants of the base of the tower that held the suspended weapon on 16 July, everything pretty much gone.]
Now we are all sons of bitches—Kenneth Bainbridge, Trinity
Director.
There were many profound thoughts in many profound heads there in the
desert, at the reaches of the Jornarda del Muerto ("The Dead
Man’s Walk", a formerly nearly-impenetrable stretch of desert in the
Llano Estacado) at the Trinity Test Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico, on
16 July 1945 for the successful testing of the first atomic bomb. Robert
Oppenheimer famously cited the Gita (“Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of
Worlds…”): Enrico Fermi was so busy with his little and excruciatingly
wonderful experiment with strips of paper calculating the effect of the blast
(he reckoned a very-close 10,000 tons) that he didn’t actually hear the
explosion; Edward Teller thought Tellerian thoughts, and so on. Actually
the observation points (like S-10000 and Campania Hill)were crowded with big
brains: in addition to Oppenheimer, Teller and Fermi were people like
Hans Bethe, James Chadwick (whose discovery of the neutron sort of started the
whole thing), Richard Feynman, George Kistiakowsky, Phil Morrison, Robert
Serber, Vannevar Bush, James Conant, and many others. The were all
thinking pretty big things (except for the occasional if-you-can-believe-it
stuff like that which maybe came from Feynman’s mouth, which was “hot
dog!”). I think that Bainbridge’s statement was the best, and truest,
summation of the morning’s activities...
July 17, 1945 (Trinity +1 or Hiroshima -20), the day after the Trinity test
of the first atomic weapon, was the first day in which very concerted, very
real discussions ensued about what to do with the bomb and where to us
it. Actually the discussions were mostly on the “where” than on the
“whether”. (As it turns out part of a minor segment of the “whether” part
was Leo Szilard’s petition
to President Truman not to use the bomb and which was signed by 155
Manhattan Project scientists, and which had reached its final version on this
day.)
The truth of the matter was that it was a very complex issue, an easily
misunderstood tapestry of circumstance and consequence. The major issue of
course was that the Japanese would not surrender, and that there would be
“fanatical resistance” once the invasion of the Japanese islands had
begun. The battle of Okinawa had just been fought—it was a
horrible confrontation taking 12,5000 American lives and more than 1000,000
Japanese , demonstrating that even in impossible circumstances that the
Japanese simply would not surrender (unconditionally). This is just
one instance—there are many others, not the least of which was t he recent
firebombing of Tokyo,
taking 150,000 lives. Air strikes in general seemed to not make a
difference in the will of Japan to fight—as was demonstrated again and again in
the British and American bombing of Germany—as was further demonstrated in
General Curtis LeMay’s and General Hap Arnold’s 60-city attack in the
May-August span. The thought was that if there was an invasion that it
could well cost the U.S.
1000,000+ casualties and would be completely...
This is a continuation of a series of posts relating to the development of the atomic bomb.
Park Avenue. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
10 Downing.112 Mercer. Institute for
Advanced Studies. The Cavendish Lab. All pretty good addresses.I have a hard time though coming up with a single best address that
beats POB 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.For the sheer breadth of those represented by this simple location, I
just can’t think of anything more specific or more inclusive.
Oppenheimer lived there.So did Fermi. And Feynman. And Teller. And Bohr. And thousands of
others.
Post Office Box
1663, Santa Fe hid
something very important—at the time, it was so important that the place that
it was hiding didn’t even have a real name, just a moniker: Site Y.
Many of the people who lived there didn’t have the use of
their real names outside of Site Y.Driver’s licenses were issued with numbers, and people paid taxes
according to code numbers and weren’t allowed to vote.They were as invisible as their address, or
as invisible as thousands of people could be in 1942.Being a place filled with mostly quite-young men
and women, there were natural tendencies followed leading to a spike in birth
rates, responded to famously by the facility’s chief to direct that actions be
taken to stem the flow. Or perhaps not*. A radio station popped up featuring
live performers, everyone identified by given name only. And to confound things
further it was nestled within the range of the Blood of Christ (the Sangre de
Christo) Mountains, all the while working with matter that was literally
hotter than hell. That was plutonium, and the “hot” was radioactivity.
Site Y (begun in June 1942) was of course the location of Los Alamos, a major cog in the machine of the Manhattan
Project, a gigantic, secret project that actually stayed secret, which was
remarkable given the wide swath and numbers of people involved and the
relatively simple security. But it was really important stuff (as Richard
Feynman would say),
and there was a life-and-death war on, a fight to the finish1, a death
struggle, so the importance of security—given the staggering consequences of
its breach—was paramount.2.
This letter of congratulation and support was written by
President Franklin Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer, and sent to The Address
of POB 1663.It is an odd letter full of
sleight, though it is obvious that Roosevelt
knows exactly what is going on, and is just not acknowledging the elephant in
the room.And that “room” was at Oppenheimer
& Co., Santa Fe,
Box1663.No scientific project had ever been bigger,
then or (perhaps) since.That’s a lot to
cram into one post office box.
______
1. By the way, in describing this item from their collection the
Library of Congress website understates WWII in a way that I don’t think I had
ever seen before:
“In the midst of World War II when the United States was engaged abroad in a major
conflict with Germany and Japan, it was also working furiously at home
toward the completion of the Manhattan
Project..” A “major conflict”? I should say so, though “major conflict
just doesn’t quite cover it, doesn’t nearly come close to describing what kind
of “conflict” was going on.Odd.A very odd description.
2. Given the vast, extraordinary amount of the resources
consumed by this effort, I don’t think that the atomic bomb could’ve been
produced by any other country at this time—I think that, materially speaking,
it was an impossibility.
*The fact was though that the place did seem to be a
baby-maker, surpassing national averages, with roughly a fifth of all the married
women on the base being pregnant in 1944.See John Hunner’s Inventing Los
Alamos for an interesting discussion of the baby topic. Babies and bombs and radioactive hell-mush in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo.
In the history of science there are a number of instances where discoveries
get passed by, or un-noticed, or un- (or under-) appreciated.Gregor Mendel’s 1865/6 paper embodying the
discovery of genetics didn’t get noticed (for real) until 1899.The Alpher-Gamow-Herman paper (1948)
postulating the background radiation for the Big Bang went unnoticed even after
Penzias and Wilson found it (by accident) right where it was supposed to
be.And so on.There’s another whole category of names
associated with discoveries that have faded into obscurity even though their
idea has not:Walter Pitts (neural
networks), Vannevar Bush (the internet), Michael Servetus (pulmonary circulation,
Rosalind Franklin (DNA), Robert Hooke (too much to mention), and so trippingly
on.
I had this second category in mind while grazing through the year 1940 in
the Physical Review.I came across a
very significant paper—a paper of exceptionally high standing, of direct
interest to hundreds of working nuclear physicists—that, after publication,
became invisible—or actually publicly invisible.The problem was that it was also of very high
interest to the war effort, and it was published by a Russian.By a Soviet.The paper was by G.N. Flerov and K.A. Petrzhak (Spontaneous fission of uraniumvolume 58, page 89, 1940), and it addressed isotopes
U-238, U-235 and U-234 and the influence of neutrons of different energies; their
experiments revealed a new type of nuclear transmutation and observed the world’s first occurrence of spontaneous
fission. And this of course was a big
deal because of the military applications of the continuing series of
discoveries on nuclear fission, and so the paper—as monumental as it was—passed
without comment and without notice.Not
because the paper didn’t merit it, of course, but because the powers that be
thought it most prudent not to tip the very secret developmental hand of
creating an atomic bomb.
Years later in his book The Advisers, Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb,
Herbert York recorded the thoughts of Igor Golovin, who supported the work of
Kurchatov who sponsored the research of Flerov and Petrazhak:“the complete lack of any American response
to the subject of this discovery was one of the foundations which convinced the
Soviets that the Americans were developing the bomb”.As was everyone else, probably.Peter Kapitza, one of the greatest Russian physicists of the century noted
(on 12 July 1941) that—based on this work— it was entirely possible that a bomb
could be developed that could kill millions of people.And it was right after this that these papers
were no longer published in the Physical Review—for national security
reasons.
There was another reason for not responding to the Soviet paper.On August 14, 1939, Josef Stalin started a letter
so:
To the chancellor of
the German Reich, Herr A. Hitler.
And finished it thus:
I thank you for your letter. I hope
that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the
better in the political relations between our two countries. .
J. Stalin
The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was a pretty good reason for not wanting to "share" with the Soviets.
The Soviets wouldn’t see the light until the Nazis ripped off the curtains
with the start of their June 1941 offensive in Operation Barbarossa, beginning
a brutal attack on Mother Russia that wouldn’t end until the Germans where
defeated by Winter.Keeping the Soviets
out of the loop was a good policy decision.
In a way though it may not have mattered. The only country on earth that had the facilities and resources to develop the bomb was the United States--the sheer amount of energy alone would've consumed something like the majority of all energy resources needed to fight the conventional war for both the Japanese and the Germans. This list goes well on, but that's another story.
I wouldn't look at this linked video if it is bedtime where you are. It is a singularly creepy experience, at least for me, to watch this exceptionally bad marionette go through the paces of explaining how rural folks should/could prepare for the consequences of Atomic Armageddon. Delivered to god knows where by the Department of Defense in 1965, this cretinous, bunch-crotched, simian-fingered, dead eyed, helmet haired, waxy marionette with a Joker mouth that goes from ear-to-ear wants to help in ways that make you want to run into the flames to drink a flaming glass of Pure Radiation. As we watch the ten or so shorts unfold, the creepiness grows denser and bolder, watching the shaky walls behind hay bales in the basement fortress, collecting the errant cow to stuff it into the bomb shelter with a pat on the butt, the deeply disturbing profile of Marionette Man watching tv, the fully-dressed-wide-eyed-shocked-into-consciousness-zombie sleep, the black mirror, and on and on.
These films are bizarre, errant, meaningless masterpieces, sugar coating the End of Things with flippant advice from a scary man moved with shining string--could such an important message be delivered with less care and still be delivered? Well, yes, of course, as anyone who can still remember "duck and cover" exercises can tell you. These supposedly "uniquely" stupid messages bombed onto the American population were basically part of an entire genre of visual seduction that induced an intellectual collitis that enabled such broadcast monologues to be delivered in the first place. The best way to lie and have your message be believed is Lie Big, and these public betterment messages were among the Biggest Lies of the decade.
