Author: JF Ptak

Blank and Empty Space: Tobias Stimmer’s Spare Portraits

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This is part of a continuing series of posts on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.




































Paolo Giovio’s (also known as Paulo Jovio, 1483–1552) Elogia vivorum bellica 
virtute illustrium (or "Praise of Men Illustrious for Courage in War") published 
in 1554 and Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1577) are two of the most 
beautiful woodcut productions of the later 16th century. They were illustrated 
galleries, a sort of supra-advanced Renaissance LIFE magazine of famous 
people in the arts and military. They were, in general, the first time the portraits
of the vast majority of these 180+ people had been seen in a printed forma, 
the mysteries (if any) of their appearance revealed to the public. The work was 
more than thirty years in the making, with the woodcuts (after the paintings by 
Giovio) being worked by Christopher van Sichem, Bernhard Jobin and the great 
Tobias Stimmer. The portraits included authors, poets and various other 
humanists, as well as military people and their support, plus natural scientists 
and medical people. 

I like these images because of their determined simplicity—at least the portraits 
themselves were simple (done with a real respect for open, blank space), though 
the borders were anything but. This portrait by Stimmer,for 
example, shows very wide spaces of white, un-tapped pieces of the woodblock, 
leaving them open for interpretation.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Liverpool, the Battle of Britain, and Alois Hitler, 1940-1942

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It is ironic that the last day of blitz bombing against Liverpoolin WWII claimed the house at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, the home of
Alois Hitler (Jr.) (1882-1956), Adolf’s brother. Alois and family survived because they were at the delivering end of this effort–Berlin–during the war, Alois serving beer throughout the course of the conflict to happily favored
stormtroopers. But at one time before
WWI the Hitlers lived there at #102 until abandoning England for the Vaterland. There is a long and unsubstantiated rumor
that Adolf lived there too in 1912/13 attempting to avoid Austrian conscription,
but that claim seems entirely unsupported to historians, though it has proved fertile imaging ground for the theater.. Alois Jr. seems to have been a violence-prone
washout, and unwanted and unacknowledged by his half-brother, winding up with far
right wing proclivities post-war. When those plans fizzled, he signed photos of
his brother for tourists for a few dollars each, providing a bit of his own surrealist-concrete theater. He did contribute a son—Heinz Hitler–to the war effort. Heinz, Hitler’s nephew, was taken prisoner in
Operation Barbarossa and sent to Moscow’s 17^th-century Butyrka prison, a truly evil place, which was
once home to 20,000 “political” prisoners taken during the Great Purge, among
much else. Heinz melted into the stone
after months of interrogation, which must’ve turned into sport after the first
few days.

That’s not what I wanted to write about here, though. It is the image of the crowd on the back
cover of this pamphlet, Your City, a citizen’s guide to Liverpool,
published in October 1945. It seems to
me that the crowd scene here numbers about 4000 people, which is representative
of the number of Liverpudians killed between 1940-1942 in the German air
attacks on the city. Liverpool was the
second-most lethal city to be in during the war for air attack (following London’s losses of better
than 30,000), due to its importance in the production of war-necessary goods.

In a true stiff upper lip, deeply old-school, and very highly admirable fashion, there is no mention of the
war, no mention of damage from air raids, no mention of anything untoward. No photos of anything bombed out. Nothing.
This was also pretty much in line with the official reporting on the
bombing, which for obvious reasons was greatly downplayed in the press. (There is no need to provide free reporting
on the effectiveness of your enemy’s bombing campaign to the enemy.) This was a simple vision of the future, and a call for all citizens to register a concern with the proper functioning of their city.

The large crowd scene struck me as a very quiet memorial to
those killed in these terror attacks.

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Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Waiting for the Atomic Goodbye: Yucca Flats, ca. 1955

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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.

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Estimating Casualties in the Invasion of Japan, July/August 1945

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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
IMPLICATIONS
by 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.

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Reporting Hiroshima in American Japanese Internment Camp Newspaper, 11 August 1945

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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.

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A History of Goodbye, Part I: “Goodbye” in Book Titles

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Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

(“Nothing
is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness”), said by Poe in his “The
Purloined Letter” to be from Seneca¹.

Several posts ago I made reference to Jean Puget de la
Serre’s wonderfully semi-vicious book The Mirrour Which Flatters Not (1639). Serre was hardly an oasis of negativity in
the early Enlightenment, writing as he was on matters epically moral—I must
admit that I was attracted to the title of this condemning and biting book, and
frontispiece illustration, which features a royal skeleton wormily seated in a field of skulls holding the mirror that awaits us all. But as it turns out—ironically, too, perhaps—in
the long parting salvo that seems to have been the crux of his book’s biscuit,
Serre’s translator, Thomas Cary, is one of the earliest English writers to use
the word “goodbye”. Why this was done, I
haven’t the foggiest notion—I do know that writers claim that this is a
contraction of the parting salutation of “god be with you”, but that’s all I know on the subject.

But it did cause me to think about the word “goodbye” and the whole concept of parting from something, or someone, and of change, and adventure , of something happening, flux, introducing or diminishing chaos. If it is anything at all, the idea of “goodbye” will probably not lead to boredom; ennui is a definite some-percentage possibility, but it is a direct promise of change for good or for ill or for nil.

And the best place I thought to start of looking at Goodbye is at the beginning, in the titles of books, where “Goodbye” or “Good-bye” makes infrequent appearances.

There are titles that say
Goodbye to people: Mr. Chips,
Columbus, Picasso, Sister Disco, Mickey Mouse, Judge Lynch, Descartes. And Goodbye… to places: Berlin, Europe, Los Angeles, New York, Venice, Earth.

They are of varying qualities. This is definitely judging a book by its
title, but I think I’d rather read Death
in Venice more so than Goodbye to
Venice, which sounds like it might be a Weekly Reader version of
Mr. Mann’s big/little write.

And of course Goodbye…
to things, not too many of which sound very appealing: Hangovers, Weight, Love, Sanity, Health,
Life. These are the books invisibly clamoring for
space and life at the 25-cent table at the library sale as they wait their turn to say “hello” to recycling.

Then there are the Goodbye…
titles that are Not Terribly Categorizable: Goodbye Girl, Say Goodbye, and of course Never Say Goodbye, and the lovely Goodbye Blue Monday (the rest of the
title of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of
Champions…). The Long Goodbye has always sounded languid and steamy and
the-ice-is-all-melted-y to me. Hello Goodbye just can’t seem to make up
its mind. So far as I can tell there are no books simply entitled Goodbye, nor has anything ever been on
bookseller shelves called Get Out,
though there is a book called Go Away. Hello Goodbye either can’t make up its mind or is welcoming Goodbye, which may or may not be a broken logical circuit.

The playing field gets very wide for book titles (and
everything else) when “goodbye” gets more expanded, less demanding, more diplomatic,
like, say , with Farewell My Lovely.

But that’s another story.
And so for this bit on the History of Goodbye, I use Mr. Graves, and say
Goodbye to All That.

Footnote

1. Evidently, it is not. By the
way, for all of the great amusement and entertainment taken from this great and
wise short story, Poe received a payment of $12 in 1845.

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Anti-Nazi Propaganda and the Triumph of Nazism in the U.S., 1943

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This striking image appeared in LIFE magazine for 4 January 1943 as an appeal from American Locomotive for the American people to be aware of what might be expected of them in the very near future if the war did not go as planned. It is doubtful that this ever could have happened, even if the tide of combat had not turned against the Germans by this point–the enormous sucking sound began in the war in the East as 90,000+ German soldiers surrendered at Stalingrad at about this

time in January, the fate of the Nazi regime had been decided at Potsdam, the war in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, Midway) was going the way of the Allies, and the invasion of North Africa was well underway, the noose beg

inning to tighten on Axis Europe. This is a little fast-and-loose on the history of the war, but I think it generally accurate to say that no Nazi flags would be displayed in American courtrooms. The other, last nail in this coffin was the beginn

ing of the Manhattan Project in June 1942, an undertaking which would lead to ultimate domination. I think it safe to say too that there was no way that any other country (or alliance) could have produced the necessary (and terrific) amounts of energy, plus large manpower, plus expertise, plus the ability to maintain the massive project (all in s

ecret)–it was all simply too much. Had the Nazis been more successful in Europe and less adventurous in the East, and was somehow able to conquer it all (and this removing the U.S. from the equation), well perhaps then it could have been possible for Germany to develop the bomb. on the third hand, given the rest of the development in the American war as dynamic, the U.S. would’ve bombed Germany (and etc.) with atomic weapons before they could have developed anything on their own. all of this is trivial rumblings to be sure–I just wanted to survey the possibility of the Nazi overthrow of America. The U.S. would’ve been too terribly much for anyone, especially given the experiment in the desert.

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Bubble Cosmology: J.J. Grandville and a Soapy, Watery “Little Bang”, 1844

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Finding the Big Bang in a bowl of soapy water.

Last year I wrote a little aboutJ.J.Grandville’s interplanetary
bridge connecting some of the planets (and including a balcony constructed of Saturn’s
ring [sic] in an early Victorian Grad Tour solar system walkabout. Grandville (the pseudonym of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard,
born in 1803 and staggering too quickly out of life in 1847) was an extraordinary
talent working somewhat out and ahead of his time; he had superb visions of the
future, and of the past, and most of them were fantastic and fanciful, though
not without some very stinging social commentary. He has been called a proto-Surrealist and I’d
have to agree, though for me he had a larger production of social commentary in
his work than any of the “real” Surrealists of the 20^th
century. For example, in his Un Autre
Monde (“Another World”) he depicts people’s
social stature literally—the taller and thinner, the more socially important;
the shorter and stouter, the more disposable/replaceable; the images are funny,
convincing and wincingly penetrative.

This being said, I have a special interest in the
astronomically-based images that he produced, and so far as I can tell, there
weren’t many of them in his vast output.
In chapter 25 (“The Mysteries of Infinity”) of Un Autre Monde
Grandville rolls out the great maker of the universe, the Primum Mobile, the
Motive Force, the First Mover. The old scamp was busy and on display for Grandville’s character Hahbble, who
floats around in the cosmos, and comes face-to-face with what in the end is
Einstein’s dice thrower, as much as the great physicist didn’t want him to be,
nor is he subtle (Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht!) The malicious (“boshaft”) part would be
supplied by someone else looking intent and dangerous, while the great maker turns out to
be a magician who is happily creating the matter of all stuff by making it all out of
bubbles.

(I feel relatively certain that Grandville is the first artist to propose the
bubble theory of cosmology, and he is among a select and restrictive minority
who allocated such a seemingly meaningless activity with the creation of creation. I like its playful nature, though I wonder if
his approach was seen as a deep mockery and perhaps heretically insulting to
the religco-forces that helped and plagued the 19^th century. Mostly it seems he was left behind int he appreciation part of acknowledgment, glory faded before his eyes; his work wasn’t necessarily prized during his lifetime, and
he had his share of brutal reviews for his great adventures. Paul St. Victor, art critic, wrote that
Grandville “wanted to dance on the clouds in leaden shoes”and “tried to get to
heaven on a bus”. That’s a tough go. Death did bring him some fame as M. Grandville slept with the worms; publishers used his illustrations mostly without gratuity to any estate, the images showing up all over the place through the end of the 19th century. His cuts were used again and again,the blocks being progressively degrade until the fineness of Grandville’s eye and incision were lost to overuse–it is easy to see the difference in crispness and clarity between the early printngs of his pictures with the later ones, his sharp edges getting rounded by greed and use and time.³)

I imagine this magician to be “almost” infinitely large and
small (what does “almost” infinitely mean?) , blowing bubbles on a large galaxy
scale, the bubbles containing other
galaxies; or smaller yet, other solar systems; and smaller yet, other
planets. And taking it down to the other
extreme, he could be sub-atomic, blowing bubbles of existence and shaping the bumpies
of quantum foam in spacetime, letting loose the primordial bits that would
become molecules that would or would not rise from the unpretty Dirac sea,
living just on the other side of measureable in space and time, shaving
barely-measureable slivers away from Planck length¹ and Planck time². Or maybe the old man is putting the white
into Schwarzchild wormholes.

Maybe he’s just blowing the bubbles of possibility and
chance, and his unacknowledged accomplice is injecting the mote in god’s eye.

Notes:

1. The Planck length 1.616 x 10 -35 (meters) which is the
smallest measureable space in the universe (comprised of Planck’s constant, the
gravitational constant and the speed of light) which in turn leads to

2. Planck
time, which is the amount of time it takes for light to traverse one Planck
length in a vacuum, 5.39 x 10 -44 seconds),
which is basically the smallest measureable unit of time, or for time that
would mean anything.

3. While ill with his own fatal bit, he composed
his own epitaph; Here Lies Grandville;
he loved everything, made everything live, speak and walk, but could not make a
way for himself”.

There’s actually quite
a nice turn of phrase in the wiki article on Grandville—quite nice,
really—which I include here: “Though the
designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually
display keen analysis of character and marvelous inventive ingenuity, and his
humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of
sober thoughtfulness.” He evidently lived a hard-ish life, not the least of which
were the deaths of his wife and two children in the early 1840’s.

Some of Grandville’s other interesting works include:

Les petites miseres de la vie humaine (The Petty Sorrows of
Human Life) 1843

Un Autre Monde 1844

Cent Proverbes 1845

Jerome paturot 1846

Les Fleurs animees (The Personified Flowers) 1847

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Deciding to Use the Atomic Bomb: The Chicago Metallurgical Lab Poll, July, 1945

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Interested in responding to the poll yourself? Answer the Metallurgical Lab (July 1945) Poll here-–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).

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Atomic Bomb: William Shockley and the Economics of Using the Atomic Bomb, 1945
JF Ptak Science Books LLC REPOST from 6 August 2008 Blog Bookstore

This is a reposting of apost from last year, one of a continuing series on the development, use and control of atomic and nuclear weapons.

Atomic Bomb: William Shockley and the Economics of Using the Atomic Bomb, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 195
- Background Documents on the Control and Proliferation Issues of the Atomic Bomb
- Vannevar Bush Group, October 1945-January 1946
- Paper 1: William Shockley
(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.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons