Category: Atomic and Nuclear weapons

JF Ptak Science Books  

The October 1945 issue of Popular Mechanics carried a story “Atomic Bomb for War / Atomic Bomb for Peace” as a reminder to its readers that the vast destructive power of the atomic bomb was just one example of what nuclear power might be–and that there could be incredible and wide-reaching benefits of the process for peaceful uses. This work came about eight weeks after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and seems to be only the second post-use story on the weapon in this magazine. The article does mention a prescient piece (“The Miracle of U-235”) published in January 1941 in Popular Mechanics by physicist R.M. Langer¹ (CalTech) which extolled the future possibilities of the energy/power potential of nuclear energy, which is really what the present article is all about.  Except of course for the 5,000 a-bomb total destruction of Japan analogy, which is an odd thing.

Half of the article’s illustration is dedicated to military applications of atomic energy, and the other to the peaceful; and in the upper-middle of the military side we are told that if necessary that every city in Japan could be completely destroyed with “5,000 atomic bombs”.  The truth of the matter is that a great percentage of the major  (and minor-major and major-minor) cities had already been pretty much decommissioned. (Just weeks before the bomb came the massive firebombing of Tokyo–334 of  General Curtis LeMay B-29’s were loaded to utmost capacity with the newly-conceived M-69s bomb, an incendiary so vicious  that the fires it produced were all but inextinguishable.  The B29’s bombed Tokyo for hours, killing 100,000+ people and making over a million homeless.)  And so I’m not sure what the message was, here, except to establish that the complete destruction of a city with weapons dropped from planes was now a possibility.  It was probably right at about this point that this idea became a real possibility–and so to for its extension, that given enough of these weapons, that the entire world could be bombed out of existence.

Notes

1. Langer wrote an earlier piece in 1940 for Colliers which was a more sugary version of the Popular Mechanics Article. In this one he hypothesized that uranium would basically fuel life–it would be a fuel source so cheap to produce that it wouldn’t make economic sense to charge for it (?). It was the seed of peace that would lead to Utopia and eliminate wars.  This was Langer’s popular side–he did in fact work and publish through the 1930’s on the fission issue; his vision of the future though were a little overly-optimistic.  

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Here’s an interesting formerly Top Secret document from the Lee Groves collection of the George C. Marshall Foundation:

The document is dated two days after the Trinity test of 16 July–I presently do not know why this is so.  

“The sketch is of a test cylinder procured and installed at a time when we were uncertain as to the explosive power of the bomb. If, at the time of the test, we anticipated that the force might be relatively small or even that there might be no nuclear explosion, we were going to place the bomb in the cylinder so that it would be possible to recover the plutonium.”–Marshall Foundation, below. 

The cylinder/container for the bomb was called “Jumbo”, and was 25’x10′ and 214 tons–a big thing.  It was decided at some near point that “Jumbo” would not be necessary as it became evident to many that the bomb would indeed “work”.  “Jumbo” and the tower were constructed and ready but abandoned for their intended purpose–it was left to stand, about 800 yards from the point of explosion; afterwards, “Jumbo” remained intact but its steel tower was completely destroyed. 

Source: the George C. Marshall Foundation: http://marshallfoundation.org/library/documents/steel-test-cylinder-tower-july-18-1945/#sthash.ccG8PSRb.dpuf

Thanks to Gene Dannen at www.dannen.com for the lead on this.  

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About eight months after the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima the Jesuit Rev. John A.Siemes contributed his well-known first-hand account of the devastation that he found there hours after the event.  Siemes also published his story in the Irish Monthly, volume 74 (#873, pp 93-104) in 1946.   This 10-page account in this version evidently is not very widely kept in libraries worldwide, as WorldCat locates only two copies (one at “New York State Library” and another at the Peace Collection of Swarthmore).  There are full-text versions of it online, though there are differences in the telling of the story–Yale University has this as a full-text version posted at their Avalon Project here:  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp25.asp    It is well worth a read.

• The original publication is available for purchase via the blog’s bookstore, here. 

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One thing is for certain–the design of this Civil Defense (“trained helpfulness”)  pamphlet issued by Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania was very determined, and obvious, and provocative, and it may have been the best thing about this publication. It is not clear to me how much of the plans for reacting to a nuclear attack (“an atomic Pearl Harbor”) were implemented or implementable when this work was printed (ca. 1950?), but the plans were certainly orderly–and so they seem in the maps of action.

Here’s one interpretation of an action plan for Armageddon in a large city–it is a bare-bones, comforting plan,even though it looks like half of the map is missing (though it isn’t); it is really just a suggestion about the course of action after an attack:

All it shows, really, is that something is going to happen.  

Here’s another vision of action, this taking place in a small Pennsylvania town “100 miles away” from bombed centers:

There are no plans for the population to go anywhere, though there are plenty of plans for convoys going to the bombed areas. Also there’s plenty of expectation, what with a hospital, temporary hospital, mass care center, and a golf course dedicated to mass care for evacuees–there would be plenty of people being removed to the town (as hospitals “prepare(d) extra beds”).  

There wasn’t much in this pamphlet about what to actually do in the event of an (ultra) emergency, though you were told that people would respond to calls–telephone calls. As a matter of fact the phone features largely in this pamphlet:

Maybe it was all about selling telephones–as in would you be ready to receive The Big Call if it was made?  

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2491    Part of the series History of Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

Earlier in this blog in 2010 there appeared a post called “Atomurbia: Responding to Atomic Threat by Moving Everyone Everywhere, 1946“–it turned out to be very popular, being about the dispersal of the U.S. population centers to thwart nuclear attacks.  (I’ll repeat: it was about the plan to redistribute the population and industry and appropriate infrastructure of the United States of America.)

It was of course (as Somerset Maugham would say in “The Three Fat Women of Antibes”) an Enormous Situation, involving (basically) moving everyone everywhere.  The term was “dispersion”, and the planners of such plans meant it–and I’ve come across it again–unexpectedly–in another issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for September 1951.

You may recall that this is the journal that keeps a doomsday clock ticking off the minutes on its front cover showing the advance or retreat from the Midnight of Armageddon.  On this issue the clock is at three minutes to midnight, though I think that the greatest distance from the zero hour was ten minutes to the hour–so for decades the clock has been very close to striking the doomed hour without much relief.  

In this issue of the Bulletin nearly every article is dedicated to the idea of dispersion (at that point under the auspices of the National Security Resources Board) and the creation of a federal program to directly oversee dispersion (the National Defense Dispersal Administration (NDDA)). And people are talking about moving around cities and people and industry as though it wasn’t that big a deal, though I must admit I haven’t seen any cost or time estimates in this source.  Moving the populations centers of the U.S. to a more “garden city” idea involves so much effort and expense it seems almost impossible to contemplate actually paying for all of it.  (And we haven’t begun to talk about how people and essential personal are actually ‘enticed” to leave their surroundings, nor is there any talk about the property rights of the owners of all of that land that is to be built on.)

As much as Frank L. Wright’s “Broadacre City” seems to be a lead balloon so far as actual implementation goes for size and scope, this type of “dispersion” idea would be of gargantuan, orders-of-magnitude bigger/costlier than what Wright was talking about. At least in this department Wright was thinking in terms of a utopia; the dispersion business was more like a dis-utopian-dystopia, or something, no matter how these authors attempted to green-up and de-slum their proposal.

I am mostly making this post for the image at the top of this post(from page 268 of the Bulletin), which fits nicely with those others posted in the earlier Bulletin article (reproduced in the link above). 

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• Part of the very long Atomic and Nuclear Weapons History series

 Here’s another maim-and-blame piece of provocative semi-future/tomorrow speculation from Mechanix Illustrated (of all places) in February, 1950, hosted by the wonderful Modern Mechanix website (where the entire War-of-the-Worlds-like article is included).  So February 1950 was pretty early in the development of the brand-new atomic Cold War.  The Soviets had been experimenting since 1946 (thanks in large part to “intelligence received” from agents working in the U.S.)  and in August 1949 successfully detonated their first atomic weapon. This came several years before most experts thought possible, with the weapon (called RDS-1, or “First Lightning”, or in the West, “Joe 1”), which was a Fat Man/implosion device, generating a yield of 22kt.  The news of the test took a few months to filter out to the rest of the world–as the U.S. had previously initiated a bomb/detection plan employing the B-29 Superfortress–with President Truman making an announcement regarding the test on September 23, 1949.  The Soviet had hoped to keep their experimentation “quiet” so that they could have a few more years of catch-up while developing a hydrogen bomb, but that didn’t work out for the evidently surprised Russians.

In any event this image fits nicely with the other 15 or so depicting a mostly pre-1960 NYC in ruins. (Check the GOogle search box at left for NYC destroyed/attacked.)

And yes Lady Liberty is facing the wrong way.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/can-russia-defeat-us-with-atom-bombs/

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The illustration below was for the story, “Red Alert. What if an H-Bomb Hit L.A?”which appeared in the Los Angeles Times 12 March 1961, and made no doubt for some very sobering contemporary wake-up-and-die reading.  If you were living anywhere in the country at the time and had never seen a representation of your city in ruins, and you encountered such a story and images before coffee, you might remember that missing cup for the rest of your life.  The dramatization and mapping was done by Harlan Kilby, and it portrayed the destruction of the city and millions of people in the event of detonation of a 10 megaton nuclear weapon–it gave the reader a vague notion of what city-eating looked like, the bomb ‘flattening” everything in a 3-mile radius of its central zone and killing everything in 28 square miles.

(A little earlier, in 1960, there appeared a work by Harrison Brown and James Real called Community of Fear, which was a sci-fi kill-’em-up that used a kill zone with a 25-mile radius. For more on this film see Kenneth D. Rose One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, page 61.]

[Image via the Library of Congress]

Anyway, waking up to this in 1961 must have been an eye-opener.