Redactions

General Groves’ secret history

by Alex Wellerstein, published September 5th, 2014

The first history of the Manhattan Project that was ever published was the famous Smyth Report, which was made public just three days after the bombing of Nagasaki. But the heavily-redacted Smyth Report understandably left a lot out, even if it did give a good general overview of the work that had been done to make the bomb. Deep within the secret files of the Manhattan Project, though, was another, classified history of the atomic bomb. This was General Leslie Groves’ Manhattan District History. This wasn’t a history that Groves ever intended to publish — it was an internal record-keeping system for someone who knew that over the course of his life, he (and others) would need to be able to occasionally look up information about the decisions made during the making of the atomic bomb, and that wading through the thousands of miscellaneous papers associated with the project wouldn’t cut it.

Manhattan District History - Book 2 - Vol 5 - cover

Groves’ concern with documentation warms this historian’s heart, but it’s worth noting that he wasn’t making this for posterity. Groves repeatedly emphasized both during the project and afterwards that he was afraid of being challenged after the fact. With the great secrecy of the Manhattan Project, and its “black” budget, high priority rating, and its lack of tolerance for any external interference, came a great responsibility. Groves knew that he had made enemies and was doing controversial things. There was a chance, even if everything worked correctly (and help him if it didn’t!), that all of his actions would land him in front of Congress, repeatedly testifying about whether he made bad decisions, abused public trust, and wasted money. And if he was asked, years later, about the work of one part of the project, how would he know how to answer? Better to have a record of decisions put into one place, should he need to look it up later, and before all of the scientists scattered to the wind in the postwar. He might also have been thinking about the memoir he would someday write: his 1962 book, Now it Can Be Told, clearly leans heavily on his secret history in some places.

Groves didn’t write the thing himself, of course. Despite his reputation for micromanagement, he had his limits. Instead, the overall project was managed by an editor, Gavin Hadden, a civil employee for the Army Corps of Engineers. Individual chapters and sections were written by people who had worked in the various divisions in question. Unlike the Smyth Report, the history chapters were not necessarily written near-contemporaneously with the work — most of the work appears to have been started after the war ended, some parts appear to have not been finished until 1948 or so.

General Groves not amused

In early August 1945 — before the bombs had been dropped — a guide outlining the precise goals and form of the history was finalized. It explained that:

The purpose of the history is to serve as a source of historical information for War Department officials and other authorized individuals. Accordingly, the viewpoint of the writer should be that of General Groves and the reader should be considered as a layman without any specialized knowledge of the subject who may be critical of the Department or the project.

Which is remarkably blunt: write as if Groves himself was saying these things (because someday he might!), and write as if the reader is someone looking for something to criticize. Later the guide gives some specific examples on how to spin problematic things, like the chafing effect of secrecy:

For example, the rigid security restrictions of the project in many cases necessitated the adoption of unusual measures in the attainment of a local objective but the maintenance of security has been recognized throughout as an absolute necessity. Consequently, instead of a statement such as, “This work was impeded by the rigid security regulations of the District,” a statement such as, “The necessity of guarding the security of the project required that operations be carried on in — etc.” would be more accurate.

This was the history that Groves grabbed whenever he did get hauled in front of Congress in the postwar (which happened less than he had feared, but it still happened). This was the history that the Atomic Energy Commission relied upon whenever it needed to find out what its predecessor agencies had done. It was a useful document to have around, because it contains all manner of statistics, technical details, legal details, and references to other documents in the archive.

"Dante's Inferno: A Pocket Mural" by Louis C. Anderson, a rather wonderful and odd drawing of the Calutron process. From Manhattan District History, Book 5, "Electromagnetic Project," Volume 6.

“Dante’s Inferno: A Pocket Mural” by Louis C. Anderson, a rather wonderful and odd drawing of the Calutron process. From Manhattan District History, Book 5, “Electromagnetic Project,” Volume 6.

The Manhattan District History became partially available to the general public in 1977, when a partial version of it was made available on microfilm through the National Archives and University Publications of America as Manhattan Project: Official History and Documents. The Center for Research Libraries has a digital version that you can download if you are part of a university that is affiliated with them (though its quality is sometimes unreadable), and I’ve had a digital copy for a long time now as a result. The 1977 microfilm version was missing several important volumes, however, including the entire book on the gaseous diffusion project, a volume on the acquisition of uranium ore, and many technical volumes and chapters about the work done at Los Alamos. All of this was listed as “Restricted” in the guide that accompanied the 1977 version.

I was talking with Bill Burr of the National Security Archive sometime in early 2013 and it occurred to me that it might be possible to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the rest of these volumes, and that this might be something that his archive would want to do. I helped him put together a request for the missing volumes, which he filed. The Department of Energy got back pretty promptly, telling Bill that they were already beginning to declassify these chapters and would eventually put them online.

Manhattan Project uranium production flow diagram, from book 7, "Feed materials."

Manhattan Project uranium production flow diagram, from Manhattan District History, Book 7, “Feed materials.”

The DOE started to release them in chunks in the summer of 2013, and got the last files up this most recent summer. You can download each of the chapters individually on their website, but their file names are such that they won’t automatically sort in a sensible way in your file system, and they are not full-text searchable. The newly-released files have their issues — a healthy dose of redaction (and one wonders how valuable that still is, all these years — and proliferations — later), and some of the images have been run through a processor that has made them extremely muddy to the point of illegibility (lots of JPEG artifacts). But don’t get me started on that. (The number of corrupted PDFs on the NNSA’s FOIA website is pretty ridiculous for an agency that manages nuclear weapons.) Still, it’s much better than the microfilm, if only because it is rapidly accessible.

But you don’t need to do that. I’ve downloaded them all, run them through a OCR program so they are searchable, and gave them sortable filenames. Why? Because I want people — you — to be able to use these (and I do not trust the government to keep this kind of thing online). They’ve still got loads of deletions, especially in the Los Alamos and diffusion sections, and the pro-Groves bent to things is so heavy-handed it’s hilarious at times. And they are not all necessarily accurate, of course. I have found versions of chapters that were heavily marked up by someone who was close to the matter, who thought there were lots of errors. In the volumes I’ve gone the closest over in my own research (e.g. the “Patents” volume), I definitely found some places that I thought they got it a little wrong. But all of this aside, they are incredibly valuable, important volumes nonetheless, and I keep finding all sorts of unexpected gems in them.

You can download all of the 79 PDF files in one big ZIP archive on Archive.org. WARNING: the ZIP file is 760MB or so. You can also download the individual files below, if you don’t want them all at once.

Statistics on the ages of Los Alamos employees, from Ted Hall (19) to Niels Bohr (59). From Manhattan District History, Book 8.

Statistics on the ages of Los Alamos employees, May 1945, from the young spy, Ted Hall (19), to the old master, Niels Bohr (59). From Manhattan District History, Book 8.

What kinds of gems are hidden in these files? Among other things:

And a lot more. As you can see, I’ve drawn on this history before for blog and Twitter posts — I look through it all the time, because it offers such an interesting view into the Manhattan Project, and one that cuts through a lot of our standard narratives about how it worked. There are books and books worth of fodder in here, spread among some tens of thousands of pages. Who knows what might be hidden in there? Let’s shake things up a bit, and find something strange.

Below is the full file listing, with links to my OCR’d copies, hosted on Archive.org. Again, you can download all of them in one big ZIP file by clicking here, (760 MB) or pick them individually from below. Items marked with an asterisk are, as far as know, wholly new — the others have been available on microfilm in one form or another since 1977. Read the full post »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 20 Comments »

Meditations

The luck of Kokura

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 22nd, 2014

On the morning of August 9th, 1945, a B-29 bomber left the island of Tinian intending to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Kokura, the location of one of the largest arsenals still standing in Japan. On arriving at the target, the plane found it obscured by clouds. It turned south and went to its secondary target: Nagasaki. 

Supposedly, some in Japan still refer to the “luck of Kokura” in reference to this time in which some bad weather saved the lives of tens of thousands of people there. But what really happened that morning? Was it bad weather, or something else, that obscured, and thus saved, Kokura? 

Surprisingly, there are actually a few different theories floating around, and the uncertainty over the matter is generally not realized or acknowledged.

Model of the Kokura arsenal made for targeting purposes, ca. 1945. North is in the lower-right hand corner. Source: USAAF photos, via Fold3.com.

Model of the Kokura arsenal made for targeting purposes, ca. 1945. North is in the lower-right hand corner. Source: USAAF photos, via Fold3.com.

But first, let’s review the basics of the mission. The Kokura/Nagasaki mission (dubbed CENTERBOARD II), as with the Hiroshima mission before it (CENTERBOARD I), did not involve the bomber flying on its lonesome to the target, as is sometimes imagined. There were a total of six planes involved in the mission, all B-29 bombers. One of them was the strike plane that carried the Fat Man implosion bomb (Bockscar).  Two other planes (The Great Artiste and Big Stink) were instrument and observation planes. One other plane was a “standby” plane (Full House) that was to serve as backup if the three bombing planes ran into air resistance — because they didn’t, it instead flew back to Iwo Jima instead of on to the target after a rendezvous with the bombing plane. Lastly, there were two weather planes that flew out in advance, one to Nagasaki (the Laggin’ Dragon), the other to Kokura (the Enola Gay, the same plane that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima a few days earlier, but with a different crew). The weather planes would check out bombing conditions and then circle back, helping the bomber plane determine whether the primary or secondary target would be used. Niigata, a third atomic bombing target, was not considered on this mission because of its great geographical distance from Kokura and Nagasaki.

Bockscar was being piloted by Major Charles Sweeney. It had taken off from the island of Tinian at 3:47am, Tinian time. They had arrived at a rendezvous point at Yakushima Island around 9:15am. It rendezvoused with one of the other B-29s (the instrument plane), but did not spot the other one (the photo plane). At 9:50am, the pilot of Bockscar, Charles Sweeney, gave up and continued on to Kokura, having waited some 30 minutes longer than he was supposed to. At 10:44am, they arrived at Kokura. The flight log records that “Target was obscured by heavy ground haze and smoke.” A crew member of Bockscar rated it as “7/10 clouds coverage – Bomb must be dropped visually but I don’t think our chances are very good.”

Three bombing runs on Kokura were attempted, but “at no time was the aiming point seen,” as the flight log recorded. Visual bombing had been made a mandatory requirement (they did not trust the accuracy of radar-assisted bombing), so this made Kokura a failed mission. Since Bockscar had limited fuel, Sweeney decided to continue on to the secondary target, Nagasaki. They arrived at Nagasaki at 11:50am, which they also found obscured by smoke and clouds, to the degree that they made the target approach entirely by radar. Right at the last possible moment, the clouds parted just enough for the bombardier to site the target and drop the bomb. (It missed the intended target by a significant margin.) Bockscar circled the target once and then, at 12:05pm, took off for Okinawa, and from there, after refueling, Tinian.

Care about the details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? Get this book.

Care about the details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? Get John’s book. I’m not just saying that because he says nice things about my blog, either.

An aside: For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, my go-to reference these days is John Coster-Mullen’s Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Insider Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. I first got a copy of John’s book in 2006 or so. John sent me a new copy a few months ago, and I have been impressed with how much new material he has added over the last 8 years. (And I have managed to find a few useful things for him over the years, which have made it into his book as well — duly credited!) If you’re interested in the history of the Manhattan Project, you can’t not have a copy of John’s book… and if your copy is over 5 years old, considered getting an updated edition! All of these little details about times and planes and whatnot come from John’s book.

So what caused the “heavy ground haze and smoke”?

Theory #1: Bad weather

The most common explanation for the obscuring of Kokura is one of weather. It seems to me to be a valid possibility, but let’s pick it apart a bit.

As noted, the Enola Gay had flown ahead to Kokura to scope out the visual conditions. They had radioed back that the visibility was “3/10 low clouds, no intermediate or high clouds, and forecast of improving conditions.”  That was a favorable-enough weather report that Kokura, the primary target, was chosen as the first run. Upon arriving, however, Bockscar found the weather conditions were now 7/10 — too obscured to bomb. Is this plausible?

Summer weather patterns in Japan, map made in early 1945. Not great for bombing. Source: Produced for the USAAF's IMPACT magazine, high-res version via Fold3.com.

Summer weather patterns in Japan, map made in early 1945. Not great for bombing. Source: Produced for the USAAF’s IMPACT magazine, high-res version via Fold3.com. There is another wonderful map for winter weather as well.

General Groves, in his 1964 memoir, suggests that it might have been the case that the change in weather conditions was simply a matter of how much time had passed between the forecast and arrival of Bockscar. The strike plane was, as noted, delayed by around half an hour. Groves also implies that there may have been a difference between how visual the target was at an angle — how a bombardier sees it — and how it looks from straight above — how a weather plane sees it). He concludes that the reasons for the haze were “never determined.”

On the face of it, it’s hard to know whether such a rapid change in visibility is possible through entirely natural causes. In some parts of the world, the weather can be very volatile. Japan is one of these parts of the world, especially around the late fall. The variability of Japanese weather conditions was something that the US Army Air Forces knew very well, and was one of the bane of their bombing plans. It was a major issue in the atomic bombing discussions as well since very early on. At the first Target Committee meeting in April 1945, weather was a major point of discussion:

…it was pointed out that the months in which the initial mission will be run constitute the worst weather months of Japan. […] Dennison pointed out that all weather maps indicated that there were only an average of 6 good bombing days in August and that of those 6 days a conservative estimate would probably result in safely predicting that we would have 3 good days in the month of August but these 3 good days could not be positively predicted in advance of more than 48 hours. 

Elsewhere in the memo it remarks that “3/10ths or less” cloud coverage was considered acceptable for visual bombing. It also notes that “only once in 6 years have there ever been 2 successive good visual bombing days of Tokyo,” which gives some indication of the weather’s variability.

Weather from the nearby city of Shimonoseki for August 8-9, 1945. Click to enlarge, or click here for the Excel file. Source: Japanese M

Weather from the nearby city of Shimonoseki for August 8-9, 1945. Click to enlarge, or click here for the Excel file. Source: Courtesy of the Japanese Meteorological Agency.

So it doesn’t seem impossible that it could have just been according to the weather, though the big difference between the conditions reported by the weather plane and the observed conditions by the strike plane seem, on the face of it, beyond what a half hour’s delay would accomplish. One question I don’t have the answer for is when the weather plane radioed those conditions back. In the case of the Hiroshima run, the weather plane was only 30 minutes earlier than the strike plane. If we assume that was a similar attempt on the second mission, it would mean that the strike plane was reaching the target over an hour after the weather plane had seen it, which could be a significant-enough delay for a serious change in visibility. (And another possibility is that the weather plane could have been, for whatever reason, incorrect — either at the wrong place or had its message garbled.)

There aren’t good weather records from this period, at least none I have seen. The closest site for state weather recording was in Shimonoseki, some 7 miles / 11 km northeast of Kokura. I asked the Japan Meteorological Agency for any records they had from that period and they sent me the above data. It is not especially helpful towards answering this question that I can see, but I’m not a meteorologist in the slightest. For me, the big take-away from the data is that it could go from totally clear to totally obscured over the course of an hour, which at least supports the plausibility of the weather theory.

Theory #2: Smoke from firebombing

One of the other causes put forward is that the “smoke and haze” seen over Kokura was actually a result of nearby firebombing. On August 8th, 1945, the 20th AF had sent 221 B-29s to the nearby city of Yahata (Yawata) to drop incendiary bombs. Yahata had been bombed several times during the war. It was, in fact, the site of the first B-29 attack on the Japanese homeland in June 1944, and indeed the first bombing attack against the Japanese homeland at all since the Doolittle raid. It had been bombed again in August 1944. The USAAF considered Yahata to be the largest steel producing center in the country, and dubbed it “the Pittsburgh of Japan.” It was the last Japanese city to be hit by a massive B-29 raid, a “night burn job” as a USAAF writer put it, and it was considered “leftover business” that had been scheduled to take place much earlier but delayed because of bad weather.

Yahata/Yawata target map, March 1945. Kokura arsenal is visible to the east. Source: JapanAirRaids.org. Click here for the uncropped, unadjusted version.

Yahata/Yawata target map, March 1945. Kokura arsenal is visible to the east. Source: JapanAirRaids.org. Click here for the uncropped, unadjusted version.

The weather at Yahata had been 4/10 clouds over the target, but this didn’t matter for B-29 firebombing raids, because accuracy was not as big a concern as with the atomic bombs. The planes had arrived at Yahata around noontime. I’ve found very little in terms of documentation about how much of Yahata was burned out with this raid — perhaps because it was so late in the war, many of the traditional sources for information about incendiary bombing results (especially those contained on the invaluable website JapanAirRaids.org) essentially omit any discussion of this final big raid.

Could the bombing of Yahata have been the cause of the smoke that obscured Kokura? It doesn’t seem impossible, but it seems to me to be somewhat unlikely.

Approximate areas of interest in Yahata and Kokura, as seen on Google Earth today.

Approximate areas of interest in Yahata and Kokura, as seen on Google Earth today.

Bockscar was flying over Kokura just a little under 24 hours after the Yahata raid began. Incendiary raids did produce extreme amounts of smoke cover, as other photographic evidence indicates clearly. Yahata was only around 6 miles / 9 km west of Kokura (and their proximity is emphasized by the fact that both are today just considered wards of a larger city, Kitakyushu).

It seems odd that the Yahata smoke would have caught them off-guard. Wouldn’t the weather plane have noticed that there was smoke over Yahata rolling towards Kokura, or at least threatening it? Yahata is close enough that at the 30,000 feet or so that a weather plane would be flying over Kokura, all they would have to do is glance in its direction to see if there was heavy cloud cover. (One can easily replicate this experience with Google Earth if one chooses.) Could the smoke cloud have been lagged behind by just the amount of time that the weather plane wouldn’t see it, then rush ahead to obscure Kokura an hour later? Could the smoke have gone from non-obscuring to obscuring in just an hour? At the wind speeds measured at Shimonoseki (around 2-12 mph), it doesn’t strike me as super likely, but I’m not an expert in this kind of thing.

Theory #3: Japanese smokescreen

One last, more obscure theory. I first read of this in John Coster-Mullen’s book. I will quote him here:

When [Bockscar] finally arrived at 10:44 AM, smoke and industrial haze had obscured Kokura. Yahata had been firebombed by over 200 of LeMay’s B-29’s the previous day and the smoke had drifted over nearby Kokura. There was also a POW camp right next door to the main downtown power plan. An American prisoner in this camp reported later the Japanese had installed a large pipe that went from the power plant down to the river. He stated that whenever B-29’s were sighted over Kokura, the steam in the plant was diverted through this pipe and into the river. This created enormous condensation clouds that also helped to obscure the city.

John himself seems to have interviewed the POW camp survivor in question, and notes in a footnote that he thinks this was the first time this claim had surfaced in print. I certainly hadn’t seen it anywhere prior to John’s book. John asked Commander Ashworth about this in 1995, and Ashworth replied that this seemed possible, and added “if the Japanese really did that, then they were damn clever!”

German smokescreen use at Wilhelmshaven in June 1943. Caption: "Despite a smoke screen, 168 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force attacked Wilhelmshaven on 11 June. There are three lines of generators to windward of the area covered when the wind is in the north, as it was in this case. Generator boats are at the upper left. Despite the extent of the smoke screen hits are observed inside the circle..." Source: USAAAF IMPACT magazine, vol. 1, No. 5, August 1945, page 18.

German smokescreen use at Wilhelmshaven in June 1943. Caption: “Despite a smoke screen, 168 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force attacked Wilhelmshaven on 11 June. There are three lines of generators to windward of the area covered when the wind is in the north, as it was in this case. Generator boats are at the upper left. Despite the extent of the smoke screen hits are observed inside the circle…” Source: USAAAF IMPACT magazine, vol. 1, No. 5, August 1943, page 18.

A few weeks ago, there was a story carried by Japanese newspapers along these lines:

As the 69th anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bombing approaches, a former mill worker in the present-day city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, spoke about his untold story on how he burned coal tar to block the view of U.S. aircraft as they were about to drop the A-bomb on the city. … Of the three workers, Oita resident Satoru Miyashiro, 85, who worked at a can factory in the steel mill at around the end of the war said he burned coal tar to lay a smoke screen on Aug. 9, 1945. … Miyashiro said about two days before the Nagasaki attack Yawata steel workers learned that Hiroshima had been wiped out by the “new bomb” from their colleagues who had come back to Yawata via Hiroshima. He thought the next target would be his city as there were arms factories located in the area.

Note that this isn’t quite the same thing — this is someone in Yahata who was burning coal tar after hearing an air raid drill, and the smoke going downwind (east) to Kokura. I find it a little odd that the worker in question doesn’t mention that Yahata itself was firebombed less than a day before he decided to do this.

Are either of these theories plausible? In terms of, could they have done these things — of course. Turning on an incinerator is not an implausible action, and neither is the steam cloud scenario.

But would this have reduced the visibility over Kokura from 3/10 to 7/10 in the time it took the strike plane to get there? I’m not an atmospheric scientist, so I wouldn’t want to hazard a strong position on this. One can presumably model both of these scenarios and see if either were possible. I would be extremely interested if anyone wanted to that!

Susquehanna Steam Electric Station — just an example of what a very large nuclear power plant can generate in terms of steam. It's a lot of steam. Could it obscure a city downwind of it from a B-29 bomber? Image source.

Susquehanna Steam Electric Station — just an example of what a very large nuclear power plant can generate in terms of steam. It’s a lot of steam. Could it obscure a city downwind of it from a B-29 bomber? Image source.

My gut thought is that they were not super likely to be wholly responsible for the cloud cover. If it had been steam from a single plant, I suspect someone on Bockscar would have noted it as such. We have lots of experience with steam-generating power plants — think of the clouds created by nuclear cooling towers. They certainly can put out a lot of steam. Would it be enough to block off the entire city? I’m kind of dubious.

What about the coal tar possibility? I’m especially dubious that this would have been enough. Setting up honest-to-god smokescreen for an entire city is hard work, even if you are a professional. When the Germans wanted to protect individual places (like plants) from bombers they set up dozens to hundreds of smoke pots to do the job, or used multiple dedicated smoke generators. Some of the larger smokescreen images I have found clearly involve lots of smoke sources placed at good intervals upwind of the target they are meant to protect. So I don’t know.

On the other hand, if the smoke from Yahata was not from the firebombing but instead something deliberate, it would explain the time delay issue. If the wind was going due east at around 5 mph, that would in fact be perfect for putting a smoke cover over Kokura. So it has its merits as a theory.

Conclusion

There are narrative aspects of each theory that appeal, and each of them change what is meant by the “luck of Kokura.” If bad weather is what saved Kokura, then it becomes a metaphor for how serendipitously life and death are dealt out by the hands of fate. If it was smoke from the firebombing of Yahata, then it becomes an ironic story about the Army Air Forces’ zeal for destruction could become counterproductive. If it was the result of deliberate action on behalf of the Japanese, then it becomes something much more complicated, a story about how individual action may have led to the saving of some lives… and the dooming of others. It also would change the standard story of how defenseless the Japanese were against these weapons.

The bombing of Nagasaki. Original source. Slightly edited to improve foreground/background distinction.

Of course, what was lucky for Kokura was not so for Nagasaki.

Looking at these three options, I find the weather theory the easiest one to stomach. Japanese weather patterns were notoriously hard to predict and it was known as the worst season for bombing conditions. That they could change over an hour seems unsurprising to me, especially for a coastal city, where clouds can come and go which impressive rapidity (as someone who has lived in the Berkeley, Boston, and New York areas can attest). I like the irony of the Yahata story, but there are things that just don’t add up — I don’t see why the weather plane would not have mentioned it, and it seems implausible to me that it would take almost exactly 24 hours for the heavy cloud cover to have migrated a mere 5-10 miles. And for reasons indicated, I’m not sure I buy the smokescreen story — it would have been really difficult to pull off that degree of cloud cover reliably. It would have taken tremendous foresight and luck. And it is strange that this story would be “buried” for so long. This doesn’t mean that someone didn’t try it (I am emphatically not calling anyone a liar!). It just means that I’m not sure it would have worked even if they did try it.

A separate possibility is “all of the above.” Maybe the weather was bad. Maybe there was haze from the Yahata bombing. Maybe someone did try to release steam or smokescreen. Maybe all of these things occurred at once, making “the luck of Kokura” something that was the result of multiple causes. That would make Kokura extra lucky, I suppose, and not fit into any of the above pat narratives. And make Nagasaki extra un-lucky in turn.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter which of these things happened. The bare fact is that Kokura didn’t get bombed and Nagasaki did. But I find looking into these kinds of questions useful as a historian. Too often it is easy to take for granted that the explanations given in narrative works of history are “settled,” when really they are often resting on very thin evidence, thinner perhaps than the historian who writes them realizes. I don’t think we really know what happened at Kokura, and I’m not sure we ever truly will.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Meditations | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »

Redactions

The Kyoto misconception

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 8th, 2014

This week we talk again of the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But if the military brass had its way in 1945, we would speak of Kyoto as well. Kyoto was spared because of a personal intervention: the US Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, did not think it should be bombed. This story has been told many times, often as an example of how thin a line there is between life and death, mercy and destruction. But there’s an angle to this story that I think has gone overlooked: how the debate about targeting Kyoto led President Truman to a crucial misunderstanding about the nature of the atomic bomb.

Toji pagoda, in Kyoto, today. Had the Little Boy bomb been dropped on Kyoto, it would have likely been destroyed, as it was less than 3,000 feet from the proposed "Ground Zero" point. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Toji pagoda, in Kyoto, today. Had the Little Boy bomb been dropped on Kyoto, it would have likely been destroyed, as it was less than 3,000 feet from the proposed “Ground Zero” point. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s start from the beginning. The first concrete discussions about what cities to target with the atomic bomb did not take place until the spring of 1945. On April 27, 1945, the first “Target Committee” meeting was held in the Pentagon. General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, was there at the beginning of the meeting, as was Brig. General Lauris Norstad of the US Army Air Forces. But the meeting was mostly presided over by Groves’ deputy, Brig. General Thomas Farrell. Among the scientists in attendance were John von Neumann and William Penney (but not Oppenheimer).

The basic decisions made at this meeting were regarding operational aspects of the bombing. The use of the atomic bomb would have to be done with visual targeting, not by use of radar. The weather had to be good — no easy thing to predict for Japan in the late summer. The targets should be “large urban areas of not less than 3 miles in diameter existing in the larger populated areas… between the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Nagasaki… [and] should have high strategic value.” A list of possible targets that met this criteria was given: Tokyo Bay, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kure, Yawata, Kokura, Shimosenka, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Sasebo. Of these, Hiroshima was noted as “the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list.” Tokyo, on the other hand, was “now practically all bombed and burned out and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing.” It was further noted that they had to take into account that the policy of the 20th Air Force was now “systematically bombing out” cities “with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on the other,” and that they would not likely reserve targets just for the Manhattan Project.

1945-04-28 - Nordstad - Target Information

This list of targets was forwarded on the next day and someone — probably Groves — indicated that Hiroshima was target #1, Kyoto target #2, Yokohama target #3,  and that other targets of high interest included Tokyo Bay, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Sasebo. Why Kyoto? A target data sheet, compiled on July 2nd, gives some indication of its perceived strategic value. Kyoto, according to this summary, was a major rail connection between Osaka and Tokyo, had several major factories inside of it (producing “ordnance and aircraft parts” as well as “radio fire control and gun direction equipment”), and numerous “peace time factories [that] have been converted to war purposes.” It also had a new aircraft engine factory that could turn out an estimated 400 engines a month, which would make it the second largest such factory in Japan.  It had a population of over a million people, of which a “sizeable proportion” of the workers commuted to war production plants. “Many people and industries are being moved here as other cities as destroyed,” another datasheet noted. Its construction was “typical Jap city” — lots of wooden residential houses, and thus very flammable.

At the Second Meeting of the Target Committee, Kyoto increased in perceived importance. This meeting was held in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos on May 10-11, 1945, and was dominated by scientists in attendance. Along with discussing the ideal burst altitude of the bomb, calculated to destroy the largest amount of “light” buildings (e.g. housing), the scientists also discussed targets. At this point, the target list was #1 Kyoto, #2 Hiroshima, #3 Yokohama, #4 Kokura, and #5 Niigata. Aside from the aforementioned justifications (population size, industries), the committee report noted that:

From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significant of such a weapon as the gadget. … Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.

No surprise, perhaps, that the scientists would believe that there was strategic value in making sure that other intellectuals saw the effects of the atomic bomb.

Target map of Kyoto, June 1945, with atomic bomb aiming point indicated. This image is a composite of eight separate microfilm images from two maps (Kyoto North and Kyoto South) that I stitched together in Photoshop.

Target map of Kyoto, June 1945, with atomic bomb aiming point indicated. This image is a composite of eight separate microfilm images from two maps (Kyoto North and Kyoto South) that I stitched together in Photoshop. If you want the full uncropped version (7MB), you can get it here.

The plans to bomb Kyoto were serious enough to warrant the creation of a target map, showing the city with a 1.5 mile circle drawn around a starred aiming point — the roundhouse of the railway yards. Even today this is an easy target to find, visually, using Google Maps — it is the site of the Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum today. One suspects that if Kyoto had been atomic bombed this site would have the same iconic status as the Genbaku Dome/Hiroshima Peace Memorial today.

On May 15, 1945, a directive was issued to the US Army Air Forces requesting that Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Niigata be put on a list of “Reserved Areas” not to be bombed, so that they could be preserved as atomic bombing targets. Why Yokohama and Kokura was not put on the list as well at that time is not known to me, but presumably Yokohama was known to be a planned target, as it was ruinously firebombed on May 29th. (As an aside, the mushroom cloud from atomic bombing of Yokohama would probably have been visible from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, according to NUKEMAP3D.) Kokura was added to the “reserved” list on June 27.

On May 30th, Groves had a morning meeting with Stimson to discuss the targeting decisions. In Groves’ later recollections, Stimson told Groves that on the matter of the bomb targeting, Stimson was “the kingpin” and that nobody else would overrule him. When Groves told him of the targeted cities, Stimson (again, in Groves’ later recollection), told him bluntly: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” Groves recalled Stimson telling him that Kyoto was a cultural center of Japan, the former capital of the country, “and a great many reasons” more why he didn’t want it bombed. Stimson had been having numerous meetings about the atomic bomb and the firebombing of Tokyo over these days — and was resistant to the new mass bombing tactics. On June 1, Stimson recorded in his diary a discussion he had with the commander of the US Army Air Forces, about the fact that the US policy was now one of mass destruction:

Then I had in General Arnold and discussed with him the bombing of the B-29’s in Japan. I told him of my promise from Lovett that there would be only precision bombing in Japan and that the press yesterday had indicated a bombing of Tokyo which was very far from that. I wanted to know what the facts were. He told me that the Air Force was up against the difficult situation arising out of the fact that Japan, unlike Germany, had not concentrated her industries and that on the contrary they were scattered out and were small and closely connected in site with the houses of their employees; that thus it was practically impossible to destroy the war output of Japan without doing more damage to civilians connected with the output than in Europe. He told me, however, that they were trying to keep it down as far as possible. I told him there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.

Stimson went to President Truman with his concerns a few days later, on June 6th. His diary records the following exchange:

I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons: first, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength. He laughed and said he understood. Owing to the shortness of time I did not get through any further matters on my agenda.

What was Truman laughing at? If Truman was a clever man, one might guess that it was the apparent contradiction between not wanting to “outdo Hitler in atrocities” but also wanting to make sure there was enough of Japan left to destroy to make an impression when the atomic bomb was ready. But Truman was not known as a clever man — he probably just thought it was amusing that we were becoming so successful at destroying Japan that we’d need to preserve a little more to destroy later.

Groves had not given up on targeting Kyoto, however. He repeatedly attempted to see if Stimson would budge. Kyoto was a rich target — more important than many of the others on the list. Why did Stimson insist on sparing Kyoto? The answer you find on the Internet is straightforward but a little glib: in the late 1920s, Stimson had been Governor-General to the Philippines, and had visited the city and loved it (and had perhaps been there on his honeymoon). Thus there was a personal connection. This is not present in most of the books on the bomb decision, oddly enough — the fact that Stimson opposed bombing Kyoto is mentioned, but other than noting it was a cultural capital, it is not probed much deeper. The historiography on Stimson’s decision is one about the moral underpinnings of it: Was Stimson trying to assuage guilt? Was he trying to preserve better postwar relations with the Japanese? There are competing interpretations, and not a lot of evidence to work from.

Truman and Stimson, August 1945. Source: George Skadding, LIFE Magazine.

Truman and Stimson, August 1945. Source: George Skadding, LIFE Magazine.

Which brings us, at last, to what interests me the most here. I am not so interested in why Stimson spared Kyoto, or how scholars have interpreted that. What I am interested in is this: Stimson’s attempt to keep Kyoto off the target list for the atomic bomb went to the very top. The list of targets was not finalized until July 25th, 1945, when Stimson and Truman were both at the Potsdam Conference. There, Stimson told Truman for a final time why Kyoto had to be kept off. From Stimson’s diary entry from July 24th:

“We had a few words more about the S-1 program, and I again gave him my reasons for eliminating one of the proposed targets [Kyoto]. He again reiterated with the utmost emphasis his own concurring belief on that subject, and he was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians. It might thus, I pointed out, be the means of preventing what our policy demanded, namely a sympathetic Japan to the United States in case there should be any aggression by Russia in Manchuria.”

Stimson left the meeting thinking Truman completely understood the matter, and the final target order — with Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki (the latter added only then) — was sent out.

But what did Truman take away from this meeting? We can look at Truman’s own diary entry from July 25th:

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful. 

This passage reflects an incredible misconception. Truman appears, here, to believe that Hiroshima was “a purely military” target, and that “soldiers and sailors” would be killed, “not women and children.” But of course every city on that list was inhabited primarily by civilians. And by the calculus of war being waged, every city on that list had a military connection — they produced weapons for the military.

This is not to say that there isn’t a distinction between the targets, just that it is slighter than Truman’s diary entry suggests. Stimson was probably trying to say that the cultural value of Kyoto outweighed its value as a strategic target. Stimson was no doubt aware that Kyoto had war industries inside of it, but thought these were worth overlooking. The lack of a large military base in Kyoto made it more of a “civilian” target in his mind than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But Truman seems to have come away from this discussion with the understanding that it was a stark contrast between a “civilian” target and a “military” one. As J. Samuel Walker has noted, if Hiroshima had been a more important military target, it likely would have already been bombed much earlier — the fact that it was still intact was in part a reflection of its lack of military presence.

Statistics on "casualties among school children" at Hiroshima, from Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs, volume VI (July 1951).

Statistics on “casualties among school children” at Hiroshima, from Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs, volume VI (July 1951), page 25.

Am I reading too much into one diary entry? I don’t think so. Consider that after the second bomb was dropped, Truman issued a “stop” order on further atomic bombing, telling Secretary of Commerce (and former VP) Henry Wallace that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.'” Because both of those atomic bombs did kill a lot of civilians, and a lot of children in particular. In fact, as a postwar report explained, elementary schools were seen as a great data source on the mortality of the bombs because good records were kept “of the fate of the children.” So you get really gristly statistics about the percentage of schoolchildren killed at various distances from Ground Zero — something that really underscores that these “purely military” targets were a little less than “pure.” Sometimes these passages have been taken to argue that Truman really did wrestle with the moral issues, but I think they show something else: that he did not understand them until after the fact.

As another bit of evidence along these lines, consider what Truman wrote to Senator Richard Russell on August 9th, before he received a detailed report of the damage at Hiroshima:

I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner.

For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the ‘pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation and, for your information, I am not going to do it until it is absolutely necessary…

My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.

Does this look like a man who understands that he signed off an an order that was being used to obliterate Japanese elementary schools, or someone who really still believes that they are primarily destroying “military” targets exclusively?

I think Truman came away from the discussions about Kyoto with a very incorrect understanding of what the atomic bomb targets were. I think he really, genuinely did not understand the degree to which civilians would compose the vast bulk of the casualties. How could he misunderstand this point? Because of the framing of the discussion, perhaps — Stimson really wanted him to agree with him that Kyoto was somehow a different category of target. Perhaps this is the greatest legacy of the Kyoto decision: it created what looked like a great moral distinction regarding the bomb, one which Truman thought he had taken a decisive stance on. But in the end it confused Truman as to the possible moral options (he was never presented with the question of whether a “demonstration” should be made, for example, or whether Japan should be given a direct warning first), and he chose one apparently under false pretenses.

I don’t think Stimson attempted to purposely mislead Truman, though. Rather, I think the root of Truman’s misunderstanding was that he was a very incurious man when it came to nuclear matters. He liked the idea of the bomb as a source of political power, but he didn’t really get into the details of how it was made or used, not in the way Roosevelt did, and not in the way Eisenhower would. He rarely questioned his advisors, rarely analyzed the issues with independent judgment, and he never grappled with the big ideas. There are many other examples of this from later in his Presidency as well. Despite having his name forever linked to the atomic bomb, one does not get the impression from even his own retrospective, self-justifying accounts that he really took the issues seriously, or even fully understood them. As a result of his lack of interest, and lack of attention, he never thought to ask how many civilians would die at Hiroshima — it doesn’t appear to him to have even been a consideration until after the damage was done.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 29 Comments »

Redactions

Would nukes have helped in Vietnam?

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 25th, 2014

That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, “Colonel, you’re insane”? … Doomsday celebs, technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, “right here in-country.” Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.

So wrote Michael Herr in his masterful and classic book of Vietnam War journalism, Dispatches. I recently re-read Herr’s book, and this passage stuck out to me today more than it did when I first read the book a decade ago. “There were always the Nukes…” is an attitude that one sometimes sees expressed in other contexts as well, the idea that if it came to it, the USA could, of course, “glassify” any enemy it so chose to. The bomb in this view is the ultimate guarantor of security and strength. But of course Vietnam, among other conflicts, showed very clearly that being a nuclear state didn’t guarantee victory.

A napalm attack in the Vietnam War. Source.</a

Napalm in Vietnam. Source.

Would nukes have helped with the Vietnam War? It is a somewhat ghastly idea, to add more slaughter to an already terrible, bloody war, but worth contemplating if only to consider in very tangible terms what nuclear weapons can and can’t do, could and couldn’t do. It was a question that was studied seriously at the time, too. In early 1967, a JASON committee consisting of Freeman Dyson, Robert Gomer, Steven Weinberg, and S. Courtney Wright wrote a 60 page report on “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia,” considering what could and couldn’t be done with the bomb. The whole thing has been obtained (with redactions) under the Freedom of Information Act by the Nautilus Institute, who have put together a very nice website on the subject under the title “Essentially Annihilated.”

The motivation for the report, according to Ann Finkbeiner, came from a few of the JASON consultants hearing off-hand comments from military men about the appeal of using a nuke or two:

“We were scared about the possible use in Vietnam,” said Robert Gomer, a chemist from the University of Chicago who was probably Jason’s first nonphysicist. During the 1966 spring meeting Freeman Dyson was “at some Jason party,” he said, and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was also close to President Johnson “just remarked in an offhand way, ‘Well, it might be a good idea to throw in a nuke once in a while just to keep the other side guessing.'”

Gomer took initiative on the report, but it is Dyson’s name that is most closely associated it, in part because he (alphabetically) is listed as the first author, in part because Dyson is much more famous. Finkbeiner, who interviewed the authors of the report, says that it was not a report that was specifically requested by the military or government, and that it hewed closely to analytical/tactical questions as opposed to ethical ones.

Which is to say, as you probably have figured out, they set out to show from the start that tactical nuclear weapons would not be a good thing to introduce into the Vietnam War. So they weren’t exactly neutral on the question, but neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing.

1967 - Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia

The report is a fascinating read. It serves as a wonderful lens into how strategic thinking about tactical weapons worked at the time, because the authors, perhaps in an attempt to make sure it was taken seriously, couch all of their reasoning in the language of other, official studies on the issue. So it offers insights into the kinds of issues that were popping up in war-gaming scenarios, and assumptions that were apparently taken as valid about what a tactical nuclear weapon could and couldn’t do. And by deliberately avoiding any discussions of politics and morality (and with that, strategic nuclear weapons use), it does allow them to get into the nitty gritty of the tactical questions without getting overwhelmed by larger and often more nebulous debates about the propriety of nuclear arms.

The basic conclusions are pretty simple. The main one is that even if the US did use tactical nuclear weapons, and such use was entirely unilateral, it wouldn’t get very useful results. Tactical nuclear weapons were thought to be most useful against large massed troops or columns of armor, such as an invading Red Army moving into Western Europe. The problem is, that didn’t describe the situation in Vietnam very well at all, where the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army typically operated in smaller groups under forest cover. You could use nukes to destroy their bases, but you’d have to locate their bases first — and by the time you’ve done that, you could have just bombed them conventionally. In general, in a war like Vietnam, tactical nuclear weapons appeared to offer little advantage over conventional arms in most situations. The one special addition of the nukes — the fallout — was too difficult to predict and control, and fallout that would be a useful barrier to troops would necessarily become a problem for civilians as well.

There are some interesting numbers in the report. One is a citation of a conclusion from a RAND study that in a complex war environment, a tactical nuclear weapon is “on the average, equivalent to about 12 nonnuclear attack sorties.” The JASON authors conclude that if you wanted to do something like the Rolling Thunder campaign using nuclear weapons, under this rubric it would require 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons per year. They also note another war-gaming conclusion, that even in the presumedly “Soviet” tactical nuclear weapons environment — large, massed troop and armor concentrations —  “the average number of enemy casualties per strike was about 100.” This probably assumes that some strikes are outright misses while others are very effective, but that’s an impressively low number. The JASON authors note that this would be considerably less in a Vietnam-style environment, because the ability to locate targets of interest would probably be much lower.

There are, they acknowledge, a few cases where specific uses of tactical nuclear weapons might be advantageous. Bridges, headquarters, and underground tunnel complexes could be more easily taken out with tactical nukes than conventional weapons. Such conclusions are somewhat underwhelming, and maybe that is the point: when you do figure out what good the weapons might do, it seems much less impressive than the fantasies.

Map of the Tet Offensive, 1968; the JASON authors would perhaps have us consider what this would have looked like if the North Vietnamese had been supplied tactical weapons from the Soviets or Chinese. Source.

Map of the Tet Offensive, 1968; the JASON authors would perhaps have us consider what this would have looked like if the North Vietnamese had been supplied tactical weapons from the Soviets or Chinese. Source.

The strongest argument they make against using the weapons, though, is not so much that they would be ineffective against the Vietnamese. Rather, it is that the weapons would be really effective against American troops in Vietnam:

If about 100 weapons of 10-KT yield each could be delivered from the base perimeters onto all 70 target areas in a coordinate strike, the U.S. fighting capability in Vietnam would be essentially annihilated. In the more likely contingency that only a few weapons could be delivered intermittently, U.S. casualties would still be extremely high and the degradation of U.S. capabilities would be considerable.

This is often the argument made today whenever the idea of using nuclear weapons — tactical or otherwise — re-raises its head. Since World War II, the US has the strongest interest in not breaking the “nuclear taboo” because once nukes start becoming normalized, the US usually stands to lose the most, or at least a lot. Massed troops, heavy armor, and fixed bases? That’s how we prefer to fight wars. Massive urban cities conveniently located on coasts? Check. Economy highly reliant on communications, transportation, and other infrastructure? Yeah. Which is probably one of the deep reasons that the US, for all of its lack of willingness to commit to a no-first use policy, has always managed to find a way so far to avoid using the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons it produced in the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The report convincingly concludes:

The use of TNW [tactical nuclear weapons] in Southeast Asia would be highly damaging to the U.S. whether or not the use remains unilateral. The overall result of our study is to confirm the generally held opinion that the use of TNW in Southeast Asia would offer the U.S. no decisive military advantage if the use remained unilateral, and it would have strongly adverse military effects if the enemy were able to use TNW in reply. The military advantages of unilateral use are not overwhelming enough to ensure termination of the war, and they are therefore heavily outweighed by the disadvantages of eventual bilateral use.

When I teach to students, I try to emphasize that there are some deep paradoxes at the core of nuclear weapons policies. Deterrence is a tricky-enough strategic issue, a mixture of  military logic and raw fear. Tactical nuclear weapons add complicated wrinkles. Were they merely a means of making deterrence more credible, by showing the Soviets (and whomever else) that we were not willing to let the threat of nuclear annihilation become paralyzing? Or were they really intended to be military weapons that could be usefully employed, regarded as a sort of scaling up of conventional capabilities? In terms of their doctrine and literature, it isn’t clear: they are spoken of as both, in part because a stated willingness to use them is core to their deterrent value. (That is, if you are going to be convincing in your statements that you are willing to use them, you have to look like you are willing to use them, even if you don’t want to use them.)

How much of tactical nuclear weapons was just swagger? Above, the Davy Crockett weapons system, in full-swagger mode.

How much of tactical nuclear weapons was just swagger? Above, the Davy Crockett weapons system, in full-swagger mode.

Thinking through, in a concrete way, what would happen if nuclear weapons are used, and what the long-term consequences would be (politically, tactically, environmentally, economically, etc.) is an important exercise, even if it is sometimes labeled as morbid. Too often, I think, we close our minds to the very possibility. But “thinking the unthinkable” is valuable — not because it will make us more willing to use them, but because it highlights the limitations of their use, and helps us come to grips with what the actual consequences would be.

So would nuke have been useful in the Vietnam War? I think the JASON authors do a good job of showing that the answer is, “almost certainly not very useful, and possibly completely disastrous.” And knowing, as we do now and they did not in 1967, how much of a long-term blot Vietnam would be to US domestic and foreign policy in the years that followed, consider how much of a danger it would have posed if we had started letting little nukes fly on top of everything else.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 18 Comments »

News and Notes

John Wheeler and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 14th, 2014

Just a quick plug: as noted previously, I’m moving out of the Washington, DC, area very soon, to start a new job at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the New Jersey/NYC area. My last talk as a DC denizen is going to be next Monday, July 21st, at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, from 12-1:30pm.

Wheeler-H-bomb-ACP

Here’s the information:

The AIP History Programs invites you to an ACP Brown Bag Lunch-Time Talk:

John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues:
Searching for a missing document
at the height of the Cold War

by Alex Wellerstein, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for History of Physics

Monday, July 21, 2014
12–1:30 pm

Conference Room A
American Center for Physics
1 Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740

There’s never a right time to lose a secret document under unusual circumstances. But for the influential American physicist John Archibald Wheeler, there might not have been a worse time than January, 1953. While on an overnight train ride to Washington, D.C., only a month after the test of the first hydrogen bomb prototype, Wheeler lost, under curious circumstances, a document explaining the secret to making thermonuclear weapons.

The subsequent search for the missing pages (and for who to blame) went as high as J. Edgar Hoover and President Eisenhower, and ended up destroying several careers. The story provides a unique window into the precarious intersection of government secrecy, competing histories of the hydrogen bomb, and inter-agency atomic rivalry in the high Cold War. Using recently declassified files, the AIP Center for History of Physics’ outgoing Associate Historian will trace out the tale of  how Wheeler ended up on that particular train, with that particular document, and the far-reaching consequences of its  loss—or theft—for both Wheeler and others involved in the case.

It’s a very fun paper, drawing heavily on John Wheeler’s FBI file, and one that I will be turning into an article fairly soon. It is open to the public if you RSVP. If you’re in town and want to see me before I go, please feel free to come! To my knowledge it will not be live-streamed or recorded or anything like that.

Tags:
Posted in News and Notes | 8 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »