This is second post of a two part series on this topic.
Click here for part one.
Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945? In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were “peace feelers” to the Soviet Union from an important minority of the Japanese government, which is quite interesting and complicates the overly-simple picture of Japanese fanaticism that is often told about their refusal to surrender, but they don’t constitute, in any meaningful sense, a real offer to surrender. And they were certainly not an offer of unconditional surrender.
But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war?
General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the diminutive Emperor with the American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.
I bring this up because my attention was not long ago directed to an article that came out recently in the (respectable) Asia-Pacific Journal that makes the argument that Japan was indeed ready to surrender. Most of it is very much the “standard revisionist” take on the end of the war, with a strong reliance on the postwar critiques of the atomic bomb by high-ranking military figures and a discussion of internal debates about whether unconditional surrender was a good idea or not. Overall I didn’t find it to contain much new, and the argument is still not compelling.
But one part stuck out to me as something I wasn’t familiar with from the normal diplomatic historical literature, in a footnote:
Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, reported that two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms later concluded by President Truman. Trohan related that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral William Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945.
Now that is very interesting! But is it true? Because if so, this would be a very different situation than the MAGIC intercepts — a real, detailed offer (40 pages!) for surrender, well before the atomic bomb was ready to use (and before the Soviets had committed to entering into the war!), that Roosevelt had rejected (more grist for the “what did Roosevelt think about nuclear weapons” mill)! One would assume that if this was the case, one would read about it in the many, many, many serious books that have been written on the end of World War II, including by people who have spent a lot of time in both the US and Japanese archives, like Hasegawa, or the hardcore revisionists, who would surely have leapt at such a thing… and yet, from what I can tell, that isn’t the case. The Trohan memorandum (as I’ll call it for brevity) isn’t in Hasegawa, or Alperovitz, or… really anybody serious. So I thought, “what’s up with that?”
So I looked at the linked-to source, an article for the History News Network, where it went into a little more detail:
Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune with impeccable credentials for integrity and accuracy, reported that two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman. The single difference was the Japanese insistence on retention of the emperor, which was not acceptable to the American strategists at the time, though it was ultimately allowed in the final peace terms. Trohan relates that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945. According to historian Anthony Kubek, Roosevelt, in the presence of witnesses, read the memorandum and dismissed it with a curt “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.”
Specifically, the terms of the Japanese peace offers of late January 1945 were as follows:
- Full surrender of the Japanese forces, air, land and sea, at home and in all occupied countries.
- Surrender of all arms and ammunition.
- Agreement of the Japanese to occupation of their homeland and island possessions.
- Relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa.
- Regulation of Japanese industry.
- Surrender of designated war criminals for trial.
- Release of all prisoners.
Other than retention of the emperor these terms were identical to the final surrender terms. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his essay “Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe,” published in the May 10, 1958 issue of the National Review, tells the same story. Barnes said that the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and says that after MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail. The Trohan story was ignored by other news media and almost immediately dropped off the public radar.
So that’s kind of interesting, but also raises some serious concerns. First, the Eisenhower-era National Review is not where I would anchor a modern historical claim. Maybe there is something of truth in their pages, but I would be very careful to support any claims like this with a less-partisan, better-cited source, and one that perhaps enjoyed access to the wealth of research resources now available to us about this topic.
Harry Elmer Barnes, left, and Anthony Kubek, right.
Second, the historians cited to back this up are, to say the least, problematic. Harry Elmer Barnes, for example, according to his Wikipedia entry, came out as a Holocaust denier in his later career (which is to say, only a few years after the National Review article). Even if one wants to make the argument that this particular article is not Holocaust denial, and is before he did that… it’s still a big oof, as the kids say.
As for “historian Anthony Kubek,” he was virulently anti-Communist, anti-Roosevelt, and anti-Truman, who, late in his career, gave at least one talk at an Institute for Historical Review conference and published an article in their journal that railed against the Morgenthau Plan as a Communist plot. The IHR is infamous for being primarily a forum for Holocaust denial. He doesn’t seem to have been an explicit Holocaust denier himself, from what I could tell, but his anti-Communism seems to have been of the sort that seems to have found easy company with anti-Semitic bigots.
So the confluence of “respected historians” who are supposedly backing this story up is… not so good. If anything, their endorsement makes this claim even more suspicious, and says much about the “kinds of circles” this claim is deployed within: far-right critiques of Roosevelt and Truman. Which is a kind of atomic bombing critique that is not very common today, as the politics of the bombings have shifted quite a bit over the years. The irony is not lost on me that the people who are deploying the Trohan allegation today are from the other end of the political spectrum!
(I would just like to note that it is not my goal here to heap scorn on the authors of the quoted pieces, so I have not engaged them by name or anything like that. From what I can tell they seem to be well-intentioned, but they are not well-known names in the fields of diplomatic history or atomic history. I suspect they fell into these claims somewhat unaware of their trickiness or the types of people who originated and supported them.)
Trying to corroborate any aspect of this story sent me down a rabbit hole. What I found was that where this story shows up, in almost identical language to the above, are various “revisionist” accounts. As one might expect from the above, these start as being right-wing revisionist accounts, but switch into left-wing revisionist accounts at some point. None of the places I have seen the Trohan story deployed in this fashion try to actually corroborate it with more evidence, which is a sign of something.
One doesn’t find the Trohan story or the alleged “offer” in it in more careful, academic histories of the end of the war. Even “revisionist” ones. It isn’t even refuted; it’s just not mentioned. There is no sign of the purported 40-page memorandum in the archives, in oral histories, in telegrams, nothing. At least, none that I could find through footnotes, finding aids, and other means at my easy disposal. I sent a draft of this post to a few scholars I respected in this field, and they hadn’t heard of any of this before. It seems relegated only to “fringe” sources. There is only one discussion of this issue in serious historical writing that I could find, which I will discuss in a moment, and it is essentially devoted to contextualizing how the story of the “Trohan memorandum,” as I will call it for brevity, became a talking point of the fringe-right in the 1940s and 1950s.
This does not mean that the “Trohan memorandum” might not be buried in some archival basement somewhere — it’s totally possible, there are lots of “lost files” out there. But one would think that something like this would have been discovered by an archivist or historian at some point, and made some deal of, given that it would play a big role in how we thought about the end of World War II, the atomic bombings, Roosevelt, and Yalta. None of these are exactly “unexamined” subjects. If anything, they have been pored over to a fault by scholars, and the importance of such a document would be obvious to anyone who stumbled across it. Which is for me pretty strong evidence that it isn’t in the archives.
The headline of the Trohan article in the Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1945.
Of course, I could easily look up the only cited source for this information: the front-page article by Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan. It is basically similar to what is reported above, but has some additional details which are interesting. I am putting the entire thing (retyped by myself from the original) into a footnote here, because it would pretty long to just insert into the post directly.
There are a few things gained from the original article that are missing from its use in “revisionist” accounts. The most important in my mind is that in Trohan’s article, there is an explanation as to why Roosevelt would have rejected the alleged offer at the time: it wasn’t meant to be an official offer from the Japanese Supreme War Council; rather, it was from some kind of “peace party” minority of it. And as such there were fears that if the US pursued this, it would lead to a coup against said “peace party” (and the Emperor) by the dominant militarists. Which is pretty interesting, because it is not so far from what actually happened, of course, when Japan did offer a conditional surrender on August 10th, 1945, and suffered an attempted coup by junior officers. (The US refused the offer then, and the Japanese offered unconditional surrender on August 14th.)
Anyway, all sources of this claim go back to Trohan and Trohan alone. There are some other claims in other, later sources (also unsubstantiated) that the source of this information to Trohan was Admiral Leahy, and that, many years later, Herbert Hoover confronted MacArthur on this article, and that MacArthur said it was essentially accurate (and this claim, again, is hard to substantiate).
The only source I have seen that contextualizes all of the above is Marc Gallichio’s Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford University Press, 2020). He spends part of chapter 6 discussing how the Trohan article was received (not it origins, which seem mysterious), and how it became pulled into the anti-Truman, anti-Communist, right-wing maw of the late 1940s and early 1950s that essentially saw Communist infiltration of the US as being behind the “loss” of China, the Korean War, and so on. He does a great job of showing how the Trohan memo became a sort of talking point of the anti-Communist Right, including Senate Republicans who were instead lionizing MacArthur (at the expense of Truman). The Trohan memo was just one of many “threads” in a growing conservative conspiracist argument that included, but was not limited to, the argument that the atomic bombs were not needed, and that Roosevelt had deliberately prolonged the war in order to allow the Soviet Union to enter into it.
Gallichio dismisses any reality of the Trohan memo pretty quickly:
The idea that, in January 1945, the emperor authorized his representatives to tell MacArthur that he was willing to have the Americans occupy Japan, liberate Taiwan and Korea, surrender war criminals for trial, regulate Japanese industry, and abandon all prerogatives of the throne was patently ridiculous. Not surprisingly, Trohan’s fantastic story received little attention when it was published amid the celebration of the war’s end. Republication in the Senate hearings gave it second life. In the crisis atmosphere of the Korean War, it quickly became an article of faith among conspiratorially minded critics of Roosevelt. According to this story, by failing to act on MacArthur’s recommendation and adhering stubbornly to unconditional surrender, Roosevelt had prolonged the war and opened northeast Asia to Soviet penetration. No evidence of MacArthur’s supposed report was ever found. That only confirmed critics’ worst fears about the lengths Roosevelt’s men would go to serve the Kremlin’s ends. The story survived for decades as part of the indictment against FDR.
I find this pretty compelling, on the whole. It doesn’t tell us where the story of the Trohan memo originated, of course. I think it suspiciously similar to the MAGIC intercept story (discussed in part 1 of this blog post), albeit transposed in time and with many details changed. So it could be a garbled version of the situation at Potsdam, with different people involved. That seems not entirely impossible to me, though it would be a big error on the part of Trohan, and involve him either deliberately fabricating some aspects (e.g., when he learned about it, the 40-page memoranda, etc.), or being duped by someone deliberately spreading misinformation to him. It could also be confused in other ways. For example, the 40-page memoranda might have been an offer prepared by some planners in the US to present to the Japanese (there were Americans working on “conditional” surrender possibilities before and at the Potsdam Conference, which Truman rejected), but the authorship got scrambled.
Another possibility is that it is entirely fabricated. This strikes me as not impossible — journalists do, sometimes, fabricate entire stories out of nothing, and there is something slightly too neat about this account. It might not have been fabricated by Trohan, of course; it could have been fabricated by someone feeding information to Trohan in some way. Remember how the Trohan story was used and understood in the 1940s and 1950s: as an attack on the necessity of the use of the atomic bombs. So it is possible that one of the people who had knowledge of MAGIC, and wanted to argue that the bombs weren’t necessary (Leahy? MacArthur? Eisenhower? Grew?) was behind a disinformation campaign. Stranger things have happened! Given the importance of MacArthur in this story, and his own well-established narcissism and conflicts with Truman, it is not entirely out of hand to wonder if he was himself the fabricator here.
The other option, of course, is that it is real or partially real — maybe there was some kind of “early peace-feeler,” in late January/early February 1945. This doesn’t strike me as at all impossible, either; again, we know the Japanese were interested in such “feelers” a few months later, so why not a bit earlier? The main argument against this is again, that there seems to be zero corroborating evidence of this being the case from either the US or Japanese sides. Which is pretty striking. Separately, from what we know, the “peace party” was not at all organized-enough to do this kind of thing in early 1945. The timeline is wrong, from what we know of what was going on in Japan at the time. I am inclined to go along with Gallichio in calling the sum of this “ridiculous” given the context of what was going on in Japan at the time.
One of the things that Gallichio does well in his chapter about this is show how this idea steadily regulated itself to the fringes of even conservative thought, so that we end up with the “chief spokesmen” of this argument being people who can only find audiences with places like the IHR. The politics of Hiroshima in the 1940s and early 1950s are not quite the politics they would become: it would instead become an article of faith of conservatism that the bombings were justified and necessary. That’s a story for another time, but it is what makes the very odd movement of this story from the far-right fringe to an anti-Hiroshima argument from the left very interesting. It’s kind of easy to see how this happened — an anti-Hiroshima argument is an anti-Hiroshima argument — but I think people on the left would be far more suspicious about using some of this evidence if they realized who had first developed it, why they had done so, and how it got deployed later.
“Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri (BB-63), 2 September 1945. Lieutentant General Richard K. Sutherland, U.S. Army, watches from the opposite side of the table. Foreign Ministry representative Toshikazu Kase is assisting Mr. Shigemitsu. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.” Via Wikimedia Commons.
Anyway, I thought this made for an interesting little historical quandary. I try to keep an open mind on these things, though I (obviously) lean much more towards the “it didn’t exist” options than the idea that it did exist. It just doesn’t add up, and the burden of proof is going to be on those who assert it is real, because so much evidence points against it.
Circling back to our original question of whether the Japanese made an offer of surrender prior to the atomic bombings, it is very interesting to note that even if the Trohan article was 100% true, the memorandum it describes still wouldn’t constitute a real “offer to surrender” as most people understand it, because it wasn’t an official offer, and it did not represent the view of the Supreme War Council. All it would be was a more direct and concrete “peace feeler” than what would come later. It would be important to understanding the historical events, to be sure, but it wouldn’t actually change the overall conclusion.
In the end, the answer to the question motivating this series of posts — did the Japanese offer to surrender prior to Hiroshima? — remains a qualified no. There were elements of the Japanese high command that were looking for a diplomatic way out of the war, to be sure, and that does challenge the all-too-common narrative of the “fanatical Japanese” who left Truman et al. “with no choice” other than to use the atomic bombs. But it is not as easy as saying that the US deliberately foreswore credible surrender offers.
Redactions
by Alex Wellerstein, published May 2nd, 2022
This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic.
Click here for part two.
One of the most common invocations made in the service of “the atomic bombs weren’t necessary” argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of context and interpretation is misleading by itself.
The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer of 1945. Photograph is from June 9, 1945. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki is front and center. Of note, second to Suzuki’s left, looking downward and glum, is Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the only members of the “peace party” actually on the cabinet. Contrast his expression with that of War Minister Korechika Anami (back row, two behind Yonai), who was, until very close to the end, one of the most die-hard supporters of a continued war. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, somewhat touched up. A captioned overlay is here.
That there were “peace feelers” put out by some highly-placed Japanese in mid-1945 is well-known and well-documented. Specifically, there were several attempts to see whether the (then still-neutral) Soviet Union would be willing to serve as a mediator for a negotiated peace between the US and Japan. This story is the heart of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s justly influential Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005), and he goes over, in great detail, how these approaches worked (one in Japan, with the Soviet ambassador there, another in Moscow, with the Japanese ambassador there). Hasegawa’s argument isn’t about Japan being ready to surrender, though; he uses this account to show how dependent Japan’s ideas about the war’s possible ends were on a neutral Soviet Union.
The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to surrender is quite large. Japan was being governed at this point by a Supreme War Council, which was dominated by militarists who had no interest in peace. The “peace party” behind these feelers was a small minority of officials who were keeping their efforts secret from the rest of the Council, because they clearly feared they would be squashed otherwise. The “peace party” did appear to have the interest — and sometimes even the favor — of the Emperor, which is important and interesting, though the Emperor, as Hasegawa outlines in detail, was not as powerful as is sometimes assumed. The overall feeling that one takes away from Hasegawa’s book is that all of these “feelers” were very much “off the books,” as in they were exploratory gestures made by a group that was waiting for an opportunity that might tilt the balance of power their way, and certainly not some kind of formal, official, or binding plan made by the Japanese government.
Furthermore, the surrender that the “peace party” was contemplating was still miles away from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the United States. There were conditions involved: mainly the preservation of the status and safety of the Emperor and the Imperial House, which they regarded as identical to the preservation of the Japanese nation. But as Hasegawa points out, they were so unclear on what they were looking for, that there was contemplation of other things they might ask for as well, liking getting to keep some of their conquered territories. Again, this was not a real plan so much as the feelers necessary for forming a possible future plan, and so we should not be surprised that it was pretty vague.
General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the 5’5″ Emperor with the six-foot American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.
One can argue, and people who argue against the necessity of the bombings do, that since the United States ultimately agreed to preserve the Emperor and Imperial House, that the US could have accepted such a condition earlier on if it had wanted to shorten the war. But this is not very compelling: it is a different thing to decide, after a war, that you are willing to cut your former enemy a break, versus cutting them that break while they are still your sworn enemy. The counter-argument, which even as someone who is not a die-hard “unconditional surrender was necessary” person I find somewhat compelling, is that if the US had modified its already-stated demands at that point, that it might have ultimately led to the Japanese making more demands, as part of the classic “give them an inch and they’ll ask for a foot” scenario. In any event, I doubt the Japanese would have been willing to accept the specific condition that the US ultimately ended up imposing during the occupation: that the Emperor had to publicly renounce his divinity. That’s a big “ask” to contemplate prior to surrender.
Anyway, whatever one thinks about the requirement of unconditional surrender and whether it prolonged the war — and it has been argued over since the 1940s — we can all agree, I think, that what the Japanese were unofficially “offering” was not what the US was demanding. And it is important to note that this was never actually offered to the US anyway: the Japanese were probing Soviet willingness to support them as a neutral party for a negotiated peace. So it was all a prelude to a negotiation of an offer. As it was, the Soviets weren’t interested (they were eager to declare war against Japan and seize promised territory as a consequence), and just strung them along. So the entire thing never got off the ground.
Cover sheet for a “MAGIC” intercept summary of cracked Japanese communications, classified ULTRA TOP SECRET, which was looked at during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. From the National Security Archive.
The US was aware of these efforts by the Japanese, because it had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (the MAGIC intercepts), but it was never a formal “offer” for them to accept or reject. The general interpretation of the intercepts at the time was that Japan might be on the road to surrender, and they perceived there was a sympathetic “peace party” in their high command, but that Japan was ultimately not yet ready to accept unconditional surrender. Which I don’t think is really wrong, though of course one could debate about what one could do with that information.
At this point, I feel I should emphasize, that I don’t think the use of the atomic bombs the way they were used (two bombs on two cities in three days) was the only possible way to achieve the aims of the United States in World War II, or even that the goal of “unconditional surrender” was unambiguously the best thing to pursue. (See my article on the possible alternatives, for example, as to other possibilities that were on the table at the time.) I am saying, rather, that I think the argument offered up by those who would use the MAGIC intercept situation as an argument that the Japanese were “ready to surrender” prior to Hiroshima is not very compelling. It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t unconditional surrender, and it wasn’t something the majority ruling the Japanese government had even approved or would support. It’s an important historical event that is crucial to understanding the end of the war (as Hasegawa makes quite clear), and one that complicates the “they all fanatics willing to fight to the death” argument that is used to justify using the atomic bombs, but it wasn’t anything like a surrender offer. I don’t have any problem with people making sound arguments either for or against the use of the atomic bombs — there are strong arguments on both sides — but they shouldn’t be based on myths. Unfortunately, many arguments in the popular sphere are.
OK, but what if the above wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? I’m not sure that would change all of my analysis above (you would still have the issue of whether the US ought to have accepted the postwar terms before it was the postwar), but it would certainly complicate the situation! There has been an account of Japan doing just that, which has circulated for over 70 years. In part 2 of this series, I’ll be exploring that — the case of the enigmatic “Trohan memoranda.” The ultimate conclusion spoilers! — is that it is likely bunk, but there’s a story in the telling…
Click here for part two of this series.
Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hiroshima, Japan, Soviet Union, World War II
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »
News and Notes
by Alex Wellerstein, published April 9th, 2022
In early February 2022, as readers will have seen, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the NUKEMAP. Privately, I had been reflecting personally on how the usage stats had been lower since the end of the Trump presidency. My feelings about the NUKEMAP usage stats are always a bit conflicted, since usage patterns tend to be lower when people are less worried about nuclear detonations, and while I do think people should be in general more worried about nuclear detonations during non-crisis periods than they are (because the possibility is still there), I don’t desire crisis periods. I’ll admit I did think, ah, maybe as a tool, NUKEMAP’s glory days have come and gone?
NUKEMAP’s most dubious media usage so far? From the March 22, 2022 edition of the National Enquirer. Yeah, they got my affiliation wrong — it’s the National Enquirer, they aren’t doing a lot of fact-checking! Thanks to Bill Geerhart for drawing this to my attention; I did manage to get my own copy as well, though these are his photos. (And before you make a Bat Boy joke, that’s Weekly World News. Totally different!)
But then Russia invaded Ukraine, and any part of me that got some kind of validation from NUKEMAP usage was quickly transmuted into a very different state of things: people are using the NUKEMAP too much. So much that my server became overwhelmed to the point that I was getting lots of feedback about it, and there were even articles written about it, and it was just taking a huge amount of my time trying to figure out the best ways to allow it to handle the amounts of traffic it was getting.
It’s impossible for me to know, for those first couple of weeks, exactly what the “demand” for NUKEMAP was, since the stats I have can only indicate how many people were served the page successfully and not the number who got a timeout screen. My rough guess, based on what happened once I improved the server capacity, was that about 50% of the people who wanted to use the NUKEMAP were unable to in this time, especially those who were not located in the United States where the server is located (one might think such things don’t matter in our cloud-based world, but they do for things like connection latency, which factors into how long your browser will wait before telling you it failed to connect).
I scrambled quite a bit to figure out the best way to overhaul the server while it was simultaneously under strain, and talked with many very helpful volunteers who were experts at various aspects of it, but in the end I suspect that 90% of the problem was solved by just changing a single server setting. (I did some other changes that will speed it up in general, which is why there is now a little “loading” icon when you first connect — it used to do some things before acknowledging that it was connecting, and that was causing it to take a few extra seconds at times, which could hit that timeout.)
The NUKEMAP daily traffic, from Google Analytics. I have annotated the various periods of usage with average (thousands per day) users. These are all visitors, not necessarily unique visitors (the numbers are not that different). The period in which it was “broken” is when it was unable to meet the demand, and so the actual demand was likely much higher than what was served. Of the 7 million in this time period, almost 6 million are from February 24th onward.
You can see, from the graph above, the remarkable increase that happened once I made these changes — the number of users pretty much doubled. What is really unusual about the above is not just that the number of users is very high, but that it doesn’t look like the standard spike-and-long-tail that is usually the hallmark of a moment of virality, but it is more like a plateau (inadequate server resources) that turns into a mountain. The traffic has gone down quite a bit over the last few weeks, but the “baseline” today is still twice what it was in January and early February.
In terms of actual usage, I haven’t tried to analyze the details — it takes a lot of work to do that, and as I’ve noted, I don’t have a lot of time at the moment — but unsurprisingly it looks like a lot of the users have been in Europe, more so than usual. Per usual, the majority of users are in Anglophone countries (because NUKEMAP is in English, something I still intend to remedy in the future), and especially the USA, but there are interested trends in some of the geographical data: the countries that host NATO nuclear weapons (Belgium, Germany, Italy the Netherlands) definitely seem to have an inflated usage patterns, as does Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Not surprising, but interesting to see.
NUKEMAP usage for European nations for February 24, 2022 through early April 2022, with select individual counts shown (in thousands). Data and map from Google Analytics.
I am glad that this got fixed, but this took quite a lot of time to figure out (I am not a server admin!), and it added quite a lot to my already-substantial workload by itself. The increased attention, and nuclear anxiety, also lead to increased numbers of media requests, which I try to honor (but don’t always have time to — believe it or not, NUKEMAP is only one small portion of my workload and responsibilities). So, for example, I have several blog posts that I meant to post in that period that haven’t come to fruition yet, both because it felt somehow inappropriate in the early period of the war to post something about nuclear weapons that had nothing to do with the present work (I have one about an interesting World War II topic that I have pretty much written, but have been holding back until it felt right), and also because the time it takes to write a blog post, even a rather breezy one, is always in competition with the other things I am supposed to be doing (teaching, grading, reviewing, writing, directing, advising, living).
So this post is just a very quick update on things, since the last thing I posted was about the temporary mirror (which is still up, for now, but will soon just be redirected to the main server). There are a few things that were on the nuclearsecrecy.com domain that are no longer functional because of how I had to reconfigure the server, notably NUKEMAP Classic, which was the original 2012 version of NUKEMAP that had much more reduced functionality but would let you put in arbitrarily (and ridiculously) high yields. There are changes to that code that would need to be made to make it run on the new setup, and I’ll admit that I haven’t really felt that it was such a pressing need, since I have essentially no confidence in those arbitrarily-large yield calculations (once you scale up to, say, the tens of billions of tons of TNT, you are talking about fireballs that are themselves larger than the atmosphere, and so there are a lot of things that are just not going to similarly scale up the same way — like the formation of the blast wave). There are times when people would still like to put in ridiculous yields just to get a very hand-wavy look at them, and maybe they could be accommodated in the existing NUKEMAP code (I would make it put a “warning: the model doesn’t work above 100 Mt, and may not even be accurate at 100 Mt” pop-up if you did so), which would be easier than fixing NUKEMAP Classic (which now also just looks very ugly to my eyes). If you have strong thoughts on the matter, feel free to let me know.
I did, however, make some time to clean up my office for the first time since the pandemic began, and to put up some new decorations — Soviet Civil Defense posters, printed in Kyiv in 1986 — on the wall. A television crew came to talk to me about NUKEMAP, but they ended up not filming in here. But I was happy to have a more functional office anyway, and plainly not above showing it off.
Anyway, as always, more soon. I have tried to hold back in offering too many concrete thoughts on the Ukraine–Russia situation, except to point out (in a Twitter thread that got retweeted enough times to make me feel uncomfortable and want to keep my mouth shut) that I do not think the probability of nuclear use is that high at the moment — higher than normal, but lower than during the 2017-18 North Korean crisis — but otherwise I have tried not to predict the future (I do not think historians are particularly gifted at such endeavors; as one senior scholar put it to me when I was just an undergraduate, we struggle as it is to understand the past). But I do have some thoughts on “what it all means” beyond just being horrified and appalled (by both the Russian behavior and the behavior of those various groups among us who would justify and enable them) that I am trying to write up as an essay that hopefully will come into existence fairly soon.
Tags: 2020s, NUKEMAP, Ukraine
Posted in News and Notes | This post has footnotes | 1 Comment »
Meditations
by Alex Wellerstein, published February 3rd, 2022
I was somewhat surprised to realize that today is the 10th anniversary of my unveiling of NUKEMAP. Historians should not be surprised by the passing of time, but people are, and historians are people, so, well, here I am, continually surprised.
NUKEMAP as it looks at the moment. You can see some previous iterations in this post.
The most disturbing effect of the passing of time with NUKEMAP has been the slightly different ways in which people talk to me about having used it. After a couple of years, I started to get people coming up to me and saying, “I used NUKEMAP when I was an undergraduate,” which wasn’t so bad, since said people were generally in graduate school. But now I get people who tell me they used NUKEMAP in elementary school, and the people telling me this are not in middle school, but look like adults. Which on the one hand makes me feel great — like I’m having an impact in this world — but on the other hand makes me feel old, because of course to me it still feels like I just created this site “the other day.”
I’m not going to write a long post reflecting on how I feel about the site, because I did that five years ago and my thoughts haven’t really changed. I still have things I’d like to add to it, and I’m still working on it pretty regularly, but as I wrote recently in reflecting on 10 years of blogging, I never have quite enough time to get all the things done I’d like. But some things that have been in the works for the last couple of years, which should come to fruition sometime in the next year include:
- 1a localization project so that NUKEMAP can be translated into languages other than English (in principle easy to do, in practice just very time consuming)
- much better mobile support for NUKEMAP (this is almost done)
- a means for calculating the possible areas of fire burn based on terrain type (this has been in the works for years but last summer a student working with me made huge progress on it)
- one of several means of visualizing 3D mushroom clouds again (variants of the NUKEMAP3D concept; a team of students is currently working on one of these, and I have another quick-and-dirty approach I am thinking of trying to implement)
- a dynamic fallout model so you can see the fallout plume grow and decay over time (a team of students working for me last summer made great progress on this front, but I’d need to really sit down with it for awhile to get it ready to deploy)
There are also some little tweaks to the underlying effects model I’ve been meaning to make (the prompt radiation curve gets out of whack at some yields, it’d be nice to have something related to underground or underwater detonations; the mushroom cloud to KMZ export has some little annoying bugs in it).
The main thing not in the works that I get asked about all the time is support for EMP effects, and that is because a) there are no open-source models of EMP effects that I have been able to find that allow you to draw useful visualizations of them (if anyone knows of one, let me know, but I’ve looked for years), and b) even if I could draw a nice HEMP SMILE diagram for a nuke at arbitrary yield and arbitrary height of burst, it’s nontrivial to translate those visualizations into meaning for people, and this is an area that is so fraught with political implications and technical disagreements/uncertainty that I am a little hesitant to go into it (I am not an EMP alarmist, but I also don’t think it would be nothing, and finding a model that would let me convey the lived reality of it is difficult). This could change in the future, depending on what is out there and how I feel about it, but I don’t have any ongoing plans to dip my toe into this debate right now (I revisit this question about once a year, for what it is worth).
Pageviews for NUKEMAP as of today. 48.8 million total pageviews (38 million unique).
One thing that I’ve been meaning to do for years (“when I get some time,” ha), is to do a more comprehensive analysis of NUKEMAP usage behaviors and make that data easily accessible. This anniversary snuck up on me, so I haven’t been able to roll that out today. But here’s a little sample of some of that data.
NUKEMAP collects two kinds of different statistics of users. First, just the basic demographic information and page usage information that Google Analytics provides (which is useful but very “high level”). Second, unless you disable it, every detonation a user make is logged into a gigantic database, including some information about the user (e.g., if it can, it will try to figure out from a user’s IP address what country they are in). All geographical data is fuzzed by enough that I can’t tell exactly where nukes are aimed (I trim enough off of the latitudes and longitudes that I can see basic areas but not specific buildings), and I don’t keep any user-identifiable information (IP addresses are not logged). The resulting data is pretty interesting, but at this point there’s a LOT of it — there have been about 220 million detonations. That’s a large-enough dataset that even manipulating the data can take awhile, but I’m in the process of having a machine crunch it down into usable pieces so I can actually do some analysis of it.
Who uses NUKEMAP? More like, who doesn’t? This is from Google Analytics.
But here are a few little samples. Who uses NUKEMAP? Pretty much every nation with an outgoing internet connection has had at least one visitor to NUKEMAP, which is a little amazing and overwhelming, even more so since NUKEMAP is in English (obviously there are ways to translate websites on the fly, but it’s an obvious impediment). The top users are Americans, no surprise there, but the list from then on is interesting. Here are the top 10 countries by NUKEMAP users:
- United States of America, 14.2 million users (34% of total)
- United Kingdom, 2.4 million (7.5%)
- Canada, 1.4 million (4.4%)
- Germany, 1.1 million (3.5%)
- Russia, 1.1 million (3.3%)
- Australia, 977K (3%)
- France, 856K (2.6%)
- Poland, 633K (1.9%)
- Spain, 582K (1.8%)
- Brazil, 572K (1.8%)
At one point, Google Analytics said it had been visited at least once from North Korea, but now it seems to be not so sure. I’ve no idea how accurate something like that could be, of course. It’s a little amusing to imagine Kim Jong-Un using it; hopefully he’d look at it and say, “gosh, let’s avoid having this happen.”
The oddest “use stories” I get are from people who do work in various aspects of the US government, military, or nuclear complex who tell me that they like to use it to “play around” with things that don’t feel “right” to do on official government software. I take that as high praise, even if it does present certain uncomfortable aspects!
What are the most popular yields of weapons that people test? It probably comes as no surprise who the King of the Bombs is — the Tsar Bomba’s maximum design yield (100 Mt) is by far the most popular yield, with over 81 million simulations by itself (37% of the total detonations). After that, it gets much more equitable, at least among the preset options, which (with two exceptions) are the most popular individual yield choices: the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba gets 5% (11.9 million), 20 kt (Fat Man and Nagasaki) also is 5% (9.9 million), 15 kt (Hiroshima) gets 4% (9.3 million), and the Davy Crockett (20 tons) gets 4% (9 million). None of that is super surprising based on why and how people use NUKEMAP: the two World War II yields (NUKEMAP always gets a lot of traffic around the anniversaries), the Tsar Bomba (biggest bomb), and the Davy Crockett (smallest bomb) look a whole lot like what I see when I ask people what they do with NUKEMAP (trying the biggest, the largest, the known). After these ones you get a dwindling percentage for each yield in the preset list, down to the least popular, 300 tons (B61 mod 3), which gets a little over a million uses. The only two yield settings that get higher than a million and are not in the preset list are 1 kt and 10 kt — which is not super surprising, either.
All together, the preset options make up 92% of what people try when they use NUKEMAP. That 8% of “non-preset” NUKEMAP can be pretty wild, though; people try lots of weird numbers, the purpose of which I cannot really guess. Most of them are either nice round numbers (e.g., 3800, or 40), which sort of makes sense, and some of them are just-off from round numbers (99,999), which might be experimentation (what’s a kiloton, between friends?). With such a large number of users, even a tiny bit of spontaneous experimentation means a lot of uses — 27,362 people each tried 99 kilotons. Over 19,000 people opted for more obvious symbolism of 666 kt.
The most interesting to me are trends about who nukes who. These are harder to get at, because while it is easy to figure out the target of a NUKEMAP nuke (it’s whatever latitude and longitude the user chooses), it’s trickier to accurately get information about where the user is located, especially since I am trying to avoid anything that would compromise their privacy (people are already “spooked” by nuclear topics, and a frequent comment about NUKEMAP online is that if you use it, you’ll be “on a list” — if so, then we’re all on the list).
There was a period in which this kind of anonymized user location data was provided easily by Google, and then that got very unreliable for awhile, and only in the last few years was I able to once again start getting that data again (using an IP address lookup table function I wrote), but even that is not entirely accurate (because people can use VPNs, and IP lookup tables can be inaccurate or go out of date). I wasn’t able to get the database to collate that data in time for this blog post (the dataset is big and not indexed, so it can take hours to run big queries — this is fixable, of course, but not in the span of an hour or two). So look for that in the near future. In the past, it has had some interesting patterns regarding how people in some countries use NUKEMAP to model attacks on other countries.
NUKEMAP still pulls in a respectable number of hits per day on a slow day — on the order of 10,000 or so. On a “viral” day that can kick up an order of magnitude, and those still happen (as I write this, there are a bunch of “what would happen if we got nuked?” articles going around for cities in Scotland), though it has been awhile since it had a “super viral” day of over 100,000 visitors. More views equal more education, but the cost of operation also scales pretty linearly as well. So I’m extremely grateful to the organizations that make the financial aspects of NUKEMAP possible: Mapbox for giving me a decent educational/humanitarian discount for the tile services; Global Zero for stepping in and picking up the server bills when my previous source dried up due to COVID belt-tightening, and the admins (esp. my dean, Kelland Thomas) at the Stevens Institute of Technology who consider this work a core part of my research and scholarship (which an outsider might take for granted, but any university professor knows is something to be appreciated!).
As always, more soon…!
Tags: 2010s, 2020s, NUKEMAP
Posted in Meditations | 3 Comments »
Visions
by Alex Wellerstein, published November 19th, 2021
In my recent article on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Tsar Bomba test, I relied very heavily on Russian sources that were digitized by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. For whatever reason, Rosatom has been dedicating an impressive amount of resources to Soviet nuclear history, radically transforming what is easily available to scholars outside of Russia. The extraordinarily useful series of (curated, redacted) archival documents, Atomniy Projekt SSSR (Atomic Project of the Soviet Union), for example, went nearly overnight from being something only existed in full in a handful of libraries in the United States (I was proud to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics has a complete set), to being easily accessible through the Rosatom Digital Library.
But I’m not here to talk about the stuff that’s useful to scholars. I’m here to talk about their section on “Atomic Fun” from the Soviet atomic bomb project. This is a collection of, as they put it, “funny stories.”
I couldn’t help myself. Yes, this is a parody — yes, it is a joke that cuts both ways.
It’s an odd concept. It’s hard to imagine the Department of Energy creating an “Atomic Fun” exhibit. It’s not that there wouldn’t be things to say — the history of the US nuclear program involves some amusing stories. Think about Feynman’s Los Alamos antics, sneaking through fences and (ho ho!) cracking safes with classified documents in them. Think about Niels Bohr sending a letter to British scientists after the Nazis occupied Denmark, telling them he was okay, and asking them to forward the message to MAUD RAY KENT. The British thought it was an anagram for RAYDUM TAKEN — radium taken! The Nazis are definitely building a bomb! They named their own secret bomb effort the MAUD Committee after this sage warning! But (ho ho!) it turned out that Bohr was just trying to send a hopeful message to the former governess of his children, Maud Ray, who lived in the county of Kent. Whoops!
The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut by a) the horrific accounts of what happened to the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs, b) other disturbing legacies of people who are rightly classified as victims of the US nuclear complex (downwinders, exposed plant employees, the Marshallese, etc.), and c) a reminder that we are having some laughs in the service of the building of weapons of mass destruction and there’s something inherently problematic about that.
We can make some jokes about the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing, but they have to be a little askew from actual history and reality. Source: XKCD, obviously.
But maybe Russia is different. Maybe they’ve just got a deeper sense of pathos, and a sense of shared victimhood. The Soviet atomic bombs were built under Stalin. Lavrenty Beria, one of the most fearsome figures in Soviet history, ran the program. Forced GULAG labor was used for the project, under horrendous conditions. The whole thing is just so dark that maybe, perhaps, you can get away with a little humor — maybe it’s a necessary thing. Maybe it’s a Freudian release of tension: you have to sometimes laugh, as a country and a culture, so you don’t just cry.
Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. I don’t know.
Either way, I find it fascinating.
Let’s start with my favorite story from the website, “And they didn’t get shot,” which happens to be the very first one I read when I first found the site some time back. Note that this is my own interpretive translation from the Russian.
They didn’t get shot
The head of the nuclear project, Lavrenty Beria, arrived in the Urals, at a new facility under construction. It was a cold autumn; there was nothing at the new site but mud, and driving there required going off-road. There was no housing, other than barracks. Prisoners were still hard at work laying the foundations.
The engineers waited, fearful of the famously harsh NKVD chief. Beria, in his trademark black leather coat, emerged from the car and grabbed his lower back in pain, having been bounced around by the rough ground. The engineers went cold as the thought raced through their minds: “He’ll send us to the Gulag!
The distinguished guest was assigned to the best barrack for his overnight stay. As soon as Beria lay down, the bed he was on collapsed underneath him! The engineers were petrified: “Someone’s getting shot!”
In the morning, it was discovered that a prisoner had stolen Beria’s black leather coat. The engineers were horrified: “He’ll shoot everyone!”
But in the end, Beria did not shoot anyone. After returning to Moscow, he issued orders to provide the workers of the facility with better food and sent them new furniture. The end.
Humor is sometimes described as subverted expectations, so I guess it works out: we all thought were going to be imprisoned or executed by one of the most terrifying men in the Soviet Union — who imprisoned millions and had thousands shot in the head (and we won’t even bring up the rapes) — but instead, we weren’t! Hilarious!
Most of the stories are not quite this on-the-nose about the circumstances of the Soviet nuclear complex; they fall into the genre of “scientists are clever, except when they’re not, and both of those can be humorous,” which really is the Feynman-style approach, even if the Russian sense of humor is a little different. But there are also lots of ones that, in their own way, take the terror-absurdist situation of working for Stalin and try to turn it into something amusing. An example:
Dead flies
Every evening, the young nuclear engineers at Arzamas-16 (KB-11) who worked with radioactive substances had to hand over their laboratory to the commandant of the military guard. But one night, the commandant was unusually late, leaving them waiting for hours. To amuse themselves, the engineers caught and killed flies, and piled up them by the window.
– “What’s this?” the commandant asked sternly, after he finally arrived.
– “Flies,” the engineers replied.
– “They’re dead..!?” the commandant asked.
— “Yes, they died… from radiation…” the engineers ad-libbed.
The commandant immediately vanished. He would never come to the laboratory personally again, instead sending assistants.
The premise of the humor is the same as those in Feynman’s tales about Los Alamos, which I find interesting: dumb military flacks versus clever and bored scientists. But it’s got a much more sinister undertone when you transpose it to the land of Mayak and Chernobyl.
Here’s another one, which is a twist on classic “misunderstanding” jokes:
Deadlines for everyone
A group of engineers arrived at the construction of a secret facility. At the gate they were greeted by a stern major who had a placard behind him which read:
Keep in mind these important lines
Working hard shortens your time
“What happened?” the worried engineers asked. “Did the government cut the deadlines for the project?”
“The poster is not for you,” the major consoled them, “but for the prisoners working here.”
Ah, the engineers misunderstood a message that was meant for the prison labor force, not them! A classic Soviet-era mistake!
I am torn between finding these sorts of things to be exceedingly bizarre and frankly offensive, versus being impressed that the Russian nuclear agency is willing to be so… transparent (?) about the insane situation of the Soviet nuclear program.
Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists” genre, which I find a lot less interesting. There’s one about Yuri Trutnev visiting Los Alamos in the 1990s and having a picnic with American scientists. Suddenly, a snake emerges from under a stone, and everyone backs away except for Trutnev, who steps forward and spits on its head, and is then celebrated as the “hero of the day.” Ho, hum.
And there are a couple “scientist says something somewhat amusing” stories, such as one who, after a briefing on some kind of “smart,” self-aiming delivery system, remarks, “If the bomb becomes too smart, maybe it won’t want to fall out of the plane!” OK. I guess.
But let’s leave with one that manages to be one of these “revealing” jokes, but isn’t quite as dismal as the others:
Information collection
Uranium mining in the USSR was highly classified. Even high-ranking officials from the Soviet nuclear ministry did not know the details of it. Once, one of these leaders received an American delegation.
– “Where do you mine your uranium?” one of the guests asked.
– “Everywhere! We have a large country!” the Soviet leader replied.
The Americans approached a large map of the USSR: “According to our satellite intelligence, you do it here, here, and here.”
– “Well, your intelligence is confused,” the leader explained, and eventually saw the delegation off. But after they had left, he rubbed his hands together gleefully: “Finally, I, too, know where the uranium is mined!”
Who says you can’t have a little clean, atomic humor at the expense of Soviet secrecy?
Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Bad ideas, Lavrenty Beria, Richard Feynman, Rosatom, Soviet Union
Posted in Visions | This post has footnotes | 7 Comments »
