Visions

Death dust, 1941

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 7th, 2014

One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the Manhattan Project is that prior to Hiroshima, all knowledge of atomic energy and nuclear fission was secret — that the very idea of nuclear weapons was unthought except inside classified circles. This is a side-effect of the narratives we tell about Manhattan Project secrecy, which emphasize how extreme and successful these restrictions on information were. The reality is, as always, more complicated, and more interesting. Fission had been discovered in 1939, chain reactions were talked about publicly a few months later, and by the early 1940s the subject of atomic power and atomic bombs had become a staple of science journalists and science fiction authors.

Campbell's magazine, Cartmill's story. Image source.

Leaks or speculation? Campbell’s magazine, Cartmill’s story. Image source.

John W. Campbell, Jr., was a prolific editor and publisher of science fiction throughout the mid-20th century. In the annals of nuclear weapons history, he is best known for publishing Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline” in March 1944, which talks about forming an atomic bomb from U-235. This got Cartmill and Campbell visitors from the FBI, trying to figure out whether they had access to classified information. They found nothing compromising (and, indeed, if you read Cartmill’s story, you can see that while it gets — as did many — that you can make atomic bombs from separated U-235, it doesn’t really have much truth in the specifics), but told Campbell to stop talking about atomic bombs.

But Campbell’s flirtation with the subject goes a bit deeper than that. Gene Dannen, who runs the wonderful Leo Szilard Online website, recently sent me a rare article from his personal collection. In July 1941, Campbell authored an article in PIC magazine with the provocative title, “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon?” It’s a story about radiological warfare in what appears to be rather middle-brow publication about entertainment. Click here to download the PDF. I don’t know anything about PIC, and haven’t been able to find much on it, but from the cover one wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be a source for people looking for hard-hitting science reporting — though the juxtaposition of DEATH DUST, “world’s strangest child,” and the “DAY DREAM” woman is a wonderfully American tableau.


PIC magazine 1941 - Campbell - Death Dust - cover

The story itself starts off with what has even by then become a clichéd way of talking about atomic energy (“A lump of U-235 the size of an ordinary pack of cigarettes would supply power enough to run the greatest bomb in the world three continuous years of unceasing flight“), other than the fact that it is one of the many publications that points out that after an exciting few years of talk about fission, by 1941 the scientists of the United States had clamped themselves up on the topic. The article itself admits none of this is really a secret, though — that all nations were interested in atomic energy to some degree. It vacillates between talking about using U-235 as a power source and using it to convert innocuous chemicals into radioactive ones.

Which is itself interesting — it doesn’t seem to be talking about fission products here, but “synthetic radium powders.” It’s a dirty bomb, but probably not that potent of one. Still, pretty exciting copy for 1941. (Campbell would much later write a book about the history of atomic energy, The Atomic Story, where he also spent a lot of time talking about “death dust.”)

The article contains a really wonderful, lurid illustration of what a city that had been sprayed with “horrible ‘death dust'” would look like:

"Even rats wouldn't survive the blue, luminescent radioactive dust. Vultures would be poisoned by their own appetites."

“Even rats wouldn’t survive the blue, luminescent radioactive dust. Vultures would be poisoned by their own appetites.”

The most interesting parts of the article are when it veers into speculation about what the United States might be doing:

With all the world seeking frantically for the secret of that irresistible weapon, what are America’s chances in the race?

It is a question of men and brains and equipment. Thanks to Hitler’s belief that those who don’t agree with him must be wrong, America now has nearly all the first-rank theoretical physicists of the world. Mussolini’s helped us somewhat, too, by exiling his best scientists. Niels Bohr, father of modern atomic theory, is at Princeton, along with Albert Einstein and others of Europe’s greatest.

The National Defense Research Committee is actively and vigorously supporting the research in atomic physics that seeks the final secrets of atomic power. Actively, because the world situation means that they must, yet reluctantly because they know better than anyone else can the full and frightful consequences of success. Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Committee, has said: “I hope they never succeed in tapping atomic power. It will be a hell of a thing for civilization.”

Bohr was in fact still in occupied Denmark in July 1941 — he had his famous meeting with Heisenberg in September 1941 and wouldn’t be spirited out of the country until 1943. The photographs identify Harold Urey and Ernest Lawrence as American scientists who were trying to harness the power of atomic energy. Since Urey and Lawrence were, in fact, trying to do that, and since Vannevar Bush was, in fact, ostensibly in charge of the Uranium Committee work at this point, this superficially looks rather suggestive.

PIC magazine 1941 - death dust - scientists

But I think it’s just a good guess. Urey had worked on isotope separation years before fission was discovered (he got his Nobel Prize in 1934 for learning how to separate deuterium from regular hydrogen), so if you know that isotope separation is an issue, he’s your man. Lawrence was by that point known worldwide for his “atom smashing” particle accelerators, and had snagged the 1939 Nobel Prize for the work done at his Radiation Laboratory. If you were going to pick two scientists to be involved with nuclear weapons, those are the two you’d pick. As for Bush — he coordinated all of the nation’s scientific defense programs. So of course, if the US was working on atomic energy as part of their defense research, Bush would have to be in charge of it.

The other illustrations seem to be just generically chosen. They are particle accelerators of various sorts; one cyclotron and many electrostatic (e.g. Van De Graff) accelerators. Cyclotrons did have relevance to isotope separation — they were used to develop the Calutrons used at Y-12 — but the captions don’t indicate that this is why these machines are featured.

I’ve never seen any evidence that Campbell’s story in PIC came to any kind of official attention. Why not? In the summer of 1941, there was a lot of talk about U-235 and atomic energy — and Campbell’s article really isn’t the most provocative of the bunch. There wasn’t any official press secrecy of any form on the topic yet. “Voluntary censorship” of atomic energy issues, which is what would get Cartmill and Campbell in trouble later, didn’t start up until early 1943. Mid-1941 was still a time when a journalist could speculate wildly on these topics and not get visits from the FBI.

The irony is, there were official fears of a German dirty bomb, but they didn’t really crop up until 1942. But the American bomb effort was starting to get rolling in the late summer of 1941. By the end of 1941, Bush would be a convert to the idea of making the bomb and would start trying to accelerate the program greatly. It wasn’t the Manhattan Project, yet, but it was on its way. Campbell’s article was, in this sense, a bit ahead of its time.

A Campbell publication from 1947 — where he apparently has a better understanding of atomic power. Here he seems to have just scaled down a Hanford-style "pile" and added a turbine to it. It took a little more effort than that in reality...

A Campbell publication from 1947 — where he apparently has a better understanding of atomic power. Here he seems to have just scaled down a Hanford-style “pile” and added a turbine to it. It took a little more effort than that in reality…

What I find most interesting about Campbell’s article is that it reveals what the informed, amateur view of atomic energy was like in this early period. Some aspects of it are completely dead-on — that U-235 is the important isotope, that isotope separation is going to matter, that places with particle accelerators are going to play a role, that the acquisition of uranium ore was about to get important, that fears of German use of atomic energy existed. But parts of it are completely wrong — not only would dirty bombs not play a role, he doesn’t seem to understand that fission products, not irradiated substances, would play the strongest role. He doesn’t really seem to understand how nuclear power would be harnessed in a reactor. He doesn’t really seem to get fission bombs at all.

This mixture of accuracy and confusion, of guess and folly, tells us a lot about the state of public knowledge at the time. Atomic energy was a topic, it was an idea — but it wasn’t yet something tangible, a reality. So when people found out, in 1945, that the United States had made and detonated atomic fission bombs, they were primed to understand this as the beginning of a “new era,” as the realization of something they had been talking about for a long time — even if the details had been secret.

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Meditations

Castle Bravo at 60

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 28th, 2014

Tomorrow, March 1, 2014, is the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo nuclear test. I’ve written about it several times before, but I figured a discussion of why Bravo matters was always welcome. Bravo was the first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb by the United States, proving that you could not only make nuclear weapons that had explosive yields a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but that you could make them in small-enough packages that they could fit onto airplanes. It is was what truly inaugurated the megaton age (more so than the first H-bomb test, Ivy Mike, which was explosively large but still in a bulky, experimental form). As a technical demonstration it would be historically important even if nothing else had happened.

One of the early Bravo fallout contours. Source.

One of the early Castle Bravo fallout contours showing accumulated doses. Source.

But nobody says something like that unless other things — terrible things — did happen. Two things went wrong. The first is that the bomb was even more explosive than the scientists thought it was going to be. Instead of 6 megatons of yield, it produced 15 megatons of yield, an error of 250%, which matters when you are talking about millions of tons of TNT. The technical error, in retrospect, reveals how grasping their knowledge still was: the bomb contained two isotopes of lithium in the fusion component of the design, and the designers assumed only one of them would be reactive, but they were wrong. The second problem is that the wind changed. Instead of carrying the copious radioactive fallout that such a weapon would produce over the open ocean, where it would be relatively harmless, it instead carried it over inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands. This necessitated evacuation, long-term health monitoring, and produced terrible long-term health outcomes for many of the people on those islands.

If it had just been natives who were exposed, the Atomic Energy Commission might have been able to keep things hushed up for awhile — but it wasn’t. A Japanese fishing boat, ironically named the Fortunate Dragon, drifted into the fallout plume as well and returned home sick and with a cargo of radioactive tuna. One of the fishermen later died (whether that was because of the fallout exposure or because of the treatment regime is apparently still a controversial point). It became a major site of diplomatic incident between Japan, who resented once again having the distinction of having been irradiated by the United States, and this meant that Bravo became extremely public. Suddenly the United States was, for the first time, admitting it had the capability to make multi-megaton weapons. Suddenly it was having to release information about long-distance, long-term contamination. Suddenly fallout was in the public mind — and its popular culture manifestations (Godzilla, On the Beach) soon followed.

Map showing points (X) where contaminated fish were caught or where the sea was found to be unusually radioactive, following the Castle Bravo nuclear test.

Map showing points (X) where contaminated fish were caught or where the sea was found to be unusually radioactive, following the Castle Bravo nuclear test. This sort of thing gets public attention.

But it’s not just the public who started thinking about fallout differently. The Atomic Energy Commission wasn’t new to the idea of fallout — they had measured the plume from the Trinity test in 1945, and knew that ground bursts produced radioactive debris.

So you’d think that they’d have made lots of fallout studies prior to Castle. I had thought about producing some kind of map with all of the various fallout plumes through the 1950s superimposed on it, but it became harder than I thought — there are just a lot fewer fallout plumes prior to Bravo than you might expect. Why? Because prior to Bravo, they generally did not map downwind fallout plumes for shots in Marshall Islands — they only mapped upwind plumes. So you get results like this for Ivy Mike, a very “dirty” 10.4 megaton explosion that did produce copious fallout, but you’d never know it from this map:

Fallout from the 1952 "Ivy Mike" shot of the first hydrogen bomb. Note that this is actually the "back" of the fallout plume (the wind was blowing it north over open sea), and they didn't have any kind of radiological monitoring set up to see how far it went. As a result, this makes it look far more local than it was in reality. This is from a report I had originally found in the Marshall Islands database.

To make it even more clear what you’re looking at here: the wind in this shot was blowing north — so most of the fallout went north. But they only mapped the fallout that went south, a tiny amount of the total fallout. So it looks much, much more contained than it was in reality. You want to shake these guys, retrospectively.

It’s not that they didn’t know that fallout went further downwind. They had mapped the Trinity test’s long-range fallout in some detail, and starting with Operation Buster (1951) they had started mapping downwind plumes for lots of tests that took place at the Nevada Test Site. But for ocean shots, they didn’t their logistics together, because, you know, the ocean is big. Such is one of the terrible ironies of Bravo: we know its downwind fallout plume well because it went over (inhabited) land, and otherwise they probably wouldn’t have bothered measuring it.

The publicity given to Bravo meant that its fallout plume got wide, wide dissemination — unlike the Trinity test’s plume, unlike the other ones they were creating. In fact, as I mentioned before, there were a few “competing” drawings of the fallout cloud circulating internally, because fallout extrapolation is non-trivially difficult:

BRAVO fallout contours produced by the AFSWP, NRDL, and RAND Corp. Source.

But once these sorts of things were part of the public discourse, it was easy to start imposing them onto other contexts beyond islands in the Pacific Ocean. They were superimposed on the Eastern Seaboard, of course. They became a stock trope for talking about what nuclear war was going to do to the country if it happened. The term “fallout,” which was not used even by the government scientists as a noun until around 1948,1 suddenly took off in popular usage:

Google Ngram chart of the usage of the word "fallout" in English language books and periodicals. Source.

Google Ngram chart of the usage of the word “fallout” in English language books and periodicals. Source.

The significance of fallout is that it threatens and contaminates vast areas — far more vast than the areas immediately affected by the bombs themselves. It means that even a large-scale nuclear attack that tries to only threaten military sites is also going to do both short-term and long-term damage to civilian populations. (As if anyone really considered just attacking military sites, though; everything I have read suggests that this kind of counter-force strategy was never implemented by the US government even if it was talked about.)

It meant that there was little escaping the consequences of a large nuclear exchange. Sure, there are a few blank areas on maps like this one, but think of all the people, all the cities, all the industries that are within the blackened areas of the map:

Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimate of "accumulated 14-day fallout dose patterns from a hypothetical attack on the United States," 1986. I would note that these are very high exposures and I'm a little skeptical of them, but in any case, it represents the kind of messages that were being given on this issue. Source.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimate of “accumulated 14-day fallout dose patterns from a hypothetical attack on the United States,” 1986. I would note that these are very high exposures and I’m a little skeptical of them, but in any case, it represents the kind of messages that were being given on this issue. Source.

Bravo inaugurated a new awareness of nuclear danger, and arguably, a new era of actual danger itself, when the weapons got big, radiologically “dirty,” and contaminating. Today they are much smaller, though still dirty and contaminating.

I can’t help but feel, though, that while transporting the Bravo-like fallout patterns to other countries is a good way to get a sense of their size and importance, that it still misses something. I recently saw this video that Scott Carson posted to his Twitter account of a young Marshallese woman eloquently expressing her rage about the contamination of her homeland, at the fact that people were more concerned about the exposure of goats and pigs to nuclear effects than they were the islanders:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the reports of the long-term health effects on the Marshallese people. It is always presented as a cold, hard science — sometimes even as a “benefit” to the people exposed (hey, they got free health care for life). Here’s how the accident was initially discussed in a closed session of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, for example:

Chairman Cole: “I understand even after they [the natives of Rongelap] are taken back you plan to have medical people in attendance.”

Dr. Bugher: “I think we will have to have a continuing study program for an indefinite time.”

Rep. James Van Zandt: “The natives ought to benefit — they got a couple of good baths.”

Which is a pretty sick way to talk about an accident like this, even if all of the facts aren’t in yet. Even for a classified hearing.

What’s the legacy of Bravo, then? For most of us, it was a portent of dangers to come, a peak into the dark dealings that the arms race was developing. But for the people on those islands, it meant that “the Marshall Islands” would always be followed by “where the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons” and a terrible story about technical hubris, radioactive contamination, and long-term health problems. I imagine that people from these islands and people who grew up near Chernobyl probably have similar, terrible conversations.

A medical inspection of a Marshallese woman by an American doctor. "Project 4," the biomedical effects program of Operation Castle was initially to be concerned with "mainly neutron dosimetry with mice" but after the accident an additional group, Project 4.1, was added to study the long-term exposure effects in human beings — the Marshallese. Image source.

A medical inspection of a Marshallese woman by an American doctor. “Project 4,” the biomedical effects program of Operation Castle was initially planned to be concerned with “mainly neutron dosimetry with mice” but after the accident an additional group, Project 4.1, was added to study the long-term exposure effects in human beings — the Marshallese. Image source.

I get why the people who made and tested the bombs did what they did, what their priorities were, what they thought hung in the balance. But I also get why people would find their actions a terrible thing. I have seen people say, in a flip way, that there were “necessary sacrifices” for the security that the bomb is supposed to have brought the world. That may be so — though I think one should consult the “sacrifices” in question before passing that judgment. But however one thinks of it, one must acknowledge that the costs were high.

  1. William R. Kennedy, Jr., “Fallout Forecasting—1945 through 1962,” LA-10605-MS (March 1986), on 5. [↩]

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Redactions

Leo Szilard, war criminal?

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 14th, 2014

Could Leo Szilard have been tried as a war criminal? Now, before anyone starts to wonder if this is a misleading or inflammatory headline, let me say up front: this was a question that Szilard himself posed in a 1949 story published in the University of Chicago Law Review titled, “My Trial as a War Criminal.” It is a work of fiction, but Szilard was serious about the questions it raised about the morality of the atomic bomb.1

Szilard testifying before Congress in the postwar. From the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Szilard testifying before Congress in the postwar. From the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Leo Szilard is one of the most colorful characters in the story of how the atomic bomb got made. An eccentric Hungarian, one of the “Martians” who emigrated to the United States during World War II, Szilard aspired to always being one step of head of the times. You didn’t have to be much ahead to make a difference, he argued, just a little bit. One example of this he gave in a later interview regards his decision to flee Germany shortly after the Reichstag fire. On the day he left, it was an easy trip on an empty train. The next day, the Germans cracked down on those trying to flee. “This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”2 In 1939, Szilard was the one who famously got Albert Einstein to write to President Roosevelt, launching the first US government coordination and funding of fission research. During the Manhattan Project itself, Szilard worked at the University of Chicago, helping to develop the first nuclear reactor (CP-1) with Enrico Fermi. After this, though, his active role in the bomb project declined, because General Groves hated the man and worked to exclude him. He attempted in various ways to influence high-level policy regarding the bomb, but was always shut out.

But after the war, Szilard found his place — as a gadfly. He wasn’t a great bomb developer. He was, however, a great spokesman for the dangers of the atomic bomb. Irrepressible, clever, and impossible-to-look-away-from, Szilard could steal the stage, even if no American could pronounce his name. It is in this context that his article, “My Trial as a War Criminal,” was written. The notes on the University of Chicago Law Review version note that it was written in June 1948, but because of “political tensions” Szilard put it off. With the “relaxation” of tensions, Szilard deemed it possible to publish in the Autumn 1949 issue. One wonders exactly what Szilard had in mind; in any case, given that the US first detected the Soviet atomic bomb in September 1949, and from there launched into the acrimonious debate over the hydrogen bomb, it seems like Szilard’s sense of timing in this instance was either perfect or terrible.

Szilard - My Trial as a War Criminal

“My Trial as a War Criminal” starts right after World War III has been fought. The Soviet Union has won, after using a new form of biological warfare against the United States.

I was just about to lock the door of my hotel room and go to bed when there was a knock on the door and there stood a Russian officer and a young Russian civilian. I had expected something of this sort ever since the President signed the terms of unconditional surrender and the Russians landed a token occupation force in New York. The officer handed me something that looked like a warrant and said that I was under arrest as a war criminal on the basis of my activities during the Second World War in connection with the atomic bomb. There was a car waiting outside and they told me that they were going to take me to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Apparently, they were rounding up all the scientists who had ever worked in the field of atomic energy. 

In the story, Szilard was given a choice: he could stand trial for being a war criminal, or he could go to Russia and work with them over there. Szilard opted for the former, claiming he had no capability to learn Russian at that point in his life, and that he had no interest in making himself a servant of Soviet science. He is then interrogated at length about his political views and his work on atomic energy. The Soviets have read his articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (“Calling for a Crusade” and “Letter to Stalin“) but think they are naive. Szilard reports no real acrimony, however.

His trial for war crimes begins a month later in Lake Success, New York. He was, “apparently as a special favor,” one of the first to be tried. Two major charges were levied against him. The first was that he had tried to push the United States towards developing nuclear weapons in 1939 (the Einstein-Szilard letter). In the eyes of the prosecutor, this was when World War II was still “an imperialist war, since Germany had not attacked Russia until 1941.” The second charge was that he contributed “to the war crime of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

Szilard has several defensive arguments in his favor. First, he points out that he in fact presented a memorandum to (future) Secretary of State James Byrnes in May 1945 which argued that the atomic bomb should not be first used against Japan cities. This memo had been published in the Bulletin as well in December 1947. Second, he also noted that he circulated a petition in July 1945 that called for not using the bomb as a military weapon before giving the Japanese a chance to surrender first, and that he attempted to put it in front of President Truman himself.

Leo Szilard at the University of Chicago in 1954. Source.

Leo Szilard at the University of Chicago in 1954. Source.

Both of these defenses, however, were easily countered. In the case of the memo to Byrnes, an original copy could not be found, and the Bulletin copy had many deletions for security reasons, any one of which could have contradicted the published material. In the case of the petition to Truman, it was noted that it never made it to Truman, because Szilard submitted it by way of General Groves, who of course squashed it. The Russian prosecutor said that Szilard should have known that the architect of the Manhattan Project would never have transmitted such a thing up the chain of command. So neither were considered adequate at exculpating Szilard.

Szilard is then released on bail. The rest of the story concerns the trials of Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of State Byrnes, and President Truman. This part revolves around a legal discussion of what it means to be a “war crime.” In the story, the tribunal adopts the definition used at Nuremberg that a war crime was any “violations of the customs of war” and “planning a war in violation of international agreements.” The use of the atomic bombs was necessarily a violation of the customs of war, because it was not customary to drop atomic bombs on other nations during World War II. And the Russian prosecutor was able to gather ample evidence that various US officials had urged war with the Soviet Union under conditions not allowed by the United Nations charter, which only allows war in the face of armed attack. So when Byrnes wrote in a book that the United States should consider “measures of last resort” if the Soviets refuse to leave East Germany, this was taken as evidence of the latter charge. (Refusing the leave occupied territory is not an “armed attack,” and “measures of last resort” can only be understood as implying war.)

Stimson’s section gets the closest to the meat of the question — whether the atomic bombs were justified. Stimson’s defense is the same as his 1947 article from Harper’s — that the bombs were used to hasten the war and to save a net number of lives. The Russians point out, however, that even the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the atomic bombs were not necessary to end the war,3 and that Stimson had access to sufficient intelligence about Japanese communications to know that Japan was on its last legs.

Szilard receives notice — in his bathrobe — that he has won the "Atoms for Peace" award in 1960. Source.

Szilard receives notice that he has won the “Atoms for Peace” award in 1960. At the time, he was in a hospital, being treated (successful) for bladder cancer. Source.

In the end, Szilard notes that practically all of them were expected to be found guilty. But a deus ex machina saves the day — the Soviets’ viral biological agents somehow get out to their own populations, their vaccines fail, and the United States is desperately appealed to for assistance. Under new settlement terms, all war crime prosecutions were ended, and “all of us who had been on trial for our lives were greatly relieved.”

Such ends Szilard’s story. It’s a curious one, and doesn’t go where you might think based on the title alone. Szilard seems to be making a strong point about the way in which war crime tribunals always favor the winners, and that if you apply the Nuremberg standards to the United States’ conduct during World War II and the early postwar, it is clear that no one, even a dissident like Szilard, would be safe. It isn’t a hand-wringing, self-flagellating confession. There is none of the “physicists have known sin” moralizing of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It isn’t even a discussion of what happened regarding the atomic bombing, whether it was justified or not, whether it was terrible or not. It is a gentle story, albeit one that subtly introduces a revisionist argument about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one that continues to be debated to this day.

One can also read the piece as being instead a complaint about the definition of “war crimes” from Nuremberg — are they nothing more than using new weapons and talking about war? The actual Nuremberg principles, also include “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.” Now whether the atomic bombings fall under that is a tricky question — how does one define “justified by military necessity”? On this sort of unclear requirement, the whole edifice hinges.4

Szilard glasses 1960 LIFE

This whole story came to my attention because Bill Lanouette, author of the Szilard biography Genius in the Shadows, e-mailed me after seeing my post on Andrei Sakharov. He noted that according to Rhodes’ Dark Sun, Sakharov was very affected by Szilard’s story. Sakharov showed it to his colleague Victor Adamsky, who reported that:

A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then face the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can’t get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich and some of us live in peace.5

What’s interesting to me is that the Soviet weapon designers seem to have read Szilard’s story in a much more moralistic light than I did. For me, Szilard’s story is more about the difficulty of having anything like a consistent stand on what “war crimes” might be — that the actions of the United States could easily be seen from another nation’s perspective as highly damning, even if from a more sympathetic position they might be justifiable. Sakharov and Adamsky apparently understood the story to be about the indefensibility of working on weapons of mass destruction full-stop. It is a curious divergence. Assuming my reading is not naive, I might suggest that the Soviet scientists saw not so much what they wanted to see, but what confirmed their existing, latent fears — something in Szilard’s story resonated with something that they already had inside of them, waiting to be released.

  1. Leo Szilard, “My Trial as a War Criminal,” University of Chicago Law Review 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1949), 79-86. It was later reprinted in Szilard’s book of short stories, The Voice of Dolphins. [↩]
  2. Spencer Weart and Gertrude Weiss Szilard, eds., Leo Szilard: His version of the facts; Selected recollections and correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 14. [↩]
  3. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” [↩]
  4. Szilard’s story also notes that just because these principles were developed after the war ended did not prohibit them from being applied to activities during the war — otherwise all of the Germans would have gotten off the hook. [↩]
  5. Richard Rhodes, Dark sun: The making of the hydrogen bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1995), 582. [↩]

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Visions

Silent Nagasaki

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 7th, 2014

Teaching and other work has bogged me down, as it sometimes does, but I’m working on a pretty fun post for next week. In the meantime, here is something I put together yesterday. This is unedited (in the sense that I didn’t edit it), “raw” footage of the loading of the Fat Man bomb into the Bockscar plane on the island of Tinian, August 9th, 1945. It also features footage of the bombing of Nagasaki itself. I got this from Los Alamos historian Alan Carr a while back. I’ve added YouTube annotations to it as well, calling out various things that are not always known.

You have probably seen snippets of this in documentaries and history shows before. But I find the original footage much more haunting. It was filmed without sound, so any sound you hear added to this kind of footage is an artifact of later editing. The silent footage, however, makes it feel more “real,” more “authentic.” It removes the Hollywood aspect of it. In that way, I find this sort of thing causes people to take the events in the footage more seriously as an historical event, rather than one episode in “World War II, the Movie.”

I posted it on Reddit as well, and while there was some share of nonsense in the ~700 comments that it accrued, there was also a lot of expression of empathy and revelation, and a lot of good questions being asked (e.g. Did the people loading Fat Man into the plane know what they were loading? Probably more than the people who loaded Little Boy did, because they knew what had happened at Hiroshima). So I think some learning has happened, and I think the fact that this has gotten +100,000 views in just a day is some sign that there is quite an audience out there for this sort of stripped-down history.

There is also Hiroshima footage, but it isn’t quite as good, on the whole. It is largely concerned with the crew of the plane taking off and arriving. Which is interesting, in a sense, but visually doesn’t mean much unless you know who everybody is.

There is a lot of Trinity test footage as well which I will upload and annotate in the future as well.

Until next week!

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Visions

Sakharov’s turning point: The first Soviet H-bomb test

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 31st, 2014

The Soviets set off their first megaton-range hydrogen bomb in November 1955. It was the culmination of many years of effort, in trying to figure out how to use the power of nuclear fission to release the power of nuclear fusion in ways that could be scaled up arbitrarily.1 The Soviet bomb was designed to be a 3-megaton warhead, but they set it off at half strength to avoid too much difficulty and fallout contamination. Unlike the US, the Soviets tested their version version by dropping it out of a bomber — it was not a big, bulky, prototype like the Ivy Mike device. But it was not an uneventful test. The details are little talked about, but it serves as an impressive parable about what can go wrong when you are dealing with science on a big scale.

Andrei Sakharov, from nuclear weapons designer to aged dissident.

Andrei Sakharov, from young nuclear weapons designer to aged dissident. Source.

Andrei Sakharov has a stunning chapter on it in his memoirs. It makes for an impressive story in its own right, but Sakharov also identifies the experience as a transformative one in his own thinking about the responsibility of the scientist, as he made his way from nuclear weapons designer to political dissident.2

Sakaharov starts out by talking about going to Kazakhstan to see the test. He had by this time been assigned two armed KGB officers, known euphemistically as “secretaries,” whose jobs were to act as bodyguards and “to prevent undesirable contacts.” Sakharov claims not to be have been too bothered by them. They lived next door.

The test of the device, code-named RDS-37, was to be the 24th Soviet nuclear test, and was the largest ever tested at the Semipalatinsk test site. This created several logistical difficulties. In order to avoid local nuclear fallout, it was going to be an airburst. The size of the bomb, however, brought up the possibility that it might accidentally blow the bomber that delivered it out of the sky. To avoid this, the bomber was painted white (to reflect the thermal radiation), and a big parachute was applied to the bomb so that the bomber could get away fast enough. Sakharov was satisfied enough with the math on this that he asked if he could ride along on the bomber, but the request was denied.

Sakharov’s account lingers on the incongruity between testing nuclear weapons in beautiful, wild places. Siberia was “a new and spellbinding experience for me, a majestic, amazingly beautiful sight.” He continued: “The dark, turbulent waters of the Irtysh, dotted with a thousand whirlpools, bore the milky-blue ice floes northward, twisting them around and crashing them together. I could have watched for hours on end until my eyes ached and my head spun. Nature was displaying its might: compared to it, all man’s handiwork seems paltry imitation.”

The RDS-37 test device. Source.

The RDS-37 test device. Source.

A test trial-run on November 18th went smoothly, but the first test attempt, on November 20th, did not. As David Holloway recounts in Stalin and the Bomb, that same Siberian wintery majesty that dazzled Sakharov made for difficult testing conditions.3 The fully-loaded Tu-16 bomber had to abort when the test site was unexpectedly covered by clouds, making them unable to see the target aiming point and rendering the optical diagnostic systems inoperable. The plane was ordered to land, only now it had a fully-armed experiment H-bomb on board. There was concern that if it crashed, it could result in a nuclear yield… destroying the airfield and a nearby town. The airfield had meanwhile iced over. Igor Kurchatov, the lead Soviet nuclear weapons scientist, drove out to the airfield himself personally to see the airfield. Sakharov assured him that even if it crashed, the odds of a nuclear yield were low. An army unit at the airfield quickly worked to clear the runway, and so Kurchatov ordered the plane to land. It did so successfully. Kurchatov met the crew on the field, no doubt relieved. Sakharov recalls him saying, “One more test like [this one] and I’m retiring.” As for Sakharov, he called it “a very long day.”

Two days later, they gave it another go. This time the weather cooperated, as much as Siberian weather cooperates. The only strange thing was a temperature inversion, which is to say, at higher altitudes it was warmer than at lower altitudes, the opposite of the usual. The meteorologists gave the go-ahead for the testing.

Sakharov stayed at a laboratory building on the outskirts of a small town near the test site. An hour before the test, Sakharov saw the bomber rising above the town. It was “dazzling white,” and “with its sweptback wings and slender fuselage extending far forward, it looked like a sinister predator poised to strike.” He recalled that “for many peoples, the color white symbolizes death.” An hour later, a loud-speaker began the countdown.

The white bomber. Source.

The white bomber. Source.

Sakharov described the test in vivid detail:

This time, having studied the Americans’ Black Book4, I did not put on dark goggles: if you remove them after the explosion, your eyes take time to adjust to the glare; if you keep them on, you can’t see much through the dark lenses. Instead, I stood with my back to ground zero and turned around quickly when the building and horizon were illuminated by the flash. I saw a blinding, yellow-white sphere swiftly expand, turn orange in a fraction of a second, then turn bright red and touch the horizon, flattening out at its base. Soon everything was obscured by rising dust which formed an enormous, swirling grey-blue cloud, its surface streaked with fiery crimson flashes. Between the cloud and the swirling durst grew a mushroom stem, even thicker than the one that had formed during the first [1953] thermonuclear test. Shock waves crisscrossed the sky, emitting sporadic milky-white cones and adding to the mushroom image. I felt heat like that from an open furnace on my face — and this was in freezing weather, tens of miles from ground zero. The whole magical spectacle unfolded in complete silence. Several minutes passed, and then all of the sudden the shock wave was coming at us, approaching swiftly, flattening the feather-grass.

“Jump!” I shouted as I leaped from the platform. Everyone followed my example except for my bodyguard (the younger one was on duty that day); he evidently felt he would be abandoning his post if he jumped. The shock wave blasted our ears and battered our bodies, but all of us remained on our feet except for the bodyguard on the platform, who fell and suffered minor bruises. The wave continued on its way, and we heard the crash of broken glass. Zeldovich raced over to me, shouting: “It worked! It worked! Everything worked!” Then he threw his arms around me. […]

The test crowned years of effort. It opened the way for a whole range of devices with remarkable capabilities, although we still sometimes encountered unexpected difficulties in producing them.

But they soon learned that a bruised bodyguard was the least of the injuries sustained in the test. Scientists and soldiers had been stationed far closer to the blast than Sakharov was. The scientists were fine — they were lying flat on the ground and the blast wave caused them no injury. One of them lost his cool and ran away from the blast, but he was only knocked down by it. But a nearby trench held a platoon of soldiers, and the trench collapsed. One young soldier, in his first year of service, was killed.

RDS-37 detonation

RDS-37, detonating. This is considerably sped up; it shows about 50 seconds of footage compressed into only a few seconds. Video source here.

There was also a nearby settlement of civilians affected by the blast wave. In theory it was at a distance remote enough to avoid anything serious; this had been calculated. But the aforementioned inversion layer reflected the shock wave back down to Earth with unusual vehemence — underscoring how even a little misunderstanding of the physics can translate into real problems when you are talking about millions of tons of TNT (something learned by the US a year earlier, at the Castle Bravo test). The inhabitants of the town were in a primitive bomb shelter. After the flash, they exited to see the cloud. Inside the shelter, however, was left a two-year-old girl, playing with blocks. The shock wave, arriving well after the flash, collapsed the shelter, killing the child.

The ceiling of a woman’s ward of a hospital in another nearby village collapsed, seriously injuring many people. Glass windows broke at a meat-packing plant a hundred miles from the test site, sprinkling ground beef with splinters. Windows broke throughout the town where Sakharov was stationed.

RDS-37, seen from a local town. Also sped up. Same source as the previous.

“The consequences of an explosion are hard to predict,” Sakharov concluded.

Had we been more experienced, the temperature inversion would have caused us to delay the test. The velocity of the shock wave increases as the temperature does: if the air temperature rises with altitude, the shock wave bends back towards the ground and does not dissipate as fast under normal conditions. This was the reason the shock wave’s force exceeded our predictions. Casualties might have been avoided if the test had been conducted as scheduled on November 20, when there was no temperature inversion.

As with Castle Bravo, there was a grim, almost literary connection between technical success and human disaster. They had shown the way forward for deployable, multi-megaton hydrogen bombs, but with a real cost — and that cost only an insignificant hint of what would happen if the weapons were used in war. Sakharov concluded:

We were stirred up, but not just with the exhilaration that comes with a job well done. For my part, I experienced a range of contradictory sentiments, perhaps chief among them a fear that this newly released force could slip out of control and lead to unimaginable disasters. The accident reports, and especially the deaths of the little girl and the soldier, heightened my sense of foreboding. I did not hold myself personally responsible for their deaths, but I could not escape a feeling of complicity.

That night, the scientists, the politicians, and the military men dined well. Brandy was poured. Sakharov was asked to give the first toast. “May all of our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.”

Sculpture of Andrei Sakharov by Peter Shapiro, outside the Russia House Club & Restaurant on Connecticut Ave in Washington, DC. Image source.

Sculpture of Andrei Sakharov by Peter Shapiro, outside the Russia House Club & Restaurant on Connecticut Ave in Washington, DC. Image source.

The immediate response was silence. Such things were not to be said. One of the military higher-ups flashed a crooked grin, and stood to give his own toast. “Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.”

Sakharov blanched at the crudity (“half lewd, half blasphemous”), and its serious implications. “The point of his story,” he later wrote, “was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of the Party and military hierarchy would make the decisions. Of course, I knew this already — I wasn’t that naive. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being, like the reality of life and death. The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking.”

  1. The Soviets tested their first thermonuclear bomb in 1953, the RDS-6s, which used fusion reactions. But it was not a true, multi-megaton capable hydrogen bomb. The 1953 device was “just” a very, very big boosted bomb, where 40 kilotons of fissioning produced 80 kilotons of fusioning which in turn produced another 280 kilotons of fissioning, for 400 kilotons total. The design could not be scaled up arbitrarily, though, and it did not use radiation implosion (like the Teller-Ulam design, known in the USSR as the “Third Idea.” It was a big bomb, but the 1955 test was the design that became the basis for their future nuclear warheads. [↩]
  2. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Knopf, 1990), 188-196. [↩]
  3. David Holloway, Stalin and the bomb: The Soviet Union and atomic energy, 1939- 1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 314-316. [↩]
  4. From elsewhere in the Memoirs, it seems that Sakharov may be referring here to the 1950 edition of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Atomic Weapons. There was a hardcover edition that apparently had a black cover. Sakharov notes that the nick-name only “partly” came from the cover; he implies that the contents are “black” as well. However there is nothing about goggles or glare in the version of the text I have, so maybe it is something different. [↩]

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