Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

Meditations

The Hiroshima-Equivalent: A Modest Proposal

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 7th, 2013

Given that the media community seems to love comparing all manners of energy release to Hiroshima, no matter how inappropriate, I humbly propose a new scientific unit: the Hiroshima-equivalent, abbreviated as H-e.

The Hiroshima-equivalent has been pegged at exactly 15 kilotons of TNT,¹ which is itself defined as being equivalent to 62.76 terajoules, or 15 teracalories.

One of the many benefits of using the H-e is that one can apply it to any type of energy release, not simply things physically similar to atomic bombs. Indeed, one should not, in any way, worry about whether the phenomena one is applying it to is anything like the actual bombings of Hiroshima. The H-e is in no way logically connected to blast phenomena, heat phenomena, ionizing radiation, radioactive fallout, or deaths upwards of a hundred thousand people. It can be applied to situations involving energy releases that occur over vastly larger areas of time and space, and in situations where only handful of people are hurt or injured. What is important about using the H-e is that you use it in a way that grabs the attention of your readers who are, as you know, bored, inattentive, and continually distracted by a multitude of empty facts, bad television, and meaningless digital social interactions.

In order to facilitate easy adoption of the Hiroshima-equivalent scale, I’ve created a simple calculator below. Here you can plug in a number of different types of energy expressions and find out their Hiroshima-equivalents. Precise energy measurements, such as Joules or Kilowatt-hours or Kilocalories, have that boring, “professional” feel to them, and as such are much less interesting than their Hiroshima-equivalent values.

(The above calculator is embedded in a frame; if you cannot see it, click here to open it as a separate window.)

Because sometimes energy releases are too small to be considered in unit multiples of Hiroshima-equivalents, I have, naturally, also created metric prefixes of milli-Hiroshima-equivalents (.001 H-e), micro-Hiroshima-equivalents (.000001 H-e), and nano-Hiroshima equivalents (.000000001 H-e). I have not opted to use positive prefixes (e.g. kilo-Hiroshima-equivalents) because it is much more exciting to instead say “thousands times the size of the Hiroshima bomb,” obviously.

So using this new system and calculator, some fascinating facts emerge:

The bomb detonated over Hiroshima was exactly 1 Hiroshima-equivalent. As one would expect, but imagine the headlines if this had been around in August 1945: “FIRST ATOMIC BOMB IS DROPPED ON JAPAN; MISSILE IS EQUAL TO ENERGY OF HIROSHIMA BOMB; TRUMAN WARNS OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN.’“
The Sun deposits 61.34 billion Hiroshimas worth of energy onto the Earth every year — that’s 168 million Hiroshimas a day, 7 million Hiroshimas an hour, 117 thousand Hiroshimas a minute!
The USA uses about 24 thousand Hiroshima-equivalents worth of electricity per year!
The Haitian Earthquake of 2010 was equivalent to around 32 Hiroshimas! (Alas, not a new conclusion.) Note that this system doesn’t work for determining the yields of underground nuclear tests, because actual nuclear weapons have more complicated energy release mechanisms when underground. (Pesky details!)
Each year, McDonald’s sells around 26 Hiroshima-equivalents worth of Big Macs in the United States alone, 42 Hiroshima-equivalents worldwide (1 H-e = 21.4 million Big Macs)!
My electric bill for last month was for 4.42 micro-Hiroshima-equivalents! (Which is 126.2 nano-Hiroshima-equivalents less than this month last year!)

There are, alas, some cases in which the Hiroshima-equivalent may lose its reader stopping power. For such cases, you may use the alternative unit, the Tsar Bomba-equivalent (TB-e), which is conveniently defined as 33,300 Hiroshima-equivalents. It should be used sparingly and tastefully, along the lines of “The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami [released less energy] than that of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.”

In case it isn’t clear how to use this, here are some simple instructions: Whenever there is a natural disaster, explosion, or, really, anything relating to energy that just doesn’t have enough pathos, tragedy, or excitement for your average reader, call up a scientist at a university somewhere, ask them to calculate how much energy was released in the event in question. He or she will probably give you some nonsense about “Joules” or “Kilowatt hours” or “Calories.” Take those meaningless numbers, paste them into the right places on the calculator, and you’ll instantly know how many Hiroshima-equivalents you are talking about! You simply can’t go wrong.

There are lots of estimates for the size of the Hiroshima bomb. Online one can find numbers range from 12-20 kilotons of TNT. A study by Los Alamos found that the best estimate of the yield for Hiroshima was 15±3 kilotons. For the purposes of a standard unit, of course, one must simply pick a number, and 15 seems appropriate in this circumstance. I note that it is tempting to define it as the lower limit, 12 kilotons, because that would mean even more Hiroshima-equivalents for any given situation, but we must have some standards. [↩]

Tags: 2010s, Hiroshima, Musings
Posted in Meditations | This post has footnotes | 10 Comments »

Visions

Bombers Over Japan

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 31st, 2013

When I was in high school, I had my first real exposure to strategic bombing through a volume of the Time/Life World War II series titled simply, Bombers Over Japan. The book was written by a Life journalist, Keith Wheeler, and was one of a 39-volume set of books that covered the war. This particular volume was published in 1982, and is exactly the sort of thing that 15-year-old me would find enthralling: 200+ oversized pages of huge photographs and riveting stories about the development and use of B-29s in the Pacific theatre.

The book is exclusively about the non-atomic strategic bombings of Japan. Specifically, it charts the creation of the B-29 as a weapon, its forward bases, and the evolution of firebombing strategy to its terrible extreme by 1945. It has nothing at all about the atomic bombings in it; presumably those are in another volume. Somehow I think it both right and wrong to segregate the atomic bomb and the firebomb: right because the firebombing really should be understood on its own terms, wrong because one can in many ways see the atomic bombing as linked both in philosophy and practice to the firebombing raids.

I recently bought a good quality version of this volume on Abebooks for a song. It is even better than I remember it being — which is another way to say, my appreciation of its virtues has only improved over the years. It pulls no punches. It is matter-of-fact about what was done, what the people who did it were thinking, and what the human consequences were. What more can one ask of a book about firebombings?

B-29s rendezvous at Mount Fugi for a raid against Tokyo.

Ah, but it gives so much more than just that. It also contains wonderful gems of information about the Japanese side of the story — how they perceived the B-29s, how their air defense forces worked (and why they didn’t), and efforts made by their government to mitigate the effects of the ruinous bombing campaign.

So, for example, the image below is a full-scale model of a B-29 on display in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park, with a large, curious crowd. The B-29 it is based on had been brought down in December 1944 by the Japanese “Swallow” aircraft next to it. They didn’t recover too much of the B-29 (you can see its landing gear underneath it), but still managed to come up with a pretty good representation of the interior arrangement.

(Sorry for the bad scan — I couldn’t find an equivalent of it online of any resolution, and I had to paste this together from several smaller scans since the original page was so large, and on a fold.)

Also below, one story I hadn’t remembered, is an advertisement for the sounds of a B-29 raid. The recordings were apparently made under rather adverse conditions. The idea is that you’d buy the record (it played on the radio, as well), and then use it to acquaint yourselves with the sound of an approaching raid, so you’d know when to flee. A grim wartime commodity, indeed.

A translation from my friend Anthony:

B-29 Explosions Captured!

Prepare for the blind attack from enemy planes!
At long last, these deadly recordings capture sounds from right under the bomber.

Under the direction of the Defense Force Supreme Command Endorsed by the Ministry of War
Explosions in formation

Under the direction of the Military Fortifications Division Headquarters
Endorsed by the Defense Force Supreme Command and Military Headquarters
Hostile explosions

10 sun [approx. 11.9 in.] 2 record set
(Record no. 100931-32)

Nicchiku Records [A shortened form of ‘Nihon Chikuonki Kabushiki-gaisha’ = Nipponophone Company Ltd. This is the current Columbia Music Entertainment, Inc.]

I’d love to find a copy of the recording, but I haven’t been able to rustle one up. If you have a lead, let me know.

As you’d also expect, there are plenty of shots of B-29s and other planes over Japan itself. Some of them are really stunning and vivid. A few of my favorites are below; I’ve cropped them all a bit to fit on the blog page, but click them and you’ll get the full resolution. (Many of these scans of the same images come from the site fold3.com, which has a huge and wonderful collection of B-29 imagery that you can access for free.)

View from above: a B-29 bombing Osaka, June 1945

The captions are also pretty stunning for some of them; they really add a lot. Below is a famous image of the firebombing of Toyama, but here’s the caption to go with it:

“Toyama, fire-bombed once by 173 Superfortresses on the night of August 1, [1945,] was assessed as 99.5 percent destroyed. Fires in the city burned so brightly, even while the raid was in progress, that they set off cameras aboard the B-29s — flying more than 12,000 feet above — that ordinarily were triggered by flash units.”

Just stunning — also, remember this happened only five days before the bombing of Hiroshima.

As I look over all of this again, I find myself wondering: why did this attract young me so? What was it that drew me in, and still draws me in? Part of it is the moral component: the firebombings, for me, are a way around the standard moral calculus argument regarding the atomic bombs.The scale of devastation, when you consider the magnitude of the the firebombing campaign — 67 cities destroyed before Hiroshima and Nagasaki — so exceeds that of the atomic bombs that it, to me, almost renders moot the question of the atomic bombs’ morality.

But there’s something else to it. The photograph that really gripped me the most when I was young was this rather unimpressive one below:

“Incendiary bombs hang in the bomb bay of a B-29. Racked in clusters of six, the cylinders were set to detonate 100 feet above the target, each releasing dozens of canisters of napalm that burst into flame on contact.”

I was so taken with this that I actually made a photocopy of it, blown up to the size of a full sheet of letter paper, and hung it in my bedroom. (What, you didn’t do this, too? The most common term that people described me with in elementary and high school was “weird,” which is probably on the mark.)

What is it about the canisters full of bomblets that entranced me? It wasn’t a rah-rah, hooray-we-did-this sort of thing. It also wasn’t a sympathy with the Japanese victims, if I can admit it. It was more a fascination with the ingenuity that went into crafting such an infernal contraption. I admire the weapons, not as things to be lauded, but as visions into the darkness that human cleverness is capable of. So much thought went into producing these outcomes, these technological marvels, whose only purpose was destruction, with none of the “weapon that would end all wars” hope that surrounded the atomic bomb.

Incendiary bombs drop over Osaka, July 1945

And, in a way, these are even more impressive than the bomb, when viewed in this light. The bomb was about creating one huge piece of destruction. But the firebombs are more piecemeal — you take hundreds of planes, put hundreds of bombs on them, and each of those split into dozens of tinier bombs (bomblets), each around the size necessary to set a Japanese-style wooden home ablaze. It’s a form of mass destruction that is surprisingly intimate. Each bomblet is calculated to play a tiny role in the overall firestorm.

(At some point soon I will write something up on here that focuses on the technology of the incendiary bombs themselves, and how they were developed, for it is an interesting story.)

Somehow I find this sort of thing even more horrible than the atomic bomb. With nuclear weapons, it’s easy to lose sight of the small-scale effects of the explosions. You can see how the scientists went from “technically sweet” to “now we’re all sons-of-bitches.” But with the firebombs, that intimate level of destruction, those individual human effects, were the point from the beginning: you are essentially making a tally of how many houses you are going to destroy when you tally up all the bomblets on the plane.

B-29 bombing damage mosaic from Bombers Over Japan.

When I was young, I found this a shocking thing. There is, and was, a rich narrative about the motivation behind the atomic bomb’s development (Nazis!), its use (end the war!), and so on. But the firebombing narrative was to me at that age a new thing, and something far more grim. It’s a narrative about efficiency, about total destruction, and about a level of massacre (for what else can such a thing be called?) perpetuated by the United States that well exceeds anything we heard about the country in my public school curriculum. It is one of those stories that busts you out of the well-worn genres of World War II, and for that reason, it has a strong pedagogical value, as well as being a source of intense fascination.

Tags: 1940s, B-29, Books, Firebombing, Japan
Posted in Visions | 6 Comments »

Visions

Inside K-25

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 24th, 2013

The K-25 plant at Oak Ridge was the single most expensive part of the Manhattan Project. It was cost about a fourth more than the entire Hanford site. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the building that housed it was pretty big — supposedly the largest single factory in the world under one roof, at the time that it was built.

I had thought about creating some kind of little graphic comparison to show you how big it was — you know, putting it next to The Pentagon and other large buildings — and then I realized that I wouldn’t really be flexing my geek cred, or taking advantage of a web medium, if I didn’t make a little custom mashup instead. So, I present for you a quick little app that I’m calling, How Big Was K-25?, where you can drag the footprint of K-25 onto anywhere in the world to make a size comparison:

(If you only see a blank spot above, or if you want to view it larger than it is displayed in the blog post, then click here to open the page in its own window. Note that there is a “rotate” button in the upper-left corner, if you want to re-arrange K-25.)

And yet… despite its cost, despite its size, when one thinks of images of the Manhattan Project, even images of Oak Ridge, views of the inside K-25 aren’t what comes to mind. We’ve all seen the images of the Y-12 “racetrack,” and many of us have seen images of the face of the B-Reactor, but what does a gaseous diffusion plant look like?

A reader asked this question in a comment on last week’s post, and it got me scratching my head, and asking around on Twitter. I got enough interesting results that I felt it was worth a post in its own right, as opposed to just a long comment. I can think of two major reasons why this sort of thing isn’t as common in the photos of the bomb project, which I’ll include at the end.

These photos were mostly taken by Ed Westcott, the official Oak Ridge photographer during the war (and after), and are hosted by the Oak Ridge Public Library. (Special thanks to the American Museum of Science and Energy for pointing this resource out to me!)

Overall aerial view of K-25 area

Close aerial view of K-25 Building

First we fly into the plant, in some typical pictures of its U-shaped bulk, but I like the juxtoposition as we get closer and closer. You can see some trucks at the very bottom center of the lower image, to get a sense of scale. It’s big.

Cleanliness control gate

We think of the signs in such an installation to be all about security, but these ones are all about cleanliness. This appears to be some kind of basic air-lock. I find that somewhat charming, though one knows that grime is something you probably don’t want in a gaseous diffusion plant, where every atom counts!

Control panels in master control room

K-25 control room

Two control rooms. I find the one on the bottom to be a wonderfully haunting photograph. I love the difference between the size of the room and the tininess of that table. It must have been a tremendous pain to keep something as interconnected and complex as the K-25 plant humming around the clock.

K-25 typical withdrawal alley

Front elevation of gaseous diffusion cells in K-303-1

Air compressors and water pumps from K-1101 Building

Conditioning filter test

Stage floor in K-306-6 showing vacuum testing

Interior of gaseous diffusion cell structure

These ones all seem to show the insides of various stages of the cascade. As you can see from this plot plan, K-25 consisted of lots of individual “cells” that were linked together. Its vastness and bulk is mostly iteration of stages, like most (all?) uranium enrichment facilities — each stage doing a tiny part of the overall work.

Two workers standing by a gaseous diffusion cell

A solvent degreaser worker showing pipe assembly in K-1400

Typical filter in gaseous diffusion cell

Typical setting of process pump

These ones I like because they help give you some sense of the size and nature of the equipment involved. Gaseous diffusion plants look like various pipes and pumps and big vessels. In a way, they are somewhat generic looking, which may be why they aren’t usually used to illustrate uranium enrichment, as I’ll speculate on a little bit below.

Lastly, a few color images, probably taken at a later date, from the Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association:

Both of these I like not only because of the color — how much of those paint jobs are post-1945, I don’t know — but also because the presence of people helps you get a sense of the scale of those vessels. They seem larger than the ones in the other photographs, so they may be later additions. Thanks to Jeffrey Lewis for pointing this out to me.

So why are these images dreadfully underrepresented in our collective imagination regarding the Manhattan Project? I offer three possible reasons.

One is the familiar problem of classification: gaseous diffusion was highly classified after the war. Unlike the electromagnetic enrichment method, or the basics of reactor operation, it wasn’t declassified in the early 1950s. There are still lots of things that are tied up tight as far as classification is concerned, despite the fact that gaseous diffusion is a pretty old technology, and arguably not the technology of choice for a modern proliferator (too expensive, too difficult).

Another is that gaseous diffusion arguably wasn’t as significant to the war effort as electromagnetic enrichment (though it wasn’t exactly insignificant, either); it came online a lot later, and really wasn’t perfected until after the war ended. Also, in comparison to the electromagnetic method, it also lacked as enthusiastic a booster as Ernest O. Lawrence, who was nothing if not entrepreneurial in promoting technologies that he was involved with.

And lastly, a potential other reason though is that as a concept it’s a bit harder to grasp, a bit hard to explain, and a bit harder to display visually, than other methods of enrichment. Electromagnetic enrichment is pretty easy to understand, and easy to diagram. And once you’ve seen how it works, suddenly images of Calutrons make a lot of sense — ah, there’s that C-shape. Rope them around a magnet and you’re done. It corresponds with nice intuitive notions of classical mechanics, and can be the source of all sorts of plain-language analogies (throwing heavier or lighter baseballs, for example).

Gaseous diffusion involves shooting gas through specialized barriers, relying on slightly different transit times, and visually, looks like just so many big tubs connected to one another. Internally it looks a lot like a lot of other anonymous industrial plants; its size, and its radioactivity, are perhaps the only things that make it obvious that it isn’t some kind of anonymous solvent factory. The kinds of diagrams explaining its operation that circulated in the early days were not exactly stimulating to thought, either.

All of this discussion of K-25, of course, is thoroughly in the past tense. Most of K-25 has been torn down; demolished. The DOE has been fairly unenthusiastic about preserving any of the K-25 buildings, despite their historical relevance. I think this is really, truly too bad. Whatever one’s feelings about the Manhattan Project, destroying historical sites doesn’t really help anybody. This is one of the reasons I’m a supported of the Atomic Heritage Foundation‘s efforts to have a number of the few remaining Manhattan Project sites declared part of a new Manhattan Project National Park. Aside from the possibility of using them as the focal point for interesting interpretations of our atomic history, it’s also necessary if we’re going to expect any remnants of these buildings to still be around in generations to come, as the Manhattan Project slides out of living memory. We can argue about the meaning of these sites for years and years — but only if we still have them to argue about.

Tags: 1940s, Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge
Posted in Visions | 31 Comments »

Meditations

The price of the Manhattan Project

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 17th, 2013

There’s been a little radio silence over here last week; the truth is, I’ve been very absorbed in NUKEMAP-related work. It is going very well; I’ve found some things that I thought were going to be difficult to be not so difficult, after all, and I’ve found myself to be more mathematically capable than I usually would presume, once I really started drilling down in technical minutiae. The only down-side of the work is that it is mostly coding, mostly technical, not terribly conducive to having deep or original historical thoughts, and, of course, I’ve gotten completely obsessed with it. But I’m almost over the hump of the hard stuff.

Two weeks ago, I made a trip out to the West Coast to hang out with the various wonks that congregate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. This was at the behest of Stephen Schwartz, who teaches a class over there and had me come out to talk to them about nuclear secrecy, and to give a general colloquium talk.

Stephen became known to me early on in my interest in nuclear things for his work in editing the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institute, 1998). This is one of these all-time useful reference books; it is the only book I’ve read, for example, that has anything like a good description of the development of US nuclear secrecy policies. And the list of contributors is a who’s-who of late 1990s nuclear scholarship. The book includes really detailed discussions about how difficult it is to put a price tag on nuclear weapons spending in the United States, for reasons relating both to the obvious secrecy issue, but also the fact that these expenses have not really been disentangled from a lot of other spending.

I’ve had a copy of the book for over a decade now, and it has come in handy again and again. I’m not a numbers-guy (NUKEMAP work being the exception), but looking at these kind of aggregate figures helps me wrap my head around the “big picture” of something like, say, the Manhattan Project, in a way that is often lost by the standard historical approach of tight biographical narratives. Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?

Here is a breakdown of cost expenditures for the Manhattan Project sites, through the end of 1945:

Site/Project	1945 dollars	2012 dollars	%
OAK RIDGE (Total)	$1,188,352,000	$18,900,000,000	63%
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant	$512,166,000	$8,150,000,000	27%
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant	$477,631,000	$7,600,000,000	25%
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities	$155,951,000	$2,480,000,000	8%
—Clinton Laboratories	$26,932,000	$430,000,000	1%
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant	$15,672,000	$250,000,000	1%
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS	$390,124,000	$6,200,000,000	21%
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS	$103,369,000	$1,640,000,000	5%
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT	$74,055,000	$1,180,000,000	4%
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT	$69,681,000	$1,110,000,000	4%
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD	$37,255,000	$590,000,000	2%
HEAVY WATER PLANTS	$26,768,000	$430,000,000	1%
Grand Total	$1,889,604,000	$30,060,000,000

I’ve taken this chart from here. The “current dollars” are 2012 dollars, with a “production line” labor deflator used (out of all of the options here, it seemed like the most appropriate to the kind of work we’re talking about, most of which was construction).

To break the numbers down a bit more, K-25, Y-12, and S-50 were all uranium enrichment plants. Hanford was for plutonium production. “Special operating materials” refers to the raw materials necessary for the entire project, most of which was uranium, but also highly-refined graphite and fluorine, among other things. Los Alamos was of course the design laboratory. The heavy water plants were constructed in Trail, British Columbia, Morgantown, West Virginia, Montgomery, Alabama, and Dana, Indiana. Their product was not used on a large scale during the war; it was produced as a back-up in case graphite proved to be a bad moderator for the Hanford reactors.

I’m a visual guy, so I of course immediately start looking at these numbers like this:

Which puts things a little more into proportion. The main take-away of these numbers for me is to be pretty impressed by the fact that some 80% of the money was spent on the plants necessary producing fissile materials. Only 4% went towards Los Alamos. And yet, in terms of how we talk about nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project, we spend a huge amount of the time talking about the work at Los Alamos, often with only token gestures to the work at Hanford and Oak Ridge as the “next step” after the theory had been worked out.

We can also break those numbers down a little finer, by turning to another source, Appendix 2 of Richard Hewlett and Roland Anderson’s The New World. There, they have costs divided into “plant” and “operations” costs:

Site/Project	Plant	Operations	Plant %
OAK RIDGE (Total)	$882,678,000	$305,674,000	74%
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant	$458,316,000	$53,850,000	89%
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant	$300,625,000	$177,006,000	63%
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities	$101,193,000	$54,758,000	65%
—Clinton Laboratories	$11,939,000	$14,993,000	44%
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant	$10,605,000	$5,067,000	68%
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS	$339,678,000	$50,446,000	87%
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS	$20,810,000	$82,559,000	20%
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT	$37,176,000	$36,879,000	50%
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT	$63,323,000	$6,358,000	91%
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD	$22,567,000	$14,688,000	61%
HEAVY WATER PLANTS	$15,801,000	$10,967,000	59%
Grand Total	$1,382,033,000	$507,571,000	73%

They do not define how they differentiated between “plant” and “operations” expenses, but the most plausible guess is that the former are various start-up costs (e.g. construction) and one-off costs (e.g. big purchases of materials) and the latter are day-to-day costs (general labor force, electricity, etc.).

Looking at that percentage can tell you a bit about how much of the Manhattan Project was the building of a weapons production system as opposed to building three individual weapons. Nearly three-fourths of the expense was for building a system so large that Niels Bohr famously called it country-sized factory.¹

The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant: the single largest and most expensive Manhattan Project site.

Another way to look at this is to say that we usually talk about the atomic bomb as project focused on scientific research. But one could arguably say that it was more a project of industrial production instead. This is actually quite in line with how General Groves, and even J. Robert Oppenheimer, saw the problem of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer, in testimony before Congress in 1945, went so far as to phrase it this way:

I think it is important to emphasize [the role of industry in the Manhattan Project], because I deplore the tendency of myself and my colleagues to pretend that with our own hands we actually did this job. We had something to do with it. If it had not been for scientists, there would have been no atomic bomb; but if there had been only scientists, there also would be no atomic bomb.

This is actually a very important point, and one which shines light onto a lot of other questions regarding nuclear weapons. For example, one of the questions that people ask me again and again is how close the Germans were to getting an atomic bomb. The answer is, more or less, not very close at all. Why not? Because even if their scientific understanding was not too far away — which it was not, even though they were wrong about several things and behind on several others — they never came close to the stage that would be necessary to turn it into an industrial production program, as opposed to just a laboratory understanding. That sheer fact is much more important than whether Heisenberg fully understood the nature of chain reactions or anything like that.

Why do we think of the bomb as a scientific problem as opposed to an industrial one? There are perhaps a few answers to this. One is that from the beginning, the bomb came to symbolize the ultimate fruits of scientific modernity: it was seen as the worst culmination of all of those centuries of rational thought. What grim irony, and what a standard story, that knowledge could lead to such ruin? Another reason is that scientific adventure stories are more interesting than industrial adventure stories. It is much more fun to talk about characters like Szilard, Oppenheimer, and Feynman running around trying to solve difficult logic problems in a desperate race against time, than it is to talk about the difficulties inherent to the construction of very large buildings.

Finally, though, there is the issue of secrecy. The scientific facts of the atomic bomb, especially the physics, were the most easily declassifiable. As discussed in a previous post (with many nods towards the work of Rebecca Press Schwartz), one of the main reasons the Smyth Report was so physics-heavy is because the physics was not terribly secret. Nuclear chain reactions, the idea of critical mass, the basic ideas behind uranium enrichment and reactors: all of these things were knowable and even known by physicists all over the world well prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The really hard stuff — the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering “know-how,” the specific constructions of the massive fissile-material production plants — was silently omitted from official accounts.

Looking at the costs of the bomb help rectify this perception a bit. It still doesn’t get us outside of the heroic narratives, for they are very appealing, but it can help us appreciate the magnitude of what is left out of the standard story.

Bohr reportedly told Teller upon seeing Los Alamos and hearing about the entire project: “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.” [↩]

Tags: 1945, Budget, Hanford, Historiography, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, Los Alamos, Manhattan Project, NUKEMAP, Oak Ridge
Posted in Meditations | This post has footnotes | 23 Comments »

Redactions

The Hiroshima leaflet

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 2nd, 2013

Last week I went over, in painful detail, the question of whether leaflets had been dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki warning them about bombing, atomic or otherwise. Some of the information was in Japanese, which is not one of my languages (and not even one of my Google Translate languages). A few readers responded with some helpful translations that I thought I’d share in a brief update.

First, there is this one, which clearly shows the classic picture of the “bent” Hiroshima mushroom cloud. The text below says:

This photo shows the destructive power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. This photo was taken from B-29 in the air after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. The atomic bomb’s horrendous destructive power can be understood by viewing this photo. As you see, this atomic bomb blast extended to a radius of 8 km, and the height of the bomb cloud reached about 14,000 m into the sky. The Japanese government said that Hiroshima was completely destroyed by the atomic bomb.

Masako Toki, who I had the honor of meeting last week when I gave at talk in Monterey, notes also that:

Please note that these numbers may not be accurate, especially, the radius. In this document, it is using a Japanese old measure which we are not using now “ri”. In this document it said 2-ri, and if we convert it to meter, it should be approximately 8000 meter. (1-ri is about 4000 meter. But usually, when you describe the Hiroshima bomb effect, usually, is is said that the atomic bomb destroyed almost every building in 2 km radius. But I guess this point is not so crucial here.

Masako also gave me a good idea for a particularly chilling feature to add to NUKEMAP in the near future — a listing of how many hospitals, schools, and other grim facilities your “detonation” has destroyed, as a way of emphasizing the humanitarian impact of the bomb. Watch for it in the forthcoming update in the next few months…

Masako also noted that on the leaflet above, none of the atomic targets (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, Niigata) are featured. That doesn’t mean they didn’t receive leaflets, but it’s an interesting bit. I wonder if there is any hard evidence that these cities received LeMay leaflets? Given that LeMay had agreed to take them off of their target list, one wonders if that inadvertently meant they got less warning than any other major cities. But I really don’t know. The only source I’d really trust on this would be some sort of document from the time which listed the various propaganda drop runs, and I have not sought such a thing out, if it exists.

Tags: 1940s, Firebombing, Hiroshima, Japan, Manhattan Project
Posted in Redactions | 1 Comment »

Restricted Data

The Hiroshima-Equivalent: A Modest Proposal

Bombers Over Japan

Inside K-25

The price of the Manhattan Project

The Hiroshima leaflet

Search

Pages

Projects

Recent posts

Post categories ►

Post tags ►

E-mail subscription

Recent posts from DOOMSDAY MACHINES