Meditations | Redactions

Death of a patent clerk

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 15th, 2013

This post is a bit longer than most, but the story is a bit more involved than most. It’s got a little bit of everything — if by “everything” one means atomic patents and mysterious deaths.

Four of my favorite atomic patents — the nuclear reactor, the Calutron, the triggered spark gap, and the barometric fuse

Manhattan Project inventions: Patents 2,708,656, 2,709,222, 3,956,658, and 3,358,605.

During the Manhattan Project, one of the odder activities that was undertaken — approved directly by Roosevelt and Churchill — was to try and file secret patent applications for every single invention that was developed while trying to build the atomic bomb. I have written about this at length in various places and won’t repeat all of that here. Basically, the people working on the bomb project weren’t sure of what would happen after the war, and so were trying to make sure they had iron-clad legal control over the bomb, and the secret patent applications were a way to guarantee government control of nuclear technology with regards to private contractors, private scientists, and universities.

The person who was in charge of all of this work was Captain Robert A. Lavender, USN (Ret.). Lavender was the chief patent officer of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which headed up the civilian functions of the bomb project. Lavender was basically a Navy lawyer who knew intellectual property law inside and out. His job, basically, was to make sure that all of those secret patent applications were properly filed. He knew his stuff and he got it done. By the time the Atomic Energy Commission took over the job, Lavender’s office had docketed reports on over 5,600 different inventions relating to the atomic bomb, with some 2,100 separate patent applications ready to be filed — in secret.

Now, one of the ironies of the Manhattan Project patent program is that it pretty much operated in an opposite way than the rest of the bomb work. The bomb program was defined by its secrecy. You didn’t use the names of real things, you used code-names (“oralloy,” “copper,” “the Gadget”). You didn’t centralize information, you compartmentalized it. You worried about what you needed now, not what you needed in the future. And the patent program was the opposite: you used the real names, with centralized information, because it was about protecting the bomb — legally — for the indefinite future. So from a certain standpoint, the Manhattan Project patent division housed more technical secrets in one place than any other part of the bomb program.

Invention by Oppenheimer, patent by Lavender.

Invention by Oppenheimer, patent by Lavender.

Lavender didn’t do this alone, of course. He had a staff, and each Project site had dozens of lawyers attending technical meetings, looking for inventions, forcing the poor, harried scientists to fill out invention reports. It’s a really amusing idea if you think about it, juxtaposing that familiar narrative of the racing Los Alamos scientists with the dull banality of the legal aspects of patent applications. The local patent officer at Los Alamos, for example, recommended that they allow a “competent disinterested individual” attend the “Trinity” test so they could write a report that would testify to the “reduction to practice” of the first atomic bomb. Talk about the least interesting reason to be at “Trinity” on July 16, 1945.

The second in command at Lavender’s office was Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh. Stoutenburgh was born in Norwalk, Ohio, on September 25, 1901. He received B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1923, was married in 1926, and received a law degree from George Washington University in 1928. Stoutenburgh was had worked as an attorney for the Justice Department, in the claims division, and had joined the Army only in July 1945. He was discharged from the Army in February 1946 as a Lieutenant Colonel, and he thereafter resigned from the Justice Department and returned to work for the Office for Scientific Research and Development as a civilian.

When I was researching the atomic patent program, I came across Stoutenburgh’s name occasionally, but it didn’t stand out. His memos to Lavender or others weren’t anything unusual or special — just a guy doing his job. Sometimes he wrote things in Lavender’s name, the way that subordinates often do. I wasn’t drawn to him in any particular way.

But as part of my research into Lavender, I started running his name through various newspaper archives, looking for obituaries, articles, later jobs, and so on. And when I did, suddenly Stoutenburgh showed up, in a horrific way:

1946 - Dead Atom Bomb Expert Carried From Home

On the morning of Saturday April 1, 1946, a friend of Stoutenburgh’s daughter, became alarmed when she did not show up for a roller skating date and no one would answer the phone at the Stoutenburgh residence. They contacted Mrs. Stoutenberg’s brother, and another friend, and together they went to Stoutenberg’s Northwest Washington, DC, home. Finding the Stoutenberg car in the garage, they assumed the worst, and contacted the Sixth Precinct police. Three officers arrived and broke into the house through a back window.

Inside was a scene of horror. Paul Stoutenburgh was wearing his pajamas and a smoking jacket, and was sprawled across his daughter’s bed on his back, with his feet on the floor. Near his hand was a .25-caliber pistol. In his right temple, a bullet wound. He was 44.

His wife, Anna, was face-down, near the door in the same room. She wore a black housecoat. She had a bullet wound in the back of her head, exiting through the skull. She was also 44.

His daughter, Mary Alice, was found unconscious, breathing heavily on the other side of the bed, in her pajamas. She had a bullet wound in her right temple. She was taken to Walter Reed Hospital, without much of hope of survival. She died a week later, without reviving. She was 12.


What happened? According to Stoutenburgh’s former Justice Department colleagues, he had visited them the week before and told them that he’d be returning to the claims division soon. According to Stoutenburgh’s neighbors, he had developed a “‘phobia’ over atomic bomb secrets, which he believed were leaking out despite his repeated recommendations to the War and Navy Departments,” as the Washington Post put it at the time. “Atomic sescrets worried him,” they wrote under his photo — mangling the epitaph.

The War Department, for their part, told the press that “Stoutenburgh had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb itself,” and left it at that. Well, yes and no, as we’ve seen. He didn’t build the bomb, but he did help patent it — every part of it.

1946 - Washington Post - Stoutenburgh detail

The newspaper stories implied that Stoutenburgh succumbed to paranoia: he imagined secrets were getting out, and couldn’t take it anymore. The coroner ruled it “homicide-suicide.” The phenomena of male familial murder-suicide is not a new one. These things happen with disturbing frequency. Apparently Stoutenburgh had tried to commit suicide a month previous, and failed.

He was a troubled man in a troubling time. The spring of 1946 was the period of the first real atomic spy scare — the Gouzenko affair. In terms of actual data given away, it was a minor thing; it involved a Canadian spy ring, and General Groves had compartmentalized the Canadians out of pretty much everything he cared about.1 It was nothing like a Klaus Fuchs situation.

But in the spring of 1946 it was a big deal, both because it was the first such spy scare, and because Groves leaked the news about the espionage to the press that February. Why? Because he wanted Congress to be scared of the Russians, so they would add scarier secrecy provisions to the draft version of the Atomic Energy Act they were considering. And it worked — the changes to the law made in the spring of 1946 are responsible for the problematic “Restricted Data” clause and all of its issues.

1946 - Stoutenburgh newspaper stories

Given the context, it’s not surprising that Stoutenburgh’s death briefly made the front pages of several national newspapers. Each played up the “secrets” angle, though the stories themselves make it clear that they are about a man driven mad by fear of secrets getting out, not actual cases of secrets getting out. Therein is the question: Did secrets kill the Stoutenburgh family, or did “secrets” kill them? Was it the thing itself, or just a fear about the thing itself? Or neither?


It doesn’t strike me implausible as that someone who was on the periphery of real policy, but with an acquaintance with secrets, might, in the spring of 1946, get concerned with the loss of secrets, especially if one implies some sort of latent mental illness. But I’m an historian, not a psychologist, so I am not really treading into those waters. Still, I’ve tried to follow this up a bit, and the trail wasn’t very rich for the most part. Stoutenburgh once had an FBI file, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

2007 - Stoutenburgh FBI FOIA response

Specifically, the FBI told me that:

Records which may be responsive to your Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request were destroyed on October 1, 2001. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it actually pertains to your subject.

Now this sounds Kafkaesque, if not a wee bit conspiratorial, but I’ve been assured this is pretty standard boilerplate for a pretty common issue. Somewhere in the FBI’s record database it basically says, “we had a file with this guy’s name on it, but we destroyed it.” Ergo, they don’t really know what was in it anymore. Not so helpful.2

The Washington, DC, Police Department destroyed the records awhile back because of age. The DC Coroner’s Office, likewise. The case had been closed, ruled murder-suicide, so there was no need to keep the files. Army Intelligence had nothing on Stoutenburgh, a FOIA to the National Archives turned up nothing.

But I did find a few little other tidbits in the archives. Because it wasn’t just present-day people who worried about conspiracies — there were Stoutenburgh conspiracy theories back in the day, they just didn’t end up in the newspapers.

The first little nibble comes from the papers of James Burnham. Burnham’s work is pretty well-known — in a nutshell, he was a former Marxist who became an anti-Communist neo-conservative political pundit during the Cold War. You know the type. He wrote a lot, and wrote for the National Review, among other publications. Apparently he also collected rumors about dead patent clerks.

Burnham - Stoutenburg case, 1951

On a memo from December 1951, now in his papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, Burnham wrote that he had been called by someone he listed only as “BL.” I’ve no clue who it is meant to correspond to, but presumably it is someone who worked with Burnham regularly.  Here’s what Burnham wrote:

L stated that a fantastic and sensational story had been brought to him. He felt it essential to try to check any point we could, in order to see whether it has a presumption of truth. Involved is a man named L.t Col. STOUTENBURGH. It is stated that on 31 March 1946 STOUTENBURGH was found shot dead by a bullet in his home in Washington, D.C. His wife and daughter were also shot, presumably also dead. Apparently they were murdered, although the facts were never established. STOUTENBURGH is said to have had a secret job in connection with the atomic bomb, perhaps in something involving British-Canadian-United States liaison.

Apparently a certain E.M. Lee, living in Silver Spring, Maryland, worked with Stoutenburgh at some point. Burnham was told by “BL” that he should call Lee and tell him he was a friend of Bill Offenhauser, of Telenews in New York, and get more information. A few weeks later, Burnham called Edward M. Lee, whose number he got from a telephone directory. He spoke to Lee, who confirmed he was a friend of Offenhauser. Burnham wrote of it:

I then brought up the STOUTENBURGH case. For a minute or two, LEE shied away from the matter, and said nothing to indicate that he knew what I was talking about. Then, he stated that he had not been personally acquainted with STOUTENBURGH but had had certain relations with him. He said that STOUTENBURGH was working in the Patent Office of the ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION (he then corrected himself and said that at that time it was called the Manhattan Project). He (LEE) had been transferred to the Navy, and had certain “business” with STOUTENBURGH, which was transacted by telephone. He said that half a dozen or more times he had telephoned STOUTENBURGH at the latter’s office. He stated that he knew nothing further about him, and nothing about the deaths except of what he had read in the papers. (It was my impression that LEE probably knows a good deal more about STOUTENBURGH that he indicated in his telephone conversation, and that he has thought a good deal about the case.)

Burnham’s other research involved pulling up the various newspaper articles about the Stoutenburgh case. But there the trail ends. It doesn’t add up to a whole lot — even the initial lead was just a suspicion, not anything hard.


The other piece was a memo I found in the archives of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In late August 1953, a certain Calvin Bertolotte of New York City got in touch with a Congressman, desiring to talk with someone about “a theory had had which might explain the operations of the Soviet espionage in connection with the atomic program.” He was put in touch with the staff of the Joint Committee, who liked to investigate this sort of thing. Bertolotte was “an employee of the Telefact Foundation engaged in research in information control and world strategy.” He told the Committee staff that he had been a friend or colleague of Sidney Young White, a physicist in New York City.

1953 - JCAE Stoutenberg detail

According to Bertolotte, White had related to him “on several occasions” the story of Stoutenburgh’s death. As the staff noted in their later write-up of their interview, “Bertolotte implied that both he and White imputed espionage significance to the story.”

Basically, Bertolotte and White’s objections to the official story were as follows, with my thoughts in parentheses:

  • Stoutenburgh actually did important secret work at the patent office and “had access to vital information.” (True)
  • White claimed to have determined that Stoutenburgh only had a .45-calibre weapon, not the .25-calibre one that he was reported to have used. (How would White have known what guns Stoutenburgh could have owned?)
  • White knew Stoutenburgh was a poor shot, so how had he hit his wife and child when at least the former was fleeing? (I don’t think you have to be that good a shot at that close a range.)
  • White “determined” (doesn’t say how) that Stoutenburgh had mentioned “either to his brother or his brother-in-law” that papers had gone missing from his desk for short periods of time, and would then be returned. (Vaguely sourced.)

Bertolotte thought the FBI ought to get involved, but didn’t want to betray White’s trust, so he gave it to the Joint Committee staff instead. (Um.) The Joint Committee staff asked whether they could relay the information to the FBI for him; Bertolotte asked to check with White first, then later got in touch and said he preferred they not give it to the FBI. The Committee staff member writing this up said that “unless advised to the contrary,” he was going to send all of this to the FBI anyway “despite Bertolotte’s objection.” I have no record as to whether he did this or not.


Where does that leave us? At a minimum, I think, we can agree with the general notion that secrecy engenders this kind of speculation. Monsters manifest within a vacuum of information, and at its peripheries. If this didn’t have any connection to “secrets,” would it stand out above the many other similar tragedies that happen each year? Obviously I wouldn’t be sending out Freedom of Information Act requests left and right if he didn’t have an atomic connection, either.

On the other hand, the fact that someone who had been so close to various secrets died under mysterious circumstances, and seems to have left no trace of any kind of official investigation, is suspicious. If you even sneezed near Los Alamos during World War II, the Manhattan Project security people would have opened a file on you. Why wasn’t there more poking around? (As for me, I poke around in these things compulsively — it’s sort of my job. I am always happy to check into unusual or unlikely stories, though I always try to do so with a skeptical mindset.)

Maybe there was, and it turned up nothing interesting, hence the destruction of the records. But I’ve got to say, the FBI sure kept around records of a lot of less-interesting cases than this one. And we do know that secrets were leaking out of the Manhattan Project during this time, after all. Stoutenburgh might not have known anything “solid” about that, but the fact that there was quite a lot of Soviet spying going on does perhaps raise our estimations of his suspicions.

Stoutenburgh signature from the Manhattan Project files

On the other hand, the idea that, say, the KGB would have killed Stoutenburgh and his family just seems unlikely. Really not their style. In general, killing someone and their whole family is not the quietest way to make accusations of spying go away. Of course, it might still be murder, but if it was, I wouldn’t really suspect the Soviets. If this were a James Ellroy novel, there’d be a murderer, but it wouldn’t really be about the atomic secrets — that would just be the hook that brings the ambitious young detective onto the case in the first place, an opening into a far seedier story. But this isn’t a James Ellroy novel. It’s real life, where banal answers are usually the correct ones.

My eventual conclusion, is that this just another sad story in a world of sad stories. It’s a story, at most, that is about the conspiracy fears that cluster around “secrets” — and the conspiracy fears that follow those conspiracy fears around, decades into the future. In this case, one almost hopes there was something more sinister to it, because it would keep it from seeming so pointlessly tragic. But pointlessly tragic is probably just what it was.

  1. Groves let a number of French and Canadian scientists work on a reactor and plutonium separation in Montreal, but it was a strictly one-way information flow. They did good work there, but they didn’t benefit from the support of the rest of the Allied effort. []
  2. Of course, the mere mention of the year 2001 is going to set off further conspiracy blinkers, but it’s hard to see any connection there. []
Meditations | Redactions

The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 8th, 2013

One of the great historical arguments of the late-20th century was whether the decision to use the atomic bomb was justified or not, and what the real goals of its use were. I’ve sometimes seen this dismissed by partisans (usually in favor of the use of the bomb) as being a recent sort of argument, only made by people who were well distanced from World War II, but this isn’t the case. People were arguing loudly about this almost immediately. The ambivalence about the use of the bomb was nearly immediate, and even the Japanese were aware of such discussions taking place in the United States a month later.

This was why, in 1947, Secretary of War Henry Stimson put his name on an article in Harpers that February 1947 titled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” — it was meant to be the “official” response to the on-going debates and speculation. General Groves, of course, had a heavy role in the composition of the article, not only because he was the guy who had all of the documents at hand, but because it was his legacy on the line, too. In fact, Groves seems to have been fairly responsible for pushing Stimson to publishing something on the subject, even offering up multiple pre-fab drafts drafts for Stimson in November 1946:1

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Personally, I don’t wade into these questions much, professionally, or even here on the blog. They honestly don’t interest me very much. Maybe it’s a sign of how post-post-Cold War I am? I don’t know. To me it has always seemed like splitting very fine hairs, trying to make distinctions without much difference. In my mind, the atomic bombings were plainly not ethically very different than the previous firebombings of Japan or Germany. To argue about whether they were justified or not seems to me to be the wrong question — a question that misleads us into mistaking what the core issue was.

For me, the better question is, under what circumstances do we believe the use of weapons of mass destruction on civilians is justified?  That gets one into much more interesting ethical territory, in my opinion, than asking why the bombs were used, a question that seems to presume that the motivations are somehow the most important thing to ask about. It also keeps us from having the same old discussion that people have been having for nearly 70 years. Maybe it’s my post-postness talking, here, but whether people in the past had better or worse intentions before setting a hundred thousand people on fire seems like the least interesting historical question to pose in the face of such actions.

1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right. Is there a significant moral difference?

Ruins of 1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right.

Nevertheless, I do pay some attention to these arguments, mostly because I get asked about this sort of thing from time to time (one of the hazards of being an historian of such matters) and it helps to have a snappy answer or two. So I was really interested to hear, at a workshop in DC a few weeks ago convened by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (more on the workshop and its purpose in a later post), the retired NRC historian J. Samuel Walker give a brief talk on the current state of the historiography over the “decision to use the bomb.” Walker wrote an article on this subject in 1990a book in 1997, and another historiographical review in 2005.

I hadn’t met Walker before this, but I’ve reviewed two of his books (one on Three Mile Island, another on US nuclear waste policy), and had appreciated and drawn upon his work as an historian. Walker is, as he put it, “a flaming moderate,” and it comes out in his work. Both of those books are great — for TMI, he has a nice balance of technical detail with political/bureaucratic considerations (and a great chapter on the long-term effects on the nuclear industry); for nuclear waste, he does a great job of being strictly factual while pointing out exactly where he saw the US government underestimating the problem and failing to appreciate how much they were losing public faith. As with all moderates, he runs the risk of disappointing partisans of all sides, but that’s the nature of it.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito. Each kind of tacky in their own way, each kind of brilliant in their own way.

Walker mapped out two major poles on the “decision to use the bomb” question. (I should say up front that this is my synthesis of Walker’s synthesis, re-written from memory. So it’s possible I may be inadvertently mangling this a bit, though I don’t think I am. There are other sub-arguments to this debate, of course, but to me this boils it down to the really crucial bits nicely.) The first is the “traditional” argument, which roughly follows the position put forward by Stimson in 1947. At its core, it argues, in brief:

  • that Truman made a decision to use the bomb on the basis of ending the war quickly;
  • the as far as the US was concerned, Japan would not surrender on acceptable terms without either the bomb or invasion;
  • and that of those two options, the bomb was the option that would cost the least number of American and Japanese lives;
  • and, as the Japanese Emperor acknowledged in his surrender statement, the bomb did in fact end the war promptly.

This is, of course, the argument that most people are familiar with. The other pole, according to Walker, is what is often called the “revisionist” take, a term acknowledged as potentially disparaging, and is expressed most forcefully in the work of Gar Alperovitz. At its core, it argues, in brief:

  • that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
  • that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
  • that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
  • and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

There are, of course, more details that people have hashed out over the years, including the infamous “how many casualties in an invasion” question. In the 1990s in particular, these were fiercely debated. It was, of course, the immediate post-Cold War, and everybody was still in a mood of assessment of trying to make out what the Cold War’s legacy actually was.

So where are we now, firmly in the 2010s? Walker reported that in his assessment, the scholarly debate had cooled down quite a bit, and that a new consensus was emerging, something that could be visualized firmly in between the two poles. There were problems, he argued, with both the “traditional” and the “revisionist” views. Specifically:

  • It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used. 
  • Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
  • American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
  • Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honor.

So what we’re left with is something that, in my view, looks a lot more plausible than either the “traditional” or “revisionist” options, both of which assume way more prescience than actual historical actors usually have. (Much less Truman, of all people. In my view, even wondering what Truman thought about this is the wrong question to ask — Truman was many things, but he was not a thoughtful guy. He makes Eisenhower look like a French philosopher by comparison.)

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year.

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year. Or something.

The are genres of historical explanation that people find compelling. This is something that goes a bit beyond the historical facts themselves: it is the superstructure in which we interpret the facts, or, to put it another way, it is how we think about everything that’s going on that doesn’t end up in the archival record.

What I find compelling about Walker’s “consensus” view is that it is much more of a muddle than either the “traditional” view or the “revisionist” view. The “traditional” view makes it look like Truman et al. were making carefully reasoned decisions based on an ethics of the bomb that had not developed, based on questions that were not yet being asked. I don’t really believe for a minute that Truman worried much about the first use of the atomic bomb. But the “revisionist” view makes him still look too clever by half — too scheming, too anticipatory, too prescient about both the Japanese war and the Cold War. That’s not the Truman I know. The “consensus” view is much more human looking: the people in it are half-way acting consciously, half-way caught up in things that had been going on for a long time and were by then out of their active control. Of course, in retrospect, everyone wants to re-write history to make them look better, especially when they’re being criticized for past actions. That’s part of being human, too.

Walker also posited that along with this emerging consensus, there was also a cooling in the tone of the debate. This was immediately proved to be somewhat premature, as Peter Kuznik, another attendee to the workshop (who I consider a friend), vigorously defended the “revisionist” point of view. Well, so it goes — there’s no better way to prove an argument among scholars than to propose that there really isn’t much of an argument anymore. Still, I found Walker’s synthesis a useful way of framing the field of historical argumentation, summing up a number of disparate positions (each with books and books of documents and footnotes debating each tiny point) in a fairly convenient format. And what can I say — I’m a sucker for moderate, synthetic arguments.

  1. Citation: Leslie R. Groves to Harvey H. Bundy, drafts of “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” (6 November 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 3, Target 5, Folder 20, “Miscellaneous.” []
Redactions | Visions

Hanford doggerel

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 1st, 2013

The Hanford site, in rural Washington state, was not a very fun place to work during World War II. The conditions were unpleasant, the site was remote, and, well, almost nobody really knew what they were doing there. The amount of compartmentalization was intense: out of the tens of thousands of workers, only a few hundred likely had any real inkling of what was really going on there. They were, of course, building the world’s first industrial-sized nuclear reactors, in order to produce the plutonium that fueled the first atomic bombs. Not exactly the first thing you’d guess you’d be doing if you were a construction worker in 1943, is it? Not knowing what you are building sort of takes some of the fun out of it, especially when you thought you were working on an important war-related project but instead you find yourself building giant concrete cathedrals with no obvious purpose. Concrete cathedrals full of toxic chemicals, at that.

Aerial view of B Reactor at the Hanford Site: isolated and mysterious. Photo: Hanford DDRS, #N1D0030582.

The secrecy at Hanford at Oak Ridge led to lots of speculation about what they were about from those who worked on them and those who lived near them. The Manhattan Project security people, of course, tracked these rumors, both because they occasionally resulted in problems (like inquiries from Congressmen, including a very dubious Senator Harry Truman) and could also potentially lead to attention from journalists, which could in turn lead to real leaks. In general the whole point of Manhattan Project security was to keep people from noticing there was an entirely new industry being created under their noses, and so curious rumors didn’t really help that.

In a sense, this was an inevitable result of the very secrecy they were trying to impose. “Absolute secrecy,” where the fact that there is a secret is itself a secret, leads to all sorts of rampant speculation. Into a total vacuum marches total speculation. My favorite wartime rumor about Oak Ridge is that it was a model socialist community following the beliefs of Eleanor Roosevelt. One can contrast this “absolute secrecy” approach to the “known secret” approach that followed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: finally, the security people could say, “it’s involved in the atomic bomb, and thus its a secret.” It’s a very different type of secrecy regime.

Squirreled away in the Manhattan Project security files is a really remarkable poem, penned by an unknown source. (I was reminded of it when posting about that “Secret song” earlier this week.) The poem is really quite amazing, in that it ties the bad working conditions at Hanford and the secrecy up into one neat package, and does so to verse as well! I reproduce the poem, “Restricted Information,” below in its entirety.1

“RESTRICTED INFORMATION”

It is a “Military Secret”
And I shouldn’t breath a word
But if you will promise not to tell
I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.

What is building here at Hanford
Is quite a mystery
But I’ve found out what it is
And will confide in thee.

It is a torture ground for Hitler
And all his Nazi bunch
And all the other Axis rats
After the final punch.

That he’ll have to live here
Should be bad enough itself
But nothing is quite appropriate
When it comes to his future health.

And so we are spending millions
And considerable effort too
To perfect conditions unbearable
For all the motley crew.

I’ve told you more than I should have
And the details — I wouldn’t dare
That is why it is such a secret —
It would give Hitler too great a scare.

The war might be prolonged
Hitler staving off defeat
With knowledge of his Hanford fate
He would be truly hard to beat.

So promise not to tell a soul
Unless they swear secrecy
For what I have just told
Might put off Victory.

So, in other words, Hanford was so secret, and so miserable, because someday Hitler and his Axis buddies would have to go live there. If they found out how miserable it was to work there, they’d all fight to the death. Pretty cute. You can view the original here.

You’ll note that they classified the entire thing “RESTRICTED,”2 which is somewhat ironic, given the content, no? But it makes sense, given the logic of “absolute secrecy” — when the secret is itself a secret, even things that lampoon the secret are thus secret as well. 

  1. Citation: “Restricted Information,” (n.d., ca. 1945), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 66, “Security (317-2).” []
  2. “RESTRICTED” was the lowest ranking of classification during World War II. It went from “SECRET” to “CONFIDENTIAL” to “RESTRICTED,” and during the war they added “TOP SECRET” as well. In the 1950s they got rid of “RESTRICTED” as a classification category because it was confusing to have both it and “restricted data” together in the same schema. []
Redactions

The “Secret” song

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 25th, 2013

I spent some of the last week in the National Security Archive, a private archive hosted by George Washington University, looking at the papers of Chuck Hansen (1947-2003). Hansen was one of the great nuclear researchers, meticulously compiling thousands upon thousands of nuclear documents by means of archival visits, Freedom of Information Act requests, and crawling of the public literature. His books, U.S. Nuclear Weapons (1988) and Swords of Armageddon (1995), were the final products of this trawling. They weren’t scintillating reads, but they’re chock full of interesting technical details derived from his voluminous archives.

Hansen papers, Box 18

How many boxes do you have lying around with “NUCLEAR WEAPONS SECRETS” written on the side of them? Answer truthfully.

I found a lot of useful files for a number of projects I’m working on (including the oft-mentioned book), but I also found a few highly amusing things as well. Chief among these is a song composed by someone at the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series, held at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. What’s really remarkable about it is that it appears to use the classified names of the actual nuclear devices, earning it a nice “SECRET” rating. How many “SECRET” songs do you know?1

It follows a little poem about setting up the tests which is not quite as good, except for the final stanzas:

As someone says, without aplomb
“We just can’t seem to find the bomb.”
So D (for day)
Looks pretty gray
For something’s surely gone agley
No bomb? Oh well
And what the hell?
We’ll try again some other day.

Below is a transcription; the original can be viewed here. The names of the devices have been blacked out in the original, but through referencing Hansen’s published work (he ferreted them out from here and there), his speculations in the margins (some of which must be right, some of which must be wrong), along with some of the internal indications (e.g. puns, character spaces), I think I’ve worked out what they are meant to be:

There were ten little gadgets, sitting in a line
[XR-3] was X-quisite and then there were nine.

There were nine little gadgets, the tower held the weight,
[ZOMBIE] had a kick to it, and then there were eight.

There were eight little gadgets (oh, NPG2 is heaven?)
They couldn’t hide the [HYDRIDE-1,] and then there were seven.

There were seven little gadgets, brought out for kicks,
[DIXY]3 was deuti-full4, and then there were six.

There were six little gadgets, pretty much alive,
[BUZZARD]5 said “let’s carrion”, and then there were five.

There were five little gadgets, they couldn’t find no more,
[HYDRIDE-2]6 kicked up its heels, and then there were four.

There were four little gadgets, observers came to see,
One was [SIMULTANEITY,] and then there were three.

There were three little gadgets, [HAMLET] got his due,
The time was not so out of joint, and then there were two.

There were two little Gadgets, [ENCORE]7 said this is fun,
The military got Effects, and then there was one.

There was one little gadget, that lonesome little Gun,8
They shot the hell right out of it
And
        then
                 there
                         was
                                NONE.

Someone else (not Hansen) has hand-written “Climax!” at the bottom of the page, here — indicating, perhaps, that the original poem was written before the final, late addition to the Upshot-Knothole schedule was added. The eleventh shot, approved at the very last minute as a special addition to the series was shot CLIMAX.9

Shot HARRY (HAMLET) of Operation Upshot-Knothole.

Shot HARRY (HAMLET) of Operation Upshot-Knothole.

The whole thing looks a little more ominous, though, when you know that Upshot-Knothole had some fairly negative public health effects. The ninth shot, HARRY (the “HAMLET” device, above) was extremely dirty — a lot of fallout resulted and contaminated nearby St. George, Utah. As Richard Hewlett and Jack Holl put it:

Postponed for three days because of unfavorable weather, Harry was fired under what seernecl to be perfect conditions. But a wind shift and a slight increase in wind velocity spread fallout in a pattern about fifty miles square over populated areas east of the proving ground. For the second time in a month roadblocks were set up on major highways to monitor motor vehicles. At 9:10 a.m., about four hours after the shot had been fired, readings as high us 0.32 roentgens per hour were being recorded at the roadblocks. At that time Edward S. Weiss, the Public Health Service officer stationed in St. George, called the sheriff’s oflice and radio station to warn people in the area to take cover. Local schools kept children indoors during the morning recess, and the washing of contaminated cars in St. George was suspended. By 9:40 a.m. most of the population in St. George was under cover, and the community came to a standstill. … From measurements at St. George the test group later estimated that the maximum amount of external exposure that could have been received at St. George was 6.0 roentgens and 5.0 roentgens at Cedar City.10

That’s probably not enough to kill you by itself, to be sure, but it’s still some thousands of times higher than the average background radiation, higher than the maximum “safe” dose that had previously been established for the entire test series, and just one of the many tests that rained fallout on the people in those towns. It may, even, have been responsible for killing John Wayne and much of the cast of The Conqueror, too. (I’m usually dubious about attributing individual deaths to such exposures — the probabilistic nature of such cancers makes it very hard to attribute them on an individual level, as opposed to an epidemiological level — though the rates for the cast, and the types of cancers involved, are particularly disturbing.)

The people running the test shot were hardly ignorant of such possibilities. Consider the first lines of the “poem” that preceded the “song”:

We’ll all be safe
As Rad can be
For milliroentgens frighten me

And if a meter
Starts its clickin’
We will run to beat the dickens

So it’s all fun and games… unless the winds shift.

  1. Citation: Poem and song about Operation Upshot-Knothole (ca. May 1953), copy in the Chuck Hansen papers, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Box 18, “1953,” folder 1. []
  2. NPG = Nevada Proving Ground = Nevada Test Site. []
  3. This might not be right. The spacing is four letters; nothing obviously fits. It can’t be “RUTH” because that’s one of the HYDRIDEs. “DIXIE” is the official name of the test, though one can imagine the scribe got the spelling wrong. The device name for DIXIE was apparently “DEUTERIUM,” which goes with the sentence. []
  4. Amusingly, this is the only part of the song that made it into Hansen’s published work. Footnote 534 of Volume II of Swords of Armageddon reads: “An untitled, undated classified poem issued sometime soon after the end of UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE states that the fourth shot ‘was deuti-full.’ The device may have used a solid or crystalline lithium deuteride boosting charge.” []
  5. Hansen thought this might be HYDRIDE-2, because it is the next in order. But “let’s carrion” must be a reference to BUZZARD, no? Plus it fits perfectly with the spacing. []
  6. Might also be “DEUTERIUM,” the device name for the DIXIE shot. []
  7. Well, this is and isn’t right. The space here is only four letters. But the ninth device was dubbed “EFFECTS” and was test “ENCORE” so it’s got to be something about that. Maybe it was spelled eccentrically, like NCOR? Or something like XR-3. []
  8. This is, of course, the famous GRABLE atomic cannon shot. Apparently the censor did not know that GUN was its device name, and it was not redacted. []
  9. The eleventh was needed because an earlier shot failed to reach its full yield. The device in question, COBRA, was the primary for at least one of the devices in the CASTLE series and its exact yield needed to be known ahead of time. Eisenhower was very irritated by the last-minute addition and approved it only because it meant they could cancel another test series, DOMINO, that had been planned for later in the year. []
  10. Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (University of California Press, 1989), 154. []
Meditations

On Meteors and Megatons

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 19th, 2013

So by now, everybody has read about the meteor which broke up over the Chelyabinsk Oblast late last week. The reportage on it was pretty interesting in the beginning — a lot of between-the-lines skepticism was being put out there by American news outlets. I was a little wary myself, too, as a lot of the initial reports from Russia were pretty sketchy, buffeted primarily by Russian dashboard cameras, which, in our Photoshop and AfterEffects age, are probably not at the top of our list of “reliable sources.” For people who care about Cold War science and technology, of course, there’s the additional fact that ChelyabinskOblast is a major site for secret Russian military-industrial developments. It’d be like reports of suspicious explosions around the Nevada Test Site, or Los Alamos, or Pantex. Chelyabinsk Oblast is the home of Chelyabinsk-70, the Soviet Livermore, and just north of it is the city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), the site of a 1979 anthrax leak that the Soviets tried to cover up by claiming it was something more “natural” in origins. Add in the legacy of the Soviet response to Chernobyl, the relative rarity of this sort of meteor strike — once a century is the frequency that’s been cited — and the extreme rarity of something like this happening over inhabited land — most of the planet is devoid of human occupation — and some skepticism in the absence of solid evidence was, I think, not unwarranted. Eyebrows raised, including mine, but apparently it all checks out.

Some of the Russian nuclear weapons facilities near the meteor path. Via Hans M. Kristensen, FAS: "The odds of a meteor hitting one of these nuclear weapons production or storage site are probably infinitely small, but on a cosmic scale it got pretty close."

Some of the Russian nuclear weapons facilities near the meteor path. Via Hans M. Kristensen, FAS: “The odds of a meteor hitting one of these nuclear weapons production or storage site are probably infinitely small, but on a cosmic scale it got pretty close.”

How powerful was the explosion? NASA currently is saying it is the equivalent of a 500 kiloton blast, which is a lot. 500 kilotons is (as you can see) half a megaton, is about the upper-limit of a pure-fission nuclear weapon, and is, as journalists love to breathlessly relate, some 20-30 times the power of the bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the only result was a lot of injuries caused by windows blowing inward — something that occurs with a shock wave of one pound per square inch or above — is attributed to the fact that the meteor exploded many miles above the ground, away from the city.

Personally, I cast a dubious eyeball towards the comparisons of natural phenomena with nuclear weapon energy releases. It’s an incredibly common trope, though. Wikipedia’s coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake is actually quite reflective of how this gets talked about, even if it is somewhat dorkier in its citation of units than the average journalistic account:

The energy released on the Earth’s surface only (ME, which is the seismic potential for damage) by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was estimated at 1.1×1017 joules, or 26 megatons of TNT. This energy is equivalent to over 1500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but less than that of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. However, the total work done MW (and thus energy) by this quake was 4.0×1022 joules (4.0×1029 ergs), the vast majority underground. This is over 360,000 times more than its ME, equivalent to 9,600 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima) or about 370 years of energy use in the United States at 2005 levels of 1.08×1020 J.

Lots of numbers thrown around, lots of energy involved, yes, but what does it mean? I have two major objections to this form of analysis, where nuclear weapons are used as some kind of barometer for general energy release.  The first is about the character of energy release is important — because it affects how these things are felt at the human scale. The second is about whether these sorts of comparisons are actually clarifying to the general public.

On the character of nuclear and non-nuclear blasts

The key thing about nuclear weapons is that they discharge most of their energy as heat and blast. Most of the energy release occurs over a very small amount of space and time. You can essentially regard the physics of a nuke as being a the creation of a tiny point in space that suddenly is heated to tens of millions of degrees, and this results in all of the effects that we are pretty well familiar with. The results are extremely localized: even the massive Tsar Bomba had a fireball only five miles in diameter, which is huge by human standards but minute by geological or geographical standards. The vast majority of the energy is discharged within a few milliseconds, as well. It’s a bang that matters on a human level because a huge amount of energy is released very quickly in an area of space that corresponds fairly well to the sizes of human habitation centers. The fact that a huge amount of that explosive energy (around 50%)  is translated specifically as a blast wave — the thing which destroys most of the houses and people and all that — is perhaps the most salient thing about nuclear explosions from a human standpoint.

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This is what a 500 kiloton nuclear blast looks like. This is not quite the same thing as what you saw on those dashboard cameras, is it?

One can see the point in distinguishing about the amount of energy over time and space by considering the Sun. The amount of energy from the Sun that reaches the Earth’s surface every moment is tremendous — equivalent to billions of tons of TNT — but it is spread out over a huge area, so instead of totally obliterating us when we go outside, it pleasantly warms us and maybe, at its worst, gives us a painful, peeling burn after several hours of intense exposure. So that is a lot of energy released over a short unit of time, but it is diffused over a very large area. The converse situation can also be considered: a given city absorbs an immense about of energy from the Sun over the course of a year, but because it is spread out in time, it isn’t anything like a nuclear explosive’s yield.

What about meteors? Yes, there’s a lot of kinetic energy in those rocks falling from the sky. But they don’t translate most of that energy into shock and heat. Even the famed 1908 Tunguska event reached temperatures “only” in the tens of thousands of degrees, as opposed to the tens of millions. You can regard the kinetic energy of such a thing as 20 megatons of yield, but the actual blast effects were more than five times less than that because the energy didn’t transfer very efficiently. (Still quite a blast, though!) The Chelyabinsk meteor was much smaller than that and it exploded in the atmosphere — a reaction more like a chemical explosive than a nuclear one. So in some sense, comparing a meteor explosion to a nuke is better than comparing an earthquake or a tsunami to a nuke, but it’s still not very exact.1

On the public understanding of nuclear explosions

My other issue, though, is about public understanding. The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded with an energy release of 500 kilotons. Is being told that going to mean anything to the average person, except to say, if it had hit the city, it would have been equivalent to a nuclear explosion? Does saying it is 20-30 times more powerful than Hiroshima mean anything to the average person, except the conjure up potentially incorrect misconceptions of what those effects would be for their cities? The truth is, as we’ve seen again and again, the average person has almost no intuitive point of reference for making sense of nuclear explosions. Heck, I barely have any point of reference and I’m constantly searching for them! The average person cannot distinguish between the results of a megaton-range explosion and a kiloton-range one unless you translate it into terms that are meaningful to them. That was the whole point of the NUKEMAP: to take these numbers and try to come up with geographical representations that make intuitive sense.

And so here’s the problem: since the physics aren’t the same, any intuitive generalization made from a nuclear analogy will be necessarily highly flawed. The effects of the Chelyabinsk meteor were not really equivalent to the 1952 Ivy King nuclear detonation, which was a nuclear explosion of 500 kilotons in yield. Even the Tunguska event was not really equivalent to a five megaton nuclear explosion in its phenomenological effects, even though it was a pretty big boom.

Still from a Sandia supercomputer simulation from 2007 of the 1908 Tunguska event, showing the blast wave formation as the meteor detonates above the ground. Intense! But not a nuke. Source.

Still from a Sandia supercomputer simulation from 2007 of the 1908 Tunguska event, showing the blast wave formation as the meteor detonates above the ground. Intense! But not a nuke. Source.

“Hey,” you object, “we’re just trying to communicate to people it was a big explosion!” Yeah, I know, but it’s misleading. If you want to communicate the size of things, don’t talk about the energy release in terms of nukes — the effects aren’t the same. If you want to convey the effects… talk about the effects. A better way to talk about the Chelyabinsk event is to not talk about the energy output but instead to talk about the radius and nature of effects — exactly how many square miles of the city had their windows blown out? Even just saying that thousands were injured by broken glass does a lot more work to convey what this was — and how scary it was — than anything else. If you want to say, “if it had directly hit the city before blowing up” — a big counter-factual but whatever — “so-many square miles would have been destroyed,” that too would make a lot more sense.

Using nukes as a genericized way to talk about energy output is highly misleading both from the point of view of the expert, but even more so from the point of view of the layman. I really don’t see the advantage to it either way. I fear in talking about asteroids as nuke equivalents people may be trying to emphasize their threat — which is totally legitimate — but at the same time may end up inadvertently down-playing nukes. After all, if a 500 kiloton airburst only knocked in a few windows, what’s all the fuss? Yes, we can explain why they are different — but we wouldn’t have to do that if we just described the effects better in the first place, rather than taking a lazy recourse in how-many-joules-equals-how-many-megatons equations. Rather than using nuclear terminology, and then down-scaling to explain how the effects are actually not quite the same… just tell us the actual effects and forget the nukes! If one must do things in response to nukes, do it the other way around: find out the actual effects of the meteor (or whatever), then tell us what yield nuke gives you those effects. It’s less sensational, sure, but it’ll help people understand both meteors and nukes better.

  1. For helping me think through the physical comparisons, and providing some interesting references, I was aided by e-mail conversations with my AIP colleagues Charles Day, Paul Guinnessy, and Ben Stein, as well as my old Harvard colleague Alex Boxer. Any interpretive errors are of course my own! []