Visions

The story behind the IAEA’s atomic logo

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 11th, 2013

Since my post last week was such a bummer, I thought I’d do something a little more fun and trivial today.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has, without much competition, the coolest logo of any part of the UN.1 Heck, I’ll go so far as to say that they have the coolest logo of any atomic-energy organization in history. I mean, check this thing out:

IAEA flag

It’s not only an atom, it’s an atom with style. It’s got a classic late-1950s/early-1960s asymmetrical, jaunty swagger. Those electrons are swinging, baby! This is an atom for love, not war, if you dig what I’m saying. An atom that knows how to have fun, even when it’s doing serious business, like investigating your nuclear program. The James Bond of atoms.

The staid seal of the US Atomic Energy Commission cannot really compete for hipness, though it gets major nostalgia points and I love it dearly. The emblem of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran is arguably the only real runner-up — check out that minimalism! Most worldwide atomic energy organizations/commissions have variously tacky rip-offs of the original AEC logo. The UK’s Atomic Energy Authority gets props for having the least cool emblem of any atomic energy agency, and also the least obviously atomic (the little sun at the top, and the Latin, somewhat give it away). On the other hand, it’s the only one that looks like it would be perfectly at home inside a Lewis Carroll book.

For awhile, I’ve been kind of obsessed with finding out who drew this thing. It looks remarkably similar to the aesthetic adopted by the Swiss designer Erik Nitsche, who did a lot of other groovy atomic posters for General Dynamics. This poster of Nitsche’s from 1955 has similarly jaunty orbitals, though I don’t think they’re meant to be electrons:

But upon further investigation, I’ve not found any evidence that Nitsche was involved, sadly. In fact, all signs point to an anonymous staffer in the US State Department, but the story is a bit more fun than just that.

The IAEA was founded  in 1957 as the UN organization that would try to enact the “Atoms for Peace” plans of the Eisenhower administration. It wasn’t yet the nuclear watchdog organization; that came later, with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its first head was W. Sterling Cole, a former US Congressman who had been a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. From pretty much the very beginning, the IAEA started using a little atomic logo on its letterhead:

IAEA letterhead, July 1957

The first instance of this I’ve found is the above, dated July 1957 (though the document was published in August), which is the same time as the IAEA came into being, more or less. By October 1957 they were using a white-on-black approach but it was basically the same thing. An internal IAEA history chalks its creation up to someone within the US State Department or the US Atomic Energy Commission — which is another way of saying, they have no real idea, except that it seems to have come from America. Fair enough, I suppose, though looking at what the Atomic Energy Commission’s own stab at an “Atoms for Peace” logo, I find it really unlikely that they had anything to do with it:

It’s a pretty different aesthetic: that staid AEC atom (perfectly symmetrical), plus a dog’s breakfast of other generic symbols (microscope! medicine! a gear! wheat!). It’s a lousy emblem — it’s messy, it’s generic, and it has finicky details that wouldn’t reproduce well at a small size, which means that it always looks too big.

Anyway, the first IAEA logo, as you can see, was a somewhat informal thing — it’s not as stylized, and its lines aren’t very confident, but the essence of the final emblem is there, hidden within it. It doesn’t have little dots for electrons, and the asymmetry looks only somewhat intentional. They used this up until 1958 without anybody raising any fuss, and without formally adopting it.

But at some point in 1958, someone with just enough education to be dangerous noticed that their little peaceful atom had three electrons. What element has three electrons, typically? Lithium. What’s lithium most associated with, in the area of atomic energy? Hydrogen bombs. Lithium deuteride is the main fusion fuel in hydrogen bombs. When the lithium nucleus absorbs a neutron, it turns into tritium and helium. Tritium and deuterium readily fuse. It’s a nice little reaction — if you’re a weapon designer. If you’re an “Atoms for Peace” agency, it’s a little more problematic. So someone — again, nobody seems to know who — flipped about this. An easy fix was proposed: add another electron! Then it’s no longer lithium… it’s beryllium. Let’s all collectively ignore the fact that beryllium is also used in nuclear weapons, and is also fiendishly toxic, to boot. If they’d just added one more orbital, it would have made boron, which is a neutron absorber that keeps you from getting irradiated — a little more on target, but nobody asked me.

You can see the extra orbital somewhat crudely added to the original emblem in this backdrop at the Second Annual General Conference of the IAEA, from 1958:

They’ve also added little dots for the electrons, too. The version above is somewhat wildly, problematically asymmetrical — the orbitals don’t intersect well in the upper-left corner at all.

Once they started messing with it, though, things got a little out of control. Why stop with just another electron? Now here’s the part where I can clearly see an American governmental influence… they started mucking it up. To quote from that IAEA internal history I referenced before:

Once the process of altering the emblem had started, further suggestions were made and soon a design evolved in which the central circle had been expanded into a global map of the world and five of the eight loops formed by the ellipses contained respectively: a dove of peace with an olive branch; a factory with smoking chimneys and surcharged with a train of three gear wheels; a microscope; two spears of grain; and finally a caduceus, to symbolise respectively the peaceful, industrial, research, agricultural and medicinal uses of atomic energy.2

If that isn’t the most god-awful design-by-committee creation, what is? Another fun fact: they made it gold.

I’d love to show you a version of that one, but I can’t find a copy of it. It sounds wonderfully awful. The helpful folks at the IAEA archive have been unable to track down a drawing of it — at least, within as much energy as they are willing to expend on such a folly, which is understandably limited. I’ve gone over every image I could find from the time period looking for a picture of it. No dice. But, just to have some fun, here is a “creative interpretation” of the above, which I have myself drawn up for you:

IAEA 1958 logo (artist's interpretation)

Ah, but they didn’t stop there. Cole, the IAEA Director General, apparently enjoyed this enough that he had the new emblem printed in gold on a blue flag, and put it up above the United Nations flag outside of the Third General Conference of the IAEA in 1959.

Apparently in UN-world, this was seen as a major scandal. A representative of the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, saw it, flipped out, and had it immediately removed. And it was never seen again. 

Shortly after this flap, it was decided that perhaps they ought to have a formal procedure before creating their emblem. They rolled back all of the modifications except the extra orbital, and cleaned up the layout a bit, and added a set of olive leaves to match the UN flag. On April 1, 1960, this finalized emblem was adopted by the IAEA Board of Governors, in a document that the IAEA archives folks were willing to dig up for me and post online:

INFCIRC/19 - The Agency's Emblem and Seal

As with all things, we’re left with the final product and generally no indication that there was a process to get to it. But, as with all things, there is a process: there is a history. Emblems don’t just pop out of nowhere fully formed, just as institutions, organizations, and policies always have to follow a messy path when coming into existence. The emblem, aside from being a piece of natty graphic design, is one of those typical organizational by-products. Somebody started drawing it, not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue drawing it forever just because… with a slight detour to make it especially ugly after having found a conceptual problem in their original, ad hoc, implementation.

Anyone who has dabbled in graphic design will also recognize this process. You start with half an idea, one imbued with a germ of goodness inside it, somewhere. You try to elaborate on the idea, inevitably making things worse temporarily  Finally, scaling things back, you return to the original, and find that beautiful thing that was hiding in it all along, just out of sight. The snazzy, modern emblem wasn’t achieved on the first go round — it had to pass through design hell before its potential for good could really emerge.

UPDATE (9/2014): The ugly logo has been located! Read all about it here.

  1. Technically the IAEA is autonomous from the UN though under its aegis. [↩]
  2. Paul C. Szasz, “The Law and Practices of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” [IAEA] Legal Series No. 7 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1970), 1001-1002. [↩]

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Meditations

Doomsday on the Cheap

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 4th, 2013

One of the really salient issues about nuclear weapons is that they are expensive. There’s just no way to really do them on the cheap: even in an extremely optimized nuclear weapons program, one that uses lots of dual-use technology bought off-the-shelf, to make a nuclear weapon you need some serious infrastructure.

A piece of gold the weight of Little Boy would have cost between $5 and $6 million in 1945. The fissile material for Little Boy cost well over $1 billion. So it would actually have been a pretty good bargain at the time if Little Boy had cost its weight in gold. Also, I knew that making a highly-realistic model of Little Boy in Blender would come in handy someday.

A piece of gold the weight of Little Boy would have cost between $5 and $6 million in 1945. The fissile material for Little Boy cost well over $1 billion. So it would actually have been a pretty good bargain at the time if Little Boy had cost its weight in gold. Also, I knew that making a highly-realistic model of Little Boy in Blender would come in handy someday.

That’s not to say that you need to redundantly overspend as much as the Manhattan Project did, or the US did during the Cold War, but even “cheap” nuclear weapons programs are pretty costly. There are a few multinational corporations that could probably pull it off if they were given carte blanche with the technology, but basically you’re talking about a weapon that is made for, and by, states. (I’m not, of course, ignoring the possibility of hijacking someone else’s infrastructural investments, which is another way to think about theft of fissile material.)

Solid gold B61s aside, this is a good thing. It actually makes nuclear weapons somewhat easy to regulate. I know, I know — the history of trying to control the bomb isn’t usually cited as one of the great successes of our time, but think about how much harder it would be if you couldn’t spot bomb factories? If every university physics department could build one? If they were really something you could do, from scratch, in an old airstream trailer?

Herman Kahn, 1968, by John Loengard, via Google's LIFE image archive

Herman Kahn, the great thinker of unthinkable thoughts, has a bit about the relationship between cost and doomsday in his 1965 book On Escalation, which a someone in the audience of a talk I gave last month helpfully sent along to me:1

Assume that it were possible to manufacture a “doomsday machine” from approximately $10 worth of available materials. While it might be “unthinkable” that the world would be destroyed by such a “doomsday machine,” it would also be almost inevitable. The only question would be: Is it a matter of minutes, hours, days, months, or years? About the only conceivable way of preventing such an outcome would be the imposition of a complete monopoly upon the relevant knowledge by some sort of disciplined absolutist power elite; and even then one doubts that the system would last.2

If the price of the “doomsday machine” went up to a few thousand, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars, this estimate would not really be changed. There are still enough determined men in the world willing to play games of power blackmail, and enough psychopaths with access to substantial resources, to make the situation hopeless.

If, however, the cost of “doomsday machines” were several millions or tens of millions of dollars, the situation would change greatly. The number of people or organizations having access to such sums of money is presently relatively limited. But the world’s prospects, while no longer measured by the hour hand of a clock, would still be very dark. The situation would improve by an order of magnitude if the cost went up by another factor of 10 to 100.

It has been estimated that “doomsday” devices could be built today for something between $10 billion and $100 billion. [Multiply that by 10 for roughly current price in USD]3 At this price, there is a rather strong belief among many, and perhaps a reasonably well-founded one, that the technological possibility of “doomsday machines” is not likely to affect international relations directly. The lack of access to such resources by any but the largest nations, and the spectacular character of the project, make it unlikely that a “doomsday machine” would be built in advance of a crisis; and fortunately, even with a practical tension-mobilization base, such a device could not be improvised during a crisis.

In other words, since Doomsday Machines are phenomenally expensive, and thus only open as options to states with serious cash to spend (and probably serious existing infrastructures), the odds of them being built, much less used, are pretty much nil. Hooray for us! (Nobody tell Edward.) But as you slide down the scale of cheapness, you slide into the area of likelihood — if not inevitability — given how many genuinely bad or disturbed people there are in the world.

Cost and control go hand-in-hand. Things that are cheap (both in terms of hard cash as well as opportunity cost, potential risk of getting caught, and so on) are more likely to happen, things that are expensive are not. The analogy to nuclear weapons in general is pretty obvious and no-doubt deliberate. Thank goodness H-bombs are expensive in every way. Too bad that guns are not, at least in my country.

But area where I start really thinking about this is biology. Check out this graph:

Cost of sequencing a human-sized genome, 2001-2012. From the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Cost of sequencing a human-sized genome, 2001-2012. From the National Human Genome Research Institute.

This graph is a log chart of the cost of sequencing an entire human genome, plotted over the last decade or so. Moore’s Law is plotted in white — and from 2001 through the end of 2007, the lines roughly match. But at the beginning of 2008, sequencing genomes got cheap. Really cheap. Over the course of four years, the cost dropped from around $10 million to about $10,000. That’s three orders of magnitude. That’s bananas. 

I was already reeling at this graph when I saw that Kathleen Vogel has a very similar chart for DNA synthesis in her just-published book, Phantom Menace or Looming Danger?: A New Framework for Assessing Bioweapons Threats (John Hopkins University Press, 2012). (I haven’t had a chance to read Kathleen’s book yet, but flipping through it, it is pretty fascinating — if you are interested in WMD-related issues, it is worth picking up.)

Everything regarding the reading and writing of DNA is getting phenomenally cheap, really quickly. There’s been a blink-and-you-missed-it biological revolution over the last five years. It’s been caused by a relatively small number of commercial players who have made DNA sequencing into an automated, computer-driven, cheap process.4 It will probably hit some kind of floor — real-world exponential processes eventually do — but still.

I don’t have anything much against DNA sequencing getting cheap. (There are, of course, implications for this, but none that threaten to destroy the world.) DNA synthesis makes me pause — it is not a huge step from DNA synthesis to virus synthesis, and from there to other bad ideas. But as Kathleen emphasizes in her book (and in talks I’ve seen her give), it’s not quite as easy as the newspapers make out. For now. We’re still probably a few decades away from your average med school student being able to cook up biological weapons, much less biological Doomsday Machines, in a standard university research laboratory. But we’re heading down that road with what seems to me to be alarming speed.

Don’t get me wrong — I think the promises of a cheap revolution in biology are pretty awesome, too. I’d like to see cancer kicked as much, and maybe even more, than the next guy. I’m not anti-biology, or anti-science, and I’m not in fan of letting a purely security-oriented mindset dominate how we make choices, as a society. I don’t necessarily think secrecy is the answer when it comes to trying to control biology — it didn’t really work with the bomb very well, in any case. But I do think the evangelists of the new biology should treat these sorts of concerns with more than a knee-jerk, “you can’t stop progress” response. I’m all in favor of big breakthroughs in medicine and biology, but I just hope we don’t get ourselves into a world of trouble by being dumb about prudent regulation.

What disturbs me the most about this stuff is that compared to the best promises and worst fears of the new biology, nuclear weapons look easy to control. The bomb was the easy case. Let’s hope that the next few decades don’t give us such a revolution in biology that we inadvertently allow for the creation of Doomsday Machines on the cheap.

  1. Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Transaction Publishers, 2010 [1965]), 227-228. [↩]
  2. Note the implicit connection here between knowledge and the importance of cheapness — when materials are cheap, knowledge becomes everything. Or, to put it another way, this is why computer viruses are everywhere and atomic bombs are not. [↩]
  3. Here he cites his own On Thermonuclear War, page 175, but in the copy I have, it is page 145, footnote 2: “While I would not care to guess the exact form that a reasonably efficient Doomsday Machine would take, I would be willing to conjecture that if the project were started today [1960] and sufficiently well supported one could have such a machine by 1970. I would also guess that the cost would be between 10 and 100 billion dollars.” $10 billion USD in 1960, depending on the conversion metric you use, is something in the neighborhood of 100 billion dollars today, with inflation. [↩]
  4. I thank my friend Hallam Stevens for cluing me in on this. His work is really must-read if you want to know about the computerized automation of sequencing work. [↩]

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Redactions

Nuclear history bibliography, 2012

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 28th, 2012

As 2012 draws to a close, I thought it might be useful to try and draw together a bibliography of nuclear history scholarship that was published over the course of the year.

Some TOP SECRET stamps from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy files. Just inserted here so there is something to look at other than text!

This list is unlikely to be complete — I’ve made something of a preliminary survey, but I don’t claim to have checked everywhere — and if there are things I’m missing, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. I’ll update this as new information comes in. One obvious thing missing are chapters in edited volumes; those are harder to find using traditional academic search engines.

As for the “rules for inclusion,” they are both boring and common-sensical. Must have a publication date of 2012. Must look like “scholarship” of some sort. Must be something that is primarily in the genre of the history of nuclear weapons or nuclear power. I’m just trying to make a useful list here (for myself as well as others) and some inclusions/exclusions are going to be necessarily arbitrary. I have not read all of these — not even most of these — I do not endorse any of them. This is just a list. The citations might not be complete; it is just a guide. I thought about including book reviews, which are often quite useful and insightful (and hey, I wrote a few), but decided it would make this list completely ungainly and my task disproportionately difficult. 

Looking this over, the obvious trend is that 2012 was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which meant a lot of monographs on the subject came out this year. Without further ado…

BOOKS

Barrett, David M. and Max Holland. Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012.

Blight, James G. The armageddon letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban missile crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

Brown, Andrew. Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Burke, David Allen. Atomic testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the quest for nuclear weapons treaty verification in the Cold War era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

Burtch, Andrew. Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’’s Cold War Civil Defence. University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

Coleman, David G. The fourteenth day: JFK and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.

Fraser, Gordon. The quantum exodus: Jewish fugitives, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Fuhrmann, Matthew. Atomic assistance: how “atoms for peace” programs cause nuclear insecurity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gavin, Francis J. Nuclear statecraft: history and strategy in America’s atomic age. Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gibson, David R. Talk at the brink: deliberation and decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hecht, Gabrielle. Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.1.

Heefner, Gretchen. The missile next door: the Minuteman in the American heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Hosaka, Masayasu. [Japan’s Atomic Bomb : Its Development and Procedural Setbacks] Nihon no genbaku: sono kaihatsu to zasetsu no dōtei / 日本の原爆: その開発と挫折の道程 . Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 2012.

Hymans, Jacques E. C. Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Iversen, Kristen. Full body burden: growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.2

Johnson, Robert R. Romancing the atom: nuclear infatuation from the radium girls to Fukushima. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2012.

Kaufman, Scott. Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Khalatnikov, Isaak M. From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute: Autobiography. Top Non-Secret. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012.

Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating grass: the making of the Pakistani bomb. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Larsen, Jeffrey Arthur. Rearming at the dawn of the Cold War: Louis Johnson, George Marshall, and Robert Lovett, 1949-1952. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press for the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012.

Matthews, Melvin E. Duck and cover: civil defense images in film and television from the Cold War to 9/11. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012.

Mikoyan, Sergo, and Svetalana Savranskaya, ed. The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the missiles of November. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Miyamoto, Yuki. Beyond the mushroom cloud: commemoration, religion, and responsibility after Hiroshima. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Monk, Ray. Inside the centre: the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. London, Jonathan Cape, 2012.

Munton, Don. The Cuban Missile Crisis: a concise history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Priestley, Rebecca. Mad on radium: New Zealand in the atomic age. Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 2012.

Schweber, S. S. Nuclear forces: the making of the physicist Hans Bethe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Stern, Sheldon M. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American memory: myths versus reality. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Stoddart, Kristan. Losing an empire and finding a role: Britain, the USA, NATO and nuclear weapons, 1964-70. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ;New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Szasz, Ferenc M. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2012.

Takahashi, Hiroko. [Closing Hiroshima & Nagasaki: The American Nuclear Experiment and Civil Defense Planning] Fūinsareta Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Bei kakujikken to minkan bōei keikaku / 封印されたヒロシマ・ナガサキ: 米核実験と民間防衛計画. Tōkyō: Gaifūsha, 2012.

Taubman, Philip. The Partnership: Five Cold War Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012.

Touze, Vincent. Missiles et décisions: Castro, Kennedy et Khrouchtchev et la crise de Cuba d’octobre 1962. Bruxelles: Versaille, 2012.

Walker, John R. Britain and disarmament: the UK and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arms control and programmes, 1956-1975. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

Van Lente, Dick, ed. The nuclear age in popular media: a transnational history, 1945-1965. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Weart, Spencer R. The rise of nuclear fear. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Wilson, Jim. Britain on the brink: the Cold War’s most dangerous weekend, 27-28 October 1962. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2012.

Yamamoto, Akihiro. [A Discourse on the Postwar History of Nuclear Energy, 1945-1960 : “Memories of the Bomb” and “Dreams of Nuclear Power] Kaku enerugī gensetsu no sengoshi, 1945-1960: “hibaku no kioku” to “genshiryoku no yume” / 核エネルギー言說の戦後史, 1945-1960: 「被爆の記憶」と「原子力の夢」. Kyōto-shi: Jinbun Shoin, 2012.

Zellen, Barry Scott. State of doom: Bernard Brodie, the bomb, and the birth of the bipolar world. London: Continuum, 2012.

ARTICLES

Børresen, Hans Christofer. “Flawed Nuclear Physics and Atomic Intelligence in the Campaign to deny Norwegian Heavy Water to Germany, 1942–1944.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 4 (2012).

Connelly, Matthew, Matt Fay, Giulia Ferrini, Micki Kaufman, Will Leonard, Harrison Monsky, Ryan Musto, Taunton Paine, Nicholas Standish, and Lydia Walker. “‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon.” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012).3

Dvorak, Darrell F. “The Other Atomic Bomb Commander: Col. Cliff Heflin and his ‘Special’ 216th AAF Base Unit.” Air Power History 59, no. 4 (Winter 2012).

Dorn, A. Walter, and Robert Pauk. “The closest brush: How a UN secretary-general averted doomsday.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).

Edwards, Paul N. “Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 4 (July/August 2012).

Fischer, Benjamin B. “Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story.” Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1 (February 2012).

Geist, Edward. “Was There a Real ‘Mineshaft Gap’?: Bomb Shelters in the USSR, 1945–1962.” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 2 (Spring 2012).

Goodson, Donald L. R. “Catalytic Deterrence? Apartheid South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Strategy.” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 32, no. 2 (2012).

Grant, Matthew. “British nuclear weapons and the test ban, 1954–73: Britain, the United States weapons policies and nuclear testing: tensions and contradictions.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2012).

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. “Fukushima and the Motifs of Nuclear History.” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012).

Hastings, Justin V. “The geography of nuclear proliferation networks: the case of A.Q. Khan.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 3 (2012).

Hecht, Gabrielle. “An elemental force: Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 2 (March/April 2012).

Higuchi, Toshihiro. “‘Genshi maguro’ no tanjō: Dai go Fukuryū maru jiken go no kankyō hōshanō sokutei jō no hantei kijun no hensen” [The Birth of “Atomic Tuna”: Changes in the Administrative Criteria for Environmental Radiation Monitoring in Japan after the Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954], Seibutsugakushi kenkyū [Japanese Journal of the History of Biology] 87 (2012).

Hogg, Jonathan and Christoph Laucht. “Introduction: British Nuclear Culture.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 4 (December 2012).

Jasper, Ursula. “The ambivalent neutral: rereading Switzerland’s nuclear history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).

Johnston, Sean F. “Making the invisible engineer visible: DuPont and the recognition of nuclear expertise.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 3 (2012).

Jolivette, Catherine. “Science, Art and Landscape in the Nuclear Age.” Art History 35, no. 2 (April 2012).

Kemp, R. Scott. “The end of Manhattan: How the gas centrifuge changed the quest for nuclear weapons.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (2012).4

Kinney, D.J. “The otters of Amchitka: Alaskan nuclear testing and the birth of the environmental movement.” The Polar Journal 2, no. 2 (December 2012).

Kirk, Andrew. “Rereading the Nature of Atomic Doom Towns.” Environmental History 17, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “The proliferation risks of gas centrifuge enrichment at the dawn of the NPT: Shedding light on the negotiating history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).5

Lewis, John W. and Xue Litai. “Making China’s nuclear war plan.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  68, no. 5 (September/October 2012).

Malloy, Sean L. “‘A very pleasant way to die’: Radiation effects and the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (2012).6

Mundey, Lisa M. “The Civilianization of a Nuclear Weapon Effects Test: Operation ARGUS.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 4 (2012).

Norris, Robert S. and Hans M. Kristensen. “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A nuclear order of battle, October and November 1962.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).7))

Overpeck, Deron. “‘Remember! it’s Only a Movie!’ Expectations and Receptions of The Day After (1983).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32, no. 2 (June 2012).

Robb, Thomas. “Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–64.” The International History Review 34, no. 2 (2012).

Sethi, Megan Barnhart. “Information, Education, and Indoctrination: The Federation of American Scientists and Public Communication Strategies in the Atomic Age.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 1 (2012).

Sime, Ruth Lewin. “The Politics of Forgetting: Otto Hahn and the German Nuclear-Fission Project in World War II.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 1 (2012).

Slaney, Patrick David. “Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Nature of Scientific Internationalism in the Early Cold War.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 2 (2012).

Sobek, David, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robison. “Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001.” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2012).

Theaker, Martin. “Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture 1939–59.” Contemporary British History 26, no. 4 (December 2012).

Tobey, William. “Nuclear scientists as assassination targets.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 1 (January/February 2012).8

Walker, John R. “Potential Proliferation Pointers from the Past: Lessons from the British Nuclear Weapons Program, 1952–69.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 1 (2012).9

Weisiger, Marsha. “Happy Cly and the Unhappy History of Uranium Mining on the Navajo Reservation.” Environmental History 17, no. 1 (2012).

Wellerstein, Alex. “A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story.” Physics Today 65, no. 5 (2012).10

Wellock, Thomas R. “Engineering Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Crisis at the Atomic Energy Commission, 1964–1973.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 4 (2012).

Wilson, Richard. “The Development of Risk Analysis: A Personal Perspective.” Risk Analysis 32, Issue 12 (December 2012).

Acknowledgements

Some of the citations I got from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues; others were found from keyword searches against the Harvard Library catalog (old habits die hard) and some publisher-specific searches. Google Scholar proved to be no help whatsoever — too much noise, too little signal, too hard to filter by discipline. Thanks to my old friend Anthony Walker for helping me with the Japanese translations. Thanks to Will Thomas and Michael Gordin for giving this a look-see before I put it up. If I’ve missed something or screwed something up — highly likely — please get in touch.

  1. I wrote an essay-review of this for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences under the title “Nuclear others,” available here. [↩]
  2. Iversen’s biographical account of Rocky Flats was discussed by me in part here. [↩]
  3. Winner of the 2012 “Wow That’s a Lot of Co-Authors Award.” [↩]
  4. I discussed Kemp’s article on the development of the centrifuge here. [↩]
  5. I discussed these Krige articles on US-UK centrifuge history in this post. [↩]
  6. For a discussion (and review) of Malloy’s article on radiation effects, see my post here. [↩]
  7. For a discussion of Norris and Kristensen’s accounting of those nukes in Cuba and elsewhere, see my post here. [↩]
  8. A little discussion of Tobey’s article on nuclear assassination is here, along with my own thoughts. [↩]
  9. Winner of the 2012 “Most Alliterative Article Award.” [↩]
  10. My article on the “Philadelphia Story” is discussed and linked-to here. [↩]

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Visions

A glove box Christmas tree

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 25th, 2012

Well, it’s not actually a glove box, but it’s meant to approximate one, I think. Decorating a tree, Hanford-style:

Hanford glove box Christmas tree

The photo was taken at the Hanford Science Center in the 1960s, and was from an exhibit probably meant to illustrate how dextrous the remote-handling equipment was.

But let’s imagine it’s a real glove box, and that the tree is dangerously radioactive. Just for fun, and in the spirit of Christmas cheer. 

Happy Holidays, from Restricted Data!

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Meditations

Duck and Cover All Over Again

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 21st, 2012

Hiding from nuclear attacks under ones school desks has got to be one of the most salient memories of Americans who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I get told about it with some regularity when I tell people about my work — the recollections of the “Duck and Cover” drills are spoken of with a sense of grim humor, in a tone of “can you believe they made us do that?”

I’m not the world’s biggest critic of Civil Defense measures of this sort. Yes, Bert the Turtle is a bit condescending, but he was aimed at children, and for 1951 his message isn’t too far off. In 1951 the Soviets still lacked ICBMs and had bombs no more than double the yield of the Nagasaki weapon. Hiding under your desk probably wouldn’t help you much if the bomb went off right over your head, but could be significant for all of the people who were within a mile or so of the blast.

Cold War children performing a "Duck and Cover" drill.

Civil Defense became a more problematic affair in the megaton and missile ages, especially since the Civil Defense planners were often kept out of the loop as to what the actual state-of-the-art was regarding bombs and tactics. There’s also a broader question about whether confidence (justified or not) in one’s ability to survive a nuclear attack drives states or individuals towards more dangerous behaviors with regards to nuclear weapons. But as a whole I think we’ve probably gone a little too far, culturally, in ridiculing Cold War Civil Defense measures — thanks in no small part by handling such as that in Atomic Café, which uses these films out of context.

I grew up in California in the late 1980s. I never did any “Duck and Cover” drills for nuclear threats — I wasn’t even aware of nuclear threats, to be honest. One of my first “political” memories is of the Berlin Wall coming down, when I was in the 6th grade. I remember being irritated, since I had just memorized which of the Germany’s was the “good” one and which was the “bad” one — no easy task for me at the time, given that the one with “Democratic” in its name was anything but!

FEMA poster for earthquake drills

I don’t remember being told to “hold” in the 1980s, but it was more or less like this.

We did have drills, though. The most common were the standard fire drills that everybody does — flee (“leave your bags!”) and line up a safe distance from the school. Boring. Next on the list were earthquake drills, a staple in California. These are basically “duck and cover” drills with less fear. You hide under your desk, or you stand in a doorway. The hardest part about earthquakes is recognizing when one is happening; unless you’ve been through a few of them (I had some practice when I lived in Berkeley) it can take practically the length of the whole earthquake for your brain to realize exactly what’s going on. What I think people who haven’t been in one don’t realize is how strangely noisy they are — they make doors shake in their hinges, and it is a very unusual sound, and your brain (at least, my brain) takes a little time to process this, which makes it hard to act rapidly.1

But the most unusual drill we did where I grew up was something quite different, and I was reminded of it when I read about the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last week. I may digress a minute here.

"Stockton, California: These are the most interesting things we could find to photograph."

“Stockton, California: These are the most interesting things we could find to photograph. Two of them are the same thing from different angles.”

I grew up in Stockton, California. It’s right in the middle of the long Central Valley that runs through the middle of the state; it’s about an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of the Bay Area, or a 45-minute drive south of Sacramento. “I’ve driven through there,” people often tell me. Rarely anybody knows much about it though, if they aren’t from California, despite its being a perennial favorite for top slots in Forbes’ America’s Most Miserable Cities list (#1 in 2009 and 2011!) and occasionally making the front-page of The New York Times for its economic woes (housing bubble, city government going bankrupt,  and so on).

The reason you probably don’t know much about it is because there isn’t a whole lot to say, and certainly very little to romanticize. It doesn’t have a “company town gone bust” story (e.g. Flint), or a “former grandeur gone to squalor” (e.g. Baltimore), and nobody makes national commercials using it as some kind of comeback story (e.g. Detroit). It’s a medium-sized American city that has many of the problems of other medium-sized American cities, just more so. It’s problematic mixture of bad economy, crime, and mundanity isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t fit into any of the well-worn American archetypes.

1989 - LA Times - Stockton massacre

But we did have a school shooting. On January 17, 1989, a disturbed loner, Patrick Purdy, brought a Chinese-made AK-47 to the Cleveland Elementary School and started firing. He killed five children and wounded 30 others, including one teacher. He then killed himself. The victims were mostly from Cambodia and Vietnam — Stockton is one of the major hubs for South Asian refugees.

I didn’t go to Cleveland Elementary; I was on the other side of town. I want to make explicit that I’m not trying to co-opt any tragedy, whether the one at Sandy Hook or at Cleveland, nor am I claiming any special knowledge of these things. But I remember the day pretty clearly. Not out of horror — I don’t think I was old enough to really process horror very well — but just out of awe. How does one live in a city, or in a world, where this sort of thing happens? What do you, as a kid, even think of in such a situation? (I didn’t know much about my own mortality at age 8, so that didn’t really factor into it.)

Michael Jackson visiting Cleveland Elementary after the shooting.

Stockton was in the national news — as always, just for something awful. Michael Jackson visited the city to show support for the children at Cleveland (very eighties). The state passed an assault weapons ban, part of a longer push for the Congressional assault weapons ban that was passed in 1994, and was allowed to lapse in 2004. The same ban that they are talking about revisiting today, as a result of Sandy Hook. As Michael Herr put it, “Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that’s a little history joke.” 

But, to circle back, after the Cleveland massacre, all of the elementary schools in my town had “guy on campus with a gun” drills. Specifically, if the adult “yard duty” dropped to one knee and blew a whistle in three, long tones, we were all supposed to hit the deck. This wasn’t something we were just told, or that teachers had contingency plans for — we practiced it. I can remember this pretty vividly. It was our “Duck and Cover,” I suppose. 

I’ve told this as stories to people before — prior to Sandy Hook — and their eyes widen, their mouth drops. Some have accused me of making it up! (I didn’t, and I’ve double-checked with others who I went to school with.) One friend of mine who grew up on the East Coast suggested that as children we must have been terrified. But I don’t remember being terrified. One isn’t terrified of fire when one is lining up outside, one isn’t terrified of earthquakes when one is standing in a doorway. The drills aren’t the thing. If anything, they’re either welcome interruptions to your daily routine, or they are boring activities involving standing in lines until everybody is accounted for.2

Human beings, especially children, have a tremendous capacity for normalizing the horrific, if it is presented to them as “normal,” if they live it as “normal.” We’ve gone, over the space of six plus decades, from teaching our children that they will be atom bombed by the Soviet Union, to teaching them that they will be shot by unstable loners. What was a war from above became a war from below.

"1989 file photograph: Stockton Police Capt. J.T. Marnoch holds up a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle that gunman Patrick Purdy used to kill five schoolchildren and injure 30 others at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)"

“1989 file photograph: Stockton Police Capt. J.T. Marnoch holds up a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle that gunman Patrick Purdy used to kill five schoolchildren and injure 30 others at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)”

In a way, wars from below are always the scarier threats, the ones that keep families and policymakers up at night, even though their ability to do mass damage is considerably diminished most of the time. “Conventional” threats, like other nation-states, can be understood through the sanitized lens of game theory, rational actors, and deterrence. Such a lens might not actually tell you much about real world behavior, but it makes the problem seem solvable. Threats that seem to come from everywhere at once, from the social fabric itself, are necessarily more diffuse, appear un-categorizable, and sometimes seem to have cures that are worse than the disease.

I don’t know what the exact response to the Newtown massacre should be, other than a long, long-overdue patching up of gun sales loopholes and maybe a reinstatement of that lapsed assault weapon ban. But I’m glad it’s not my job to try and hash out the details, or try and sell them politically. I do hope, though, it goes beyond telling children to hide under their desks, to expect that they might have to “hit the deck” to hide from their fellow countrymen. The “Duck and Cover” drills of the Cold War were evidence of a dangerous international regime — one where a “full nuclear exchange” was seen as a likely future outcome. School-shooter “Duck and Cover” drills of yesterday and today are evidence that something’s very profoundly wrong with how we’re doing things in this country.

  1. When we had that earthquake in DC in 2011, I was completely prepared, I have to admit. I recognized it for what it was very rapidly, and moved to a doorway. All of that California training was put to use. Part of my rapidity, then, was that I was too daft not to realize that earthquakes were so very rare in the mid-Atlantic states, and so didn’t rationalize it away. I did, however, do a back-of-the-envelope reasoning about what the effects of a thermonuclear blast set off in DC would feel like at my office in College Park, Maryland… [↩]
  2. And in any case, Stockton had enough horrors to go around. Among other things, the apparent inspiration for that urban legend about flashing your headlights at gang members was the shooting of a secretary at my own elementary school. Even that is more sensational and unusual than the more quotidian threats that one felt in a city with a pretty high crime rate, gang problems, drug problem, etc. The place was once Steinbeck country, it’s now something more like Breaking Bad country. [↩]

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