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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Visions

Advertising for weapons designers

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 14th, 2012

Advertising, annoying as it is in the present, is a great tool for looking at the past. You really do get a sense for what passed as acceptable, who people thought the ideal consumer was, and what kind of life people dreamed they could have, when you look at the elaborate construction of fantasy and insecurity that plays out in the advertising medium.1 This is one of the reasons it is especially galling, as an historian, that many digitized archives of past magazines or journals do not let you search advertising copy, or even — gasp! — have all advertising cut from them. This sort of thing is so irritating for historians, just passing that on.

Jack and Heintz missile systems ad, August 1958. See what you’re missing if you cut out the ads? No comment necessary.

Scientific American is a periodical whose online archival incarnation thankfully retains the ads. You can’t search them through the default search engine, but they’re in the PDFs. By downloading lots of PDFs in bulk (it can be done), you can then run searches for specific ad copy across all of them, or compile the individual articles into massive PDFs that roughly approximate a full bound set. (There are some ways in which having digital sources are a convenience — instant searching! — and some ways in which it is a pain — difficult browsing.)

During the Cold War, Scientific American was a major periodical, much more so than it is today. Its publisher since 1948, Gerard Piel, was not a scientist, but saw himself as an ideal Cold War liberal intellectual lay science enthusiast. He was anti-nuclear weapons and pro-nuclear power, if that helps solidify the type. In the 1950s he was anti-McCarthy and pro-Oppenheimer, by the 1970s he was criticized as being too old for the New Left. When he took over Scientific American, it was still being pitched at industrial researchers and tinkerers; under his management, it became something of a luxury “lifestyle magazine,” where the lifestyle in question was science.2

Of these early ads, the ones that really have gripped me in the past are the ones advertising for nuclear weapons scientists and for rocket scientists. They were advertisements that said — in fairly blunt language — that you’d be happier if you were making weapons of mass destruction. There’s something particularly American about that.

Without further ado, here are a few of my favorites, culled from issues of Scientific American from the 1950s:

How do you recruit a nuclear weapons designer? Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory tried a number of approaches. Some of these, like the one you see above from September 1956, emphasized that living out in the middle of nowhere could be “leisurely living,” and also emphasized the cool topics you’d get to work on: weapons physics, nuclear propulsion, etc. You’ve also got to admit that Los Alamos had a pretty cool logo at the time, as well. The “we work in an awesome place” pitch is one that Los Alamos would return to on a regular basis.

Los Alamos could also emphasize its history. It was over a decade old at this point, and had done some pretty important things. The above ad, from October 1956, has a wonderful message of “Los Alamos gets in the newspaper because it’s important” mixed in with an attempt to recruit young scientists.

Livermore, on the other hand, started out with a much more blunt approach: Got any new nuclear weapons ideas? Tying their work in with the work at Berkeley helped, of course — the Berkeley Rad Lab had at least as fabled a history as Los Alamos, and some of their later ads would do this even more explicitly.

To draw a contrast, take a look at this Sandia advertisement from May 1958. It’s more heady and ideological than the “come do science” and the “we have nice mountains” sorts of pitches:

For centuries men have tried to develop new and more powerful weapons to achieve victory in war. Lately these have been weapons of unprecedented power. Now war can become race suicide, and victory thus gained is a delusion. Yet we keep on trying to develop new and more powerful weapons, because we must. Not because we seek victory through a nuclear war, but because through strength we may prevent one. For as long as there are powerful forces with a record of cynical duplicity and oppression, the free world must have weapons capable of neutralizing them. At least until men learn that the only alternate to peace is oblivion. At Sandia, we play an important part in providing this protective strength…”

Although, for all of that rallying against “cynical duplicity and oppression,” a few months later (December 1958) a Sandia advertisement compared them to the Spanish Conquistadors — not exactly known for their peaceful ways. But lest you think this is the most politically incorrect form of scientist recruitment you might find from the period…

…Los Alamos had this one in the same issue. No comment here, other than the fact that this is obviously pre-Wen Ho Lee.

Los Alamos also had this wonderful little ad from April 1959, where the fact that they used obscure weapons-physics jargon was taken to show that they were on the cutting edge of science. It’s a rather clever advertising approach, you have to admit — taking what might otherwise be seen as a weakness and turning it into a strength. They didn’t use this tactic very often, though; other ads from this period had someone different messages, like “Scientists are people,” or “we do peaceful stuff, too.”

The gender stuff in some of these ads is incredible. This is an ad that ran a few times in 1958, recruiting for rocket scientists at the AC Spark Plug division of General Motors:

This is the Mrs. Behind the Missile… It takes a special kind of woman to be the wife of one of today’s missile men. … They know more about the problems of raising a family virtually alone than they do about the business of producing the missiles themselves. This advertisement is a tribute to the courage of such women, and to the very real contribution they are making to the development of a guided missile arsenal for this nation’s defense. … If you are such a woman, and your husband has engineering or scientific training which could make a contribution to this program, and is not a member of the armed forces, ask him to write — or write yourself — to the personnel section of AC in Milwaukee.

What’s most interesting to me about this one is that it, unlike most of the advertisements in Scientific American from this period, is written under the conceit that women are going to be reading the magazine. Most of the ads, it almost goes without saying, were pitched at white, scientifically-educated men. This one seems to be pitched at that guy’s wife. Which might seem progressive if it wasn’t a pitch for wives to sign their husbands up as rocket scientists so they could live a patriotic life in depressing isolation.

Douglas Aircraft was also on board with the “rocket scientist’s lifestyle” pitch, though it’s interesting how much more chummy it seems for men than was the one for women. This is from April 1957; it’s amazing how many of these rocket scientist ads were just pre-Sputnik. Things got so much crazier after Sputnik that it’s hard to forget that people were already pretty hyped up about rockets.

Douglas also used the “our work is so awesome it’s secret” pitch as well. “Look at all the nuclear-tipped missiles we’ve made! Actually, half of them are still secret!” I also really like the line, “These are the projects that require engineers who are looking far beyond tomorrow.” An impressive sounding bit of nonsense, no?

In the 1960s, Los Alamos’ as got a little more unusual — emphasizing that there was culture out where they worked. I’m not sure too many other places took this approach, though Los Alamos did it quite a few times. These ads are one part recruitment — meant to appeal — and one part projection. How much is the above ad actually soliciting scientists, and how much is it trying to say, “did you know that Los Alamos men appreciate art?”

It’s a stark contrast from this sort of ad from Lockheed (October 1956), which makes it look like your non-science time there will be spent playing golf, tennis, or boating.

What to make of all of these? There are a lot of obvious — perhaps too obvious — observations here. Gender stuff. Lifestyle stuff. Technoscientific enthusiasm. You know. But what strikes me as most interesting here is that in some of these, there’s a bit of explicit rah-rah Cold War ideology, but mostly it is absent. Is this because ideology is messy, or because it could be taken for granted? That is, do you appeal to rad science and rad living conditions because you don’t want to turn off people who aren’t totally sold on WMDs, or do you assume that the only people who are going to apply have already made their peace with that idea? I don’t know — there’s only so much you can see on the surface of these ads, without delving into the processes of their creation, much less their success or failure. Still, as source materials, these sorts of ads are wonderful windows into the past — often as much or more so than the magazine content they abutted. And like all good windows into the past, they raise as many questions as they answer…

  1. There’s an obligatory Mad Men reference here, but I never got into the show so I’d probably bungle it. I’m more of a The Wire sort of guy when it comes to television shows, I’ve got to admit. [↩]
  2. Everything I know about Scientific American and Gerard Piel comes from an excellent senior thesis I had the good fortunate to be an adviser for while I was at Harvard: Emma Benintende, “Who was the Scientific American? Science, Identity, and Politics through the Lens of a Cold War Periodical” (Senior thesis, Department of History of Science, Harvard University, 2011). [↩]

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Meditations | News and Notes

That Doomsy Time of the Year

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 7th, 2012

It’s that time of the year again — when The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists hosted their Doomsday Clock Symposium, the cheeriest conference ever. Basically it was an all-day conference where experts present on what appears to be the status quo in various doomsy topics: nuclear weapons, nuclear powerw, bioweapons/bioterrorism, climate change, and so on. At the end of it, the Science and Security Board of The Bulletin (a group of smart and well-credentialed folks) convened privately and decided whether things are doomy enough to move the Doomsday Clock another minute or so towards midnight, or whether it should be moved back a minute or so, or whether things are basically the same.

(Yes, I know that this oft-used image is not really a Mayan calendar. Cut me some slack. C’mon, admit it, it’s kind of clever. A little bit.) The Doomsday Clock is a registered trademark of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, used here only in playful jest.

I went last year, but didn’t make it this year. The Doomsday Clock is currently at five minutes to midnight, which is to say, the same as it was in 2007, and the worst it has been since the end of the Cold War. (The clock’s closest times were two minutes in 1953, and three minutes in 1984, both of which were admittedly pretty tense times. Interestingly, in both cases, the clocks were radically moved back within a few years.) They changed the clock one minute forward after last year’s meeting, which was in line with my predictions having sat in on the event.

Everything looked not-so-good at the beginning of 2012: India and Pakistan seemed to be charging ahead with fissile material production without much heed to anything else (even each other); the United States was so crippled by Executive-Legislative in-fighting that it could barely pass completely sensible, bi-partisan treaties, much less hard stuff; Fukushima had happened just the previous year, with ill implications for nuclear energy regulation; and nobody was doing anything significant about climate change, despite the evidence getting stronger and stronger that things were accelerating as bad as the worst-case models had predicted. The closest thing to good news was that it would still be some time before kids could cook up decent biological weapons in their college bio classes.

How are things on the cusp of 2013? My basic read is: nothing’s changed too much from the last time. (This is also the gist of what I’ve heard from folks who were at the conference this year.) Pretty much all of those individual items are the same as they were. What would that mean towards the clock? In a world where the clock was a simple, objective measurement of “doom,” you’d say that inaction would count as a net increase of badness. With climate change, that argument is especially strong: if the models are correct, then every year we spend not mitigating or at least slowing climate change means some greater amount of mitigation in the future. The longer it goes untended, the harder it will be to fix in the future, and the longer the negative effects will last. (The EPA explains this as a “carbon bathtub” effect — the input vastly overpowers the drain, and even decreases the size of the drain.) So that’s pretty doomy.

Of course, the Doomsday Clock isn’t an objective measure of doom — it’s a piece of publicity meant to focus attention onto key issues. In this sense, nothing changing might be a sign to just keep the clock where it is. Moving it forward, without any really strong reasons to do so, might dilute its publicity power. And if you’re moving it forward just because nothing positive is being achieved, well, you’ve only got a few more years of being able to do that before you run out of minutes! (A negative-time wouldn’t really work, conceptually, would? “Doomsday was five minutes ago.” Well, at least it gives The Bulletin something to do in the post-apocalyptic world…) I think of the “minutes” as something that can be “spent” — you only have a few of them, and if you wiggle the clock each and every year by a little bit without a really strong reason, it’ll look like the Clock that called “wolf.” I do think the change last year was justified — in part because the “optimistic” aspects of the 2010 change had seemed already undone — but I just haven’t seen a strong reason to tweak it again.1

Anyway, my guess is that the Doomsday Clock won’t move this year. But we’ll find out in January, says the BAS. Which, you have to admit, is kind of a hedging of bets: if the Mayan apocalypse happens on December 21st, they can always change their clock time to zero and nobody will know whether they really predicted it or not.

I leave you with one of my favorite “Doomsday” quotes, from Time magazine, December 3, 1945:

“What is the goal of science? To blow up the world? If scientists mean what they say — and they generally do — scientific progress is within sight of that nihilistic goal, and may soon succeed in reaching it. … But the scientists, with the purest scientific motives in the world, still toy with the idea of a scientifically induced Doomsday. They know the gun is loaded, but their fingers itch to try the trigger.”2

What a line! And on that happy note…

It’s that time of the year again — where one hunts, frantically, for some kind of gift for those hard-to-satisfy family members and friends. I thought I might post a little update about some new products I’ve added to the Restricted Data Store, as well as one other non-self-serving gift suggestion. But first, Season’s Greetings from the Eniwetok Atoll:

(These particular pictures from an eBay offering; more information about the card itself is here.)

Over the last few months I’ve been adding a few designs to the Restricted Data Store. I should note that I think such things are not necessarily laudatory or condemnatory — I’ve chosen all of the images for how graphically interesting they are, and the fact that the bomb is nothing if not an ambiguous object. You can always say you’re wearing it ironically if someone asks — apparently that lets you get away with anything these days.

Above is the official emblem of the Manhattan Project — devised after the bombs were dropped, of course. The little castle at the bottom is from the emblem of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It has a wonderful retro aesthetic style, I feel, and I managed to get a very high-quality scan of it, which I then cleaned up, and applied to all manner of clothing. There are two variants: a light logo on dark clothing (as on the left), or a dark logo on light clothing (as on the right).

Above we have the first official depiction of a nuclear fission chain reaction from the Princeton University Press edition of the Smyth Report. I’ve always really liked this drawing: it is very seriously drawn (no fancy embellishments), yet it is really quite understandable. This is one of the shirts that get people to ask, “what is that?” when I wear it. “Oh, nothing,” I casually reply, desperately trying to keep my giddiness under wraps, “it’s just, you know, a nuclear fission chain reaction from the Smyth Report! Let me tell you about what that means to me…” At which point the person asking usually regrets it, but it’s far, far too late for them.

Lastly, I’ve recently added two more shirts: one featuring that Soviet drawing of the American implosion bomb, derived from espionage, and the other of the striking diagram illustrating the concept of “critical mass” from Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons:

Both combine a gnomic technicality with geometric simplicity, which, as you can see, appeals to me. Maybe it will appeal to someone else in your life as well, if not yourself! For all of the clothing, I’ve tried to include a pretty wide range of styles and sizes. If you find your body-type or inclinations not represented, just let me know and I will be happy to try and accommodate.

There are also still many nice mugs:

All meager profits go towards the upkeep of the blog.

Lastly, I want to highlight two calendars. The first is one that I made, the 2013 Nuclear Testing Calendar. It features 12 months of striking, high-resolution photographs of American atmospheric nuclear testing. Throughout the calendar are also a number of nuclear anniversaries noted — some fairly well-known, some that will probably be new to you. The cover image is a nice indication of the sort of thing you get from this: this is an image of the nuclear test Greenhouse ITEM (1951), which I personally scanned at the US National Archives at very high resolution, and then edited out any smudges, fingerprints, and dust spots. The colors are as they were in the original — vivid reds and oranges, with an otherworldly turquoise at the center of the fireball.

The calendar is through Lulu.com, a self-publishing enterprise, but they are very high quality — the pages are crisply printed, and the page stock is heavy and professional.

One more calendar: my employer, the history program at the American Institute of Physics, sells a calendar each year as well. This year the theme is the life of Niels Bohr, since 2013 will be the 100th anniversary of the Bohr atom. The calendar is quite beautiful and would be a real boon to any science fans out there:

All sales of the Bohr calendar benefit the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives and the Niels Bohr Archive, Denmark.

  1. I should say, just to drift for a second: I actually think the Clock is a useful piece of publicity. A lot of coverage after the movement last year was, “oh, this doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a bunch of experts, you know, making a statement about how dangerous the world is”… which is exactly the point. To argue that it is anything but that is to construct an obviously foolish straw man. And really, I don’t understand what the counter-argument really was, anyway. That the world was safer than the experts concluded? Maybe it was the inclusion of climate change and Congressional intransigence as serious global security issues that got the critics hackles up, but dismissing the Clock as “just publicity” is just a fool’s argument, the ultimate head-in-the-sand gesture. [↩]
  2. “They Know It’s Loaded,” Time (3 December 1945). The context of the story is a proposal by John A. Wheeler for studying cosmic rays, which he claimed could help further figure out how mass-energy transformation works:

    The present atomic bomb, Professor Wheeler believes, is a mere firecracker. The cornerstone of atomic physics is the Einstein Equation, which shows that all matter, on earth and elsewhere, is merely frozen energy. “It tells us that the most powerful nuclear transformation so far known, the fission of a heavy nucleus, releases only one-1,000th of the energy locked up in its mass.” The sub-atomic particles which form the uranium nucleus are not themselves transformed. They are only reshuffled into smaller nuclei, with a tiny loss of mass. If protons, for instance, which are found in all nuclei, could only be transformed into energy, the explosion would be really vigorous.

    [↩]

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Redactions | Visions

Soviet drawings of an American bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 30th, 2012

The United States government is pretty gun-shy on publishing drawings of nuclear weapon designs, even very crude ones. When it comes to implosion bombs, this is about all that’s allowed to come out of official sources:

From the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. “Then explodes” puts it a little mildly, I think.

Not extremely informative — a ball-within-a-ball — and a heck of a lot less information than you can find from other sources. The reasons for this are ostensibly based in security — terrorists, enemy powers, etc. — though I tend to suspect they are based in the fear of scandal more than anything else. Congressional oversight gets itchy when they see something that looks like a “bomb-making guide,” even when it is well-within the limits of security.1 (The basic implosion idea was declassified in 1951 as part of the Rosenberg trial, though there were knowledgable people arguing for it as early as 1945.)

I find the level of abstraction allowed in such drawings to be a little ridiculous, especially when far more detailed technical information is actually declassified. For reasons that I suspect are deeper than mere policy considerations alone, you can write a lot of things down that you can’t draw, if you’re someone with an actual security clearance. This isn’t totally nonsensical: drawings can make immediately clear lots of things that can otherwise hide in technical descriptions, which is one of the reasons that putative drawings of nuclear weapons are one of the topics that originally drew me to the topic of nuclear secrecy.

We aren’t really talking about blueprints here — these things aren’t usually to scale, they aren’t designed for engineers to use. Even if we were talking about blueprints, there are still quite a few steps in between a drawing of a thing and the thing itself. Drawings of this sort could certainly help an incipient nuclear program, but only in the sense that they can guide research questions or general directions. A drawing of an atomic bomb is not an atomic bomb.

But even though the US is fairly tetchy about its bowdlerized bomb drawings, it does better than most other nuclear states. The United States actually publishes things about their nuclear programs. Though the US has a well-deserved reputation for secrecy, they also have put out tons and tons of technical and non-technical information about how their bombs work(ed), how bombs in general work, technical details about the weapons themselves, and so on. Why? It’s a legacy, perhaps, of the Smyth Report, Atoms for Peace, and other gestures towards the positive role that nuclear information can play in the public sphere.

Ah, but there is one exception: post-Soviet Russia. The people working at Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear agency/corporation, have been publishing impressive amounts of raw historical documents information about the Soviet bomb project, as part of their on-going series Atomnyi proekt SSSR/Атомный проект СССР/USSR atomic project. The series started in 1998, and the early volumes have gotten a lot of good scholarly attention by folks like Alexei Kojevnikov and Michael Gordin, but only very recently did I find that they’ve been still publishing them, and from what I can tell, the newer volumes have not been used too much. The most recent volume that I’ve heard of — volume 3 — was published in 2009. Getting ahold of them is another matter altogether; in the United States, anyway, they’re devilishly hard to find to purchase, and even on Russian websites they are pretty rare. The Library of Congress has the first two volumes in their entirety, and I think I’ve found a source for purchasing the third (supposedly it is on its way), but not without some effort.

Here, for example, is the sort of drawing that the Russians declassified and published in one of the 2007 volumes:

Nuke aficionados will recognize immediately that this is a pretty good drawing of an implosion bomb, especially when compared to the ball-within-a-ball. The labels are pretty straightforward: A– detonator; B– explosive lens (1–Comp. B outer lens, 2–Baratol cone, 3–Comp. B inner lens); C–cork lining; D–aluminum pusher; E–uranium tamper; F–boron plastic shell; G–the Po-Be initiator. The only weird part is that they didn’t label the actual plutonium core itself (the cross-hatched sphere that surrounded the G sphere), but I guess it went without saying. Note also that they’ve indicated how the core can be added in after-the-fact with the removable “trap door” pusher. That’s one of those nice little touches that says, “I am not merely trying to explain an abstract concept, I’m trying to tell you how we might build one of these things.”

But more awesome than the drawing itself — which you can, incidentally, get on a T-shirt, if you’re interested and go for that sort of thing — is its source. It’s from the Soviet archives, part of a report dated January 28, 1946, titled “Notes on the design of the atomic bomb: Description of the construction of the ‘explosion inside‘ type bomb.”2 Get it, “explosion inside”? They hadn’t even formalized their terminology for “implosion” yet and were using a scare-quoted, made-up word in the meantime. As the report makes clear, this is a Soviet description of the American atomic bomb detonated at “Trinity,” based on intelligence received from Soviet spies at Los Alamos. (Other reports refer to Klaus Fuchs directly by name, though I’m not sure if the people drawing up this particular report knew he was the source.)

There is no way in heck that the American government would ever allow the release of so “detailed” a drawing from any source that had access to classified information. Granted, it’s a long way from being a “blueprint” — something the drawing itself acknowledges; the text at the bottom reads “schematic drawing, not to scale” — but it’s still the sort of thing that no weapons lab would want a Congressperson to see them handing out, much less publishing widely. But apparently Rosatom is not as burdened by this — when it comes to publishing pictures of American bombs, anyway!3

Here’s another fan-favorite — a series of drawings breaking the final assembled “Fat Man” bomb into its constituent parts, showing how they call go together, IKEA-style (click any of them to zoom):

The outer casing and the placement of the bomb within it. The caption at bottom says, “Bomb used on Nagasaki (Total weight 10,500 pounds – 4,650 kilograms).” I’m having trouble making out the “note” at the top left but it is seems to be saying something is tentative about the drawing.

The first four “spheres”: 1–initiator, 2–plutonium, 3–tamper, 4–aluminum pusher. Note that the publishers have omitted the exact measurements and replaced them with ellipses. It seems to indicate that the plutonium core is in “3 parts,” which jibes with an earlier post of mine (and indicates that the intelligence source really knew what he was talking about, not that we didn’t already know that). Actually, as is pointed out in the comments, if I had continued translating, I’d see that it says the plutonium must have impurities of only 3 parts per million. Still, a nice little detail.

Spheres 5 and 6: a layer of 32 blocks of chemical explosives, and then a layer of 32 blocks of explosive lenses. The detonator is labeled as a “booster” in English, oddly enough.

Sphere 7: the duraluminum casing, with “holes for detonators.” Comrade Beria likes his details! Compared with the Trinity Gadget.

Lastly, the overall arrangement of the bombs within the casing itself, with its electrical and detonating systems indicated. (You’ll perhaps recognize the first and last images here from another post I did, awhile back, as they are reprinted in a tiny form in another source.)

It’s a veritable nuclear Matryoshka doll, is it not? I wish I could make this stuff up, but I can’t. My favorite part about this document, though, is the fact that so much of the captions are in English — again, as if any indication were needed about where this information was coming from. The document itself was written by Igor Kurchatov for Lavrenty Beria, dated June 4, 1946.

There isn’t anything remotely like a security threat here — you can get better drawings on Wikipedia these days, without the numbers redacted — but to have stuff like this published by an actual nuclear power, based on data they derived in the course of making their own atomic bomb, data taken from a source working in a weapons lab… well, let’s just say, I don’t think it’s going to happen over here anytime soon.

Still, the drawings do have a talismanic power, and the Mandala-like quality of the implosion design doesn’t hurt that. It’s the bomb, right? And yet, it’s really not. It’s a drawing. A technically crude one, albeit more detailed than the other “official” releases. It’s no surprise, I suppose, how easily we get sucked in by the superficially technical — whether it carries any real power or not.

  1. See, for example, page 70 of chapter 2 of the Cox Report, which criticized Los Alamos for releasing exactly this kind of heavily-sanitized information. [↩]
  2. Заметки о конструкции атомной бомбы. Описание конструкции бомбы типа “взрыва вовнутрь.” [↩]
  3. This reminds me of a joke from the Brezhnev-era USSR that a Russian teacher of mine told me: During a visit to the United States, Premier Brezhnev and President Carter happen to see a protest. “No Carter, No Reagan!” the protesters shouted. “You see,” said Carter, “in our country we have freedom of expression, something you don’t have over in your country.” “Ah, Comrade,” says Brezhnev, “you are wrong! Come over and see!” So they go to Red Square, and indeed, there is a mob of protesters forming, shouting, “Nyet Carter, nyet Reagan!” [↩]

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How to make an atomic thunderstorm

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 15th, 2012

The rapid temperature and pressure changes produced by atomic explosions can, in fact, alter the local weather. This isn’t conspiracy theory kookery — it’s actually occurred numerous times in the course of nuclear testing. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a report about Redwing CHEROKEE, a 1956 test of a 3.8 megaton hydrogen bomb:

As the cloud rose and cooled, a very  intense purple with Szchrinkoff [sic — Cherenkov] radiation. Rain started in the area at about H+3 minutes after the burst, and at about H+10 minutes, a thunderstorm developed within the stem. Mr. Tanner and I counted 21 flashes appearing exactly like lightning flashes within a cloud.1

Lightning accompanied many hydrogen bomb detonations. Ivy MIKE, the first H-bomb, produced quite a lot of lightning, later analysis of the Rapatronic footage found:

Great, another thing to worry about. Image from Colvin, et al., “An empirical study of the nuclear explosion-induced lightning seen on IVY-MIKE,” (1987). You can see film of this footage here. Note that these sorts of things should not be confused with the smoke trails that were sometimes used to visualize the moving blast wave on tests.

That local weather changes would follow nuclear explosions isn’t too surprising when you think about it. What is weather if not pressure, temperature, and electrostatic charge? All three of those things are present in quantity when you detonate a nuclear weapon. I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed, a priori, that rain, lightning, and thunderheads could be created in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb, but after hearing about it, it makes sense.

What’s more surprising, though, is that this was actually investigated as a way to enhance nuclear weapons as early as 1945.

In late April 1945, two theorists working at Los Alamos working on the possible health hazards of the “Trinity” test stumbled upon the fact that rising hot air (such as that produced by a nuclear weapon)  might produce rain. They sent a memo to J. Robert Oppenheimer raising the possibility:

After the ball of fire and hot air produced by the gadget explosion start to rise, conditions could easily exist favorable for the formation of a thunderhead. The initial velocity of rise of the hot air should be about 25 meters per second. Hubbard believes that a velocity of only 15 meters per second would be sufficient to produce a thunderhead provided that the atmospheric conditions were just right. He believes that the time when the proper conditions of humidity and instability would prevail over Japanese targets can be predicted accurately. In general they would be quite likely to occur in the summer months,. We are going to make a careful study of this question and its consequences.2

Two days later, they sent him another memo, this time discussing raising the possibility of making this happen deliberately. (As a side note, I always love it when the defensive swings around to become the offensive — this might be a problem becomes this might be a cool weapon with amazing rapidity.)

The memo, written by physicist Joseph Hirschfelder, had an ominous title: “Strategic Possibilities Arising if a Thunderstorm is Induced by Gadget Explosion.”3 Hirschfelder, his 1990 obituary explains, was a leader of a theoretical group at Los Alamos, and later went on to do physics work on the bombs dropped at Bikini in 1946.

Hirschfeder’s 1945 memo explained that “it would be feasible, if desired, to choose the proper weather conditions for delivery [of the bomb] so that the gadget explosion would induce a thunderstorm.” The physics seems fairly clear:

Joseph Hirschfelder’s Los Alamos badge photograph.

Because of the high potential temperature of the hot air, the active material and fission products would surely rise to heights of the order of 10,000 feet (in a time of three minutes) before the thunderhead would develop. With even a light wind the major portion of the active materials would be carried away from the area of blast damage (for a 15 mile an hour wind, one mile in four minutes) and the products would rain down on an area which has not been severely damaged by the blast (a radius of A damage for blast is considerably under one mile).

A simple calculation shows that the radiation from the active material and fission products would be sufficient to to render an area of from one to one-hundred square kilometers uninhabitable. Calculations which I have made on the smoke column would indicate that the radius of our smoke column would be of the order of 500 to 1000 meters therefore we could not expect to poison an area of more than a few square kilometers. …

I do not believe that there would be any lessening of the blast damage if we deliver the gadget in weather conditions favorable for the formation of the thunderstorm (conditional instability, humidity above 60%) and therefore the radiation effects might cause considerable damage in addition to the blast damage ordinarily considered.

In plainer language, Hirschfelder is saying, “hey Oppy, I found a way to make the bomb even more radioactive than we had previously contemplated. We’ll set it off in a way that will create a thunderstorm, which will spread radiation all over the place, even to places that weren’t hit by the actual blast itself.” Clever? Undoubtedly. Horrible? I find it so — it’s an attempt to make the bomb even more unpleasant than it already was. But in a sense, that’s part of the job description, isn’t it?

Hirschfelder closed the memo by offering that, “if you are interested in this possibility, we should try to work out more explicit details: how long it would take before the rain started, how predictable would be the area on which the active material was dumped, etc.” It doesn’t appear that Oppenheimer followed up on the issue, but he didn’t condemn it either. My total speculation is that he never followed up on it because it sounds a little complicated to pull off under wartime conditions — and waiting around for ideal weather conditions was tricky enough as it was without trying to create atomic thunderstorms. 

(A small, weather-related meditation: As you probably know, bad weather saved the city of Kokura, Japan, from being the target of the Fat Man bomb. Nagasaki was the runner-up, and even its mission was almost scrapped because of cloud cover. There was probably somebody who lived in Kokura who complained about it being so cloudy on that day, August 9, 1945, without realizing how lucky he or she was. When clouds get you down, cheer up! You might be living in Kokura.)

I came across this memo for the first time while going through the footnotes of Sean Malloy’s excellent article on what was and wasn’t known about radiation effects prior to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. What struck me about it, aside from the gee-whiz aspect of ATOMIC THUNDERSTORMS, was how bloodthirsty these physicists appeared. Another document from Sean’s article, Bill Penney’s calculations on the ideal height to detonate the atomic bomb (with the special goal of trying to kill as many Japanese firefighters as possible), similarly affected me.

A common depiction is of the Los Alamos scientists as a bunch of giddy geeks whose “technically sweet” lab experiments get appropriated by the military for awful ends. But it’s a far darker story than that. These were some of the smartest people around at the time, and they applied all of their mental energies to the making of war — to the production of deaths. It’s not incomprehensible, of course: they knew they were doing wartime work, and there was, of course, a particularly vicious war on. But the flip side of all of those cute films and photographs of them drinking at lab parties is that when they weren’t there, they were plotting, in meticulous fashion, for killing as many people as were possible.

I think we’ve lost some of that in our collective memory. It’s present in some of the earlier depictions of the scientists and their work, but we seem to have compartmentalized our “weapons scientists” into the “good guys” (Oppenheimer, Bethe, Feynman) and the “bad guys” (Teller, Von Neumann) in terms of who we think are more dovish or hawkish. And yet, they all made weapons of mass destruction — some with more ambivalence than others, but they made them nonetheless. I’m not a total dove about these things, but I still think it’s worth keeping that at the forefront of one’s mind when talking about these guys. What I think is easy to forget when we read about Feynman’s hijinks and Oppenheimer’s highballs is that these geniuses were applying the entirety of their brains to a very grim job, one they did quite well. It is impossible to imagine the military men thinking up atomic bombs — much less atomic thunderstorms — on their own.

  1. Cherokee Field Report Bikini Operations, page 10, quoted in Chuck Hansen, The swords of Armageddon: U.S. nuclear weapons development since 1945 (Sunnyvale, CA : Chukelea Publications, 1995), 1307. [↩]
  2. Joseph O. Hirschfelder and J.M. Hubbard to J. Robert Oppenheimer (23 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada, document NV0123756. [↩]
  3. Joseph O. Hirschfelder to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Strategic Possibilities Arising if a Thunderstorm is Induced by Gadget Explosion,” (25 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada, document NV0124031. [↩]

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