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Los Alamos and the Smyth Report

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 15th, 2012

Everyone has spent a lot of time talking about the 67th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But last Sunday (August 12) was also another anniversary: the 67th anniversary of the release of the Smyth Report.

Richard Tolman, advisor to General Groves and one of the security editors of the Smyth Report, and Henry DeWolf Smyth, in 1945

The Smyth Report is one of the great documents of the nuclear age. Written by the Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, it was an official history of the Manhattan Project that was released to the public only days after the bombing of Nagasaki. From the very beginning of the document you can tell it is playing a very delicate game with regards to openness and secrecy. Let us juxtapose the Introduction, written by Smyth, with the Foreword, written by General Groves:

Smyth: The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. The average citizen cannot be expected to understand clearly how an atomic bomb is constructed or how it works but there is in this country a substantial group of engineers and scientists who can understand such things and who can explain the potentialities of atomic bombs to their fellow citizens.

Groves: All pertinent scientific information which can be released to the public at this time without violating the needs of national security is contained in this volume. No requests for additional information should be made to private persons or organizations associated directly or indirectly with the project. Persons disclosing or securing additional information by any means whatsoever without authorization are subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act.

What a fun game, eh? “Here is some important information, because it is necessary for democracy and sound policy. Also, if you go even an inch beyond what is written in here, we’ll put you in jail forever.”

Even the title of the report reflects this push and pull of secrecy. On the face of it, it’s got a dull, boring, bureaucratic title (which matches tone of the report itself, which is no great read):

“A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy For Military Purposes Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? You can see why in the Princeton University Press edition, they dubbed it Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (still a dull title), and everyone just calls it the Smyth Report. (Note: it’s pronounced Smythe but spelled Smyth.)

But here’s a little-known fact: that long, awful title wasn’t meant to be the title. It was supposed to be the sub-title — the actual title was so sensitive that it was going to be stamped on at the last moment before distribution. In the hubbub before its release, the stamp was essentially never used, and the sub-title became the title.

So what was the original title? Recently I found a rare copy in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress that contains the original title with the original stamp:

The original title was ATOMIC BOMBS, to be applied in a bright red stamp. Now how cool is that? In a way, this is Manhattan Project trivia, but really it points towards a deeper truth about the Smyth Report: every single aspect of it — even its title! — was shaped by the question of secrecy. The story of the Smyth Report is a fascinating one, and I spend the good part of a chapter in my forthcoming book talking about it.1 The idea of its creation, the process of its creation, and the debate over whether it should be released at all, much less the consequences of that release, are all completely vital stories in their own right for making sense of secrecy and publicity in the immediate postwar period.

I want to focus on just one little part of that, though: what Smyth did, and didn’t, write about Los Alamos, the most secret site in a system of secret sites.

On February 1, 1945, Smyth sent the first draft of the history of Los Alamos to none other than J. Robert Oppenheimer.2 (As if Oppenheimer didn’t have enough to do.)

“I am at last ready to send you the first draft of what I have written about the project at Y,” Smyth explained. (Project Y was the official code name for the Los Alamos lab.) In the habit of all academics, then and now, he apologized for being a bit tardy. He explained that it would be swell if Oppenheimer could have Richard Feynman take a look at the draft. He also noted that:

You will notice that I have omitted nearly all numerical values for constants. This is a departure from my original intention, but I do not see that their inclusion would really add much to the usefulness of this document and it might necessitate a complete revision before publication.

This is interesting: Smyth’s “original intention” was to write the entire report without any regard for secrecy. Later, after everyone agreed the draft was more or less correct, he’d cut out all of the secret stuff, once it was decided what the secret stuff would be. In this case, though Smyth has pre-censored himself on numerical constants — but still written it as if he hadn’t. A weird genre of writing, no?

Nobody got back to Smyth on this letter; they were too busy. Smyth wrote Oppenheimer again in April 1945, sending another draft.3

He had heard from Groves and James Conant that Oppenheimer “did not like the chapter as a whole” but “were unable to give any report of specific criticisms.” Smyth asked for any that Oppenheimer had, and noted that: “I have not found the writing or this report an easy assignment.”

Smyth also explained some of the major omissions that had been made from the previous draft:

As I anticipated, the critical comment on the choice of the site will be deleted. I may say that I inserted this comment and similar comment in other chapters with the expectation that they would be removed before publication but with the feeling that it was desirable to record the existence of such opinions in the original draft.

All discussion of ordnance work is also to be removed. There is no objection to including the general statement of the ordnance problem and all the other parts of the problem, but the approaches to solution that have been made will be omitted. On the other hand, the feeling is that there is no objection to including the nuclear physics.

The General believes that the metallurgical work and a considerable amount of the chemistry work should be excluded on the ground that it would be extremely difficult for the average scientist to carry out any of this work without supplies and material which would not be available to him. I am not entirely clear how this criterion should be applied, but it probably means the elimination of the metallurgical work on plutonium and at least of some of the chemistry. I shall simply have to write a revised version and discuss it in detail with General Groves and Dr. Conant.

One other general comment which they made is that more names should be included. While this comment applies more forcibly to some other chapters than to that on Y, it is a point to be borne in mind in criticizing what I have written.

I don’t know what the “critical comment on the choice of site” refers to — except maybe to the fact that Los Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, which has its disadvantages as well as its advantages — but the rest is pretty straightforward. Ordnance — the actual work to design the atomic bomb, esp. relating to implosion — was out. Metallurgy and chemistry? Out and out.4 Basic nuclear physics? In!

So let’s get this straight: out of all of the work done at Los Alamos, all that gets past the censor is basic nuclear physics. And the implications of removing metallurgy and chemistry here probably means almost nothing will be written about Hanford, either. The final report has exactly two paragraphs on Hanford, despite it consuming a fifth of the Project resources. Which also meant cutting out the legions of chemists, engineers, and metallurgists who worked on the project in that capacity.

And so one suddenly sees that there is more missing from the Smyth Report than there is revealed in it.

Oh, but also: add more names of people. Why? Because Groves was afraid that scientists (and contractors) would seek credit after the war ended if they didn’t feel it was properly given to them — and in the act of seeking credit, they might give away secrets.

The Smyth Report as published by Princeton University Press.

Oppenheimer finally did write back to Smyth about this draft, apologizing for never writing back to his first letter, in April 1945.5 Oppenheimer wasn’t particularly pleased with it. What’s interesting about his objections and corrections to it are that they are almost completely concerned with things which were cut from the final draft for security reasons anyway. There’s a lot about implosion (what prompted it, who came up with it, etc.), for example, and implosion was completely omitted from the final Smyth Report.

If you’re interested in Los Alamos project history, you might find Oppenheimer’s comments interesting — Oppenheimer’s history of implosion is from a rather unique vantage point, since they hadn’t actually even tested the bomb yet (“In the past months I think we have had the fundamentals of implosion licked, and the future in this field looks bright“). Oppenheimer’s list of corrections has a lot of interesting bomb arcana in it; a selection here to give a flavor for it, along with some of the more interesting corrections:

Page 2, line 9. “December” should be “October.”
Page 3, line 11 (from bottom). “January” should be “November.” […]
Page 9, line 10. “Mass” should be “radius.”
Page 12. This is the point I have discussed above. The history of implosion is roughly thus:

It was proposed by Neddermeyer at the April conference, and some arguments were given by him to show that it would give a faster assembly than the gun; work was carried out on exploratory basis which gave misleadingly hopeful looking results. The matter was considered again by von Neumann in the Fall of 1943; he expressed the opinion that the implosion would work better with high charge to mass ratio, and might avoid the necessity for extreme purification of plutonium, at least or very small gadgets, because it would give such a rapid assembly. The compression on the material resulting from high velocities was then pointed out by Teller and investigated by Bethe. After much struggle and argument the implosion project was adopted with over-riding priority in late 1943. The later history I have outlined above. […]

Page 25, line 15. I would use the word “surprise” rather than “setback,” but that is a matter of judgment. […]
Page 32, par. 3, line 1. The 3000 ft/sec figure always referred to 49. The 25 velocity was not set until firm limits on the spontaneous fission of the isotopes enabled us to take 1000 ft/sec. This occurred early in 1944. […]
Page 42 line 10. The theoretical behavior is well known, but we are not sure that the theories are right.

The final version of the chapter on Los Alamos, “The Work on the Atomic Bomb,” is comparatively barren, when compared to the nitty-gritty that Oppenheimer went into above. It has a nice, but brief administrative history (why the lab was created, why the site was chosen — no critical comments, who was in charge of it), the world’s most basic discussion of basic bomb design issues (critical mass, tamper, efficiency, and an extremely vague statement on the gun-type design), and then more or less doesn’t advance the timeline beyond April 1943.

Like so many things, it’s clear that Smyth, Oppenheimer, and even Feynman spent a lot of time trying to ferret out all of the facts about Los Alamos — only to see them almost completely, and silently, cut from the final publication.

  1. I should also note here that there is an in-depth study of the Smyth Report which I’ve benefited a lot from: Rebecca Press Schwartz, “The Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb: Henry DeWolf Smyth and the Historiography of the Manhattan Project,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, September 2008). Rebecca has actually looked at the original drafts of the Smyth Report, which are kept in the archives of the American Philosophical Society. [↩]
  2. Henry D. Smyth to J. Robert Oppenheimer (1 February 1945),  Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125251. [↩]
  3. Henry D. Smyth to J. Robert Oppenheimer (6 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125250. [↩]
  4. Rebecca Press Schwartz’ dissertation, cited above, notes that for many years Smyth received angry letters from chemists and metallurgists in particular complaining that they had been cut out of the official history! [↩]
  5. J. Robert Oppenheimer to Henry D. Smyth (14 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125249. [↩]

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Visions

The Week of the Atom Bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 10th, 2012

This week is, as you all no doubt know, the 67th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These anniversaries happen to fall on the same days of the week as the original ones. So the bombing of Hiroshima on August, 6, 1945, was a Monday — just as with August 6, 2012. The bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, was a Thursday. The Smyth Report would be released on August 12, a Sunday. Hirohito’s “surrender” message would come on August 15, the next Wednesday.

For some reason, conceptualizing all of this as happening within a few weeks makes it seem awfully short in time. What a week that would have been.

Headline for the New York Times, August 7, 1945.

One of the things I really enjoy doing as an historian is looking through old newspaper front pages. You find so much out about past societies that way — the juxtaposition of related and unrelated articles provides a fascinating kaleidoscope of the day in question. Put a bunch of different newspaper headlines together, from different parts of the country, and you get an even more interesting portrait of a specific time and place.

In closing out the 67th anniversary of the Week of the Atom Bomb, I want to share a number of newspaper front pages with you. I’m limited in what I can conjure up, but I’ve managed to collect some 38 different front pages from newspapers in different parts of the country for the work week of August 6th through August 10th, each of which I thought was interesting or revealing in some way. Some of these newspapers will be immediately familiar to you — the New York Times, the Washington Post — some will be quite obscure — the Big Spring Daily Herald, from Big Spring, Texas, for example. Some represent quite specific markets: the Atlanta Constitution, for example, is an African-American newspaper in the age of segregation, and there are interesting differences between how they cover the issue versus the big city newspapers or the small town newspapers.

One additional point: the headlines are different, but the stories are almost exactly the same. This is because in the first week of the bomb, all of the stories were essentially written by William L. Laurence of the New York Times and released to the press by the Army. Not until the Smyth Report was released, on August 12th, do you start to see much independent reporting. The content of the “official” stories is interesting, but today I just want to focus on the headlines.

In an effort to keep this post from sprawling out forever, I’ve arranged all of the images in a little gallery below. If you are reading this on an RSS feed or an aggregator, you may have to visit the main site to view these.

August 6, 1945: Big Spring Daily Herald, Big Spring, Texas.

Image 1 of 32

"Five Cities Hit, One By New Bomb": I find it interesting here that they've explicitly lumped the firebombed cities in with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The subheadline, "Atoms Harnessed for Destruction," is more vivid. But note that far more space is given to the firebombing than the atomic bomb -- likely because they had only just received word of the atomic bomb and had to fit it in later. There is an interesting ambivalence in describing the "helpless Japs" in the headline about the firebombs.

There are two images from the set that I’d really like to draw your attention to. The first is from the August 9, 1945, edition of the Indiana Evening Gazette, from Indiana, Pennsylvania. (A bit confusing, that.) It appears to have been used in a lot of newspapers that day in different parts of the country, so it probably originates on the AP wire service. Anyway, here’s the image:

“DEATH KNOCKS AT EVERY JAP’S DOOR,” the main announcement reads. The caption is completely insane:

The utter desolation facing the Japanese, unless they surrender, as result of development of the atomic bomb is illustrated on the map above. Scientists say that if 1000 of the new weapons were exploded within each of the five circled areas, they would destroy virtually all life and property in the enemy homeland.

It’s not every day that you see small-town American newspapers cheerfully contemplating genocide, is it?

The second detail is a little illustration from the Kingsport Times, in Kingsport, Tennessee, published on August 9, 1945. It attempts, in visual form, to make sense of the force of an atomic bomb as described by President Truman (” …Ruin from the Air, The Like of Which Has Never Been Seen On Earth”):

On the left, a colorful illustration of an atomic bomb going off under the Empire State building: “The atomic bomb is the most terrible engine of destruction every conceived. One pound of U-235 could blast a great city, like New York, off the face of the map.”

In the middle, a train being blasted to oblivion: “To get a comparable explosion from TNT, you would have to set off 15,000 tons, or 300 carloads of 50 tons each. If U-235 exploded at TNT’s speed, pressure would be 1,000,000 times as great.” I don’t really know what they mean by the last line, there, but going from “trainloads of TNT’ to “an exploding train” is somewhat imaginative.

On the right, a dead fleet — presaging Operation Crossroads. “Exploded amid a great fleet at sea, an atomic bomb would sink most of the ships, send a great tidal wave shoreward. Most tightly compartmented ship would be crushed by air pressure.” Some original typos, there, but you get the picture.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there was a tremendous mixing of exaltation and  anxiety that first week of the bomb. It wasn’t just one thing or the other; it wasn’t all positive. Looking at these front pages, you see a real mixture of expressions, and a real diversity of types of coverage, even given the limitations imposed by secrecy. For some, the story is the secrecy itself — for others, the bomb gets mixed into an existing narrative about firebombing. Out of the mixture of these narratives, our “standard narrative” of the history of bomb is derived. But it’s all too easy to turn that into a condensed, one-size-fits-all assessment of how Americans thought about the atomic bombs, when there was quite a diversity of opinion and expression, even from the start.

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Redactions

The Height of the Bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 8th, 2012

The United States justly gets the lion’s share of credit for making and using the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was an international effort, we all know, but the U.S. bore the greatest amount of the labor, the cost, and the ultimately responsibility. When people get mad about the bomb, they get mad at the United States. It makes sense.

The importance of the United Kingdom, in some narratives of the bomb, was mostly in pushing the idea, sending a handful of scientists to help, and signing off on the use of the bomb. (Let’s not even get into Canada, who, according to this narrative, just provided some uranium and a lab that wasn’t allowed to communicate with the rest of the Manhattan Project.)

Several members of the British Mission to Los Alamos: William Penney, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, and John Cockroft. Photo via Los Alamos.

That handful of scientists, though, included some fairly important people. James Tuck did crucial work relating to the development of the explosive lens in the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs. Klaus Fuchs, aside from being the most significant Soviet spy on the project, helped tremendously with the design of the implosion bomb and the neutron initiators. And so on.

William Penney (later Baron Penney), who later ran the British atomic bomb project, did a whole variety of interesting things. He was crucial in developing means of assessing the effects of the bomb, was the only member of the British delegation to witness the bombing of Japan (he was on an observation plane on the Nagasaki mission), and was one of the first Allied scientists who went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war.

One of the other topics he worked on was the question of what height the bombs should be detonated at for maximum effect.

Illustration of one of the effects of a bomb detonated in the air: a reflection of the blast wave off of the ground, which produces a powerful shock wave known as a Mach stem. From Glasstone and Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1957 edn.).

This was a non-trivial issue: prior to nuclear weapons, it was pretty common for a bomb to detonate just when it actually physically made contact with its target. With atomic bombs, though, that isn’t ideal. Set one off too high, and much of the blast is going off into outer space and not the target. Too low, and a lot of it is going off straight into the ground. There is no truly “right” height, in the sense that any height will produce different effects that may or may not be desirable, but if the goal is the destruction of civilian buildings, then there are heights that work much better for that than others.

All of which Penney wrote up in a charming December 1944 report on “The Height of Burst of the Gadget.”1

Click for the PDF.

It’s a chilling — and fascinating — document for a few reasons. One is that it goes against any myth that the height of the bomb was set to minimize fallout exposure. This is discussed in great length by Sean Malloy in a recent article in Diplomatic History, which I will be posting a review of fairly soon.2 The entire reasoning for the height of the bomb detonation was about blast and fire effects. Radiation didn’t come into it. Later, when it was questioned as to whether there were fallout issues, the Manhattan Project principals said that they thought the height of the blast would avoid a lot of fallout — which is somewhat true — but this isn’t what caused them to set the height of the blast.

Another interesting bit is that Penney actually wants you to set the bomb off very low — 500 feet or so above the ground — rather than very high. The reason, though, is that Penney is assuming a much smaller bomb than actually was built: his calculation is based on the notion that the bomb will only be about 1 kiloton in yield, whereas previous guesses had been that it would be 10 kilotons or so in yield.

William Penney in the 1950s, looking like a character out of a Le Carré novel

Penney’s document is remarkable in its frankness about the point of the bomb: to destroy civilian houses. He also makes a big distinction between the types of targets available:

There is a significant difference in the blast resisting characteristics of German towns and of Japanese towns. While in Germany a broad distinction may be made between industrial buildings and the remainder, it is true that there is no pronounced contrast in the strength of one building or another, with the exception of the multi-floored reinforced concrete structures which are relatively few in number. In Tokyo or Yokahama, some areas consist entirely of extremely strong steel framed and concrete structures built to resist earthquakes, whereas other much larger areas contain only comparatively flimsy wooden houses with tiled roofs. … Therefore, it may be said that if the gadget is to be used in area attack against a German town, only one height of fusing is required for attack anywhere. Such is not the case for area attack on Tokyo. If the accuracy of delivery can be guaranteed within 500 yards, then the bursting height for attack on wooden houses can be set twice as high as for attack on the business and shopping areas. If this accuracy cannot be guaranteed, then some suitable compromise must be worked out from tactical and statistical arguments.

In other words, all German buildings would be more or less affected in the same way in an atomic bomb blast. Japanese buildings, however, vary between very strong industrial buildings and very flimsy civilian buildings. If the goal is to target civilians, you have much more leeway in the blast height.

Two very interesting things here: One, an atomic attack on Germany is still being explicitly discussed. Two, the “area attack” being discussed is one that contemplates the direct and purposeful targeting of civilians — perhaps even at a detriment to targeting industrial facilities.

Penney then moves on to consider what kind of damage you’re trying to maximize: “complete destruction” versus “severe but not unrepairable damage.” Penney notes that “opinion in England” has gone from favoring “severe” damage to favoring “complete destruction.” Why? Because it turns out that “severe” damage is pretty quick to repair, as the Londoners discovered after the V-1 attacks (“the robot attacks,” as Penney calls them), and because “complete destruction” “implies many casualties, and this in turn has a very serious effect on the efficiency of fire fighting.”

Dwell on that for a moment. The more people you kill, the less people who can put out the fires. Lest you think this is perhaps just a moment of remarkable cruelty, Penney actually elaborates on this theme at length later in the report. He makes a distinction here between the “Fire Force” and “fire guards,” which, if I understand it correctly, is the distinction between professional and amateur fire prevention forces:

The explosion of a gadget in either Germany or Japan, causing large amount of [“complete destruction” class] damage will almost certainly result in fires. While the general impression among the Fire Force in England is that the Japanese are likely to prove the most efficient fire guards in the world (because their ordinary lives gives them continual experience), the large number of casualties associated with [this class of] damage may well lead to such confusion in Japan that the critical incubation period of the fires [to become a firestorm] is passed unobserved. Thereafter the fire guards are useless, and only the Fire Force counts. The possibility of eliminating a large fraction of the Fire Force of a Japanese town by getting the fireman into the radioactive contaminated area to fight fires is attractive and realistic. The success of a follow-up attack may be greatly increased in this way. … If a gadget can be followed or accompanied by small [incendiary devices] the probability of a devastating fire, spreading well beyond the limits of the blast damage, will be greatly increased.

Gristly thoughts, no? This is also the only area of the report where radioactivity is mentioned: as a way to kill firefighters, so you can encourage a massive conflagration to develop.

Fire damage in Hiroshima shown in red

In reality, a massive firestorm did erupt in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and was responsible for the majority of the deaths in each. Making the bombs go off at just the right height for maximizing this sort of damage was a high priority — it even required the development of new kinds of bomb fuses just for this purpose.3

The bomb that went off above Hiroshima, 67 years ago this week, was set off at 600 meters above the ground. The Nagasaki bomb was detonated at 500 meters. Both of those heights were chosen to maximize damage — especially for the “flimsy” wooden houses of Japanese civilians. 

It’s easy to demonize the people who made these kind of decisions — especially when they describe the pre-irradiation of firefighters as “attractive.” But this is the logic of total war, when you’ve given up on the idea of a morality of war fighting and decide that the ends — and not the means — are all that matter. 

Whether one thinks the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified or not, it must be remembered that along with whatever else they were they were massacres of civilians. It was not an incidental or accidental side-effect: it was what they were planned to be. When the scientists at Los Alamos made plans for how to use the atomic bomb, they optimized them for the burning of civilians. This should not be forgotten or glossed over, even if one thinks it was still the right thing to do.

  1. Source: William G. Penney, “The Height of Burst of the Gadget,” (13 December 1944), copy in the Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0315458. [↩]
  2. Sean L. Malloy, “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012), 515-545. [↩]
  3. The Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had two sets of altitude-detecting fuses. One, known as the “Archie,” was based on a small directional antennae that had been originally developed so that airplanes could tell if another airplane was behind them. The other was a barometric switch that relied on the changes in atmospheric pressure at different altitudes. They also had a backup timer system that would go off if the other two failed. The technical specifications of both of these fuses are long since declassified, and even patented! See the “Folded Dipole” and “Pressure Sensitive Switch” patents on my page of atomic patents. [↩]

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Meditations

Hiroshima at 67: The Line We Crossed

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 6th, 2012

Today is the 67th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Sixty-seven isn’t a particularly exciting anniversary, being neither divisible by five or ten, but I get the feeling that it’s been talked about more this year than it was in the last few years. Maybe it’s all of the concderns regarding Iran and the Middle East? Maybe because it’s the first anniversary post-Fukushima? I’m not sure, but something’s in the air.

67 also happens to be the number of Japanese cities we firebombed before dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I wrote up a short, quick essay on the anniversary of Hiroshima for a group that didn’t pick it to be used (which is fine), but I thought I’d share it here.  I’ve added some illustrations, because you can do that with blogs.

THE LINE WE CROSSED

We have been debating the morality, strategy, and history of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for sixty-seven years. From their first use, the bombs were the subject of intense adulation and exuberance, as well as deep anxiety and ambivalence. Almost immediately the bomb was viewed as something completely new, and after the Japanese declared their surrender days later, the bomb was given the credit for ending the war.

Paul Tibbets in the Enola Gay

Whether it deserved that credit, or whether the war could have been ended without it, has been the subject of debate for nearly that long. Over the decades various arguments about the reasons for using the bombs, and their possible justifications, have been aired, confronted, revised, and rebutted. But even the arguments in favor of the bombing acknowledge that the United States crossed a line when it used the first nuclear weapons on inhabited cities. (Those who argue against the use of the bomb necessarily invoke such an argument.) The justification for such a “special” weapon — to use the terminology of the day1 — was that it was necessary to “shock” the Japanese into rapid submission for a net saving of lives.

But was a line really crossed? The atomic bombs killed tens of thousands of civilians immediately in each city, with more casualties attributed to their lingering effects over time. Looked at in a vacuum, this certainly looks like a particularly egregious moral transgression.

Within the context of the time, however, the atomic bombs were merely a refinement of an existing “art”: the mass firebombing of cities. This “terror bombing,” as it was sometimes called, reached its highest form under the leadership of Curtis LeMay in the Pacific theatre, where B-29s in massive numbers flew repeated, low-altitude nighttime raids against sixty-seven Japanese cities. They dropped explosives, napalm, and thermite onto streets of wooden houses, creating massive, inextinguishable conflagrations that sucked the air out of shelters and burned people alive. The incendiary bombs were specially developed for the destruction of Japanese houses: the small bomblets were designed to break through the ceilings, stop on the first floor, and spray a cone of flaming, jellied gasoline into the interior. The thermite and magnesium were added so that the existing fires would burn too hot to be put out.

Over two long nights in March 1945, over 300 B-29s were sent to burn the megalopolis of Tokyo. Estimates vary as to the exact numbers, but in the neighborhood of 100,000 people were killed, with another million people injured, and another million made homeless. Success was measured in raw percentages of the total area destroyed.

1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right

In such a context, it is hard to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the attacks that crossed the line. The line was already crossed — we were already burning men, women, and children by the thousands. Hiroshima and Nagasaki added the effects of radiation (which were little understood at the time by those who ordered the use of the atomic bombs2), but the firebombings were not without their lingering, scarring effects on the survivors, either.

How did this happen? As was the case with the decision to develop, produce, and use the atomic bomb, it was a process of gradual accumulation. Small decisions seemed to lead to big “inevitable” consequences. Strategic bombing began as an attempt to find clever, scientifically-informed ways to shut down the enemy’s war-making capability, and it ended with a butchery that would have been recognizable to Genghis Khan.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki crossed a line only insomuch as they were more spectacular, ripped straight out of science fiction — the burning of civilians alive with atomic fire rather than gasoline.

Death by gasoline: Tokyo, March 10, 1945

The lesson is not that nuclear weapons do not demand a “special” consideration — indeed, by the time they were put onto long-range rockets, and had their explosive power increased to levels impossible to replicate with conventional means, they certainly deserved to be considered a new moral problem.

Rather, the lesson is that nations do not arrive at these big decisions from a state of innocence. We gradually acclimate to the moral climate we produce from a multitude of smaller decisions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the product of one fateful moral debate, but the accumulation of a thousand small choices. We should be mindful of this especially in this age of drone assassinations, cyber attacks, and indefinite detentions — we may find ourselves in the middle of a much bigger moral morass than we expected.

This isn’t the world’s most strikingly original take on things, I’d be the first to admit. I recently had the opportunity to read a fairly lousy “defense of the bombing” editorial published by a major American magazine (same old arguments mixed with a sense of superiority abetted by a dearth of information), and the author also made the argument that firebombing was the same as atomic bombing. But what I would add to the above, if I were revising it now, was the fact that just because they’re equivalent doesn’t make either of them moral. Which is to say, I don’t think saying, “we were already burning civilians alive!” actually gets you off the hook — it just points at how depraved the strategy actually was. “But we were already committing war crimes for months!” is not a good defense against being charged as a war criminal.

What’s important for me is to recognize that burning civilians alive in great numbers should be considered a terrible idea if you care about fighting a “just war.”

And no, I don’t buy the, “but their soldiers also did awful things.” So what? That justifies burning their mothers, children, and wives? I don’t think so. It justifies killing the soldiers, sure. But everyone else, too? That’s the road to war crimes.

I’m with Robert McNamara on this one, perhaps surprisingly: I’m not sure that firebombing 67 cities and then dropping two atomic bombs was proportional with our goals in World War II, especially if the main goals — a disarmed and occupied Japan — likely could have been accomplished far earlier, if the original idea of “unconditional surrender” had just been modified to what it ended up being in practice (conditional upon being able to keep the Emperor as the titular head of state).

If it were up to me, we’d mark March 10th — the bombing of Tokyo — as an anniversary of significance as well as August 6 and August 9.

  1. Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). [↩]
  2. Sean L. Malloy, “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012), 515-545. [↩]

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Visions

Enough Fallout for Everyone

by Alex Wellerstein, published August 3rd, 2012

Nuclear fallout is an incredible thing. As if the initial, prompt effects of a nuclear bomb weren’t bad enough — take that and then spread out a plume of radioactive contamination. The Castle BRAVO accident was the event that really brought this to the public forefront. I mean, the initial effects of 15 megaton explosion are pretty stunning in and of themselves:

But the fallout plume extended for hundreds of miles:

Why yes, you can get this on a coffee mug!

Superimposed on an unfamiliar atoll, it’s hard to get a sense of how long that plume is. Put it on the American Northeast, though, and it’s pretty, well, awesome, in the original sense of the word:

Of course, it’s all about which direction the wind blows, in the end.

And remember… that’s just a single bomb!

Of course, if you’re interested in the more diffuse amounts of radioactivity — more than just the stuff that you know is probably bad for you — the fallout maps get even more interesting. Here’s what the BRAVO fallout did over the next month or so after the detonation:1

Now, you can’t see the numbers there, but they aren’t high — it’s not the same as being immediately downwind of these things. They’re low numbers… but they’re non-zero. But one of the “special” things about nuclear contaminants is that you can track them for a very long time, and see exactly how one test — or accident — in a remote area is intimately connected to the entire rest of the planet. 

And, in fact, nearly everyone born during the era of atmospheric nuclear testing had some tiny bits of fallout in their bones — you can even use it to determine how old a set of teeth are, to a very high degree of accuracy, by measuring their fallout content. (And before you think atmospheric testing is a matter of ancient history, remember that France and China both tested atmospheric nuclear weapons long after the Limited Test Ban Treaty! The last atmospheric test, by China, was in 1980!)

The same sorts of maps are used to show the dispersion of radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactors when accidents occur. I find these things sort of hypnotizing. Here are four “frames” from a simulation run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on their ARAC computer showing the dispersion of radioactivity after the Chernobyl accident in 1986:2

Chernobyl ARAC simulation, day 2

Chernobyl ARAC simulation, day 4

Chernobyl ARAC simulation, day 6

Chernobyl ARAC simulation, day 10

Pretty incredible, no? Now, the odds are that there are lots of other contaminants that, could we track them, would show similar world-wide effects. Nuclear may not be unique in the fact that it has global reach — though the concentrations of radioactivity are far higher than you’d find anywhere else — but it may be unique that you can always measure it. 

Yesterday I saw a new set of plots predicting the dispersion of Caesium-137 after the Fukushima accident from 2011. These are just models, not based on measurements; and all models have their issues, as the modelers at the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Environnement Atmosphérique (CEREA) who produced these plots acknowledge.

Here is their map for Cs-137 deposition after Fukushima. I’m not sure what the numbers really mean, health-wise, but the long reach of the accident is dramatic:

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Fukushima-Daichii accident

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Fukushima-Daichii accident by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source)

Compare with Chernobyl. (Warning: the scales of these two images are different, so the colors don’t map onto the same values. This is kind of annoying and makes it hard to compare them, though it illustrates well the local effects of Chernobyl as compared to Fukushima.)

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Chernobyl accident

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Chernobyl accident, by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source)

Lastly, they have an amazing animated map showing the plume as it expands across the Pacific. It’s about 5MB in size, and a Flash SWF, so I’m just going to link to it here. But you must check it out — it’s hypnotic, strangely beautiful, and disturbing. Here is a very stop-motion GIF version derived from their map, just to give you an incentive to see the real thing, which is much more impressive:

Fukushima-Daichii activity in the air (caesium-137, ground level) (animated)

There’s plenty of fallout for everyone — well enough to go around. No need to be stingy. And nearly seven decades into the nuclear age, there’s a little bit of fallout in everyone, too.

Update: The CEREA site seems to be struggling a bit. Here’s a locally-hosted version of the full animation. I’ll remove this when CEREA gets up and running again…

  1. Image from “Nature of Radioactive Fall-Out and Its Effects on Man, Part 1,” Hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Joint Subcommittee on Radiation (May 27-29 and June 3, 1957), on 169. [↩]
  2. These images are courtesy of the DOE Digital Archive. [↩]

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