Visions

The Sound of the Bomb (1953)

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 13th, 2012

Most films of nuclear explosions are dubbed. If they do contain an actual audio recording of the test blast itself (something I’m often suspicious of — I suspect many were filmed silently and have a stock blast sound effect), it’s almost always shifted in time so that the explosion and the sound of the blast wave are simultaneous.

This is, of course, quite false: the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound, and the cameras are kept a very healthy distance from the test itself, so in reality the blast wave comes half a minute or so after the explosion. Basic physics that even a non-technical guy like me can understand.

It’s rare to find footage where the sound has not been monkeyed with in post-processing. So I was pleased when a Russian correspondent sent me a link to footage digitized by the National Archives of a 1953 nuclear test. The footage is very raw: it hasn’t been edited much, and is a bit washed out, but the audio is still in “correct,” original sync.

Click the image to go to a YouTube edit of the video that I made. You can see the original via NARA’s page, or click here for a direct link to the WMV file (90MB).

The video starts off pretty dark and muddled, but don’t let that turn you off. What’s interesting about this clip is not the visual aspects. The test looks like any old nuclear test, but with poor film quality.

The audio is what makes this great. Put on some headphones and listen to it all the way through — it’s  much more intimate than any other test film I’ve seen. You get a much better sense of what these things must have been like, on the ground, as an observer, than from your standard montage of blasts. Murmurs in anticipation; the slow countdown over a megaphone; the reaction at the flash of the bomb; and finally — a sharp bang, followed by a long, thundering growl. That’s the sound of the bomb.1

The test itself was the ANNIE shot of Operation Upshot-Knothole, March 17, 1953. Carey Sublette reports that:

In an effort to calm public fears about weapons testing, Annie was an “open shot” – civilian reporters were permitted to view it from News Nob, 11 kilometers south of the shot-tower. Annie was a weapon development test, it was an experimental device (code named XR3) that provided additional information to normalize the yield-vs-initiation time curve. It was a Mk-5 HE assembly using a Type D pit, and used a betatron for external initiation (the third such test). Total device weight was 2700 lb, predicted yield was 15-20 kt.

There were U.S. troops there as well, as part of Operation Desert Rock V. They provide a huge amount of ambient noise. Whistles, “WHOAS!”, and “JEEZ!” follow the blast wave’s arrival.

Obviously watching a grainy black and white video on YouTube is not really going to give you that elusive sense of scale. But with a good pair of headphones, you really do get immersed in it — good audio triggers something special in the brain, above and beyond what you might expect it to do. So give it a shot, and cozy up to the real sounds of the bomb.

At the complete other end of the spectrum, there are films that the DOE has produced a number of silent nuclear test explosions… which someone thought would sound better with extremely cheesy synthesizer music behind it.

Click the image to access the MPEG file, or click here to view its entry at the DOE Nevada Site Office website.

Seriously. Wait for the “lasers.” In my experience, this is what a lot of promotional videos produced by the military look like, but I don’t know who is responsible for this particular atrocity. If you haven’t gotten enough with that one, here’s another.

Personally, I think silence is preferable to… that. The original, silent footage of the preparations for the Trinity test is much more haunting, in its way, than the many versions which add music or narration. But nothing really compares to the actual sound from the actual time — unedited.

  1. Robert Serber, on the sound of the Trinity test: “Some time later, the noise of the explosion reached us. It had the quality of distant thunder, but was louder. The sound, due to reflections from nearby hills, returned and repeated and reverberated for several seconds, very much like thunder.” [↩]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Visions | This post has footnotes | 19 Comments »

Redactions

Edward Teller on “Loyalty” (1948)

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 11th, 2012

Edward Teller’s relationship to Cold War loyalty/security hearings is, in a word, infamous. 

Teller famously was one of the few academic scientists to testify against J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954. The most damning part of Teller’s testimony was thus:

Q. To simplify the issues here, perhaps, let me ask you this question: Is it your intention in anything that you are about to testify to, to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States?

A. I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.

Q. Now, a question which is the corollary of that. Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?

A. In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.

In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.1

Personally, I’ve long thought that the flack that Teller got for this has been a bit overdone. Teller goes out of his way to keep his testimony pretty respectful and pretty mild, and was hardly the only scientist who opposed Oppenheimer. Behind the scenes Teller did a lot worse stuff than this. There’s no evidence that Teller’s testimony really directed the Gray Board or the AEC in directions they weren’t already going. Oppenheimer didn’t lose his security clearance because of Teller. He lost it because he made fairly large political enemies (much larger than Teller), and because he came off as inconsistent and problematic when he got on the witness stand.

“Don’t Fence My Baby In.” Cartoon by Bill Mauldin, Chicago Sun-Times, 1963; no doubt a reference to Teller’s opposition to the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Still, I understand why Teller gets so much opprobrium: he turned on a (former) friend, and he did so largely because of differences in intellectual opinions. This, coupled with his vigorous advocacy for excessively large weapons and extremely hawkish positions with respects to the arms race, makes him a fairly unlovable figure. But it was Teller’s association with one of the more disturbing “loyalty” hearings that really sealed his position as one of the “bad guys” of the atomic age.

So I was a bit surprised when I came across this week’s document — a letter from Teller to Norris Bradbury (Oppenheimer’s successor as the director of Los Alamos) from 1948. In it, Teller contemplates coming back to Los Alamos, at Bradbury’s request, having retreated to the University of Chicago at the end of World War II.2

Click to view PDF.

Teller was enthusiastic about coming back to the lab, even though he claimed more interest in abstract theoretical physics:

The main reason that attracts me is the great importance of the work on the atomic bomb. I fully realize the menacing international situation and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism.

Nothing surprising there — that’s classic Edward Teller for you. Fair enough. But then Teller changes course dramatically from the stereotype:

In considering my proposed position in Los Alamos during the past weeks, I have been disturbed by a problem which can be best summarized by the words “loyalty investigation.”

Wait, what? That’s right: Dr. Strangelove himself was anxious about “loyalty” getting in the way of a security clearance.

Teller continued:

I fully realize the necessity or checking improper dissemination of information. I am convinced of the necessity of checking Russian attempts to obtain classified information about atomic developments from our country. But clearance cases that have occurred in the last months have raised questions in my mind concerning the interpretation or the word “loyalty.”

I feel certain that in my actions and intentions I am loyal to the United States. More specifically I am certain that I would under no conditions want to live under a communist dictatorship and that I shall in every way try to oppose communist-world domination. This, indeed, is the reason why I consider coming to Los Alamos.

On the other hand, I do not want to lose the privilege of reading any publication about Russia — favorable or unfavorable. I consider it my right to make up my own mind about political questions and I feel that it is my intellectual duty to study all sides of a question that is as important as the question or communism. … I believe, however, that I never could understand the nature or the communist system and could never be convinced of the magnitude of communist danger it I did not inform myself of the arguments in favor of communism as well as of the reasons to reject that system. I should certainly not like to put myself into a position where it would be considered improper for me to read literature favorable to Russia or even to read publications which are Russian propaganda.

In other words, Teller is afraid that the “loyalty” will be assessed in a clunky way , by just looking at what books someone reads, or — more to the later relevance of Oppenheimer — who they “associate” with.

I furthermore do not want to be in a position where it would be necessary for me to avoid an individual merely because he is a convinced communist. It is of course clear that I never discuss classified material with any unauthorized person, whether I agree with his political views or not. In the past I have associated occasionally with individuals whom I believed to be communists. In the following I want to describe to you these cases.

Teller then describes two cases, a Mr. A and a Mr. B (he does not identify them by name), where his friends have had dubious views. He then generalizes the problem:

It is quite possible that some of my other friends or acquaintances had connections with the communist party. I have not discussed politics with all of them and some of them may have been reticent on purpose. In no other cases did I have as clearcut evidence as in those mentioned above.

I certainly do not want to feel that in order to behave properly I must scrutinize the convictions or my friends. I furthermore want to feel free that in case I know of a person that believes in communism I need not avoid him for that reason alone.

Reading Russian literature probably wouldn’t get the FBI too irritated with you, in and of itself. (Subscribing to Communist newspapers is another story.) But acquaintances were definitely a source of judgment — and Teller probably knew this, having followed the well-publicized security issues of other scientists in the late 1940s. (On these, Jessica Wang’s American Science in an Age of Anxiety remains the canonical source.)

Bradbury did write back to Teller in November. He told Teller that what he described would not be a problem… but, if Teller had the chance, the FBI would love the names of that “Mr. A” and “Mr. B” he mentioned, just in case:

This is entirely independent of the Atomic Energy Commission and is only for the purpose of making sure that the position of the United States is as strong as possible with respect to possible unfriendly individuals. The execution of this suggestion is entirely at your discretion, but you can be assured that any information of this nature which you may give the FBI would be kept entirely confidential, that your name would not be involved, and that the rights of the individual concerned would be fully protected.

Thus Teller gets off the hook, but it is not too subtly implied that a truly “loyal” citizen would provide the names. Such is the way of “loyalty” — you can associate with whomever you want… as long as you’re willing to sell them out. 

Edward Teller by Paul Shutzer for LIFE magazine (1957)

Teller isn’t unique in this respect. Oppenheimer did the same thing; anyone who was anyone in the high Cold War reported on their acquaintances. Oppenheimer’s own FBI file is full of “friends” who informed on his every opinion given at his famous cocktail parties. (Teller’s FBI file is mostly devoted to whether he is the same “Edward Teller” who once taught a class on Marxism in New York City.)

But it’s interesting to see that Teller too recoiled at the idea of “loyalty” as something that can be easily measured and assessed. And indeed, as we’ve seen above, Teller went out of his way to express his belief that Oppenheimer was in no way disloyal. But he didn’t see that as being synonymous with not being a security risk.

  1. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 710. [↩]
  2. Citation: Edward Teller to Norris Bradbury (30 August 1948), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125269. [↩]

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 9 Comments »

Meditations

Please Do Not Smoke Next to the H-bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 9th, 2012

Some sage advice, plucked from the archive, to brighten your Monday morning.

I was poking around DOE’s OpenNet site last week, as I am wont to do, and I stumbled across a fair number of documents from 1959 labeled as a “Special Weapons Retrofit Orders.”

These are basically instructions on how to make some sort of mechanical changes. So on this one, for example, the part that needs alteration is a caster — that is, a wheel:

Pretty run of the mill… until you see that the caster is mounted to a 10 megaton H-bomb. (That’s what the “special” is meant to tell you.)

…all of which makes it a bit more surreal. (That’s a Mark 21/Mark 36 casing there, for those who are keeping track at home.) I can see the importance of fixing these things — imagine if you were the one stuck with the H-bomb that had a squeaky wheel, or one that was always pulling to the right. That kind of thing gets sooo annoying.

But also, check out the “safety precautions”:

Be sure that no open flame, lighted cigarette, or other spark potential is present when the bomb is uncovered and opened or when cleaning and/or stenciling operations are being performed.

Don’t smoke near the H-bomb, please… it’s bad for your health. Also, always remember to wear rubber gloves.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Meditations | 4 Comments »

Visions

“The Manhattan Projects” (Review)

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 6th, 2012

“What if the research and development department created to produce the first atomic bomb was a front for a series of other, more unusual, programs?” Such is the apparent premise of a current comic book series from Image Comics, titled The Manhattan Projects (note the plural), written by Jonathan Hickman and pencilled by Nick Pitarra.

From The Manhattan Projects #1. History comics, these ain’t.

I say, “apparent” because, after having read the first four issues (at least three more are forthcoming), I’m not really sure that’s the best way to sum up what it’s about. It’s really more like, “What if the cast of characters from World War II research and development projects were transposed into a somewhat standard comic book science fiction setting?” Which isn’t quite the same thing.

The plot, so far as I’ve understood it so far (it is not completely linear, which is not in itself a criticism), has something to do with opening up portals between parallel universes, or something along those lines. There are also aliens. And lots and lots of robots.

Which isn’t awful, but I had expected it to be more firmly set during World War II, based on the initial description (and name), but it’s really not. What makes it feel silly is that the bomb, the V-2, and other actual World War II technologies look quite mundane and uninteresting next to cyborg implants, robot androids, all-knowing supercomputers, and, you know, dimensional warp gates. Who cares about “Little Boy” next to all of those?

Cyborg Wernher von Braun builds a rocket while Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein look on. Surely building an army of robot helpers is a lot harder than building a simple rocket? This is kind of what I’m talking about.

But if you put that all aside, and regard it instead as a comic book that happens to star otherworldly versions of Manhattan Project characters you know and love, it’s actually kind of fun. The characters often quite inspired and made this atomic historian laugh. It’s clear that Hickman did some research and took the time get really grok some of these figures.

(I should say, explicitly, that there are actually a number of graphic novels/comic books devoted to actual Manhattan Project history. The work of Jim Ottaviani stands out here. I’ll talk about those another time — this post is just about this particularly pulpy contribution.)

The Oppenheimer(s)

J. Robert Oppenheimer has been made literally fractured — his real-life weirdness, inconsistency, and occasional callousness is translated, by the logic of the comic book, into a sociopathic character with multiple personalities. It’s not a flattering depiction — he’s more psychopath than genius — but it’s more interesting than the usual “hero” and “martyr” takes on Oppenheimer.  This fractured aspect of his personality is something I’ve commented on before, so I approve of this literary flourish.

Radioactive Daghlian and alien Fermi.

Enrico Fermi is a literal alien of some sort (it isn’t yet explained) — a fitting way to explain the enemy alien‘s otherworldly genius, and one which makes the Fermi paradox all the more amusing. Harry Daghlian, the physicist who died after a criticality accident in late August 1945, lives on in the comics as an irradiated skeleton inside of a containment suit. A little poor taste.

Groves and Feynman

General Groves is more boorish, more violent, more unpleasant than ever. I can’t say I’m too thrilled with the characterization — he comes off as a generic Nick Fury, G.I. Joe sort of character. The real Groves was plenty imperial, but he also felt acutely where his power was potentially threatened (by Congress in the postwar, and he knew that the buck stopped with the President). The Groves of the comic is more or less invincible, and that’s unattractive. He’s also seriously in shape, something which, well, the General Groves of our universe was not.

Most perversely, Richard Feynman is… just Richard Feynman. In this universe, he seems (so far) totally normal. Which makes him one of the only characters played straight in the whole series. Funny, no? Feynman as the only straight man, rather than the crazy guy with the bongos.

The art is quite beautiful (as you can see), extremely well-executed, and lushly colored. Pitarra has a real talent for capturing emotions on human faces, and his characters by and large are completely recognizable when compared to their historical analogues (which is no easy thing to pull off, from looking at other drawings of historical figures).

This is what actual 1940s secret science looks like. Compare with the images above. (Via Los Alamos).

Hickman’s plot has yet to really grip me, with the exception of the characterizations. I think the writer has really done interesting things with the characters of the (real world) Manhattan Project — he’s got an eye for both detail and the big picture, and that’s a tough thing to pull off. I was somewhat surprised to read in an interview that he considers the time period of the 1940s to be a compelling aspect of the story he’s telling — the whole thing feels only tenuously set in a World War II period, and most of the scenes (see above, again) have the look of a generic comic book “laboratory” to them (e.g. the Baxter Building), which look nothing like real world scientific laboratories of the time.

Still, I haven’t quite seen anything like The Manhattan Projects — it’s a fictionalization of the Manhattan Project on a level I’d never contemplated, and is something fresh on account of that. And I’m eager to see what Hickman does with Edward Teller. You couldn’t not have Teller in this sort of universe, could you? Could you?

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Visions | 8 Comments »

Redactions

Bringing Fermi in on the Bomb (1943)

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 4th, 2012

Enrico Fermi was one of the main players in the Manhattan Project. Arguably he, even more than J. Robert Oppenheimer, could be considered the true “father of the bomb.” His work on slow neutrons drastically opened up the field of nuclear research in the 1930s, and it was these experiments which eventually led the way to Hahn, Meitner, et. al’s discovery of fission. No slouch, Fermi built the world’s first nuclear reactor, CP-1, and then went on to Los Alamos to play a key role in the development of the bomb itself. He was part of the Scientific Panel which advised that the first use of the bomb in war should be on an inhabited city. There was scarcely an aspect of the bomb’s development that Fermi didn’t have a hand in as a theorist, as an experimentalist, or as an advisor.

Enrico Fermi in Rome, mid-1930s — splitting atoms, taking names.

With such a pedigree, it can be hard to imagine that anyone ever doubted including Fermi in the Manhattan Project. But he was, you will remember, a citizen of an Axis power, Italy. True, he was one who fled Mussolini (in 1938, after receiving his Nobel Prize in Stockholm), but a citizen nonetheless. He didn’t become a naturalized U.S. citizen until 1944, well after he had begun his work on the bomb. In the early years, Fermi was, in the technical parlance, an “enemy alien.”

Fermi as alien, as featured in the new comic series, Manhattan Projects. More on this on Friday.

In the very early years of the bomb work, Vannevar Bush was unsure about bringing Fermi in. It wasn’t that Bush doubted Fermi’s loyalties — I think it would seem pretty clear that Fermi was no Fascist spy — but it wasn’t clear what the military brass would say. “The Army is going to talk about the case of Fermi… [and] I am sitting tight until I hear about these conversations. …in the interim we are not giving him information.”1 It required “a good deal of protest” for the Army to finally clear Fermi, and only on a very small part of the work being done at Columbia, and in a subordinate role. “I am not at all sure that the Army would reverse its point of view on this matter where an Italian citizen is concerned,” Bush wrote in the summer of 1941.2

Through at least the summer of 1941, both Fermi and Szilard — enemy aliens highly-connected to the project — were not even allowed to travel freely within the United States! They had 90-day permits that let them travel to specific cities (Fermi could go to New York; Washington, DC; Chicago; Beverly, Mass.; and Princeton, N.J., and that’s it), and that had to be renewed when it ran out. Arthur Compton thought this was pretty ridiculous as far as situations went; but James Conant didn’t want to push it.

Eventually Bush got around to getting Fermi full clearance, full freedom of action. Interestingly it came right at the Manhattan Project itself was ramping up, in late 1942. Fermi was one of the odd cases that Bush used to justify the need for the uranium work to have its own security system, independent of the Army and the Navy, who balked at clearing such people. (Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton were two others that he thought they’d have trouble clearing — not because of where they were from, but where they had signed their names, over the years.)

In 1943, Fermi was finally able to be fully brought in. The independence of Groves’ organization allowed him to do things that Bush’s OSRD found much more difficult. This week’s document is a letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, inviting the latter (who was at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory) to travel to Los Alamos in order to attend a three-week series of lectures on bomb design. These lectures would be later compiled into the Los Alamos Primer.3

Click for the PDF.

The main paragraph of the letter reads:

We are planning to hold a three-week conference at Los Alamos, starting probably about April 15. The purpose of the conference is to discuss the scientific problems of the Los Alamos laboratory and to define its schedules and its detailed experimental program. The background of our work is so complicated, and information in the past has been so highly compartmentalized, that it seems that we shall have a good deal to gain from a leisurely and thorough discussion. My own view is that this is likely to contribute essentially toward our carrying out our directive in the simplest and fastest way. I want very much to have you present at the conference, whether or not you will have moved permanently to the site by that time.

It’s interesting, here, that the Primer conference was in part seen as an antidote to compartmentalization. Los Alamos was originally to be as compartmentalized as the rest of the project, but Oppenheimer and others insisted that it be a bastion of scientific interchange. Within its walls, the cleared scientists could discuss problems with other cleared scientists, even if they weren’t always working on the same problems. The consequence of this, from Groves’ perspective, was that Los Alamos had to be walled off from the other sites completely — information could be sent to Los Alamos, but the flow was generally not supposed to go the other direction.

The rest of the letter continues to explain that Los Alamos is still be assembled, and that the living arrangements weren’t quite worked out. It was an understatement — Los Alamos was famous for being a mud pit of prefabricated housing during the war years.

It seems that by this point, Fermi was more or less given carte blanche — except, of course, that because he was so important to the project, he was disallowed from flying and had to have a bodyguard/chauffeur at all times. His wife, Laura, recounted later that:

The rules General Groves had set could have been chosen by a wise mother for her teen-age daughter. Enrico was not to walk by himself in the evening, nor was he to drive without escort to the newly built Argonne Laboratory twenty miles from our home.4

Even in 1944, however, Manhattan Project officials worried that Fermi might want to return to Italy after the war — with their secrets. It didn’t happen.

One wonders if, had the suspicion and paranoia gotten their way, and all people of German, Hungarian, or Italian descent had been cut out of the bomb project, whether it would have worked. Personally, I doubt it. Cut out Fermi, Bethe, Szilard, Teller, Wigner, Segrè, and Fuchs (yes, even Fuchs, who, for all his spying, was actually an important contributor)  and you end up with quite a gutted Los Alamos.

It would have been a curious irony if, having fled Fascism in Europe, they found themselves too suspicious to employ in the United States.

  1. Vannevar Bush to Carroll Wilson (30 September 1940), Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, microfilm publication M1392, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., n.d. (ca. 1990), Roll 2, Target 4, Folder 9, “S-1 British Relations Prior to Interim Committee [Fldr.] No. 1 [1942].” [↩]
  2. Vannevar Bush to Frank B. Jewett (9 July 1941), Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, microfilm publication M1392, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., n.d. (ca. 1990), Roll 8, Target 7, Folder 91, “J (1941-44).” [↩]
  3. J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi (11 March 1943), via the Los Alamos National Laboratory website. [↩]
  4. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the family: My life with Enrico Fermi (Los Angeles, Calif.: Tomash Publishers, 1987 [1954]), 212. [↩]

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 6 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »