Visions

The Hair of Physicists (1930s)

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 22nd, 2012

Sam Schweber’s book, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000), is a classic dual-biography of two physicists close to the dark atomic arts. I read Sam’s book very early on in my bomb-history career, and have also had the pleasure of spending some time around Sam when we shared an office for a year while I taught at Harvard.

Castle ROMEO: Providing cover photographs for nuclear books since at least the 1980s.

Sam’s basic argument, to put it bluntly, is that J. Robert Oppenheimer was terribly inconsistent when it came to acting like an ethical human being, and his attempt to fly as high as possible led to his being burnt. Hans Bethe, on the other hand, did have some moments of considerable ethical wavering (his stance on the H-bomb being the most well-known), but generally speaking stood up for the right side of things and was far more consistent about his ethics.

I think it’s a fascinating book; for me, it helped draw attention to the aspects of Oppenheimer’s actions and character that get lost in the standard “martyr to McCarthyism” narrative. Oppenheimer was kind of a jerk — famously so. And he didn’t really take any kind of principled stand against the military-industrial complex: he was entirely complicit with it and always looking for a way to cooperate. Even his stance against building the H-bomb was 1. conditioned by the fact that he thought it would detract from an amassing a huge tactical weapons stockpile, and 2. dissipated the moment he saw the H-bomb as being technically feasible. This isn’t to say he was the worst of the bunch, but his reputation as principled opposition of the bomb is misattributed.

Bethe, on the other hand, managed to not only be more principled about his opposition to the H-bomb (except when he decided to work on it, but, as Sam emphasizes, this was originally because he hoped to show it was impossible), he also parlayed his security clearance into a life’s work of being an insider critic of US nuclear policies. He was also, by all accounts, not a jerk.

(Interesting factoid I will someday return to: I have a FOIA’d copy of Bethe’s FBI file. It is 500 pages of love from other physicists, plus occasional, accidental security breaches on Bethe’s part. A remarkable document in its lack of innuendo or scuttlebutt.)

Sam compared Oppenheimer and Bethe in terms of their ethics and behaviors. Since this is a blog, and it is Friday, I want to compare them by a different, perhaps more frivolous metric: their hairstyles in the 1930s. Because both young Oppenheimer and young Bethe rocked some considerable hair back in the days before the bomb.

All of the below images come from the amazing Emilio Segrè Visual Archives at the American Institute of Physics — my employer. These are very low-resolution versions of the images in question; the high-res files are impressively detailed. It is one of the perks of the job that I can look through these images; if you’re ever doing anything where you need an image of a physicist, definitely go to the ESVA first.

All right, let’s start with Oppenheimer:

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1928. Even his hair was left-leaning at that point in time! Har-dee-har-har.

Before he was running the scientific side of the atomic bomb project, Oppenheimer had a pretty impressive mound of hair. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Oppenheimer tried pretty hard to look like a badass theoretical physicist.

“Are you talkin’ to me…. about muons?”

And hey, let’s admit it — he pulled it off. Not even 30, he had two professorships, one at the University of California (Berkeley), the other at Cal Tech. He was one of the only theoretical physicists in the country who was worth a damn at that point in time. He knew his stuff, and he wanted you to know he knew it.

Physicist, horse-rider, and fellow-traveler.

The hair really does work for the image.

Bethe’s hair at the time was also pretty wild. Two of my favorite photos of him, both from a 1935 “Summer School” at Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Edward Condon, I.I. Rabi, Hans Bethe, and unknown; 1935.

Bethe’s hair, at this point, bore a not-inconsiderable resemblance to the mushroom cloud on the cover of Sam’s book up there.

Hans Bethe and Jenny Rosenthal Bramley, 1935.

Bethe generally smiled in his photos, though. He wasn’t broody like Oppenheimer was; one gets the sense that he just didn’t cut his hair as often as he could have, not that he was making a big fashion statement. He looks like he would have been a fun guy to be around; he’s not staring you down in the photos the way Oppenheimer does.

(Jenny Rosenthal Bramley, though, also had some pretty great hair. Let’s give a cheer to a not-very-well-known physicist, one of only a handful of women with physics Ph.D.s in the U.S. at the time. You’d think she’d warrant at least a Wikipedia article, eh?)

Alright, you’re asking — where’s the meaningful historigraphical comment, here? It’s just this: both Oppenheimer and Bethe had some precedence with the “theoretical physicists can have crazy hair” trend, of course. Another guy had somewhat beat them to that punch already:

“Go big, or go home.” — Not Albert Einstein

It would be a bit ridiculous to claim that many theoretical physicists at this time had crazy hair. They didn’t. As far as I can tell, most of the others had pretty conservative hair. Most of them would blend in fine with a business crowd.

But, again, there is some precedence for looking a little wild-eyed in the 1930s — and you could get away with it, because nobody thought theoretical physics was going to add up to much. It was a head-in-a-cloud, never-going-to-be-relevant field of study. Muons and deuterons? What good are those?

Case-in-point, Einstein’s two pre-1945 covers of Time magazine:

On the left is February 1929, on the right is April 1938.

In both of these, Einstein — even then the world’s most famous physicist — is basically sitting around in what looks like his pajamas. He might be thinking deep thoughts, but they’re tagged as deeply irrelevant thoughts.

(One interesting discovery: the ESVA has a copy of the photograph that the painting from 1938 is based on. In the high-res version, you can see that he’s not wearing silk pajamas, as the cover somewhat implies. He’s actually wearing a strange leather outfit. Somewhat unexpected. My wife says, “It’s like a leather Mao jacket.”)

The bomb changed all of this. Theoretical physicists became perceived as unbearably relevant — even deadly. Both Oppenheimer and Bethe started cropping their hair more closely.

Oppenheimer and Bethe ca. 1945

Oppenheimer’s hair would only get shorter over time during his time of government tenure — perhaps a nice visual illustration of Schweber’s thesis of his moral capitulation? Bethe’s varied quite a bit over the years, though it was never quite as voluminous as it was in his more carefree days.

As for Einstein… well, the old rebel’s hair only got more unruly over time. But after the bomb, at least, they did get him to occasionally put on a suit — if only for another cover of Time.

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Redactions

Bethe argues against the MIKE test (1952)

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 20th, 2012

Hans Bethe's Los Alamos ID badgeTo say that Hans Bethe was a fascinating character would be something of colossal understatement. His stance on the hydrogen bomb is one of the most enigmatic: in early 1950, he strongly lobbied against Truman’s “crash” program. Two weeks after Truman’s announcement on the H-bomb (and the unveiling of Klaus Fuchs, which was almost simultaneous), Bethe wrote to the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, explaining that:

The announcement of the President has not changed my feelings in this matter. I still believe that it is morally wrong and unwise for our National security to develop this weapon. … The main point is that I can not in good conscience work on this weapon.1

But, for complicated reasons that Sam Schweber has discussed in his classic book, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, 2000), Bethe eventually changed his position and played a key role in the development of the Super bomb. Why? Initially he hoped that he could prove that it couldn’t be done — which was certainly the case with Teller’s initial “Classical Super” plan that so much effort was expended on. But it was not long until a better way was found. (Sam’s newest book, Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe, covers Bethe’s earlier years. I’ve no doubt it’s a good read.)

On Monday, I indicated that I really think that US could have not ordered an H-bomb crash program in1950 and come out pretty well on top of things even if the Soviets had roared ahead with their own program. Last Wednesday, I talked about how the test of the first H-bomb in November 1952, Ivy MIKE, leaked out almost immediately, despite attempts to keep it secret.

For today, I want to share a document in between these two dates: a letter by Hans Bethe, written to Gordon Dean, from September 1952. Bethe’s subject: why the US should postpone the testing of MIKE.2

Click for the PDF.

Why would Bethe want the first H-bomb not to be tested? Interestingly, it wasn’t because of any argument about the arms race — perhaps not a surprise, given that by this time, Bethe was firmly of the position that the H-bomb was “inevitable” since it did appear to be workable.

No, it was about Politics with a capital “P.” The Operation Ivy test schedule was for November 1 — just three days before voting day in the 1952 Presidential election. In Bethe’s view, this was too close:

Ever since I came here [Los Alamos] last February, I have been concerned about the choice of the date for the thermonuclear test, November 1. …

The first danger is, of course, that this test might in some manner be injected into the election campaign. I do not believe that the Presidential candidates themselves would do so but there are many others that might, for instance members of Congress or newspaper columnists. If the test is carried out on November 1, if it is successful, and if this fact becomes known, the danger is very great that it will be used as campaign material. 

Now I don’t believe that it will be an effective argument in the campaign; in fact, I think it is unpredictable which party would benefit from it, regardless of how or by whom the topic is raised. But I am worried that some politicians of either party might believe that it would help their side. We all know that emotions run high in a campaign, especially towards its close. Demagogic statements may be made at such a time which the speaker himself will later regret.

But this short term problem was only part of the problem:

The least of the troubles which would arise from such speeches is that they might make atomic energy and atomic weapons a partisan issue. Much more serious is the possibility that the public would be led to believe that the accomplishment of a thermonuclear reaction had made us invincible, that we could now take chances in foreign policy and perhaps even risk a major war. It would take a long time to correct this impression, and in trying to do so, we would be unable to use some of the most potent arguments because they are classified. A few words said in the heat of battle can thus do permanent damage to the public attitude on this matter.

So this is an interesting connection to make: the use of the H-bomb as a talking point in the heat of an election could lead to a complete misunderstanding of the H-bomb itself. Note that it’s not an argument for secrecy: it’s an argument against testing the first H-bomb in the middle of an election. 

Courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

But “the most important reaction” in Bethe’s view would be that of the international community:

If our test becomes publicly known, and I think the chances for this are enhanced if it is held during the election campaign, it will undoubtedly give food to the Communist propaganda machine. This propaganda is apt to be quite effective because I believe that the knowledge of a successful thermonuclear test will create fear in the countries of Western Europe rather than confidence. A few belligerent or merely incautious remarks by some people in this country will play into the hands of Communist propaganda by convincing many otherwise friendly people abroad that this is an important step towards our starting a war. “Neutralism” will be  strengthened, to an extent that it may influence the policy of European governments and become very hard to deal with. There is of course no guarantee that inappropriate remarks will not be made outside of a campaign, but the danger is much greater during it.

The connection between this and the domestic election, again, is that the election season would make the chances of a leak — and sensationalism — much higher than any other point in time. (Bethe also notes that this isn’t just about the Presidential candidates — there were plenty of Congressmen up for re-election as well.)

Bethe also thought that a leak was going to be likely whenever you had the test, because, frankly, it’s hard to keep something as big as an H-bomb a secret.

If there is no disclosure, the test may still become public knowledge because of large fall-outs, visual observations from Kwajalein, or possibly observations of shock or seismic phenomena. Whichever may be the method of revelation, the evidence of a test with enormous yield combined with a lot of previous discussion in the columns of newspapers will almost undoubtedly lead the public to the right conclusion.

At the very least, Bethe thought it should be postponed until November 5, the day after the election, if not longer. (Bethe’s ideal date was November 15.)

The rest of the letter concerns whether the Presidential candidates should be informed about the prospective test. Bethe figures this should be easy; both Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were trustworthy figures. Bethe thought Oppenheimer would be a great guy to give them the head’s up.

Bethe could see only benefit to delaying it. Changing the date of the shot might increase the chances slightly of bad weather, but not much. “The effect of a postponement by two weeks or a month on the general thermonuclear program of the Laboratory would be almost unnoticeable.”

As we know, this suggestion went unheeded… and the news of the test did leak almost immediately to the press.

Well, it was a little conspicuous.

But… surprisingly, none of the leaks hit the newspapers until November 7, 1952, when a story by Elton C. Fay went out on the AP wire.3 (Eye-witness stories began running on November 8.4)

It’s hard not to see this as anything other than restraint on behalf of those at the press who had known about the success of Ivy MIKE within hours of the test. And here Bethe thought they couldn’t keep a secret! Well, they could keep it for almost a week, anyway.

Curiously, an event did happen in between that time that engendered H-bomb speculation — and it didn’t have anything to do with the election, or even the H-bomb test itself. On November 4, 1952, a massive 9.0 earthquake occurred off of Kamchatka, the Russian peninsula north of Japan. The result was a tsunami for Japan and 13 foot waves in Hawaii. It was the third-largest earthquake of the 20th century, according to USGS.

Kamchatka quake map (Daily Boston Globe, November 5, 1952)

At least one major newspaper’s story about the quake was devoted to speculation as to whether it was a hydrogen bomb or not:

A senior Canadian Government scientist said it is not impossible that the earthquake was in reality the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. “It’s one possibility,” he said, but it’s pretty well down the list. It’s theoretically possible, but pretty hard to believe. I’m assuming it’s an earthquake until something else is proved.”5

Of course, in that instance, it would be far more likely to be a Soviet bomb than an American one (unless the Americans were getting exceedingly bold), but in any case, it’s an interesting coincidence — one that, with a little prodding, could have revealed the fact that an H-bomb had in fact been tested in the Pacific only a few days before.

Read the footnotes to this post to see the leaked, eye-witness account of MIKE…

  1. Hans Bethe to Gordon Dean (14 February 1950), copy in the Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125241. [↩]
  2. Citation: Hans Bethe to Gordon Dean (9 September 1952), copy in the Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0409418. [↩]
  3. The Fay story appeared under different headlines — and sometimes without a by-line — in many newspapers, e.g. “H-Bomb Test Explosion in Pacifc Hinted,” Los Angeles Times (7 November 1952), 1. [↩]
  4. The anonymous “eye-witness account” is pretty wonderful, in and of itself. From a version of the story carried in the Washington Post:

    The blast, the letter said, was viewed through dark glasses and “appeared a huge orange ball, which grew larger and brighter until it appeared as if no dark glasses where there at all.”

    Intense heat was felt almost immediately, the writer continued, adding:

    “The ball of fire started to rise and slowly lose its intensity. We took off our glasses and saw water vapor suddenly form around the column. Then it rushed into the base of the column and up, clearing the air so that you could see countless tons of water rushing skyward.

    “The column went up and up and finally mushroomed. About three minutes later the report, like a nearby cannon shot, hit us and was followed by several seconds of dull rumbling . . .

    “All we could do was stand there and gasp in amazement and awe at the enormous size and force released before us. Typical comment from old timers: ‘Holy cow! That sure makes the A-bomb a runt.’

    “And so I saw the first H-bomb explode.”

    “‘First H-bomb Blast’ Described in Letter,” Washington Post (9 November 1952), M7. [↩]

  5. “13-Foot Hawaii Waves Follow Siberia Quake,” Daily Boston Globe (5 November 1952), 1. [↩]

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Meditations

What If Truman Hadn’t Ordered the H-bomb Crash Program?

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 18th, 2012

The debate over the hydrogen bomb is one of my favorite Cold War episodes. I keep coming back to it, both on the blog and in my research. I’d posit that it is in many ways a lot more interesting than the debates about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why? Because at the time of the Second World War, there was actually very little debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You basically had the Franck Report and the Targeting Committee; the former said, “don’t drop it,” and the latter replied, “who cares what you think? We’re dropping it.” As many have pointed out, the whole idea that there was a conscious “decision to drop the atomic bomb” is a bit off — it doesn’t appear that anybody who had the authority to drop the bomb agonized over the question before dropping it. What agonizing there was mostly came after the fact.

The H-bomb was something else, though. This was a technical possibility that had been seen long before the weapon was capable of being built, and there actually was a period of serious behind-the-scenes and later public debate over whether it should be built, in an era where the potential guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still palpable. A lot of scientists saw the hydrogen bomb as an opportunity for the moral debate they never had about the atomic bomb, and that makes it, to me, a much more interesting co-mingling of visions of the past and fears of the future.

The ultimate “What If?“ of the atomic bomb is, “what if they didn’t drop the bomb?” The ultimate “What If?” of the H-bomb is, what if Truman hadn’t ordered the crash program in late January 1950? 

The common Cold War argument was one of technological inevitability: if the H-bomb could be built, it would be built. This was then mixed with an existential plea: it would have been “intolerable” for the USSR to have an H-bomb and the USA not to. But let’s shelve these common arguments for a minute, because, while interesting, they obscure a somewhat more basic factual question about what would have happened. I think that the incredible US superiority in both fission bombs and in delivery mechanisms would have easily deterred an H-bomb attack from the USSR, personally, and there are lots of ways to imagine the could/would transition could be avoided or stalled, but frankly, I think both of those questions are actually irrelevant to what would have occurred. 

There’s a brief timeline that we all have to know to be on the same page here, so let’s just throw it out in bulleted form:

  • August 1949: USSR tests its first bomb in a test the US dubs “Joe-1.” The US detects it in September. Secret debate begins within US government over whether an H-bomb should be built. Debate leaks to public by end of 1949.
  • Late January 1950: Truman announces publicly that the Atomic Energy Commission should work to build an H-bomb.
  • March 1951: Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam figure out how to make a multi-megaton H-bomb.
  • May 1951: The basic principle of the Teller-Ulam design is tested at the Greenhouse GEORGE test in the Pacific Ocean. Also tested is Greenhouse ITEM, a “boosted” bomb whereby a tiny amount of fusion fuel is used to improve the efficiency of a fission bomb. “Boosted” bombs greatly increase the yield of existing weapons and/or allow you to make more weapons with less fissile material.
  • November 1952: The US tests its first Teller-Ulam style H-bomb, Ivy MIKE (10 Mt). It also tests Ivy KING, the largest pure-fission weapon ever built (500 kt; half a megaton). The Ivy MIKE device is a proof-of-concept; it weighed over 50 tons. (A handful of  potentially-deliverable prototypes were made based on the design, but it isn’t clear whether they were considered reliable.)
  • August 1953: The USSR tests “Joe-4,” a nuclear weapon that involves some fusion reactions but was not a “true” H-bomb. It was a very big bomb (400 kt, still less than the all-fission Ivy KING), but the design could not be scaled into the megaton range. Still, a big bomb, and it could be dropped from existing Soviet bombers.
  • March 1954: The US begins a test series of deliverable high-yield thermonuclear weapons, Operation Castle. Castle BRAVO, the first test in the series, was considerably larger in yield than was expected (15 Mt) and was one of the worst radiological accidents in US testing history. The US now has weaponized H-bombs in the multi-megaton range.
  • November 1955: The USSR tests its own multi-megaton H-bomb for the first time (RDS-37); it is deliverable.

That’s the history we’re really concerned with. Herbert York, in 1975, wrote an article in Scientific American about this question, the gist of which was later published as a book, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). Most of the book and article concern the October 1950 report by the AEC’s General Advisory Committee which was unfavorable to the idea of building the H-bomb and led to Oppenheimer’s security hearing some years later. But what I really love about the Scientific American article, as opposed to the book that came out, are his illustrated timelines.1

The above is a modified version of the Scientific American timeline, and describes the events shown up above in bullet points. I’ve added a few small things to it — the period of the H-bomb debate itself (the endpoint is Truman’s announcement; the debate technically goes on after that though it is a pretty done deal from a policy perspective), and the asterisk on the US “side” of the timeline shows when the US learned the Teller-Ulam idea, and the asterisk on the Soviet side is supposedly when the USSR figured it out for themselves. (Exactly when the Soviets actually figured it out, and how, is a matter of some continuing dispute.) The colors indicate the bomb type as indicated by the chart (they are not as distinct in the scan as the original), and the size of the circles indicate relative yield.

I like two things about this timeline. The first is that it shows how relatively close these events were to one another — two years (say, 1950 to 1952, or 1952 to 1954) seems like a long time until you stack it up like this, when it seems almost immediate. But the other thing comes what York (or, rather, the graphics editors at Scientific American, who worked quite independently from the authors at this period of time) does next: he proposes alternate possibilities.

Let’s imagine, says, York, that Truman doesn’t order an H-bomb built. What’s the most probable outcome? Here’s what he gives in response (I’ve modified this to fit onto the “original” timeline above; in York’s it is a series of branching timelines):

In York’s view, this “most probable alternative world,” without the Truman decision, the US would still have developed ITEM (the “boosted” bomb) and KING (the all-fission bomb, which he says would have likely even been tested earlier, since the tempo of Operation Ivy was set by the time it took to get MIKE together). Let’s imagine the Soviets still tested “Joe-4,” which was, again, not a “true” multi-megaton H-bomb. York thinks that at that point, the US would have then initiated a “crash” H-bomb project, and pulled off a GEORGE-like test in late 1954, and probably a full-scale H-bomb in 1955 or 1956. (The MIKE/BRAVO distinction is whether it would have been liquid or solid fueled; hard-to-deliver or easier-to-deliver.)

Interestingly, York also thinks that the Soviets’ development of a multi-megaton H-bomb would have been delayed. Why? Because in his view they got a lot of “stimulus” from the 1952 test, knowing that it was possible to work in the first place. Once you know something is achievable, for whatever reason, you end up finding the solution pretty quickly. (This is not unlike, but not quite the same thing, as the technological inevitability argument.) There is also (but York doesn’t propose this) the possibility that the MIKE shot more directly helped the USSR in the way of fallout, as was speculated by Daniel Hirsch and William G. Mathews in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists awhile back now.2 The Soviets later claimed that they bungled the fallout analysis, but one never really knows.

So in York’s “most probable” scenario, the US still would have had a real H-bomb well before the USSR. It’s hard to see “Joe-4” as creating a strong strategic imbalance, especially since the US still would have had a bomb that big ready to go (KING).  OK, York says, maybe that’s optimistic. What’s the worst possible scenario? Another timeline:

In this timeline, we use the “real world” Soviet testing timeline with the “most probable” US reaction timeline. The result is that the Soviets have their first H-bomb at just about the same time that the US would have had one. That is, even in the worst-case scenario, the US and the USSR more or less have multi-megaton H-bombs at the same time. Not much imbalance to be held, especially if you take it into account that the US still had a huge advantage in fission weapons (3057 to 200 in 1955) and deliverability (bases in close proximity, long-range bombers).

All of these scenarios, of course, presume that the USSR would have soldiered on ahead with the H-bomb even if the US had renounced building it. That is, these are by definition all pessimistic scenarios — and none of them are that bad. One wonders what truly optimistic scenarios would have looked like!

The first “true” Soviet H-bomb test, 1955.

I like this way of using the timelines, though it flattens a lot. Would Teller and Ulam have come up with the Teller-Ulam idea without the Truman “crash” program? There’s a lot to unpack there in terms of chronology — they didn’t come up with it by just sitting around idly. Did the “crash” program really speed up development? A big, deep, difficult question. (In other words, are the asterisks on the modified “real” timeline actually fixed positions or are they relative to other things, and if so, to what?)

But still, even while this timeline approach doesn’t quite cover all the bases, I still think it helps us play with the dates here a bit better, and visually play with the possibilities (“most probable” and “worst possible”) in a provocative way. The “flattening” effect of the timeline is by design. I’m all for thick description (as you can tell), but sometimes there’s an analytical advantage to being able to smooth things out to try and see the big pictures.

I’m more or less convinced that the world wouldn’t have ended if Truman hadn’t ordered the H-bomb’s development. Heck, even if the USSR did have exclusive possession of multi-megaton H-bombs, I still don’t see it affecting the strategic situation in a completely “intolerable” way — I don’t see the USA ever thinking its fission deterrent wasn’t able to deter. But the beauty of this way of thinking about it is that you don’t even have to have that discussion, really, because it’s not clear that possibility was ever on the table.

  1. Herbert York, “The Debate over the Hydrogen Bomb,” Scientific American 233 (October 1975), 106-113. A copy is reprinted in York’s Arms and the Physicist, for those who don’t have access to Scientific American back issues. [↩]
  2. Daniel Hirsch and William G. Mathews, “The H-bomb: Who Really Gave Away the Secret?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 46, no. 1 (January 1990), 22-30. [↩]

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Visions

Semipalatinsk Then and Now

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 15th, 2012

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about American nuclear tests on this blog, but of course that’s only part of the story of our nuclear world. If ever there was an argument for making nuclear history global, testing easily provides it: what was tested atmospherically in the USSR ended up over here, what was tested atmospherically in the US ended up over there. No doubt much was learned on both sides from a mutual exchange of fallout.

“Map predicting where the Soviet explosion might have happened if it took place on 29 August, the numbers indicating percentage probability. This was the actual date of the explosion, although US officials believed it was more likely to have happened on 27 August.” Originally from the files of the National Security Files, copy and quote from Michael Gordin’s Red Cloud at Dawn.

A colleague and friend of mine at Princeton University, Michael Gordin (@GordinMichael), has written an excellent book on the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949. Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2010). I co-wrote a review of it with Sam Schweber as part of a round table (with Bart Bernstein and Ethal Pollack, with responses by Michael) in Metascience last year.

Michael does at least two things extremely well in this book. The first is the obvious work of the book itself, it’s main story. Michael’s book is a wonderful dual-history of the bomb, showing the back-and-forth between the American and the Soviet bomb projects. If you’re looking for a single book to bring up to date on the most interesting tidbits about the Soviet use of its espionage into “ENORMOZ” (as they called the Manhattan Project), Michael’s book is a great one-stop shop.

Stalin and Truman at Potsdam, July 18, 1945: one day after Truman learned about the success of “Trinity,” but still six days before Truman would tell Stalin. But Stalin already knew about the bomb, and had known about it longer than Truman had.

But what makes this account really wonderful, and a really great work of history of science, is the way in which he reconstructs all of the work that went into making the knowledge of the Soviet bomb “real” — that is, how the US knew it had happened in the first place, which was no simple thing (they had to set up a sprawling and difficult fallout monitoring plan from scratch) — and then all of the considerations and debates that went into making it public. Truman’s first inclination was not to announce to the world that the Soviets had a bomb; he only did it, in the end, because he feared the Soviets would beat him to the punch and subsequent propaganda coup. It turns out that Stalin had no plans to announce they had the bomb — he saw no reason in giving anything away. (A book that the US would start taking pages from around the same time.)

The second thing that Michael does well that I hadn’t seen done before was to give you a real sense of what the Soviets were up to when they staged that first test. “First Lightning,” as they dubbed it, was a far more elaborate operation than “Trinity.” It was not a rushed proof-of-concept test in the way that the first American test was; it had considerably more infrastructure and instrumentation. The goal was not just to see whether the bomb had worked, but to really get down what the effects were at the same time.

“The test tower for First Lightning.” They even had an elevator to move the bomb to the top! And here you thought of the USSR as lacking in luxury. Source: V. Zhuchikhin, Pervaia atomnaia: Zapiski inzhenera-issledovatelia (Moscow: IzdAT, 1993), 85, via Red Cloud at Dawn.

The first Soviet bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk Experimental Proving Ground — also known as “Polygon No. 2” — in the steppes of Kazakhstan. To quote from Michael:

The Soviet test dwarfed the TRINITY test in terms of preparations and scale. Unlike the Alamogordo explosion, which was conducted by the Army under the extreme time pressures of the late stages of the war,  Beria and Kurchatov began preparing for the test a full three years before it happened. Construction of the experimental “polygon” … began by late 1946, and the Ministry of Defense, which directed the effort, had spent 185 million rubles (in 1945 rubles) by 1949. There was even a miniature copy of the polygon at Arzamas-16, so that small-scale replicas of the eventual test could be modeled with conventional explosions (analogous to the American 100-ton test). It was, at the time, one of the most highly instrumented and well prepared scientific experiments ever performed.

As Michael notes, all American civil defense estimates derived from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at that time (as well as Crossroads for effects on ships, of course); the Soviets were doing tests that the US wouldn’t do until the 1950s. Fifteen thousand Soviets constructed the sprawling test site, which covered over 18,000 square kilometers. (Beria, of course, was Lavrenty Beria, overall head of the project, secret-police head, architect of Stalin’s purges, serial rapist, and all-around complete jerk; Kurchatov was Igor Kurchatov, top scientist on the bomb project, had a big beard.)

“Schematic of the layout of the Semipalatinsk test site.” Source: V.
Zhuchikhin, Pervaia atomnaia: Zapiski inzhenera-issledovatelia (Moscow: IzdAT, 1993), 71, via Michael Gordin. This image was in the initial draft of Red Cloud at Dawn but was cut for space. I don’t have the full legend for it, but the large amount of text says something like, “structures for optical and mechanical measurements.” “Ris. 2” means “figure 2.”

Michael also passes on this quote from David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb (also an excellent book if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of the Soviet project) which is too amusing not to reproduce:

In deciding on who was to receive which award [after the completion of the first atomic test], Beria is said to have adopted a simple principle: those who were to be shot in case of failure were now to become Heroes of Socialist Labor; those who would have received maximum prison sentences were to be given the Order of Lenin, and so on down the list. This story may well be apocryphal, but it nevertheless conveys the feeling of those in the project that their fate hinged on the success of the test.

Ah, that Beria! To appropriate a line from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (which is now, very recently, available in Kindle format, which is really an ideal way to read this amazing but hefty book): “This ought to be shown in a film comedy, but they wouldn’t allow it: there is nothing funny in our life; everything funny takes place in the West!” Michael also notes that another physicist had been asked by Beria to be Kurchatov’s “understudy,” with the implicit understanding that he would take over if Kurchatov failed and was shot. Oy.

The mushroom cloud from “First Lightning.” Darker and more ominous than your standard “Trinity” photographs.

The Soviets would conduct over 450 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk over the course of the Cold War. Today the site is predictably polluted and its soils contain all sorts of heavy actinides (e.g. plutonium) that nobody really is happy about being there. The US has spent a lot of money — money well spent, in my opinion, when it comes to buying security — helping seal the place up to keep out scavengers or worse.

Earlier this week Carole Gallagher passed on this amazing footage of Semipalatinsk today. It’s worth a watch, especially in light of the above:

One thing that I was struck by in the above footage is how they keep mentioning that scavengers had been stripping the place of metal. It’s not an isolated incident — even the shot tunnels that were supposedly safely sealed were almost immediately breached by people looking for copper wire (no matter how radioactive it is).

This is disturbing on two levels: the immediate level, whereby having people going through radioactive muck at Semipalatinsk looking for metal is not exactly a great testimony to the specific safeguards put in place there. The US quickly spent a bunch more money trying to seal them up again (which, again, is a good thing). But in the long term, it says quite a lot about our ability to keep dangerous nuclear things safely plugged away, unwatched. I’m not especially optimistic.

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Redactions

The Ivy MIKE leak

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 13th, 2012

On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb.1 Shot MIKE of Operation Ivy was the culmination of nearly a decade of work on developing thermonuclear weapons, and it released an explosive force equivalent to 10.4 million tons of TNT — some 800 times the explosive force of Hiroshima, capable of setting fire to an area of over a thousand square miles. 

The world had entered the megaton age, but the United States didn’t want anybody to know about it.

Which is an odd thing, if you think about it. It’s true, the first atomic bomb test — “Trinity” — had been kept a secret at the time. But only because the U.S. planned to use it on Japan quickly and wanted it to be a surprise. There was no “operational” reason for keeping the MIKE test a secret, except for the fact that, well, it wasn’t actually really ready for prime-time, as far as weapons went. MIKE was a big, clunky cryogenic test apparatus that weighed over 50 tons. It had been designed (by Dick Garwin) to prove a point, not to fit on an airplane. They did manage to scale it down a bit as five “Emergency Capability” weapons (the “Jughead” bombs), but these required specialized plane modifications to field (and only one plane was so modified), and even then, one wonders how reliable they were considered. (And even these weren’t produced until 1954, shortly before the U.S. developed more easily weaponized solid-fuel hydrogen bombs.)

Still, one might ask again why the U.S. tried to keep it secret, and from whom. The thing is, keeping it secret from the USSR just wasn’t an option: when you set off 10 megatons in the Pacific Ocean, people are going to notice. Now, it’s true that the Soviets later claimed that they botched their fallout monitoring program at that stage of things (and thus apparently were unable to analyze the MIKE fallout to the degree that would have revealed fundamental design information, thus saving Soviet dignity when they came up with the same idea independently!),2 but it’s clear that they were aware that something big had happened in the Pacific Ocean. And the only thing that big would have been an H-bomb.

When your nuclear test involves vaporizing an entire island, it’s a bit hard to keep it secret.

The secrecy of the H-bomb has long been an interest of mine, because it was instituted so early (Truman put the AEC under a “gag” on discussing H-bomb topics in 1950, which they struggled to get reversed), and persisted for a relatively long time (the US didn’t officially admit to having H-bombs until 1954, after the Castle BRAVO accident) despite the weighty subject matter. Information on the Ivy Mike shot wasn’t released until nearly two years after it was detonated, which is a long time to try and keep something that big secret!

Who were they trying to keep it from? Well, everybody. The timing and circumstances of MIKE were not politically ideal. It was detonated just days before the 1952 Presidential election, and there was considerable question to whether it should be delayed until after the election took place. In the end it was decided that delaying it would be a politically tricky thing, so they just went ahead with it when they were ready. Truman didn’t make it a political issue, though he easily could have. When President-elect Eisenhower was briefed on it, he was relieved that the AEC hadn’t told anybody, because he didn’t want to tip off the Russians to anything whatsoever.3 All that was immediately let out was a terse statement that admitted that the test series “the test program included experiments contributing to thermonuclear weapons research” — the same thing they had said after Operation Greenhouse. From that point until the Operation Castle debacle it just never seemed like the right time to say anything.

Of course, as I said, you can’t really keep something that large truly secret. And indeed — Ivy MIKE leaked almost immediately. Thus we turn to this week’s document, a series of AEC correspondence by Morris Salisbury, their public relations officer, Gordon Dean, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and J. Edgar Hoover, infamous head of the FBI.4

Click for PDF.

Only a few hours after the first H-bomb detonation, the AEC public relations man got a call from someone at the Department of Defense who had got off the phone with Clay Blair, Jr., at Life magazine wanting to confirm that the US had indeed just detonated a hydrogen bomb. Just prior to that, they had gotten another phone call from Time magazine:

Hobbing [Time]: Is this the big day?
Thompson [AEC]: Why don’t you tell me? What are you talking about?
Hobbing: We understand that the H-bomb has just been set off.
Thompson: We have a standard policy of no comment about weapons tests. We haven’t anything to say in that field.
Hobbing: Aren’t you getting out a release, don’t you usually issue releases after you have made a shot?
Thompson: We have at times issued releases or statements after a shot in Nevada. We have never followed such procedure on tests at Eniwetok.
Hobbing: Don’t you have any releases coming out there this afternoon?
Thompson: I don’t know offhand. I’ll have to check.
Hobbing: I mean about H-bombs.
Thompson: No.

A not entirely compelling performance on behalf of the AEC representative, there. Dean opted to have the FBI try and track down the source of the leak — the exact place and time of the shot was considered extremely sensitive information (because it would help the Soviets reconstruct information from the fallout), and the fact that it involved an H-bomb at all meant that it was “restricted data” (the unauthorized dissemination of which could even carry the death penalty).

Over the course of the week the story made its way into the press — and the AEC’s secrecy on the issue itself became a main part of the story.

Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1952 — The story starts to rear its head (center page).

“The United States may be keeping secret an explosion of the world’s first full-scale hydrogen bomb.” (L.A. Times, November 7, 1952)

Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1952

” ‘No Comment’ was the only reply from the commission to inquiries based on an H-bomb story story in a Los Angeles newspaper today.” (L.A. Times, November 9, 1952)

Finally the AEC release the terse statement I mentioned earlier, which, when paired with the rumors, and several “first-hand accounts” made the H-bomb test a fairly “open secret.”

New York Times, November 17, 1952

It’s still worth wondering, why try to keep it so secret? I mean, as we’ve seen from the film (released later), Operation Ivy was no small affair. (Interestingly, and this was news to me, an Air Force pilot actually died while taking fallout samples. Not from the radiation, mind you, but because he ran out of fuel and crashed the plane.5 This is the only acute, immediate death I’ve ever heard of during a U.S. nuclear test. Are there more?) Over 2,500 people were present at the test site, and the bomb itself was pretty conspicuous. As far as I know, nobody was ever charged with “leaking” the news about the MIKE shot.

A short version is to say that by this point, the AEC was taking all of its guidance on public releases relating to the H-bomb from the National Security Council, who saw no benefit to transparency. There’s more to this story, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

A few parting observations:

  • In all of the news coverage, notice that it is the AEC who gets the blame for the secrecy. This isn’t exactly true — the “no comment on the H-bomb” policy had been decided before the shot by the National Security Council, and the post-shot silence was dictated by both Truman and Eisenhower. But the very secrecy of the matter obscures the source of the secrecy.
  • In a sense, one could see the U.S. as participating in a form of “strategic opacity” regarding its possession or non-possession of a hydrogen bomb between 1952 and 1954. Like Israel today, the U.S. then derived some advantage from its vagueness — if everyone “knew” that the U.S. had an H-bomb, but the U.S. didn’t announce it, it could help avoid troublesome international issues (like criticism from allied countries who decried the H-bomb effort) while also avoiding several acute strategic weaknesses (like the fact that their “H-bomb” was not yet really a deliverable military weapon).
  • On the other hand, the H-bomb issue as a whole was one of the real turning points with respects to the AEC and the press. It was in the 1950s that the AEC’s relationship with the press soured in a bad way, and when it got its most fearsome reputation as an agent of censorship and an enemy of disclosure. Some of this was deserved, but some of this was not. As pointed out, a lot of that secrecy didn’t derive from the AEC at all, but other sources of power it was beholden to.

Ultimately, like so much regarding the hydrogen bomb (more on this in a future post), one has to wonder what it all added up to. The AEC was already in a pretty prime strategic relationship with regards to the arms race, and it didn’t have any great reason to assume otherwise. I don’t think it got them very much to be secretive, but I do think it hurt them. Then again, it wasn’t entirely up to them what was secret and what wasn’t — a case of “gambling with other people’s money,” or, more correctly, “gambling with other agency’s reputations,” on behalf of the NSC.

 

  1. Note that it was November 1 local, Eniwetok time — in the U.S. itself it was Halloween, which I find appropriate. [↩]
  2. See Hugh Gusterson, “Death of the authors of death: Prestige and creativity among nuclear weapons scientists,” in Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison, eds., Scientific authorship: Credit and intellectual property in science (New York: Routledge, 2003), 281-307, riffing off of the account in David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb. [↩]
  3. Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953-1961 (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 1989), 3-4. [↩]
  4. Roy B. Snapp, “Note by the Secretary – Letter to J. Edgar Hoover, Operation Ivy, AEC 483/33,” (18 November 1952), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, as document NV0409009. [↩]
  5. Mark Wolverton, “Into the Mushroom Cloud,” Air & Space (August 2009). [↩]

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