Visions

James Conant’s Atomic Bomb Sketch? (1943)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 25th, 2012

I had fun with the little visual mystery I posted last Friday, so here’s another one I’ve been chewing over for awhile.

Drawings of “official” atomic bomb designs are rare. (Where “official” means “created by people who actually build bombs.”) It’s the sort of thing which is generally kept close — what are released are generally extremely sanitized abstractions, which are then elaborated upon by people without security clearances (like John Coster-Mullen).

So I was somewhat surprised to find, buried in some files of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, this drawing which appears to have been made by none other than James B. Conant, then the President of Harvard University:

That looks an awful lot like the drawing of a gun-type nuclear weapon. But is it?

Conant, of course, was a major scientific administrator during the war. He was a chemist by training, and was no stranger to secret projects: during World War I, he had worked to develop lewisite for use in Europe while working at the “Mousetrap” facility in Cleveland, so called because once you went in, you were never supposed to come out.1 The chemical munitions that Conant worked on were never used in the war; the armistice came just before they were to be shipped out. During World War II, Conant was pals and colleagues with Vannevar Bush, head of the OSRD, and the two of them did quite a lot of work on early atomic development policy.

The context of the sketch is apparently a note from Conant to Bush, dated January 21, 1943 (with notes that it was amended March 10, 1943).  I say “apparently” because, while this follows the other sequentially in the file, it isn’t clear that they are attached or from the same period. (The handwriting is Conant’s though, which is something. Don’t read too much into the fact that the pages look different; one is just scanned in black and white, the other as grayscale.)2

The note itself is pretty hard to decode; it is in Conant’s nearly-impossible handwriting. The basic gist of it is that he is estimating how much enriched uranium they can product at Oak Ridge and what that implies about when a bomb would be ready (he seems to think one would ready by September 1944, and then later updates the note to push it back a bit).3

On the “drawing” page itself, there is a list (anything in italics is written by me, trying to make sense of his handwriting):

(1) Metallurgy
(2) cows [!?! see below]
(3) Development of technique for handling material in bulk
.                                          70-80, 90% of critical
(4) What cases are effective? [could this mean casings?]
(5) Further [???] [???] for cross section
(6) No. of neutrons for 49
(7) Capture + emission[?]  of neutr.                          (Bohr)
(8) Cross section of scattering[?]
(9) Firing problem
.                              length of time first mass stays in
(10) Source of neutrons Neutron source
(11) Effect of dilution
(12) Protection against thermal neutrons                (25)

To my eye, even with the ambiguity caused by his bad handwriting, it looks like a list of problems to tackle when thinking about designing a bomb the first time. What will the metallurgy of U-235 or plutonium be like? How will you shape these materials safely on a lathe? Was sorts of casings or reflectors will be best? How do you handle this stuff without getting totally irradiated? How many neutrons will plutonium emit per fission? How will you make a neutron initiator? What’s the engineering of the actual bomb assembly going to look like? And so on.

Except, of course, for “cows,” which I find inexplicable. It’s not a codename I’m familiar with. I am almost surely transcribing it wrong, but it looks a lot like “cows”:

Cows. Hmm. There were some cows involved in the Manhattan Project in a peripheral way, but I doubt he was thinking about that at this point. More likely is I’m making a garble of his handwriting again, but now that I’ve seen “cows,” I can’t stop seeing it. (Got a better guess? Let me know.)

Anyway, what it looks like to me is the result of either brainstorming or notes from a meeting that Conant was having, all of which seems to pertain to weapon design issues. So the idea that he might have sketched a crude gun-type design at the bottom of it isn’t fanciful in and of itself.

The drawing seems to show one “40 lb” piece of fissile material at the bottom of a gun barrel, with the cross section of a ring of the same stuff at the other end of it inside some sort of heavy neutron reflector or tamper. There are some other numbers nearby; it seems to say “10 meters, 30 ft.” Is that meant to be the length of the gun barrel? It would be pretty long, much longer than any of the actual bombs estimated for combat, but it might just be a back-of-the-envelope guess.

The bomb — if it is a bomb — that Conant has sketched out here doesn’t look much like Little Boy actually looked, but it doesn’t look wildly different than Thin Man, the plutonium gun-type bomb that was pursued before Little Boy.

Experimental bomb casings from the aborted “Thin Man” plutonium gun design. There are early “Fat Man” casings designs in the background.

The actual Little Boy weapon used (according to John Coster-Mullen) a cylindrical projectile that weighed around 85 lbs, and the “spike” that it was shot into (not the other way around) weighed 56 lbs, bringing it to a total of 141 lbs of fissile material, considerably more than is shown in this sketch. But still, the entire point of the list seems to be that they don’t know the details at that point.

The other possibility is that this isn’t a bomb at all, and that it is some kind of “tickling the dragon’s tail” criticality experiment. But that’s a much more boring conclusion.

Instead of pointing out how crude and inaccurate the drawing is, though, I’m still just amazed that it was hiding on that microfilm, waiting to be stumbled upon. It’s oh so rare to see bomb designs in “the wild,” and this one is considerably more “real” (in the sense of it being less conceptual and more of an engineering-style layout) that the only other declassified drawings from the same period I have seen (those in the Los Alamos Primer).

Did Harvard’s President sketch an atomic bomb on his notepad? I don’t know, but it’s a very real possibility, is it not? I wonder if any Harvard president since then — much less Harvard’s current President — has ever done such a thing.

  1. See James Hershberg’s James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), chapter 3. [↩]
  2. Citation: James B. Conant to Vannevar Bush (21 January 1943, amended 10 March 1943), 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 4, Target 3, Folder 21, “Miscellaneous Bush-Conant Material, May 1941-October 1944.” [↩]
  3. Here’s an attempt by me to decode Conant’s handwriting. Anything I’ve put in italic means “I can’t read this.”

    Memo to V. Bush               Amended by JBC before [???] on March 10, 1945
    From J.B. Conant              Date Jan. 21, 1943

    The latest news from the electromagnetic front via Gen. Groves is (1) Tennessee Eastman are quite confident that process can be made to work. It now seems quite certain that each tank will yield from 50-300 mg per day.
    At  500 tanks that means 50-150 g per day.
    If priorities can be settled there is a chance this output can begin November 1, 1943 (First set Y tanks Aug 1). [Inserted note:  I ??? this now, March 10, 1943; a bomb will require 24 ???; 100 g a day begins ???, 1944. Will take till ??? 1, 1944 for amount! There is still a chance for a military effort in 44.]  This would yield first first [sic??] bomb Feb 1, 1944, at rate of 100 gm per day. This might mean first mean first military result July 1, 1944 allowing four months for developing bomb and manufacturing material for a second. I still believe barring miracles, best day is Sept 1, 1944 . The Chicago method might come along at the same point. So we have two chances of making that schedule. J.B.C.

    That’s not the world’s best transcription attempt (I loathe Conant’s handwriting, I should probably say), but you can get the gist of it, I think. “The Chicago method” refers to plutonium production. “Y” tanks refer to the electromagnetic method used at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. I’m open to any guesses as to better transcription attempts. Conant’s estimate for when they’d have a bomb ready was off by about six months, something I’m sure my German friends are undoubtedly thankful… [↩]

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Visions | This post has footnotes | 20 Comments »

Redactions

Declassifying ARGUS (1959)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 23rd, 2012

One of the strangest — and perhaps most dangerous — nuclear tests ever conducted was Operation ARGUS, in late 1958.

The basic idea behind them was proposed by the Greek physicist Nicholas Christofilos, then at Livermore. If you shot a nuclear warhead off in the upper atmosphere, Christofilos argued, it would create an artificial radiation field similar to the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the planet. In essence, it would create a “shell” of electrons around the planet.

Frame from an government film showing the electron shell going around the planet

The tactical advantage to such a test is that hypothetically you could use this knowledge to knock out enemy missiles and satellites that were coming in. So they gave it a test, and indeed, it worked! (With some difficulty; it involved shooting nuclear weapons very high into the atmosphere on high-altitude rockets off of a boat in the middle of the rough South Atlantic Ocean. One wonders what happened to the warheads on them. They also had some difficulty positioning the rockets. The video linked to discusses this around the 33 minute point. Also, around the 19 minute mark is footage of various Navy equator-crossing hazing rituals, with pirate garb!)

It created artificial belts of electrons that surrounded the planet for weeks. Sound nutty yet? No? Well, just hold on — we’ll get there.

(Aside: Christofilos is an interesting guy; he had worked as an elevator repairman during World War II, studying particle physics in his spare time. He independently came up with the idea for the synchrotron and eventually was noticed by physicists in the United States. He later came up with a very clever way to allow communication with submerged submarines deep under water which was implement in the late 20th century.)

James Van Allen kissing Explorer IV (a satellite used in Argus) good-bye

In early 1959 — not long after the test itself — none other than James Van Allen (of the aforementioned Van Allen radiation belts) argued that the United States should rapidly declassify and release information on the Argus experiment.1

Click for the PDF.

Van Allen wanted it declassified because he was a big fan of the test, and thought the US would benefit from the world knowing about it:

As you will note, my views are (a) that continued security classification of the Argus-Hardtack tests is of little practical avail, (b) that a prompt and full public report of the tests and observations will contribute greatly to the international prestige of the United States as a leader in the application of atomic devices to scientific purposes, and (c) that if we fail to do (b) the U.S. will be quite likely be again ‘Sputniked’ in the eyes of the world by the Soviets.

Basically, Van Allen argued, the idea of doing an Argust-type experiment was widely known, even amongst uncleared scientists, and that the Soviets could pull off the same test themselves and get all the glory.

But here’s the line that makes me cringe: “The U.S. tests, already carried out successfully, undoubtedly constitute the greatest geophysical experiment ever conducted by man.” 

This was an experiment that affected the entire planet — “the greatest geophysical experiment ever conducted by man” — that were approved, vetted, and conducted under a heavy, heavy veil of secrecy. What if the predictions had been wrong? It’s not an impossibility that such a thing could have been the case: the physics of nuclear weapons are in a different energy regime than most other terrestrial science, and as a result there have been some colossal miscalculations that were only revealed after the bombs had gone off and, oh, contaminated huge swathes of the planet, or, say, accidentally knocked out satellite and radio communications. (The latter incident linked to, Starfish-Prime, was a very similar test that did cause a lot of accidental damage.)

There’s some irony in that the greatest praise, in this case, is a sign of how spooky the test was. At least to me, anyway.

This is the same sort of creepy feeling I get when I read about geoengineering, those attempts to purposefully use technology to affect things at the global scale, now in vogue again as a last-ditch attempt to ameliorate the effects of climate change. It’s not just the hubris — though, as an historian, that’s something that’s easy to see as an issue, given that unintended consequences are ripe even with technologies that don’t purposefully try to remake the entire planet. It’s also the matter of scale. Something happens when you go from small-scale knowledge (produced in the necessarily artificial conditions that laboratory science requires) to large-scale applications. Unpredicted effects and consequences show up with a vengeance, and you get a rapid education in how many collective and chaotic effects you do not really understand. It gives me the willies to ramp things up into new scales and new energy regimes without the possibility of doing intermediate stages. 

(Interestingly, my connection between Argus and geoengineering has been the subject of at least one talk by James R. Fleming, a space historian at Colby College, who apparently argued that Van Allen later regretted disrupting the Earth’s natural magnetosphere. Fleming has a paper on this in the Annals of Iowa, but I haven’t yet tracked down a copy.)

As for Argus’s declassification: while the Department of Defense was in the process of declassifying Argus, per Van Allen’s recommendations, they got a call from the New York Times saying that they were about to publish on it. (The Times claimed to have known about Argus well before the tests took place.) It’s not clear who leaked it, but leaked it did. The DOD decided that they should declassify as much as they could and send it out to coincide with this, and the news of Argus hit the front pages in March 1959.

  1. Citation: James Van Allen to James R. Killian (21 February 1959), copy in the Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0309054. [↩]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 10 Comments »

Visions

The DIXIE Showgirl (1953)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 18th, 2012

There are a lot of photographs of nuclear weapons tests, and there’s a pretty standard visual vocabulary for how those look. (Something I’ve touched on before.) Personally I find it a little easy to get desensitized to mushroom clouds after awhile. They all look more or less the same, though some are a little more sinister looking than others. It’s easy to lose a sense of scale, it’s easy to start seeing them all as a blur. Perhaps it’s one of the consequences of being in a country that conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests, and has circulated photographs of many of them for quite a long time?

But every once in awhile I find one that stumps me.

Shot DIXIE of Operation Upshot-Knothole was set off on April 6, 1953. It was a “weapons-related” test; it was done for reasons relating to weapons design (as opposed to testing the effects of the weapon). Carey Sublette says it was also an experiment using LiD as a boosting agent, for those who are curious.

It wasn’t a terribly large explosion by the standards of the day — “only” 11 kilotons, so smaller even than the Hiroshima bomb (though still large enough to, say, take out downtown Boston). It was dropped from a plane and detonated some 6,000 feet above the ground, which is some three to four times higher in the air than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had been set off. As a result, its cloud was a mushroom “cap” without a stem — it was too high off the ground to suck up the debris and dirt necessary to form a vertical column.

Already that makes for somewhat unusual nuclear test photographs, as you can see above. A lonely little cloud. It almost could be just any old cloud hanging out there — I’m just a little black raincloud, pay no attention to little me. But it’s almost totally composed of highly-radioactive fission products, so don’t start feeling too sorry for it.

I occasionally go through the photo library of the DOE’s Nevada Site Office, which has a rather large collection of scanned photos of atmospheric tests online. The Upshot-Knothole series is quite a large one, and there is a numbing effect looking at so many of them. So when I saw this one of the DIXIE event, I was initially just totally bamboozled:

What. Is. Going. On. Here? A few things to take note of:

1. This is an official government photo in an official government archive. This isn’t the same as those “Miss Atomic Bomb” photos in the later 1950s, which were created by casinos and otherwise private individuals.

2. That little cloud under the dancer’s right foot is, of course, the DIXIE cloud, seen from a lower angle than in the first photo posted here. There’s some definite posing going on. It’s also definitely taken on the premises of the Nevada Test Site with foreknowledge of the test itself. I don’t know if reporters were allowed to visit the site for the DIXIE test; they were allowed to view a few other tests in the Upshot-Knothole series, but I don’t see any mention of them being at DIXIE.

3. This isn’t purposefully frivolous and campy like the “Miss Atomic Bomb” photos. Zoom in on her face. She’s trying to do something, well, artsy here. She’s trying to express something. The power of science? The futility of progress? The existential angst of deterrence? I don’t really know. But it’s something.

4. Awhile back, I showed this photo to a friend of mine, Dawn Davis Loring, who is also a dancer, dance instructor, and someone much better versed than I in the language of dancing. She suggested to me that the appearance and posture of the person in the photo suggested the dancer was competent but not an expert. Her balance is slightly wrong and so she’s overcompensating a bit with her arm, or something along those lines. Which possibly suggests that she is a showgirl from nearby Las Vegas. But again, the dancer isn’t done up in a campy, frivolous, or unusually sexualized style. (Obviously it is still sexualized to a large degree, but compare it to the “Miss Atomic Bomb” photos to see what I mean. It’s far more “serious.”)

But I don’t know the backstory on this photo, and I’ve not been able to find anything on it. The DOE folks who host the archive don’t have anything about it in their records either, apparently. But it’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill nuclear testing photo. 

Update: A helpful Russian reader forwarded me another photograph from the same series!

It appears to be originally from this site, which tentatively identifies it as something called “Atomic Ballet,” and identifies the dancer as one Sally McCloskey. The date they give is wrong, though, if it’s DIXIE, which it looks like it is (the stemless cloud).1 I’ve been able to find very little on Ms. McCloskey, except that she was also a dancer in the 1956 film Anything Goes.2

Double-Update: The aforementioned Dawn Davis Loring tracked down an oral history with Donald English, a photographer for the a Las Vegas news bureau. Here’s the relevant part:

Sometimes we would cover it from Angel’s Peak, take pictures of the mushroom cloud. Sometimes we’’d take dancers up to the top of the peak. I’’d have one girl, Sally McCloskey, we did a little series that was called Angel’’s Dance. And she was a ballet dancer, not a showgirl, and she did an interpretive dance to the mushroom cloud as it came up and we shot a series of pictures and sent it out on the wire and they called it Angel’’s Dance. We just did anything we could to make the picture a little bit different because the newspapers would run the mushroom cloud pictures, but they were always hungry for anything that had any kind of a different approach.

So that clears up quite a bit about where this was shot, and what it was meant to be! And apparently she was a ballet dancer after all. (Actually, see below…)

Update, the Third: Searching around a bit more, I found a citation for the Angel’s Dance. The Oakland Tribune ran it on page 86 of their June 28, 1953, edition. It appears to have been a feature in the PARADE magazine that newspapers sometimes insert into their Sunday editions. There is a preview page available online:

Pretty cool! I managed to coax a higher resolution out of that archive site, too. Here’s the caption:

High (6,000 feet) over the yawning canyons of the West, a young girl cavorted recently in what could be the Dance of the Century. Her name: Sally McCloskey, chorus girl from Las Vegas’ plush Sands Hotel.
The place: the gravely summit of Angel’s Peak.
Her task: to interpret the greatest drama of our time in dance rhythms. For high over her sinuous, leaping form rose a symbol no eye could miss: the pale, rising cloud of an atomic bomb just exploded 40 miles away.

The poses are, counter-clockwise from the top left: 1. ‘Apprehension’ starts dance, 2. which illustrates ‘impact’, 3.  goes on to symbol of ‘awe’, 4. Climax of dance (which took place at dawn in temperature little above freezing) in brisk pose Sally calls “Survival.”

It’s always a little apprehensive to announce, “I have looked into this and found not too much, and here are my guesses.” This time, though, it paid off from some really helpful readers, and I think I’ve just about rounded out the whole story of this crazy photo. I was right about some things (showgirl, seriousness, ultimate goal), but wrong about it being an official government production (which raises the question of why it’s in the archive, I guess). Anyway, thoroughly fascinating all around.

  1. The date they give on that site, June 4, would be for CLIMAX, which — all name-related jokes aside — was a very different looking test. The jet contrails in the second photo also help confirm it as being DIXIE. It just may be a numerical switcharoo, though— 6/4/1953 vs. 4/6/1953, the former being CLIMAX and the latter being DIXIE. [↩]
  2. Doing searches on “Atomic Ballet” in ProQuest, however, did turn up one interesting little nugget: In December 1947, there was a Japanese ballet troupe from Hiroshima that performed “The Story of the Atomic Bomb and its Aftermath” for British occupation forces in Kure, Japan. [↩]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Visions | This post has footnotes | 8 Comments »

Redactions

The Hiroshima Do-Over (1963)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 16th, 2012

As everybody knows, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only instances of actual combat detonations of nuclear weapons. The victims of the bomb — the Hibakusha — were also the one-and-only direct human test subjects on the effects of the bomb. This grim connection between victims and experimental subjects runs through quite a bit of the scientific literature on nuclear health.

A doctor working for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission examines a Hibakusha in the postwar period.

After World War II, the US sent over physicians and specialists to find out as much as they could on the survivors of the atomic bombs. Japanese physicians were of course already doing this themselves. This work was eventually consolidated into the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.

Starting in the mid-1950s, when the US government became concerned about Civil Defense against atomic bombs, scrutiny of radiation data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a major preoccupation. What exactly was the radiation output of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs? Nobody knew. They hadn’t really kept as good tabs on that as they perhaps ought to have. Oppenheimer, Groves, et al., hadn’t even really thought that much about the radiation effects before dropping the bombs.1

The Nagasaki bomb, at least, was an implosion model, and these had been not only continued to be tested after the war (the Operation Crossroads weapons were essentially Fat Man devices), but were the subject of on-going interest and development. The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was a model that was obsolete even as it was being dropped. (Literally: Oppenheimer proposed to Groves that they abandon it; by removing all of the HEU inside the single Little Boy bomb, they could make half a dozen HEU-fired Fat Man bombs.) Nothing terribly similar to the Little Boy bomb would ever be dropped again (only four gun-type devices were ever detonated, ever, and the later ones — one W9 and two W33 tests — were different enough that their radiation spectrum was probably not the same).

One way that you could carefully measure the radiation output of the Little Boy bomb would be to test another one — say, out in the Nevada desert. In 1963, Norris Bradbury, director of Los Alamos, wrote out exactly why he thought this would be a bad idea. ” The periodic proposal to refire the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs is air over Nevada or somewhere to measure their radiation in great detail appears to have arisen again,” Bradbury wrote, and then enumerated a number of reasons against it.2

Click to view PDF.

First on the list is the fact that by 1963, the United States had signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, barring any kind of nuclear tests in the atmosphere. So the possibility of detonating an old Little Boy bomb in the atmosphere “has about the chance of a snowball in you know where,” wrote Bradbury. (Why not underground? Bradbury doesn’t say, but elsewhere I’ve seen it pointed out that the entire point of such an exercise would be to understand the radiation in the atmosphere. Doing it underground would involve a lot of fudging, apparently.)

Second on the list was the difficulty of putting together fair replicas of the 1945 bombs. While parts of the Nagasaki bombs could probably be rustled up, “new X-units would be required,” (the X-unit was the firing electronics), and “the different X-unit would certainly cause some difference in the radiation spectrum and distribution.” Put another way, they just didn’t have exact replicas of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs by 1963. Bradbury offers up that the Mark-6 bomb would probably be pretty close to the Nagasaki bomb. “LASL is not repeat not going to make a replica of the Nagasaki bomb in this day and age for this type of purpose. It is worth neither the time nor the effort. If a MK 6 will not do — then forget it.”

Third on the list is related specifically to the Little Boy bomb: “We could probably make a reasonable replica of the Hiroshima device. Some old LBs probably exist in part. They are unsafe (remember Parsons‘ famous bomb bay insertion of the active material?) and some type of safing would have to be dreamed up.” Bradbury earlier describes these old weapons as being “hideously unsafe.” He concludes that the differences between a Little Boy replica and the actual one would not be as big as between the Mark 6 and the Fat Man, but the differences “will take time and effort to work out.”

Lastly, he laid out exactly how much of a bad idea he thinks it was:

Unless these experiments are likely to be real, we see no reason to give much more than idle speculative effort thereto and do not [sic] real work. Let us not kid ourselves — making these devices and shooting them is going to be real work and totally unproductive work from the standpoint of weapon development. In my personal opinion, although doubtless based more on emotion than on scientific reason, the experiments will add little of practical utility in the high level dose rate area anyway. What does one do with the information when (and if) one has it? Some people get exposed at some level and die; some do not; some get malignancies; some do not. That will remain true whether we know the MLD 50 to 5, 10 or 50 Roentgens. Basically, with test money cruelly short and with testing philosophy cruelly restrictive why should we waste effort on this sort of thing?

One wonders what the cause of the “emotions” were. Dredging up memories of old and difficult work? Just a feeling that he was wasting time? Frustration with the atmospheric test ban? A lack of interest in the Hibakusha?

They never did re-test Little Boy. What they did do, some many years later, was create a replica.

Click on for more information about the Little Boy Replica, including pictures!

  1. Sean Malloy has a fascinating article about this coming out in Diplomatic History next month; I am writing something up on it to share then as well. [↩]
  2. Citation: Norris Bradbury TWX to A.W. Betts (2 January 1963), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0102280. [↩]

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Redactions | This post has footnotes | 4 Comments »

Meditations

Divine Waste Management

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 14th, 2012

This past weekend the Santa Fe Institute hosted a two-day seminar on the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project,” which the Nuclear Diner live-blogged on Twitter. You can see the whole transcript by looking up the hashtag “#bomblegacy.” I tuned in whenever I got a chance over the weekend. There were a lot of interesting things said; here are some of the bits that provoked the most thoughts from me.

One of the big questions that Murray Gell-Mann asked a number of times was whether “Big Science” would have taken off in the same way without the Manhattan Project. Obviously there’s no way to know that, but I would emphasize that Sputnik was responsible for a lot of the ramping up of science funding in the United States. My favorite illustration of this comes from David Kaiser‘s work, much of which is about the postwar physics boom (and eventual bust). (I might plug How the Hippies Saved Physics, here, given that I helped on it in various small ways — I was a research assistant for some of it, rendered the in-book figures, and designed the website.) One of Dave’s great charts is of the number of American Ph.D.s in Physics granted between 1900 and 1980:

American Ph.D. degrees granted in Physics, 1900-1980 (David Kaiser)

Two things jump out. One is that during World War II, the number of degrees granted went down quite a lot. No surprise: it’s hard to finish or supervise degrees when you’re building the atomic bomb, radar, and the other multitude of projects that physicists were mobilized  to do during those years. After 1945, you get an initial up-tick in degrees, a lot of which are the “backlog” of the war years. Then things level off a bit… until 1957, when you start an exponential climb that peaks in 1970, at which point the market collapses (for various reasons that Dave goes into).

Anyway, I just bring this up to note that we naturally see moments like the end of the Manhattan Project as the “obvious” point where “everything changed,” but reality can be a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes it takes a decade for the “lesson” of the previous decade to fully sink in.

Another interesting bit: “[Stan] Norris: I make the argument in my book that the ManProj is the template for a Natl Security State.” That’s an interesting idea, no? My one nit-pick there is that while the Manhattan Project utilized huge numbers of massive contractors to pull off its feat, they were largely not-for-profit arrangements. You could do that during World War II because the contractors in question (e.g. DuPont) were afraid of being dubbed “war profiteers,” as they had been at the end of World War I, and there was that whole patriotism thing. The modern national security state is immensely enriching to private contractors, and the idea that anyone would be criticized — rather than lauded — for making massive profits off of war feels rather quaint!

Another bit from Stan: “Norris: Nearly 20 scientists became Nobel Prize winners as a result of research associated with the ManProj.” I find myself wondering if that was transcribed correctly, because it seems like too high a number. There were well over 20 laureates involved in the Manhattan Project, but I find it a stretch that 20 Nobel Prizes came out of research during the Manhattan Project. (Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan’s bomb-related work definitely was behind their Nobel Prize, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any other prizes so directly related to the US bomb project.)

A lot of the stuff I hadn’t heard before came from Harold Agnew, which is no surprise, given that he was actually there. At one point he was asked “What was the take of the Native Americans and surrounding people living around Los Alamos with all of the activity?” His answer was new to me: “Agnew: The whole NM National Guard went to Philippines in War. They were all lost. Young male Native Americans were wiped out.”

He also had some amusing recollections on nuclear waste: “Agnew: The way we got rid of waste – mix w/ concrete, dig a big cylindrical hole, line w/ culvert. There is a farm of it.” “Waste should be above ground in monitored retrievable storage to get rid of the heat. You can see if there is a leak.” “I argued with Sierra Club. Look at the Pyramids. They are still here.” “Put the Catholic Church in charge on monitoring the storage. It will be here forever. Sierra Club person not humored.” 

Divine waste management? That’s actually an idea I’ve heard before (religions are known to have been more persistent over the centuries than states or other political institutions; Neal Stephenson also plays with this idea briefly in his Anathem), but I hadn’t thought about the Catholic Church as the steward! (It is arguably a more realistic idea than the idea of creating a new religion to steward nuclear waste…)

Another great bit from Harold Agnew that I didn’t know about: “Oppy was so charming. I made $125/mo. Carpenters, electricians made $500/mo. Some of us got mad.” ” I told Oppy we were a bit unhappy. Oppy came down to Z bldg. I said that we are doing carpentry/electrical at work.” “Oppy said ‘You know what you are doing here. They don’t.’ We were speechless. He walked out.”

I’ve talked before about the concerns that project administrators had with respects to the demoralizing effect of compartmentalization — when you don’t know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, you’re less motivated to do it. I hadn’t realized that increased pay might be part of that incentive (though it makes sense), or, the converse, that those who did know what they were doing might be paid less than those who were not “in the know”! That’s fascinating.

At one point, Cormac McCarthy joined the conversation (!!), but his main contribution that made it to the Twitter feed was to note that, “One thing you here from people who worked on these weapons is that they never had so much fun.” I can see why that might stick out to a guy with his interests.

It’s an interesting event, in any case. I’ve never been a huge fan of live-blogging (either stream the thing, or don’t, is usually how I’ve thought of it), but I did enjoy tuning in to this one. 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Meditations | 6 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »