Visions

Visualizing the Stockpile

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 11th, 2012

How does one make visual sense out of the size of the nuclear stockpile?

On paper it’s just a number. Or a lot of numbers, if you’re talking about it historically. Or even more numbers, if you’re concerned with things like delivery platforms, megatonnage, or megadeaths, what have you.

It’s easy to make visual sense of one or two bombs. A few hundred is still within the realm of sensible representation. But thousands?

The standard method for awhile has been to use a graph showing stockpile sizes over time. In 2010, the Department of Defense declassified the size of the stockpile (present and historical) and included a rather ugly graph show its change over time:

I don’t want to pick on the DOD, but whoever made this graph could use a little more Edward Tufte in their lives. Beautiful evidence it ain’t. Why is it in pseudo-3D? Come on, guys, this is “How to Make a Chart 101”: don’t use 3D unless there’s a really compelling reason to.

This is itself a variation on a graphic tendency that, as far as I can tell, only began as recently as the early 1980s. NGOs like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) began making systematic stockpile estimates around this time. Their original 1984 Nuclear Weapons Databook featured what I believe is one of the first attempts to give something of a comprehensive graph of past US nuclear warheads:1

Here’s a more updated version of the NDRC historical stockpiles graph, something you’ve probably seen variants of before:

This is a sensible way to show historical trends, of course. But as a graphic representation of complicated information, it can be misleading as well.

For example, these graphs just show warheads. Warheads, by themselves, do not really represent the full nuclear threat. Yes, they’re a big part of it! But one wouldn’t realize from such a graph that by the early 1960s, even though the USSR had thousands of warheads, it didn’t have really great ways to get them to the United States.

And not all warheads are the same — the huge apparent advantage of the USSR/Russia in terms of nuclear arms in the late Cold War is mostly tactical nuclear weapons. (So is the huge ramp-up in the US arsenal before it levels off.) Some warheads are “small” — under a kiloton — and some are massive, region-destroying monsters. In a graph like this, though, they’re all just numbers. Even if you do add in separate lines for them (as in the original NDRC graph, and in many of their nation-specific graphs), it still doesn’t quite convey what kind of nuclear world we’re talking about.

There have been alternative visualizations. One which features prominently in another 1980s product, William Bunge’s wildly unusual Nuclear War Atlas (worthy of its own posting at a later point), is what we might call a “dot graph” showing relative total megatonnage:2

This would be a little more useful to the expert if we were given some kind of numerical equivalent (I think the dots are about 2Mt each, and I’m not sure if this is meant to be the world arsenal or the US arsenal), but, in any case, it’s a striking attempt to make visible the power of said weapons. It is, of course, not historical — it represents a specific moment in the history of the nuclear arsenal.

I bring all this up as a prelude to talking about another visualization which has been floating around the Internet this week, a visualization of the world nuclear arsenals by Andrew Barr and Richard Johnston of the National Post:

The dataset this is based on is from the Federation of American Scientists, who seems to have inherited the NDRC’s old mission (and dataset) of making these kinds of estimates.

It’s a cool graphic, and not a representation style I’ve seen before. What they’re showing, here, are strategic launchers — not warheads — represented by little pictures of the weapons in question. This does two things that I like very much: it gets away from focusing just on warheads, and it also makes them feel more “tangible.”

Warheads are important. They shouldn’t be ignored. But if the worst were to happen, it’s the launchers that are going to be what causes all the damage. The warheads stashed in a cave somewhere are politically important, and important from a safeguards and security perspective, but they’re not part of the immediate calculus of nuclear war.

I like representing these as discrete entities, as opposed to just a line on a graph, or just a number. 1,379 launchers — the US estimate — doesn’t sound that big in any of itself. And if you look at it historically, like the NDRC warhead graphs, it’s hard not to see that as a huge improvement over the situation in the Cold War! But when you draw each of them out individually, and know that each of them has essentially a city-destroying, megadeath-creating consequence, it suddenly looks like quite a lot indeed.

I also like that even the “small” arsenals of the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, look pretty large enough when you draw them out this way.

And putting the poor little Earth at the center was a stroke of graphic genius. If the missiles were lined up in a row, pointing at the sky, it might be possible to see them as a sign of safety or security. But they’re pointed at a tiny, vulnerable planet. They’re pointed at all of us.

(Which is not actually an exaggeration. Even regional nuclear wars would be global in consequences. Anyone who thinks that it would be fine to let India and Pakistan blow themselves to hell should read this article. As with all expert estimates and simulations, there are those who will quibble with it one way or another, but it seems like reason enough to think that we’re all in the same boat on this.)

There are, of course, issues to be taken with it. One that the authors acknowledge is MIRVs — putting more than one warhead on each missile. My understanding is that under the various arms control treaties, we don’t actually do a whole lot of that these days (certainly not the maximum “12 warheads per missile” for some of them), but it’s still worth noting that some of these missiles actually contain two or three nuclear weapons each — which multiplies the total destruction significantly. The authors do note this.

Another is that these are only strategic weapons — that is, the big bombs meant to be used only in the event of total nuclear war, destroying whole cities, etc. Lacking are tactical weapons — the little bombs that states might actually be tempted to use in local conflicts, blowing up bunkers, etc. The problem is that it’s hard to get a handle on tactical weapons, as David Hoffman recently wrote, and ignoring them has consequences.

Furthermore, there is a lot of fuzziness in estimating actual launcher types. From this graph alone, you’d think that the USA was the only country that still used atomic bombs dropped from airplanes, and that everyone else used exclusively missiles. But that’s probably not the case — all estimates about the Indian, Pakistani, and Israeli programs are very fuzzy, and it’s likely that some of the Russian tactical nuclear arsenal is delivered through gravity bombs as well.

Anyway, I’ll concede that some of these are nit-picky, wonky points. On the whole, I think this new visualization is a great success: it actually conveys some realistic, wonky technical information in a way that your average Internet user can make sense of and recognize as being relevant to the world they live in, without wildly distorting the facts very much. That’s not an easy thing to do!

  1. Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook: Volume I: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing, 1984), on 14. [↩]
  2. William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas (New York, N.Y.: Blackwell, 1988), on 12. [↩]

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News and Notes

May 12-13, 2012: “Legacies of the Manhattan Project”

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 10th, 2012

Just a quick note to point out that there’s a cool online event this weekend: “Legacies of the Manhattan Project: A Case Study in the Consequences of Conflict.”

Here’s the abstract:

The Manhattan Project united the physics and engineering talent of a generation to produce the atomic bomb in just 26 short months. On May 12-13, 2012, a working group of physicists, historians, social scientists, systems theorists, and writers will gather at the Santa Fe Institute to explore the project’s lasting influence on science and humanity. The meeting will present new information, review original records, and mine the memories of project participants to present a local case study from an important period in scientific history. This event will be of interest to historians, scientists, foreign and domestic policy-makers, and members of the public who are interested in exploring challenges and implications of living in the nuclear age.

The Santa Fe Institute is collaborating with the Nuclear Diner to broadcast this SFI event live on Twitter. To follow the discussion, search for the hashtag #bomblegacy on Twitter.

The list of experts is a good one: Harold Agnew, Stan Norris, Jessica Flack, Gregg Herken, Murray Gell-Mann, Ellen Bradbury-Reid, and Gino Segre. There is also a Facebook page. I’m going to definitely try and participate online.

Also, just a reminder, if you’re in the Washington, DC, metro area, AIP has its FEYNMAN graphic novel event tomorrow (Friday). All are welcome!

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Redactions

The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 9th, 2012

The question of how large the American nuclear stockpile should be has long been a controversial one. Usually it is argued out as a question of how many nukes do we need to be safe?, where “safe” here means, “to make sure nobody wants to nuke us first,” i.e., deterrence.

It’s a fair enough question, although, as my readers all surely know, there are many sides to how one should pose it.

But for the Weekly Document, let’s go back to an earlier time. Today, I want to look closely at the very first attempt at coming up with a systematic estimate for how many nuclear weapons the United States should ideally have. This was completed in early September 1945 — well before nuclear deterrence was on the table, for at this point the United States still had a literal monopoly on nuclear arms.

The architect of this estimate appears to have been Major General Lauris Norstad of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF). Norstad would later go on to be one of the top Air Force planners, and later the Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, but at this junction he was high-ranking staff at the USAAF headquarters in Washington, DC.

On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (That the report came with an attached map showing projected US atomic capabilities in the USSR probably didn’t help with that.)1

Click the image to view the document as a PDF.

Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart:

Click to enlarge (the image, not the stockpile). I wonder whether anybody would buy a mug with this on it.

Let’s parse that out. The left column is the minimum, the right is the optimum. The purpose of the requirement is “M-Day,” defined in the report as the day in which the US would be desiring to be capable of “desirous of immediately crippling the ability of the enemy to wage war.” This “M-Day” force would need to be capable “of being employed immediately upon initiation of hostilities and the estimated quantities of bombs required must be available at that time.”

In other words, M-Day is a first-strike attack by the United States — a nuclear knock-out punch designed to beat another nation immediately into the stone age. “There has been no attempt to estimate the quantity of atomic bombs which would be required to conduct a prolonged war of attrition,” the paper continues. Oy, that’s an idea.

And, of course, it isn’t just “any other nation.” The analysis quickly fesses up to the fact that the only nation they’re concerned about is Russia, because they’re the only one who is projected to be even remotely on par with the United States from a military point of view for the next decade. “For the purpose of this study the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war has therefore been used as a basis upon which to predicate the United States, atomic bomb requirements.”

For the “minimum” strike, there are “15 first priority targets,” and for the “optimum” strike, there are “66 cities of strategic importance.” Amazingly, these planners have decided that you need around three nukes per city to really destroy them.

And “really destroy them” is not too far from the language in the plan: “The primary objective for the application of the atomic bomb is manifestly the simultaneous destruction of these fifteen first priority targets.” They don’t weasel around with euphemisms, do they? Later in the report, it describes the possibility of a back-and-forth nuclear exchange as “a mammoth slug-fest.”

Here is the list of the 15 priority targets, in order of priority: Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorki, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuybyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov, Magnitogorsk, Grozny, Stalinsk, and Nizhny Tagil. You might wonder why Baku is on there and, say, Leningrad is not. The priority targets are based largely on important industrial output; Baku was responsible for 61% of all Soviet crude oil output, 49% of oil refining, and 15% of steel output. Leningrad, at that point, was responsible for far fewer things.

The full map of the 66 Soviet targets — and 21 Manchurian targets (which they decided weren’t of a high enough priority to worry about right now, but they did map them — is here:

Click to enlarge substantially (1.4MB)

(I’ve uploaded a reasonably high resolution file here — with some heavy JPEG compression to keep the file size as small as I could; if for some reason you need it in the ultimate, maximum, uncompressed size — some 20MB or so — get in touch. Note that this is a stitch of six different microfilm scans, and the alignment isn’t perfect. So if you see weird artifacts of that… well, that’s what it is. Should you desire this map on a mug, there are ways of making it happen.)

What the map really underscores is the methodology. It’s about industrial, war-making capacity, not just population or cultural importance. That is, when they say “strategic,” here, they still mean it in the World War II sense, not the Cold War, “strategic as deterrence” sense. They aren’t planning on deterrence, here. They’re planning for destruction.

Back to the plan: The only differences between the “minimum” and “optimum” plan are the total number of cities targeted. At three-ish bombs apiece, that 39 for the “minimum,” 204 for the “optimum.”

Both estimates also include 10 bombs for the “neutralization of possible enemy bases in the Western hemisphere” — the report explains that this is in case the USSR grabs a few other bases in the meantime that might be within shooting distance of US bases. It doesn’t elaborate. Let’s imagine that at least one of them is in West Germany, since the Soviets rolling westward is the common military scenario from this period. (Note: After writing this, a friendly reader wrote in to point out that the official definition of the “Western hemisphere” does not include West Germany at all. It’s actually considerably to the West of most of Europe. Was the idea that the USSR would roll across France and Spain as well? That they would somehow land in North or South America? I don’t know.)

Lastly, both estimates include a desire for 10 more bombs for “strategic isolation of the battlefield” — that is, keeping the Soviets from being able to move their ships or tanks or whatnot into useful places. In practice, they explain, this means blowing up the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, and the Suez Canal. That’s as close as the report gets to recommending any kind of “tactical” use of the bombs. For anything smaller than that, the analysts conclude, conventional weaponry will do the trick.

So that adds up to 59 for the “minimum” and 224 for the “optimum.” But they don’t stop there. They assume, based on World War II figures, that a certain number of the bombers will get shot down, have technical problems, miss the target, or simply drop duds. So they calculate that all of those bombs will only be 48% effective anyway, and thus they’ll need just over double the total number. So instead of about three bombs per city, they’ve allocated six.

So we divide our original totals by 0.48, and we end up with the final figures of 128 as the “minimum” and 466 as the “optimum.”

Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? So did General Groves think about this?

Click on for General Groves’ reaction.

  1. Citation: Lauris Norstad to Leslie Groves, “Atomic Bomb Production,” (15 September 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 4, Folder 3, “Stockpile, Storage, and Military Characteristics.” [↩]

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Meditations

Missing: Four Million Pages of Secrets

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 7th, 2012

The indomitable Steven Aftergood at Federation of American Scientists reported last week that the National Archives and Records Administration has, well, lost nearly 2,000 boxes of classified documents:

More than a thousand boxes of classified government records are believed to be missing from the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a three-year Inspector General investigation found.

But there are no indications of theft or espionage, an official said.

An inventory of the holdings at the Records Center determined that 81 boxes containing Top Secret information or Restricted Data (nuclear weapons information) were missing.  As of March 2011, an additional 1,540 boxes of material classified at the Secret or Confidential level also could not be located or accounted for, the Inspector General report on the matter said.  Each box can hold approximately 1.1 cubic feet or 2000 to 2500 sheets of paper.

So that’s probably between three or four million classified pages that have just gone missing. Whoops.

(An Anecdotal Aside: The Washington National Records Center is in Suitland, Maryland, just over the South-East border of DC. It’s not a great part of town. I once called them to see about doing some research down there, and they basically told me that it would be in my best interest to find some way — any way — to avoid actually going out to their facility. I didn’t get the feeling they were trying to keep secrets; it was more like they were trying to avoid any bad headlines, e.g. “SCIENCE HISTORIAN STABBED ON THE WAY TO THE ARCHIVES – WAS DEVOTED TO WORK, ECCENTRIC, SAY FRIENDS.” But like all places with bad reputations, there is probably a little exaggeration for effect here. And strictly speaking, K Street and its environs probably transacts a much higher volume of illegal activity.)

So, what to make of this? The first thing is to just state the likely and boring explanation: these boxes are probably just sitting on a shelf in a government archive, somewhere. They were probably moved — or not moved when they were supposed to — and someone lost the tracking information, or entered it in incorrectly. Or checked the “feel free to burn these records or send them to the dump” checkbox by accident.

The tracking of this kind of historical data is still pretty low-tech, and I can speak from a little experience on this point. As part of a graduate fellowship I had with the Department of Energy awhile back (I was the “Edward Teller Graduate Fellow,” a title which I relished), I helped them improve their internal holdings database, which is just a big Microsoft Access database. It’s not a bad database, to be sure, but it isn’t some super-advanced NSA creation, and it can be pretty cryptic when you are trying to figure out what they have and where they have it.

You remember that scene from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they “hide” the Ark of the Covenent in that giant government warehouse? It’s not entirely far-fetched, though the NARA stacks that I’ve seen are a bit cleaner looking, and have lower ceilings.

As the Library of Congress’ web system likes to say, “Item not on shelf.”

Let’s banish from our minds the idea that terrorists or criminals are somehow trucking around archival boxes. Doesn’t happen. These things don’t usually contain stuff that is that interesting to ne’er-do-wells. It takes a lot of work to find the occasional interesting document, take it from me. It’s just far-fetched. Activists and journalists and maybe even an historian or two? It’s been known to happen. But people who want to actually do bad things to the fellow man? I wouldn’t bet on it.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that these missing records are actually being stored correctly, or safely, or securely, or in the manner which is mandated by the law. But I seriously doubt there’s any great matters of security at stake. Especially since, as Steven points out, most of that stuff is pretty old, and probably should have been reviewed and declassified a long time ago (which requires resources — money, time, will, etc.).

But this isn’t likely a security problem. It’s not necessarily even an organizational problem. It may just be a complexity problem. If you have enough records, you’re going to lose track of a few of them.

How many is “a few”? It’s actually a quantifiable number. The problem is known as inventory control: how much physical stuff (in this case, boxes full of paper) can you actually control at any given time? In various industries and contexts, studies have shown that losses and misplacements have real minimal limits. I don’t know what they are for records of this sort — in controlled facilities — but every place has an unavoidable loss rate. This is the rate of things going missing that happens even if you have extremely advanced inventory control systems — sophisticated databases, tagged items, really elaborate systems of checking and re-checking inventory. Because there are fundamental limits on how much stuff any organization can actually keep track of.

Let’s run some numbers!

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Visions

Ol’ Blue Eyes

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 4th, 2012

J. Robert Oppenheimer had famously blue eyes. From Bird and Sherwin’s American Prometheus:

  • “His eyes were the brightest pale blue, but his eyebrows were glossy black.”
  • “…a Jewish Pan with his blue eyes and wild Einstein hair.”
  • ” ‘He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,’ McKibben said, ‘very clear blue.'”
  • ” ‘…something about his eyes gave him a certain aura.'”
  • ” ‘My feeling was,’ Robb recalled, ‘that he was just a brain and as cold as a fish, and he had the iciest pair of blue eyes I ever saw.'”

People clearly responded to them, though differently. (Roger Robb was the “prosecutor” in the Oppenheimer security hearings, so it’s no surprise he saw them in the most negative way possible.)

But it’s hard to get a sense of those eyes these days — there just simply isn’t that much by way of color photography of Oppenheimer. We have that wonderful Time magazine cover, which conveys something of them:

Cover of TIME magazine, Nov. 8, 1948, featuring a painting of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Which does have more life than similar photographs of him that are in grayscale:

Oppenheimer by Alfred Eisenstaedt, November 1947

But it’s still hard to get a handle on those eyes.

There is another Eisenstaedt photo set of Oppenheimer from 1963 which conveys some of the eyes’ majesty:

Oppenheimer by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1963

One wonders if the eyes were the entire point of Eisenstaedt’s 1963 session with Oppenheimer: they seem to be the focal point, the entire goal of the photo set. The 1963 Oppenheimer is the Oppenheimer who stares you down, with a martyred look upon his face, all of the sins of the world on his back, etcetera.

Does this matter? Only in the sense that it reminds us how hard to can be to conjure up the “living image” of a long dead historical figure. It’s easy to see that Oppenheimer’s eyes affected the memories of those around him (as did his famously ice-cold martinis). It’s harder to re-create that affectation later, to really see Oppenheimer as a flesh-and-blood human being, rather than a character in a story. 

Seeing historical actors as real people, and not “characters in a story,” is tough. It has its ups and its down, methodologically. If we get too sentimental, we become blinded to the big picture, and our analytical knives can get dull. On the other hand, viewing people in the past as being ontologically on par with fictional creations can lead us to make them too rational, too un-real — we forget about all of the messiness that makes people essentially human — warts and all.

So I do strive for these little details, not because history is made up of the little details — a common fallacy, and one that distinguishes “history buffs” from “historians” — but because the details do help you assemble something that feels a bit more like a re-creation of the past, and that’s a hard thing to come by.

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