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. [↩]

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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. [↩]

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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. [↩]

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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. 

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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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