Visions

Nuclear Bombs, Soviet Style (1958)

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 17th, 2012

This set of Friday Images comes from an obscure Soviet publication I tracked down on a trip to the Library of Congress a few weeks ago. I had been searching for this for awhile, since I knew that the Army had paid to translate it quite some time ago, but the Army translation was itself a bit hard to track down. I really just wanted it for the images — it’s one of the few Soviet books that I’ve seen which purports to explain how nuclear weapons are designed, and I’m always curious how they went about that sort of thing.

The book is titled Termoyadernoye Oruzhiye (Thermonuclear Weapons) and is by M.B. Neiman and K.M. Sadilenko. Neiman (or Neyman, depending on your transliteration preferences) is listed on the frontispiece as a doctor/professor of chemical science, and Sadilenko is listed as some kind of “research associate” (научный сотрудник) of the Soviet Academy of Science. The volume was published by the Ministry of Defense for the USSR, in Moscow, 1958.

The two bomb drawings I’m most interested in are their depictions of implosion and the hydrogen bomb. The basics of the implosion design had been declassified in the United States as early as 1951, and by 1958 there were lots of depictions of its more-or-less correct operation (using chemical explosives to compress a solid or hollow core). In the Soviet Union, though, they usually drew implosion differently. Here’s the Neiman and Sadilenko version, which is more or less the only way I’ve seen it depicted in the Soviet literature:

“Fig. 9. Schematic diagram of the atomic bomb (the charge is split into several parts): 1 — explosives; 2 — plutonium; 3 — neutron source; 4 — neutron reflector; 5 — shell (tamper)”

It’s a curious design — almost implosion, but not quite. It depicts shooting a plutonium core together into a spherical configuration, not compression through explosive lenses. It’s actually quite similar to the “pre-implosion” design depicted in the Los Alamos Primer (second from the top here).

The hydrogen bomb diagram is even more amusing:

I’m not going to type this caption out, but basically the idea is that this is a fission-fusion-fission weapon, where you have multiple fission primaries surrounding a large amount of fusion fuel. See the image below for a more-or-less similar English translation.

Now this isn’t the world’s worst H-bomb drawing for the time. The Teller-Ulam design wasn’t known publicly until 1979, so for 1958, this is pretty good. The key feature that sticks out as wrong is the fact that there are at least seven fission primaries here, which is a bit excessive (the real Teller-Ulam design uses one). But other than that, not too bad — it has the final “dirty” U-238 fission stage, and seems to get that external compression (rather than internal compression, as most H-bomb designs from the period show) is a key thing.1

But this drawing isn’t Soviet at all in origin — it’s a complete rip-off of a drawing that appeared in a 1955 issue of Life magazine:

“3-F” here means “fission-fusion-fission.”

This drawing derives, I believe, from Ralph E. Lapp, who was really the first to popularize the idea that the fallout from the Castle Bravo accident (1954) implied that about 50% of the yield of hydrogen bombs was from a final, “dirty” uranium-238 fission stage.

This underscores an interesting dynamic throughout the Neiman and Sadilenko book: most of the drawings they have are ripped off of American sources… because the United States has long been the major producer of extensive speculation about how atomic bombs work!

There are also lots of charming Civil Defense drawings in this volume, which I’ll post more of at a later time. But for the moment, I’ll leave you with this wonderful little drawing of a Soviet street-washer decontaminating a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic city:

The little sign in the picture with “УБЕЖИЩЕ” written on it can be translated as refuge or shelter, but it can also be translated as asylum. Fitting, that.

  1. I’m using the terms “external” and “internal” a little idiosyncratically here, but what I mean is that the fission primary here is distinct and “outside” of the fission fuel. Contrast this with versions where the fission primary is surrounded by fusion fuel, or has “shells” of fusion fuel around it. The latter is like the Teller “Alarm Clock” model and the Soviet “Sloika” design, and was much more commonly depicted when people were speculating as to how H-bombs might work in this period. Before someone gets too picky, I’m aware that this lacks physical separation of the primary and secondary, that there is neutron shield for the secondary, that there isn’t an interstage, and that, of course, there’s no mention of radiation implosion in any of this. There’s still more wrong than right here. [↩]

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Redactions

The “Immediate Cessation of Bomb Manufacture” (1946)

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 15th, 2012

For a brief moment after the end of World War II, the fate of the American nuclear arsenal was unknown. The Manhattan Project had built up a sprawling network of laboratories, production facilities, and administrative offices. But the idea of international control was in the air: the idea that there wouldn’t be a nuclear arms race at all, that somehow the world would find a way to outlaw proliferation before it even began.

It didn’t happen that way, as we well know. Perhaps it was a pipe dream from the start: we also now know that the Soviet Union was fairly dedicated to the idea of getting an atomic bomb of its own, and had been working on it for a number of years at that point. Still, the idea of “international control of atomic energy” is worth taking seriously from an historical mindset: it wasn’t at all clear that the Cold War was going to shake out the way it did, in those early days. And much of what was hoped for did eventually take form in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — with the obvious exception that the five big nuclear states got to keep their arsenals.

In this context, today’s weekly document is a memo by Richard C. Tolman, the Caltech physicist who had been General Groves’ scientific advisor during the war, and who served as the scientific advisor to Bernard Baruch, presenter of the ill-fated “Baruch Plan” for international control to the United Nations.1

A meeting of the UN Atomic Energy Commission in October 1946. Baruch is the white-haired man sitting at the table at right behind the “U.S.A” plaque. At far top-right of the photo is Robert Oppenheimer. Two people above Baruch, in the very back, is General Groves. Directly below Groves is Richard Tolman. British physicist James Chadwick sits directly behind the U.K. representative at the table.

Tolman’s memo is an analysis of the question of whether the United States should immediately stop producing more atomic bombs. This sounds like something of a heresy to our modern ears — the US stop producing atomic bombs, right at the dawn of the Cold War? — but as Tolman discusses, there were those thought that it might be a little hard to convince the USSR that you’re willing to submit to international control restrictions when you’re still expanding your nuclear arsenal.

Click image to view PDF.

Tolman was no radical scientist — he was fairly old, he was politically conservative, and he usually came to the same conclusions as General Groves. His analysis on the cessation issue was also fairly conservative: he pointed out that even if the production of bombs was stopped, there would be no pleasing the Soviets with it, since they would argue that production was going on in secret, or that the US probably already had a big stockpile saved up. (The former point, Tolman notes, might emphasize the importance of inspection, which would become the sticking point of the Baruch Plan. On the latter point, I am not sure whether Tolman knew that that the US stockpile was quite small at that point, but he might have.)

Moreover, Tolman argued that if they made a big deal of stopping, and then later decided to resume production, it would have “a serious adverse effect on international relations.”

Still, the fact that Tolman had to go through and make a systematic (and classified) analysis of the issue tells us a lot about the period — it wasn’t an unthinkable idea that the US might have stopped producing nuclear weapons. Within a few years, of course, such an idea would enter into the unthinkable domain, at least for those in positions of influence, and stay there for much of the Cold War.

  1. Richard C. Tolman to John M. Hancock, “Immediate cessation of bomb manufacture,” (4 October 1946), in National Archives, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, Files of Richard C. Tolman, S-1 Files, Box 1, “Atomic Energy Commission.” [↩]

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Meditations

Is the Past Strange or Familiar?

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 13th, 2012

Is the job of the historian to make the past look strange, or sensible?

I bring this up in the context of a very interesting discussion that Will Thomas has posted on his blog, Ether Wave Propaganda. Will’s post was in response to my previous post on imagery and metaphors; you should go to Will’s blog to see his comments and my comments on those.

The broader question that Will addresses — or at least, that I take him to be addressing — is one that has confounded me for some time. Historians in general, and especially historians of science, have for a long time rallied against the notion of “Whig history”: teleological historical accounts that explain how the past adds up in a logical fashion towards a rational present. Many historians have pointed out that this is something of a straw man, but  that’s not really my concern here.

The question for me is what our duty to the past is. Do we make it look unusual, or do we make it look relatable?

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Visions

“If an A-bomb Falls” (1950)

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 10th, 2012

John Cloud, an historian at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sent me scans of a really wonderful precursor to the NUKEMAP. It comes from a 1950 publication by the National Industrial Conference Board titled, If an A-Bomb Falls:

John reports that the pamphlet was some 20 pages long and was designed to help apocalypse-minded executives figure out how impending nuclear war might affect their bottom line.

The mapping connection comes from the fact that the pamphlet also included a overlay acetate sheet that, if you had your maps printed to the right size, could be overlaid on top of them to show you various nuclear effects:

As the overlay explains,

By placing this insert over a vital target in your community you can judge the effects of an atomic explosion, either air or underwater, on your plant and community. Air burst effects are based on Japanese explosions, with detonation at 2,000 feet. Underwater burst effects are based on Bikini, with wind velocity of 5 mph. Higher winds would carry the surge front downwind more quickly and increase the area and volume of the surge cloud.

The radii don’t quite match up to the NUKEMAP calculations, but they’re close. They’re a bit larger on the whole because they include some more moderate effects, like “moderate skin burns.” It’s also probably the case that even in 1950, the AEC hadn’t released full information on the effects radii. But other than that, they seem to match up well with 20kt explosions.

Of course, by 1950, the US had already increased its standard yields to around 49kt. And the yields would only go up from there. The Soviets had 20kt bombs in 1950, but by 1951 would be testing weapons in the 40kt range. And the yields would only go up from there. (And so it goes.) So this sort of overlay would have had, let us say, some planned obsolescence built into it.

Still, it’s pretty amazing, with its brilliant colors and highly “busy” rings. No simple circles here!

For your amusement, I whipped up a very simple Google Maps simulation of what it would be like to use ones of these. Nothing fancy — just drag your location and the “air burst” image will remain centered (and at the right size for a 20kt blast):

If you have trouble viewing the map as embedded above, click here to view it as a stand-alone page. Per usual, it attempts to center in on wherever Google thinks you are accessing the internet from, based on your IP address. (This particular function is not super accurate, but there you have it.) No logs are kept of where you move it to. Playing with it a bit, I’ve noticed that the image gets a bit distorted depending on your latitude and longitude. This has to do with plotting an essentially square overlay (the PNG image that makes up the explosion) onto the surface. It looks more or less fine if you stay at around the same latitude as the continental USA. If you start changing latitude the little circles will either compress or expand along one dimension. Things get very strange near the poles. You have been warned: this isn’t science! I’m sure there is some kind of correction I could put into the latitude measurement to keep this from happening, but I’m not too shook up about it.

John (who is known to historians of Cold War secrecy as the author of a number of articles on the CORONA satellites) came across this in the Coast and Geodetic Survey Library during his long-running research into the origins and practices of analog map overlays, the genesis of what are now called geographic information systems. Pretty interesting stuff.

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Redactions

Declassifying the Ivy Mike film (1953)

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 8th, 2012

Every good nuclear wonk has seen the delightfully over-the-top film that the government made about the Operation Ivy test in 1952. If you’ve seen any films involving nuclear test footage, you’ve probably seen parts of it, even if you didn’t recognize it as such. It ranks probably second in the all-time-most-viewed nuclear weapons films.1

Ivy Mike was, of course, the first test of a staged, multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon: the first hydrogen bomb. With an explosive yield of 10.4 million tons of TNT, it was a grim explication how tremendously destructive nuclear arms could be. Even Congressmen had difficulty making sense its power.

A 17-minute version (down from 28 minutes, which is already down from the hour-plus version now available from Archive.org, embedded above) of the Operation Ivy film was released for American citizens on April 1, 1954. The domestic and international reactions were immediate. The Soviet Union warned its people that these weapons could destroy “the fruits of a thousand years of human toil”; Premier Nehru of India called for the US and USSR to cease all hydrogen bomb tests. It was replayed two days later in the United Kingdom with an estimated 8 million viewers, even though supposedly the film was not meant to be distributed overseas, to avoid inflaming international opinion against nuclear testing.

The New York Times’ television critic, Jack Gould, reviewed it negatively: “A turning point in history was treated like another installment of ‘Racket Squad.'”2 The problem, Gould explained, was that it used “theatrical tricks” to talk down to the audience. Now the irony here is that the Operation Ivy film wasn’t made for a television audience. It was made for the President of the United States and top military brass and folks like that. Which makes the “talking down” even more disturbing, no?

This week’s document concerns the internal deliberations by the Atomic Energy Commission regarding the declassification and sanitizing of the Operation Ivy film. This report, AEC 483/47, outlines the opinion of the AEC directors of Classification and the Information Service about whether the film could and should be declassified.3

Click the image for the full PDF.

This isn’t the story of how it ends up on American television, but it is moving in that direction. The document goes over a proposal to release an edited (sanitized) version of the film for usage at a Conference of Mayors that President Eisenhower had assembled. The goal was to convince the mayors that Civil Defense was important: you’d better act now, before your city gets nuked.

The problem: the AEC didn’t really want to release the precise yield of the Mike shot. That’s a hard thing to hide when you’re obliterating an island with it. They also weren’t keen on releasing the fact that this wasn’t a deliverable weapon yet, but they couldn’t see a way of getting around that without seriously cutting it down to nothing. But at least they managed to cut out everything about its design, and the Ivy King shot (the largest pure-fission explosion, at half a megaton).

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  1. First likely goes to the Crossroads Baker test, which aside from being used everywhere is featured very prominently, repeatedly, at the end of Dr. Strangelove. [↩]
  2. Note that the Operation Ivy narrator was Reed Hadley, from the aforementioned “Racket Squad.” [↩]
  3. Citation: Report by the Directors of Classification and Information Service regarding the Film on Operation Ivy (AEC 483/47), (8 December 1953), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document #NV0074012. [↩]

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