Visions

Presenting NUKEMAP

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 3rd, 2012

Update: NUKEMAP has had well over a million “detonations” since it was first made public. I’m both agog and aghast. Click here for a FAQ of sorts.

This Friday, instead of giving you an image like I normally do, I’m giving you a little application to make your own images.

There are lots of nuclear effects calculators out there on the web.1 But I was never fully satisfied with how these looked, or with their interfaces. (Of course, purists don’t require apps.)

So over the last few days, I put together my own nuclear effects calculator, which I am calling NUKEMAP, only because “Alex’s Nuclear Effects Calculator” was deemed by a colleague as “unsexy.”

What makes this one so great? Check out these features:

  • Easily draggable target marker (which has an adorable little atom on it)!
  • Bright, stomach-churning colors indicating major negative effects of atomic detonations!
  • Effects described include zones of 500 rem exposure, major overpressures, and fire! Plus, the legend breaks these down into easy-to-understand descriptions of what they mean for your average person caught inside of them.
  • Lots of pre-sets for both places to drop them (I didn’t want to discriminate) and yields of historical weapons! It has never been easier to put a 50Mt H-bomb on the Eiffel Tower.
  • Automatically tries to drop the bomb on wherever Google thinks you are accessing the Internet from (based on your IP address)!
  • You can link to specific detonations and send them to your friends to enjoy forever!
  • Automatic zooming to make sure that all of a given nuke’s effects fit within the view window! (This can be disabled.)
  • More historically contextualized than your average web app!

I have in the past made maps of this sort for use in teaching, when I want to emphasize how “impressive” the first hydrogen bomb was when compared to the first atomic bombs. If you dropped a Fat Man-style bomb onto downtown Boston, the results wouldn’t be pretty, but the effects would be limited to the immediate area surrounding the peninsula, primarily. (In other words, I would tell the students, Harvard is probably not too bad off, fallout excepting, but MIT is completely fried.) Do the same thing with an Ivy Mike-sized bomb and you’ve set houses on fire all the way out to Concord (a visual argument, when done with appropriate build-up and theatricality, that never failed to result in a horrified gasp from the auditorium of undergrads). It becomes quite clear why many of the atomic scientists of the day considered H-bombs to be exclusively genocidal weapons.

Of course, all such mappers fail to take into account terrain and building differences. Someday, I have no doubt, the Google Maps API will evolve to a level where that will be possible, but not today. It would also be wonderful to have it automatically guess as to the level of megadeaths (which wouldn’t be to hard if you could automatically find population sizes within a given circle radius) but this also is not something easily done with Google Maps (though again, someday I bet it will be possible). It also doesn’t do anything to gauge fallout — this is in part because calculating fallout paths is hard if you are not just being hand-wavy about it, and that even being hand-wavy about it is hard to depict in Google Maps because it doesn’t natively support drawing ellipses as opposed to circles. But there are work-arounds to this, and maybe someday this mapper will support basic fallout trajectories.

Technical credit and caveat: the scaling equations are all adapted from the wonderful Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette. They are approximate scaling equations and they assume optimum burst height. So they are not going to be perfect for estimating ground bursts, and they are probably a little hand-wavy when you talk about bombs at the margins (very tiny or very huge yields).

NUKEMAP should be more or less compatible with any browsers that support the latest Google Maps API (v.3).

Wish this did something that it doesn’t? Let me know. I’m all ears for good suggestions and I find this stuff more fun than is probably healthy.

And maybe you do, too. As one of my AIP colleagues wrote to me: “It’s weird to say that it’s fun…  but I just blew up Chicago!”

  1. The two most prominent via Google are one written in Java at FAS and one called the HYDESim which only shows overpressures. There is also this one that does thermal damage only. And this one from Graham Allison that I wasn’t aware of until after writing NUKEMAP. And this one which also does thermal effects. [↩]

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Redactions

Implosion: To Declassify or Not to Declassify? (1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published February 1st, 2012

The implosion design of the atomic bomb is considered the ultimate secret triumph of Los Alamos. Unlike the relatively simple gun-type design, the implosion design required innovation on a whole manner of scientific fronts: nuclear physics, metallurgy, chemistry, ordnance engineering, electronics… the list goes on. Making explosive lenses that could precisely compress a solid sphere of plutonium into a supercritical state wasn’t easy.

The very idea of implosion — much less the specifics of its implementation — wasn’t declassified after the bombings of Japan. As I’ve mentioned previously, it wasn’t until 1951 (that is, well after the Soviets had demonstrated their own ability to do it) that a bare-basics idea of implosion was declassified, as part of the evidence in the Rosenberg trial.

But that isn’t to say that people hadn’t thought that it was perhaps safe to declassify it earlier than that. This week’s document is a memo from then-Commodore William S. Parsons (USN) to Norris Bradbury, scientific director of Los Alamos, from late October 1945 on this very subject. Parsons you will remember as the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, and a truly key figure at multiple junctions in the development of the practical ordnance engineering of the atomic bomb. In this memo, Parsons was arguing against the declassification of implosion — something he felt needed to be done because there were a considerable number of folks who were arguing for its declassification:1

Click the image to view the PDF.

As you’ve probably picked up on by now, I like anything that helps me get inside the head of a classifier (or declassifier) and see how they saw the world in their time and place. It’s the grist for my historical mill: it’s how I understand nuclear secrecy as a never-quite-stable category, one that is always evolving, one whose logic is always up for grabs and thus needs to be articulated and re-articulated repeatedly.

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  1. Citation: William S. Parsons to Norris E. Bradbury, “Declassification of Implosion,” (30 October 1945), copy in the National Security Archive, George Washington University, Chuck Hansen Papers, Box 11, “1945-1949,” Folder 3. [↩]

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Meditations

The Custody Dispute Over the Bomb

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 30th, 2012

The term “custody dispute” is one we usually associate with acrimonious divorce proceedings. But there was a very real nuclear custody dispute in the 1950s, one which I’ve often been surprised that even folks fairly well-versed in nuclear history weren’t aware of.1

Some fifty B61 bombs in a US Air Force base “igloo.” Courtesy Federation of American Scientists.

The issue in a nutshell: When Eisenhower took office in 1953, there were around 1,000 nuclear bombs in the US nuclear arsenal and all but a few dozen were in the hands of the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). When he left office in 1961, the nuclear stockpile contains some 18,000 weapons (of widely varying size, yield, and delivery mechanism), and 90% of them were under military control.2 That shifting of control — of whether it was a civilian or a military organization that physically had responsibility over the bombs — was the essence of the custody dispute.

The backstory to the dispute is rather simple. As part of the Congressional battle over postwar domestic legislation to regulate atomic energy, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (the McMahon Act) assigned all control of the manufacture, development, and possession of nuclear weapons to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This was not accidental — the key push by Senator Brien McMahon was that this was “civilian control” of the atom, as opposed to “military control.” (The bill the McMahon Act was meant to replace, the May-Johnson Act, was castigated as a “military” bill, which was not entirely true.) The fear, in 1946, was that a military-controlled nuclear complex would result in an un-reflective arms race, preempt democracy, and make an unpleasant atmosphere for scientists. (Thank goodness civilian control resulted in none of those ills!)

The Atomic Energy Act allowed for the possibility that the President could, “from time to time,” direct the AEC to give the military access to fissile material and weapons “for such use as he deems necessary in the interest of national defense.” Otherwise, all weapons would be kept by the AEC.

Thus the custody dispute: the military was, over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s, meant to be ramping up its integration of nuclear weapons into its war plans. And yet, they did not physically have access to live nuclear weapons. In fact, they didn’t even have access to weapons casings to practice with, on account of the weapons casings being classified as “restricted data,” and required Q-clearances (with full FBI investigations) to even look at!

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  1. My source for this is a rather classic document for information about US nuclear deployments: History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons, July 1945 through September 1977 (8MB PDF here), prepared by the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), in February 1978. What I mean by “classic,” here, is that lots of other folks seem to have known about this document for a long time, but I was only made aware of it when I asked a former Harvard colleague of mine, Dan Volmar, who is doing a dissertation on nuclear command and control systems, for something about the custody issue. [↩]
  2. Peter J. Roman, “Ike’s Hair-Trigger: Nuclear Predelegation, 1953-60,” Security Studies 7, no. 4 (Summer 1998), 121-164, on 121. [↩]

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News and Notes

R.I.P.: Richard H. Groves, son of Leslie Groves

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 27th, 2012

Richard H. Groves died on December 26, 2011, at the age of 88, according an obituary published yesterday in the Washington Post. Richard was the son of General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.

Leslie Groves didn’t tell his family what he was working on over the course of World War II — compartmentalization was, as he put it later, “the very heart of security.”

That being said, Leslie Groves didn’t ice out his son over the course of the war. The Leslie Groves papers at NARA contain lots of interesting wartime correspondence relating to Richard. My favorite bit: In early 1942, Leslie Groves wrote to Henry DeWolf Smyth, head of the Princeton Physics department and later author of the famous Smyth Report, for advice about whether Richard should select Physics as his college major.1

Click the image for the full PDF.

I love the feeling of paternal concern one gets from the note. General Groves, the man who would move mountains if it further the development of the bomb, suddenly becomes the concerned father, dutifully worried about whether his son’s calculus was up to snuff.

  1. Citation: Leslie R. Groves to Henry D. Smyth (3 January 1942), in National Archives, RG 200, Papers of Leslie R. Groves, Correspondence, Box 4, “Richard H. Groves.” [↩]

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Visions

An Oppenheimer for Every Historian

by Alex Wellerstein, published January 27th, 2012

My favorite photographer of J. Robert Oppenheimer is Ulli Steltzer. She’s a Canadian photographer of some renown, and took many of the late photographs of Oppenheimer in the early 1960s that grace many of his biographies. I had inadvertently used one of her photographs — a whole set of them, actually, in the form of a contact sheet or proof sheet1 — while designing the poster for the Oppenheimer centennial conference at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004 (just before I went off to grad school). I had found a photocopy of the contact sheet in Frank Oppenheimer’s papers at the Bancroft Library and was just immediately taken with its symbolism: every bomb historian has their own J. Robert Oppenheimer, slightly different.2

The quality of the photocopy isn’t as good as the original, but I like the stark contrast it created. It also worked well with the color process (the whole poster is just black, white, and blueish) that we used.3 Only much later did I figure out that the photographer was Steltzer. She was kind enough to ship me a darkroom reproduction of the original contact sheet, which is stunningly beautiful.

Over e-mail, I asked Ulli about her sessions with Oppenheimer. This was her response to me:

I am glad you like the proof sheet. It is one of several, though I only took O.’s picture four times. The first time I was so exited, that all the pictures were out of focus. Your proof sheet is from the second time. He was shy of the camera and I never got more than 12 shots. It is hard to say which expression is most typical. Priscilla chose a very different picture from Kai Bird. And I have one of the friendly ones here, with the pipe and a smile. Was he an easy or difficult guy to photograph? He asked me to come and take the pictures at different times and occasions, but I never stayed longer than 8 or 10 minutes because he would soon say that it was enough. … When you say “anything you could remember would be appreciated”…..I could not write a book, but I do have many profound memories of conversations with Oppenheimer, enough to justify any expression of his that I was able to catch on film. A man of his depth and complexity can not be easily portrayed in one frame. This is why I can truly appreciate your wanting the proof sheet.4

I thought the portions I’ve bolded above were pretty interesting. I like the idea that someone of Oppenheimer’s richness — sometimes one thing, sometimes another — defies the static notion of the photograph, and perhaps a static notion of a narrative character. Sometimes he’s smiling at you, elfin, almost winking. Sometimes he’s brooding and dark. Sometimes he looks the haunted martyr, sometimes he looks proud. All within the span of 10 minutes or so.

  1. Contact sheets are used by photographer to figure out which of their negatives are worth developing. Any photographer, or anyone who took a photography class in high school, knows this, but I wonder how obscure this fact will be in an age of cheap digital photography. Don’t mistake this for nostalgia on my part — I never saw much glory in smelling like chemicals all day! Though there is something intimate about the darkroom that doesn’t quite carry over to Photoshop. [↩]
  2. It’s a little cheesy of me to use a poster that I designed as the Friday Image, but it’s really because I’m still in love with the original image that makes it work. [↩]
  3. These days, cheap color laser printing is extremely easy to do, but at the time for whatever reason we were using some sort of color separation process. The final result is beautiful but it ended up being a huge hassle. We had told the printers we wanted it to be two colors — meaning black and blue. We hadn’t realized they were considering white — the absence of color — to be a color. For whatever reason, we didn’t get a proof made. What we received from the printer was horrible: instead of black, white, and blue, it was entirely blue and white, where everything you see as black in the above was rendered as the blue color. It took a lot of e-mails with the printer for them to re-print it again on short notice. I can’t remember whether we ended up having to pay some of the second run as well — it wasn’t really clear whose fault this was supposed to be, though I had felt that the fact that the printed work looked nothing like the digital files we had provided might have been a tip-off to a competent printer, and probably override the fact that my language in describing it had been imprecise. It also didn’t help that they tried to fake some of their e-mails to make it sound like they were in the right. Anyway, you live and you learn. This was my first big poster printing job, and I learned a lot from it — as one does from all survived disasters. [↩]
  4. E-mail reproduced with permission. [↩]

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