Visions

The Hanford Rumor Rat (1951)

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 9th, 2011

This week’s image is a  “security poster” from the Hanford site at the height of the Cold War, warning that “Rumors, too, can Sabotage“:1

Click to view full image.

Subtle it isn’t. I love the nefariousness of the rat, the complexity of his sausage/loudspeaker apparatus, and the content of the “lies, b-z-z-z, rumors”:

  • “Security’s silly” (a sentiment not discouraged by this rather silly poster)
  • “We’re a target” (probably true, if it refers to Soviet weapons or espionage targeting)
  • “Hanford is doomed” (too vague to evaluate as true or false)
  • “Abolish the A-bomb” (a legitimate political position; also, technically neither a lie, rumor, or “b-z-z-z”)

I’ll cut them some slack. 1951 was a pretty uncertain time (exacting scholarly reference on the subject). Maybe confusing legitimate, albeit left-wing, positions with sabotage can be written off a bit.

But the most interesting thing to me about this poster is the confluence of security with morale. Because this isn’t really about technical sabotage: it’s about workers at Hanford feeling depressed about their jobs, and the effect that political opinions can have on that. I’m not sure this particular poster, though, gets around that.

There are some other posters from the period at the Hanford DDRS database (part of my big list o’ links posted previously); just enter “N1D Security Poster” in to the basic search query (the “N1D” limits the results only to images). The rat makes (warning: clunky Java image viewer applet at this link) at least one other appearance.

  1. Source: “Security Posters,” (8 May 1951), Hanford Declassified Document Reference System, accession number N1D0034852. [↩]

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Redactions

Dangerous Princeton Wives (1943)

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 7th, 2011

The atomic bomb was meant to be one of the greatest secrets of the war. A vast security force was set up to monitor the thousands of personnel involved. Barbed wire, remoteness, and intrusive investigations were meant to keep the Los Alamos lab a complete and total blank. But the Manhattan Project administrators didn’t count on the powers of one especially nefarious group to pierce the veil of secrecy: Princeton wives.

This week’s document is a letter, from early 1943, from Henry DeWolf Smyth, Princeton physicist and future author of the famous Smyth Report, to Irving Stewart, the Executive Secretary of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the civilian organization were had overall control over the wartime bomb project. Smyth reports that he had become aware of “an extremely unpleasant and serious situation with regard to Dr. Oppenheimer’s new project.”1

Click the image to view the full document in PDF format.

J. Robert Oppenheimer had been in town not too long earlier, and had been recruiting physicists to his new, secret laboratory in New Mexico. He recommended to the physicists that they consult with their wives about the possible relocation. “It is not clear to me,” Smyth wrote, “whether they were to tell their wives anything more than the location and restrictions. There were, of course, repeated warnings by him and by me on the necessity for extreme secrecy.”

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  1. Citation: Henry D. Smyth to Irving Stewart (15 February 1943), in Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Record Group 227, microfilm publication M1392, Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. (ca. 1990), Reel 9, Target 24, Folder 140, “Oppenheimer, June 1, 1942-February 1943.” [↩]

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News and Notes

R.I.P.: Paul Doty and Lawrence H. Johnston

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 6th, 2011

This is just a small post to acknowledge the passing of two participants in the Manhattan Project this week.

Paul Doty (L) and Jerome Wiesner (R) with John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Paul M. Doty (1920-2011) passed away yesterday morning, according to a release from the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. I had some chance to talk with Professor Doty last year when I was a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center. Professor Doty was crucial to the running of the Pugwash Conference in the early years, and gave me some opportunity to look at, and talk to him about the disposition of, many of his copious and well-kept volumes of Pugwash proceedings and ephemera. His opening address at the Sixth Pugwash Conference (1960), “Current Attitudes on Disarmament in America,”1 is an interesting read, and represents the mix of pragmatism and idealism that characterized Doty’s thinking:

Our job now in this meeting is not to pass resolutions stating the importance of disarmament. Our job is to get on with the task of finding realistic and more secure alternatives to the arms race. We must not misjudge the scope of this problem. For more than a generation the genius and labor treasure of the major powers have been concentrated in the most highly organized effort the world has ever known. This will not tumble and a peaceful world fitting each person’s desire will not appear by saying it should. If this enormous agglomeration of carefully counterpoised power is not dismantled with a skill at least equal to that which created it, we may invite the very catastrophe we seek to avoid.

These words seem as true to me today with regards to disarmament as they did in 1960. One more great Doty excerpt: “Fear is usually based not on what we know, but on what we do not know of others. Fear can only be driven from the relations among states by increasing openness among us — by a progressive reduction in the outmoded fog of secrecy which surrounds our national affairs.”

Lawrence H. Johnston (1918-2011) passed away yesterday as well. Johnston was featured in a previous post as one of the people involved with assembling the atomic bomb on Tinian, and posing with the plutonium core of the “Fat Man” bomb. I had been in touch with him over e-mail in 2006 regarding his patent on the Exploding-Bridgewire Detonator, a precise blasting cap that initiates by means of an electrical current, and was part of the instrumentation necessary to detonate the explosive lenses of the “Fat Man” and “Trinity” bombs.

He was, as far as I know, the only person to witness all three of the first atomic detonations firsthand — at only age 27 or so. (Aside from being present at the “Trinity” test, he was aboard an instrumentation plane for both of the Japanese bombing missions.)

Lawrence H. Johnston in a flack suit in front of "The Great Artiste," an instrument support plane that accompanied "Bockscar" on the Nagasaki bombing mission.

He gave a talk at Los Alamos in 2006 about the invention of the detonator, as well as his role in the bomb in general, which is still online. It’s an interesting little read, very defensive of the positions of Ernest Lawrence and Johnston’s mentor, Luis Alvarez:

Back at Los Alamos there was lots of rejoicing. “We won the War!”  But several important people were having pangs of conscience, most notably Oppenheimer.  Yes we had stopped the wartime killing, but we had killed a lot of people with our bombs, and worst of all we had let the genie out of the bottle, and now nuclear war would be a specter for the world to face.  … Oppie felt especially responsible for this nuclear worry, and he made public statements of remorse.  I think it was because of this that Oppie was forgiven by the 1945 Peace Activists in the Physics community.  Instead he became their hero. But Alvarez was not forgiven, and he suffered public insults as a warmonger.  The same for Ernest Lawrence.  The Peace activists sounded like they wished we had lost the war, or at least that it had ended in a bloody stalemate.

I don’t think that’s a totally accurate reading of the history, but within it you can see the conflict and frustration of a man who felt like he was doing the right thing — working to end World War II — and found himself seen as being part of something awful by a large proportion of his own scientific community.

  1. My copy of this was provided to me by Professor Doty, and was from his personal files. [↩]

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Meditations

Origins of the Nuclear Black Budget

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 5th, 2011

How much does the nuclear complex cost the American taxpayer? In a post last Thursday, Mia Steinle and Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight wrote about the fact that the exact cost of the U.S. nuclear complex remains an unknown figure to taxpayers. (“Taxpayers Left in the Dark When it Comes to Nuclear Weapons Spending,” POGO, December 1, 2011.) They describe a debate between the Obama administration and groups trying to come up with realistic estimates for the numbers:

So, how much does the U.S. spend on nuclear weapons? The only way to know for sure—and the only way for Congress to make informed decisions about funding—is for the administration to be more transparent about its nuclear spending, and to make a complete, detailed budget available to the public that includes operations, tactical nukes and other costs borne by the taxpayer. We also need a GAO audit of that budget, because right now, the one thing we do know is that we do not know enough.

There’s a way in which billions and billions just seem like lots of numbers with zeros attached to them, though the difference between “$700 billion over ten years” (one estimate) and “$200 billion” (official estimate) is pretty large. Half a trillion is quite a lot of zeros.

What accounts for the disagreement? Interestingly, classification and secrecy appear to play a very small role. While all sides acknowledge that there are some classified programs that aren’t being listed, it seems to me that everybody is more or less in agreement that most of the expenditures are more or less in the open. The question is not so much a matter of what’s being paid for, but how much everything will eventually cost, and whose figures you trust on that point.

So that’s interesting to me. The old debate on the price of the nuclear complex was based on classification and inconsistent record keeping. The new debate is a question of how much these large technical systems are actually going to cost and how many factors over budget they will be — POGO claims that a DoD project costing six times its initial estimate is not unusual.

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Visions

How to Use the Atomic Bomb in your Business

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 2nd, 2011

In Wednesday’s post, I made the bold assertion that nuclear warfare would probably be bad for business. Today’s image of the week is, well, something of a caveat to that statement. Nuclear warfare — rockets a burstin’ in air and all that — are definitely not good for the old capitalist enterprise. But the preparations for nuclear war — the making of the bombs, missiles, submarines, and so on — can be quite lucrative indeed!

This week’s image is an advertisement that appeared in Time magazine in January 1946, not too long after the end of World War II, bearing the wonderful heading: “How to  use the Atomic Bomb in your business.”1

Click to enlarge the image.

You can benefit from the atomic bomb project now! New engineering principles, new processing methods, new equipment — mere by-products of the bomb — have already, by a conservative estimate, more than given back America its total investment in atomic research. Some of these benefits will soon be yours for the asking.

The firm in question is Taylor Instruments, who developed some of the pressure sensitive instrumentation for the gaseous diffusion project at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. (The company is still in existence today, and still uses its bomb work as one of its selling points.)

The pitch of the ad, with its hilarious boss with a bomb on his desk image, is that while Taylor Instruments can’t share any bomb secrets with you, they did some pretty difficult stuff during the Manhattan Project, and now you can share some of the same, bomb-hardened expertise they developed.

 To meet the unheard-of tolerances involved, Taylor had to develop dozens of new types of instruments, and mass-produce them in astronomical quantities. In addition, many standard Taylor Instruments were used. Many instrumentation details are still secret, but… The same Taylor Engineers who worked them out for Oak Ridge are ready to help solve your processing problems!

Taylor wasn’t the only Manhattan Project contractor to later hype its atomic experience for postwar benefit, but they’re the only one I’ve seen with such an amusing advertisement.

This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to profiteering off of the atomic bomb, both in the past and today. For the full bill for the nuclear weapons complex, the best reference is Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institution Press, 1998).

  1. Citation: Taylor Instruments, “How to use the Atomic Bomb in your business,” [advertisement], Time (21 January 1946), on 43. [↩]

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