Visions

Erik Nitsche’s posters for General Dynamics

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 18th, 2011

The bomb has produced a lot of pretty amazing imagery. It’s not just the atomic sunsets from nuclear testing — there’s something about the bomb that has plucked at the collective imagination, for both good and ill. (Spencer Weart’s Nuclear Fear: A History of Images is still the classic on this subject — and a revised edition should be coming out fairly soon.)

Every Friday from here on out I’ll post an interesting atomic image. I have a separate (not updated very often) atomic imagery site, Atomland-on-Mars, but that site is all about the exceptionally unusual, the exceptionally striking, and the public domain. It turns out that there’s a fairly narrow intersection of those three categories. The photos I post here will be a little bit more loose, with the only main constraint being that I find them interesting or amusing for one reason or another.

I’ll start it off with one from my all-time favorite nuclear graphics designer, Erik Nitsche. Nitsche is best known today for his work on corporate graphics design in the 1950s and 1960s — he made some really stunning images for the company General Dynamics and its subsidiary General Atomics.  My favorite is this one, celebrating their meltdown-free TRIGA research reactor:

Erik Nitsche, “Triga” (1958)

Nitsche also did an amazing series in 1955 celebrating “Atoms for Peace”:

Erik Nitsche, “Atoms for Peace (Astrodynamics)” (1955)

Erik Nitsche, “Atoms for Peace (Hydrodynamics)” (1955)

Erik Nitsche, “Atoms for Peace” (1955)

There’s something so Eisenhower-clean about Nitsche’s work: a vision of a clean, peaceful, technocratic atomic future that never quite arrived. There are some more great examples of Nitsche’s work here.

Nitsche’s style is reflected in the emblem of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well. I’m not sure whether he was actually involved in designing it (I’d love to know for sure),1 but it’s that same Atoms-for-Peace cool:

Emblem of the International Atomic Energy Agency (1960)

It’s a stark contrast to the clunky Atoms-for-Peace logo of the United States from around the same period, which is much less hip or graphically informed:

U.S. Atoms for Peace program logo (ca. 1955)

Clip-art quality wheat, microscopes, and gears, all mixed up in a gigantic atomic wheel? A sad showing. So sad, that the Atomic Energy Commission logo in the center has erected a little wall to keep itself separated from its visually lame compatriots.

  1. The IAEA emblem was made official in 1960, but there are documents dated from the late 1950s which have the same emblem on them, so I’m not sure exactly when it was designed. Again, I’d love to know for sure who designed it, if anyone out there knows. IAEA circular INFCIRC/19 is the official order on the emblem and seal, but it’s not available online, alas. My screenshot is from the IAEA’s Annual Report of the Board of Governors to the Conference, 1960, which also cites when they approved of the emblem. [↩]

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Redactions

J. Edgar Hoover on Fuchs and Lilienthal (1950)

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 16th, 2011

Last weekend I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film about the FBI’s first director, “J. Edgar.” I can’t say that I thought it was a great film. Aside from the question of its historical accuracy (which strikes me as, well, dodgy), it was too long, too plodding, and Leonardo DiCaprio, for all of his talents, is just not a very good Hoover. He’s miserable with accents, and just doesn’t ever cease being DiCaprio-playing-Hoover. I never felt like he “inhabited” Hoover, and I didn’t feel he had expanded my understanding of Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson lunching in their regular booth at the Mayflower Hotel, 1970. Source: Google LIFE archive.

My favorite fictional depiction of Hoover is, without a doubt, the J. Edgar who inhabits James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy of novels. The Hoover in Ellroy’s books has the same voice as the Hoover in the FBI files I’ve read: precise, curt, with contempt and threat just out of vision, but always present.

In honor of that mindset, and in a shameless movie tie-in, this Weekly Document is a February 1950 memo by J. Edgar Hoover to his Deputy Director, Clyde Tolson, and two other high-ranking FBI employees regarding a phone conversation Hoover had with David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The conversation’s topic: the imminent announcement of Klaus Fuchs’ role as atomic spy.

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Meditations

Web-based Primary Sources for Nuclear History

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 14th, 2011

Right now, across the world, there are students taking or planning on taking courses on the history of the atomic bomb. The history of the bomb has been and will probably always be (for better or worse) a relevant topic, and students are drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some are better than others…

Source: Cartoon by Peter Arno, The New Yorker (April 6, 1963), p. 42.

Fortunately for these students, writing really impressive term papers on the atomic bomb is easier today than it has probably ever been, in part because the amount of primary source research material about the history of nuclear weapons available through the web is actually quite large — if you know where to go.

Below is a list of the most useful web archives relevant to writing papers on the atomic bomb that I have come across in my own research. My intention is to keep this somewhat up to date over time, and I’d love feedback, in the comments or via e-mail, if I’ve missed something, or something goes dead. I’ve omitted academic journals, magazines (for the most part), and blogs, just because this would be a somewhat unmanageable list and one of a very different character. This list is for primary sources only, and those available without stepping foot into an actual archive. Some are pretty specific in what they cover, and some are more general.

I’ve divided them up into open (free) access databases, subscription-only databases, and a few other miscellaneous useful resources. I don’t know how common the subscription databases are among university libraries these days — I was long spoiled by Harvard Library’s copious e-resources — but at least knowing what is out there might be useful for people.

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Redactions

Trinity test press releases (May 1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 10th, 2011

Let’s get this out there: I’m a confessed “Archive Rat.” While I may not actually be thrilled while in the archives themselves (which are often dusty, bureaucratic, uncomfortable places), I love the thrill of finding something old, something new, something once secret. I get a lot out of that, and I love having thousands of documents at my fingertips, digitized and easy to search. This is a fortunate thing, because if you want to do the history of the bomb, you’d better love sifting through paperwork — because there’s a lot of it. 

OK, so technically this is an FBI facility from World War II, and has nothing specific to do with the bomb. But it’s a pretty great image for the modern bureaucratic-security state. Source: Google LIFE image archive. See the bottom of the post for discussion of what’s really going on in this photo.

The Big Science of the atomic bomb was accompanied by a Big Bureaucracy, the majority of which was kept in secret. This turns out to be great for historians, even if it was arguably lousy for the nation. As Richard G. Hewlett, put it the first volume of his official history of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission:

The records have survived. For this, scholars can thank two much-maligned practices of the bureaucracy: classification and multiple copies. Classified documents endure; they do not disappear from the files as souvenirs. As for copies in sextuplicate, their survival is a matter of simple arithmetic. If the original in one agency is destroyed, the chances are better than even that one of the five carbons will escape the flames in another.1

What Hewlett doesn’t say here is that the reason people don’t take them home as souvenirs, or throw them out haphazardly, or lend them to their friends, or accidentally mutilate or staple them, is that because the maximum penalty for doing these sorts of things was death for much of the Cold War.2

In this spirit, once a week I will pick out an interesting or exceptional document from my research database and share it with you here, with a little contextualization and commentary.

I want to start with a favorite: a series of press releases written by William L. Laurence to be sent out after the Trinity test in July 1945. Laurence, as I mentioned earlier this week, was the only newspaper reporter brought in to view the Manhattan Project. General Groves had decided that Laurence, a science journalist at the New York Times, would be useful for writing press releases, newspaper articles, and official statements. (He soon discovered Laurence was lousy at the latter — too “gee-whiz!” — and assigned those duties to Arthur W. Page, the Vice President of Marketing at AT&T and a close friend of the Secretary of War.)

One of Laurence’s duties was to compose a series of press releases issuing cover stories for the Trinity test. The Manhattan Project folks knew that Trinity would make a big noise, and so they needed some sort of excuse — an exploding ammunition dump, for example — to give out immediately afterwards to the surrounding area. What they didn’t know was how big of a noise it was going to be, so Laurence wrote up a series of escalating press releases depending on how awful the test was.

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  1. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume I (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), on 657. [↩]
  2. In 1969, when the Supreme Court temporarily ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, the Atomic Energy Act was amended to remove the death penalty and make the maximum penalties life imprisonment. It was never added back to the law even when it was made constitutional again. Small miracles, eh? [↩]

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Meditations

The Mysterious Design of Little Boy

by Alex Wellerstein, published November 8th, 2011

On August 11, 1945 — just two days after the bombing of Nagasaki — the U.S. government issued a technical history of the Manhattan Project, written by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth.1 The Smyth Report, as it came to be known (its official title was unpleasantly long), was meant to serve as the authoritative guide for what could be publicly said by Manhattan Project participants about the atomic bomb.

One of the areas that the Report was most sheepish about is how the actual charges of the atomic bombs — now called the “physics packages” — are designed. Implosion, the method used on the Trinity “Gadget” and the Nagasaki bomb (“Fat Man”), was ignored completely (and not declassified until 1951). Even the simple “gun-type” design used in the Hiroshima bomb, “Little Boy,” was treated only obliquely:

Since estimates had been made of the speed that would bring together subcritical masses of U-235 rapidly enough to avoid predetonation, a good deal of thought had been given to practical methods of doing this. The obvious method of very rapidly assembling an atomic bomb was to shoot one part as a projectile in a gun against a second part as a target.2

In the early days, most people assumed that meant shooting two halves of a critical mass together, or, in more “real-looking” depictions, such as this very early one from the Austrian physicist Hans Thirring’s Die Geschichte der Atombombe (1946), a small “projectile” being shot into a dense “target”:

“One of the possible constructions of the atomic bomb.” Click to see the full page.

On Thirring’s diagram,3 a “Phantasie” of “Details der Bombenkonstruktion” (you have to love the German here) based on the description in the Smyth Report, you can see that there is a projectile (P) which gets shot down an artillery barrel (R) by conventional explosives into the target (S), which is a larger amount of fissile material embedded in a tamper (T). The role of the tamper (which is discussed in the Smyth Report) is to reflect neutrons and hold together the fissioning mass a few milliseconds longer than it might otherwise be inclined. This allows for more fission reactions and more of an explosion.

So this is more or less how we’ve been talking about gun-type designs since 1945… until very recently. John Coster-Mullen, a trucker/photographer/bomb geek (and a friend of mine), dubbed “Atomic John,” by the New Yorker in 2008, found, through some painstaking research, that this old story was wrong on one important detail.

The actual “Little Boy” bomb was not a small “projectile” being shot into the larger “target.” It’s a large “projectile” being shot into a smaller “target.” That is, as John puts it, “Little Boy” was in fact a “girl”:

A Little Boy diagram from Wikipedia based on John Coster-Mullen’s description.

Now half of you are saying “so what,” the other half are saying “I already know this, I’m an atomic wonk,” and the two of you who are not in that category (and are left out of the halves by rounding errors) are saying, “Cooooool.”

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  1. The paranoid pedant in me wants to point out that the date, August 11, is correct for the distribution date, whereas it is often quoted as August 12. In order to avoid any one newspaper getting the “scoop,” the government requested that none report on it until the morning of the 12th, however. So either date is technically fine. Don’t you feel better, knowing that? [↩]
  2. See §12.19, “Method of Assembly,” in Chapter 12, “The Work on the Atomic Bomb.” [↩]
  3. Those who are very into this bomb thing may recognize that this is the same image as the supposed “Nazi nuke” that made the rounds in 2005. Needless to say I am not super impressed with the claims that this was an actually working bomb and not just a visualization based on Thirring’s book, which itself was clearly based on the Smyth Report. The fact that the “Nazi nuke” refers to the fissile material as “Plutonium,” a name given to it in secret by Americans and only released after the bomb project was made project, makes it patently clear this is very much a postwar construction. [↩]

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