My diss does include some Manhattan Project stuff, but Malloy provides a couple of excellent cites (which are actually quite handy) and offers intriguing suggestions that may cause me to recast a couple of things I did manage to include. Given the Ziegler and Jacobson covered nuclear intelligence up through 1949 and JOE-1, I pretty much moved on from there with my diss, which concentrates on 1949 to 1964.

I do have a couple of observations. Groves has a lot on his plate and tended to defer to Oppenheimer about what was important scientifically, thus I can easily see “fallout before it had a name” being something that was a matter more of neglect than intent given everything else going. If Oppie wasn’t worried about it, why should Gives be?

Then there was the issue of his fears over the darn bomb just not working and how that would put him on the spot after spending all that money in secret. Having the bomb turn out to be “poisonous” wouldn’t be quite the disaster that failure to explode would’ve been, although that is a bit more self-serving than simple neglect as an explanation if that had Groves worried. Better to ask forgiveness, than risk asking permission, if it did trun out to be a problem? Works for teenagers and politicians, why not generals?

Then there is the complexity of such an enormous organization operating in wartime. Given the press of other priorities, it’s not unreasonable to say this just fell through the cracks, although it’s obvious that a few folks do seem to be on the right track, although empirical evidence for their theory that radiation would be a threat was still not present.

What’s key in my diss argument is something similar, based on what Z&J documented for the R&D involved in chasing fallout for intelligence purposes. It was really hard at first, so this tended to support the idea in the minds of the military that fallout couldn’t be much of an issue if it was so hard to track down.

One thing that is pretty clear is that Oppenheimer’s dismissive view on fallout as inconsequential changed. At the very least, he evidenced a lot of enthusiasm in helping with R&D after SANDSTONE experiments finally proved that collecting aerial samples at a distance could work. The problem there was that the Air Force grew pretty hostile about having him around shortly after JOE-1. But Oppie did seem to finally embrace the idea that fallout was a threat with the super, simply because of the quantities involved. So he did respond to empirical evidence in terms of his changing views on fallout.

The problem then was that the military assumed that he was simply making an issue of fallout as one of the many reasons they thought he was finding to oppose pursuing the super. It took CASTLE BRAVO to eventually make them reluctant believers, too, and the resistance to changing what many in the military believed about fallout, that it was inconsequential, continued for some time as influential in the way the military approached the subject and still persists to a certain degree.

Thus, it is amazing to see several very familiar characters involved at this early date in a fallout cover up. One of the S. Warrens, I’m pretty sure it was Stafford (I can’t keep them straight without my notes in front of me) was the person who certified that using the Nevada Test Site would be “safe,” for instance. I’m just not sure there was any collective or even completely malicious intent to bury this info this early, but it does demonstrate the natural inclination of those who had it that it was a very sensitive topic and kept from view, if at all possible. Certainly this was an approach to fallout that prevailed for the next couple of decades, an example of what I call infrapolicy, which is a lot like policy, but functions in its absence or at variance with official statements. The Pentagon was more than happy to try to keep this buried for multiple reasons, but fallout has the power of tending to escape and seep into everything…and well, there’s a lot more. Looking forward to your review.

I think the “contamination” idea may be related to some of the concerns they still held about the German atomic research program. While the nuclear intelligence work of ALSOS had largely ruled out the possibility of a German fission bomb by the beginning of 1945, there were still concerns that the Germans might have been able to develop mixes of deadly isotopes in lieu of actual fission. Like some other ways of war, once the Germans adopted it, it became justifiable for the British to to go there, too, so Penney may have been keeping this option open for this reason.

I’m basing my assessment of Penney on his later role in shutting down some of the fallout research that accompanied British nuclear testing in Australia. I’m referring here to the Hedley Marston affair, where Penney played a role in retrieving the equipment that allowed Marston to closely inquire into the role of I-131, one of the key isotopes used for nuclear intelligence purposes.

Penney obviously knew more about fallout by the mid-50s, but his reaction to independent scientific research into it was to suppress it. I believe that Penney’s motivations at the time were primarily related to keeping secret the techniques that the British and Americans used for nuclear intelligence, but he was also leery of stirring up the Australian public, which eventually did indicate they would prefer the British do their testing elsewhere.

BTW, back to firestorms, here’s a link to help model the results you’d get in starting your very own firestorm:
http://www.nucleardarkness.org/nuclear/nuclearexplosionsimulator/

Penney’s reference to radiation was most likely a reference to gamma and prompt radiation. The risks of alpha and beta radiation was still poorly understood. Burns from beta radiation were noticed as a problem among those handling “hot” samples for test diagnostics and intel R&D during the 1948 SANDSTONE test series. A full appreciation of the dangers of alpha wouldn’t be recognized until near the end of the 1950s as the risks posed by fallout were better understood.

What’s really interesting was how the problem of nuclear firestorm was largely suppressed during the Cold War. Lynn Eden’s 2004 book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge and Nuclear Weapons Devastation covers this well, although I’ve only read the excerpts published IIRC in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This is particularly interesting in my research, as the Air Force tended to see nuclear weapons as just more powerful forms of conventional weapons, which is one reason why they tended to ignore the problem of fallout. This casting of nuclear weapons as simply hyper-efficient conventional ones was a way to suppress the moral issues raised by strategic attacks on civilian targets, which became widely acceptable in the course of WWII. Apparently, the US military was nearly as reticent to address the use of firestorms against cities as they were to address the risks of fallout, indicating that even they saw such attacks as close to the moral line shading into war crimes that they preferred to avoid an open and thorough discussion of the issue.

I find it interesting as this report was written in December 1944. The bombing of Hamburg on 27 July 1943 created the first firestorm of WW2 though the effects of fire driven winds from aerial bombing were observed during the Blitz in 1940. Other firestorms followed in 1944 and most in 1945 in Germany and Japan.

I’ve always presumed the idea of the firestorm was fully understood before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but perhaps not?

How did the idea of a fire-storm evolve in WW2 in planning for both conventional and nuclear bombing?

Was a fire-storm explicitly accounted for in the planning of the final burst height of the A-bombs?

In Section VII on “radiation contamination” does Penny mean the effects of fallout from the bomb or the effects of prompt radiation including neutrons irradiating material on the ground and so making that material alpha/beta/gamma radioactive? Or was he just thinking of prompt gamma and prompt neutrons?