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NUKEMAP at one year and 10 million blasts

Friday, February 8th, 2013

A year ago this week, I launched the NUKEMAP. It’s perhaps fitting that this week, NUKEMAP also (coincidentally) hit 10 million “detonations.” That corresponds with just over 2.25 million pageviews (1.96 million unique). Which is pretty crazy. I attribute a lot of the success I’ve had with this blog to the NUKEMAP, as a driver of traffic. A few percent of the visitors look at the blog; a few percent of them become regular readers. A few percent of two million is a lot of people.

The mapping of where people bombed doesn’t look significantly different than did the first million, so I won’t post another one of those images. But here’s some fun-with-data for you: below is a heatmap of all of the 10 million detonations. The “hotter” it is (e.g. red or orange), the more times a given place or region was nuked. I shaved off a few decimal places from the latitude and longitude coordinates so that repeated nukes in the same basic area were lumped together (and so you don’t have to worry if you nuked your neighbor’s house a million times), but it is still pretty granular.

NUKEMAP at 10 million

If you click on the image, you’ll go to an interactive version.1

For people who are into metrics, here are the daily, weekly, and monthly pageview graphs of the NUKEMAP from Google Analytics. After an initial big burst, it died down a bit (to 2,000 hits or so a day, mind you), punctuated by occasional new big bursts as it occasionally landed on the Reddit front page every once in awhile.

Hey, even Jon Stewart was into it:

"sinc when"

John asks: “When did lower Manhattan become the standard unit of destruction measurement?” Answer: Certainly by the late 1940s, probably even earlier.

OK, so Jon Stewart posted something that was originally from ABC News, so technically ABC News was into it, but it’s still Jon Stewart! I’ll take what I can get in that department!

Awhile back I did a write-up of NUKEMAP usage patterns for WMD Junction, an online journal: So Long, Mom, I’m Off to Drop the Bomb: A Case Study in Public Usage of an Educational Tool. Check it out if you are curious about who-bombed-who.

People have also done some pretty cool things with it. The infographic shown by Jon Stewart derives  from a setting that was sent around on Reddit and elsewhere showing the effects of a 6 kiloton bomb on lower Manhattan, with 6 kilotons being one of the yield estimates of the 2009 North Korean test. 6 kilotons doesn’t sound like a lot by modern standards, unless you happen to be right underneath it, and then it’s probably worth taking seriously.

An engineer in the U.K. (who has asked to be credited only as “RLBH”)  recently made and sent me an incredibly elaborate map modeling  ”Probable Nuclear Targets in the United Kingdom” as imagined by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Ministry of Defence in 1967:2

NUKEMAP UK targets, 1967

That’s pretty neat, and is actually very much related to the original project of which NUKEMAP was originally a spin-off (dubbed as TARGETMAP, which I’ve put indefinitely on hold for the moment for lack of time).

There’s only one lesson that I’ve been a little disturbed by. An awful lot of people are amazed at how small the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were compared to thermonuclear weapons. That’s true — but it’s because the megaton-range weapons were insane, not because the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were small. By human standards, 10-20 kilotons should still be horrifying. From a view of 100,000 feet, though, it’s a lot less impressive than the Tsar Bomba, even though the latter was a lot less of a realistic threat than weapons of “smaller” yields, and is certainly a lot less of a threat today. When you put “small” nukes next to monstrous nukes, it is easy to lose perspective. That’s not my goal — my goal is to help people get a sense of scale, something that I think is even more important in a post-Cold War age.

So I’m excited to announce that I’m deep in the coding of a successor to NUKEMAP. It isn’t quite ready for prime time, yet, but it’s well past the proof-of-concept stage. It works. I’m trying to incorporate the lessons I learned with the use and reception of the first NUKEMAP into the new one, and trying to provide a very different sort of user experience. The details are still hush-hush. I’ve told a handful of people about it in person, to gauge reactions, and have a few beta testers lined up, but I’m confident enough to say that this is something entirely new. The new NUKEMAP will do things that no other online nuclear effects simulator does. So keep an eye out for it. There is no estimated-time-of-arrival — it’ll be up when it’s good and ready — but it will probably be up by the end of spring 2013.

Notes
  1. Note: the underlying dataset for the 10 Million browser is static. So it would not be worth your time trying to influence how it looks at this point by bombing all over the place. [↩]
  2. RLBH sent me some details on how he made his map:

    I’m sure you’re familiar with Professor Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst, 1945-2010 (London: Penguin, 2003), which contains (amongst other things) a list of ‘Probable Nuclear Targets in the United Kingdom’ drawn up by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Ministry of Defence in 1967. This list suggests the use of some 377 nuclear devices against 100 targets in the United Kingdom, none of less than 500 kilotons yield and with a total yield between 272.5 and 362.5 megatons.

    I know that a Swedish gent has used your NUKEMAP tool to generate his own targeting plan against Sweden, but I’ve not heard of it being used to illustrate a ‘real’ war plan before. For my own elucidation, I’ve modelled the JIC’s targeting plan for the UK in NUKEMAP, with the following caveats applying to my method.

    - Where multiple devices are programmed for a single point target, I’ve only modelled the largest. Some such targets were overkilled to a remarkable extent, even allowing for delivery system unreliability – most command & control centres, for instance, were allocated two missiles warheads of 3 megatons each, and two 1 megaton gravity bombs.

    - For the industrial area targets, I’ve selected DGZs on the basis of my own best judgment, generally seeking to maximise the industry receiving 20 psi of overpressure. Unsurprisingly, this results in significant overkill against the housing and population of the targeted cities. This also means that some surprisingly large cities are totally untouched by the initial strike, which would certainly be targeted in a pure countervalue ‘dehousing’ strike. I’ve similarly eyeballed the attack on London, assuming here that the eight one-megaton warheads would be dual-targeted on four DGZs.

    - I’ve not made any allowance for devices initiating over other than their programmed DGZ. This means, in effect, that two or three devices are ‘wasted’ against some targets, which could in fact be more profitably used elsewhere. This is especially the case, of course, for the bomber-carried devices, as these can more readily be retargeted.

    - Where the yield of devices is specified as a range, I’ve used the simple arithmetic mean of the maximum and minimum. This means there are a few unusual sized weapons used.

    - I’ve treated all devices as airbursts, because of the limitations of NUKEMAP. This isn’t meant as a criticism, it’s far and away the best tool of its’ kind that I’ve seen, and there’s obviously a tradeoff between usability and flexibility. In any case, some 140 devices directed against 70 targets (bunkers, dockyards and airfields) ought to be ground bursts.

    - I’ve also interpreted the central government target at Cheltenham to mean the BURLINGTON bunker at Corsham, rather than GCHQ as Hennesy does. Both would be viable targets, but GCHQ is out of keeping with the rest of the list, whereas BURLINGTON was thought highly likely to be compromised and it’s unlikely that RSGs would be hit and the Government bunker ignored. [↩]

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Posted in News and Notes, Visions | 21 Comments »

Three losses

Friday, January 25th, 2013

There were three Manhattan Project losses that I heard about over the last week that I thought were worth briefly commenting on. They highlight, in different ways, how the living history of the Manhattan Project is rapidly vanishing.

Erwin Hiebert, 1972. From the Radcliffe Archives.

Erwin Hiebert, 1972. From the Radcliffe Archives.

Erwin Hiebert had worked as a chemist at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. He passed away last November, though a notice was just recently sent around. I interviewed him a few years back, though not about his bomb work (connected with doing some local Harvard history). I believe I recall him telling me he had worked with Harold Urey on diffusion research. He later became an historian of science, and this was the capacity I knew him in. He was a charming old man, very helpful, very friendly. He wasn’t a major figure on the Manhattan Project, but it’s sometimes worth remembering how many people were involved in the project other than the main, well-known scientists and the thousands of construction workers or miscellaneous technicians. I recently had a chance to look up just how many people working at the Met Lab — we normally only hear about the 20 or so people who worked on the pile, but at its height, there were around 2,000 people working at Chicago on the bomb, with some 750 of them doing it in a scientific (as opposed to administrative or construction) capacity.

Assembling the Trinity device: Louis Slotin, Herb Lehr, and — I believe, at top right — Donald F. Hornig. It looks a lot like him, to me.

Assembling the Trinity “Gadget”: Louis Slotin, Herb Lehr, and — I believe, at top right — Donald F. Hornig (magnified). It looks a lot like him, to me, but I don’t have confirmation of this. The “Gadget” is at far left, of course; on top of the box next to it is the container with its plutonium core.

Donald F. Hornig also recently passed away. He worked at Los Alamos during the war, and was heavily involved in the instrumentation work that was required for the implosion bomb. He was credited as the inventor of the triggered spark-gap switch (a “low-impedance switch”), which was the switch necessary to divert a high-voltage signal to the 32 detonators on the “Gadget” with a simultaneity tolerance of only nanoseconds. (A patent application for this switch had been filed in his name in late 1945; it was declassified and granted in 1976. Hornig told me he had no awareness of it being filed or granted when I talked to him a few years back.) He was also one of the last people in the “Trinity” tower before its detonation, checking the electrical connections, which proved to be a somewhat hair-raising experience. He describes his work at “Trinity” in some detail here. It’s worth a read:

I think I was the last person down from the tower although there might be a little bit of argument about that. I won’t go into any detail, but Oppenheimer had gotten worried about nine o’clock the night before about how easy the thing was to sabotage by anyone who really knew anything about it, and so I believe it was Kistiakowsky, Bainbridge and I who each took a turn sitting with it up on the tower. My turn came from around nine o’clock until midnight, in the midst of a violent thunder and lightning storm. You get philosophical in those circumstances. You know, either you do get hit by lightning or you don’t and either way you won’t know what happens.

He had many later achievements, including being LBJ’s science advisor.

The Oak Ridge K-25 plant in 1945.

The Oak Ridge K-25 plant in 1945.

Lastly, the K-25 plant has been completely destroyed. The Oak Ridge facility, which had been used during and after World War II to enrich uranium via the gaseous diffusion method, was the largest factory under one roof at the time it was constructed. It had been long since shut down, and, a few years back, all but one “cell” of its building had been destroyed. A number of people had been trying to keep the cell preserved as an historic site, but it came to naught. It took only 20 minutes to permanently knock down the last piece of it, the last indication of the scale of this site.

I think this is really too bad — a completely missed opportunity. I know that there are people who have mixed feelings about preserving the Manhattan Project sites — they think that they will be used as excuses to glorify the atomic bomb. I think this is entirely misguided. These sites are ambiguous and they provoke different reactions from different people. By analogy, there can be controversy over how the Enola Gay should be presented to the public, but the answer is not to melt the Enola Gay into scrap. Destroying these sorts of legacies is a permanent act, whereas the act of interpretation is an always changing one. Erasing history is not the right response to the fact that we still disagree over it. Destroying the sites where the atomic bomb was made will not change the fact that we made the atomic bomb.

The last generation of people who worked on the first atomic bombs is passing away. The bomb still exists. We should be doing more to preserve these sites, even if they make us uncomfortable, even if we are unsure how they will be used by people in the present or the future.

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Posted in Meditations, News and Notes | 3 Comments »

H-bomb talk, National Museum of American History

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Just a little announcement for my DC-area friends: I’m giving a talk on the history of the hydrogen bomb next week at the colloquium of the National Museum of American History. It’s on Tuesday, January 22, 2013. Tea and cookies are served at 3:30pm, the talk starts at 4:00pm.

Well, it was a little conspicuous.

The title is “The Hydrogen Bomb and the Shifting Focus of Cold War Scientific Secrecy.” I’ll be talking about some research I’ve been working on for a few years now relating to how the H-bomb debate and its aftermath changed the way in which Cold War nuclear secrecy operated. Basically, I argue that something big changed in 1950 — the way the government started handling its scientists, the press, and the legality of secrecy suddenly shifted in a much more antagonistic direction. I argue this wasn’t actually because of a radical shift in ideology, but more because of a series of practical governance problems that the Atomic Energy Commission were faced with in late 1949 and early 1950 (the first Soviet bomb, the H-bomb debate, and finally the revelation of Fuchs as a spy). Seeing this shift, and making sense of why and how it happened, required going deep into the AEC archives to unearth the secret history of secrecy.

It is a pretty fun topic, one I am pretty excited about, and even well-seasoned nuclear folks will learn new things. Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think would be interested.

The talk is done, and it was fun! People laughed when I hoped they would and I kept more or less within my time limit. If you’re interested in listening to the audio (it’s about an hour) and looking at the slides, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment here and I’ll get in touch with you.

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That Doomsy Time of the Year

Friday, December 7th, 2012

It’s that time of the year again — when The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists hosted their Doomsday Clock Symposium, the cheeriest conference ever. Basically it was an all-day conference where experts present on what appears to be the status quo in various doomsy topics: nuclear weapons, nuclear powerw, bioweapons/bioterrorism, climate change, and so on. At the end of it, the Science and Security Board of The Bulletin (a group of smart and well-credentialed folks) convened privately and decided whether things are doomy enough to move the Doomsday Clock another minute or so towards midnight, or whether it should be moved back a minute or so, or whether things are basically the same.

(Yes, I know that this oft-used image is not really a Mayan calendar. Cut me some slack. C’mon, admit it, it’s kind of clever. A little bit.) The Doomsday Clock is a registered trademark of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, used here only in playful jest.

I went last year, but didn’t make it this year. The Doomsday Clock is currently at five minutes to midnight, which is to say, the same as it was in 2007, and the worst it has been since the end of the Cold War. (The clock’s closest times were two minutes in 1953, and three minutes in 1984, both of which were admittedly pretty tense times. Interestingly, in both cases, the clocks were radically moved back within a few years.) They changed the clock one minute forward after last year’s meeting, which was in line with my predictions having sat in on the event.

Everything looked not-so-good at the beginning of 2012: India and Pakistan seemed to be charging ahead with fissile material production without much heed to anything else (even each other); the United States was so crippled by Executive-Legislative in-fighting that it could barely pass completely sensible, bi-partisan treaties, much less hard stuff; Fukushima had happened just the previous year, with ill implications for nuclear energy regulation; and nobody was doing anything significant about climate change, despite the evidence getting stronger and stronger that things were accelerating as bad as the worst-case models had predicted. The closest thing to good news was that it would still be some time before kids could cook up decent biological weapons in their college bio classes.

How are things on the cusp of 2013? My basic read is: nothing’s changed too much from the last time. (This is also the gist of what I’ve heard from folks who were at the conference this year.) Pretty much all of those individual items are the same as they were. What would that mean towards the clock? In a world where the clock was a simple, objective measurement of “doom,” you’d say that inaction would count as a net increase of badness. With climate change, that argument is especially strong: if the models are correct, then every year we spend not mitigating or at least slowing climate change means some greater amount of mitigation in the future. The longer it goes untended, the harder it will be to fix in the future, and the longer the negative effects will last. (The EPA explains this as a “carbon bathtub” effect — the input vastly overpowers the drain, and even decreases the size of the drain.) So that’s pretty doomy.

Of course, the Doomsday Clock isn’t an objective measure of doom — it’s a piece of publicity meant to focus attention onto key issues. In this sense, nothing changing might be a sign to just keep the clock where it is. Moving it forward, without any really strong reasons to do so, might dilute its publicity power. And if you’re moving it forward just because nothing positive is being achieved, well, you’ve only got a few more years of being able to do that before you run out of minutes! (A negative-time wouldn’t really work, conceptually, would? “Doomsday was five minutes ago.” Well, at least it gives The Bulletin something to do in the post-apocalyptic world…) I think of the “minutes” as something that can be “spent” — you only have a few of them, and if you wiggle the clock each and every year by a little bit without a really strong reason, it’ll look like the Clock that called “wolf.” I do think the change last year was justified — in part because the “optimistic” aspects of the 2010 change had seemed already undone — but I just haven’t seen a strong reason to tweak it again.1

Anyway, my guess is that the Doomsday Clock won’t move this year. But we’ll find out in January, says the BAS. Which, you have to admit, is kind of a hedging of bets: if the Mayan apocalypse happens on December 21st, they can always change their clock time to zero and nobody will know whether they really predicted it or not.

I leave you with one of my favorite “Doomsday” quotes, from Time magazine, December 3, 1945:

“What is the goal of science? To blow up the world? If scientists mean what they say — and they generally do — scientific progress is within sight of that nihilistic goal, and may soon succeed in reaching it. … But the scientists, with the purest scientific motives in the world, still toy with the idea of a scientifically induced Doomsday. They know the gun is loaded, but their fingers itch to try the trigger.”2

What a line! And on that happy note…

It’s that time of the year again — where one hunts, frantically, for some kind of gift for those hard-to-satisfy family members and friends. I thought I might post a little update about some new products I’ve added to the Restricted Data Store, as well as one other non-self-serving gift suggestion. But first, Season’s Greetings from the Eniwetok Atoll:

(These particular pictures from an eBay offering; more information about the card itself is here.)

Over the last few months I’ve been adding a few designs to the Restricted Data Store. I should note that I think such things are not necessarily laudatory or condemnatory — I’ve chosen all of the images for how graphically interesting they are, and the fact that the bomb is nothing if not an ambiguous object. You can always say you’re wearing it ironically if someone asks — apparently that lets you get away with anything these days.

Above is the official emblem of the Manhattan Project — devised after the bombs were dropped, of course. The little castle at the bottom is from the emblem of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It has a wonderful retro aesthetic style, I feel, and I managed to get a very high-quality scan of it, which I then cleaned up, and applied to all manner of clothing. There are two variants: a light logo on dark clothing (as on the left), or a dark logo on light clothing (as on the right).

Above we have the first official depiction of a nuclear fission chain reaction from the Princeton University Press edition of the Smyth Report. I’ve always really liked this drawing: it is very seriously drawn (no fancy embellishments), yet it is really quite understandable. This is one of the shirts that get people to ask, “what is that?” when I wear it. “Oh, nothing,” I casually reply, desperately trying to keep my giddiness under wraps, “it’s just, you know, a nuclear fission chain reaction from the Smyth Report! Let me tell you about what that means to me…” At which point the person asking usually regrets it, but it’s far, far too late for them.

Lastly, I’ve recently added two more shirts: one featuring that Soviet drawing of the American implosion bomb, derived from espionage, and the other of the striking diagram illustrating the concept of “critical mass” from Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons:

Both combine a gnomic technicality with geometric simplicity, which, as you can see, appeals to me. Maybe it will appeal to someone else in your life as well, if not yourself! For all of the clothing, I’ve tried to include a pretty wide range of styles and sizes. If you find your body-type or inclinations not represented, just let me know and I will be happy to try and accommodate.

There are also still many nice mugs:

All meager profits go towards the upkeep of the blog.

Lastly, I want to highlight two calendars. The first is one that I made, the 2013 Nuclear Testing Calendar. It features 12 months of striking, high-resolution photographs of American atmospheric nuclear testing. Throughout the calendar are also a number of nuclear anniversaries noted — some fairly well-known, some that will probably be new to you. The cover image is a nice indication of the sort of thing you get from this: this is an image of the nuclear test Greenhouse ITEM (1951), which I personally scanned at the US National Archives at very high resolution, and then edited out any smudges, fingerprints, and dust spots. The colors are as they were in the original — vivid reds and oranges, with an otherworldly turquoise at the center of the fireball.

The calendar is through Lulu.com, a self-publishing enterprise, but they are very high quality — the pages are crisply printed, and the page stock is heavy and professional.

One more calendar: my employer, the history program at the American Institute of Physics, sells a calendar each year as well. This year the theme is the life of Niels Bohr, since 2013 will be the 100th anniversary of the Bohr atom. The calendar is quite beautiful and would be a real boon to any science fans out there:

All sales of the Bohr calendar benefit the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives and the Niels Bohr Archive, Denmark.

Notes
  1. I should say, just to drift for a second: I actually think the Clock is a useful piece of publicity. A lot of coverage after the movement last year was, “oh, this doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a bunch of experts, you know, making a statement about how dangerous the world is”… which is exactly the point. To argue that it is anything but that is to construct an obviously foolish straw man. And really, I don’t understand what the counter-argument really was, anyway. That the world was safer than the experts concluded? Maybe it was the inclusion of climate change and Congressional intransigence as serious global security issues that got the critics hackles up, but dismissing the Clock as “just publicity” is just a fool’s argument, the ultimate head-in-the-sand gesture. [↩]
  2. “They Know It’s Loaded,” Time (3 December 1945). The context of the story is a proposal by John A. Wheeler for studying cosmic rays, which he claimed could help further figure out how mass-energy transformation works:

    The present atomic bomb, Professor Wheeler believes, is a mere firecracker. The cornerstone of atomic physics is the Einstein Equation, which shows that all matter, on earth and elsewhere, is merely frozen energy. “It tells us that the most powerful nuclear transformation so far known, the fission of a heavy nucleus, releases only one-1,000th of the energy locked up in its mass.” The sub-atomic particles which form the uranium nucleus are not themselves transformed. They are only reshuffled into smaller nuclei, with a tiny loss of mass. If protons, for instance, which are found in all nuclei, could only be transformed into energy, the explosion would be really vigorous.

    [↩]

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Christy’s Gadget: Reflections on a death

Friday, October 5th, 2012

Robert Christy, ca. 1959. Via the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Robert F. Christy, one of the last remaining “big names” on the Manhattan Project, has died, at the age of 96.

I met Christy at his office in Pasadena in 2007, while I was doing some research at the Caltech Archives. He was extremely charitable with his time; it was clear even then that his health wasn’t great.

We talked a little bit about the origins of the famous “Christy Gadget” — the solid-core design of the Trinity and Nagasaki implosion bombs. Christy always got the credit for that, to the point of it being dubbed his Gadget, and the solid-core models being referred to as “Christies” for some time afterwards. To me, he professed to being a little confused as to why he, of all people, got his name attached to it.

The solid-core concept was originally proposed by Edward Teller, whose experience working with George Gamow on the iron core of the Earth gave him the somewhat unintuitive knowledge that even very dense materials can be compressed to even higher densities under many megabars of uniform force. Christy, for his part, was the guy who took it from the “Teller’s interesting but potentially wrong idea” phase to the “so will it actually work?” phase. And he did a good job of that — everyone was convinced that a solid core bomb would be both plausible and easier than the alternatives (such as a hollow core bomb).

I asked Christy what he thought about having his name associated with a design for a nuclear bomb — one of the only two that was actually dropped on cities. He said he didn’t really mind.

We also talked a bit about Los Alamos patenting procedures; this was still in the very early days of my work on the patenting of the atomic bomb. Christy confirmed to me that indeed, he had had to sign off his patent rights to the bomb almost immediately after arrival. I only much more recently learned that there is still a secret patent application for the bomb in Christy’s name. (There are about a dozen of these still-secret bomb patents.) The DOE was willing to let me know its predictably unrevealing and dull name: Robert Christy and Rudolph Peierls, “Method and apparatus for explosively releasing nuclear energy,” filed August 27, 1946. Still secret after all these years. (I now regret having not gotten in touch with Christy again and asking if he even knew about it — I suspect not.)

The only other remarkable thing from our conversation is that he asked me if I could find declassified copies of reports he had written from that time period, because he had never been able to get ahold of them himself! I sent him half a dozen of them, including this one that might interest my readers: “Memorandum on the Immediate After Effects of the Gadget,” by Hans Bethe and Robert F. Christy, dated December 1944. (My original source for this was Los Alamos’ history website, but see below for a note on that.)

In their report, Bethe and Christy attempt to describe, in quantitative as well as qualitative terms, what the effects of an exploding atomic bomb would be, apparently with the question of in mind of how a pilot would be able to drop this from a plane and also survive it. It is written quite readably, for something that must have been based on extensive calculations. Notably, it dismisses the hazards of fallout:

The radioactive materials are expected to be near the center of the ball of fire and rise with that ball of fire to the stratosphere. Presumably the ball of fire will rise to very considerable height (100 kilometers or more) before its rise is stopped by either diffusion or cooling. If the radioactive material ever comes down again it will certainly be spread out over a radius of at least 100 kilometers and probably very more and will, therefore, be completely harmless.

There some hedging there (“probably,” “if”), but it still is a highly idealized treatment of a very serious health question — lots of things affect the deposition of fallout (weather being an important one of them), and I do wonder if “completely harmless” was perhaps a bit too strong of a phrase. (A post on this specific question is slated for a few weeks from now.)

One last little thing on Christy specifically: in 1994, he did an Oral History interview at Caltech, the transcript of which is online. One thing I didn’t know is that Christy and his family briefly shared a house with Edward Teller and his family in Chicago right after the war. The many connections of Christy with Teller are particularly interesting in that Christy cut off all relations with Teller after the Oppenheimer security hearing. His was the hand shake that Teller was famously denied at Los Alamos, which signaled to Teller that his life had irrevocably changed on account of his involvement with the Oppenheimer affair. In the Oral History, Christy details the incident:

Well, my feelings were very strong. I told you earlier that in some sense I viewed Oppenheimer as a god. He was on a pedestal, and I looked up to him. And I was sure that he was not a treasonable person. I knew he had leftist contacts; that was well known to everyone. But I felt that it was just the wrong thing to do, for an honorable physicist to testify against Oppenheimer. It just wasn’t right. And I was very upset by it. I still am. I felt, therefore, that it as really improper, it was wrong. …

I ran into [Teller] not long afterward. We were both at Los Alamos—this was in the summertime. I remember that the Fuller Lodge was where they had an eating establishment. It was a fine, beautiful old log building. And there I was, eating. And I happened to see Edward Teller. I believe he approached me with his hand out to shake my hand. And I very deliberately refused to shake his hand. …

[I]t was a very deliberate action on my part—impulse, of course, because I didn’t have time to plan this. And it was recognized by everyone else for what it was—that I refused to have a direct association with him. I think he was somewhat hurt. … I’ve seen him from time to time [since then]. Our relationship has remained cool.

The connection between Teller and Christy on the solid-core bomb, and the fact that they shared a house together after the war, makes all of this even more poignant. Rest in Peace, Robert F. Christy.

One of the silver Manhattan Project pins given to individuals who worked on the Manhattan Project for over a year. From my personal collection.

Every time one of these major Manhattan Project scientists dies, I wonder, how many of them are still left? Looking at an intersection of the Wikipedia categories “Manhattan Project people” and “Living people,” I came up with this paltry list of eleven names:

Jack Aeby
Harold Agnew
Philip J. Dolan
Anthony French
Roy J. Glauber
David Greenglass
Dieter Gruen
William Perl
Ed Westcott
Robin M. Williams
Hubert Yockey

That’s not a big list. I bolded the ones I recognized immediately.1 (Undoubtedly there are lots of other people who worked on the Manhattan Project, even in a scientific context, who are still alive — but they aren’t really known for it, and they weren’t really “major figures.”) Only Agnew was something of a big wig at Los Alamos, and even then, he was a pretty young (early 20s) guy. Greenglass was of course notorious and interesting for that reason. Aeby and Westcott’s work is well known even if their names are not (though Westcott is a much-beloved figure for Oak Ridgers). French’s Los Alamos experience is interesting (he worked on the cross-section of deuterium reactions, if I remember correctly), but not very well known.

We are on the precipice of an age where no one alive will have worked on the Manhattan Project. It’s very close. I’ve thought quite a lot about this, and talked about it with other nuclear historians. Is this a good or a bad thing, from an historical point of view? I’m mixed on it — immediacy can be useful for reconstructing the past, as lots of great historians before me have shown. But getting beyond the immediate can be useful, too, for taking a more detached look at things. Whether that detachment will lead to deeper insight, or just easier dismissal of the past’s fears and hopes, is something we’ll have to see.

In the process of writing this post up, I found, in a bitter irony, that Los Alamos seems to have — in the last week or two — completely taken down their once-excellent online history exhibit (including all of those staff photographs) and replaced it with an awful piece of corporate copy that rambles meaninglessly about their commitment to “innovation.” All of those cool photographs, nice write-ups, and online documents? Gone. All that remains is a desiccated timeline and a Flickr feed of many of the same images that used to be in the exhibit, sans context. Thanks, Los Alamos National Security, LLC! Way to prove your critics wrong about your corporate sensibilities. Maybe I’m jumping the gun, and they’ll replace it with something even better — or eventually restore it — but we’ll have to see. At a time when the living legacies of the Manhattan Project are disappearing, it’s sad to see that the lab has made reading about its own past a more difficult endeavor.

Notes
  1. Aeby is known primarily as the guy who took that one color photograph of the Trinity test, which graces the cover of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which I see just came out in a 25th anniversary edition and no longer features that photograph as prominently as in the past). Agnew was a major figure, present at the bombing of Hiroshima and later a director of Los Alamos. Dolan is mostly recognizable to me (and most others) as half of the famous Glasstone and Dolan duo that edited the Effects of Nuclear Weapons books. Glauber won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005 and is quite scientifically distinguished (and a known presence at Harvard). Greenglass was the brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg, and a confessed spy. French was part of the British delegation to Los Alamos, and I’ve talked with him at MIT; he’s written a number of important physics textbooks, as well. (Fun fact: he bought Klaus Fuchs’ car after the war ended — the same one that Fuchs smuggled his secrets out of in the trunk — and drove it back to Cambridge. He then re-sold it to someone else, who had the unfortunate fate of having it searched and dismantled by the FBI years later.) Westcott was the official photographer at Oak Ridge.

    Of the others: Gruen worked on isotope separation and later became a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory; a name not known to me, but probably known to others. Perl was apparently another minor Rosenberg ring spy (and it’s not clear to me that he’s actually known to be still alive — there’s very little reference to him other than his conviction in the early 1950s). Williams seems to have later gone on to a state career in New Zealand, but it’s not quite clear to me what he did with the Manhattan Project; unlikely a major figure. Yockey is an information theorist who was a student of Oppenheimer’s. [↩]

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