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The 36-Hour War: Life Magazine, 1945

Friday, April 5th, 2013

When NUKEMAP first got very hot, the Washington Post’s blog declared its popularity a sign of our jittery times. Those were Iranian jittery times, if we remember back all the way to a year ago — today we are jittery again, this time regarding North Korea. And so people are flocking to the NUKEMAP again, trying to see what North Korea’s latest weapons would do to their cities if they were used. I’m almost tempted to push out the new one early, just to take advantage of the interest, but I have faith that we will be jittery again whenever the new one is done. Nuclear jitters aren’t a new thing.

Visualizing nuclear war is an old media pastime. How old? One of the most vivid early depictions of this sort of atomic apocalyptic thinking come from Life magazine’s issue of November 19, 1945 — only a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From the cover of the issue, you’d have little to suspect about its contents. “Ah, big belts! Fascinating! I love big belts!”

Life magazine - November 1945 - Big Belts

But once you get beyond that, the interior stories are much more interesting. For people interested in World War II and the Cold War, there are a lot of great stories in here: articles about what should be done with postwar China, what was going on in postwar Poland (with some impressive, awful photographs), plus an article on occupied Tokyo (with some amazing illustrations), and another on the OSS (spies!). There was even, at the very end, a reproduction of the Jack Aeby photo of the “Trinity” test, in full color (which was apparently just “orange,” after going through Life’s printing processes).

But the real stunner story of the issue was something much more grim. Once you get past a lot of fluffy stuff, you’re greeted with this horror:

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 1

“The 36-Hour War.” This long, feature story is a description of what nuclear war in the future will look like. It was based on a report by General “Hap” Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces during World War II and the later founder of Project RAND, which became the RAND Corporation, the epitome of a Cold War think tank. (He was also, incidentally, the guy who gave Curtis LeMay his job in the Pacific theatre.)

The report in question was the “Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces to the Secretary of War.” Hunting around a bit, I eventually located a copy of the original online, if you’d like to look at it. It was published only a week before the Life story on it, which is pretty impressive given the illustrations involved in the article. The report is concerned both with summarizing what had happened in the air war during World War II on both the European and Pacific fronts, as well as a concluding section on “Air Power and the Future,” which is the subject of the “36-Hour War” article. Like many strategic bombing advocates, Arnold downplayed the importance of the bomb for World War II, emphasizing that the only reason the atomic bombs, or any bombs, could be delivered at will was because they had already won strategic superiority over the island. It’s the future where Arnold thought atomic weapons will really matter.

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 2

And it’s a grim future: rockets plus nuclear weapons equals “the ghastliest of all wars,” according to Life. The implications of ICBMs somewhat understood well over a decade before they were technologically realized.

The Life story starts with a large illustration of Washington, DC, getting nuked (hey, at least it’s not New York again, right? But why are they nuking RFK Stadium?), and then follows with a two-page spread showing 13 “key U.S. centers” getting wiped out by the Soviet Union. “Within a few seconds atomic bombs have exploded over New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boulder Dam, New Orleans, Denver, Washington, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Kansas City, and Knoxville.” (Sorry, Boston, but you didn’t rate! Austin, you are fine for now!) They guess that 10 million people would be killed in the initial attack. “The enemy’s purpose is not to destroy industry, which is an objective only in the long old-fashioned wars like the last one, but to paralyze the U.S. by destroying its people.”

Amusingly, the Life writer suggests that these Soviet missiles came from silos in equatorial Africa, “secretly built in the jungle to escape detection by the UNO Security Council.” Ah, the naiveté of 1945, believing that it would be a taboo of some sort to build ICBM sites! Believing that some kind of international order would be assembled that might affect the conduct of nuclear war! Sigh.

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 3

But on the whole the Life story is not bad (except for the ending, which I’ll get to). On the page above, it talks about radar as an early warning technique which they claim would give perhaps 30 minutes warning in the event of an ICBM attack. But they also point out that radar can be evaded by low-altitude missiles and smuggled atomic bobs. And they recognize that 30 minutes is really not that long of a period in time — “even 30 minutes is too little time for men to control the weapons of atomic war.” At best, they suggest, such warning could be used to fire defensive rockets at the incoming rockets, a topic they cover on the next page.

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 4

“Our Defensive Machines Stop Few Attackers.” Dang. In this hypothetical future, the US has a missile defense system that works pretty much like you’d expect one to work today — maybe it might destroy a few of them, “but inevitably it would miss some of the time.” The illustration above shows the enemy rocket “coasting through space” in its final descent, with the interceptor missile coming up from the ground. Some nice copy: “When the two collide, the atomic explosion will appear to observers on the earth as a brilliant new star.” It doesn’t actually work that way, but whatever, it’s a nice sentence.

In his report, Arnold outlines three approaches to “defense” against atomic attack. First, you basically try to make sure nobody is making nuclear weapons. Not a bad start, you have to admit. Second, you should try and develop defenses against launched attacks — e.g. missile and bomber defense. A bit more problematic. Third, you redesign the entire country to make it harder to attack with nukes. This is basically the “dispersal” theory of defense — if you don’t have all of your infrastructure and people living in a few, centralized locations, then the vulnerability to all but the most apocalyptic attacks is a lot lower.

But finally, he emphasizes — in the manner befitting a general, I suppose — that the best defense is a good offense. That is, deterrence. And to do that, you need a good second-strike capability, to use the lingo of a later time.

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 5

The Life writer and illustrator decided to combine both of these last two ideas, creating a rather amazing fantasy nuclear installation. Take a look at that spread — it’s a huge underground city devoted to producing ICBMs and launching them en masse. It has underground streets and underground cars and underground trains. I’m not sure that Arnold was suggesting anything like this, but it’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t seem very practical, for a lot of reasons (those firing tubes look pretty vulnerable to attack, which would moot the whole installation), but it’s wonderfully imaginative for 1945. Philip K. Dick wrote about crazy installations like this in some of his short stories, but those were written in the 1950s and 1960s.

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 6

Towards the “war’s end,” enemy troops would show up. This is because, according to the Life writers, “in spite of the apocalyptic destruction caused by its atomic bombs, an enemy nation would have to invade the U.S. to win the war.” Win the war? Here you see a little bit of divergence from what would be a more common narrative: that nuclear war is really just about a “knock-out punch,” as opposed to conventional notions of taking over a country.

The illustration above is pretty interesting. OK, obvious cheesecake fantasy going on there, as gas-masked Soviet thugs step over the somehow-still-beautiful corpse of a telephone operator whose blouse has almost been knocked open by atomic bombs. The Soviet soldiers are attempting to repair the telephone infrastructure and get the country back up to (occupied) speed, and are walking around destroyed streets with bazookas (a less-sung wonder-weapon of WWII). The Life staff estimate that 40 million would be dead at this point “and all cities of more than 50,000 population have been leveled.” New York’s Fifth Avenue is merely a “lane through the debris.” 

But, but! Have some hope! Improbably, “as it is destroyed, the U.S. is fighting back. The enemy airborne troops are wiped out. U.S. rockets lay waste the enemy’s cities. U.S. airborne troops successfully occupy his country. The U.S. wins the atomic war.“ Wait, what? We won the war? How? A little hand-waving was all that was needed. I know, they nuked all our major cities and landed troops with bazookas, but don’t worry, we managed to (within 36-hours, mind you!) launch a devastating counterattack that included occupying his country. Well. I am relieved and can move on to the article on big belts, no?

1945 - Life - 36-Hour War - 7

Well, hooray. Of course, the country has been reduced to radioactive rubble — “By the marble lions of the New York Public Library, U.S. technicians test the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.” But chin up — we won the war!

It’s an amazing place for the article to just… end. A preview of un-defendable, horrible destruction, and then a quick deus ex machina that resolves it. And what a resolution! 40 million dead, no more big cities, but don’t worry, we got ‘em back! It’s really not very satisfying. It has the whiff of a heavy, least-minute editorial hand: “we can’t end on such a grim note, and then expect them to just move on to other articles. We’ve gotta win, in the end! Give ‘em some hope!”

One wonders: what was the public supposed to take away from this? Support for international control of the bomb? Support for better defenses? Fear of the future? It’s really a wonderful mess, the sort of thing you’d expect only a few months after the bomb made its debut, to be sure. Not all of the clichés had codified, the genre was still new.

Speaking of which — remember that devastating sequence from Fog of War, where Robert McNamara describes the firebombing of Japan, telling you what percentage of each Japanese city was destroyed, and then telling you an American-sized equivalent? The Arnold report in question did it first, and may have been the source for the data (the percentages and cities seem to match exactly):

1945 - Arnold map - bombing of Japan

Which makes a wonderful full-circle, doesn’t it? Something originally used to brag about performance has now become a touchstone for explaining the barbarity of the Pacific campaign.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki in color

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

I’ve been on the road all this week, so there’s not too much of a post today! (The one last week was double-sized, though.) But I thought I’d share some interesting images that have captivated me over the last week or so.

Most of the photos we are familiar with of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are black and white. The effect is one of a dusty, barren landscape — they look like abandoned cities on the moon. On top of that, almost all photos of the cities from the ground were taken after the bodies had been cleaned up and the streets cleared — most were taken no earlier than late September 1945, and many of the “classic” ones are actually from mid-to-late 1946, a year or so later. The net effect is that the cities were somehow neatly “vaporized.” This is a false impression.

Hiroshima in black and white

Color photographs of the city, however, are far more striking. What was a city of dust now looks like a city of rubble. It becomes, in some unconscious way, more believable, more recent, less distant. It becomes more “real.”1

The effects of the bomb also become a bit more clear, though there is still a lot missing. The atomic bombs used during World War II killed most of its victims by burning and crushing them — the classic medieval tortures, made wholesale by technology but not much more modern. (Only about 15-20% of the people at the cities died truly “modern” deaths, from the radiation effects.)

Hiroshima in color, March 1946

The above photograph is of Hiroshima, apparently taken in March 1946 — some eight months after the bombing. You can tell a lot has been cleaned up: the roads, for example, are very clear. There are no obvious corpses. A few reinforced buildings are standing, but not much else is. There are some telephone or electricity poles up; I don’t know whether those were added after the attack, or were somehow still standing despite it (blast effects can be complicated).

Hiroshima - Autumn 1945

The photo above is labeled as being of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945. Superficially, when compared to the one before it, one thinks that the damage looks a lot lighter. There are a lot of poles and trees and a few shack-like structures in the foreground, and some factory-looking buildings in the background. But there’s still a lot of rubble — a lot of places that just aren’t there anymore. (I’m a little suspicious about whether this photo is identified correctly, to be honest.)

Hiroshima in color by J.R. Eyerman

The above photograph was taken by the photographer J.R. Eyerman sometime in the fall of 1945. It’s a rare color view from the ground, as opposed to being from aircraft or from a high vantage point. It’s a vivid look at the twisted jungle of pipes, bricks, concrete, wood, trees, and other unidentified objects. Imagine the struggle of trying to make your way through that.

Hiroshima - March 1946

Another of Hiroshima from March 1946. Compare it to the one above, and how different a perception one has. It’s not that one of these is wrong, per se; they’re both of Hiroshima, and they both give away a different sense of the damage. In trying to get a sense of scale for these things, I find mixing up the modes of perception to be pretty important. One needs to understand what this looks like at the ground level, but then one needs to realize the extent to which that damage applied.

Nagasaki - October 1945

Nagasaki - October 1945, 2

The above two are both of Nagasaki from around October 1945. Again, notice the almost capricious nature of this kind of damage: some of those trees look not so badly off, next to structures that have collapsed to the point of non-identification. The presence of people also lets you get a sense of the scale from the human point of view. A big ruinous mess.

Nagasaki - August 1945

This is listed as the damage outside a school in Nagasaki, taken just a few weeks after the bombs were dropped. Without knowing what this looked like before the attack, it’s hard to get a sense for what we’re looking at, but it appears the windows of the school are probably all blown in (there isn’t any glare or reflection), and those are some pretty big trees to see snapped about.

Hiroshima financial district

Hiroshima’s financial district, date unknown. Again, note the apparent capriciousness of the damage. The truth is, the construction of the buildings in question matters quite a bit. But don’t be too fooled — being inside a burning concrete building whose windows are blown in isn’t that great. You can tell the one in the middle has no remaining glass and some ominous-looking charring around the windows.

Hiroshima gas company

And here is one of the Hiroshima Gas Company and the Honkawa Elementary School. I think the latter really emphasizes the horror of “strategic” bombing, where burning elementary schools become acceptable as “collateral damage.” The famous dome at the upper right hand corner of the photo was directly underneath the explosion; the school was about 800 feet from there.

There are two ways you can go wrong in making sense of the scale of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is to see the bombs as instant vaporizers, to see the bombs as Everything Killers that just zap cities out of existence. This isn’t the case. They kill by crushing and burning and irradiating. They don’t turn you to dust.  They don’t freeze you and turn you into a stop-motion skeleton, like in The Day After. For some, death was instantaneous, but for a lot of others, it was a much more protracted affair.

The other way to misunderstand it is to downplay it. Ah, a number of large buildings survived! It’s not so bad, then, right? Maybe the whole nuke thing has been exaggerated! Well, unless you are, you know, not in one of those buildings, and even if you are, it’s a pretty awful thing. Yes, you can approximate the city-wide effects of early atomic bombs with a fleet of conventional bombers dropping napalm — which personally I consider just as much a weapon of mass destruction as anything else, and yes, napalming cities is “conventional” in the sense that it is not a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon, but let’s not forget that it’s not exactly an everyday occurrence. But being napalmed is not exactly a walk in the park for those being bombed, either.

So what’s the right view? An ugly, troublesome, disturbing one; right between those extremes. The atomic bomb was a weapon used to inflict tremendous human suffering. (This is true whether you think its use was justified or not.) If an atomic bomb were to go off over your city, the damage would be horrifying, the death toll staggering. But it’s a level of destruction that people should try to appreciate for what it is — a realistic possibility, not a clean science-fiction ending or a blow to be shrugged off. 

That’s the perception I’m always searching for. The color photographs add a little bit to that, to keep one from the misconceptions, to keep one from seeing these wrecked cities as sanitary piles of dust.

Notes
  1. These come from here and there on the Internet, but two very nice galleries I got a number of them from are here, here, and here. I’ve done some color correction on the photos, which understandably have faded a bit over time. [↩]

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Hanford doggerel

Friday, March 1st, 2013

The Hanford site, in rural Washington state, was not a very fun place to work during World War II. The conditions were unpleasant, the site was remote, and, well, almost nobody really knew what they were doing there. The amount of compartmentalization was intense: out of the tens of thousands of workers, only a few hundred likely had any real inkling of what was really going on there. They were, of course, building the world’s first industrial-sized nuclear reactors, in order to produce the plutonium that fueled the first atomic bombs. Not exactly the first thing you’d guess you’d be doing if you were a construction worker in 1943, is it? Not knowing what you are building sort of takes some of the fun out of it, especially when you thought you were working on an important war-related project but instead you find yourself building giant concrete cathedrals with no obvious purpose. Concrete cathedrals full of toxic chemicals, at that.

Aerial view of B Reactor at the Hanford Site: isolated and mysterious. Photo: Hanford DDRS, #N1D0030582.

The secrecy at Hanford at Oak Ridge led to lots of speculation about what they were about from those who worked on them and those who lived near them. The Manhattan Project security people, of course, tracked these rumors, both because they occasionally resulted in problems (like inquiries from Congressmen, including a very dubious Senator Harry Truman) and could also potentially lead to attention from journalists, which could in turn lead to real leaks. In general the whole point of Manhattan Project security was to keep people from noticing there was an entirely new industry being created under their noses, and so curious rumors didn’t really help that.

In a sense, this was an inevitable result of the very secrecy they were trying to impose. “Absolute secrecy,” where the fact that there is a secret is itself a secret, leads to all sorts of rampant speculation. Into a total vacuum marches total speculation. My favorite wartime rumor about Oak Ridge is that it was a model socialist community following the beliefs of Eleanor Roosevelt. One can contrast this “absolute secrecy” approach to the “known secret” approach that followed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: finally, the security people could say, “it’s involved in the atomic bomb, and thus its a secret.” It’s a very different type of secrecy regime.

Squirreled away in the Manhattan Project security files is a really remarkable poem, penned by an unknown source. (I was reminded of it when posting about that “Secret song” earlier this week.) The poem is really quite amazing, in that it ties the bad working conditions at Hanford and the secrecy up into one neat package, and does so to verse as well! I reproduce the poem, “Restricted Information,” below in its entirety.1

“RESTRICTED INFORMATION”

It is a “Military Secret”
And I shouldn’t breath a word
But if you will promise not to tell
I’ll tell you what I’ve heard.

What is building here at Hanford
Is quite a mystery
But I’ve found out what it is
And will confide in thee.

It is a torture ground for Hitler
And all his Nazi bunch
And all the other Axis rats
After the final punch.

That he’ll have to live here
Should be bad enough itself
But nothing is quite appropriate
When it comes to his future health.

And so we are spending millions
And considerable effort too
To perfect conditions unbearable
For all the motley crew.

I’ve told you more than I should have
And the details — I wouldn’t dare
That is why it is such a secret —
It would give Hitler too great a scare.

The war might be prolonged
Hitler staving off defeat
With knowledge of his Hanford fate
He would be truly hard to beat.

So promise not to tell a soul
Unless they swear secrecy
For what I have just told
Might put off Victory.

So, in other words, Hanford was so secret, and so miserable, because someday Hitler and his Axis buddies would have to go live there. If they found out how miserable it was to work there, they’d all fight to the death. Pretty cute. You can view the original here.

You’ll note that they classified the entire thing “RESTRICTED,”2 which is somewhat ironic, given the content, no? But it makes sense, given the logic of “absolute secrecy” – when the secret is itself a secret, even things that lampoon the secret are thus secret as well. 

Notes
  1. Citation: “Restricted Information,” (n.d., ca. 1945), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 66, “Security (317-2).” [↩]
  2. “RESTRICTED” was the lowest ranking of classification during World War II. It went from “SECRET” to “CONFIDENTIAL” to “RESTRICTED,” and during the war they added “TOP SECRET” as well. In the 1950s they got rid of “RESTRICTED” as a classification category because it was confusing to have both it and “restricted data” together in the same schema. [↩]

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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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More nuclear symbolism

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Two small graphical things I wanted to share that came from feedback on a few recent posts.

The first is an explanation, of sorts, of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s very unusual emblem:

UKAEA Coat of Arms

I had ragged on the AEA’s design as being particularly stodgy, but I’ve been corrected. It’s just unduly weighed down by obscure symbolism, as a commentator pointed out. It was, apparently, designed by the Royal College of Arms with the following visual references:

  • The central shield is black denoting the core of a graphite reactor, with inserted rods of silver uranium.
  • The inverted triangle shows gold and scarlet bolts of heat and power.
  • The energy released by splitting the atom is controlled by a pair of red pantheons, which are ferocious heraldic beasts. They are firmly held to the ground by thick golden chains to ensure the energy is firmly controlled.
  • The pantheons have 13 six-pointed stars and two seven-pointed stars, totalling 92. These represent the 92 natural elements found in creation and also the atomic number of uranium.
  • The five spikes on the collars signify the atomic number of boron, which was used to shutdown the early reactors.
  • There are numerous representations of 8 for the atomic number of oxygen, 2 for helium and 1 for hydrogen – suggesting water. The whole gives insights into the four medieval elements of earth, air, fire and water.
  • The sun represents the power of fusion, and the small shield with the black bird (a martlet) is the Coat of Arms of Lord Rutherford. He is recognised as the founder of nuclear physics.
  • The steel helmet signifies the arms of a corporate body.
  • The whole is placed on the earth on which flowers and plants are flourishing normally. [???]
  • The motto “E minimis – maxima” means; ‘from the smallest, the greatest‘.

I thought that was interesting enough to share. Any resemblance between the “pantheons” and mutated horse-dogs is apparently entirely coincidental. And despite the barren, Moon-like appearance of the “earth,” it is apparently “flourishing normally.” Actually, the above image, painted on the doors of the Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor, is slightly different than the other image of the emblem I had posted, which does have a more flourishing-looking ground cover, as well as a knight’s head.

All of this is a stark contrast from the US Atomic Energy Commission’s emblem, whose symbolism seems to have been, “it’s an atom, stupid.” I hereby promote the AEA’s emblem from “most boring” to “not as boring as I thought,” which leaves the current Department of Energy seal as the “most boring.”

Secondly, I have another cryptic drawing referencing the history of the hydrogen bomb, again by George Gamow. This one has been reproduced here and there, but a friend of mine came across an original version in the Gamow papers at the Library of Congress awhile back, and sent me his photographs of it and its captions. The drawing follows:

H-bomb history drawing, by George Gamow

The attached caption (written, as always, in Gamow’s amusing handwriting and bad English) was as follows:

A drowing made by G. Gamow (with photographic inserts) which was handing [hanging?] in his office in the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during the dispute about the political necessity of developing an H-bomb and during the early stages of its developement after President Truman sayd: “Yes, go ahead.”

Top left is Comarade Stalin carrying the A-bomb made in the USSR.

Top right is Dr. Robert Oppenheimer who was objecting against H-bomb project on the basis that it is extremely difficult (actually it took less than two years) and will induce USSR to do the same (actually Russians worked on H-bomb when this discussion was taking place).

The coffin with the Harvard University coat of arms belong to Professor Dr. James B. Connant who said that: “H-bomb will be built only over his dead body.”

On the bench below are Dr’s Stan Ulam, Edward Teller, and George Gamow, demonstrating their proposals for making H-bomb. The simbolism of these deviced cannot be explained because AEC classified them as “SECRET”. 

The “simbolism” is fairly cryptic. The caption dates it around February 1950, so that might make it even harder to make sense of, as we’re talking about fairly early days when it comes to the final H-bomb design, but I’m not sure how reliable I find that dating. (The H-bomb debate was in late 1949-early 1950, though the caption was obviously written at a much later time.)

Looking for some insight into the technical discussions that were happening at this time, I took a gander at Anne Fitzpatrick’s quite detailed thesis on the early history of the H-bomb, “Igniting the Light Elements: The Los ALamos Thermonuclear Weapons Project, 1942-1952,” (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1999), which was issued as LA-13577-T. Fitzpatrick’s work is notable as one of the few H-bomb histories that have been written by a non-participant but also with access to classified information. (The whole thing was, of course, screened for security, and she notes in a few places where she was asked to label things merely as “special” to make them more vague.)

Fitzpatrick notes that Gamow spent a sabbatical year at Los Alamos in 1949-1950, to help with work on the H-bomb, which matches up with his caption above. While there, he seems to have produced a bevy of H-bomb-themed drawings, of which she reproduces three. One shows the complexity of the energy flow problem in a Super, another portrays the hydride bomb (“Elmer”) as “unattractive and clumsy” in comparison with a lower-yield water penetrating fission bomb (“Elsie”/”L.C.”), and the another portrayed Ulam and Teller themselves as the ultimate Super design:

Gamow's Can't Lose Model for the Super

But back to the original, “simbolic” Gamow image. Ulam’s spittoon almost surely references the fact that you’re using forces at a (relative) distance to compress the secondary, right? Whether one does that by hydrodynamic lensing (Ulam’s original proposal) or radiation implosion (the later Teller-Ulam design) doesn’t seem to be distinguishable. On the other hand, Ulam didn’t propose that until 1951, so this might be something else entirely. Fitzpatrick’s thesis doesn’t spell out any additional Ulam proposals that I saw.

Teller’s is much more cryptic. Looking at Fitzpatrick’s thesis, she says that at this time, Teller was championing a device dubbed “Little Edward.” (Oh myyyy.) This was, she says, “a giant, high-yield multi-crit gun device proposed by Teller that was supposed to produce x-radiation to ignite the D-T mixture in the Super.” Could that be the string of beads with the giant Omega in the middle of it? It sounds like an ungainly device, and indeed, it was eventually dropped as being very wasteful and without much guarantee that it would do anything better than other designs on the table.

And lastly, there’s Gamow’s. According to Fitzpatrick, Gamow’s design was known as the “Cat’s Tail.” She says that it was “a variation on the large fission detonator purported to ignite the Super… Gamow theorized that the Cat’s Tail needed less T[ritium] than had been assumed in the ENIAC Super problems, but could not guarantee this.” Since, as far as I know, Gamow’s designs have never been discussed openly (and were not successful), it’s pretty difficult to try and correlate such an image to an actual bomb design.

Presumably there were no cat-driven hydrogen bombs, though having owned a cat, I can see that one might be seriously tempted to exploit some of their malicious energy in this way. I welcome any and all additional interpretations.

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