A doctor working for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission examines a Hibakusha in the postwar period.

After World War II, the US sent over physicians and specialists to find out as much as they could on the survivors of the atomic bombs. Japanese physicians were of course already doing this themselves. This work was eventually consolidated into the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.

Starting in the mid-1950s, when the US government became concerned about Civil Defense against atomic bombs, scrutiny of radiation data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a major preoccupation. What exactly was the radiation output of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs? Nobody knew. They hadn’t really kept as good tabs on that as they perhaps ought to have. Oppenheimer, Groves, et al., hadn’t even really thought that much about the radiation effects before dropping the bombs.¹

The Nagasaki bomb, at least, was an implosion model, and these had been not only continued to be tested after the war (the Operation Crossroads weapons were essentially Fat Man devices), but were the subject of on-going interest and development. The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was a model that was obsolete even as it was being dropped. (Literally: Oppenheimer proposed to Groves that they abandon it; by removing all of the HEU inside the single Little Boy bomb, they could make half a dozen HEU-fired Fat Man bombs.) Nothing terribly similar to the Little Boy bomb would ever be dropped again (only four gun-type devices were ever detonated, ever, and the later ones — one W9 and two W33 tests — were different enough that their radiation spectrum was probably not the same).

One way that you could carefully measure the radiation output of the Little Boy bomb would be to test another one — say, out in the Nevada desert. In 1963, Norris Bradbury, director of Los Alamos, wrote out exactly why he thought this would be a bad idea. “ The periodic proposal to refire the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs is air over Nevada or somewhere to measure their radiation in great detail appears to have arisen again,” Bradbury wrote, and then enumerated a number of reasons against it.²

Click to view PDF.

First on the list is the fact that by 1963, the United States had signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, barring any kind of nuclear tests in the atmosphere. So the possibility of detonating an old Little Boy bomb in the atmosphere “has about the chance of a snowball in you know where,” wrote Bradbury. (Why not underground? Bradbury doesn’t say, but elsewhere I’ve seen it pointed out that the entire point of such an exercise would be to understand the radiation in the atmosphere. Doing it underground would involve a lot of fudging, apparently.)

Second on the list was the difficulty of putting together fair replicas of the 1945 bombs. While parts of the Nagasaki bombs could probably be rustled up, “new X-units would be required,” (the X-unit was the firing electronics), and “the different X-unit would certainly cause some difference in the radiation spectrum and distribution.” Put another way, they just didn’t have exact replicas of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs by 1963. Bradbury offers up that the Mark-6 bomb would probably be pretty close to the Nagasaki bomb. “LASL is not repeat not going to make a replica of the Nagasaki bomb in this day and age for this type of purpose. It is worth neither the time nor the effort. If a MK 6 will not do — then forget it.”

Third on the list is related specifically to the Little Boy bomb: “We could probably make a reasonable replica of the Hiroshima device. Some old LBs probably exist in part. They are unsafe (remember Parsons‘ famous bomb bay insertion of the active material?) and some type of safing would have to be dreamed up.” Bradbury earlier describes these old weapons as being “hideously unsafe.” He concludes that the differences between a Little Boy replica and the actual one would not be as big as between the Mark 6 and the Fat Man, but the differences “will take time and effort to work out.”

Lastly, he laid out exactly how much of a bad idea he thinks it was:

Unless these experiments are likely to be real, we see no reason to give much more than idle speculative effort thereto and do not [sic] real work. Let us not kid ourselves — making these devices and shooting them is going to be real work and totally unproductive work from the standpoint of weapon development. In my personal opinion, although doubtless based more on emotion than on scientific reason, the experiments will add little of practical utility in the high level dose rate area anyway. What does one do with the information when (and if) one has it? Some people get exposed at some level and die; some do not; some get malignancies; some do not. That will remain true whether we know the MLD 50 to 5, 10 or 50 Roentgens. Basically, with test money cruelly short and with testing philosophy cruelly restrictive why should we waste effort on this sort of thing?

One wonders what the cause of the “emotions” were. Dredging up memories of old and difficult work? Just a feeling that he was wasting time? Frustration with the atmospheric test ban? A lack of interest in the Hibakusha?

They never did re-test Little Boy. What they did do, some many years later, was create a replica.

The “Little Boy Replication Project” involved putting together the “Comet Assembly Machine”³, and was essentially a very small prompt-critical reactor. That is, it was an assembly that could be brought just up to criticality and then stopped before it went too far. The operation of the machine would raise a chunk of fissile material into another chunk, and they would then take all sorts of neutron measurements. On top they put the front-end of an extra Little Boy bomb casing that was left over from the war.⁴

Why go to all the trouble, in the end? As a report on the replication project explains:

Nearly all evaluations of the long-term effects of exposure to radiation for a human population are derived from observations concerning the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the medical history is well documented, the radiation exposures are still uncertain. Fat Man, the Nagasaki weapon, is well understood and has been subject to numerous comparisons between calculation and observation. Little Boy is not understood; it was unique, never tested, and, until recently, never duplicated.⁵

Little Boy was also, the authors of that study claim, “a neutron leaker.” I don’t know what that means (Fat Man is a “gamma-ray source” by comparison), but it’s a funny term.

Another paper using the Little Boy Replica put it this way:

Most of our radiation safety guidelines in the nuclear industry are based on the data concerning the survivors of the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Crucial to determining these guidelines is the radiation from the explosions.⁶

Apparently the replica worked well, and they were able to use it for all sorts of different experiments well beyond what they originally intended. I find it such an unexpected story, personally. We base our radiation understanding on the victims of the bomb. But it turns out we used the bomb without knowing too much about it, and by the time we realize that, it’s far too late to make or set off another. So an elaborate machine has to be invented, one which simulates (in a non-explosive way), technology that by that point was well over thirty years old, so that we can recapture some of that old knowledge in order to calibrate our standards for the present. It’s a round-about connection between victims and experiments, bombs present and past, knowledge old and new.

1. Sean Malloy has a fascinating article about this coming out in Diplomatic History next month; I am writing something up on it to share then as well.
2. Citation: Norris Bradbury TWX to A.W. Betts (2 January 1963), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0102280.
3. The “Comet” machine was named for Jano Haley, its designer — it was, thus, Haley’s Comet. Har har. I first heard of this device through John Coster-Mullen’s work.
4. For background on the project, see Richard E. Malenfant, “Little Boy Replication: Justification and Construction,” LA-UR-84-1726 (June 1984).  If you search the DOE’s Information Bridge for “little boy replica,” you can get many papers about the various experiments done with it. Figure 1 is from the “Justification and Construction” document; figure 3 is from this document.
5. Malenfant, “Little Boy Replication: Justification and Construction.”
6. C.E. Moss, M.C. Lucas, E.W. Tisinger, M.E. Hamm, “Gamma-Ray Spectra and Doses from the Little Boy Replica,” LA-UR-84-1613 (June 1984).

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One of the big questions that Murray Gell-Mann asked a number of times was whether “Big Science” would have taken off in the same way without the Manhattan Project. Obviously there’s no way to know that, but I would emphasize that Sputnik was responsible for a lot of the ramping up of science funding in the United States. My favorite illustration of this comes from David Kaiser‘s work, much of which is about the postwar physics boom (and eventual bust). (I might plug How the Hippies Saved Physics, here, given that I helped on it in various small ways — I was a research assistant for some of it, rendered the in-book figures, and designed the website.) One of Dave’s great charts is of the number of American Ph.D.s in Physics granted between 1900 and 1980:

American Ph.D. degrees granted in Physics, 1900-1980 (David Kaiser)

Two things jump out. One is that during World War II, the number of degrees granted went down quite a lot. No surprise: it’s hard to finish or supervise degrees when you’re building the atomic bomb, radar, and the other multitude of projects that physicists were mobilized  to do during those years. After 1945, you get an initial up-tick in degrees, a lot of which are the “backlog” of the war years. Then things level off a bit… until 1957, when you start an exponential climb that peaks in 1970, at which point the market collapses (for various reasons that Dave goes into).

Anyway, I just bring this up to note that we naturally see moments like the end of the Manhattan Project as the “obvious” point where “everything changed,” but reality can be a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes it takes a decade for the “lesson” of the previous decade to fully sink in.

Another interesting bit: “[Stan] Norris: I make the argument in my book that the ManProj is the template for a Natl Security State.” That’s an interesting idea, no? My one nit-pick there is that while the Manhattan Project utilized huge numbers of massive contractors to pull off its feat, they were largely not-for-profit arrangements. You could do that during World War II because the contractors in question (e.g. DuPont) were afraid of being dubbed “war profiteers,” as they had been at the end of World War I, and there was that whole patriotism thing. The modern national security state is immensely enriching to private contractors, and the idea that anyone would be criticized — rather than lauded — for making massive profits off of war feels rather quaint!

Another bit from Stan: “Norris: Nearly 20 scientists became Nobel Prize winners as a result of research associated with the ManProj.” I find myself wondering if that was transcribed correctly, because it seems like too high a number. There were well over 20 laureates involved in the Manhattan Project, but I find it a stretch that 20 Nobel Prizes came out of research during the Manhattan Project. (Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan’s bomb-related work definitely was behind their Nobel Prize, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any other prizes so directly related to the US bomb project.)

A lot of the stuff I hadn’t heard before came from Harold Agnew, which is no surprise, given that he was actually there. At one point he was asked “What was the take of the Native Americans and surrounding people living around Los Alamos with all of the activity?” His answer was new to me: “Agnew: The whole NM National Guard went to Philippines in War. They were all lost. Young male Native Americans were wiped out.”

He also had some amusing recollections on nuclear waste: “Agnew: The way we got rid of waste – mix w/ concrete, dig a big cylindrical hole, line w/ culvert. There is a farm of it.” “Waste should be above ground in monitored retrievable storage to get rid of the heat. You can see if there is a leak.” “I argued with Sierra Club. Look at the Pyramids. They are still here.” “Put the Catholic Church in charge on monitoring the storage. It will be here forever. Sierra Club person not humored.” 

Divine waste management? That’s actually an idea I’ve heard before (religions are known to have been more persistent over the centuries than states or other political institutions; Neal Stephenson also plays with this idea briefly in his Anathem), but I hadn’t thought about the Catholic Church as the steward! (It is arguably a more realistic idea than the idea of creating a new religion to steward nuclear waste…)

Another great bit from Harold Agnew that I didn’t know about: “Oppy was so charming. I made $125/mo. Carpenters, electricians made $500/mo. Some of us got mad.” “ I told Oppy we were a bit unhappy. Oppy came down to Z bldg. I said that we are doing carpentry/electrical at work.” “Oppy said ‘You know what you are doing here. They don’t.’ We were speechless. He walked out.”

I’ve talked before about the concerns that project administrators had with respects to the demoralizing effect of compartmentalization — when you don’t know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, you’re less motivated to do it. I hadn’t realized that increased pay might be part of that incentive (though it makes sense), or, the converse, that those who did know what they were doing might be paid less than those who were not “in the know”! That’s fascinating.

At one point, Cormac McCarthy joined the conversation (!!), but his main contribution that made it to the Twitter feed was to note that, “One thing you here from people who worked on these weapons is that they never had so much fun.” I can see why that might stick out to a guy with his interests.

It’s an interesting event, in any case. I’ve never been a huge fan of live-blogging (either stream the thing, or don’t, is usually how I’ve thought of it), but I did enjoy tuning in to this one.

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On paper it’s just a number. Or a lot of numbers, if you’re talking about it historically. Or even more numbers, if you’re concerned with things like delivery platforms, megatonnage, or megadeaths, what have you.

It’s easy to make visual sense of one or two bombs. A few hundred is still within the realm of sensible representation. But thousands?

The standard method for awhile has been to use a graph showing stockpile sizes over time. In 2010, the Department of Defense declassified the size of the stockpile (present and historical) and included a rather ugly graph show its change over time:

I don’t want to pick on the DOD, but whoever made this graph could use a little more Edward Tufte in their lives. Beautiful evidence it ain’t. Why is it in pseudo-3D? Come on, guys, this is “How to Make a Chart 101″: don’t use 3D unless there’s a really compelling reason to.

This is itself a variation on a graphic tendency that, as far as I can tell, only began as recently as the early 1980s. NGOs like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) began making systematic stockpile estimates around this time. Their original 1984 Nuclear Weapons Databook featured what I believe is one of the first attempts to give something of a comprehensive graph of past US nuclear warheads:¹

Here’s a more updated version of the NDRC historical stockpiles graph, something you’ve probably seen variants of before:

This is a sensible way to show historical trends, of course. But as a graphic representation of complicated information, it can be misleading as well.

For example, these graphs just show warheads. Warheads, by themselves, do not really represent the full nuclear threat. Yes, they’re a big part of it! But one wouldn’t realize from such a graph that by the early 1960s, even though the USSR had thousands of warheads, it didn’t have really great ways to get them to the United States.

And not all warheads are the same — the huge apparent advantage of the USSR/Russia in terms of nuclear arms in the late Cold War is mostly tactical nuclear weapons. (So is the huge ramp-up in the US arsenal before it levels off.) Some warheads are “small” — under a kiloton — and some are massive, region-destroying monsters. In a graph like this, though, they’re all just numbers. Even if you do add in separate lines for them (as in the original NDRC graph, and in many of their nation-specific graphs), it still doesn’t quite convey what kind of nuclear world we’re talking about.

There have been alternative visualizations. One which features prominently in another 1980s product, William Bunge’s wildly unusual Nuclear War Atlas (worthy of its own posting at a later point), is what we might call a “dot graph” showing relative total megatonnage:²

This would be a little more useful to the expert if we were given some kind of numerical equivalent (I think the dots are about 2Mt each, and I’m not sure if this is meant to be the world arsenal or the US arsenal), but, in any case, it’s a striking attempt to make visible the power of said weapons. It is, of course, not historical — it represents a specific moment in the history of the nuclear arsenal.

I bring all this up as a prelude to talking about another visualization which has been floating around the Internet this week, a visualization of the world nuclear arsenals by Andrew Barr and Richard Johnston of the National Post:

The dataset this is based on is from the Federation of American Scientists, who seems to have inherited the NDRC’s old mission (and dataset) of making these kinds of estimates.

It’s a cool graphic, and not a representation style I’ve seen before. What they’re showing, here, are strategic launchers — not warheads — represented by little pictures of the weapons in question. This does two things that I like very much: it gets away from focusing just on warheads, and it also makes them feel more “tangible.”

Warheads are important. They shouldn’t be ignored. But if the worst were to happen, it’s the launchers that are going to be what causes all the damage. The warheads stashed in a cave somewhere are politically important, and important from a safeguards and security perspective, but they’re not part of the immediate calculus of nuclear war.

I like representing these as discrete entities, as opposed to just a line on a graph, or just a number. 1,379 launchers — the US estimate — doesn’t sound that big in any of itself. And if you look at it historically, like the NDRC warhead graphs, it’s hard not to see that as a huge improvement over the situation in the Cold War! But when you draw each of them out individually, and know that each of them has essentially a city-destroying, megadeath-creating consequence, it suddenly looks like quite a lot indeed. 

I also like that even the “small” arsenals of the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, look pretty large enough when you draw them out this way.

And putting the poor little Earth at the center was a stroke of graphic genius. If the missiles were lined up in a row, pointing at the sky, it might be possible to see them as a sign of safety or security. But they’re pointed at a tiny, vulnerable planet. They’re pointed at all of us.

(Which is not actually an exaggeration. Even regional nuclear wars would be global in consequences. Anyone who thinks that it would be fine to let India and Pakistan blow themselves to hell should read this article. As with all expert estimates and simulations, there are those who will quibble with it one way or another, but it seems like reason enough to think that we’re all in the same boat on this.)

There are, of course, issues to be taken with it. One that the authors acknowledge is MIRVs — putting more than one warhead on each missile. My understanding is that under the various arms control treaties, we don’t actually do a whole lot of that these days (certainly not the maximum “12 warheads per missile” for some of them), but it’s still worth noting that some of these missiles actually contain two or three nuclear weapons each — which multiplies the total destruction significantly. The authors do note this.

Another is that these are only strategic weapons — that is, the big bombs meant to be used only in the event of total nuclear war, destroying whole cities, etc. Lacking are tactical weapons — the little bombs that states might actually be tempted to use in local conflicts, blowing up bunkers, etc. The problem is that it’s hard to get a handle on tactical weapons, as David Hoffman recently wrote, and ignoring them has consequences.

Furthermore, there is a lot of fuzziness in estimating actual launcher types. From this graph alone, you’d think that the USA was the only country that still used atomic bombs dropped from airplanes, and that everyone else used exclusively missiles. But that’s probably not the case — all estimates about the Indian, Pakistani, and Israeli programs are very fuzzy, and it’s likely that some of the Russian tactical nuclear arsenal is delivered through gravity bombs as well.

Anyway, I’ll concede that some of these are nit-picky, wonky points. On the whole, I think this new visualization is a great success: it actually conveys some realistic, wonky technical information in a way that your average Internet user can make sense of and recognize as being relevant to the world they live in, without wildly distorting the facts very much. That’s not an easy thing to do!

1. Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, and Milton M. Hoenig, Nuclear Weapons Databook: Volume I: U.S. Nuclear Forces and Capabilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing, 1984), on 14.
2. William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas (New York, N.Y.: Blackwell, 1988), on 12.

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Here’s the abstract:

The Manhattan Project united the physics and engineering talent of a generation to produce the atomic bomb in just 26 short months. On May 12-13, 2012, a working group of physicists, historians, social scientists, systems theorists, and writers will gather at the Santa Fe Institute to explore the project’s lasting influence on science and humanity. The meeting will present new information, review original records, and mine the memories of project participants to present a local case study from an important period in scientific history. This event will be of interest to historians, scientists, foreign and domestic policy-makers, and members of the public who are interested in exploring challenges and implications of living in the nuclear age.

The Santa Fe Institute is collaborating with the Nuclear Diner to broadcast this SFI event live on Twitter. To follow the discussion, search for the hashtag #bomblegacy on Twitter.

The list of experts is a good one: Harold Agnew, Stan Norris, Jessica Flack, Gregg Herken, Murray Gell-Mann, Ellen Bradbury-Reid, and Gino Segre. There is also a Facebook page. I’m going to definitely try and participate online.

Also, just a reminder, if you’re in the Washington, DC, metro area, AIP has its FEYNMAN graphic novel event tomorrow (Friday). All are welcome!

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It’s a fair enough question, although, as my readers all surely know, there are many sides to how one should pose it.

But for the Weekly Document, let’s go back to an earlier time. Today, I want to look closely at the very first attempt at coming up with a systematic estimate for how many nuclear weapons the United States should ideally have. This was completed in early September 1945 — well before nuclear deterrence was on the table, for at this point the United States still had a literal monopoly on nuclear arms.

The architect of this estimate appears to have been Major General Lauris Norstad of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF). Norstad would later go on to be one of the top Air Force planners, and later the Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, but at this junction he was high-ranking staff at the USAAF headquarters in Washington, DC.

On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (That the report came with an attached map showing projected US atomic capabilities in the USSR probably didn’t help with that.)¹

Click the image to view the document as a PDF.

Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart:

Click to enlarge (the image, not the stockpile). I wonder whether anybody would buy a mug with this on it.

Let’s parse that out. The left column is the minimum, the right is the optimum. The purpose of the requirement is “M-Day,” defined in the report as the day in which the US would be desiring to be capable of “desirous of immediately crippling the ability of the enemy to wage war.” This “M-Day” force would need to be capable “of being employed immediately upon initiation of hostilities and the estimated quantities of bombs required must be available at that time.”

In other words, M-Day is a first-strike attack by the United States — a nuclear knock-out punch designed to beat another nation immediately into the stone age. “There has been no attempt to estimate the quantity of atomic bombs which would be required to conduct a prolonged war of attrition,” the paper continues. Oy, that’s an idea.

And, of course, it isn’t just “any other nation.” The analysis quickly fesses up to the fact that the only nation they’re concerned about is Russia, because they’re the only one who is projected to be even remotely on par with the United States from a military point of view for the next decade. “For the purpose of this study the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war has therefore been used as a basis upon which to predicate the United States, atomic bomb requirements.”

For the “minimum” strike, there are “15 first priority targets,” and for the “optimum” strike, there are “66 cities of strategic importance.” Amazingly, these planners have decided that you need around three nukes per city to really destroy them.

And “really destroy them” is not too far from the language in the plan: “The primary objective for the application of the atomic bomb is manifestly the simultaneous destruction of these fifteen first priority targets.” They don’t weasel around with euphemisms, do they? Later in the report, it describes the possibility of a back-and-forth nuclear exchange as “a mammoth slug-fest.”

Here is the list of the 15 priority targets, in order of priority: Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorki, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuybyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov, Magnitogorsk, Grozny, Stalinsk, and Nizhny Tagil. You might wonder why Baku is on there and, say, Leningrad is not. The priority targets are based largely on important industrial output; Baku was responsible for 61% of all Soviet crude oil output, 49% of oil refining, and 15% of steel output. Leningrad, at that point, was responsible for far fewer things.

The full map of the 66 Soviet targets — and 21 Manchurian targets (which they decided weren’t of a high enough priority to worry about right now, but they did map them — is here:

Click to enlarge substantially (1.4MB)

(I’ve uploaded a reasonably high resolution file here — with some heavy JPEG compression to keep the file size as small as I could; if for some reason you need it in the ultimate, maximum, uncompressed size — some 20MB or so — get in touch. Note that this is a stitch of six different microfilm scans, and the alignment isn’t perfect. So if you see weird artifacts of that… well, that’s what it is. Should you desire this map on a mug, there are ways of making it happen.)

What the map really underscores is the methodology. It’s about industrial, war-making capacity, not just population or cultural importance. That is, when they say “strategic,” here, they still mean it in the World War II sense, not the Cold War, “strategic as deterrence” sense. They aren’t planning on deterrence, here. They’re planning for destruction.

Back to the plan: The only differences between the “minimum” and “optimum” plan are the total number of cities targeted. At three-ish bombs apiece, that 39 for the “minimum,” 204 for the “optimum.”

Both estimates also include 10 bombs for the “neutralization of possible enemy bases in the Western hemisphere” — the report explains that this is in case the USSR grabs a few other bases in the meantime that might be within shooting distance of US bases. It doesn’t elaborate. Let’s imagine that at least one of them is in West Germany, since the Soviets rolling westward is the common military scenario from this period. (Note: After writing this, a friendly reader wrote in to point out that the official definition of the “Western hemisphere” does not include West Germany at all. It’s actually considerably to the West of most of Europe. Was the idea that the USSR would roll across France and Spain as well? That they would somehow land in North or South America? I don’t know.)

Lastly, both estimates include a desire for 10 more bombs for “strategic isolation of the battlefield” — that is, keeping the Soviets from being able to move their ships or tanks or whatnot into useful places. In practice, they explain, this means blowing up the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, and the Suez Canal. That’s as close as the report gets to recommending any kind of “tactical” use of the bombs. For anything smaller than that, the analysts conclude, conventional weaponry will do the trick.

So that adds up to 59 for the “minimum” and 224 for the “optimum.” But they don’t stop there. They assume, based on World War II figures, that a certain number of the bombers will get shot down, have technical problems, miss the target, or simply drop duds. So they calculate that all of those bombs will only be 48% effective anyway, and thus they’ll need just over double the total number. So instead of about three bombs per city, they’ve allocated six.

So we divide our original totals by 0.48, and we end up with the final figures of 128 as the “minimum” and 466 as the “optimum.”

Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? So did General Groves think about this?

The General, Perturbed

Quoth the General: ”The number of bombs indicated as required is excessive.”²

Why? It’s not because Groves thinks the entire idea is wrong, or that maybe as the world’s sole nuclear power, the country could perhaps do with fewer than a hundred of these things. (What if Groves thought the USSR was going to get a bomb soon? you ask. Groves believed that it would take the USSR 20 years to get a bomb, so that’s not the issue on his mind at this point.)

No. Groves’ reasons for disagreeing are very Grovesian. He disagrees because they’re low-balling the destructive power of the bombs. “It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy its effectiveness. Hiroshima no longer exists as a city even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total.” 

So what, we might speculate, would Groves propose as a revised version? He doesn’t offer up any figures. But it’s worth noting that Groves is only taking issue with the question of how many bombs might be needed per city — Groves is more or less saying that one should do the trick in most cases. So if we re-ran the numbers, exactly as before, but assumed only one successful bomb per city (even leaving in the 48% fudge factor), that drops the “minimum” to around 73 and the “optimum” to 179. That’s a reducing of 40% for the minimum, and 60% for the optimum.

That’s still an ambitious figure for September 1945, if not a somewhat bloodthirsty one. The US wouldn’t hit 100+ bombs until 1948, and broke the 400 bomb mark in 1951. Of course, by that point, the Air Force had decided that many more bombs would be necessary. When we know that the peak US nuclear stockpile was over 32,000 warheads (in 1966), a paltry 466 looks like kid’s stuff.

But from the perspective of the immediate postwar, it still seems like quite a lot. And its very ambitiousness was a sign of things to come.

1. Citation: Lauris Norstad to Leslie Groves, “Atomic Bomb Production,” (15 September 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 4, Folder 3, “Stockpile, Storage, and Military Characteristics.”
2. Citation: Leslie Groves to Lauris Norstad (26 September 1945), attached to the previous document.

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More than a thousand boxes of classified government records are believed to be missing from the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a three-year Inspector General investigation found.

But there are no indications of theft or espionage, an official said.

An inventory of the holdings at the Records Center determined that 81 boxes containing Top Secret information or Restricted Data (nuclear weapons information) were missing.  As of March 2011, an additional 1,540 boxes of material classified at the Secret or Confidential level also could not be located or accounted for, the Inspector General report on the matter said.  Each box can hold approximately 1.1 cubic feet or 2000 to 2500 sheets of paper.

So that’s probably between three or four million classified pages that have just gone missing. Whoops.

(An Anecdotal Aside: The Washington National Records Center is in Suitland, Maryland, just over the South-East border of DC. It’s not a great part of town. I once called them to see about doing some research down there, and they basically told me that it would be in my best interest to find some way — any way — to avoid actually going out to their facility. I didn’t get the feeling they were trying to keep secrets; it was more like they were trying to avoid any bad headlines, e.g. “SCIENCE HISTORIAN STABBED ON THE WAY TO THE ARCHIVES – WAS DEVOTED TO WORK, ECCENTRIC, SAY FRIENDS.” But like all places with bad reputations, there is probably a little exaggeration for effect here. And strictly speaking, K Street and its environs probably transacts a much higher volume of illegal activity.)

So, what to make of this? The first thing is to just state the likely and boring explanation: these boxes are probably just sitting on a shelf in a government archive, somewhere. They were probably moved — or not moved when they were supposed to — and someone lost the tracking information, or entered it in incorrectly. Or checked the “feel free to burn these records or send them to the dump” checkbox by accident.

The tracking of this kind of historical data is still pretty low-tech, and I can speak from a little experience on this point. As part of a graduate fellowship I had with the Department of Energy awhile back (I was the “Edward Teller Graduate Fellow,” a title which I relished), I helped them improve their internal holdings database, which is just a big Microsoft Access database. It’s not a bad database, to be sure, but it isn’t some super-advanced NSA creation, and it can be pretty cryptic when you are trying to figure out what they have and where they have it.

You remember that scene from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they “hide” the Ark of the Covenent in that giant government warehouse? It’s not entirely far-fetched, though the NARA stacks that I’ve seen are a bit cleaner looking, and have lower ceilings.

As the Library of Congress' web system likes to say, "Item not on shelf."

Let’s banish from our minds the idea that terrorists or criminals are somehow trucking around archival boxes. Doesn’t happen. These things don’t usually contain stuff that is that interesting to ne’er-do-wells. It takes a lot of work to find the occasional interesting document, take it from me. It’s just far-fetched. Activists and journalists and maybe even an historian or two? It’s been known to happen. But people who want to actually do bad things to the fellow man? I wouldn’t bet on it.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that these missing records are actually being stored correctly, or safely, or securely, or in the manner which is mandated by the law. But I seriously doubt there’s any great matters of security at stake. Especially since, as Steven points out, most of that stuff is pretty old, and probably should have been reviewed and declassified a long time ago (which requires resources — money, time, will, etc.).

But this isn’t likely a security problem. It’s not necessarily even an organizational problem. It may just be a complexity problem. If you have enough records, you’re going to lose track of a few of them.

How many is “a few”? It’s actually a quantifiable number. The problem is known as inventory control: how much physical stuff (in this case, boxes full of paper) can you actually control at any given time? In various industries and contexts, studies have shown that losses and misplacements have real minimal limits. I don’t know what they are for records of this sort — in controlled facilities — but every place has an unavoidable loss rate. This is the rate of things going missing that happens even if you have extremely advanced inventory control systems — sophisticated databases, tagged items, really elaborate systems of checking and re-checking inventory. Because there are fundamental limits on how much stuff any organization can actually keep track of.

The NARA College Park facility has at least 3,340 boxes of materials in Record Group 326 (Atomic Energy Commission) alone. This is just one agency, and a lot of that agency’s files are still held at the Department of Energy archives in Germantown, or at other NARA facilities. (This count is taken from RG 326′s Master Location Register, which, I might add, as I look it over again, has quite a few “item not on shelf during last inventory” notes in it, many for classified entries.)

So let’s imagine that the unavoidable loss rate is something that feels quite low, like 1-2%. That’s 33-66 boxes out of this one Record Group, many of which are classified to one degree or another. (Is the loss rate per year or a constant? I don’t know, but either way, it adds up.) Let’s imagine that the loss rate is higher than the unavoidable rate, because people are using these records, the organization is not as perfectly well-oiled a machine as possible, or the record-keeping is sloppier than it ideally could be. What if the loss rate is as high as 5%? That’s 167 boxes.

Now multiply that across the entire organization, all of its records, all of its secrets. Quite a lot of boxes. So 1,540 boxes doesn’t quite surprise me, nor does it look all that surprising that you’d run into that sort of problem.

I’m not trying to exculpate anybody. It isn’t like this fact makes losing classified records right. But it does make it expected. 

FBI filing room, 1944. Imagine how much paper 1% of these records adds up to.

There’s a nice quote about excessive secrecy from Michael Hayden, former chief of the CIA and NSA, which is reproduced in Dana Priest and William Arkin’s Top Secret America:

“This is just a reflection of complexity, not any vice.”

This jibes with my own feeling on the matter pretty well, and likely applies well to this specific case. This is what happens when you have billions of (physical) pages of classified information accumulated over the course of the last seventy years or so. You inevitably lose a few of them. And “a few” of a billion is a lot. 

The only way to avoid losing track of thousands upon thousands of boxes of secrets on a regular basis is to not have as many secrets to lose track of.

If they had already declassified these boxes, it’d be a minor thing — the only people who’d be really upset are historians, and we all know how important a lobby they are. But they didn’t, and now their loss is now a big, huge, ugly deal. Expect FBI involvement, expect Congressional hearings, expect a lot of man-hours spent tracking them down, expect a lot of finger-pointing and maybe even some finger-wagging.

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• “His eyes were the brightest pale blue, but his eyebrows were glossy black.”
• “…a Jewish Pan with his blue eyes and wild Einstein hair.”
• ” ‘He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,’ McKibben said, ‘very clear blue.’”
• ” ‘…something about his eyes gave him a certain aura.’”
• ” ‘My feeling was,’ Robb recalled, ‘that he was just a brain and as cold as a fish, and he had the iciest pair of blue eyes I ever saw.’”

People clearly responded to them, though differently. (Roger Robb was the “prosecutor” in the Oppenheimer security hearings, so it’s no surprise he saw them in the most negative way possible.)

But it’s hard to get a sense of those eyes these days — there just simply isn’t that much by way of color photography of Oppenheimer. We have that wonderful Time magazine cover, which conveys something of them:

Which does have more life than similar photographs of him that are in grayscale:

Oppenheimer by Alfred Eisenstaedt, November 1947

But it’s still hard to get a handle on those eyes.

There is another Eisenstaedt photo set of Oppenheimer from 1963 which conveys some of the eyes’ majesty:

Oppenheimer by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1963

One wonders if the eyes were the entire point of Eisenstaedt’s 1963 session with Oppenheimer: they seem to be the focal point, the entire goal of the photo set. The 1963 Oppenheimer is the Oppenheimer who stares you down, with a martyred look upon his face, all of the sins of the world on his back, etcetera.

Does this matter? Only in the sense that it reminds us how hard to can be to conjure up the “living image” of a long dead historical figure. It’s easy to see that Oppenheimer’s eyes affected the memories of those around him (as did his famously ice-cold martinis). It’s harder to re-create that affectation later, to really see Oppenheimer as a flesh-and-blood human being, rather than a character in a story. 

Seeing historical actors as real people, and not “characters in a story,” is tough. It has its ups and its down, methodologically. If we get too sentimental, we become blinded to the big picture, and our analytical knives can get dull. On the other hand, viewing people in the past as being ontologically on par with fictional creations can lead us to make them too rational, too un-real — we forget about all of the messiness that makes people essentially human — warts and all.

So I do strive for these little details, not because history is made up of the little details — a common fallacy, and one that distinguishes “history buffs” from “historians” — but because the details do help you assemble something that feels a bit more like a re-creation of the past, and that’s a hard thing to come by.

In NUKEMAP news, I’ve written up an analysis of who-bombed-where for the online journal WMD Junction. Check it out.

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In celebration of Richard Feynman’s birthday — and because we were looking for an excuse — the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics is happy to host a talk, discussion, reception, and book-signing with Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, the writer/artist team behind the smash graphic novel biography FEYNMAN (New York: First Second, 2011). You are invited for an evening of history of science fun, here at the American Center for Physics. Admittance is free!

Here’s the link for more information and the RSVP form (which is not mandatory but is helpful to us). It’s open to the general public, all are invited. There will be food. AIP is an easy walk from the College Park metro station, on the Green line. Please feel free to forward this on to any geeky friends.

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Click to go to the article online.

The basic story is thus: in late 1945, a group of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by one William E. Stephens, decided that it would be a really cool thing to write their own, heavily-technical version of the Smyth Report. They would show that a bunch of non-nuclear physicists could, from the published literature and first principles, explain in technical terms exactly how atomic bombs worked. By publishing this, they’d prove that there wasn’t any “secret” to the atomic bomb at all. But what started out as a statement about the futility of scientific secrecy quickly became a test of the limits of free discourse in the nuclear age.

These scientists were the unheralded predecessors of the Howard Morlands, Chuck Hansens, Carey Sublettes, and John Coster-Mullens of the world, but their story is basically unknown today, despite having lasting effects on the way that the postwar Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission thought about secrecy. Their original goal — to show that clever outsiders could guess at secret things — definitely came across to the atomic officials, even if their denunciation of secrecy did not.

The final book was published as Nuclear Fission and Atomic Energy in late 1948 (two years after it was first written), and is now completely out of copyright. It’s not an interesting read, on the whole, though the forward and preface are interesting in respect to the purpose of the volume.

But the published version is missing part of the chapter on nuclear weapon design — the part that was “voluntarily” censored at the request of the Manhattan Project and AEC. The reason it was censored was because the scientists had managed to independently derive the idea of implosion. The implosion design (which was used in the Trinity “gadget” and the Fat Man bomb) was still considered secret at the time (it wasn’t declassified until 1951), so this was a pretty big coup on their part.

This week’s document is a true exclusive: the censored chapter from Nuclear Fission and Atomic Energy, taken from the AEC’s files. Stuck into the chapter was a note by William Waymack to Robert Bacher (AEC Commissioners both) decrying how irresponsible they felt the scientists were. (It is quoted, and partially photographed, in the Physics Today article.)¹

Click the image for the PDF.

Everything from section 11.6 onward was cut from the final book (as can be seen from the Archive.org version of the book, linked to above). It’s the only part of the volume that was so censored, but it ends the chapter quite abruptly. I’ve marked the point of censorship in the PDF above.

It’s not a thrilling read — it is heavy on the math — except for the fact in that it actually talks about implosion (by name!) which is pretty big bananas for a bunch of scientists with no Manhattan Project connection in late 1945. The fact that they mentioned it by name was considered a particular indictment by MED and AEC officials — though they pointed out that it was a common technical term and was present in every decent dictionary.

The fateful word.

If there are any technical people reading, I’d love to know what you think about their reasoning here. I suspect it is actually not that great — that other than getting the general implosion concept, it is probably more revealing of their ignorance than their knowledge — but I’m not a technical person, so I don’t really know. My feeling is that while the point that trained scientists can independent re-derive and re-discover scientific “secrets” is largely correct, you probably can’t do it very well from a purely theoretical standpoint. (To their credit, the physicists admit this, especially when talking about critical mass estimates, since they could tell from the Smyth Report that so much hinged on getting very good neutron cross-section measurements.)

Some parting intrigue: the Library of Congress has a copy of this early draft as well in its main holdings… but  somebody has long since torn out the pages in question. Spooky! I suspect the FBI — they were sent around in 1948 to round up any missing copies of the book, and the AEC had been told about the copies on deposit at the LOC — but I’ve no hard evidence on it.

An addendum: Yesterday evening, I received an e-mail from William Stephens’ son, thanking me for writing the article. He added a detail I hadn’t any clue about. At one point in the story, the Pennsylvania scientists go to New York to give a press conference denouncing atomic secrecy. Stephens’ son was born while he was away — on the same day. I love that detail; it adds a personal touch to a story which is otherwise composed of letters and memos. (Look for some more thoughts along those lines on Friday.)

1. Citation: Chapter 11 from William E. Stephens, ed., Nuclear Fission and Atomic Energy (draft June 1946), copy in Records of the Atomic Energy Commission, RG 326, National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Commissioners, Office Files of Robert F. Bacher, Subject File, 1947-1949, Box 3, Folder “Philadelphia Story.”

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"Photographs from a video show an expert trying to determine whether Mr. Williams could have locked himself in a duffel bag." I don't judge. (Reuters via The New York Times)

That’s titillating, I suppose, but what’s really interesting here is that the UK intelligence agencies are using this as an example of the fact that they don’t care about the outre sexual practices of their agents anymore — and because of that, it isn’t blackmail material. That’s a pretty bold thing to say, given the sordid history of intelligence agencies in prosecuting homosexuals and others who engaged in other-than-heteronormative sexual activity during the Cold War. (On this, see David K. Johnston’s The Lavender Scare.)

The official line here was that “sex deviants” were probably psychologically unwell (this is, of course, the period in which homosexuality was still classified as mental illness), and, even if they weren’t, that they were vulnerable to blackmail attempts, and thus could be vulnerable to being coerced into aiding enemy powers. Or putting that last part in its fully circuitous form: because homosexuals were not tolerated, they were vulnerable to blackmail, thus they could not be tolerated. 

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was no stranger to these Cold War concerns. In February 1951, just before the beginning of the Rosenberg trial, AEC Chairman Gordon Dean reported to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that they had rooted out a high-placed homosexual:¹

• Mr. Dean: … We had one other pleasant thing during the course of the last month. We found out that a man down at Oak Ridge, who was in charge of personnel, was given to homosexual activity. He was arrested up here in the District of Columbia when he was up here on a trip; and of course we removed him from the payroll immediately, fired him.
• We have also checked to see if there has been anybody brought into the program by him who might be a person with similar proclivities at the Oak Ridge office. We see no evidence of that at this point.
• Mr. Holifield: How long had he been personnel officer at that point?
• Mr. Dean: A matter of three years, I think. [...]
• Sen. Bricker: What did he do?
• Mr. Dean: He was a homosexual, picked up here by the police in Washington, D.C. It was a very unfortunate place for a man to be in, a place as high in the program as the personnel office of Oak Ridge, but such things happen.
• Sen. Hickenlooper: He failed to report a former arrest on his PSQ [Personnel Security Questionnaire, required for security clearances], didn’t he?
• Mr. Dean: In looking back in the file we find he did not report an arrest in his PSQ. At a subsequent hearing, which took place about two and a half years ago, he was interrogated about this, and the interrogation was not skillfully conducted and they got almost up to the point of why he had been arrested and what it was all about and then it trails off into the transcript. [...]
• Mr. Cole: What is the reason your folks weren’t able to discover his weaknesses in the three years he was down there?
• Mr. Dean: He is perfectly normal apparently when he is down there. He is a married man, he engaged in sexual intercourse. When he goes out of town, apparently this other thing comes on him. He got liquored up. It is when he drinks excessively. There is no indication from anybody down there he was even suspected of this sort of activity. [...]
• Sen. Bricker: Was there any evidence in this man’s contacts and associations away from there that there was any security risk?
• Mr. Dean: No. [...]
• Sen. Bricker: I mean, in his homosexual activities outside. Do you know of any pressure that might be used against him to give secrets and to get any more of his kind into the operation?
• Mr. Dean: Is there evidence of that?
• Mr. Waters: No evidence of that.

What a sad thing. Here’s a guy who has spent the one life he has living in a horrible closet — not just one mandated by the social norms, but the “national security” requirements of his career. He’s so deep in the closet, so afraid, that he doesn’t act upon it unless out of town and very drunk. He gets arrested for his sexual preferences, loses his job, god knows what else. At least he was probably unaware that his sexual habits were being discussed (in secret) by one of the most powerful Congressional committees of all time.

I think it’s actually a great thing that MI6 has made a point of explicitly breaking the original circuitous cycle. If they don’t care about the sexuality of their agents, then it isn’t blackmailable, and thus they don’t have to care.

“If something is secret, and something else touches it, it too becomes secret. Secrecy becomes a disease. Everything around the secret issue becomes secret, so the trial became a secret, so I became a secret.”

Secrecy, as Avner puts it, is contagious. It spreads. It goes from something that we might all agree ought to be secret — how to make a weapon of mass destruction, to take the canonical example. But from that point of apparent agreement, it seeps out, worming its way into the lives of everyone who comes near it — even into the bedroom, that most private of places.

1. Executive Session CCLXXXVIII (8 February 1951), Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

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