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Visions

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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George Gamow and the atomic bomb

Friday, January 18th, 2013

George Gamow stands out as a colorful physicist among a generation of colorful physicists. He was a known wit, a friend to many of the “golden generation” of physicists, and — on top of all that — was a Russian émigré who had made a dramatic defection from the Soviet Union during a Solvay Conference. He was also a well-known popularizer of science, authoring well over a dozen works of physics aimed at the general public, often illustrated with his own amusing little drawings. He was quite a card: who else adds a scientist’s name to a massively important paper just to make a silly pun?

George Gamow, laughing and smoking, probably ca. the 1950s. Photo from the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

George Gamow, laughing and smoking, probably ca. the 1950s. Photo via the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

(Later in life, he became a very difficult person to be around, on account of his alcoholism. It was this fact that made me a little surprised that there was a free wine bar sponsored in the name of George Gamow at a meeting of the History of Science Society a few years back.)

Gamow’s scientific interests were all over the place — he was completely uninterested in disciplinary boundaries — and he was enormously influential on his peers as a “program builder.”1  It’s a little-known fact that Edward Teller came up with the idea of using a solid core of plutonium in the implosion design — an intuition he had because of his work with Gamow on the molten, compressed iron core of the Earth.2 Gamow’s work on nucleosynthesis and the Big Bang was immensely important to the advancement of cosmological thinking. Incidentally, Gamow did not like the term “Big Bang,”  because it sounded too much like nukes. He later even had an excursion into molecular biology.

But during World War II, Gamow didn’t work on the atomic bomb, though he continued to work on nuclear physics. One of the most charming letters I’ve found in the archives was written by Gamow to Vannevar Bush on August 12, 1945. You will note, of course, that this comes just three days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and is the same day the Smyth Report was released. In a clear but stylized handwriting, with a touch of refugee’s English, Gamow wrote the following letter to Bush:3

Click image to view PDF.

Click image to view PDF.

Aug 12th, 1945
19 Thoreau Drive
Bethesda, Md.

Dear Dr. Bush,

I am writing to you because I think you are the best man to advice me what to do. As you know I was in no way connected with the project of “atomic bomb” developement, while on the other hand, working all my life on nuclear physics, I naturally could not help not thinking about it and have rather clear ideas about the possibilities involved etc. As long as the whole thing remained a supersecret I was naturally trying to hold all my thoughts to myself. However now, when the thing exploded and all the newspapers are full of informations, I wonder where the boundary between what can and what cannot be told should be placed. Thus, for example, in my course of nuclear physics which I am giving in G.W.U. this summer I will have to speak next week about nuclear transformations, thermonuclear reaction, and nuclear chain reactions. Should I entirely avoid mentioning explosive reactions or not?

Again, I am now preparing the new edition of my Book on Nuclear Physics for Oxford Univ. Press. How much could be told in it about this part of the problem? Finally I was recently asked to write a small popular book on Atomic Energy. Must I reject such offer or not?

You understand of course that in all these cases the question is not about the technical details which I do not know, but about broad “purely scientific” point of view. As the matter of fact I do not think I know much more on the subject that the scientists in other countries, as for example in Soviet Russia, know at present, so that such utterings on my part will hardly be of any particular use for the “competitors.” Still, I would not like to do anything in this direction, without first receiving your advice.

Hoping to hear from you soon

Your very truly G Gamow.

Gamow’s concern was not unique to him, though he was a little ahead of the curve when it came to expressing it. He, like most other physicists, quickly saw that nuclear physics was going to become a much more troublesome thing in the age of atomic bombs. One of the biggest concerns at the time, by those inside the bomb project and those not, was that if nuclear physics became a top-secret area, it would severely impact the education of new physicists.

His letter did not go unnoticed; Vannevar Bush wrote him back a careful reply two days later, pointing out that the Smyth Report was released at almost the same time that Gamow’s letter was written, and that one of its explicit purposes was to make that firm line of security visible to folks like Gamow. Bush then offered up this bit of speculation:

I have no doubt that later there will be constituted in some way an official body to determine the proper bounds of scientific discussion, and undoubtedly competent scientists will be present on any such body. How this may possibly be done it is too early to know. However, in the interim there is a guide in the form of a report [the Smyth Report] and after the body is established there will be a place to turn which anyone can use who may be in doubt. 

The reality was somewhat more complicated than this, in the end. Policing “the proper bounds of scientific discussion” was ostensibly the role of the Atomic Energy Commission, but they found it quite hard to do such a thing in practice.

Gamow was, in the end, somewhat sucked into the weapons complex. He was a lecturer to US Naval Officers on fission physics just before Operation Crossroads, and later he was involved in the work on the hydrogen bomb, at Los Alamos. While there he drew this rather unusual little drawing celebrating the discovery/invention of the Teller-Ulam design in 1951:4

Gamow's drawing of Ulam and Teller, March 1951

What does it mean? Stanislaw Ulam as a very Bugs-Bunnyish hare, Edward Teller as a tortoise? The most banal and boring interpretation would be that Teller had been working at the H-bomb problem for a long time, and it was Ulam — the relative new-comer — had scooped him.

But I can’t help but wonder if there is more to its imagery than that — Gamow’s pen was famously more quick-witted than that. Perhaps there is meant to be a secret clue as to the differences in their approaches?

One stab at it: Teller’s Classical Super involved a propagating thermonuclear reaction in a large mass of fusion fuel — you light one end of a deuterium candle, and the thermonuclear “fire” travels along it. Ulam’s compression scheme (which would be translated into radiation implosion in collaboration with Teller) involved trying to ignite the entire fusion fuel mass all at once, more or less. Teller’s approach is a much slower reaction than Ulam’s; this is part of the reason that Teller’s Classical Super wouldn’t work (the fuel cools too quickly and can’t sustain the temperatures needed for fusion). So Ulam is the fast rabbit, Teller is the slow turtle, and in this instance (unlike Aesop), the rabbit wins the race.

Or perhaps it has something to do with the different geometries? Why does the Teller turtle have three rocks? Is the carrot a reference to the relatively long geometry of the Ulam approach, versus the spherical symmetry of the Alarm Clock design? Is the “P” on Ulam’s hat for his native Poland, or something else?

Are there secrets hidden in Gamow’s humor? Might Gamow be having the last laugh?

Notes
  1. Nasser Zakariya, “Making Knowledge Whole: Genres of Synthesis and Grammars of Ignorance,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, No. 5 (November 2012), 432-475. [↩]
  2. Robert Christy usually gets the credit for the solid core. It was Teller’s initial idea, but it was Christy who proved it would work. [↩]
  3. George Gamow to Vannevar Bush (12 August 1945), General Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 227, Box 110, “Security – S-1.” [↩]
  4. This scan comes from the copy reproduced in Peter Galison’s Image and Logic. [↩]

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Visions

Advertising for weapons designers

Friday, December 14th, 2012

Advertising, annoying as it is in the present, is a great tool for looking at the past. You really do get a sense for what passed as acceptable, who people thought the ideal consumer was, and what kind of life people dreamed they could have, when you look at the elaborate construction of fantasy and insecurity that plays out in the advertising medium.1 This is one of the reasons it is especially galling, as an historian, that many digitized archives of past magazines or journals do not let you search advertising copy, or even — gasp! — have all advertising cut from them. This sort of thing is so irritating for historians, just passing that on.

Jack and Heintz missile systems ad, August 1958. See what you’re missing if you cut out the ads? No comment necessary.

Scientific American is a periodical whose online archival incarnation thankfully retains the ads. You can’t search them through the default search engine, but they’re in the PDFs. By downloading lots of PDFs in bulk (it can be done), you can then run searches for specific ad copy across all of them, or compile the individual articles into massive PDFs that roughly approximate a full bound set. (There are some ways in which having digital sources are a convenience — instant searching! — and some ways in which it is a pain — difficult browsing.)

During the Cold War, Scientific American was a major periodical, much more so than it is today. Its publisher since 1948, Gerard Piel, was not a scientist, but saw himself as an ideal Cold War liberal intellectual lay science enthusiast. He was anti-nuclear weapons and pro-nuclear power, if that helps solidify the type. In the 1950s he was anti-McCarthy and pro-Oppenheimer, by the 1970s he was criticized as being too old for the New Left. When he took over Scientific American, it was still being pitched at industrial researchers and tinkerers; under his management, it became something of a luxury “lifestyle magazine,” where the lifestyle in question was science.2

Of these early ads, the ones that really have gripped me in the past are the ones advertising for nuclear weapons scientists and for rocket scientists. They were advertisements that said — in fairly blunt language — that you’d be happier if you were making weapons of mass destruction. There’s something particularly American about that.

Without further ado, here are a few of my favorites, culled from issues of Scientific American from the 1950s:

How do you recruit a nuclear weapons designer? Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory tried a number of approaches. Some of these, like the one you see above from September 1956, emphasized that living out in the middle of nowhere could be “leisurely living,” and also emphasized the cool topics you’d get to work on: weapons physics, nuclear propulsion, etc. You’ve also got to admit that Los Alamos had a pretty cool logo at the time, as well. The “we work in an awesome place” pitch is one that Los Alamos would return to on a regular basis.

Los Alamos could also emphasize its history. It was over a decade old at this point, and had done some pretty important things. The above ad, from October 1956, has a wonderful message of “Los Alamos gets in the newspaper because it’s important” mixed in with an attempt to recruit young scientists.

Livermore, on the other hand, started out with a much more blunt approach: Got any new nuclear weapons ideas? Tying their work in with the work at Berkeley helped, of course — the Berkeley Rad Lab had at least as fabled a history as Los Alamos, and some of their later ads would do this even more explicitly.

To draw a contrast, take a look at this Sandia advertisement from May 1958. It’s more heady and ideological than the “come do science” and the “we have nice mountains” sorts of pitches:

For centuries men have tried to develop new and more powerful weapons to achieve victory in war. Lately these have been weapons of unprecedented power. Now war can become race suicide, and victory thus gained is a delusion. Yet we keep on trying to develop new and more powerful weapons, because we must. Not because we seek victory through a nuclear war, but because through strength we may prevent one. For as long as there are powerful forces with a record of cynical duplicity and oppression, the free world must have weapons capable of neutralizing them. At least until men learn that the only alternate to peace is oblivion. At Sandia, we play an important part in providing this protective strength…”

Although, for all of that rallying against “cynical duplicity and oppression,” a few months later (December 1958) a Sandia advertisement compared them to the Spanish Conquistadors — not exactly known for their peaceful ways. But lest you think this is the most politically incorrect form of scientist recruitment you might find from the period…

…Los Alamos had this one in the same issue. No comment here, other than the fact that this is obviously pre-Wen Ho Lee.

Los Alamos also had this wonderful little ad from April 1959, where the fact that they used obscure weapons-physics jargon was taken to show that they were on the cutting edge of science. It’s a rather clever advertising approach, you have to admit — taking what might otherwise be seen as a weakness and turning it into a strength. They didn’t use this tactic very often, though; other ads from this period had someone different messages, like “Scientists are people,” or “we do peaceful stuff, too.”

The gender stuff in some of these ads is incredible. This is an ad that ran a few times in 1958, recruiting for rocket scientists at the AC Spark Plug division of General Motors:

This is the Mrs. Behind the Missile… It takes a special kind of woman to be the wife of one of today’s missile men. … They know more about the problems of raising a family virtually alone than they do about the business of producing the missiles themselves. This advertisement is a tribute to the courage of such women, and to the very real contribution they are making to the development of a guided missile arsenal for this nation’s defense. … If you are such a woman, and your husband has engineering or scientific training which could make a contribution to this program, and is not a member of the armed forces, ask him to write — or write yourself — to the personnel section of AC in Milwaukee.

What’s most interesting to me about this one is that it, unlike most of the advertisements in Scientific American from this period, is written under the conceit that women are going to be reading the magazine. Most of the ads, it almost goes without saying, were pitched at white, scientifically-educated men. This one seems to be pitched at that guy’s wife. Which might seem progressive if it wasn’t a pitch for wives to sign their husbands up as rocket scientists so they could live a patriotic life in depressing isolation.

Douglas Aircraft was also on board with the “rocket scientist’s lifestyle” pitch, though it’s interesting how much more chummy it seems for men than was the one for women. This is from April 1957; it’s amazing how many of these rocket scientist ads were just pre-Sputnik. Things got so much crazier after Sputnik that it’s hard to forget that people were already pretty hyped up about rockets.

Douglas also used the “our work is so awesome it’s secret” pitch as well. “Look at all the nuclear-tipped missiles we’ve made! Actually, half of them are still secret!” I also really like the line, “These are the projects that require engineers who are looking far beyond tomorrow.” An impressive sounding bit of nonsense, no?

In the 1960s, Los Alamos’ as got a little more unusual — emphasizing that there was culture out where they worked. I’m not sure too many other places took this approach, though Los Alamos did it quite a few times. These ads are one part recruitment — meant to appeal — and one part projection. How much is the above ad actually soliciting scientists, and how much is it trying to say, “did you know that Los Alamos men appreciate art?”

It’s a stark contrast from this sort of ad from Lockheed (October 1956), which makes it look like your non-science time there will be spent playing golf, tennis, or boating.

What to make of all of these? There are a lot of obvious — perhaps too obvious — observations here. Gender stuff. Lifestyle stuff. Technoscientific enthusiasm. You know. But what strikes me as most interesting here is that in some of these, there’s a bit of explicit rah-rah Cold War ideology, but mostly it is absent. Is this because ideology is messy, or because it could be taken for granted? That is, do you appeal to rad science and rad living conditions because you don’t want to turn off people who aren’t totally sold on WMDs, or do you assume that the only people who are going to apply have already made their peace with that idea? I don’t know — there’s only so much you can see on the surface of these ads, without delving into the processes of their creation, much less their success or failure. Still, as source materials, these sorts of ads are wonderful windows into the past — often as much or more so than the magazine content they abutted. And like all good windows into the past, they raise as many questions as they answer…

Notes
  1. There’s an obligatory Mad Men reference here, but I never got into the show so I’d probably bungle it. I’m more of a The Wire sort of guy when it comes to television shows, I’ve got to admit. [↩]
  2. Everything I know about Scientific American and Gerard Piel comes from an excellent senior thesis I had the good fortunate to be an adviser for while I was at Harvard: Emma Benintende, “Who was the Scientific American? Science, Identity, and Politics through the Lens of a Cold War Periodical” (Senior thesis, Department of History of Science, Harvard University, 2011). [↩]

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Soviet drawings of an American bomb

Friday, November 30th, 2012

The United States government is pretty gun-shy on publishing drawings of nuclear weapon designs, even very crude ones. When it comes to implosion bombs, this is about all that’s allowed to come out of official sources:

From the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. “Then explodes” puts it a little mildly, I think.

Not extremely informative — a ball-within-a-ball — and a heck of a lot less information than you can find from other sources. The reasons for this are ostensibly based in security — terrorists, enemy powers, etc. — though I tend to suspect they are based in the fear of scandal more than anything else. Congressional oversight gets itchy when they see something that looks like a “bomb-making guide,” even when it is well-within the limits of security.1 (The basic implosion idea was declassified in 1951 as part of the Rosenberg trial, though there were knowledgable people arguing for it as early as 1945.)

I find the level of abstraction allowed in such drawings to be a little ridiculous, especially when far more detailed technical information is actually declassified. For reasons that I suspect are deeper than mere policy considerations alone, you can write a lot of things down that you can’t draw, if you’re someone with an actual security clearance. This isn’t totally nonsensical: drawings can make immediately clear lots of things that can otherwise hide in technical descriptions, which is one of the reasons that putative drawings of nuclear weapons are one of the topics that originally drew me to the topic of nuclear secrecy.

We aren’t really talking about blueprints here — these things aren’t usually to scale, they aren’t designed for engineers to use. Even if we were talking about blueprints, there are still quite a few steps in between a drawing of a thing and the thing itself. Drawings of this sort could certainly help an incipient nuclear program, but only in the sense that they can guide research questions or general directions. A drawing of an atomic bomb is not an atomic bomb.

But even though the US is fairly tetchy about its bowdlerized bomb drawings, it does better than most other nuclear states. The United States actually publishes things about their nuclear programs. Though the US has a well-deserved reputation for secrecy, they also have put out tons and tons of technical and non-technical information about how their bombs work(ed), how bombs in general work, technical details about the weapons themselves, and so on. Why? It’s a legacy, perhaps, of the Smyth Report, Atoms for Peace, and other gestures towards the positive role that nuclear information can play in the public sphere.

Ah, but there is one exception: post-Soviet Russia. The people working at Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear agency/corporation, have been publishing impressive amounts of raw historical documents information about the Soviet bomb project, as part of their on-going series Atomnyi proekt SSSR/Атомный проект СССР/USSR atomic project. The series started in 1998, and the early volumes have gotten a lot of good scholarly attention by folks like Alexei Kojevnikov and Michael Gordin, but only very recently did I find that they’ve been still publishing them, and from what I can tell, the newer volumes have not been used too much. The most recent volume that I’ve heard of — volume 3 — was published in 2009. Getting ahold of them is another matter altogether; in the United States, anyway, they’re devilishly hard to find to purchase, and even on Russian websites they are pretty rare. The Library of Congress has the first two volumes in their entirety, and I think I’ve found a source for purchasing the third (supposedly it is on its way), but not without some effort.

Here, for example, is the sort of drawing that the Russians declassified and published in one of the 2007 volumes:

Nuke aficionados will recognize immediately that this is a pretty good drawing of an implosion bomb, especially when compared to the ball-within-a-ball. The labels are pretty straightforward: A– detonator; B– explosive lens (1–Comp. B outer lens, 2–Baratol cone, 3–Comp. B inner lens); C–cork lining; D–aluminum pusher; E–uranium tamper; F–boron plastic shell; G–the Po-Be initiator. The only weird part is that they didn’t label the actual plutonium core itself (the cross-hatched sphere that surrounded the G sphere), but I guess it went without saying. Note also that they’ve indicated how the core can be added in after-the-fact with the removable “trap door” pusher. That’s one of those nice little touches that says, “I am not merely trying to explain an abstract concept, I’m trying to tell you how we might build one of these things.”

But more awesome than the drawing itself — which you can, incidentally, get on a T-shirt, if you’re interested and go for that sort of thing — is its source. It’s from the Soviet archives, part of a report dated January 28, 1946, titled “Notes on the design of the atomic bomb: Description of the construction of the ‘explosion inside‘ type bomb.”2 Get it, “explosion inside”? They hadn’t even formalized their terminology for “implosion” yet and were using a scare-quoted, made-up word in the meantime. As the report makes clear, this is a Soviet description of the American atomic bomb detonated at “Trinity,” based on intelligence received from Soviet spies at Los Alamos. (Other reports refer to Klaus Fuchs directly by name, though I’m not sure if the people drawing up this particular report knew he was the source.)

There is no way in heck that the American government would ever allow the release of so “detailed” a drawing from any source that had access to classified information. Granted, it’s a long way from being a “blueprint” — something the drawing itself acknowledges; the text at the bottom reads “schematic drawing, not to scale” — but it’s still the sort of thing that no weapons lab would want a Congressperson to see them handing out, much less publishing widely. But apparently Rosatom is not as burdened by this — when it comes to publishing pictures of American bombs, anyway!3

Here’s another fan-favorite — a series of drawings breaking the final assembled “Fat Man” bomb into its constituent parts, showing how they call go together, IKEA-style (click any of them to zoom):

The outer casing and the placement of the bomb within it. The caption at bottom says, “Bomb used on Nagasaki (Total weight 10,500 pounds – 4,650 kilograms).” I’m having trouble making out the “note” at the top left but it is seems to be saying something is tentative about the drawing.

The first four “spheres”: 1–initiator, 2–plutonium, 3–tamper, 4–aluminum pusher. Note that the publishers have omitted the exact measurements and replaced them with ellipses. <s>It seems to indicate that the plutonium core is in “3 parts,” which jibes with an earlier post of mine (and indicates that the intelligence source really knew what he was talking about, not that we didn’t already know that).</s> Actually, as is pointed out in the comments, if I had continued translating, I’d see that it says the plutonium must have impurities of only 3 parts per million. Still, a nice little detail.

Spheres 5 and 6: a layer of 32 blocks of chemical explosives, and then a layer of 32 blocks of explosive lenses. The detonator is labeled as a “booster” in English, oddly enough.

Sphere 7: the duraluminum casing, with “holes for detonators.” Comrade Beria likes his details! Compared with the Trinity Gadget.

Lastly, the overall arrangement of the bombs within the casing itself, with its electrical and detonating systems indicated. (You’ll perhaps recognize the first and last images here from another post I did, awhile back, as they are reprinted in a tiny form in another source.)

It’s a veritable nuclear Matryoshka doll, is it not? I wish I could make this stuff up, but I can’t. My favorite part about this document, though, is the fact that so much of the captions are in English — again, as if any indication were needed about where this information was coming from. The document itself was written by Igor Kurchatov for Lavrenty Beria, dated June 4, 1946.

There isn’t anything remotely like a security threat here — you can get better drawings on Wikipedia these days, without the numbers redacted — but to have stuff like this published by an actual nuclear power, based on data they derived in the course of making their own atomic bomb, data taken from a source working in a weapons lab… well, let’s just say, I don’t think it’s going to happen over here anytime soon.

Still, the drawings do have a talismanic power, and the Mandala-like quality of the implosion design doesn’t hurt that. It’s the bomb, right? And yet, it’s really not. It’s a drawing. A technically crude one, albeit more detailed than the other “official” releases. It’s no surprise, I suppose, how easily we get sucked in by the superficially technical — whether it carries any real power or not.

Notes
  1. See, for example, page 70 of chapter 2 of the Cox Report, which criticized Los Alamos for releasing exactly this kind of heavily-sanitized information. [↩]
  2. Заметки о конструкции атомной бомбы. Описание конструкции бомбы типа “взрыва вовнутрь.” [↩]
  3. This reminds me of a joke from the Brezhnev-era USSR that a Russian teacher of mine told me: During a visit to the United States, Premier Brezhnev and President Carter happen to see a protest. “No Carter, No Reagan!” the protesters shouted. “You see,” said Carter, “in our country we have freedom of expression, something you don’t have over in your country.” “Ah, Comrade,” says Brezhnev, “you are wrong! Come over and see!” So they go to Red Square, and indeed, there is a mob of protesters forming, shouting, “Nyet Carter, nyet Reagan!” [↩]

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Redactions

Forbidden spheres

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Spheres are special shapes for nuclear weapons designers. Most nuclear weapons have, somewhere in them, that spheres-within-spheres arrangement of the implosion nuclear weapon design. You don’t have to use spheres — cylinders can be made to work, and there are lots of rumblings and rumors about non-spherical implosion designs around these here Internets — but spheres are pretty common.

A photograph of a rather suspicious sphere-within-a-hemisphere, from the inside of Israel’s secret nuclear site, Dimona, taken by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986.

Spheres also happen to be fairly common sights in the non-nuclear weapons design as well. What interests me is what happens when you take a perfectly non-nuclear sphere, like, say, a soccer ball, and move it into a nuclear context. To the trained eye, it takes on a rather interesting new meaning:

Image from the cover of A.Q. Khan on Science and Education.

Presumably Dr. Khan was not using the ball above to express his love of sport, but instead was using it to convey in broad terms what the truncated icosahedron shape has to do with implosion weapons — it is the geometry of the explosive lenses used in the Trinity “gadget” and “Fat Man” bomb designs, similar to the one sketched on the upper-right side of the chalkboard above.

(I will just also note that somebody — presumably not Dr. Khan himself, but who knows — has rendered in chalk a truly excellent reproduction of figure 2.07a from Glasstone and Dolan’s Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1977 edition.)

All of which is to say that spheres are important from a nuclear point of view, and the context of spheres can change their meaning dramatically. Nothing too surprising or controversial there, I hope.

Such is the background I want you to be thinking of when you read the below line item from the notes of a Technical Board Meeting at Los Alamos, from May 1947.1

8. The Director [Norris Bradbury] asked for an expression of opinion as to what might be the difficulties that would arise if he asked that all possibly revealing shapes in the various Tech offices be removed. For example, spherical ash trays and such things that are not actually bomb parts or models, but cause security people concern because they feel that the presence of such items makes security policing difficult. It was agreed that the Director would bring this up at the next colloquium.

Imagine the scenario: you’re a security officer working at Los Alamos. You know that spheres are weapon parts. You walk into a technical area, and you see spheres all around! Is that an ashtray, or it is a model of a plutonium pit? Anxiety mounts — does the ashtray go into a safe at the end of the day, or does it stay out on the desk? (Has someone been tapping their cigarettes out into the pit model?)

You must admit, there’s a certain familial resemblance.

All of this anxiety can be gone — gone! — by simply banning all non-nuclear spheres! That way you can effectively treat all spheres as sensitive shapes.

What I love about this little policy proposal is that it illuminates something deep about how secrecy works. Once you decide that something is so dangerous that the entire world hinges on keeping it under control, this sense of fear and dread starts to creep outwards. The worry about what must be controlled becomes insatiable — and pretty soon the mundane is included with the existential.

I’ve posted this quote before, from Mordechai Vanunu’s lawyer, but it never gets old. Secrecy is contagious:

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.

So, did Los Alamos actually end up adopting the policy of No Spheres in the War Room? It may very well have! Below is an excerpt from Joseph Masco‘s highly-recommended book, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico:

One weapons scientist explained to me how he breached security at Los Alamos simply by bringing a sack lunch into the plutonium facility. He left his lunch on his office desk and stepped out for a minute. He came back to find a commotion. A security officer informed him that the orange he left on his desk was, in fact, a classified object.

He learned that any spherical object became a nuclear secret once it passes over the line demarcating the secure from the open areas of the laboratory, as it could be taken as a model for the plutonium pit that drives a nuclear weapon.

The weapons scientist was told that in the future he could eat the fruit or store it inside his office safe with the rest of his classified documents, but if he left the orange out on his desk unsupervised it was a security infraction that could be referred to the FBI for investigation.

Truth, rumor, exaggeration? A distinction that’s not mine to know. But it’s still pretty amusing. One wonders how many “inappropriate lunch” cases the FBI has to investigate.

Image source: floating around the Internet.

I’ve asked some contacts I have at Livermore if they had such a policy out there, and they said they hadn’t heard of one. But maybe they’ve just never made the mistake of bringing a sphere to lunch. 

Notes
  1. Citation: Los Alamos Technical Board Notes (2 May 1947), copy in Chuck Hansen papers, National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., Box 51, “U.S. Nuclear Testing Program, 1944-1947, 1959.” [↩]

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