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Nuclear history bibliography, 2012

Friday, December 28th, 2012

As 2012 draws to a close, I thought it might be useful to try and draw together a bibliography of nuclear history scholarship that was published over the course of the year.

Some TOP SECRET stamps from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy files. Just inserted here so there is something to look at other than text!

This list is unlikely to be complete — I’ve made something of a preliminary survey, but I don’t claim to have checked everywhere — and if there are things I’m missing, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. I’ll update this as new information comes in. One obvious thing missing are chapters in edited volumes; those are harder to find using traditional academic search engines.

As for the “rules for inclusion,” they are both boring and common-sensical. Must have a publication date of 2012. Must look like “scholarship” of some sort. Must be something that is primarily in the genre of the history of nuclear weapons or nuclear power. I’m just trying to make a useful list here (for myself as well as others) and some inclusions/exclusions are going to be necessarily arbitrary. I have not read all of these — not even most of these — I do not endorse any of them. This is just a list. The citations might not be complete; it is just a guide. I thought about including book reviews, which are often quite useful and insightful (and hey, I wrote a few), but decided it would make this list completely ungainly and my task disproportionately difficult. 

Looking this over, the obvious trend is that 2012 was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which meant a lot of monographs on the subject came out this year. Without further ado…

BOOKS

Barrett, David M. and Max Holland. Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012.

Blight, James G. The armageddon letters: Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro in the Cuban missile crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

Brown, Andrew. Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Burke, David Allen. Atomic testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the quest for nuclear weapons treaty verification in the Cold War era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

Burtch, Andrew. Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’’s Cold War Civil Defence. University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

Coleman, David G. The fourteenth day: JFK and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.

Fraser, Gordon. The quantum exodus: Jewish fugitives, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Fuhrmann, Matthew. Atomic assistance: how “atoms for peace” programs cause nuclear insecurity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gavin, Francis J. Nuclear statecraft: history and strategy in America’s atomic age. Cornell University Press, 2012.

Gibson, David R. Talk at the brink: deliberation and decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hecht, Gabrielle. Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.1.

Heefner, Gretchen. The missile next door: the Minuteman in the American heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Hosaka, Masayasu. [Japan's Atomic Bomb : Its Development and Procedural Setbacks] Nihon no genbaku: sono kaihatsu to zasetsu no dōtei / 日本の原爆: その開発と挫折の道程 . Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 2012.

Hymans, Jacques E. C. Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Iversen, Kristen. Full body burden: growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.2

Johnson, Robert R. Romancing the atom: nuclear infatuation from the radium girls to Fukushima. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2012.

Kaufman, Scott. Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Khalatnikov, Isaak M. From the Atomic Bomb to the Landau Institute: Autobiography. Top Non-Secret. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012.

Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating grass: the making of the Pakistani bomb. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Larsen, Jeffrey Arthur. Rearming at the dawn of the Cold War: Louis Johnson, George Marshall, and Robert Lovett, 1949-1952. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press for the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012.

Matthews, Melvin E. Duck and cover: civil defense images in film and television from the Cold War to 9/11. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012.

Mikoyan, Sergo, and Svetalana Savranskaya, ed. The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the missiles of November. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Miyamoto, Yuki. Beyond the mushroom cloud: commemoration, religion, and responsibility after Hiroshima. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Monk, Ray. Inside the centre: the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. London, Jonathan Cape, 2012.

Munton, Don. The Cuban Missile Crisis: a concise history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Priestley, Rebecca. Mad on radium: New Zealand in the atomic age. Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 2012.

Schweber, S. S. Nuclear forces: the making of the physicist Hans Bethe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Stern, Sheldon M. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American memory: myths versus reality. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Stoddart, Kristan. Losing an empire and finding a role: Britain, the USA, NATO and nuclear weapons, 1964-70. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ;New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Szasz, Ferenc M. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2012.

Takahashi, Hiroko. [Closing Hiroshima & Nagasaki: The American Nuclear Experiment and Civil Defense Planning] Fūinsareta Hiroshima, Nagasaki: Bei kakujikken to minkan bōei keikaku / 封印されたヒロシマ・ナガサキ: 米核実験と民間防衛計画. Tōkyō: Gaifūsha, 2012.

Taubman, Philip. The Partnership: Five Cold War Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012.

Touze, Vincent. Missiles et décisions: Castro, Kennedy et Khrouchtchev et la crise de Cuba d’octobre 1962. Bruxelles: Versaille, 2012.

Walker, John R. Britain and disarmament: the UK and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arms control and programmes, 1956-1975. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

Van Lente, Dick, ed. The nuclear age in popular media: a transnational history, 1945-1965. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Weart, Spencer R. The rise of nuclear fear. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Wilson, Jim. Britain on the brink: the Cold War’s most dangerous weekend, 27-28 October 1962. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2012.

Yamamoto, Akihiro. [A Discourse on the Postwar History of Nuclear Energy, 1945-1960 : "Memories of the Bomb" and "Dreams of Nuclear Power] Kaku enerugī gensetsu no sengoshi, 1945-1960: “hibaku no kioku” to “genshiryoku no yume” / 核エネルギー言說の戦後史, 1945-1960: 「被爆の記憶」と「原子力の夢」. Kyōto-shi: Jinbun Shoin, 2012.

Zellen, Barry Scott. State of doom: Bernard Brodie, the bomb, and the birth of the bipolar world. London: Continuum, 2012.

ARTICLES

Børresen, Hans Christofer. “Flawed Nuclear Physics and Atomic Intelligence in the Campaign to deny Norwegian Heavy Water to Germany, 1942–1944.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 4 (2012).

Connelly, Matthew, Matt Fay, Giulia Ferrini, Micki Kaufman, Will Leonard, Harrison Monsky, Ryan Musto, Taunton Paine, Nicholas Standish, and Lydia Walker. “‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon.” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012).3

Dvorak, Darrell F. “The Other Atomic Bomb Commander: Col. Cliff Heflin and his ‘Special’ 216th AAF Base Unit.” Air Power History 59, no. 4 (Winter 2012).

Dorn, A. Walter, and Robert Pauk. “The closest brush: How a UN secretary-general averted doomsday.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).

Edwards, Paul N. “Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 4 (July/August 2012).

Fischer, Benjamin B. “Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story.” Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1 (February 2012).

Geist, Edward. “Was There a Real ‘Mineshaft Gap’?: Bomb Shelters in the USSR, 1945–1962.” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 2 (Spring 2012).

Goodson, Donald L. R. “Catalytic Deterrence? Apartheid South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Strategy.” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 32, no. 2 (2012).

Grant, Matthew. “British nuclear weapons and the test ban, 1954–73: Britain, the United States weapons policies and nuclear testing: tensions and contradictions.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2012).

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. “Fukushima and the Motifs of Nuclear History.” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012).

Hastings, Justin V. “The geography of nuclear proliferation networks: the case of A.Q. Khan.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 3 (2012).

Hecht, Gabrielle. “An elemental force: Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 2 (March/April 2012).

Higuchi, Toshihiro. “‘Genshi maguro’ no tanjō: Dai go Fukuryū maru jiken go no kankyō hōshanō sokutei jō no hantei kijun no hensen” [The Birth of “Atomic Tuna”: Changes in the Administrative Criteria for Environmental Radiation Monitoring in Japan after the Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954], Seibutsugakushi kenkyū [Japanese Journal of the History of Biology] 87 (2012).

Hogg, Jonathan and Christoph Laucht. “Introduction: British Nuclear Culture.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 4 (December 2012).

Jasper, Ursula. “The ambivalent neutral: rereading Switzerland’s nuclear history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).

Johnston, Sean F. “Making the invisible engineer visible: DuPont and the recognition of nuclear expertise.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 3 (2012).

Jolivette, Catherine. “Science, Art and Landscape in the Nuclear Age.” Art History 35, no. 2 (April 2012).

Kemp, R. Scott. “The end of Manhattan: How the gas centrifuge changed the quest for nuclear weapons.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 2 (2012).4

Kinney, D.J. “The otters of Amchitka: Alaskan nuclear testing and the birth of the environmental movement.” The Polar Journal 2, no. 2 (December 2012).

Kirk, Andrew. “Rereading the Nature of Atomic Doom Towns.” Environmental History 17, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “Hybrid knowledge: the transnational co-production of the gas centrifuge for uranium enrichment in the 1960s.” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012).

Krige, John. “The proliferation risks of gas centrifuge enrichment at the dawn of the NPT: Shedding light on the negotiating history.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 2 (2012).5

Lewis, John W. and Xue Litai. “Making China’s nuclear war plan.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  68, no. 5 (September/October 2012).

Malloy, Sean L. “‘A very pleasant way to die’: Radiation effects and the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (2012).6

Mundey, Lisa M. “The Civilianization of a Nuclear Weapon Effects Test: Operation ARGUS.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 4 (2012).

Norris, Robert S. and Hans M. Kristensen. “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A nuclear order of battle, October and November 1962.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 6 (November/December 2012).7))

Overpeck, Deron. ”‘Remember! it’s Only a Movie!’ Expectations and Receptions of The Day After (1983).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32, no. 2 (June 2012).

Robb, Thomas. “Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–64.” The International History Review 34, no. 2 (2012).

Sethi, Megan Barnhart. ”Information, Education, and Indoctrination: The Federation of American Scientists and Public Communication Strategies in the Atomic Age.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 1 (2012).

Sime, Ruth Lewin. “The Politics of Forgetting: Otto Hahn and the German Nuclear-Fission Project in World War II.” Physics in Perspective 14, no. 1 (2012).

Slaney, Patrick David. “Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Nature of Scientific Internationalism in the Early Cold War.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 2 (2012).

Sobek, David, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robison. “Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001.” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2012).

Theaker, Martin. “Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture 1939–59.” Contemporary British History 26, no. 4 (December 2012).

Tobey, William. “Nuclear scientists as assassination targets.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no. 1 (January/February 2012).8

Walker, John R. “Potential Proliferation Pointers from the Past: Lessons from the British Nuclear Weapons Program, 1952–69.” Nonproliferation Review 19, no. 1 (2012).9

Weisiger, Marsha. “Happy Cly and the Unhappy History of Uranium Mining on the Navajo Reservation.” Environmental History 17, no. 1 (2012).

Wellerstein, Alex. “A tale of openness and secrecy: The Philadelphia Story.” Physics Today 65, no. 5 (2012).10

Wellock, Thomas R. “Engineering Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Crisis at the Atomic Energy Commission, 1964–1973.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 4 (2012).

Wilson, Richard. “The Development of Risk Analysis: A Personal Perspective.” Risk Analysis 32, Issue 12 (December 2012).

Acknowledgements

Some of the citations I got from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues; others were found from keyword searches against the Harvard Library catalog (old habits die hard) and some publisher-specific searches. Google Scholar proved to be no help whatsoever — too much noise, too little signal, too hard to filter by discipline. Thanks to my old friend Anthony Walker for helping me with the Japanese translations. Thanks to Will Thomas and Michael Gordin for giving this a look-see before I put it up. If I’ve missed something or screwed something up — highly likely — please get in touch.

Notes
  1. I wrote an essay-review of this for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences under the title “Nuclear others,” available here. [↩]
  2. Iversen’s biographical account of Rocky Flats was discussed by me in part here. [↩]
  3. Winner of the 2012 “Wow That’s a Lot of Co-Authors Award.” [↩]
  4. I discussed Kemp’s article on the development of the centrifuge here. [↩]
  5. I discussed these Krige articles on US-UK centrifuge history in this post. [↩]
  6. For a discussion (and review) of Malloy’s article on radiation effects, see my post here. [↩]
  7. For a discussion of Norris and Kristensen’s accounting of those nukes in Cuba and elsewhere, see my post here. [↩]
  8. A little discussion of Tobey’s article on nuclear assassination is here, along with my own thoughts. [↩]
  9. Winner of the 2012 “Most Alliterative Article Award.” [↩]
  10. My article on the “Philadelphia Story” is discussed and linked-to here. [↩]

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Meditations

Plutonium Lives and Half-lives

Friday, October 12th, 2012

Plutonium is a fascinating element. It’s named after the Roman God of Death (by way of being named after a former planet). Its atomic abbreviation, “Pu,” was chosen to sound like “Peee-yooou,” as in, something smells bad. It doesn’t exist in nature (at least not in more than trace quantities) — all plutonium of significance currently in the world was created by human beings. And of course it is fissile, and so can be used as fuel for nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors.

It’s also pyrophoric, which is a fancy term to say it combusts on contact with air. It’s chemically unusual — it’s right on the juncture point between two different groups of elements, so it has six allotropic phases and four oxidation states. In non-sciency terms, this means that its volume and density changes radically as a factor of its temperature. This made it a tetchy addition to the wartime bomb project, where things like volume and density made a big difference when trying to use it inside of an exploding nuclear bomb. (They found that a plutonium-gallium alloy was a bit more stable.)

And hey, at least one form of it, Plutonium-238, actually glows in the dark! It does so because it’s radioactive enough to be scalding hot, which is why it is useful as a power source for things like the Curiosity rover currently tooling around Mars.1

A glowing pellet of plutonium-238. And you thought The Simpsons wasn’t factually accurate.

If you’re something of a science geek, all of the above is, again, terribly fascinating. And I think it’s been established on here that I am, among other things, something of a science geek. There’s something alluring to folks like me about the idea of a chemically irritable, glowing man-made element named after the god of the dead that catches fire on its own and can be used to blow up entire cities. It sounds like something out of the worst types of science fiction, where authors just make up goofy substances to advance the plot.

Oh — I left out one key thing. It’s also toxic. Exactly how toxic is up for some debate — some informed sources say it is intensely, acutely toxic in very small inhaled amounts, others suggest its toxicity is a lot lower than that, making it more of a long-term threat — but either way, it’s not good for you if it gets into your body. 

Because of its connections to nuclear weapons, the United States produced some 100 metric tons of plutonium over the course of the Cold War. And it was produced and operated on in big factories, under lots of secrecy, surrounded by lots of regular people. And there’s the rub: part of me wants to geek out on how awesome plutonium is, and part of me keeps saying, hey, idiot, don’t forget how it affects individual human beings — men, women, children, families. People who have been inadvertently exposed to it, for example. People who went out of their way to live next to a plutonium fabrication facility, for example, because it promised them good jobs and work that helped their country. 

Map adapted from P.W. Krey and E.P. Hardy, “Plutonium in Soil around the Rocky Flats Plant,” HASL-235 (1970). This adaptation is taken from here.

I find nuclear history fascinating, from an intellectual point of view, and all of its little detailed ins and outs continually draw me in. But I endeavor to not be too fascinated by it — so attracted to the “technically sweet” bits that I lose sight of the big picture, and lose any empathy I might have with those who lived it. It’s all too common that in our rush for objectivity, especially about Big Male Military Subjects, that we take solace in the cold, hard facts, and disregard accounts that come from other perspectives.

I was reminded of this last week, when I went to see a talk at the National Museum of American History. The speaker was Kristen Iversen, talking about her new book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (which recently got a very favorable review from the New York Times). Iversen directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Memphis, and gave a good, heartfelt presentation to a packed room. Interestingly, the room was packed with mostly women, which is highly unusual for nuclear-themed talks, in my experience.

The book is part memoir, part investigative account. Iversen’s family moved to Arvada, Colorado, in the late-1950s. Arvada, a small town north of Denver, was next to Rocky Flats, a plutonium fabrication facility owned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and operated initially by Dow Chemical.

Hanford would breed the plutonium in their mammoth nuclear reactors, and the metal would be shipped to Rocky Flats, where workers would shape it into forms useful inside nuclear weapons — the “pits.” The pits would then be shipped to the Pantex Plant in Texas for final assembly into bombs.

In theory, all of this would be well-contained within glove boxes and filters and sensibly designed waste systems. In practice, plutonium is a messy substance, and for a variety of reasons, a lot of corners were cut. The result is that map up above — a fairly large plume of plutonium was deposited in the soil around the plant and the surrounding communities.

An employee at Rocky Flats holds a plutonium “button” inside of a glove box, 1973.

From Iversen’s presentation, it sounded like a pretty interesting read. It’s historical, it’s journalistic, and yet it’s read through the lens of the personal. This sort of thing is necessary — we need to keep in mind, when talking about grand strategy and big motivations, that there are all sorts of regular people caught up in this as well. That most of the world is not comprised of heads of state, or even heads of agencies.

The residents of the towns around Rocky Flats were ill served by nuclear secrecy. They weren’t told, for example, that a fire in 1957 spread a wide plume of radioactivity across the area. Or when it happened again in 1969. They weren’t given information on the sorts of diseases that are associated with coming into contact with heavy actinides. They were assured, again and again, that everything was under control.

And from Iversen’s account, most of them believed it. Why wouldn’t they? They had skin in that game — the livelihood of their town depended on it, and, as we’ve all seen again and again, human beings, for all of their famed skittishness, are quick to rationalize the big, unwieldly long-term risks that they live next door to. This is something that people in the field of risk communication have known for a long time: we learn to ignore risks that we live next to, especially when we have a personal incentive to do so. (In fact, many of those cut corners mentioned above were done by the employees themselves, because the profit incentive was on speed, not safety. This is unfortunately an all-too-common story with toxic industries.)

An “Infinity Room” at Rocky Flats — a room so contaminated by radiation that it was never to be occupied by unshielded humans again. From the DOE Digital Archive.

To give you an idea of how not under control things were, though, Iversen tells a gripping account of when the FBI raided Rocky Flats in 1989. Alerted by whistleblowers for egregious safety violations inside the plant, the FBI eventually concluded that the only way to find out what was being done inside Rocky Flats was to bust on inside. But you can’t just walk into a plutonium fabrication facility, even if you’re the FBI. So they came up with what was really an ingenious plan. The FBI told the Department of Energy officials at Rocky Flats that they had to brief all of them on a potential eco-terrorist threat — they said that Earth First was planning to attack the plant. Once the FBI had all of the senior management rounded up in a room for the briefing, they served them with search warrants, and along with the EPA, they invaded the facility and occupied it.

The DOE and the contractor (by then Rockwell) got off the hook pretty much scott free, despite plenty of evidence that they had in fact been complicit in plenty of environmental crimes — which are, as well, crimes against the community at large. Such is how things go, sometimes, when you’re talking about plants that do secret things for the nuclear weapons industry.

I’m looking forward to reading Iversen’s full book. Because I work primarily with records of the state, I always risk seeing like a state — or at least seeing history like one. Stories of the personal effects, ironically, can help one keep some distance from that standpoint. This isn’t to say that the personal, individual perspective is everything — the “big picture” still undoubtedly matters — but I think a serious historian excludes it at their peril.

One little announcement: In today’s issue of Science, I have a review published of Michael Gordin’s The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovksy and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012). I’ve reviewed a number of Michael’s books over the years, but I think this one is his best-written one yet, and I really enjoyed it a lot. It’s not very nuclear, but it does have an important Cold War theme. Check it out.

Notes
  1. A correspondent also notes that this heating is from alpha emission, which also tends to break the Pu-238 into small particles — meaning they can contaminate a volume rather quickly. Charming. [↩]

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Visions

Rare Photos of the Soviet Bomb Project

Friday, July 27th, 2012

I was recently perusing some Russian-language books on the Soviet atomic bomb project at the Library of Congress, and I stumbled across one that was really pretty amazing. The book itself is a catalog of a big exhibit on the Soviet bomb project (“Atomic project USSR: The 60th Anniversary of the Russian nuclear shield”1 which was held in Moscow in the fall of 2009. Much of the text is a rote repetition of what has been known for years — with some historical weirdness, like repeat using of “we” to mean the USSR, which is not the most encouraging thing for Russians to do — but the images are fantastic, and many of them are quite new.

Calling this “new” is a bit of a stretch, since the book was published three years ago. But it’s new to me, and if it’s new to me, it’s probably new to you! It’s definitely newer than most of the Soviet nuclear program photos that are out there, most of which showed up in the early 1990s when the Russian archives (temporarily) became easier to use.

Before I start, I would like to just point out how crazy it is that this book is so well-produced. It’s on glossy paper. The design is well done. The pictures are in color! None of this would be remarkable if the book was from the United States or a country in Western Europe, but most Russian-language books that I’ve seen in this country look like they were mimeographed on recycled newsprint by old Marxists. Somebody spent a comparative fortune on getting this book published. It’s a slick book; I wish there were an easy place to buy it online.

The whole thing kicks off with this amazing photograph of Vladimir Putin and a number of Russian Orthodox big-wigs at Sarov, the city that was once known as Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos. Apparently the Soviet bomb scientists liked to call the place “Los Arzamas.” Sarov has been the site of a big Russian Orthodox monastery for centuries.

There are some great, rare photographs of key Soviet weapons scientists in the book. From left to right here, we have young, beardless Igor Kurchatov; Kurchatov after he grew his famous beard; a dashing portrait of Georgii Flerov, and finally, Yuli Khariton. Kurchatov agreed not to shave his beard until the enemy was defeated, during World War II, but being “the Beard” somewhat became him so I don’t think he ever shaved it off. He looks like such a goofy kid on the photograph to the left, which I think was taken when he was in his early twenties. The beard photo is from the early 1940s.

Flerov is the guy who really got the Soviet project off the ground initially. His story is pretty fascinating. In 1942, he had hoped to get the Stalin Prize for his work on the spontaneous fission of U-238, which would have kept him from the murderous Eastern Front of World War II, but was rejected because his paper wasn’t cited by anyone, and thus was judged as unimportant. Flerov did a literature search and realized that nobody was publishing on fission anymore — and indeed, all of those who had been publishing on it had dropped off the map completely. He immediately started writing letters — including to Stalin himself — pointing out that this could only indicate that the United States was working on an atomic bomb. Anyway, this is the most dashing photograph I’ve seen of him. It dates from 1940.

Khariton was the head Soviet theorist — something of an equivalent to their Oppenheimer. The photo dates from the 1940s. Khariton, oddly enough, has some links to Freud’s inner circle. I don’t find that changes my understanding of the bomb much, but it’s still unexpected. (Hat-tip to Michael Dennis for forwarding that to me.)

Perspective view of a mine at Taboshar, Tajikistan, from 1944.2 Taboshar was one of the few early sources of Soviet uranium, known since the 1920s and mined extensively for uranium since 1945. The acquisition of raw uranium was the key setter of the timetable of the Soviet bomb program. They had very few known sources of the ore at the end of World War II, and the United States and the United Kingdom had worked behind the scenes to attempt secure a monopoly on all other known world supplies. General Groves thought their access to uranium was so bad that it would take the Soviets 20 years to get a bomb — but it turned out that uranium is more plentiful than he realized, and concentrations that wouldn’t be economic to mine for the United States turned out to be just fine for Soviet slave labor.

Here we have two diagrams of the Nagasaki atomic bomb (Fat Man) based on information passed on to the Soviets from Klaus Fuchs and other spies. These aren’t particularly sensitive today, but would have been Top Secret–Restricted Data when they were acquired. On the right is the basic dimensions of the body of the bomb, and on the left is a more detailed arrangement showing the electrical systems inside the bomb. As anyone reading this blog no doubt knows, the Soviet Union had a number of spies in high places in both the US and UK sides of the Manhattan Project, which they dubbed “ENORMOZ” in their code language.

What I like about these drawings, aside from their novelty, is that the labels are first in English, and then translated into Russian again — betraying their obvious roots in espionage.

There are also some cool documents reproduced in here. This one is from a report written for Lavrenty Beria, dated February 28, 1945, on the “Progress of the atomic bomb abroad.” It says that it is expected that the United States will produce a bomb by July of that year, and then explains in very basic terms how it works. I also love the punctuation of the technical terms with handwritten English (“High explosive,” “Composition C,” “commercial radium tube.”) Even without much Russian beyond transliteration, you can recognize a bunch of what’s being discussed: the fact that only about 5 kg of plutonium was used in the implosion bomb (actual value was close to 6kg, but who’s counting), the discussion of the different explosives involve in implosion, and, amusingly, the term “tube alloy” as a codename for uranium.

The last line, underlined, says “The explosion is expected approximately July 10.” As Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “the Organs always earned their pay.”

A nice spread labeled as “the territory of Laboratory No. 2, 1943.” Pretty desolate. Laboratory No. 2 is located just outside of Moscow and was run by Kurchatov, and was the site of the first Soviet nuclear reactor and now the Kurchatov Institute.

This is an outside view of a tent at Laboratory No. 2, also from 1943. Apparently “experiments with uranium” were performed.3

And here is an interior view of the same tent. The stack at the right looks like graphite blocks, which the first Soviet reactor was made out of. (As was the first American reactor, of course.)

Here are three views of the assembly of F-1, the first Soviet reactor. On the left, they are laying the graphite blocks; in the middle, you can see it more completely assembled; on the far right, the diagram of the design. One can easily compare these with the first American reactor design, Chicago Pile-1.

The F-1 reactor in 2009. Fun fact of the day: Reactor F-1 is still a functional, operating nuclear reactor. It achieved criticality on December 25, 1946, and is still using its original fuel load. (It is very low power, so that’s not quite as impressive as it sounds.) It’s the oldest functioning nuclear reactor in the world.

This is listed a the central hall of Reactor “A” after it received an upgrade, from the late 1950s.4 Reactor A was a military production reactor in Chelyabinsk, running on natural uranium fuel, with graphite as the moderator. It was up and running by June 1948, and provided plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb.

In other words, this is something like the Soviet equivalent of the B-Reactor at Hanford, though after the aforementioned upgrade, Reactor A was able to run at 500 MW, about twice what B-Reactor could do.

And lastly… the bomb itself. Well, a model of it, anyway. The caption says this is model of the first Soviet bomb at “the Polygon,” which was the code name for the Semipalatinsk test site.5 Somehow it manages to look very futuristic (the big circles, the large poles) and yet quite rustic (the trees, the way in which everything looks like it has been fashioned by hand by some ancient Kazakh craftsman).

(If anyone has any insight into what function the poles and  the big circle have, I’d love to know.)

This is one of the more intimate photographs of the Soviet bomb I’ve ever seen. Photographs of the Trinity gadget in arrangements like this have been common for a few decades, now, but Soviet equivalents are quite rare.

This may be my favorite photo of the whole set: the most profoundly indicative of the Soviet situation and the most graphically arresting. A bedraggled Russian worker, straight out of Gogol, posing next to a riveted, crude, and terrible atomic bomb. It’s a dystopic juxtaposition: the desperate old paired with the horrible new.

The “bomb” appears to be an early bomb casing model used for aerodynamic testing.6 I suspect they used these proto-casing the same way the US did: dropping them endlessly from planes, to make sure they wouldn’t spin or pinwheel in unpleasant ways that would rattle the sensitive internal components.

This is from a report on the first atomic bomb test co-written by Beria and Kurchatov for the pleasure of Comrade Stalin. It shows what happened to a Lavochkin La-9 which was 500 meters from the test blast. It’s dramatic, all right.

Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet bomb, and Sergei Korolev, father of the Soviet ICBM, hanging out in the 1950s. I can’t quite tell what Korolev has in his hands — it sort of looks like a giant (Lysenko-enhanced) cabbage, but it also looks somewhat reflective, which most cabbages aren’t. Hard to tell, but Kurchatov and Korolev seem rather amused by it. [My father suggests it looks an awful lot like Jiffy-Pop, no doubt acquired through special intelligence sources. Hey, who knows?]

And with a job well done came… an appreciative letter to Stalin. In the Soviet Union, Stalin doesn’t thank you when you accomplish something difficult… you thank Stalin!7 OK, in truth, it was them thanking Stalin for giving them awards (and not, you know, executing them) after the successful test. But it’s still amusing.

It reads something like this (pardon my likely spotty translation):

Comrade Stalin
Dear Josef Vissarionovich!

We heartily thank you for the high appreciation of our work, which the Party, government and you personally awarded us.

Only the daily attention, care and support that you gave us for those four-plus years of hard work have enabled use to successfully solve the task of organizing the production of nuclear energy and the creation of atomic weapons.

We promise you, dear Comrade Stalin, that we will be working with even more energy and dedication on the further development of the business entrusted to us, and we shall give all our strength and knowledge to justify your confidence in us.8

It’s signed by Beria, Kurchatov, Khariton, and a boat load of other Soviet scientists. Was Stalin pleased? Well, no. The note at the upper left is in Stalin’s handwriting, and it says, “Why not Riehl (the German)?”9 As in, where is Nikolaus Riehl’s signature? Riehl was one of the German scientists who had gone to work on the Soviet bomb after World War II. Ah, that Stalin… never could just take a compliment!

(Riehl’s story is an interesting one — he was half guest, half captive. He got many nice things for his work, but was also in a legally ambiguous status. He was not present at the first Soviet test; he learned of it later from listening to British radio. Riehl’s lack of signature on the letter probably had less to do with trying to offend Stalin — he wasn’t suicidal — but because he had been compartmentalized out of that part of the project.)

Finally, it ends with a picture of “veterans of the first Soviet atomic bomb test,” gathered in 1999. I’ve seen a number of photos of folks with the Soviet bomb, but this one really brought out the fact that it’s actually a very large bomb indeed.

Notes
  1. “Атомный проект СССР. К 60-летию создания ядерного щита России.” All translations are mine with help from Google Translate and an old Soviet technical dictionary. Original Russian will be in the footnotes. I am happy for clarifications and corrections; I acknowledge my Russian is far from perfect. Citation for the book: Atomnii proekt SSSR: katalog vystavki (Moscow: Rosatom, 2009). [↩]
  2. “Axonometric projection of the mines of the eastern section of the field ‘Taboshar.’ 1944.” / ”Аксонометрическая проекция горных выработок восточного участка месторождения ‘Табошар.’ 1944 .” [↩]
  3. “Laboratory No. 2 tent — location of experiments with uranium. External and internal views.” [1943] / Палатка Лаборатории No. 2 — место проведения экспериментов с ураном. Внешний и внутренний виды. [1943] [↩]
  4. “Central hall of the reactor “A” after the upgrade. The end of the 1950s.” / Центральный зал реактора “А” после модернизации. Конец 1950-х. [↩]
  5. “Model of the bomb at the Polygon. Not earlier than 1948.” / Макет установки взрывного устройства на полигоне. Не ранее 1948. [↩]
  6. “Bomb casing before aviation testing.” / Корпус авиабомби перед авиационними испытаниями. [↩]
  7. “Letter of appreciation awarded with orders and ranks of academics, specialists, and scientists to Stalin in appreciation for the work in the field of nuclear energy and the creation of atomic weapons. November 18, 1949.” / Благодарственное письмо награжденных орденами и званиями академиков и ученых специалистов Сталину И.В. за высокую оценку работы в области производства атомной энергии и создания атомного оружия. 18 ноября 1949. [↩]
  8. Товаришу Сталину И.В

    Дорогой Иосиф Виссарионович!

    Горячо благодарим Вас за высокую оценку нашей работы, которой Партия, Правительство и лично Вы удостоили нас.

    Только повседневное внимание, забота и помощь, которые Вы оказывали нам но протяжении этих 4-х с лишним лет кропотливой работы, позволили успешно решить поставленную Вами задачу организации производства атомной энергии и создания атомного оружия.

    Обещаем Вам, дорогой товарищ Сталин, что мы с еще дольшей энергией и самоотверженностью будем работать над дальнейшим развитием порученного нам дела и отдадим все свои силы и знания на то, чтобы с честью оправдать Ваше доверие. [↩]

  9. “Почему нет Рилля (немец)?” [↩]

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Meditations

Mysteries of the Soviet Biological Weapons Program

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

This is a nuclear-themed blog, but as you probably could guess, I’m pretty equal-opportunity when it comes to being interested in weapons of mass destruction. (Heck, I find conventional weapons pretty important, too!)

I had previously read a two interesting reviews — one by Steven Aftergood, another by David Hoffman — of Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas‘ new book, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Harvard University Press, 2012). My prior knowledge of this topic came from reading Hoffman’s book, The Dead Hand (which is a disturbing and fascinating read in and of itself, and well-deserving of its Pulitzer), and from an association I had with Matthew Meselson as a graduate student at Harvard, but the reviews hinted that there was a lot of new stuff here.

So I was pretty excited to snag an invitation to hear Milton Leitenberg speak at the Wilson Center, at a small talk last Friday afternoon, organized by my friend Kathleen M. Vogel. I was one of maybe four “academics” in the audience; the rest of the people there were affiliated with the intelligence community in one way or another — I didn’t ask for details, but it was not a classified talk (obviously, or they wouldn’t have let me in there).1 Below are some of the things that really grabbed me about Leitenberg’s talk, with a preface that I’m working from notes here, and biology isn’t really my strongest suite, so if I write something outlandish, blame me, not the book.2

Two generations of BW

Leitenberg and Zilinskas periodize the Soviet biological weapons program into two phases. The first generation was from 1928 through 1971, and used classical genetic selection techniques — Mendelian selection and its subsequent variations. The very early program was an outgrowth of a chemical weapons program, and made the USSR the only country in the world at the time (the first?) to have a devoted BW program. (France may have had one at the same time; Japan would start its own up soon after.) In 1939 the Soviet BW program was taken over by none other than Lavrenty Beria, the security chief/rapist/executioner who also later ran the Soviet atomic bomb project.

“Inside the biological weapons factory at Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union was prepared to make tons of anthrax if the orders came from Moscow.” Via National Security Archive/Andrew Weber

The second generation program, from 1972 until 1993, is the really interesting one. This one used new molecular genetics techniques — genetic engineering. The goal was to produce better and different “bugs” — with a high priority placed on changing the surface properties of the bacteria and viruses, so that not only would pre-existing antibiotics and vaccines not work, but even the detection methods would be erroneous.

What makes this especially surprising is that the USSR wasn’t exactly known as a genetics powerhouse, a inevitable result of their long foray with Lysenkoism. Leitenberg says that the second generation program was pushed by the biologists, who saw it as the way to quickly reboot Soviet genetics post-Lysenko. A new, high-tech BW program was seen as a way to re-build Soviet biology after a generation of persecution.

Twelve “recipes”

As with most Soviet R&D, the strategy was first copy whatever the US was doing, and then move forward with their own lines of research. It’s not a bad strategy in a world where you do know there’s a country that is throwing gobs of money at a scientific program. It was a strategy made somewhat easier because of the relative openness of the US; when the US declassified and published designs for biological bomblets, the USSR copied them and used them for their own program.

The US E120 biological bomblet, which was apparently copied by the USSR after it was declassified.

I would just note that we often, in this literature, making “copying” seem like an easy thing, but it’s really not — a huge amount of work still goes into replicating a basic design. In any case, I’m always surprised that we Americans acted personally offended when the USSR copied US technology — as if it were a form of high-stakes academic plagiarism or piracy. Hey, they were just going after solutions that were known to work, and it’s a pretty high compliment, is it not? I don’t think we should take this sort of thing personally.

The Soviet BW program had five major subprograms: 

  • Bonfire, the main program, which succeed in making multi-antibiotic resistance for bacteria and modified antigenic structures for viruses (bad things)
  • Factor, which sought higher virulence out of existing agents, as well as higher stability and new outcomes — which are basic goals for any BW program, but again, were being done with molecular genetics methods for the most part
  • Hunter, which attempted to make hybrids of bacteria and viruses — apparently they were trying to come up with agents that were essentially bacterial, but if you used antibiotics to kill the bacteria, they would then release viruses into the system, which sounds like something from a movie
  • Chimera, which were working on “exotic viral genes” (i.e. making better Ebola)
  • Flute, which were trying to attack neuropeptide regulators, bioweapons meant for targeted assassinations

All together they produced twelve “recipes,” as they called them, which were “type-verified” and ready to produce. Some of these were mass produced to the tune of hundreds of tons. Leitenberg and Zilinskas were able to identify eleven of them, and they’re scary — anthrax, plague, tularemia, and Marburg virus, to name a few ones that even I recognized — but the identity of the last one is still a mystery to them.

Unclear motivations

The million dollar question, though, is why the Soviets were doing it in the first place. I mean, post-1972 they were violating their own commitments to the Biological Weapons Convention — a treaty with no verification methods, but still a treaty. They were also completely convinced that the US must be doing their own BW work and violating the treaty themselves. Why? Because it’s what they’d do. (A nice illustration of the errors of assuming the enemy thinks like you do.)

“The inside of a 20,000 liter fermentor at a plant in Kazakhstan.” Photo via Center for Cooperative Threat Reduction.

But also, apparently, they were egged on in this idea by a collaborative Army-FBI operation in the late 1960s that fed them disinformation. Apparently the Soviets witnessed a test of a biological agent  near Johnston Island, in the Pacific Ocean, sometime in the 1960s, and the Army-FBI operation decided that would really throw them off if they, through a double-agent, made them think that it was the test of a different biological agent, and added on to that — oddly enough — the line that the US was continuing a vigorous biological program. In the early 1970s, when SALT and the BWC were on the table, someone finally realized that this was a very bad idea, and they “cancelled” the disinformation effort. But how do you withdraw disinformation? Issue a statement that says, “sorry, that part of your intel was totally fabricated?” Who is going to believe that?

Even more strange, though, is that the USSR apparently didn’t have any strategic delivery mechanisms for the BW program. That is, they couldn’t actually target them on the US, according to Leitenberg and Zilinskas. They couldn’t fit them on ICBMs (they looked into it, but the program went nowhere), and the only planes that could disperse them were slow and wouldn’t last five seconds in NATO airspace. And apparently they weren’t thinking about using them on the Chinese, either.

So who was the BW program for? What was it for? Why have a secret BW program that you couldn’t use? Why keep a BW program through the 1980s and even early 1990s? Leitenberg isn’t really sure.

A few obvious possibilities stand out 1. maybe they did have strategic delivery and L. and Z. are just wrong on that; 2. maybe they just thought they’d work that out later (in the same way that the US put off serious work on the nuclear waste issue for the future); 3. maybe they were planning to use them in a way we really aren’t considering (e.g. tactically, though Leitenberg says there weren’t any tactical munitions); 4. maybe it was just bureaucracy run amok, egged on by scientists and generals who were ever eager to keep the funding flowing. I’d like to believe number four, because it would be the most amusing to me, but that doesn’t really pass logical muster.

The program even persisted into Gorbachev’s time, and Gorby himself apparently lied his pants off to the United States on this point. During the Gorbachev era, apparently only four people in the higher echelons of the Soviet government knew the “full story” about the BW program. George H.W. Bush apparently didn’t push Mikhail on this point, even though he had intelligence which said, straight up, that Gorbachev was lying. Leitenberg describes this as a “terrible” thing to have done, to avoid that confrontation. (Leitenberg says that he thinks Gorbachev would have liked to mothball the BW program, but found his hands pretty full with everything else that happened during the USSR’s endgame.) The flagrant violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, though, created all sorts of diplomatic complications for the late USSR — even though the BWC lacked verification, and thus was easy to cheat, it did create huge headaches to be caught out in 20 year lie.

Lessons learned

The real take-aways, for me, were:

  • Treaties without verification are not worth the paper they are written on, but before violating one, keep in mind how much of a bind you’ll put your future, reforming leaders when they find out about it.
  • Disinformation that makes you out to be more scary than you are is a really bad idea.
  • Even though your country may not be weaponizing the coolest, newest scientific techniques (like genetic engineering), someone else might be. Be aware of that before proclaiming your field of research totally unnecessary for regulation.
  • Soviet WMD history seems like a super hard thing to do — a mixture of US intelligence reports, interviews with former participants who may or may not be interested in telling you the truth, and the occasional smuggled/given document which may or may not be true. In my experience, anyway, US WMD history is much more straightforward — there’s a real culture difference.

Anyway, it sounds like the Leitenberg and Zilinskas volume will bring a lot of enlightenment to our discussions of the Soviet biological weapons program, even while it raises deeper mysteries.

This post was updated later in the day to clarify a few points after a communication from Leitenberg.

Notes
  1. Note to future self: the dress code for summertime, lunchtime talks with intelligence community folks in DC is slacks, shirt, open collar, no tie, no jacket. I wore a tie and was conspicuously overdressed — a rare thing for unfashionable me! [↩]
  2. None other than Raymond A. Zilinskas himself once got on me at a talk I gave when I conflated the terms “mutated” and “genetic engineered” — which was helpful, in a way, because I won’t make that error again! [↩]

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Visions

“The Manhattan Projects” (Review)

Friday, July 6th, 2012

“What if the research and development department created to produce the first atomic bomb was a front for a series of other, more unusual, programs?” Such is the apparent premise of a current comic book series from Image Comics, titled The Manhattan Projects (note the plural), written by Jonathan Hickman and pencilled by Nick Pitarra.

From The Manhattan Projects #1. History comics, these ain’t.

I say, “apparent” because, after having read the first four issues (at least three more are forthcoming), I’m not really sure that’s the best way to sum up what it’s about. It’s really more like, “What if the cast of characters from World War II research and development projects were transposed into a somewhat standard comic book science fiction setting?” Which isn’t quite the same thing.

The plot, so far as I’ve understood it so far (it is not completely linear, which is not in itself a criticism), has something to do with opening up portals between parallel universes, or something along those lines. There are also aliens. And lots and lots of robots.

Which isn’t awful, but I had expected it to be more firmly set during World War II, based on the initial description (and name), but it’s really not. What makes it feel silly is that the bomb, the V-2, and other actual World War II technologies look quite mundane and uninteresting next to cyborg implants, robot androids, all-knowing supercomputers, and, you know, dimensional warp gates. Who cares about “Little Boy” next to all of those?

Cyborg Wernher von Braun builds a rocket while Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein look on. Surely building an army of robot helpers is a lot harder than building a simple rocket? This is kind of what I’m talking about.

But if you put that all aside, and regard it instead as a comic book that happens to star otherworldly versions of Manhattan Project characters you know and love, it’s actually kind of fun. The characters often quite inspired and made this atomic historian laugh. It’s clear that Hickman did some research and took the time get really grok some of these figures.

(I should say, explicitly, that there are actually a number of graphic novels/comic books devoted to actual Manhattan Project history. The work of Jim Ottaviani stands out here. I’ll talk about those another time — this post is just about this particularly pulpy contribution.)

The Oppenheimer(s)

J. Robert Oppenheimer has been made literally fractured — his real-life weirdness, inconsistency, and occasional callousness is translated, by the logic of the comic book, into a sociopathic character with multiple personalities. It’s not a flattering depiction — he’s more psychopath than genius — but it’s more interesting than the usual “hero” and “martyr” takes on Oppenheimer.  This fractured aspect of his personality is something I’ve commented on before, so I approve of this literary flourish.

Radioactive Daghlian and alien Fermi.

Enrico Fermi is a literal alien of some sort (it isn’t yet explained) — a fitting way to explain the enemy alien‘s otherworldly genius, and one which makes the Fermi paradox all the more amusing. Harry Daghlian, the physicist who died after a criticality accident in late August 1945, lives on in the comics as an irradiated skeleton inside of a containment suit. A little poor taste.

Groves and Feynman

General Groves is more boorish, more violent, more unpleasant than ever. I can’t say I’m too thrilled with the characterization — he comes off as a generic Nick Fury, G.I. Joe sort of character. The real Groves was plenty imperial, but he also felt acutely where his power was potentially threatened (by Congress in the postwar, and he knew that the buck stopped with the President). The Groves of the comic is more or less invincible, and that’s unattractive. He’s also seriously in shape, something which, well, the General Groves of our universe was not.

Most perversely, Richard Feynman is… just Richard Feynman. In this universe, he seems (so far) totally normal. Which makes him one of the only characters played straight in the whole series. Funny, no? Feynman as the only straight man, rather than the crazy guy with the bongos.

The art is quite beautiful (as you can see), extremely well-executed, and lushly colored. Pitarra has a real talent for capturing emotions on human faces, and his characters by and large are completely recognizable when compared to their historical analogues (which is no easy thing to pull off, from looking at other drawings of historical figures).

This is what actual 1940s secret science looks like. Compare with the images above. (Via Los Alamos).

Hickman’s plot has yet to really grip me, with the exception of the characterizations. I think the writer has really done interesting things with the characters of the (real world) Manhattan Project — he’s got an eye for both detail and the big picture, and that’s a tough thing to pull off. I was somewhat surprised to read in an interview that he considers the time period of the 1940s to be a compelling aspect of the story he’s telling — the whole thing feels only tenuously set in a World War II period, and most of the scenes (see above, again) have the look of a generic comic book “laboratory” to them (e.g. the Baxter Building), which look nothing like real world scientific laboratories of the time.

Still, I haven’t quite seen anything like The Manhattan Projects — it’s a fictionalization of the Manhattan Project on a level I’d never contemplated, and is something fresh on account of that. And I’m eager to see what Hickman does with Edward Teller. You couldn’t not have Teller in this sort of universe, could you? Could you?

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