Posts tagged "J. Robert Oppenheimer"

Posts Tagged ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’

Meditations

The price of the Manhattan Project

Friday, May 17th, 2013

There’s been a little radio silence over here last week; the truth is, I’ve been very absorbed in NUKEMAP-related work. It is going very well; I’ve found some things that I thought were going to be difficult to be not so difficult, after all, and I’ve found myself to be more mathematically capable than I usually would presume, once I really started drilling down in technical minutiae. The only down-side of the work is that it is mostly coding, mostly technical, not terribly conducive to having deep or original historical thoughts, and, of course, I’ve gotten completely obsessed with it. But I’m almost over the hump of the hard stuff.

Two weeks ago, I made a trip out to the West Coast to hang out with the various wonks that congregate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. This was at the behest of Stephen Schwartz, who teaches a class over there and had me come out to talk to them about nuclear secrecy, and to give a general colloquium talk.

Stephen became known to me early on in my interest in nuclear things for his work in editing the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institute, 1998). This is one of these all-time useful reference books; it is the only book I’ve read, for example, that has anything like a good description of the development of US nuclear secrecy policies. And the list of contributors is a who’s-who of late 1990s nuclear scholarship. The book includes really detailed discussions about how difficult it is to put a price tag on nuclear weapons spending in the United States, for reasons relating both to the obvious secrecy issue, but also the fact that these expenses have not really been disentangled from a lot of other spending.

I’ve had a copy of the book for over a decade now, and it has come in handy again and again. I’m not a numbers-guy (NUKEMAP work being the exception), but looking at these kind of aggregate figures helps me wrap my head around the “big picture” of something like, say, the Manhattan Project, in a way that is often lost by the standard historical approach of tight biographical narratives. Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?

Here is a breakdown of cost expenditures for the Manhattan Project sites, through the end of 1945:

Site/Project	1945 dollars	2012 dollars	%
OAK RIDGE (Total)	$1,188,352,000	$18,900,000,000	63%
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant	$512,166,000	$8,150,000,000	27%
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant	$477,631,000	$7,600,000,000	25%
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities	$155,951,000	$2,480,000,000	8%
—Clinton Laboratories	$26,932,000	$430,000,000	1%
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant	$15,672,000	$250,000,000	1%
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS	$390,124,000	$6,200,000,000	21%
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS	$103,369,000	$1,640,000,000	5%
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT	$74,055,000	$1,180,000,000	4%
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT	$69,681,000	$1,110,000,000	4%
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD	$37,255,000	$590,000,000	2%
HEAVY WATER PLANTS	$26,768,000	$430,000,000	1%
Grand Total	$1,889,604,000	$30,060,000,000

I’ve taken this chart from here. The “current dollars” are 2012 dollars, with a “production line” labor deflator used (out of all of the options here, it seemed like the most appropriate to the kind of work we’re talking about, most of which was construction).

To break the numbers down a bit more, K-25, Y-12, and S-50 were all uranium enrichment plants. Hanford was for plutonium production. “Special operating materials” refers to the raw materials necessary for the entire project, most of which was uranium, but also highly-refined graphite and fluorine, among other things. Los Alamos was of course the design laboratory. The heavy water plants were constructed in Trail, British Columbia, Morgantown, West Virginia, Montgomery, Alabama, and Dana, Indiana. Their product was not used on a large scale during the war; it was produced as a back-up in case graphite proved to be a bad moderator for the Hanford reactors.

I’m a visual guy, so I of course immediate start looking at these numbers like this:

Which puts things a little more into proportion. The main take-away of these numbers for me is to be pretty impressed by the fact that some 80% of the money was spent on the plants necessary producing fissile materials. Only 4% went towards Los Alamos. And yet, in terms of how we talk about nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project, we spend a huge amount of the time talking about the work at Los Alamos, often with only token gestures to the work at Hanford and Oak Ridge as the “next step” after the theory had been worked out.

We can also break those numbers down a little finer, by turning to another source, Appendix 2 of Richard Hewlett and Roland Anderson’s The New World. There, they have costs divided into “plant” and “operations” costs:

Site/Project	Plant	Operations	Plant %
OAK RIDGE (Total)	$882,678,000	$305,674,000	74%
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant	$458,316,000	$53,850,000	89%
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant	$300,625,000	$177,006,000	63%
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities	$101,193,000	$54,758,000	65%
—Clinton Laboratories	$11,939,000	$14,993,000	44%
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant	$10,605,000	$5,067,000	68%
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS	$339,678,000	$50,446,000	87%
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS	$20,810,000	$82,559,000	20%
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT	$37,176,000	$36,879,000	50%
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT	$63,323,000	$6,358,000	91%
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD	$22,567,000	$14,688,000	61%
HEAVY WATER PLANTS	$15,801,000	$10,967,000	59%
Grand Total	$1,382,033,000	$507,571,000	73%

They do not define how they differentiated between “plant” and “operations” expenses, but the most plausible guess is that the former are various start-up costs (e.g. construction) and one-off costs (e.g. big purchases of materials) and the latter are day-to-day costs (general labor force, electricity, etc.).

Looking at that percentage can tell you a bit about how much of the Manhattan Project was the building of a weapons production system as opposed to building three individual weapons. Nearly three-fourths of the expense was for building a system so large that Niels Bohr famously called it country-sized factory.¹

The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant: the single largest and most expensive Manhattan Project site.

Another way to look at this is to say that we usually talk about the atomic bomb as project focused on scientific research. But one could arguably say that it was more a project of industrial production instead. This is actually quite in line with how General Groves, and even J. Robert Oppenheimer, saw the problem of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer, in testimony before Congress in 1945, went so far as to phrase it this way:

I think it is important to emphasize [the role of industry in the Manhattan Project], because I deplore the tendency of myself and my colleagues to pretend that with our own hands we actually did this job. We had something to do with it. If it had not been for scientists, there would have been no atomic bomb; but if there had been only scientists, there also would be no atomic bomb.

This is actually a very important point, and one which shines light onto a lot of other questions regarding nuclear weapons. For example, one of the questions that people ask me again and again is how close the Germans were to getting an atomic bomb. The answer is, more or less, not very close at all. Why not? Because even if their scientific understanding was not too far away — which it was not, even though they were wrong about several things and behind on several others — they never came close to the stage that would be necessary to turn it into an industrial production program, as opposed to just a laboratory understanding. That sheer fact is much more important than whether Heisenberg fully understood the nature of chain reactions or anything like that.

Why do we think of the bomb as a scientific problem as opposed to an industrial one? There are perhaps a few answers to this. One is that from the beginning, the bomb came to symbolize the ultimate fruits of scientific modernity: it was seen as the worst culmination of all of those centuries of rational thought. What grim irony, and what a standard story, that knowledge could lead to such ruin? Another reason is that scientific adventure stories are more interesting than industrial adventure stories. It is much more fun to talk about characters like Szilard, Oppenheimer, and Feynman running around trying to solve difficult logic problems in a desperate race against time, than it is to talk about the difficulties inherent to the construction of very large buildings.

Finally, though, there is the issue of secrecy. The scientific facts of the atomic bomb, especially the physics, were the most easily declassifiable. As discussed in a previous post (with many nods towards the work of Rebecca Press Schwartz), one of the main reasons the Smyth Report was so physics-heavy is because the physics was not terribly secret. Nuclear chain reactions, the idea of critical mass, the basic ideas behind uranium enrichment and reactors: all of these things were knowable and even known by physicists all over the world well prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The really hard stuff — the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering “know-how,” the specific constructions of the massive fissile-material production plants — was silently omitted from official accounts.

Looking at the costs of the bomb help rectify this perception a bit. It still doesn’t get us outside of the heroic narratives, for they are very appealing, but it can help us appreciate the magnitude of what is left out of the standard story.

Notes

Bohr reportedly told Teller upon seeing Los Alamos and hearing about the entire project: “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.” [↩]

Tags: 1945, Budget, Hanford, Historiography, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie R. Groves, Los Alamos, Manhattan Project, NUKEMAP, Oak Ridge
Posted in Meditations | 4 Comments »

Meditations | Redactions

The Problem of Redaction

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Redaction is one of those practices we take for granted, but it is actually pretty strange if you think about it. I mean, who would imagine that the state would say, “well, all of this is totally safe for public consumption, except for a part right here, which is too awful to be legally visible, so I’ll just blot out that part. Maybe I’ll do it in black, maybe in white, maybe I’ll add DELETED in big bold letters, just so I know that you saw that I deleted it.”

From Hans Bethe’s “Memorandum on the History of the Thermonuclear Program” (1952), which features some really provocative DELETED stamps. A minimally-redacted version assembled from many differently redacted copies by Chuck Hansen is available here.

From a security perspective, it’s actually rather generous. The redactor is often giving us the context of the secret, the length of the material kept from us (a word? a sentence? a paragraph? a page?), and helpfully drawing our eye to the parts of the document that still contain juicy bits. The Onion’s spoof from a few years back, “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years,” is only slightly off from the real truth. Blacking something out is only a step away from highlighting its importance, and the void makes us curious. In fact, learning what was actually in there can be quite anticlimactic, just as learning how a magician does their trick (“the guy in the audience is in on the trick”).

And, of course, the way the US declassification system is set up virtually guarantees that multiple, differently-redacted copies of documents will eventually exist. Carbon copies of the same documents exist in multiple agencies, and each agency can be separately petitioned for copies of their files, and they will send them to individual reviewers, and they will each review their guides and try and interpret them. There’s very little centralization, and lots of individual discretion in interpreting the guides.

The National Security Archive recently posted an Electronic Briefing Book that was very critical of this approach. In their case, they pointed out that a given paragraph in a once-secret document that was deemed by the redactor to be completely safe in 2001 was in 2003 deemed secret again, and then, in 2007, reaffirmed safe, and then, in 2012, again secret. “There often seems little logic to redaction decisions, which depend on the whim of the individual reviewer, with no appreciation of either the passage of time or the interests of history and accountability,” writes Michael Dobbs.

This sort of thing happens all the time, of course. In the National Security Archive’s Chuck Hansen papers there are bundles of little stapled “books” he would create of multiply, differently-redacted copies of the same document. They are a fun thing to browse through, viewing four different versions of the same page, each somewhat differently hacked up.

A page from a 1951 meeting transcript of the General Advisory Committee, from the Hansen files. Animated to show how he staples three different copies together. Some documents contain five or more separate versions of each page. For closer inspections of the page, click here.

In the case of Hansen’s papers, these differences came about because he was filing Freedom of Information Act requests (or looking at the results of other’s requests) over extended periods of time to different agencies. The passage of time is important, because guides change in the meantime (usually towards making things less secret; “reclassification” is tricky). And the multiple sites means you are getting completely different redactors looking at it, often with different priorities or expertise.

Two different redactors, working with the exact same guides, can come up with very different interpretations. This is arguably inherent to any kind of classifying system, not just one for security classifications. (Taxonomy is a vicious profession.) The guides that I have seen (all historical ones, of course) are basically lists of statements and classifications. Sometimes the statements are very precise and technical, referencing specific facts or numbers. Sometimes they are incredibly broad, referencing entire fields of study. And they can vary quite a bit — sometimes they are specific technical facts, sometimes they are broad programmatic facts, sometimes they are just information about meetings that have been held. There aren’t any items that, from a distance, resemble flies, but it’s not too far off from Borges’ mythical encyclopedia.

The statements try to be clear, but if you imagine applying them to a real-life document, you can see where lots of individual discretion would come into the picture. Is fact X implied by sentence Y? Is it derivable, if paired with sentence Z? And so on. And there’s a deeper problem, too: if two redactors identify the same fact as being classified, how much of the surrounding context do they also snip out with it? Even a stray preposition can give away information, like whether the classified word is singular or plural. What starts as an apparently straightforward exercise in cutting out secrets quickly becomes a strange deconstructionist enterprise.

One of my favorite examples of differently redacted documents came to me through two Freedom of Information Act requests to the same agency at about the same time. Basically, two different people (I presume) at the Department of Energy looked at this document from 1970, and this was the result:

In one, the top excerpt is deemed declassified and the bottom classified. In the other, the reverse. Put them together, and you have it all. (While I’m at it, I’ll also just add that a lot of classified technical data looks more or less like the above: completely opaque if you aren’t a specialist. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to somebody, of course. It is one of the reasons I am resistant to any calls for “common sense” classification, because I think we are well beyond the “common” here.) In this case, the irony is double, because what they’re de/classifying are excerpts from classification guides… very meta, no?¹

What’s going on here? Did the redactors really interpret their guidelines in exactly the opposite ways? Or are both of these borderline cases where discretion was required? Or was it just an accident? Any of these could be plausible explanations, though I suspect they are each borderline cases and their juxtaposition is just a coincidence. I don’t actually see this as a symptom of dysfunction, though. I see it as a natural result of the kind of declassification system we have. It’s the function, not the dysfunction — it’s just that the function is set up to have these kinds of results.

The idea that you can slot all knowledge into neat little categories that perfectly overlap with our security concerns is already a problematic one, as Peter Galison has argued. Galison’s argument is that security classification systems assume that knowledge is “atomic,” which is to say, comes in discrete bundles that can be disconnected from other knowledge (read “atomic” like “atomic theory” and not “atomic bomb”). The study of knowledge (either from first principles or historically) shows exactly the opposite — knowledge is constituted by sending out lots of little tendrils to other bits of knowledge, and knowledge of the natural world is necessarily interconnected. If you know a little bit about one thing you often know a little bit about everything similar to it.

For this archive copy of a 1947 meeting of the General Advisory Committee, all of the raw numbers were cut out with X-Acto knives. Somewhere, one hopes, is an un-mutilated version. In some cases, numbers like these were initially omitted in drawing up the original documents, and a separate sheet of numbers would be kept in a safe, to be produced only when necessary.

This is a good philosophical point, one that arguably is a lot stronger for scientific facts than many others (the number of initiators, for example, is a lot less easily connected to other facts than is, say, the chemistry of plutonium), but I would just add that layered on top of this is the practical problem of trying to get multiple human beings to agree on the implementations of these classifications. That is, the classification are already problematic, and now you’re trying to get people to interpret them uniformly? Impossible… unless you opt for maximum conservatism and a minimum of discretion. Which isn’t what anybody is calling for.

In theory, you can read the classification history of a document from all of its messy stamps and scribblings. They aren’t just for show; they tell you what it’s been through, and how to regard it now.

Declassification can be arbitrary, or at least appear arbitrary to those of us locked outside of the process. (It is one of the symptoms of secrecy that the logic of the redactor is itself usually secret.) But to me, the real sin of our current system is the lack of resources put towards it, which makes the whole thing run slow and leads to huge backlogs. When the system is running at a swift pace, you can at least know what it is they’re holding back from you, compare it to other sources, file appeals, draw attention to it, and so on. When it takes years to start processing requests (as is the case with the National Archives, in my experience; it varies a lot by agency), much less actually declassify them, there is a real impediment to research and public knowledge. I’d rather declassification be arbitrary and fast than conservative and slow.

That individual redactors individually interpreting the guidelines according to the standards they are told to use come up with different results doesn’t bother me as much. There is going to be a certain amount of error in any large system, especially one that deals with borderline cases and allows individual discretion. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it’s being able to play the game in the first place that matters the most to me.

Notes

The document is a discussion of instances in which classification guidelines are based on strict numerical limits, as opposed to general concepts. Citation is: Murray L. Nash to Theos Thomson (3 November 1970), “AEC Classification Guidance Based on Numerical Limits,” part of SECY-625, Department of Energy Archives, RG 326, Collection 6 Secretariat, Box 7832, Folder 6, “O&M 7 Laser Classification Panel. The top was received as the response to a FOIA request I made in 2008, the bottom another one in 2010. Both were part of FOIA requests relating to declassification decisions relating to inertial confinement fusion; the memo in question was part of information given to a panel of scientists regarding creating new fusion classification guidelines. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Atomic Energy Commission, Declassification, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Klaus Fuchs, Leslie R. Groves, Manhattan Project
Posted in Meditations, Redactions | 10 Comments »

Meditations

Narratives of Manhattan Project secrecy

Friday, March 29th, 2013

Secrecy suffused every aspect of the Manhattan Project; it was always in the background, as a context. But it’s also a topic in and of itself — people love to talk about the secrecy of the work, and they’ve loved to talk about it since the Project was made public. In the 1940s there was something of a small industry of articles, books, and clichés regarding how secret the atomic bomb was kept. Of course, the irony is… it wasn’t really kept all that well, if you consider “keeping the secret” to involve “not letting the Soviet Union know pretty much everything about the atomic bomb.” (Which was, according to General Groves, one of the goals.)

It’s easy to get sucked into the mystique of secrecy. One way I’ve found that is useful to help people think critically about secrecy (including myself) is to focus on the narratives of secrecy. That is, instead of talking about secrecy itself, look instead at how people talk about secrecy, how they frame it, how it plays a role in stories they tell about the Manhattan Project.

One of many early articles in the genre of Manhattan Project secrecy: “How We Kept the Atomic Bomb Secret,” from the Saturday Evening Post, November 1945.

My first example of this is the most obvious one, because it is the official one. We might call this one the narrative of the “best-kept secret,” because this is how the Army originally advertised it. Basically, the “best-kept secret” narrative is about how the Manhattan Project was sooo super-secret, that nobody found out about it, despite its ridiculous size and expense. The Army emphasized this very early on, and, in fact, Groves got into some trouble because there were so many stories about how great their secrecy was, revealing too much about the “sources and methods” of counterintelligence work.

The truth is, even without the knowledge of the spying (which they didn’t have in 1945), this narrative is somewhat false even on its own terms. There were leaks about the Manhattan Project (and atomic bombs and energy in general) printed in major press outlets in the United States and abroad. It was considered an “open secret” among Washington politicos and journalists that the Army was working on a new super-weapon that involved atomic energy just prior to its use. Now, it certainly could have been worse, but it’s not clear whether the Army (or the Office of Censorship) had much control over that.

Panel from FEYNMAN by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick.

We might contrast that with the sort of narrative of secrecy that comes up with regards to many participants’ tales of being at places like Los Alamos. Richard Feynman’s narrative of secrecy is one of absurd secrecy — of ridiculous adherence to stupid rules. In Feynman’s narratives, secrecy is a form of idiotic bureaucracy, imposed by rigid, lesser minds. It’s the sort of thing that a trickster spirit like Feynman can’t resist teasing, whether he’s cracking safes, teasing guards about holes in the fence, or finding elaborate ways to irritate the local censor in his correspondence with his wife. All participants’ narratives are not necessarily absurd, but they are almost always about the totalitarian nature of secrecy. I don’t mean “fascist/communist” here — I mean the original sense of the word, which is to say, the Manhattan Project secrecy regime was one that infused every aspect of human life for those who lived under it. It was not simply a workplace procedure, because there was no real division between work and life at the Manhattan Project sites. (Even recreational sports were considered an essential part of the Oak Ridge secrecy regime, for example.)

So we might isolate two separate narratives here — “secrecy is ridiculous” and “secrecy is totalitarian” — with an understanding that no single narrative is necessarily exclusive of being combined with others.¹

“Beyond loyalty, the harsh requirements of security”: Time magazine’s stark coverage of the 1954 security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

But the Feynman approach looks perhaps unreasonably jolly when we contrast it to the narrative of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his students, for whom secrecy became something more sinister: an excuse to blacklist, a means of punishment. Oppenheimer did fine during the Manhattan Project, but the legacy of secrecy caught up with him in his 1954 security hearing, which effectively ended his government career. For his students and friends, the outcomes were often as bad if not worse. His brother, Frank, for example, found himself essentially blacklisted from all research, even from the opportunity to leave the country and start over. (It had a happy ending, of course, because without being blacklisted, he might never have founded the Exploratorium, but let’s just ignore that for a moment.)

For a lot of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, secrecy ended up putting their careers on the line, sometimes even their lives on the line. In response to (fairly ungrounded) suspicions about Oppenheimer’s student Rossi Lomanitz, for example, Groves actually removed his draft deferment and had him sent into the dangerous Pacific Theatre. This narrative of secrecy is what we might classically call the “tragic” narrative of secrecy — it involves a fall from grace. It emphasizes the rather sinister undertones and consequences of secrecy regimes, especially during the period of McCarthyism.

The original “best-kept secret” story, released on August 9, 1945 (the day of the Nagasaki bombing).

So what other narratives are there? Here is a short list, in no particular order, that I compiled for a talk I gave at a workshop some weeks ago. I don’t claim it to be exhaustive, or definitive. Arguably some of these are somewhat redundant, as well. But I found compiling it a useful way for me to think myself around these narratives, and how many there were:

“Secrecy is essential”: early accounts, “best-kept secret” stories
“Secrecy is totalitarian”: secret site participants’ accounts
“Secrecy is absurd”: e.g. Feynman’s safes and fences
- Common hybrid: “Secrecy is absurdly totalitarian”
“Secrecy is counterproductive”: arguments by Leo Szilard et al., that secrecy slowed them down (related to the “absurd” narrative)
“Secrecy is ineffective”: the post-Fuchs understanding — there were lots of spies
“Secrecy is undemocratic”: secrecy reduces democratic participation in important decisions, like the decision to use the bomb; fairly important to revisionist accounts
“Secrecy is tragic”: ruinous effects of McCarthyism and spy fears on the lives of many scientists
“Secrecy is corrupt”: late/post-Cold War, environmental and health concerns

It’s notable that almost all of these are negative narratives. I don’t think that’s just bias on my part — positive stories about secrecy fit into only a handful of genres, whereas there are so many different ways that secrecy is talked about as negative. Something to dwell on.

What does talking about these sorts of things get us? Being aware that there are multiple “stock” narratives helps us be more conscious about the narratives we talk about and tap into. You can’t really get out of talking through narratives if you have an interest in being readable, but you can be conscious about your deployment of them. For me, making sense of secrecy in an intellectual, analytical fashion requires being able to see when people are invoking one narrative or another. And it keeps us from falling into traps. The “absurd” narrative is fun, for example, but characterizing the Manhattan Project experience of secrecy makes too much light of the real consequences of it.

As an historian, what I’m really trying to do here is develop a new narrative of secrecy — that of the meta-narrative, One Narrative to Rule Them All, the narrative that tells the story of how the other narratives came about (a history of narratives, if you will). Part of talking about secrecy historically is looking at how narratives are created, how they are made plausible, how they circulate, and where they come from. Because these things don’t just appear out of “nowhere”: for each of these narratives, there is deep history, and often a specific, singular origin instance. (For some, it is pretty clear: Klaus Fuchs really makes the “ineffective” narrative spring to live; Leo Szilard and the Scientists’ Movement push very hard for the “counterproductive” narrative in late 1945; the “best-kept secret” approach was a deliberate public relations push by the government.)

As a citizen more broadly, though, being conscious about narratives is important for parsing out present day issues as well. How may of these narratives have been invoked by all sides in the discussions of WikiLeaks, for example? How do these narratives shape public perceptions of issues revolving around secrecy, and public trust? Realizing that there are distinct narratives of secrecy is only the first step.

Notes

Both of these might classically be considered “comic” narratives of secrecy, under a strict narratological definition. But I’m not really a huge fan of strict narratological definitions in this context — they are too broad. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Espionage, Historiography, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Klaus Fuchs, Leo Szilard, Leslie R. Groves, Los Alamos, Manhattan Project, Musings
Posted in Meditations | 15 Comments »

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:

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:

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.

Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Bomb design, Graphic design, H-bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, United Kingdom
Posted in Visions | 4 Comments »

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How to make an atomic thunderstorm

Thursday, November 15th, 2012

The rapid temperature and pressure changes produced by atomic explosions can, in fact, alter the local weather. This isn’t conspiracy theory kookery — it’s actually occurred numerous times in the course of nuclear testing. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a report about Redwing CHEROKEE, a 1956 test of a 3.8 megaton hydrogen bomb:

As the cloud rose and cooled, a very intense purple with Szchrinkoff [sic — Cherenkov] radiation. Rain started in the area at about H+3 minutes after the burst, and at about H+10 minutes, a thunderstorm developed within the stem. Mr. Tanner and I counted 21 flashes appearing exactly like lightning flashes within a cloud.¹

Lightning accompanied many hydrogen bomb detonations. Ivy MIKE, the first H-bomb, produced quite a lot of lightning, later analysis of the Rapatronic footage found:

Great, another thing to worry about. Image from Colvin, et al., “An empirical study of the nuclear explosion-induced lightning seen on IVY-MIKE,” (1987). You can see film of this footage here. Note that these sorts of things should not be confused with the smoke trails that were sometimes used to visualize the moving blast wave on tests.

That local weather changes would follow nuclear explosions isn’t too surprising when you think about it. What is weather if not pressure, temperature, and electrostatic charge? All three of those things are present in quantity when you detonate a nuclear weapon. I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed, a priori, that rain, lightning, and thunderheads could be created in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb, but after hearing about it, it makes sense.

What’s more surprising, though, is that this was actually investigated as a way to enhance nuclear weapons as early as 1945.

In late April 1945, two theorists working at Los Alamos working on the possible health hazards of the “Trinity” test stumbled upon the fact that rising hot air (such as that produced by a nuclear weapon) might produce rain. They sent a memo to J. Robert Oppenheimer raising the possibility:

After the ball of fire and hot air produced by the gadget explosion start to rise, conditions could easily exist favorable for the formation of a thunderhead. The initial velocity of rise of the hot air should be about 25 meters per second. Hubbard believes that a velocity of only 15 meters per second would be sufficient to produce a thunderhead provided that the atmospheric conditions were just right. He believes that the time when the proper conditions of humidity and instability would prevail over Japanese targets can be predicted accurately. In general they would be quite likely to occur in the summer months,. We are going to make a careful study of this question and its consequences.²

Two days later, they sent him another memo, this time discussing raising the possibility of making this happen deliberately. (As a side note, I always love it when the defensive swings around to become the offensive — this might be a problem becomes this might be a cool weapon with amazing rapidity.)

The memo, written by physicist Joseph Hirschfelder, had an ominous title: “Strategic Possibilities Arising if a Thunderstorm is Induced by Gadget Explosion.”³ Hirschfelder, his 1990 obituary explains, was a leader of a theoretical group at Los Alamos, and later went on to do physics work on the bombs dropped at Bikini in 1946.

Hirschfeder’s 1945 memo explained that “it would be feasible, if desired, to choose the proper weather conditions for delivery [of the bomb] so that the gadget explosion would induce a thunderstorm.” The physics seems fairly clear:

Joseph Hirschfelder’s Los Alamos badge photograph.

Because of the high potential temperature of the hot air, the active material and fission products would surely rise to heights of the order of 10,000 feet (in a time of three minutes) before the thunderhead would develop. With even a light wind the major portion of the active materials would be carried away from the area of blast damage (for a 15 mile an hour wind, one mile in four minutes) and the products would rain down on an area which has not been severely damaged by the blast (a radius of A damage for blast is considerably under one mile).

A simple calculation shows that the radiation from the active material and fission products would be sufficient to to render an area of from one to one-hundred square kilometers uninhabitable. Calculations which I have made on the smoke column would indicate that the radius of our smoke column would be of the order of 500 to 1000 meters therefore we could not expect to poison an area of more than a few square kilometers. …

I do not believe that there would be any lessening of the blast damage if we deliver the gadget in weather conditions favorable for the formation of the thunderstorm (conditional instability, humidity above 60%) and therefore the radiation effects might cause considerable damage in addition to the blast damage ordinarily considered.

In plainer language, Hirschfelder is saying, “hey Oppy, I found a way to make the bomb even more radioactive than we had previously contemplated. We’ll set it off in a way that will create a thunderstorm, which will spread radiation all over the place, even to places that weren’t hit by the actual blast itself.” Clever? Undoubtedly. Horrible? I find it so — it’s an attempt to make the bomb even more unpleasant than it already was. But in a sense, that’s part of the job description, isn’t it?

Hirschfelder closed the memo by offering that, “if you are interested in this possibility, we should try to work out more explicit details: how long it would take before the rain started, how predictable would be the area on which the active material was dumped, etc.” It doesn’t appear that Oppenheimer followed up on the issue, but he didn’t condemn it either. My total speculation is that he never followed up on it because it sounds a little complicated to pull off under wartime conditions — and waiting around for ideal weather conditions was tricky enough as it was without trying to create atomic thunderstorms.

(A small, weather-related meditation: As you probably know, bad weather saved the city of Kokura, Japan, from being the target of the Fat Man bomb. Nagasaki was the runner-up, and even its mission was almost scrapped because of cloud cover. There was probably somebody who lived in Kokura who complained about it being so cloudy on that day, August 9, 1945, without realizing how lucky he or she was. When clouds get you down, cheer up! You might be living in Kokura.)

I came across this memo for the first time while going through the footnotes of Sean Malloy’s excellent article on what was and wasn’t known about radiation effects prior to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. What struck me about it, aside from the gee-whiz aspect of ATOMIC THUNDERSTORMS, was how bloodthirsty these physicists appeared. Another document from Sean’s article, Bill Penney’s calculations on the ideal height to detonate the atomic bomb (with the special goal of trying to kill as many Japanese firefighters as possible), similarly affected me.

A common depiction is of the Los Alamos scientists as a bunch of giddy geeks whose “technically sweet” lab experiments get appropriated by the military for awful ends. But it’s a far darker story than that. These were some of the smartest people around at the time, and they applied all of their mental energies to the making of war — to the production of deaths. It’s not incomprehensible, of course: they knew they were doing wartime work, and there was, of course, a particularly vicious war on. But the flip side of all of those cute films and photographs of them drinking at lab parties is that when they weren’t there, they were plotting, in meticulous fashion, for killing as many people as were possible.

I think we’ve lost some of that in our collective memory. It’s present in some of the earlier depictions of the scientists and their work, but we seem to have compartmentalized our “weapons scientists” into the “good guys” (Oppenheimer, Bethe, Feynman) and the “bad guys” (Teller, Von Neumann) in terms of who we think are more dovish or hawkish. And yet, they all made weapons of mass destruction — some with more ambivalence than others, but they made them nonetheless. I’m not a total dove about these things, but I still think it’s worth keeping that at the forefront of one’s mind when talking about these guys. What I think is easy to forget when we read about Feynman’s hijinks and Oppenheimer’s highballs is that these geniuses were applying the entirety of their brains to a very grim job, one they did quite well. It is impossible to imagine the military men thinking up atomic bombs — much less atomic thunderstorms — on their own.

Notes

Cherokee Field Report Bikini Operations, page 10, quoted in Chuck Hansen, The swords of Armageddon: U.S. nuclear weapons development since 1945 (Sunnyvale, CA : Chukelea Publications, 1995), 1307. [↩]
Joseph O. Hirschfelder and J.M. Hubbard to J. Robert Oppenheimer (23 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada, document NV0123756. [↩]
Joseph O. Hirschfelder to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Strategic Possibilities Arising if a Thunderstorm is Induced by Gadget Explosion,” (25 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada, document NV0124031. [↩]

Tags: Bad ideas, Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, Manhattan Project
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