Posts tagged "Leslie R. Groves"

Posts Tagged ‘Leslie R. Groves’

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 | 11 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 »

Meditations | Redactions

Death of a patent clerk

Friday, March 15th, 2013

This post is a bit longer than most, but the story is a bit more involved than most. It’s got a little bit of everything — if by “everything” one means atomic patents and mysterious deaths.

Four of my favorite atomic patents — the nuclear reactor, the Calutron, the triggered spark gap, and the barometric fuse

Manhattan Project inventions: Patents 2,708,656, 2,709,222, 3,956,658, and 3,358,605.

During the Manhattan Project, one of the odder activities that was undertaken — approved directly by Roosevelt and Churchill — was to try and file secret patent applications for every single invention that was developed while trying to build the atomic bomb. I have written about this at length in various places and won’t repeat all of that here. Basically, the people working on the bomb project weren’t sure of what would happen after the war, and so were trying to make sure they had iron-clad legal control over the bomb, and the secret patent applications were a way to guarantee government control of nuclear technology with regards to private contractors, private scientists, and universities.

The person who was in charge of all of this work was Captain Robert A. Lavender, USN (Ret.). Lavender was the chief patent officer of the Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which headed up the civilian functions of the bomb project. Lavender was basically a Navy lawyer who knew intellectual property law inside and out. His job, basically, was to make sure that all of those secret patent applications were properly filed. He knew his stuff and he got it done. By the time the Atomic Energy Commission took over the job, Lavender’s office had docketed reports on over 5,600 different inventions relating to the atomic bomb, with some 2,100 separate patent applications ready to be filed — in secret.

Now, one of the ironies of the Manhattan Project patent program is that it pretty much operated in an opposite way than the rest of the bomb work. The bomb program was defined by its secrecy. You didn’t use the names of real things, you used code-names (“oralloy,” “copper,” “the Gadget”). You didn’t centralize information, you compartmentalized it. You worried about what you needed now, not what you needed in the future. And the patent program was the opposite: you used the real names, with centralized information, because it was about protecting the bomb — legally — for the indefinite future. So from a certain standpoint, the Manhattan Project patent division housed more technical secrets in one place than any other part of the bomb program.

Invention by Oppenheimer, patent by Lavender.

Lavender didn’t do this alone, of course. He had a staff, and each Project site had dozens of lawyers attending technical meetings, looking for inventions, forcing the poor, harried scientists to fill out invention reports. It’s a really amusing idea if you think about it, juxtaposing that familiar narrative of the racing Los Alamos scientists with the dull banality of the legal aspects of patent applications. The local patent officer at Los Alamos, for example, recommended that they allow a “competent disinterested individual” attend the “Trinity” test so they could write a report that would testify to the “reduction to practice” of the first atomic bomb. Talk about the least interesting reason to be at “Trinity” on July 16, 1945.

The second in command at Lavender’s office was Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh. Stoutenburgh was born in Norwalk, Ohio, on September 25, 1901. He received B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1923, was married in 1926, and received a law degree from George Washington University in 1928. Stoutenburgh was had worked as an attorney for the Justice Department, in the claims division, and had joined the Army only in July 1945. He was discharged from the Army in February 1946 as a Lieutenant Colonel, and he thereafter resigned from the Justice Department and returned to work for the Office for Scientific Research and Development as a civilian.

When I was researching the atomic patent program, I came across Stoutenburgh’s name occasionally, but it didn’t stand out. His memos to Lavender or others weren’t anything unusual or special — just a guy doing his job. Sometimes he wrote things in Lavender’s name, the way that subordinates often do. I wasn’t drawn to him in any particular way.

But as part of my research into Lavender, I started running his name through various newspaper archives, looking for obituaries, articles, later jobs, and so on. And when I did, suddenly Stoutenburgh showed up, in a horrific way:

On the morning of Saturday April 1, 1946, a friend of Stoutenburgh’s daughter, became alarmed when she did not show up for a roller skating date and no one would answer the phone at the Stoutenburgh residence. They contacted Mrs. Stoutenberg’s brother, and another friend, and together they went to Stoutenberg’s Northwest Washington, DC, home. Finding the Stoutenberg car in the garage, they assumed the worst, and contacted the Sixth Precinct police. Three officers arrived and broke into the house through a back window.

Inside was a scene of horror. Paul Stoutenburgh was wearing his pajamas and a smoking jacket, and was sprawled across his daughter’s bed on his back, with his feet on the floor. Near his hand was a .25-caliber pistol. In his right temple, a bullet wound. He was 44.

His wife, Anna, was face-down, near the door in the same room. She wore a black housecoat. She had a bullet wound in the back of her head, exiting through the skull. She was also 44.

His daughter, Mary Alice, was found unconscious, breathing heavily on the other side of the bed, in her pajamas. She had a bullet wound in her right temple. She was taken to Walter Reed Hospital, without much of hope of survival. She died a week later, without reviving. She was 12.

What happened? According to Stoutenburgh’s former Justice Department colleagues, he had visited them the week before and told them that he’d be returning to the claims division soon. According to Stoutenburgh’s neighbors, he had developed a “‘phobia’ over atomic bomb secrets, which he believed were leaking out despite his repeated recommendations to the War and Navy Departments,” as the Washington Post put it at the time. “Atomic sescrets worried him,” they wrote under his photo — mangling the epitaph.

The War Department, for their part, told the press that “Stoutenburgh had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb itself,” and left it at that. Well, yes and no, as we’ve seen. He didn’t build the bomb, but he did help patent it — every part of it.

1946 - Washington Post - Stoutenburgh detail

The newspaper stories implied that Stoutenburgh succumbed to paranoia: he imagined secrets were getting out, and couldn’t take it anymore. The coroner ruled it “homicide-suicide.” The phenomena of male familial murder-suicide is not a new one. These things happen with disturbing frequency. Apparently Stoutenburgh had tried to commit suicide a month previous, and failed.

He was a troubled man in a troubling time. The spring of 1946 was the period of the first real atomic spy scare — the Gouzenko affair. In terms of actual data given away, it was a minor thing; it involved a Canadian spy ring, and General Groves had compartmentalized the Canadians out of pretty much everything he cared about.¹ It was nothing like a Klaus Fuchs situation.

But in the spring of 1946 it was a big deal, both because it was the first such spy scare, and because Groves leaked the news about the espionage to the press that February. Why? Because he wanted Congress to be scared of the Russians, so they would add scarier secrecy provisions to the draft version of the Atomic Energy Act they were considering. And it worked — the changes to the law made in the spring of 1946 are responsible for the problematic “Restricted Data” clause and all of its issues.

Given the context, it’s not surprising that Stoutenburgh’s death briefly made the front pages of several national newspapers. Each played up the “secrets” angle, though the stories themselves make it clear that they are about a man driven mad by fear of secrets getting out, not actual cases of secrets getting out. Therein is the question: Did secrets kill the Stoutenburgh family, or did “secrets” kill them? Was it the thing itself, or just a fear about the thing itself? Or neither?

It doesn’t strike me implausible as that someone who was on the periphery of real policy, but with an acquaintance with secrets, might, in the spring of 1946, get concerned with the loss of secrets, especially if one implies some sort of latent mental illness. But I’m an historian, not a psychologist, so I am not really treading into those waters. Still, I’ve tried to follow this up a bit, and the trail wasn’t very rich for the most part. Stoutenburgh once had an FBI file, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

Specifically, the FBI told me that:

Records which may be responsive to your Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request were destroyed on October 1, 2001. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it actually pertains to your subject.

Now this sounds Kafkaesque, if not a wee bit conspiratorial, but I’ve been assured this is pretty standard boilerplate for a pretty common issue. Somewhere in the FBI’s record database it basically says, “we had a file with this guy’s name on it, but we destroyed it.” Ergo, they don’t really know what was in it anymore. Not so helpful.²

The Washington, DC, Police Department destroyed the records awhile back because of age. The DC Coroner’s Office, likewise. The case had been closed, ruled murder-suicide, so there was no need to keep the files. Army Intelligence had nothing on Stoutenburgh, a FOIA to the National Archives turned up nothing.

But I did find a few little other tidbits in the archives. Because it wasn’t just present-day people who worried about conspiracies — there were Stoutenburgh conspiracy theories back in the day, they just didn’t end up in the newspapers.

The first little nibble comes from the papers of James Burnham. Burnham’s work is pretty well-known — in a nutshell, he was a former Marxist who became an anti-Communist neo-conservative political pundit during the Cold War. You know the type. He wrote a lot, and wrote for the National Review, among other publications. Apparently he also collected rumors about dead patent clerks.

On a memo from December 1951, now in his papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, Burnham wrote that he had been called by someone he listed only as “BL.” I’ve no clue who it is meant to correspond to, but presumably it is someone who worked with Burnham regularly. Here’s what Burnham wrote:

L stated that a fantastic and sensational story had been brought to him. He felt it essential to try to check any point we could, in order to see whether it has a presumption of truth. Involved is a man named L.t Col. STOUTENBURGH. It is stated that on 31 March 1946 STOUTENBURGH was found shot dead by a bullet in his home in Washington, D.C. His wife and daughter were also shot, presumably also dead. Apparently they were murdered, although the facts were never established. STOUTENBURGH is said to have had a secret job in connection with the atomic bomb, perhaps in something involving British-Canadian-United States liaison.

Apparently a certain E.M. Lee, living in Silver Spring, Maryland, worked with Stoutenburgh at some point. Burnham was told by “BL” that he should call Lee and tell him he was a friend of Bill Offenhauser, of Telenews in New York, and get more information. A few weeks later, Burnham called Edward M. Lee, whose number he got from a telephone directory. He spoke to Lee, who confirmed he was a friend of Offenhauser. Burnham wrote of it:

I then brought up the STOUTENBURGH case. For a minute or two, LEE shied away from the matter, and said nothing to indicate that he knew what I was talking about. Then, he stated that he had not been personally acquainted with STOUTENBURGH but had had certain relations with him. He said that STOUTENBURGH was working in the Patent Office of the ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION (he then corrected himself and said that at that time it was called the Manhattan Project). He (LEE) had been transferred to the Navy, and had certain “business” with STOUTENBURGH, which was transacted by telephone. He said that half a dozen or more times he had telephoned STOUTENBURGH at the latter’s office. He stated that he knew nothing further about him, and nothing about the deaths except of what he had read in the papers. (It was my impression that LEE probably knows a good deal more about STOUTENBURGH that he indicated in his telephone conversation, and that he has thought a good deal about the case.)

Burnham’s other research involved pulling up the various newspaper articles about the Stoutenburgh case. But there the trail ends. It doesn’t add up to a whole lot — even the initial lead was just a suspicion, not anything hard.

The other piece was a memo I found in the archives of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In late August 1953, a certain Calvin Bertolotte of New York City got in touch with a Congressman, desiring to talk with someone about “a theory had had which might explain the operations of the Soviet espionage in connection with the atomic program.” He was put in touch with the staff of the Joint Committee, who liked to investigate this sort of thing. Bertolotte was “an employee of the Telefact Foundation engaged in research in information control and world strategy.” He told the Committee staff that he had been a friend or colleague of Sidney Young White, a physicist in New York City.

According to Bertolotte, White had related to him “on several occasions” the story of Stoutenburgh’s death. As the staff noted in their later write-up of their interview, “Bertolotte implied that both he and White imputed espionage significance to the story.”

Basically, Bertolotte and White’s objections to the official story were as follows, with my thoughts in parentheses:

Stoutenburgh actually did important secret work at the patent office and “had access to vital information.” (True)
White claimed to have determined that Stoutenburgh only had a .45-calibre weapon, not the .25-calibre one that he was reported to have used. (How would White have known what guns Stoutenburgh could have owned?)
White knew Stoutenburgh was a poor shot, so how had he hit his wife and child when at least the former was fleeing? (I don’t think you have to be that good a shot at that close a range.)
White “determined” (doesn’t say how) that Stoutenburgh had mentioned “either to his brother or his brother-in-law” that papers had gone missing from his desk for short periods of time, and would then be returned. (Vaguely sourced.)

Bertolotte thought the FBI ought to get involved, but didn’t want to betray White’s trust, so he gave it to the Joint Committee staff instead. (Um.) The Joint Committee staff asked whether they could relay the information to the FBI for him; Bertolotte asked to check with White first, then later got in touch and said he preferred they not give it to the FBI. The Committee staff member writing this up said that “unless advised to the contrary,” he was going to send all of this to the FBI anyway “despite Bertolotte’s objection.” I have no record as to whether he did this or not.

Where does that leave us? At a minimum, I think, we can agree with the general notion that secrecy engenders this kind of speculation. Monsters manifest within a vacuum of information, and at its peripheries. If this didn’t have any connection to “secrets,” would it stand out above the many other similar tragedies that happen each year? Obviously I wouldn’t be sending out Freedom of Information Act requests left and right if he didn’t have an atomic connection, either.

On the other hand, the fact that someone who had been so close to various secrets died under mysterious circumstances, and seems to have left no trace of any kind of official investigation, is suspicious. If you even sneezed near Los Alamos during World War II, the Manhattan Project security people would have opened a file on you. Why wasn’t there more poking around? (As for me, I poke around in these things compulsively — it’s sort of my job. I am always happy to check into unusual or unlikely stories, though I always try to do so with a skeptical mindset.)

Maybe there was, and it turned up nothing interesting, hence the destruction of the records. But I’ve got to say, the FBI sure kept around records of a lot of less-interesting cases than this one. And we do know that secrets were leaking out of the Manhattan Project during this time, after all. Stoutenburgh might not have known anything “solid” about that, but the fact that there was quite a lot of Soviet spying going on does perhaps raise our estimations of his suspicions.

Stoutenburgh signature from the Manhattan Project files

On the other hand, the idea that, say, the KGB would have killed Stoutenburgh and his family just seems unlikely. Really not their style. In general, killing someone and their whole family is not the quietest way to make accusations of spying go away. Of course, it might still be murder, but if it was, I wouldn’t really suspect the Soviets. If this were a James Ellroy novel, there’d be a murderer, but it wouldn’t really be about the atomic secrets — that would just be the hook that brings the ambitious young detective onto the case in the first place, an opening into a far seedier story. But this isn’t a James Ellroy novel. It’s real life, where banal answers are usually the correct ones.

My eventual conclusion, is that this just another sad story in a world of sad stories. It’s a story, at most, that is about the conspiracy fears that cluster around “secrets” — and the conspiracy fears that follow those conspiracy fears around, decades into the future. In this case, one almost hopes there was something more sinister to it, because it would keep it from seeming so pointlessly tragic. But pointlessly tragic is probably just what it was.

Notes

Groves let a number of French and Canadian scientists work on a reactor and plutonium separation in Montreal, but it was a strictly one-way information flow. They did good work there, but they didn’t benefit from the support of the rest of the Allied effort. [↩]
Of course, the mere mention of the year 2001 is going to set off further conspiracy blinkers, but it’s hard to see any connection there. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Espionage, FBI, FOIA, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Leslie R. Groves, Manhattan Project, Speculation
Posted in Meditations, Redactions | 3 Comments »

Meditations

Who knew about radiation sickness, and when?

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Historians of science love “who knew what, and when?” question in science. We like to do so, in part, because the results are often so counterintuitive when compared with the “traditional” narratives: Mendel wasn’t really a Mendelian, Darwin’s novelty is often quite overstated, and even superficially straightforward questions like, “when was the electron discovered?” yield a considerable amount of debate about how one knows when the existence and identity of a fundamental particle is “discovered.”¹ They rarely have answers that come in the form of names and exact dates. In fact, they usually show you something deeper about the way knowledge is produced, circulated, and agreed-upon at any given time in history.

Of all the many questions and sub-questions about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the ones that occasionally comes up is, “How much was known about the radiation effects of the first atomic bombs before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Did Harry Truman know, for example, that the bombs would produce both prompt and residual radiation? Would it have changed his decision to use the bomb?

21-year-old soldier at Nagasaki, suffering from what was known as “Disease X” to the Japanese doctors before its identification as radiation poisoning. It took him a little under a month to die from the effects; click the image for the unpleasant details.

The reason it might matter is because arguably the radiation effects of the first atomic bombs are what distinguish them from “traditional” incendiary raids — i.e., the firebombing that had already been going on for quite some time before the Second World War went nuclear. (I personally don’t think they do, from an ethical standpoint, but I’ll be writing an entire post on this very soon, so let’s put that question to the side for now.)

Truman didn’t feel it was appropriate to use chemical or “poison” warfare — so perhaps, the argument goes, if he had thought about the atomic bombs not just as “big fire bombs” but instead as “big fire bombs with poison” he would have considered them an inappropriate weapon to actually use on cities inhabited primarily by non-combatants.

This is an interesting question, and one that would take a lot of careful work to answer. So I was really glad that Sean Malloy, an historian at UC Merced and the author of a great biography of Henry L. Stimson, decided to sit down and seriously hash it over. He wrote what I expect is going to be the definitive article on the subject, published this summer in Diplomatic History with the title: “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan.” For the very literal out there, Malloy isn’t himself saying that radiation sickness is a pleasant way to die; it’s from a quote by General Groves. (If you would like a copy of the article and don’t have access to the journal, I am sure that Sean would be happy to send you one if you sent him an e-mail.)

I have written a lengthy review of Sean’s article for the online-list H-Diplo. I wrote it a little while back — closer to when Sean’s article actually came out — but due to the way H-Diplo schedules things, it’s only just come out this week. You can read it online here, if you’re interested in getting my extended take on Malloy’s article.

What follows here is a summary of my main points from my review of Malloy, which summarizes his main points. So if you’re curious about anything said below, read my full review, and if you’re still curious, read Malloy’s article.

There were certainly physicists at Los Alamos who understood that the first atomic bombs would produce significant amounts of radiation, and were likely to cause both radiation sickness and nuclear fallout effects.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1946. Oppenheimer was curiously incurious about the effects of radiation on the Japanese. Photo via the DOE Digital Archive.

But J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn’t interested in something? Anyway, for whatever reason, he never really paid too much attention to the reports about radiation effects, and spoke almost exclusively of the bomb in terms of heat and blast effects.

Despite much lore to the contrary, the targeting height of the bomb was not chosen in order to minimize radiation effects. It was chosen to maximize blast and thermal effects. The argument that its height was chosen to minimize radiation effects is an after-the-fact argument, though it is not an entirely inaccurate side-effect.²

Because Oppenheimer didn’t know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn’t really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives. Malloy thinks — and I agree — that such is a good indication that he was pretty confused on the issue.

And yet, Groves and Oppenheimer did consider radiation in other contexts — such as the health of those involved with witnessing the Trinity test. But they never seemed to have talked about it in the context of the Japanese, the intended victims of the bomb. Why not? Malloy suggests that Groves was subjected to a “self-compartmentalization” — that a side-effect of his compartmentalized project was a compartmentalized self. Health safety and weapons effects were totally different departments as far as he was concerned; he never made the linkage. This is, of course, speculative, but I like it as an explanation, because it jibes with other commonly-observed side-effects of working in highly-compartmentalized environments.

Oppenheimer, Groves, and others take reporters to the Trinity test site in September 1945, as part of their publicity effort to show that the atomic bombs were not too toxic. Many of the visitors picked up Trinitite — radioactive glass — as souvenirs. Some of this was made into jewelry, prompting a later press release saying that radioactive glass shouldn’t be worn close to the body. Whoops.

If Groves didn’t know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s turf, didn’t know at all. If Stimson didn’t know, Truman didn’t know. Question answered, in a sense: some people knew, but they were very low on the hierarchy, and the Manhattan Project was highly hierarchical. The reasons it didn’t percolate up the chain aren’t because anyone was deliberately holding it down — it’s because knowing something and caring about it (that is, thinking it is important) are linked. (This is my formulation of the reason, anyway, and why I like to use know/care as a linked term here.)

They didn’t really care, they didn’t really know, and it never got passed up. Oppenheimer was a scientific filter to Groves, and Groves was a filter to the politicians — and a good deal of filtering had to take place for something done at Los Alamos to ever make it to Truman’s ear. (As an aside, Groves struggled with this even in explaining the basics of the project to Truman in terms the latter could understand and care about, much less technical details.)

Would Truman have stopped the bombing if he had known that 15%-20% of those affected by it would die of radiation sickness?

Would it have mattered? Malloy thinks it might very well have mattered for Truman — he was markedly averse to the idea of poison warfare. Personally I doubt it would have made a difference; you don’t call off a massacre because you think it might kill a few more people than you originally intended, and the scientists would have had no way to give a plausible number for the number affected. Later estimates put the number of acute dead from radiation exposure at about 15%-20% of the total casualties from the bombings — a not insignificant number (many thousands of people), but probably not enough to change the direction of the bomb program, and probably a number that would have been dismissed as too high if it had been presented as an estimate before actual use.

Lastly, what about the allegations of an “atomic cover up” that periodically go around, which say that Groves et al. tried to hide the fact of radiation illnesses? Malloy gets into this here fairly well, too. Not long after the bombing, reports started coming in that doctors in Japan were seeing the effects of radiation sickness amongst the (apparent) survivors of the attacks. Groves thought they were just propaganda, trying to make the American people feel sympathetic to the Japanese. He asked his medical experts about it, they told him it was unlikely, and so he enlisted Oppenheimer to help deny that this could have been the case.

A few things here warrant attention:

Oppenheimer was happy to help, even though really he was kind of out of his league. Such was the way of Oppenheimer, but I also suspect he genuinely thought the reports were propaganda, as well.
Prior to this instance, there actually had been fairly uninformed stories circulating about how Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be totally uninhabited for generations and things like that which legitimately were total nonsense. So Groves was already in “defensive mode” when it came to radiation effects, and already primed to see them as nonsense.
The Japanese did release significant propaganda about the bomb during this period. A lot of total nonsense, like the fact that they too had atomic bombs and were just saving them up for a rainy day and now were going to use them. (The Germans did stuff like this too, of course.) It’s easy to forget, in the absence of a sense of the day-to-day from that period, how hard it would have been to separate out fact from fiction. If you look through newspapers of the day though you will be amazed at how much weird news — stuff that was clearly propaganda and false — was coming in from abroad.

To his credit, even though he dismissed the Japanese doctors’ claims, Groves also sent his own teams to Japan as soon as he could to evaluate the results themselves. They found that indeed, radiation had been a significant factor in mortality at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Groves’ testimony to the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, late November 1945: “…they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

By November 1945, Groves had stopped denying that radiation sickness had occurred, even if he did, in his awful way, suggest that they were not all so bad (the aforementioned “very pleasant way to die”). But spinning, however misleading or offensive, is not the same thing as knowingly perpetuating a cover-up.

I find Malloy’s account very convincing, not just because it is well-documented and well-argued, but because it generally agrees with my reading of the primary sources. These guys were not really in the “cover-up” business. They certainly were in the “spin” business. They were willing to give in to their internal biases and believe what they wanted to believe in the absence of indisputable information. They weren’t shining heros, and they weren’t despicable villains. They muddled it out the way most people do when it came to anything other than the business of producing atomic bombs, which they turned out to be fairly good at — though even there, their superhuman prowess is usually exaggerated.

But what I really love about Malloy’s work, here, is that instead of saying, “they did know” or “they didn’t know,” he asks about how knowledge worked in the context of the Manhattan Project, which is a question of how knowledge is created, how it circulates within institutions, and how it is or isn’t acted upon. This is a very deep endeavor and one that takes you well beyond the standard ways of thinking not only about the bomb, but in thinking about any other comparable projects and institutions. This is how these sorts of questions should be worked on.

Notes

Does it matter, for example, that J.J. Thomson, the so-called discoverer of the electron, thought his results said something quite different than did his contemporaries? Does it matter that the modern understanding of what it means to be an electron is quite different from that of the late 19th century? Does it matter that a low-mass, negatively-charged particle called an “electron” had been proposed well before Thomson claimed the existence of his “corpuscle”? If this sort of question interests you — there must be one of you out there! — you might enjoy Helge Kragh’s Quantum Generations, which is full of interesting stuff like this. [↩]
The height of the detonation points did mean that the neutron effects of the bomb were relatively minimal, even if the gamma rays were not; the difference matters because neutrons, and not gamma rays, can induce radioactivity in other substances, and thus produce more contamination. The height also meant less material was sucked up into the fireball than otherwise would have been were it detonated lower. But the fact remains that the height wasn’t chosen to minimize radiation effects. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie R. Groves, Manhattan Project, Nagasaki, Radiation
Posted in Meditations | 10 Comments »

Restricted Data