Posts tagged "NUKEMAP" | Restricted Data

Posts Tagged ‘NUKEMAP’

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 | 9 Comments »

Meditations

On Meteors and Megatons

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

So by now, everybody has read about the meteor which broke up over the Chelyabinsk Oblast late last week. The reportage on it was pretty interesting in the beginning — a lot of between-the-lines skepticism was being put out there by American news outlets. I was a little wary myself, too, as a lot of the initial reports from Russia were pretty sketchy, buffeted primarily by Russian dashboard cameras, which, in our Photoshop and AfterEffects age, are probably not at the top of our list of “reliable sources.” For people who care about Cold War science and technology, of course, there’s the additional fact that ChelyabinskOblast is a major site for secret Russian military-industrial developments. It’d be like reports of suspicious explosions around the Nevada Test Site, or Los Alamos, or Pantex. Chelyabinsk Oblast is the home of Chelyabinsk-70, the Soviet Livermore, and just north of it is the city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), the site of a 1979 anthrax leak that the Soviets tried to cover up by claiming it was something more “natural” in origins. Add in the legacy of the Soviet response to Chernobyl, the relative rarity of this sort of meteor strike — once a century is the frequency that’s been cited — and the extreme rarity of something like this happening over inhabited land — most of the planet is devoid of human occupation — and some skepticism in the absence of solid evidence was, I think, not unwarranted. Eyebrows raised, including mine, but apparently it all checks out.

Some of the Russian nuclear weapons facilities near the meteor path. Via Hans M. Kristensen, FAS: “The odds of a meteor hitting one of these nuclear weapons production or storage site are probably infinitely small, but on a cosmic scale it got pretty close.”

How powerful was the explosion? NASA currently is saying it is the equivalent of a 500 kiloton blast, which is a lot. 500 kilotons is (as you can see) half a megaton, is about the upper-limit of a pure-fission nuclear weapon, and is, as journalists love to breathlessly relate, some 20-30 times the power of the bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the only result was a lot of injuries caused by windows blowing inward — something that occurs with a shock wave of one pound per square inch or above — is attributed to the fact that the meteor exploded many miles above the ground, away from the city.

Personally, I cast a dubious eyeball towards the comparisons of natural phenomena with nuclear weapon energy releases. It’s an incredibly common trope, though. Wikipedia’s coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake is actually quite reflective of how this gets talked about, even if it is somewhat dorkier in its citation of units than the average journalistic account:

The energy released on the Earth’s surface only (M_E, which is the seismic potential for damage) by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was estimated at 1.1×10¹⁷ joules, or 26 megatons of TNT. This energy is equivalent to over 1500 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, but less than that of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. However, the total work done M_W (and thus energy) by this quake was 4.0×10²² joules (4.0×10²⁹ ergs), the vast majority underground. This is over 360,000 times more than its M_E, equivalent to 9,600 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima) or about 370 years of energy use in the United States at 2005 levels of 1.08×10²⁰ J.

Lots of numbers thrown around, lots of energy involved, yes, but what does it mean? I have two major objections to this form of analysis, where nuclear weapons are used as some kind of barometer for general energy release. The first is about the character of energy release is important — because it affects how these things are felt at the human scale. The second is about whether these sorts of comparisons are actually clarifying to the general public.

On the character of nuclear and non-nuclear blasts

The key thing about nuclear weapons is that they discharge most of their energy as heat and blast. Most of the energy release occurs over a very small amount of space and time. You can essentially regard the physics of a nuke as being a the creation of a tiny point in space that suddenly is heated to tens of millions of degrees, and this results in all of the effects that we are pretty well familiar with. The results are extremely localized: even the massive Tsar Bomba had a fireball only five miles in diameter, which is huge by human standards but minute by geological or geographical standards. The vast majority of the energy is discharged within a few milliseconds, as well. It’s a bang that matters on a human level because a huge amount of energy is released very quickly in an area of space that corresponds fairly well to the sizes of human habitation centers. The fact that a huge amount of that explosive energy (around 50%) is translated specifically as a blast wave — the thing which destroys most of the houses and people and all that — is perhaps the most salient thing about nuclear explosions from a human standpoint.

This is what a 500 kiloton nuclear blast looks like. This is not quite the same thing as what you saw on those dashboard cameras, is it?

One can see the point in distinguishing about the amount of energy over time and space by considering the Sun. The amount of energy from the Sun that reaches the Earth’s surface every moment is tremendous — equivalent to billions of tons of TNT – but it is spread out over a huge area, so instead of totally obliterating us when we go outside, it pleasantly warms us and maybe, at its worst, gives us a painful, peeling burn after several hours of intense exposure. So that is a lot of energy released over a short unit of time, but it is diffused over a very large area. The converse situation can also be considered: a given city absorbs an immense about of energy from the Sun over the course of a year, but because it is spread out in time, it isn’t anything like a nuclear explosive’s yield.

What about meteors? Yes, there’s a lot of kinetic energy in those rocks falling from the sky. But they don’t translate most of that energy into shock and heat. Even the famed 1908 Tunguska event reached temperatures “only” in the tens of thousands of degrees, as opposed to the tens of millions. You can regard the kinetic energy of such a thing as 20 megatons of yield, but the actual blast effects were more than five times less than that because the energy didn’t transfer very efficiently. (Still quite a blast, though!) The Chelyabinsk meteor was much smaller than that and it exploded in the atmosphere — a reaction more like a chemical explosive than a nuclear one. So in some sense, comparing a meteor explosion to a nuke is better than comparing an earthquake or a tsunami to a nuke, but it’s still not very exact.¹

On the public understanding of nuclear explosions

My other issue, though, is about public understanding. The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded with an energy release of 500 kilotons. Is being told that going to mean anything to the average person, except to say, if it had hit the city, it would have been equivalent to a nuclear explosion? Does saying it is 20-30 times more powerful than Hiroshima mean anything to the average person, except the conjure up potentially incorrect misconceptions of what those effects would be for their cities? The truth is, as we’ve seen again and again, the average person has almost no intuitive point of reference for making sense of nuclear explosions. Heck, I barely have any point of reference and I’m constantly searching for them! The average person cannot distinguish between the results of a megaton-range explosion and a kiloton-range one unless you translate it into terms that are meaningful to them. That was the whole point of the NUKEMAP: to take these numbers and try to come up with geographical representations that make intuitive sense.

And so here’s the problem: since the physics aren’t the same, any intuitive generalization made from a nuclear analogy will be necessarily highly flawed. The effects of the Chelyabinsk meteor were not really equivalent to the 1952 Ivy King nuclear detonation, which was a nuclear explosion of 500 kilotons in yield. Even the Tunguska event was not really equivalent to a five megaton nuclear explosion in its phenomenological effects, even though it was a pretty big boom.

Still from a Sandia supercomputer simulation from 2007 of the 1908 Tunguska event, showing the blast wave formation as the meteor detonates above the ground. Intense! But not a nuke. Source.

“Hey,” you object, “we’re just trying to communicate to people it was a big explosion!” Yeah, I know, but it’s misleading. If you want to communicate the size of things, don’t talk about the energy release in terms of nukes — the effects aren’t the same. If you want to convey the effects… talk about the effects. A better way to talk about the Chelyabinsk event is to not talk about the energy output but instead to talk about the radius and nature of effects — exactly how many square miles of the city had their windows blown out? Even just saying that thousands were injured by broken glass does a lot more work to convey what this was — and how scary it was — than anything else. If you want to say, “if it had directly hit the city before blowing up” — a big counter-factual but whatever — “so-many square miles would have been destroyed,” that too would make a lot more sense.

Using nukes as a genericized way to talk about energy output is highly misleading both from the point of view of the expert, but even more so from the point of view of the layman. I really don’t see the advantage to it either way. I fear in talking about asteroids as nuke equivalents people may be trying to emphasize their threat — which is totally legitimate — but at the same time may end up inadvertently down-playing nukes. After all, if a 500 kiloton airburst only knocked in a few windows, what’s all the fuss? Yes, we can explain why they are different — but we wouldn’t have to do that if we just described the effects better in the first place, rather than taking a lazy recourse in how-many-joules-equals-how-many-megatons equations. Rather than using nuclear terminology, and then down-scaling to explain how the effects are actually not quite the same… just tell us the actual effects and forget the nukes! If one must do things in response to nukes, do it the other way around: find out the actual effects of the meteor (or whatever), then tell us what yield nuke gives you those effects. It’s less sensational, sure, but it’ll help people understand both meteors and nukes better.

Notes

For helping me think through the physical comparisons, and providing some interesting references, I was aided by e-mail conversations with my AIP colleagues Charles Day, Paul Guinnessy, and Ben Stein, as well as my old Harvard colleague Alex Boxer. Any interpretive errors are of course my own! [↩]

Tags: 2010s, Musings, NUKEMAP
Posted in Meditations | 36 Comments »

News and Notes | Visions

NUKEMAP at one year and 10 million blasts

Friday, February 8th, 2013

A year ago this week, I launched the NUKEMAP. It’s perhaps fitting that this week, NUKEMAP also (coincidentally) hit 10 million “detonations.” That corresponds with just over 2.25 million pageviews (1.96 million unique). Which is pretty crazy. I attribute a lot of the success I’ve had with this blog to the NUKEMAP, as a driver of traffic. A few percent of the visitors look at the blog; a few percent of them become regular readers. A few percent of two million is a lot of people.

The mapping of where people bombed doesn’t look significantly different than did the first million, so I won’t post another one of those images. But here’s some fun-with-data for you: below is a heatmap of all of the 10 million detonations. The “hotter” it is (e.g. red or orange), the more times a given place or region was nuked. I shaved off a few decimal places from the latitude and longitude coordinates so that repeated nukes in the same basic area were lumped together (and so you don’t have to worry if you nuked your neighbor’s house a million times), but it is still pretty granular.

If you click on the image, you’ll go to an interactive version.¹

For people who are into metrics, here are the daily, weekly, and monthly pageview graphs of the NUKEMAP from Google Analytics. After an initial big burst, it died down a bit (to 2,000 hits or so a day, mind you), punctuated by occasional new big bursts as it occasionally landed on the Reddit front page every once in awhile.

Hey, even Jon Stewart was into it:

John asks: “When did lower Manhattan become the standard unit of destruction measurement?” Answer: Certainly by the late 1940s, probably even earlier.

OK, so Jon Stewart posted something that was originally from ABC News, so technically ABC News was into it, but it’s still Jon Stewart! I’ll take what I can get in that department!

Awhile back I did a write-up of NUKEMAP usage patterns for WMD Junction, an online journal: So Long, Mom, I’m Off to Drop the Bomb: A Case Study in Public Usage of an Educational Tool. Check it out if you are curious about who-bombed-who.

People have also done some pretty cool things with it. The infographic shown by Jon Stewart derives from a setting that was sent around on Reddit and elsewhere showing the effects of a 6 kiloton bomb on lower Manhattan, with 6 kilotons being one of the yield estimates of the 2009 North Korean test. 6 kilotons doesn’t sound like a lot by modern standards, unless you happen to be right underneath it, and then it’s probably worth taking seriously.

An engineer in the U.K. (who has asked to be credited only as “RLBH”) recently made and sent me an incredibly elaborate map modeling ”Probable Nuclear Targets in the United Kingdom” as imagined by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Ministry of Defence in 1967:²

That’s pretty neat, and is actually very much related to the original project of which NUKEMAP was originally a spin-off (dubbed as TARGETMAP, which I’ve put indefinitely on hold for the moment for lack of time).

There’s only one lesson that I’ve been a little disturbed by. An awful lot of people are amazed at how small the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were compared to thermonuclear weapons. That’s true — but it’s because the megaton-range weapons were insane, not because the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were small. By human standards, 10-20 kilotons should still be horrifying. From a view of 100,000 feet, though, it’s a lot less impressive than the Tsar Bomba, even though the latter was a lot less of a realistic threat than weapons of “smaller” yields, and is certainly a lot less of a threat today. When you put “small” nukes next to monstrous nukes, it is easy to lose perspective. That’s not my goal — my goal is to help people get a sense of scale, something that I think is even more important in a post-Cold War age.

So I’m excited to announce that I’m deep in the coding of a successor to NUKEMAP. It isn’t quite ready for prime time, yet, but it’s well past the proof-of-concept stage. It works. I’m trying to incorporate the lessons I learned with the use and reception of the first NUKEMAP into the new one, and trying to provide a very different sort of user experience. The details are still hush-hush. I’ve told a handful of people about it in person, to gauge reactions, and have a few beta testers lined up, but I’m confident enough to say that this is something entirely new. The new NUKEMAP will do things that no other online nuclear effects simulator does. So keep an eye out for it. There is no estimated-time-of-arrival — it’ll be up when it’s good and ready — but it will probably be up by the end of spring 2013.

Notes

Note: the underlying dataset for the 10 Million browser is static. So it would not be worth your time trying to influence how it looks at this point by bombing all over the place. [↩]
RLBH sent me some details on how he made his map:

I’m sure you’re familiar with Professor Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst, 1945-2010 (London: Penguin, 2003), which contains (amongst other things) a list of ‘Probable Nuclear Targets in the United Kingdom’ drawn up by the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Ministry of Defence in 1967. This list suggests the use of some 377 nuclear devices against 100 targets in the United Kingdom, none of less than 500 kilotons yield and with a total yield between 272.5 and 362.5 megatons.

I know that a Swedish gent has used your NUKEMAP tool to generate his own targeting plan against Sweden, but I’ve not heard of it being used to illustrate a ‘real’ war plan before. For my own elucidation, I’ve modelled the JIC’s targeting plan for the UK in NUKEMAP, with the following caveats applying to my method.

- Where multiple devices are programmed for a single point target, I’ve only modelled the largest. Some such targets were overkilled to a remarkable extent, even allowing for delivery system unreliability – most command & control centres, for instance, were allocated two missiles warheads of 3 megatons each, and two 1 megaton gravity bombs.

- For the industrial area targets, I’ve selected DGZs on the basis of my own best judgment, generally seeking to maximise the industry receiving 20 psi of overpressure. Unsurprisingly, this results in significant overkill against the housing and population of the targeted cities. This also means that some surprisingly large cities are totally untouched by the initial strike, which would certainly be targeted in a pure countervalue ‘dehousing’ strike. I’ve similarly eyeballed the attack on London, assuming here that the eight one-megaton warheads would be dual-targeted on four DGZs.

- I’ve not made any allowance for devices initiating over other than their programmed DGZ. This means, in effect, that two or three devices are ‘wasted’ against some targets, which could in fact be more profitably used elsewhere. This is especially the case, of course, for the bomber-carried devices, as these can more readily be retargeted.

- Where the yield of devices is specified as a range, I’ve used the simple arithmetic mean of the maximum and minimum. This means there are a few unusual sized weapons used.

- I’ve treated all devices as airbursts, because of the limitations of NUKEMAP. This isn’t meant as a criticism, it’s far and away the best tool of its’ kind that I’ve seen, and there’s obviously a tradeoff between usability and flexibility. In any case, some 140 devices directed against 70 targets (bunkers, dockyards and airfields) ought to be ground bursts.

- I’ve also interpreted the central government target at Cheltenham to mean the BURLINGTON bunker at Corsham, rather than GCHQ as Hennesy does. Both would be viable targets, but GCHQ is out of keeping with the rest of the list, whereas BURLINGTON was thought highly likely to be compromised and it’s unlikely that RSGs would be hit and the Government bunker ignored. [↩]

Tags: NUKEMAP
Posted in News and Notes, Visions | 21 Comments »

Visions

In Search of a Sense of Scale

Friday, June 8th, 2012

The other day, I saw a rather medium-sized, plump, stand-alone cumulus cloud hovering over Washington, D.C., and somehow my brain made the connection between it and that photo of the stemless mushroom cloud from the DIXIE shot.

Since then I’ve been playing a little game every time I see clouds like that — imagining they were the remains of something horrible. It’s been an interesting exercise in imaginative empathy, a way of getting beyond the “flatness” of the photos of mushroom clouds and trying to imagine how large they would look in person, even for “small” bombs.

The late Herbert York (who I had the opportunity to interview in 2008), in his book Making Weapons, Talking Peace (1987), spoke about the way in which being present at nuclear tests actually could lead one to under-appreciate the power of the bomb:

It’s an impressive sight, all right, but the setting completely undercuts the true horror of the bomb. In Nevada, in the days when bombs were tested there in the atmosphere, the explosions commonly took place over a dry lake bed in the middle of a great circular valley. Nothing was destroyed, except the tower supporting the bomb; nothing even burned, except for an occasional desert scrub. No one was killed or even seriously endangered. The whole operation took place in such a way as to guarantee that nothing unpleasant would happen. Safety was the rule. It was all totally antiseptic.

It was the same in the Pacific. The explosions took place on tiny islets in the middle of a great ocean. Nothing but test equipment was destroyed, nothing burned, no one was killed. If the explosion made a crater, it filled with water and sand before anyone could get a look at it.

Far more impressive to me are the photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the day after. Even in reproductions of the kind presented in newspapers, the full horror of those events can easily be seen. And in the case of of the multimegaton tests of the 1950s, observing the explosions themselves did not impress me nearly as much as seeing a map of Washington with the bomb crater laid over it, the circles indicating the reach of total destruction enclosing the entire metropolis.¹

I think York has something of a profound point here about how we know the bomb. With the sole exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have been detonated under extremely controlled conditions. (Though not always as controlled as York makes out — there have been accidents, there have been exposures, there have even been acute fatalities, if you spread your net outside of the testing of the United States.) And controlled conditions are necessarily “antiseptic” compared to the reality of war. Such is especially the case since nuclear weapons stopped being tested in the atmosphere — underground test are far more “antiseptic,” (except when something goes wrong), and nothing is perhaps as antiseptic as a computer simulation.

Of all of the nuclear footage I’ve seen, my favorite is a silent, color reel that has been floating around the Internet for a long time now. I’m not sure of its original provenance (the folks floating it around label it as being from 1959, which is to some degree false or misleading, given that the US was in the middle of a test moratorium at the time! A reader suggests it is Desert Rock IV, from 1952, which I find entirely plausible), but, in any case, it has one shot in it that is just stunning:

It starts in a trench, with soldiers. The bomb goes off; the soldiers stand and turn to face it, their faces lit by the blast. The camera turns to the roiling mushroom cloud. A second later, the shock wave hits. The cloud rises out of the frame. Cut to more soldiers getting a mouthful of dust, cut finally to them getting out of the trenches. There’s then one great, long shot where the camera follows the soldiers walking, walking, and as it pans, the cloud then looms before them. The camera pans up and up to get the mushroom in the frame.

There’s something about this shot that restores the sense of scale to me — I suddenly get a sense for how big the cloud is, even though it must be many miles away. The tacking of the shot between the soldiers, who are at a recognizable, human scale, and the mushroom cloud, reveals the true enormity of the cloud in visual terms that I can intuitively digest.

I’m always in search of that sense of scale: ways of making the sublime horror of nuclear weapons actually accessible. It is easy to get inured to your subject matter; it is easy to get “academic” about it and lose sense of its intuitive, visceral reality. (Obviously to do so is partially a defense reflex.) This was part of my motivation with the NUKEMAP, but it’s part of a broader goal as well, and is one of the reasons I am drawn to any little tidbit which gives a taste of it. There’s an advantage to being able to manipulate one’s distance from the research — but the question of distance has to go both ways, it isn’t just about making things antiseptic.

Notes

Herbert York, Making weapons, talking peace: a physicist’s odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 56-57. [↩]

Tags: Musings, Nuclear testing, NUKEMAP
Posted in Visions | 15 Comments »

News and Notes | Visions

NUKEMAP at One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Million “Detonations”

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

I woke up this morning to find that NUKEMAP had hit well over one million ”detonations.”

Remember when I was very impressed that I had 1,500 detonations? Yeesh.

These have been spread over about 190,000 unique visitors. The average of ~5 “detonations” per visitor has held pretty solidly over the last week.

Here are some visualizations I threw together showing where those million-and-change detonations fell. Each of the dots has an opacity of only 25%, so when they look bright red, that means they’re being stacked on top of each other. I’ve also thrown out any perfectly redundant data, so nuking the exact same spot repeatedly doesn’t change how it is rendered.

Click the image to zoom in. For details of various regions, click here: the USA, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, South America and Africa, and Oceania.

I will be soon writing up a somewhat formal analysis of this data, and other feedback I’ve gotten as to how NUKEMAP was used, talked about, spread around, and so on. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Until then, Tom Lehrer will serve as analysis-by-proxy:

After the jump is a brief NUKEMAP FAQ of sorts, based on various blog comments, forum posts, news stories, and so on that I’ve seen on this.

Update: It’s only 2/26 (three days after I wrote the above) and we’re already at the second million. If I had a nickel for every Tsar Bomba dropped… well, I’d have about $25,000. Update: NUKEMAP hit three million around 3/6. Update: NUKEMAP hit four million sometime around 4/12. Update: NUKEMAP hit five million sometime around 7/12. Update: NUKEMAP hit six million detonations on 8/27 (another round on Reddit). Update: NUKEMAP hit seven million detonations on 10/22 (Reddit, again). Update: NUKEMAP hit eight million around 10/29 (tail end of that Reddit traffic). Update: Nine million around 12/22/12 (Reddit again).

I’ve written up an analysis of 4.3 million “detonations” and their locations for the online journal WMD Junction. Check it out.

Read the full post »

Tags: NUKEMAP
Posted in News and Notes, Visions | 31 Comments »

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