Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Discovering Something Not Discovered--or, How to Best Figure Out What You've Got Left After Being Nuked

ITEM:  The Bomb Damage Problem, AFAPA-4-4, published in 1954 by the Directorate of Management Analysis (DCS/Comptroller at the  Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force).  11x8 inches.  GVC binding. 22pp.  Very good condition. RARE.  No copies located in WorldCat.  $175.

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1300

The spoiler answer to this:  make sure to account for the nukes dropped on you  when figuring out what you've got left to work with.

This seems a tautologically  tongue-twisting, not-quite-right title for this post, and indeed it might be.  But that's the way the pamphlet I'm reporting on read, a sometimes resilient-to- inspection rubberie beastie whose basis for being written was to report on an great oversight that doesn't really want to be recognized, even if it is the title of the work.

The Bomb Damage Problem, AFAPA-4-4, published in 1954 by the Directorate of Management Analysis (DCS/Comptroller at the  Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force) is a pamphlet of discovery–or rather, the discovery of the lack of discovery.

The work is an introduction to some aspects of  nuclear exchange post-attack predictive capacity–particularly with the ability of American industry “to support a war plan”. 

The anonymous pamphlet gets straight away to the discovery part–that previous predictions of post-attack capacity were “probably completely unrealistic” because “[they] did not take account of the likely bomb damage to the U.S. production facilities”. 

I would think that even at this relatively early point of planning for possible Soviet nuclear attack that war game scenarios would have taken bomb damage to industry a”and accompanying manpower losses” into account of how the war machine would react after the bombs began to explode.  Though it seems not. I’ve looked to see how I could be misreading this thing because it seems like too monumental an oversight to make. But I can’t find where I’m making my interpretative mistake. 

Ultimately the authors focuses on saving the corpus of the overall works, saying that this oversight does not damage the “important thinking” that had gone on it spite of this error.

The word “error: is not used in the text of course.  This is how it is described: “In connection with this critical new obstacle to intelligent military planning, it is essential that speculation be minimized.” The error is actually redefined as a “critical new obstacle” the effect of which heightens “speculation”.   Which is all true.

I suppose what is really going on his the formation of some bedrock stuff formulating information gathering for creating a computer program for deeper analytical study of the effects of nuke warfare on post-attack industry.  1954 is about right for the time for this to happen, and the DMA–as the home for the creation of linear programming among countless other things–would’ve been the place for this work to happen. 

But I keep coming back to what seem to be enormous understatements–even giving plenty of allowance for the time–that keep cropping up in the pamphlet.  Perhaps it is just stating the obvious for te first time that makes all of these seem so potentially underwhelming, like this nugget:   “numerous measures of the importance of each target may eventually be needed....” (Page 7). 

There’s plenty of more detail though that occurs in the pamphlet, as in figuring out damage to structures by the yield of the explosion and distance from the target and the composition of the target’s structure, and so on.

And then we get back to the obvious: “the principal effect of a fire storm following an attack would be to enlarge the area of destruction and to alter the shape of the various damage zones, changing them from concentric rings to irregular patterns. “.  As I said, maybe it is just a case of a “Call me Ishmael”, or stating that lines and points in space exist for the purpose of geometry.  Still, it rubs me the wrong way, all over.

And just to make this point perfectly clear:  the "bomb damage" problem is to take into account bomb damage to U.S. war-making, bomb-producing capacity, in a sort of BIBO (bomb in, bomb out)  version of a SISO (shit in, shit out).

Less-than-Optimum Oblivion: Measuring the Bad Side of Advanced Nuclear Exchange, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books   [Another in a long series of post on atomic and nuclear weapons.]

ITEM: The Concentration of Essential Personnel in American Cities. Margaret Bright Rowan.  The RAND Corporation, May 1956.  72pp.  11x8 inches.  RARE. No copies located in WorldCat/OCLC $350.00

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established or labeled so; perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be officially, recognizably, the case.  And perhaps the greater the obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so.  Perhaps nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving” that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night, just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956, the great issue seems to be laid to rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people will be killed.  And if those people in the cities are there because of professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people will be killed than not.  

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions.  And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear “exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed, thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war. 

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse world.  Of course these people would be killed because it was their industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the components necessary to build, say, a B-52.  That part of the equation is not addressed here, though.  Nor is there any sort of recommendation presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated, saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what?  There were other evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning, sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew--one of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in print.  And so it did.

Reporting the Hiroshima Bomb the Day After, 7 August 1945. AND The First Map of NYC A-Bombed

ITEM:  7 August 1945 issue of the newspaper PM. 12pp, 15x12 inches.  Fair condition, numerous tears, a problematic copy of a scarce publication. $150

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 1257 (continuing post 669)

[In which me meet exceptional coverage of a mammoth day-old event and what must be the first map of NYC under atomic attack.]

Atomic and Nuclear Weapons Series

The news coverage of the 6 August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima was covered in spectacular (all things and time considered) detail in the 7 August issue of the daily newspaper, PM.  The entire issue of 12 pages (with no advertisement) was dedicated to the event—I have no idea, really, how they were able to put together this amount of good tough data so very quickly, nimbly and intelligently, as the bomb was detonated at Hiroshima only the day before.

It is odd how well the case is covered, and it is positively issued on the day after --it isn't the case that it was issued for the week of 7 August and released on 13 August, which I thought was a possibility of explaining the deep coverage.  But there's no mention of Nagasaki (which would come in two days), so I am certain that the coverage was all accomplished within 24 hours of the use of the weapon.  The newspaper distinguishes itself by not screaming something about the “Jap city” being wiped out (as so many other newspapers did), with its front page summarizing beyond the bomb.  (“It Will End all War—Or all Men” and “It Will Revolutionize Human Life” as sub-heads; the first being accurate, while the second being nearly so.) 

The editorial, “Thank God its OUR Bomb”, by Irving Brant, is a lovely piece of thoughtful interpretation in the opening moments of the nuclear age. He writes: “America must join and lead in a worldwide renunciation of this worldwide renunciation and prevention of war”,and “What will happen to industry, to society, when the power of all the coal mined in a year is compressed into an exploding fistful of atoms?” And further:“There is no escape.  The split atom may shatter humanity, but not before then will it retreat into the physical void from which it came.  The dust of creation is in our hands.  We must master it.” Not bad stuff for having a few hours or so to think this  through. 

 

The other articles included “Bombs and Sabotage Stopped Nazi Experiment with Heavy Water”, “New Atomic Era Could Revolutionize Mankind’s Whole Manner of Life/Power Harnessed for Destruction Has Limitless Constructive Possibilities”, big two-page story “Stimson Reveals How Work on Bomb Was Organized”, “Bomb’s Death Range Believed to be 4 Miles”, “Four Scientists who Will Plan Postwar Uses of Atomic Energy”, “Harnessing of Atomic Power research Strengthens US Research”, “If a Piece of the Sun Were Placed on Earth”, “End Not Yet Truman Tells the Japanese”, and another 12 articles.

 

There’s another baffling article “Steel Tower Vaporized in First Test”, discussing the shot at Alamagordo—it must have been the case that there was an enormous amount of material divulged by the government in the hours after the explosion at Hiroshima .  The work at Columbia is also chronicled, as is the personal life of the man in control, General Leslie Grove (and how completely in the dark his wife was, and so on). 

One of the most interesting objects to me though is the small graphic on page 7 which shows what effect the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have if dropped on New York City—it was no doubt gigantically sobering to anyone who looked at it, and brought the power of the bomb and its destruction to a common, understandable point.  I'm not an historian of the first newspaper coverage of the bomb, but it strikes me that this may well be the first graphic to depict the effects of an atomic bomb exploded over NYC.

 

 

In any event, the overall coverage of the event was stunning given the short amount of time to do the research, writing, and publication.  Truly a great effort. 

RAND Report on Post-ICBM Weaponry: the “Non-Violent” War, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  

 ITEM:  Project Rand, Next Generation Weapon After the IBM.  RAND Copr, 1957. 11x8 inches, 12pp.  Mimeo or offset.  RARE.  $150

The RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company.  After 1948 RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the  U.S. military. (Maybe.)  It still did enormous amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have been their chief  theoreticians during this period.  It was also the time that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road Robert McNamara.  And of course much else. 

This publication is an internal RAND document, not meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957.  I own a number of these reports, and I must say that this one is odd—it is rather flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly (dare I say it?) funny.  It is also short (four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately.  The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “.  The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been called the cold war.”

Controlling the Vocabulary of Mass Destruction, 1966

ITEM:Pendleton, WIlliam H.  A Study of the Demography of Nuclear War.  Human Sciences Research Inc., 1966.  11x8 inches, 103pp, gvc/plastic comb binding.  Very good copy.  Rare.  $200

[Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series.]

 

I think no plumb line was ever so worked with pulleys and wheels, strings and catclaws and other Rube Goldberg devices as were the demographic studies of nuclear warfare.  It is as though their compass rose had no compass, with everything centered on the center, no way out, no way in. just there.  A faceless clock face describing “G-2 o’clock” whenever it pleased.  These studies seem to me the nuclear warfare equivalent of the Bellman’s map (described earlier in this blog as the most perfect map ever constructed): a pretty polygon describing a totally blank surface.

 

Virtuosic Apocalypticism: Maps and Charts of Nuclear Exchange, 1964

ITEM: 

NATO COnference on Damage Assessment, Summary Report, May 5-6, 1964. Printed at the NATO Headqaurters, Paris, 1964/  11x8 inches, 127pp, gvc-bound.  Very good condition. RARE.  $250

“…our choice of path may be delayed too long… “  Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XII, line XIII, 2^nd level of Hell (envy).

[This item is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

The NATO Conference on Damage Assessment Summary Report (May 5-6, 1964) was not one written for its outcome, necessarily, but the means of getting there. The outcomes were highly differentiated levels of sameness, a strategic tour of Dante’s creation cataloging the layers of deep destruction like those of his funneling pit.

Professionally  the paper dealt with several different ways of computing nuclear exchange scenarios (given names of understated inelegance like Jumbo, Brisk, Frisky, Dart and Dusk) with lots of smokily mirrored hocus pocus, the necessary ingredient of the philosophical technology of Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD.  Somehow it all worked out without any exchange ever happening. (The principal contributor here was James Coker, chief of the National resource Evaluation Center, Office of Emergency Planning, Executive off of the President, who I wrote earlier about here.)

bout here.) “Which utterly with sadness had confused me,  New torments I behold, and new tormented Around me, whichsoever way I move,  And whichsoever way I turn, and gaze.”  Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto VI, third circle, gluttony.

The first image shows the effects of a 20 megaton nuclear blast detonated in in a city, presenting an incredible picture of absolute destruction, reaching out from ground zero for more than 11 miles.    

This doesn't begin to measure the overall damage inflicted by radiation, which is deeply, extraordinarily, severe.  This again is the effect of one weapon, the 100%  fatality rate eventually reaching out 12 miles; 90% reaching over 40 miles.  General casualties extend to 80% up to 70 miles from ground zero. 

The emergency planning end of the paper comes in at about this point.The fallout map of the U.S. shows a possible situation of an unspecified (though wide-ranging) attack (on a "spring day") and its effects on the population as it is housed in various shelters and bunkers, suggesting the amount of time needed to "survive" the attack by staying inside the fail safe habitation.

The following chart, "Lifesaving Potential of Improved Strategic Defense" (in millions of people) shows the effect of the installation of the shelters and bunkers.  In this scenario, in  a massive strike, the fatality rate in the U.S. of an unprotected population was 65%, or 144 million.  On the other end of the extreme was "ballistic missile defense plus blast shelters plus fallout shelters", or a massively- protected population of fictional expanse shows that in spite of all precautions 45.2 million people would die (as "unavoidable fatalities"). 

 

“These have no longer any hope of death;  And this blind life of theirs is so debased,    They envious are of every other fate.” Canto III, Vestibule of Hell, the Opportunists.
This document is nothing if not a death sentence had the massive strike ever been launched.  In the dozens of such reports that I've seen, there hasn't been one with the Really Big One with thousands of euphemistically-named "exchanges", which I assume would make all  of these others pale by comparison.