Ptak Science Books

Questionable Quidity: the Preservation of Decay--Atomic Bomb Suits

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1486

Part of this blog's long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

 Is there anything more revolting than this solitary, encapsulated,  iron maidenesque survival sarcophagus and its promised hope of survivability? 

Perhaps not.  This patent application for an individual survival suit from 1958 gives us something to think about, perhaps gives us the cause to imagine what the world would look like from the inside of that portable evacuation chamber (that had its own attache case for storage).

 

The bomb(s) would go off, and there you would be, standing with your back against the wall, or laying in the gutter pressed against the curb, just another piece of the dead city, another piece of metal waiting to decay.  I'm not sure what is going on in this scene, which while being crude is still steeped in a high-creep factor.  I get the impression of slow time in these images, as though the atom-bomb-suited people have been there for a long time, though I suspect that we are seeing an urban area just after a blast.  It is a wincingly bad scene. 

 

(Why is it that when seeing Civil Defense films and etc from this period we see people ducking-and-covering from one bomb?  Since the great majority of Americans lived in one of the 75 "essential delivery acquisitions" areas (I forget now the source for this phrase) it was exceptionally unlikely that people would be dealing with a single acquisitions implement, since the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons would've been at probably half-par with the U.S., which at this point (1958 or so) would be around 18,000.)

Here's another example of some unusual thinking on surviving nuclear holocaust, 1958, only these--while solitary--are not terribly mobile, even if they did come with wheels. (Didn't it bother anyone that something that was supposed to prevent you from flying glass and bricks and the terrestrial ring of fire could be moved around on such tiny wheels?) They look more like waste receptacles.  Maybe that's what they would wind up being, if they were ever used for their intended purpose. 

And another atomic bomb "garment-like" thing--this looks like it might actually be useful on airplanes, because most people who die in crashes do so from smoke inhalation...but providing one of these per person would be a bad flying vibe, just like seat belts (so ferociously resisted by Mr. Iacocca) were seen by the car industry as an unnecessary reminder of how dangerous cars were/are).

Anyway, the only way these things might be useful in times of such an emergency as atomic holocaust would be as a burial shroud.  And since a bunch of people would (presumably) already be wearing them at the time of attack, the job of burying them would be that much less work, since they were already shrouded.  Of course, that's assuming (a) that people would or could be buried, and (b) that there was anyone left to do the burying. 

 

 

Louis Turner's Review of Published Work on Nuclear Fission, 1934-1940.

With a List of Turner's References (Below)

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

I've found this article¹ by physicist Louis A. Turner to be very helpful over the years.  He was an I-was-there guy (and actually an I-am-here guy) who wrote a stuccato article on the history of nuclear fission which was top heavy in references, and did so in 1940, just before the clamp came down on publication on the topic.  Certainly there are other more modern efforts in this area that are far more detailed, but few have managed to do so good a job in as limited space as Turner, which the fabulous John A. Wheeler recognized as a "great and timely" review².

Notes:

1. Louis Turner. "Nuclear Fission."  Lancaster:  American Physical Society,  1940. An article in the  Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 12/1, January 1940, pp 1-30  of an issue of 85pp   Original orange wrappers.  Fine condition.  Also contains articles by Seaborg and Zwicky.   

2.  J.A. Wheeler, "Fission in 1939, the Puzzle and the Promise" Annual Reviews, 1989. 

The original article can be purchased through our blog bookstore, here.

His 133 references can be read as a succession of one-line histories of the subject (barring the permissions to reproduce the entire article):

1. E. Fermi, Nature 133, 898 1934.
2. E. Amaldi, O. D'Agostino, F. Rassetti and E. Segrè, Proc. Roy. Soc. A146, 483 1934.
3. I. Noddack, Zeits. f. angew. Chimie. 37, 653 1934.
4. O. D'Agostino and E. Segrè, Gaz. Chim. Ital. 65, 1088 1935.
5. I. Curie, H. von Halban and P. Preiswerk, J. de phys. [7] 6, 361 1935; C.R. 200, 1841 1935; 200, 2079 1935.

Monumentally Bad Writing: Recovery from Thermonuclear War, Loan Forgiveness, and Taxes, 1966

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1430

In the entirety of the text of Social and Behavioral Factors in the Implementation of Local Survival and Recovery Activities (written by William Chenault, Richard Engler and Peter G. Nordhie in August 1967¹) there is little evidence that its authors fought to rid themselves of their Thesaurus of Obfuscation.  A dissected version of their effort would've made for good, clean fun, adding their bits to a Menckenian database of extraordinarily-written governmentese, but since all of this involved surviving thermonuclear war, the "fun" part is obliterated.  What, exactly, was it that the authors were trying to accomplish?  Perhaps in all of it they weren't constructing anything devious at all--perhaps their incredible assault on meaning was simply written in a language understood by their audience.  That, or they really didn't intend to have heard what they were trying to say,, if there was anything that was being said at all. (This report is available from our blog bookstore.)

The baseline to this pamphlet is this:  that in a post-thermonuclear war United States there will be survivors; the survivors will have "hardships", but the hardships will be overcome; the key issue is to get survivors to work together to put the country back on its feet militarily and economically;  survivors will need "incentives" to work together; the strong will survive, and others will have to be thrown under the bus.  There will be worries about compensation for destroyed property, shipping schedules, trust in money, and a certain amount of debt forgiveness.  There will be tax--sales tax.

There is no mention of the amount of death or the continuation of the dying in the year or two post-attack, but there is a graph, and the graphs not pretty.  It doesn't get very much mention. 

“...communities of [nuclear] disaster struck individuals need to define their needs and activities in the immediate context of the community”. pg. 5.

 “The tendency of nuclear disaster is to isolate communities..” pg 6

I've written often on this blog¹ about spectacularly bad thinking in planning for post-Apocalypse thermonuclear war America, mostly on government/agency reports that write about the impossible being done by survivors in impossible ways, painting the specter of impossibility and liquid death in turgid, unprovable prose.

This study reports of the ways in which American society can survive and rebuild following a devastating nuclear/thermonuclear war. The authors list five consequences of “severe attack”:

#1. Tremendous destruction of property...

#2. Disruption of transportation and shortage of fuel for motive power together with an associated disruption of regional specialization and significant breaks in geographical continuity.

#3. Drastic reorientation of effective economic demand”

#4 . General disruptions of normal interindustry flows

#5. Shortages of technical and professional manpower in some fields.

I particularly like #3. Also the use of words like “shortages” and “disruption”.  And why they stopped there I really don't know. 

Much of the report is an examination of how to get the surviving elements of society back on its feet via carrot-and-stick methods, coaxing people into working together, with the eventual goal of restructuring the country, building America back again, observing capitalism, the tax codes, exchanging labor exchange units for goods and services.

“Personal and group motivations would continue to be related to economic organization and production as they are in the preattack society” (pg 1)

“It follows that the nature and direction of many recovery activities will be determined by national, not local, requirements” (pg 3)

“Individuals must be motivated to implement policies and perform activities dictated by national economic interests”. (pg 4)

It is assumed that the character of the post-attack country would be pretty much the same as it was before thermonuclear war, and that we all want to return there. The report states that one of the most important elements of that society is the military and its capacity to protect people and industry. Therefore the survivors of nuclear war must be induced to work on a national scale to maintain the military and thus the stability of whatever was left of society, in spite of the fact that “in the heaviest attack, the loss of familiar landmarks, relationships and dependencies would be unsettling to survivors”.  (I'm not sure what “dependencies” relates to, whether they are child or the need for pharmaceuticals or the need to watch the news on television. This is unclear.)

Generally, there are a host of activities suggested to compel compliance, depending on where a community is in a 9-part destruction grid. There are incentives like food and water, medical treatment, and of course loan forgiveness. These inducements must be considered because enforcing compliance militarily is not an option, as the report states:

“It is doubtful whether a very widespread employment of a force to secure participation in recovery activities is feasible” (pg 7)

Meaning I guess that the U.S. Armed Forces will no the enforcing mandatory compliance schedules for recovery—or at least they weren't writing about it “preattack”.

But the authors clearly assume that there will be something approximately preattack life in the post-attack world. Amidst the horror and chaos, we read that

“Businessmen, in particular, but others as well, would experience disturbing and subtle changes in familiar institutions and in such bases of mutual trust as methods of establishing or verifying credit...or estimating delivery dates”--pg 11.

“Disturbing and subtle” changes to delivery, indeed.

We further read of “widespread readjustments of status, status symbols, and values” (page 11) which no doubt would come if all of your possessions were burned up, or lost or destroyed in some way, along with the owner. It is definitely difficult to maintain status relationships in the evidence of no status and no relationships. Of course this whole deal is complicated by the issue that status symbols are also relationships and associations, much of which could also be gone in the same fire cloud.

If your valuables and house and such weren't destroyed, then you were expected to go out and work for the community, and not spend your time inside your house protecting it from people who didn't have anything.  This issue is sort of addressed here:

"Measures for the control of displaced persons, obviating the necessity of individuals devoting their time to the protection of their homes, represent one form of indirect influence on the motivation of potential workers to abandon maintenance activities." (pg 50).

Which means, I think, that there will be some sort of control or protection so that people don't need to spend their time securing their possessions. 

But the thing that will make people work for the greater good, the compliance with the orders of rebuilding the country, will be "economic incentives...or a penalty for nonparticipation)".  Payment would be made with money or food.  The next incentive:  housing, or "more desirable dwelling places for those participating in recovery activities".    It remained to be seen though in this report what it was specifically that represented "recovery activities" or how the compensation per work bit was handed out. 

One way to raise the necessary capital to fund this post-attack world was through taxes, "a structure of indirect taxes could be developed, with higher rates applied to non-essential goods".  (pg 53).    On the other hand, just a few paragraphs later, the authors discuss getting rid of an income tax in favor of direct taxes, which means that taxes survive  the atomic nightmare. 

This continues on and on, a cascade of some wincing ideas tumbling over themselves, settling into a confusing mist of wording and logic that is difficult to translate.  Perhaps that was the inention.  Perhaps not.  There's not much left in the bottom of a smoking, radioactive hole, except for smoke and radiation.

Lastly, I wonder why “post-attack” is hyphenated in these reports and “preattack” isn't?

Notes

1. See for example Bad Grandeur, Predicting Post-Nuke USA (1966) and the Loss of 76% of all Authors

The Nonsense of Strategically Meaningful Phrases, Finding Pillows int eh Post-Nuclear Attack World, 1968

Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Department, the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awkwardness of Nuclear Holocaust, and others.)

Dentists and Mushroom Clouds--the Nuclear Mundane in Planning for the Thermonuclear Post-Apocalypse

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1428    Part of a long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons History

How can a person--how can I--write about Nuclear Holocaust as being mundane? When it comes to reading how some people mundanely responded to planning for surviving it.

It is a very deep Disturbia into which people fall when writing about the millions of details in accounting for the unaccountable, writing about the medical/physical/psychical consequences of surviving a bomb when dozens might well be detonated at the same time, the millions of details overtaken by billions of other details not mentioned and perhaps not imagined. 

I've collected some wide non sequiturs dealing with the matters of the nuclear apocalypse from a publication called Military Medicine in an article entitled "Mass Casualties, Principles Involved in Management",  which were papers delivered at the 62nd annual convention of the Association of Military Surgeons, 1956.  Sometimes the chapter heading says it all, giving wide pause; and sometimes you have to wade in a little, but you don't need to go very far, or very deep.  Overall the issue of the absolutely overwhelming devastation and the impossibility of dealing with the human consequences of nuclear war do absolutely get written about, but it occurs somewhere inside each contribution, which is front-loaded with pop-iconic understatement and then followed up with vast simplification. 

Then of course there is the official-speak in quietly stating screamingly bad things: "a wide disparity will in all probability exist between patient load and medical resources".  There's so much like that in this publication that it is hard to keep up, like differentiating sands on a beach. 

[I resisted including the section on the use of dentists in the post apocalypse--it was too painful, and I ran out of steam.]

 

 

Miss Atomic Bomb: the A-Bomb in Popular Culture--Comics, Cakes and the Will of God

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1425 

 

I've written dozens of posts on this blog about atomic bomb history and where the bomb has shown up in popular culture.  This installment is on the bomb in very popular culture

Miss Atomic Bomb is an icon of some sort for the relationship of the bomb with society, or, perhaps the bomb and Vegas, which is where this picture was taken. I guess there are reasons to put pretty women in front of computers (in the 1950's/60's), cigarettes and automobiles--why not with The Bomb?

The atomic cake (with matching headware):

The caption to this story from Life magazine (1946) reads: "U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy, his wife, and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry cut a cake made in the shape of a mushroom cloud at a reception for Operation Crossroads, November 6, 1946."  Actually Blandy was an early (August 1945 or thereabouts) forward thinker about how to deal with the U.S. owning the bomb and  international control.  I have little doubt that he probably thought that the cake was a bad idea, but, well, he did what he needed to do.

There were all sorts of comic book adventures dealing withe the atomic bomb, right from the very beginnig (as it seems the earliest of them appears a month after the Hiroshima bombing).  These are just a few examples with the a-bomb on the comic's cover(s):

 

Bizarro--I don't know the story of this image in Picture Parade, only having the cover graphic--perhaps that's enough, perhaps we don't need anything more, perhaps the backstory would spoil a perfectly bizarre image with something perfectly benign.  Or perhaps not. 

Bizarre but for different reasons--a pocket-sized ball bearing patience game. Tokyo is included as a target for this game but in actuality was not considered atomic-bomb-worthy, mainly because it was decimated,  blanketed with a firebombing  that destroyed a host of the city just weeks before the first blast. (On March 9-10, 1945, 339 B-29’s dropped 2000 tons (4 million pounds, about 496,000 bombs) of the incendiary M-69 on Tokyo.  Two initial passes were made on the city, marking a large, burning “X” in the city.  Each plane had the capacity to cover a drop area of 350 feet by 2000 feet, which means a much greater area was affected. The citizens of Tokyo met their ends with buckets of water and brooms in defense. Hours later fifteen square miles of the city were destroyed.  In the months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 66 cities were bombed with M-69, killing about a million people, and wounding more.)  Fresh cities were needed for the atomic weapons so that there effectiveness could be judged against a palette of a normal. intact city, and not one that had been previously attacked. 

  And still more bizarre, when you combine all of the aspects of the race to the bomb with the race to god and the people who would believe such a thing.  This advertisement belonged to a mail order religico empire builder, Frank B. Robinson, (1886-1948), who claimed himself to be a prophet of god, had conversations with the Creator, and in general used whatever was of interest in the newspapers to drive interest in his ministry by mail.  It looked like his creation--Psychiana--wasn't much more than a feel-good, self affirming, positive-thinking enterprise driven by a man with a personality big enough to be on speaking terms with the god, who in the ad below somehow was selling "the atomic power of the spirit of god in us"  because we are composed of atoms.

And of course on the other end of this:

This is an example of a host of end-of-the-world, post apocalypse movies (and books, and short stories, and so on) made to scare and entertain.  Judging from the trailer the more-modern television series Jericho owes a lot to Ray Milland. 

Mel Morris  published God's Atomic Bomb  in 1945, which means he must've worked a little feverishly to pump up his bible prophesy and history to include the new atomic weapon to replace whatever else he had been using as a prophecy for end of times.  (As it turns out, "God's Atomic Bomb" was more tempest and disaster in the bible, and not (whew!) the bomb itself.  Though as we've learned from scientologists and the sort-of creative mind of Ron Hubbard, a civilization came to the earth thousands of years ago and pummeled it with "atomic bombs" and other nastiness, polluting humans for milennia to come.  But that's another story--suffice to say that Morris found many dozens of examples of "God's Atomic Bomb" being used in the deep biblical past, and that the use of the real atomic bomb in 1945 was pre-ordained, and not without its figurative historical counterparts.  I'm not sure why any of this was necessary outside of proving to some small minority that these preachers could at least be contemporary and topical. 

The following is not the worst idea regarding the survival of nuclear holocaust, though it is an extremely bad one.  (Atomurbia, which makes the entire country a suburb to itself and therefore nothing, and which I write about below, is perhaps the worst idea that I have seen on combating the Soviet menace.)   But this one, which appeared in Life magazine in 1950, does come close, setting up post-attack suburbs (for "refugees") and which takes some pre-attack city planning into some account.  There is a lot of planning for people in cars to make their way out of the city, which reminds me of the evacuation maps of Washington D.C. (which were still being handed out in the early 1980's), which sends people on their way east and west depending upon the last digit of their car's license plate being an odd or even number. 

One reaction to impending Doomsday was to construct concentric outer highways around metropolitan areas, “life belts around cities (which) would provide a place for bombed-out refugees to go”. In the birds eye view provided here, we see the plan in action, the main parts of which are an 8-lane “express” highway belt 10 miles away “from the built up edges of the city” , and a 6-track railway belt five miles further out, these accompanied by various feeder arms stretching straight-away from downtown.  In between the two outer rings would be land that would be kept free of development, so that farms and tent cities could be constructed after the attack. There would also be major collections of hospital and fuel depots in the greenbelt area.  Infrastructure would already be in place (gas and electricity, supplied with power from who-knows-where).   Shopping centers and a giant “motor pool:” would also already be in place, waiting for the Doomsday clock to strike midnight. 

This idea of city planning was one of many offering the prospect of safety from nuclear attack by spacing out the population of the United States so that the Soviet Union wouldn't have enough nuclear warheads to take everyone out.  It called for the redistribution and resettlement of virtually everyone in the country, and is one of the most spectacularly bad ideas that I have come across in this field.  (I wrote about it earlier in this blog, here.)

This issue of Life offered the possibility of hope that 97% of the American population could survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It was a hard sell of a bad idea of insane optimism.

 

 Sylvian Kindall's Total Atomic Defense (published by a very severely right-wing publisher in 1952) is one of a series of books made for a deceived American population, offering the general reader both fear and hope, often from the same, exact source. But Kindall has a  somewhat diffident approach, offering his belief that the country and its population can largely  survive an all-out nuclear war--intact.  Chapter 10 tells the remarkable story of how to make the captial city of America atom-bomb proof, mostly by digging it into the side of a mountain.

 

 

Again, this is just the barest touch of the top of a huge pile of such stuff--and I've not even mentioned duck-and-cover films.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The First X-Ray of an Atomic Explosion Inside a Person? Superboy/Superman & the Atomic Bomb, 1945-1964

JF Ptak Science Books  (Continuing  Post 1140)

I don't know why, but I cannot remember ever having seen an x-ray of an atomic explosion taking place inside of a person, before today.  I guess that Superboy's body is susceptible to x-rays but is also at the same exact time capable of preventing a nuclear explosion from escaping his body--all except for the "nuclear fire" coming from his mouth.Now that's some sort of body control! The men in white seem pretty confident, being so close to the Trinity-like action and all.

Superboy evidently needs fewer ribs than humans, and it looks like the detonation point is right on the transpyloric plane, taking out kidney, liver, gall bladder and just about everything else.  And his spine doesn't show up, either--along with a lot of other innards.

 

The original (published in September 1964) comes from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and they point out that this issue comes right after the signing of in-air nuclear weapons testing ban (after a speech by JFK in June 1963, marked by a memorial that was about 10 feet away from where I used to practice the shot put in D.C.)

This mushroom cloud doesn't take place inside of Superman, but it does seem to take place, well, oddly--there was no text that I could find that accompanied this image, so we'll have to leave the story arc to imagination. 

And, well, if you're not having an atomic explosion in your stomach and not combating one, I guess as Superman you could cover one (image found here):

\

 

 

How YOU Can be One of the 97% of Americans Who Survive Nuclear Holocaust, 1961

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1378

Well, I'd think that this issue of LIFE magazine would've sold in the hundreds of millions with the promise it makes here--right on the front cover--that 97 out ot 100 Americans could survive a nuclear slugfest--if only they were to follow the instructions of this article.

We only get to the marrow of the issue after wading through a few articles and ads for Hires Root Beer, Maiden bras, silk skin girdles, Bayer aspirin, Schlitz beer, Old Taylor Whiskey, Ge "telephone color" night table clocks, scotchguard raincoats, Lanolin Plus Hair Spray Net, Marja bras, Red Rose cologne, nylon carpet, Maidenform girdles, NY Life, Sealy mattresses, Metrecal, Corn Flakes, Hammond organ, John Hancock Life Insurance, Friskies dog food, Cahmpion spark plugs, Budweiser, BF Goodrich tires, Tang, RCA, Anacin, Speedstick deodorant, Castro convertibles, B+W Whiskey, Kodak and  Vista TV.  Probably I missed a few. When you get to the big ad for Royal Crown Colas with the white-hatted BBQ cook getting a kiss with a big wiener on a stick, you've arrived at the article on saving the life of your family and your country.

If only we could build enough shelters--and by "we" I mean "you", and build them properly, and outfit them, and are able to get to them in the 14 minutes that you might have to get to your destination, and you stay down long enough and the attack light enough, then probably some people will survive.  How these folks got the 97% number is an issue of faith--I think that they must've steeped themselves in mystical prayers to secretly reformulate the percentage "23" into "97" without actually telling anyone.  I figure that this was the key to survival.

I've written many times on this theology of survivability (see the series on atomic and nuclear weapons on this blog, here) but seldom does one see such an incredible, indefensible claim such as this, and splashed across the cover of America's most popular picture magazine, accompanied by a letter of support from Camelot.  Somehow in the great looming nuclear confrontation that actually comes to pass, somehow "only"3% of the population doesn't make it.  Of course if there was a natural catastrophe in which 3% of the country was killed--that would be about 4.5 million in 1961 population or about 9 million in 2011--it would be an absolutely phenomenal tragedy. (Ofcourse there were many European countries that lost more than 3% of their populations during WWI and WWII, but that's another story).  But to escape nuclear Armageddon in this country with 3% loss is much better than other government figures published around the same time that predicted casualty rates exceeding 100 million. 

But hearts and minds are won abroad and at home, so the homefires must have been stoked to prevent a colossal depression from befalling the country, which of course goes hand-in-hand with the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, with all policies somehow making it possible for the rush to the abyss to be the one thing that was keeping us (in a Zeno-ish paradox) from falling into it. 

But 97%?  You can read the article here from page 95 for the full story. 

 

 

Outrageous Analogy Dept: How Hitler Can Help in the Post-Nuclear-Attack USA, 1967

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1371

"Understanding, n.  A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house.  Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse."  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"The German experience in reordering an industrial economy for total war in the midst of conflict offers insights into planning for postattack conditions"--Stanford Research Institute, 1967

If such is the case for understanding, then I think that those responsible for the pamphlet German Wartime Industrial Controls:  an Analogy to Recovery from Nuclear Attack intended to ride their house in the Kentucky Derby and upgrade the kitchen in their horse.  After all, ideas are just connections among words, though it seems that here it might be just between words, or suggestions between letters, although the words might all be privately defined. [The original document is available form our blog bookstore, here.]

This pamphlet is another one of those monuments of living proof showing the impossibility of defining where the "bottom" might be in the well of bad ideas--even when you strangle this Nazi business into its own, narrowly-defined category, trying to extricate the logic of its titanically bad idea, the pamphlet instantly ignites when removed from its ether-y vacuum of under- and over-think and  exposed to oxygen. 

It was the Stanford Research Institute (Menlo Park, California) that produced this thing, carved whole and with precision from a quivering block of fat and federal dollars.  If the title doesn't stop time, the first page will.  There we are introduced to Albert Speer (1905-1981), Minister of Armaments and War Production and architectural joyboy for Adolph Hitler.  We are told about the basis for his exceptional achievement in reordering the German economy to all-out war production thus:

    "...a vast armament production would have to be obtained through scrupulous attention to increased production efficiencies and the most effective use of fixed supplies and essential materials and skilled labor.  Speer developed a unique variant of conventional economic planning for a controlled economy and applied it successfully..." (from page 1.)

Speer, a high-ranking Nazi party member since 1931 and intimate of Hitler, was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and sentenced to 20 years at Spandau prison, not the least of which was for his broad and acknowledged use of slave labor.  The "P" in the square standing on its edge at the top of this post is the symbol worn by a Polish slave laborer--there were some 12 million people abducted/arrested/stolen by the Nazis to work on various parts of German society. 

Perhaps this was part of the "scrupulous" detail and the "effective use" of fixed supplies that the author of the Stanford paper was writing about?  Surely anyone studying Speer's methods would have known this--that the author would chose to ignore this sets every moral compass everywhere into free spin. 

But such is the realm of the coin in the ugly, a bubbling bulk of post-attack scenario scripting done at the taxpayers' vast expense in waging the Cold War is littered with vocabulary meant to redirect the attention, essentially to change the meaning of words in discussing the outcomes of vast nuclear war.   For example, we find the phrases "period of fractionation", "the break in traditional economic time series" and "production degradation" in certain documents  (which I discuss in an earlier post here)  used to describe the breakdown of the American social and  industrial base following a nuclear war.. These are just three of thousands of such examples, not the least of which is nuclear "exchange", which is a conceit suggesting something less than the U.S. and the Soviet Union blasting away at one another with spectacularly deadly weapons. (Perhaps the thinking is that such a situation wouldn't necessarily be a "war", and so it is something less than that, like the Korean War really wasn't one but a U.N. policing action.)

But enough of this, were not even a full page into the report, which I remind you tells us we can find useful lessons in Hitler's monstrosity, particularly about war production--that is producing materials post-attack so that we can either defend ourselves or attack again, all by taking a look at Germany, and particularly  "the improvisation by gifted industrialists driven to the limits of their power and imagination" (page 12 of the report).  It is difficult to want to read this report because everywhere I look there are Orwellian Ghosts--half-referenced facts wrapped in Newspeak, available at random.  For example, on page 31, in discussing oil and rubber production, I find:"The output of the new synthetic Buna-s rubber was increased to 22,000 tons in 1939 and to 69,000 tons ion 1942 by accelerated production of new plant."  The "new plant" is the think tank version of "new plants" (the plural is left off of many things for unknown reasons but I guess mostly for a form that seems to have more economo-cache than the simple English expedient), which is a very simplistic way of telling of the enormous production battles in Germany to come up with their own, home-brewed (and not foreign-dependent) rubber (the super-necessity of all things military).¹ The other part not mentioned here in what seems to be a disingenuous appraisal of Nazi rubber production is the increase in 1943/1944, particularly from the "new plant" at Monowitz, which was also known as the Buna Works, and better known yet at Auschwitz III, where slave laborers were put into work-or-die situations producing Buna-s as part of the overall Auschwitz complex of forty camps and subsidiaries. 

Here's another example, tying Hiter and (Fritz) Todt and Speer together--Todt was "one of Hitler's most important administrators", who would be replaced by Speer "who had been an assistant to Todt"--though not mentioning that Todt had used millions of slave laborers (Zwangsarbeiter) in doing his "administrating".  Speer would do the same.  

ANd so on and on this paper crawls until it reaches its end, which is published on detachable sheets on pages one through three, pullaways for the executive summary so that the text and subsequent documentation and analysis could be discarded.  It seems to have been a waste of detachable paper when the whole thing could be thrown away at once.  The author makes a case for studying the Nazi situation because it was the closest thing in modern times to use as an analogy to the possible scenario in America after nuclear war, and then launches into an analysis of Nazi "competitiveness".  The author never comes close to making a compelling argument for the closeness of fit for its major assumption, though, and as far as I can tell the logic of it just doesn't work,which makes the rest of what follows unnecessary.  I guess they could've kept their federal grant by identifying ideas that wouldn't work as America post-attack analogies--which is also useful--and could've easily used what they had here for that purpose.   But at that point I'm not sure what is the more ridiculously-titled idea--I couldn't imagine someone reading the report on why Nazi industrial controls weren't a good analogy, because it seems tautological and unnecessary; and yet the opposite is what gets thought about and published, in all of its error and omission, swimming in its own turgid muck.  This is what people were thinking about in 1967 when, evidently, houses didn't have roofs. 

______

1.  Germans were forbidden to import chemicals and food from 1933-1937, forcing Germany industry to come up with their own versions of things like rubber, meaning that there were many new places in which Buna-s (BUtdiane & NAtrium) was produced.  That rubber production increased so much was a function also of not being able to import the stuff. 

 

 

 

 

The Office: Nuclear Weapons and Management Pre- and Post-Attack (!) Job Description, 1956

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1358

I've written many times¹ on the technical and political end of the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb, along with some posts on the use and manipulation of language in controlling the sense impressions of nuclear war and survivability.  What I have found so extraordinary about this second part is the creation of ordinariness, or mechanization, or acceptance, of the aftermath of nuclear warfare--and what we're talking about here is the
"exchange" of not just a few 20 kiloton Hiroshima-type weapons, but thousands of megatons of explosives and massive amounts of radiation. 

[The image above, a U.S. government position description of the job described below, is clickable to 200%.]

Yes.  Well.  All things being equal, such things as an Afterlife in the United States needed to be contemplated because that is what we do--we make the situation possible for end-of-the-world stuff to happen, and so we have to plan for building things up again with radioactive detritus once all of the keys get turned and buttons pushed, as  it is just a natural course of that historical river. That the bomb would be built was a given; that the Soviets would develop the a bomb and delivery capacities was just a matter of time, and that they would be our sworn death-enemies was also a fait accompli. To develop a way to somehow survive a nuclear war may have been a major deterrent to not launching an attack, especially when linked with a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arms build up (where everyone and everything would be obliterated if there was a nuclear war, or at least so by 1965 (and probably earlier than that). All this insane stuff may have worked, and somehow we managed not to ignite the world, because (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) there would be no real estate left.

On the other hand, building all of these weapon systems and planning for attack and the post attack world could have pushed us into a final confrontation, making all of this sound "winable", "doable" somehow, that once the bombs had all exploded and nothing worked anymore, that there would be enough to pull together of our civilization to declare that we had indeed "won'". 

And the only way to declare a winner was to have something to stand on besides pieces of green glass and Earth, and so  plans for communications and a military, police force, fire brigades, medical care, food distribution, banking, and all the rest--the pieces of a recognizable backbone of American society--would have to be undertaken.  All of this could very well accomplish the creation of an illusion in the mind of the adversary that you are capable of surviving a nuclear war, and so there would be no great gain in attacking; or it could send the message that by doing this preparation that you were preparing a first strike scenario, and so the adversary would attack while the odds were still not horribly out of balance.  And on and--it all looks like a lose-lose endgame to me, which is hardly a "game" at all when all players are losers.

But still there was a need to staff the thousands of positions that went into the theoretical end of figuring out the non-weapon-end world after nuclear war, and the above "position description" is an example of that, a necessarily pro forma form, just another job in a ea of jobs.  This one's job descriptions read like any other, except of course that the content was much different.  Form the same, setence structure the same, vocabulary basically invariable. 

This position description was for "Chief, Damage Assessment Division", was was the part of the Office of Emergency Preparedness (which operated under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President, and then under the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), and then under the Production Area, and then, finally, the Damage Assessment Division DMA).  The job of the DMA was to identify what would happen to the essential production facilities that would keep the country going--industrial, technical, medical, biological, and so on--how they would be targeted, and how they might survive an attack.  This also applied to the people who would be required to be in charge of all of this.  Damage assessment.

It was also the job of this person to coordinate the estimation of damage and assessment business post-attack.

So, one "perk" of this job was that they would be expected to survive a nuclear attack, which means that the added benefits to this employment would be a special trip to a safe place to wait out the destruction of the world.  I assume that this person would have a leverage like the one I wrote about  in my Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Card post (pictured just here, and clickable to 250%).

The position description clearly makes distinctions between pre- and post-attack responsibilities of the Chief of the Damage Assessment Division:  under "Nature of Purpose of Work",  part 1, section A (1) it reads "a pre-attack capability for translating likely patterns of attacks into losses of manpower, industrial capacity, and weapon systems output'.  In Section A (2) we see"a post-attack capability for assessing actual losses, for alternating alternate levels of output consistent with surviving resources and for testing feasibility of proposed new mobilization programs".  Or in other words, sifting the rubble to see who and what was left and to see where they could be actually plugged into whatever scenarios had already been planned, and alter as necessary.  And also on page two, part (3) "development and maintenance of capabilities for both rapid and deliberate damage assessments in event of actual attack..."

Continuing on page two, the Damage Assessment Division would create damage estimates, "disseminate ...estimates of indirect effects including effects...on government, financial and credit systems, and production..." which of course is, well, everything.  Except overall assessments of total numbers of people killed, which isn't a necessary statistic for most of the stuff we're talking about here.

There was much else in this job description, which is five pages long.  It is quite fascinating, seeing all of this spelled out so clearly, written on the endpages of our national book of life.

On the other hand, I'm not exactly sure what else everybody else could've done, all other things being equal.

[The original document is available from our blog boosktore.]

Notes

1. Related posts and a long series (75+ posts) on the history of atomic and nuclear weapons, Armageddon, and fat thinking about survivability, a good example of which is   Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Dept.: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awkwardness" of Holocaust, 1962 )

The rest of the document:

The Nonsense of Strategically Meaningful Phrases--Finding Pillows in the Post-Nuclear-Attack World, 1968/9

 JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1356

Caveat: this story is of course forever and best told by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

Researching a study on the usefulness of the actions of Adolf Hitler amd their application to the U.S. government's planning possibilities for post-nuclear-holocaust existence (German Wartime Industrial Controls: an Analogy to Recovery from Nuclear Attack, Stanford Research Institute, 1968, review coming soon), I came across the following related studies, all of which are available at the Storming Media website, here.

The titles are incredible, the abstracts more so--but some phrasing in the abs were absolutely, sensationally, bad. 

I can imagine a play, a scenario leaning heavily on Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, men sitting in front of reel-to-reel tape recorders, listening to themselves describing the impossible language that they were using to transmit the ideas of surviving nuclear Armageddon--brilliantly lit from single spots directly above the seated figures and with all else absolutely black, they play these snippets, and try to explain what the language actually meant. Perhaps they try to talk over the recordings, only to have the recorded audio get a little louder, and multiply, a la Steve Reich's Come Out.

I understand that in order to talk about a complicated and complex landscape that you need to establish certain words and phrases to mean one thing and one thing only so that information can be transmitted and analysis with common denominators can take place.  At the same time these phrases loosen the reality of what they represented, removing the implications of fighting such a war, and thereby making the button-pushing a little easier.  Perhaps the launch business becomes more automated this way, even in considering the theoretical end of the actions of nuclear war.  Like the soldiers who were endlessly trained to turn the keys and punch the buttons at this country's x-number of launch facilities, trained countlessly and tirelessly, so that when the real call came in they could just do the job, follow the instructions as they had 2,000 times before, and launch the missiles that would kill tomorrow.

And so in 15 minutes I found these impressive examples of polyprhases that meant both something and nothing:

Paper 1

"Period of fractionation"--describing the civil circumstance directly after nuclear exchange.  Found in Scenario for Postattack Social Reorganization, : Raymond D. Gastil; William Schneider Jr; HUDSON INST INC CROTON-ON-HUDSON N Y

This paper also provides us with "historical disasters that were somewhat comparable to nuclear war" as well as "return to normalcy" as the sixth part of a six-part post-nuclear landscape.  And this is all just in the abstract. 

"Abstract: This approach to postattack analysis was meant to explore the possible contribution that a documented scenario could make to postattack research on organizational problems. Using knowledge of historical disasters that were somewhat comparable to nuclear war, we divided the scenario into the following periods: Pre-attack, the disaster; period of fractionation; survival and reconstruction; innovation and control; and, return to normalcy. The scenario covers a period of more than two years (1970-1972), and the attack was OCD's CIV-LOG '65 in which 2000 megatons were used. [Emphasis mine.] Appendices explore more analytically certain issues raised by the scenario. (Author)"

Paper 2

"The break in traditional economic time series..."  Meaning that there were new timetables in how things got done and how we communicate, in business, following a nuclear war.  Found in: Information Needs for Postattack Recovery Management, 1968.  {Actually the entire abstract is worth a quote.]

Abstract: "The study is concerned primarily with information needed for monitoring the effects of actions taken by governmental bodies at federal, state, and local levels in a postulated postattack period and for providing business management with the overall information it needs for making business decisions in the absence of undistorted indicators of economic developments. The break in traditional economic time series and the need for drastic reorientation of industrial efforts in .."

 Paper 3

"interdiction of normal business channels" Found in Institutional Factors in Total Vulnerability,  1968

and 

"None of the problems [in surviving nuclear attack] would pose insurmountable difficulties but all would require prompt attention and appropriate resolution within the first two months after a nuclear attack"

Authors:  Francis W. Dresch; Hazel B. Ellis; STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA

"A systems approach was used to identify institutional problems likely to be neglected in analyses of the vulnerability of physical systems at risk from nuclear attack. This report discusses six specific problems (solvency, credit, business organization and management, interdiction of normal business channels, legislative imbalance, and disruption of election machinery) and their implications for the assessment of national vulnerability. None of the problems would pose insurmountable difficulties but all would require prompt attention and appropriate resolution within the first two months after a nuclear attack.

Paper 4

"nature of demands for labor in a postattack world" and of course "post-attack economy" found in Preliminary Estimates for Labor Demands in a Post Attack Economy, 1968. Authors:  Stephen Baer; INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES ARLINGTON VA PROGRAM ANALYSIS DIV

"Abstract: This is an informal exploration of ways to determine the nature of demands for labor in a postattack world. An attempt is made to determine the needs for labor and the demands of consumers after a nuclear attack based on preattack patterns, community sizes and income levels. (Author)"

Paper 5

"using retired boxcars for simulating urban area fires" [ignited by thousands of megatons of explosives] found in Feasbilities and Representativeness of Large-Scale Boxcar Burns, 1968

Authors:  Frederick Salzberg; IIT RESEARCH INST CHICAGO ILL ENGINEERING MECHANICS DIV

"Abstract: the study deals with the feasibility of using retired boxcars for simulating urban area fires. Considerations are given to the representativeness of boxcars fires, development of an experimental plan, and a cost analysis. An outline is given of experimental series designed to study various aspects of urban area fires by means of boxcar fires. Included are studies of fire spread, development of group fires, and behavior of mass fires. (Author) "

Paper 6

"production degradation" found in Industrial recovery Model Constraints, 1969.

"Abstract: The vulnerability of a facility to nuclear blast damage is determined by identifying the industrial facility with a structural type and the type of processing equipment contained therein. Equations are extended to estimate production degradation. Damage repair data and analysis are reviewed and a straight-line function is suggested for relating repair effort and elapsed repair time to overpressure. The functional relationships of industrial recovery are analyzed with respect to target ..."

Paper 7

"problems of debris removal to achieve specified objectives in urban areas" found in Debris Removal in Civil Defence Operations, 1969.  Authors:  George E. Wickham; STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CALIF

"Abstract: As a part of the Five-City Study, this report examines the problems of debris removal to achieve specified objectives in urban areas. It details the necessary steps for determination, and provides a quantitative value of the total resources required to accomplish clearing operations. It illustrates the application of methodology developed in research report titled 'Debris Removal Civil Defense Operations: Volume 1' so as to provide realistic appraisals ..."

Paper 8

"disorganization inevitably following a nuclear war" found in Capabilities of Fire Services to Limit Damage from Nuclear Attack. Authors:  S. B. Martin; R. W. Ramstad; URS RESEARCH CO BURLINGAME CALIF

"Abstract: The report emphasizes the dangers to eventual reconstruction that are posed by the disorganization inevitably following a nuclear war. What can go wrong in this reorganization period is examined by the use of scenarios and analogy. It is then suggested that during the crisis period preceding a nuclear war a number of useful actions enhancing the chance of postattack recovery should be undertaken as part of an emergency mobilization for ..."

These are just eight examples--the problem here is that nearly every paper I looked at on this first page of papers from Storming Media could be used as examples of massive underspeak...the real issue being that there were another 100 pages of these things. So its not as though I even cherry-picked these things--they were all in line on the front page.  That's the scary part--to see how deep the depth was of these things, an infinite depth of finite measurement. Something in nothing. 

The Tipping Point of Degeneracy: a Look Back at Robert Oppenheimer's Black Hole that Wasn't his Post War Existence

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1354

Its easy to forget about the pre-Los Alamos Oppenheimer, especially for those who aren't necessarily interested in the history of 20th century physics. I was preparing to write something about a very brief window that seemed to have been opened in the 72 hours or so after the second atomic bomb was dropped....or perhaps from the time of he Hiroshima bomb.  In any event, it was a short period, measurable in terms of dozens of hours, where people--even Robert Oppenheimer--had a sense of a sea-change regarding the bomb and peace, and that perhaps the thing was so terrible and so controllable that it might bring about the end of war.  But the gloom of the reality of the future of the weapon--and the future weapon systems--settled in, and that illusory window was closed, if indeed it was ever actually open, which it really wasn't.  

Not long after this, Oppenheimer was shuttled into the Oval Office to meet for the first time with President Truman--it must've been a worlds-in-collision moment, though it seems Oppenheimer was no quite himself, not quite as filled up as he should've been.  Depressed, I'm sure, after having just gone through a bit of rough business as to who would be controlling the future of the bomb.  Anyway, he met with Truman on 25 October 1945, in there with Truman for a 10:30 appointment, and things did not go well.  Truman "asked" (apparently rhetorically) Oppenheimer his opinion on when the Soviets would develop the bomb.  Oppenheimer simply said that he didn't know.  Truman shot back "never", that the Soviets would never develop the bomb.  I have no idea if Truman believed this or just was pissed with what he thought of his meeting with a "cry baby" Oppenheimer.  Truman evidently told a number of different versions of this story, but one thing was for certain:  he did say that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch again".

If Oppenheimer wasn't depressed when he went into the Oval Office at 10:30, he was when he was promptly shuttled out for Truman's 11:00 meeting, which was with the postmaster of Joplin Missouri, Mr. Leslie Travis.  My feeling (completely unsubstantiated) was that equal weight was given by Truman to both the 10:30 and the 11:00.But the man was a definite force in the relatively short time he spent in the high community, from the late 1920's to about 1942. 

But just four years before, and the decade or so preceding it, Oppenheimer was a brilliant new force in the American physics community, a  remarkable, brilliant talent with a big insight.  And this is what brought m back to Oppenheimer on the first day of WWII.

People tend to think of black holes as a Stephen Hawking-era phenomenon while the facts of the matter are that they began perhaps hundreds of year earlier, probably with Cambridge John Michell (1724-1793), back in the year of the end of the American Revolution, 1783 (and perhaps before).  His famous experiment (known as the "Cavendish Experiment") was really only rediscovered in the 1970's in Michell's correspondence with Henry Cavendish.  In those pages he hypothesized that there may evolve a star so massive (which he referred to as a "dark star' in Newtonian theory) that light itself might not be able to escape fro it, that the escape velocity for the light could never be reached, and that its phenomenal gravity would make the star impossibly dense.  This was very similar to the dark star hypothesis of Simon Pierre de Laplace in his epic Exposition du Systeme du Monde which was published in 1796. Karl Schwarzchild's 1916 paper using Einstein's relativity paper of the same year discussed the possibilities of singularity (the Schwazchild limit of the diameter of black holes), as did (the beautiful) Subrahmany Chandrasekhar (one of the last men able to know everything) in 1928. 

In hunting for a number of Richard Feynman papers here at the warehouse I happened to find this extraordinary effort by J. Robert Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkhoff in the 15 February 1939 issue of America's greatest journal contribution to physics, The Physical Review.  Here (along with a preceding paper by Richard C. Tolman, issued in the same issue just above Oppenheimer, which were the analytic analysis used by O+V to base their estimates of nuclear forces) was established the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkhoff limit, which stated that if the state of evolution of  neutrons forming a degenerate Fermi gas of extremely dense masses in neutron stars was more  massive than .07 solar masses that it would collapse into a black hole or exotic/quark star; if the mass was below that limit, the star would not collapse due to the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and the strong force.  The black hole part was left really to a second paper of 1 September 1939 (the day that the Nazis attacked Poland and the fighting began in World War II in Europe) when Oppenheimer teamed up with Hartland Snyder to write "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", when the two wrote about the singularity of the event.  the paper met with little appreciation at the time, though the two papers today have lead to some of the most progressive ideas in 21st century astrophysics. (This paper is available at our blog bookstore, here.)

Dividing by Zero: David Byrne and Herman ("the Fat Man") Kahn Sing the Future Blues

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1312

Earlier in this blog, about two years ago, I wrote a piece on David Byrne's beautiful Knee Plays, which included a song "In the Future".  The post was about Byrne's vision of the future which was bounced off the belly of "futurist" Herman Kahn, a man who was widely influential and whose thinking (I do believe) was widely incorrect.  He was also a proponent of possible first-strike (that is, American-initiated) nuclear warfare, deeming the scenarios "winable"., a broad thinker on Thinking-the-Unthinkable, and coiner of the word "megadeath" when used in conjunction with his nuclear end-game games. A main component of the template for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick's movie by that name,  Kahn and the think tank he helped found (the Hudson Institute) had the ear of the Reagan administration, among others, and it shows.

Here's the revised post, expanded some.

David Byrne, former Talking Heads member, produced a series of twelve short pieces to be used in the Philip Glass (and Robert Wilson*) Opera CIVIL warS  in 1985. (“Opera” may not be the right word for this piece, as I think it was one only in so far as the composition needed an opera house to be performed in.)   The Byrne pieces, called ”Knee Plays”, were meant to fill in the spaces, the spaces in-between,  place holders, between the sections of the day-long multimedia production..  Glass had used this idea of inter-pieces to the whole earlier in 1976 in his at-the-edge Einstein on the Beach, in which the connective elements were meant to not only join the pieces of the production together, but were also meant to stand alone, as a cohesive unit, if removed from the opera.  (Glass said they were “short connecting pieces which appear throughout the work much as prelude, interludes and post-ludes. Taken together they form a play in themselves”)

One of the Knee Plays, “In the Future” (Knee Play Number 12) is a slippery, stacatto brass section accompanying Byrne’s 51 sophisms about life in the future.  About thirty years earlier, “futurist” and think-tank-filler (or maybe it was “Think Tub”?) Herman Kahn (1922-1983), occupying a lot of space at the RAND and Hudson Institutes  (he was also known in many circles as the “Fat Man”), diligently recorded his myopic views of the future. He is generally regarded as a systems theory and military strategy guy, and is most remembered for (as he claims, perhaps) introducing the term “Vietnamization” which described the ultra-failed de-escalation (?) process and withdrawal for the United States from Vietnam (attention Obama administration).  Superluminarily speaking though his contribution to thought on constructing and implementing thought regarding nuclear weapons exchange (pointless to refer to this as “war”) in several books, including On Thermonuclear War (1960), Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) and, On Escalation (1965), where he famously put The Bomb on the table of use possibilities.  In addition to these books—which he is busily trying to forget out there in his afterlife, somewhere, maybe in a penitential place where you are forced to think endlessly about paths-to-bad-decisions) is that 1967 peek into the future, The Year 2000.  Petroleum and oil are not issues.  Computers are of minor societal importance.  And then other things of no importance happen.

When you take Byrne's Knee Play 12 and place it next to Kahn and other mis-spent prognosticators, the musician looks positively brilliant.  Some of the stuff has come to pass, some hasn't; some will, and some won't.  Some are open to a little interpretation, and some, a lot.  Overall, though, if you think through these little future bullets a little carefully, David Bryne looks very good.  Byrne's lyrics/list is below.

Kahn's writing is necessarily less elegant than Byrne's, and probably less elegant than most other people in general including those who don't write, though it does lower itself to some height of governmental semi-speak.  For example, from his July 1957 RAND paper "War Gaming" (available at our blog bookstore, HERE), we find this nugget:

I have no doubt that Kahn looks like a warrior to many people--he no doubt was something of one, so long as that warrior could wear a white button-down shirt and not get dirty.  Simply because a person is thought of as a "warrior" doesn't make them a 'good" one, either, and I think that I would nominate Herman Kahn as an example of one:  in my own approximation of Kahn-speak, he would  "generate the apparent non-non appearance in definable though undefined parameters as  a non-good non-warrior in circumstances that defined or not define him/them in this semi-stable manner".

I think it is important to look at documents like this--documents that helped establish military policy--to see how their authors were able to convince people in government that they could divide by zero.

 

*Robert Wilson is a phenomenal conceptualist and theatrical designer.  On the liner notes to CIVIL warS is found the interesting note on Wilson and Byrne:  "At first, Robert Wilson asked David to compose pieces for several sections of The CIVIL warS, but on account of David's limited time, he composed only The Knee Plays part. The CIVIL warS was supposed to be played in its complete form at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but if one plays every part, it takes at least eight hours. There was also a financial problem for playing every part. So only some parts of it were staged there. David himself was very interested in composing for such a play and dance and this time again he enjoyed this work very much. Last time, for The Catherine Wheel, he used recorded tape, but this time he made musicians play on the stage."

(Featuring a prominent role for The Tuba)

IN THE FUTURE (KNEE PLAY 12)

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed

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

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 rubbery 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 pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.)

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 the 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.]

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.  [This rare pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

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

JF Ptak Science Books LLC     Blog Bookstore  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.¹  The entire issue of 12 pages (with no advertisement²) 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. [The original newspaper is available at our blog bookstore, here.]

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. 

Note:

1. PM (1940-1948) was a left-wing newspaper funded by Marshall Field III, and was home to excellent reporting.  See here for more details. Among the staff writers was I.F.Stone and staff photographers Margaret Bourke-White.  Other contributors included Heywood Hale Broun; James Thurber; (the great) Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway; Eugene Lyons; Ben Stolberg; Malcolm Cowley; Tip O'Neill;and Ben Hecht.

2. Actually, NO issue of PM had advertisements--it was entirely ad-free. (And even so it still came close to making money after 8 years.)

PM's stated mission:

PM is against people who push other people around.   

PM accepts no advertising.

PM belongs to no political party.

PM is absolutely free and uncensored.

PM's sole source of income is its readers--to whom it alone is responsible.

PM us one newspaper thayt can and dares to tell the truth.

Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was a cartoonist for PM (see here for his War cartoons) as was the great Crockett Johnson.