Candor About the Effects of Nuclear Weapons, IV
What we are experiencing, in as much as it can be experienced, is the experience of nu{clear war. Because the anticipation…, the anxiety, the suspense, is the only experience of nuclear war that anyone is going to get. The reality (different kinds of death, in a world without discourse) could hardly be called human experience, any more than such temporary sentience as remained could be called human life. It would just be human death.
If you think about nuclear weapons, you feel sick. If you don’t think about them, you feel sick without knowing why.
Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters, 1987
[This discussion continues the unpacking in the two preceding entries of the immediate effects that we might experience in a nuclear detonation—from the light, the heat, the ionizing radiation, the air blast, and the fallout. Just how these effects would be experienced by a particular person in a particular place would depend on many variables. And, of course, on how many nuclear bombs are arriving.
For a map of how widely the effects being described here would be distributed by single nuclear weapons of different yields detonated at a location of your choice, see the remarkable interactive online Nukemap, conceived and built by Alex Wellerstein, first released in 2012.]
Are the “probable effects . . . of our atomic weapons” that we’ve been setting out here something our leaders should be candid about in Operation Candor?
Some of President Eisenhower’s national security advisors and President Eisenhower himself had said they were worried that candor about the nuclear arms race might cause us Americans to despair or panic and call for a “preventive” war. That is, we might just become apathetic or demand that we drop our atomic bombs on the Soviet Union now, while we had more than they did.
Even though they now had nuclear weapons too.
President Eisenhower had made it clear even before he was elected president that he would not be in favor of a “preventive” war. A war that would start a war, he called it.
I suppose going into the kind of detail we’ve been going into here about the “probable effects . . . of our nuclear weapons” (and their nuclear weapons too now) could make a despairing or panicky response more likely. Maybe that’s why Oppenheimer thought we should keep the revelations in Operation Candor within the realm of “rough terms” concerning “the probable effects and the numbers available.”
On the other hand, Oppenheimer had said in his essay,
I believe that until we have looked this tiger in the eye, we shall be in the worst of all possible dangers, which is that we may back into him. More generally, I do not think a country like ours can in any real sense survive if we are afraid of our people.
Was Oppenheimer implying there that at some level our leaders were “afraid of our people”? Should they have been? What do you think?
But maybe it’s not even a question whether we can be “candid” about the “effects” that will be experienced if atomic weapons are ever used. Used again, that is. Maybe the question is whether it’s possible to imagine those effects meaningfully in the first place. Maybe we should just leave all this in the realm of the unimaginably horrific. Like some of us do with the idea of hell.
Or maybe we could be candid about some effects and not others. Candid only about the effects we might do something about, maybe?
Candor about ionizing radiation from fallout might be such an effect.
One trouble with being candid about something like fallout was how much we still didn’t know about it. But isn’t that an important aspect of candor—acknowledging what you don’t know? Most of what I’d heard so far as I was about to start junior high school was that ionizing radiation wasn’t that big a deal. In the movie we all saw in elementary school, Bert the Turtle hadn’t had to worry about it at all.
The blast was the big deal.
Our leaders did know about radioactive fallout that by now we had produced a lot of it in our testing of nuclear weapons at our Pacific Proving Ground. We’d produced more of it after 1951, at home inside the continental United States, at our new test site in Nevada. By now, fallout from both test sites had spread out far beyond both the sites. Some from our tests in the Pacific had been detected on our west coast and some from our smaller tests in Nevada had been detected all the way across the country in Rochester, New York on film in a Kodak factory.
In Utah, next to and downwind of the Nevada Test Site, some sheep ranchers believed they had lost stock recently to radioactive fallout from tests at the NTS. Hearings were to be conducted this summer of 1953 by Lewis Strauss’s Atomic Energy Commission to consider whether the ranchers’ application for compensation should be granted.
Since Hiroshima, our leaders had been denying or downplaying the effects of ionizing radiation and fallout. Lewis Strauss’s AEC would deny those effects now and deny compensation. They would say the ranchers’ sheep must have been suffering from malnutrition. The ranchers knew that wasn’t true, but they were patriotic and didn’t want to make trouble for the Atomic Energy Commission and maybe endanger national security.
If sheep had been harmed by fallout, people might also have been, I suppose, but there weren’t any reports of that yet. None that I’d seen. Our leaders might not have been checking as carefully on this as they might have.
This wasn’t just a question of the AEC keeping something secret, was it? It was a question of them and those above them lying--lying for what they took to be a higher cause, which is often what is taken to justify lying. Lewis Strauss’s AEC clearly thought keeping the testing program going was the most important thing. More important than sheep. More important even than people. Some people, anyway.
We were doing a whole lot of testing in this year of 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. Some of it was to test components of what we thought we would be able to use for the huge hydrogen bombs that we couldn’t test in Nevada, the effects would be too widespread. Those we would test later at our Pacific Proving Ground.
Some of the testing at NTS now was of devices with smaller yields for weapons that we thought might have “tactical” (that is, battlefield) uses. This was an idea our weapons developers had had during the Truman administration.
The effects of the tactical weapons wouldn’t be as widespread but it would have to be a pretty big battlefield. Some of the tactical devices we were now testing had yields as big or bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.
When it came to tactical nuclear weapons, something we knew we didn’t know enough about know yet was how our soldiers would be affected if they had been in the vicinity of a nuclear detonation. Not at ground zero, of course. Just somewhere in the neighborhood where they wouldn’t be dead already.
Would our soldiers be able to go into ground zero after a nuclear detonation and conduct maneuvers? Would the residual ionizing radiation allow it? Would the mental states of the soldiers who had witnessed the detonation—just the one detonation, in this case—allow it?
To find out, we’d been conducting since 1951 at the Nevada Test Site some military exercises called “Desert Rock.” After a nuclear detonation the soldiers would be ordered to get out of trenches they were crouching in, for example, and march off toward the cloud that was boiling up over ground zero.
So far, the soldiers had been doing what they were ordered to do, not freezing or running off, or something like that. As for the effects on them of residual radiation, the soldiers were being told by their officers that they didn’t have anything to worry about.
Some of them weren’t so sure. But good soldiers that they were, they followed orders.
Next: Oppenheimer’s Essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” published in July 1953