Candor about the effects of our Atomic Weapons" I
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
What we are experiencing, in as much as it can be experienced, is the experience of nuclear 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 Monsters, 1987
In the essay J. Robert Oppenheimer published in July 1953 called “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” he argued the need for a new affirmative policy of “candor” by our government with the American people about the meaning of the nuclear arms race now going on between us and the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer wrote,
It is true that there are and always will be, as long as we live in danger of war, secrets that it is important to keep secret, at least for an appropriate period, if not for all time; some of these, and important ones, are in atomic energy. But knowledge of the characteristics and probable effects of our atomic weapons, of--in rough terms--the numbers available, and of the changes that are likely within the next years, this is not among the things to be kept secret. Nor is our general estimate of where the enemy stands.
Not among the things to be kept secret, then, in his view, were “the probable effects of our atomic weapons.”
Earlier in the essay, he’d written something about what the actual effects had been of the atomic weapon we used in Hiroshima.
When Hiroshima was bombed there was a single plane. There was no air opposition. We flew straight in at medium height, at rather low speed, over the city of Hiroshima; we dropped one bomb with an energy release the equivalent of about fifteen thousand tons of TNT. It killed more than seventy thousand people and produced a comparable number of casualties; it largely destroyed a medium-sized city. That we had in mind.
The “we” here who had had these effects “in mind” before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima was not, of course, all of us in this country. At the time, very few of us knew anything at all about our effort to make an atomic bomb, very few even in the military, almost no one in Congress. Of those of us who did know, very few of us—probably not even President Truman—would have “had in mind” effects on the scale of those Oppenheimer describes here since “effects” on this scale would probably have been foreseeable by only some of the Manhattan Project scientists.
Oppenheimer would have been among them, of course, since he had directed the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos where the bomb had been designed and where the first implosion bomb was tested.
But, Oppenheimer wrote, these effects were just part of what he and the others in his position “had in mind.”
But we also had in mind, and we said, that it was not a question of one bomb. It would become a question of ten, and then one hundred, and then a thousand, and then ten thousand, and then maybe one hundred thousand. We knew—or, rather, we did not know, but we had very good reason to think—that it was not a question of ten thousand tons but of one hundred thousand and then a million tons, and then ten million tons and then maybe one hundred million tons.
The “we” here—the Manhattan Project scientists and maybe a few others—did not “know” but “had very good reason to think,” wrote Oppenheimer, that these numbers would be in the offing. And, in July 1953, there would have been even more reason to think so. We had begun mass producing atomic bombs. We knew that the Soviet Union had been producing some of them since August 1949. In what numbers, we didn’t know. But there was no reason to think they also wouldn’t be mass producing them before long.
Numbers like that—one hundred thousand bombs and a yield of the equivalent of one hundred million tons of TNT—may be eye-opening. But what do such numbers convey about “the effects of our atomic weapons”? Numbers are abstractions. They elide experience. If we talk about the effects of atomic bombs, not in terms of numbers and quantities, but of human experience, what do we know, what can we know, of the effects of one hundred thousand atomic bombs?
Or even one. The people of Hiroshima still living would know the experience. The rest of us have to do the best we can to imagine it.
Do photographs help us grasp the “effects,” the experience, of nuclear weapons? They can certainly add something to numbers.
On August 8, 1945, the day before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, President Truman was shown aerial pictures of the aftermath at Hiroshima. Before he saw those pictures, he might not have understood the indiscriminate nature of the destruction that the atomic bomb would cause. He might not have realized that it would have been impossible to limit the destruction to a military target, which is what he had ordered in Potsdam after he had learned about our first successful test of the weapon and he had okayed its use against Japan.
President Truman saw the pictures of the effects at Hiroshima too late to affect the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, but in a cabinet meeting on August 10, the day after Nagasaki was bombed, President Truman had said he didn’t like the idea of killing all those women and children (90% of the dead in Hiroshima had been civilians).
He had directed that no more atomic bombs be dropped without his explicit order. That oral directive is the origin, and, I believe, the only sanction for, the notion that our nuclear weapons can be used only upon the explicit order of the president.
By 1953, when Oppenheimer published his essay, the rest of us had been allowed to see photographs too, even some movies, of detonations. The photographs we’d seen had always pictured the effects of just one bomb, not of the ten thousand or one hundred thousand bombs Oppenheimer had said had been “in mind,” even before the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped.
So how “candid” is it possible to be about the “effects of our atomic weapons”? Whatever the level of candor, how possible is it to know what it would be like to experience these effects?
Next: Candor about the Effects of Our Atomic Weapons II