Candor about the effects of our Atomic Weapons, III
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 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 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 varying yields detonated at a location of your choice, see the remarkable interactive online Nukemap, conceived and built by Alex Wellerstein, first released in 2012.]
After all this, if we had been able to witness the detonation of a single atomic bomb from a safe distance and not from Ground Zero or too close to it, we might be able to enjoy watching the rapid ascent of the “mushroom cloud.” People being called “atomic tourists” had started coming to Las Vegas to see the mushroom clouds produced by our testing at the Nevada Test Site.
The mushroom cloud at Hiroshima had risen after just thirty seconds to above 30,000 feet. That’s the altitude the Enola Gay had been flying at when it dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. That meant the cloud from the Hiroshima bomb had climbed above the altitude of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on earth (Mount Everest had been summited for the first time on May 25, 1953, only last month, by a Sherpa and a British man.)
In the Ivy Mike test of the hydrogen bomb device that had taken place in November 1952, just before President Eisenhower was elected, the mushroom cloud had risen to 135,000 feet after a minute or two, more than four times higher than the summit of Mount Everest. Maybe you’ve seen Mount Everest. Maybe even climbed it. I haven’t. We are left to imagine such things as mushroom clouds four times higher than Mount Everest.
You probably didn’t get to see the Ivy Mike test. Then President Truman and soon to be President Eisenhower weren’t there to see it either. No President has ever seen the detonation of a nuclear device.
Anything in the lower part of Mike’s churning cloud, any bird, for example would be killed by ionizing radiation if it weren’t already dead or vaporized from the heat. After the tests, there are always birds on the ground.
If you were far enough away from the bomb’s detonation to see the mushroom cloud go up, you might still need to find protection, if you could, from the radioactive debris produced by the detonation. The “fallout.” The amount of fallout you might experience would depend on how close to the ground the bomb had been when it was detonated and which way the wind was blowing, among other things.
If you couldn’t leave the area that got contaminated, you’d need shelter from this fallout for more than a little while. Weeks maybe. We weren’t getting solid information from our leaders on how long we’d need such shelter. Maybe it wasn’t possible to say.
Lots of unknowns. There might be more unknowns than there were knowns about all this, about the aftermath.
One other “effect” of a nuclear bomb should be mentioned. If you were in a city that had been bombed with one, nothing would likely be left to help you with what you needed now—help to put out fires, help to stop bleeding from wounds caused by flying debris, or help to treat burns, for example. Or, later, help with the symptoms of radiation poisoning. There would be no hospital to go to. No source of medical supplies. No doctors who didn’t themselves need help.
Nowhere you might get a drink of water.
After the bomb had detonated in Hiroshima, nothing of that kind had been left for the survivors, and that had been just the one nuclear bomb, a small nuclear bomb by the standards of today in 1953. It had a yield, as Oppenheimer said in his essay, equivalent to only about fifteen thousand tons of TNT.
Later some help might have come to Hiroshima from elsewhere in Japan, though after August 10 not from Nagasaki. If it’s been just one or two bombs, you might be able to get help from somewhere else. But Oppenheimer had said in his recent essay “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” that even before Hiroshima, some Manhattan Project scientists had had in mind it being a question of a thousand, maybe ten thousand, nuclear bombs. Where would help come from if that is what had gone down? Even if your country were as large as the United States. Or the Soviet Union?
We were now testing bombs at the Nevada Test Site that were three times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. And they weren’t even our hydrogen bomb. Which, when we got it working, could be expected to be more than six hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The Ivy Mike test had shown that.
Next: Candor About the Effects of Nuclear Weapons IV