Candor about the Effects of our Atomic Weapons II
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’s Monsters, 1987
In his essay published in July 1953 setting out the requirements for an Operation Candor to be conducted by the government with the American people about the meaning of the nuclear arms race, J. Robert Oppenheimer said we would need to be candid about
the characteristics and probable effects of our atomic weapons, of—in rough terms—the numbers available, and of the changes that are likely to occur within the next years. [T]his is not among the things to be kept secret.
But what if we should decide to take the discussion beyond “—in rough terms—the numbers” and get explicitly into “the . . . effects” of nuclear weapons? What might we want to touch on?
By now we’ve all seen photographs of atomic detonations. Do photographs help us grasp the “effects”—that is, the experience—of nuclear weapons?
On August 8, too late for President Truman to affect the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, President Truman was shown aerial pictures of the aftermath at Hiroshima. Before he saw those pictures, he might not have imagined how indiscriminate the destruction caused by the atomic bomb be. He might not have realized that it would have been impossible to limit the destruction to a military target, as he had ordered in Potsdam when he okayed use of the weapon.
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. He had directed that no more atomic bombs be dropped on Japan without his explicit order. That oral directive is the origin of—and, as far as I know, the only sanction for—the notion that our nuclear weapons can be used only if explicit permission is given by the president.
By 1953, we’d all seen some photographs too (not all of us, but you know what I mean). The photographs we’d seen had always pictured the results of the detonation of just one bomb, not of the ten thousand or one hundred thousand bombs Oppenheimer said in his essay were “in mind,” even before the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped and the world had learned that the nuclear weapon existed.
If just one bomb is in the picture, it’s tempting, isn’t it, to imagine ourselves as spectators, at a safe distance, where the photographer had been positioned perhaps. Not at Ground Zero where the heat from the detonation would have been enough, as it was at the hypocenter at Hiroshima, not only to burn us black or flay our skin into rags now hanging off our arms, but maybe to vaporize us and leave behind only a shadow on the concrete.
Those who were vaporized would would be, some might think, the lucky ones.
But the first effect of the bomb—wherever we were and before the heat—would be the light that would burst upon us. It would be a light many times brighter than the sun’s light, a light that might blind us permanently as even the sun’s light will do if the sun is gazed at directly for long enough.
If we have in mind just one bomb, we may be able to imagine ourselves easily enough in a place where all we would have had to do to protect ourselves from that blinding light would be to turn away or put on some welder’s glasses. If, that is, we knew when and where was to take place. Which we wouldn’t, of course, in wartime conditions. And if there were just the one.
But if we were within a certain distance of ground zero, or the ground zeroes—in Hiroshima it would have been a kilometer or so from the hypocenter—we would also have had to be shielded somehow from the effects of the ionizing radiation produced by the blast. We can think of ionizing radiation as light that is invisible even though it carries a much higher energy. We can’t see ionizing radiation or feel it but, unlike light, ionizing radiation has enough energy to damage living tissue. It could be immediately fatal for us, but only if we had already been killed by the heat, so maybe we needn’t worry about this initial blast of it. But even if we had survived the heat because we were far enough away, the blast of ionizing radiation could still kill us later, just more slowly, because it could cause a number of things to break down in our bodies. We might die from diarrhea, for example, or uncontrolled bleeding from just about everywhere.
Later—after a while, not that long, some seconds—the air blast would arrive. All bombs produce air blast, but given the almost inconceivable heat produced by a nuclear detonation, the air pressures produced by nuclear bombs will be much greater than those produced by conventional bombs, greater than anything else we might have experienced on earth, even if we’ve experienced one of the strongest tornadoes. The pressures will be great enough, within—distances that vary according to the yield of the bomb—to shatter wooden structures into kindling, kindling that may already have been set on fire by the heat, with that fire likely to go on to join other fires to produce firestorms, tornadoes of fire, which is what happened at Hiroshima, burning to death those who had been trapped in the debris.
Even if we were standing next to the photographer at a safe distance, another effect we might be subjected to could come later from materials blasted into the air that had been made radioactive by the detonation, materials that will blow away and come down here and there, wherever, depending on the weather. We might notice the particles of fallout on our skin but we wouldn’t feel the ionizing radiation coming from them. That radiation would be unlikely to kill us quickly, but it might later, we wouldn’t ever be able to say with certainty whether or when. It would kill some of us some time, that we knew.
We wouldn’t be able to say with certainty whether or when even if we happened to be wearing one of those “dosimeters” that tell you how much ionizing radiation you’ve been subjected to. People who work around nuclear power reactors have to wear dosimeters.
Do you have one? I don’t.
Next: Candor about the Effects of Atomic Weapons III