You Might Want to Know: Did any of our Presidents ever witness a nuclear detonation?
[A reader of the previous posting wondered what we knew about what happened to the soldiers who after atomic detonations in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site were sent into ground zero so the physical and psychological effects upon them could be observed. For many years, almost nothing was known about this. The veterans had been required to take a oath of secrecy. In 1979 a veteran formed a nonprofit called the National Association of Atomic Veterans to represent these veterans and others who might have suffered injury from ionizing radiation. In October 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. It is now possible for surviving veterans of the tests at NTS to apply for a payment of $75,000.]
Did any of our presidents ever witness a nuclear detonation?
No. Not one.
Why not? Unlike those of us who weren’t insiders, they could have gotten to see whatever they wanted.
Why hadn’t they? Isn’t that something they should have done? Or did they think they already knew what they needed to about what nuclear weapons do? Might they have believed that because the bomb was as terrible as at some level they knew it to be, they needed not to experience it directly because it might somehow make them hesitant to use it?
In any case, they saw only photographs. Like the rest of us.
President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t even get to see photographs. He had authorized the project to build the bomb, but he died four months before the first bomb was detonated, in the test called Trinity in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
President Truman, who took office when FDR died, surely saw pictures of the Trinity blast, and then the cloud at Hiroshima, and then pictures of the aftermath in that city and in Nagasaki. Later in his administration, he would also have seen pictures of the tests conducted in our Pacific Proving Ground in and among the Marshall Islands. But he never did witness any actual tests.
In January 1950, President Truman authorized our effort to build the hydrogen bomb (which scientists prefer to call a “thermonuclear” bomb”). He did not, however, witness the first successful test of this bomb, Ivy Mike, conducted at our Pacific Proving Ground on November 1, 1952. This was in the last year of his administration, just before he passed the reins to Eisenhower. That bomb had the explosive force equivalent to 10.4 megatons of TNT, 666 times what the Hiroshima bomb had yielded.
Eisenhower, like the rest of us, hadn’t known about the Ivy Mike test at the time it was conducted. Only after he was elected in November was he told about it. In 1953, when he was shown movies of it, he is reported to have “visibly blanched.” As the Commander of Allied Forces Europe in World War II, Ike had to have seen some terrible things. But the explosive yield of Ivy Mike was more than twice the yield of all the bombs dropped by all sides during World War II. He hadn’t seen anything like that before.
The biggest bomb we ever tested in the Pacific, which turned out to be the biggest bomb the United States ever would test, was detonated in March 1954 in the Castle Bravo test. It yielded fifteen megatons, a thousand times Hiroshima, fifty percent more than Ivy Mike had. Ike was still President. He didn’t witness the Castle Bravo test either.
Our Nevada Test Site, the test we established inside the United States, closer to home, about sixty miles northwest of Las Vegas, was established in 1951, during Truman’s administration. Some eighty tests took place there during Eisenhower’s administration. Ike didn’t witness any of them. The economy of Las Vegas got a boost from the “atomic tourists” who came to see and feel what they could. School children in Las Vegas saw the mushroom clouds. We have some of the pictures they drew of the clouds.
In July 1962, a year and a half after JFK had become president, Bobby Kennedy came to NTS. He witnessed what was to be the last above-ground test we would conduct there, a test of one of the smallest warheads we ever produced, the W54, also known as the “Davy Crockett.” The W54 weighed around fifty pounds and in the test yielded the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT. Miniscule for an atomic bomb. That was as close as we got to one of our presidents witnessing a detonation.
In 1963, during Kennedy’s administration, the Soviet Union and the United States decided we needed to limit the poisonous radioactivity that was being released by above-ground tests, and concluded the Partial Test Ban Treaty. No more tests in the atmosphere. Testing wasn’t banned but all tests thereafter--by those two countries, at least--were to be conducted underground. Now there would be no pictures even, no new ones, that is. Pictures of a heaving of the earth, maybe.
Among actual witnesses of above-ground nuclear detonations, Harold Agnew must have been unique. As a recent college graduate, he had been present on December 2, 1942 when the first nuclear chain reaction—a controlled nuclear chain reaction in this case—was achieved under the football stands at the University of Chicago in Enrico Fermi’s Pile-1, which Agnew had helped build Three years later, Agnew was present at Trinity, the first test on earth of an atomic bomb. Less than a month after that, from The Great Artiste, the B-29 that flew with the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, Agnew took the movies of the mushroom cloud over the city that are the only pictures we have from the air of the event. Three days later, at our base on Tinian Island, he helped assemble Fat Man, the bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki. You may have seen the photograph of him at the base on Tinian carrying in one hand the small reinforced metal box that contained the grapefruit-sized plutonium core for the Nagasaki bomb.
The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, and the Nagasaki bomb, Fat Man, were small bombs by today’s standards. In the 1950’s, however, Agnew also witnessed most of the major hydrogen bomb tests conducted at our Pacific Proving Ground, including the biggest one, Castle Bravo, in 1954, that yielded fifteen megatons.
As far as I know, he is the only person who witnessed all that.
From July 1970 to 1979, Agnew served as the third director (following J. Robert Oppenheimer and Norris Bradbury) of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Los Alamos was where our first atomic were designed, and then the place where most of our nuclear weapons were designed over the years.
In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 8, 1977, Agnew testified
…I firmly believe that if every five years the world’s major political leaders were required to witness the in-air detonation of a multimegaton warhead, progress on meaningful arms control measures would be speeded up appreciably.
In 1984, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, he added that every leader should be in his underwear for the experience “so he feels the heat and understands just what he’s screwing around with…. [O]nce you’ve seen one, it’s rather sobering.”
If what Agnew recommended were done, we know now that the radioactive fallout released would eventually kill some of us . We wouldn’t be able to say how many, exactly, only within a range. We wouldn’t be able say who and we wouldn’t be able say when. But some of us would die before our time. That much was certain.
Even so, might we want to choose—we and Russia, of course, but also the other seven Nuclear Weapons States there are now—to do what Agnew recommended? Might we decide that the deaths that would follow would be for us—even if we ourselves became one of those who died early--an acceptable sacrifice?
You can sign me up as supporting this. All the leaders of the nuclear weapons states would need to be present, of course. I agree that they should have to be in their underwear.
Agnew quotations:
“For those of you who may wish to remind me of the destruction caused by a nominal 15 kiloton bomb, may I remind you that I flew on the Hiroshima mission and have participated in the major thermonuclear tests which this country has conducted. As an aside, I firmly believe that if every five years the world’s major political leaders were required to witness the in-air detonation of a multimegaton warhead, progress on meaningful arms control measures would be speeded up appreciably,” – quoted in Masco, Joseph. "Nuclear technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos." American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 349-373. The citation points to 1983 Vintage Agnew. Los Alamos Science 7:71 (the quote itself an excerpt from Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, September 8, 1977).
Another Agnew statement, similar in theme: “he would require every world leader to witness an atomic blast every five years while standing in his underwear ‘so he feels the heat and understands just what he’s screwing around with… because we’re approaching an era where there aren’t any of us left that have ever seen a megaton bomb go off. And once you’ve seen one, it’s rather sobering.’” – from Los Angeles Times, Monday, January 2, 1984 Page: 15.
Next: How big can these things get?