You Might Want to Know: What Got This Business Going For Me
To get us going, here is an account of how I--an English professor, recovering lawyer, and no nuclear insider--came to be interested in this business. I begin with this story hoping it will inspire readers of this newsletter to believe that they too—as mere curious citizens--can become knowledgeable about nuclear weapons and as qualified as any nuclear insider to take part in deliberations about their future in our world. I agree with Albert Einstein who said right after World War II that “To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America’s voice.” And with J. Robert Oppenheimer who argued in 1953 in Project Candor that we who are not insiders need to be part of the deliberations. At this point, it is clear that this is not a matter to be left entirely to the insiders and experts, who all too often are deeply invested in the status quo.
I was born in 1941 so I grew up during and lived through the Cold War. Fifty years later, at the end of 1991, to my amazement, the Soviet Union had dissolved. No longer was it a mortal threat to us. Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union didn’t even want to be Communist any more. They wanted to be friends, it looked like. Hopes were high. In 1991, mine were.
High hopes. My wife Tilly and I had an interesting new job. In 1990, we both had come to the University of Arizona to join the graduate program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English in the English Department. In summer, 1991, we were teaching classes for the Bread Loaf School of English in Santa Fe. Wonderful students, themselves teachers, most of them. One evening, we had gone with some of them to a performance of the Santa Fe Opera.
The big opera house is north of town. Its ceiling is partly open to the sky. The back of the stage is open too and looks west. Framed in the opening, thirty miles away or so, was a dark flank of the Jemez Mountains. On it, a scattering of pretty lights. The lights of Los Alamos, I was told.
I knew something about Los Alamos. It was the city that grew up after World War II around Site Y, the secret site of the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project, “the town that had no name.” Site Y was where the first atomic bombs had been designed and built. Now it was the site of one of our two major nuclear weapons laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
A week later, I drove up to Los Alamos and saw the place in the center of town near Ashley Pond where the Gadget had been assembled. “The Gadget” was what the designers and engineers at Site Y called the first atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, in a test called Trinity, the Gadget had exploded with a force equivalent to forty million pounds of TNT.
From Ashley Pond, I walked across the street and into Fuller Lodge where Robert Oppenheimer, the director at Site Y, had hung his hat on a nail that was still there. And then next door to the Bradbury Museum of Science, managed at the time by the University of California, where the work of LANL was represented. Actual-size models of the two nuclear bombs that had been dropped on Japan were on display. How did these things work? Why were they so much more powerful than regular bombs? How much more powerful were they? I had only the vaguest idea about any of this.
That day I remembered something I’d learned growing up. On August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb called Little Boy detonated over Hiroshima, my father had been with the Navy in Okinawa, in command of a Landing Ship Medium in Amphibious Group 1, Flotilla 1, preparing to invade the Japanese mainland. A few weeks later, his group did land on beaches in Japan, flawlessly, he said, but it was after the surrender and they weren’t taking fire. For a short time, he had occupied Japan. I have a photograph of him occupying Japan with a pistol on his hip.
I asked him once if he’d heard what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and had wanted to go see. He said he had heard about it. But he just wanted to get home. Home was Tucson, Arizona where I and my little sister were living with our mother. I was 4 ½ years old.
My visit to Los Alamos in 1991 made me realize how ignorant I was about all of this--about the Manhattan Project, about how nuclear weapons worked, about their actual effects, about developments during the Cold War--technical developments in weapons design, in weapons delivery systems, in intelligence gathering and surveillance, in strategy, in operational plans, in politics and policy.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t been paying attention. Even in elementary school, I’d seen the pictures in Life. But all along we’d been taught, those of us who weren’t insiders, that it was none of our business. Even insiders with security clearance knew not to ask questions if they couldn’t show a “need to know.” Curiosity invited suspicion. Never mind: we probably wouldn’t understand anyway, right?
I’d lived through the forty-some years of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and, like most of us, knew almost nothing about it.
I did remember what I’d felt like in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and suddenly all of us at Tucson High were being made to feel we should be studying rocket science. I didn’t know what I was interested in but knew it wasn’t that, and felt guilty.
And I remembered what it had felt like in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was at Amherst College and we thought the end was nigh. I wondered what I’d do if I survived. Winter was coming. Canada wasn’t a good idea. Tucson was awfully far away.
I knew what I’d felt like in 1966 when I was at Oxford University and learned that back in Tucson eighteen launch sites for our new Titan II ICBM were under construction around the city. I didn’t know then that the warhead on each of the eighteen Titan IIs would be the W53 and that it had a yield of nine megatons. Or that nine megatons was twice the power of all explosives that had been detonated by all sides in World War II. Eighteen of them around Tucson. Tucson would have to be a target now if it hadn’t been before. If that mattered.
I knew what it felt like in 1966 when I was a law school student at New York University and we got the news that one of our bombers flying over Spain on something called “airborne alert” had collided with its refueling tanker and crashed and one of its hydrogen bombs had been lost, and, after a while, found. We got shown a photograph of that hydrogen bomb, the first hydrogen bomb I’d ever seen. Laid out on the deck of a ship, it looked like a big, somewhat shortened, cigar canister. With a dent in the nose.
I knew what it felt like in the 1970’s when I was teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and realized that just over the hill, in Cheyenne, forty-six miles east of us, was Warren Air Force Base, the headquarters for one of our ICBM missile fields. One of my students wrote a paper about looking east over the Laramie Range and seeing missile tracks ascending.
In the Bradbury, I could tell that some, maybe a lot, of what we couldn’t even ask about before the Cold War ended was going to come out now and be accessible to those of us who still had some interest in it. I resolved to learn as much as I could about this era I’d lived through without having any idea what was actually going on. And write about it, some way. Some way that caught what it was like to live through that time, that fearful, exciting, and anesthetized time, knowing and not knowing, and knowing we didn’t know. Some way that enabled others to come to know what we might want to know, might need to know, and could know now.
The entries in this newsletter are for those who might also want to know.
Next: How I’ve Come Out