“Ready!” said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.

“Round,” he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped. . . .

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the façade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its fellow.

Wells’ “atomic bombs” were not like the fission or fusion explosives that would come in the future. It is somewhat difficult to imagine exactly what he had in mind, as the text is not always entirely clear on it.

The section quoted above mentions an explosion with the appearance of “the crater of a small volcano.” He describes the mechanism in a bit more detail shortly thereafter:

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. […]

[…]once [Carolinum’s] degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission was a half of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays. . . . […]

Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far.

And so on, with his faux-technical terms, describing something that is both radioactive and a “continuing explosive.” To me it invokes a mash-up between a radiological weapon (contaminating with radioactivity), an open and erupting volcano, inextinguishable incendiary warfare, and the Sun.

Wells’ ideas about the atomic bomb and atomic energy are traceable to the writings of Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), the easily-overlooked British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 for his work on nuclear transmutation with the (much more famous) physicist Ernest Rutherford. Soddy was the first major English-language popularizer of the idea of “atomic energy,” the notion that the newly-discovered phenomena of radioactivity implied that all matter contained huge amounts of latent energy locked into its structure. Whereas radioactive elements tend to leak away their energy steadily, and uncontrollably, Soddy, in popular lectures published as The Interpretation of Radium (1909), imagined a future in which that energy could be released on demand:

This bottle contains about one pound of uranium oxide, and therefore about fourteen ounces of uranium. Its value is about £1. Is it not wonderful to reflect that in this little bottle there lies asleep and waiting to be evolved the energy of about nine hundred tons of coal? The energy in a ton of uranium would be sufficient to light London for a year. The store of energy in uranium would be worth a thousand times as much as the uranium itself, if only it were under our control and could be harnessed to do the world’s work in the same way as the stored energy in coal has been harnessed and controlled. […]

As we have seen, we cannot yet artificially accelerate or influence the rate of disintegration of an element, and therefore the energy in uranium, which requires a thousand million years to be evolved, is practically valueless. On the other hand, to increase the natural rate, and to break down uranium or any other element artificially, is simply transmutation. If we could accomplish the one so we could the other. These two great problems, at once the oldest and the newest in science, are one. Transmutation of the elements carries with it the power to unlock the internal energy of matter, and the unlocking of the internal stores of energy in matter would, strangely enough, be infinitely the most important and valuable consequence of transmutation.

Soddy’s book did not speak of bombs, but its allusions to immense the power contained in the nuclei of atoms were frequent, and many of his examples of such, like the one above regarding the lighting of London, would quickly become standard clichés.1

He describes individual radioactive decay reactions as “explosive” in character, and does at one point make an unusual analogy about how much is unknown about the atomic realm at that point, comparing it to an architect being suddenly told that his everyday bricks could “could with effect be employed as an explosive incomparably more powerful in its activities than dynamite,” but he never warns of radioactivity or atomic energy as a fodder for weaponry. The jump from a new, inexhaustible source of energy to a dread weapon seems to have been Wells’ own.2

In the summer of 1922, various news syndication agencies ran a story that consisted of essentially one long quote from “one of the eminent English scientists” warning of similarly dire possibilities:

We are on the eve of scientific discoveries of so sensational and so far-reaching a character as to render Einstein’s theory, by comparison, child’s play. I predict that within the next five, ten, or at the outside twenty years, men will be able to say, “I have harnessed the atom.” […] The energy stored in such elements as thorium and uranium is stupendous. […] It only needs the knowledge of how to ignite it — how to cause the atoms to break up when we desire — to make this power immediately available. […]

It is conceivable, too, that such terrific force might eventually be liberated as to blow up the world.

Then consider the possibilities of war. The first nation to discover the secret will be in a position to wipe out all the other nations, literally, in a quarter of an hour. It could send over an aeroplane with a 2,000-pound bomb which would have as devastating an effect as that of a million aeroplanes carrying the 2,000-pound bombs in use today. […]

The question is: Which will that nation be?

This article circulated globally, at times accompanied by dramatic headlines, like “EARTH AS A BOMB.”3 Some of the accounts say it was an “eminent Oxford scientist” who provided the story. But who was the “eminent” scientist? It is quite unclear. That the article ran anonymously suggests that whomever the source was, they didn’t want their name publicly attached to the idea. To my knowledge, no one ever came forward later to claim their prescience as the source after the fact.4

In interwar September 1924, Winston Churchill tried his hand at writing about new technological futures in an article with the odd title, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Influenced by both H.G. Wells — Churchill claimed to have read all of Wells’ books since The Time Machine immediately as they came out, and multiple times — and his close scientific friend and advisor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell, Oxford professor), Churchill laid out a his grim sense of coming conflict and the role that science and technology might play in it:

The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. But up to the present time the means of destruction at the disposal of man have not kept pace with his ferocity. Reciprocal extermination was impossible in the Stone Age. One cannot do much with a clumsy club. […] It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that War really began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organization of mankind into great States and Empires and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined.

Churchill warned that the peace of the Great War was likely a temporary one, as “two mighty branches of the European family will never rest content with their existing situation” — Russia and Germany. And just as surely as war will return, Churchill wrote, the technology of mass destruction will continue to evolve:

“Wars,” said a distinguished American to me some years ago, “are fought with Steel: weapons may change, but Steel remains the core of all modern warfare. France has got the Steel of Europe, and Germany has lost it. Here, at any rate, is an element of permanency.” “Are you sure,” I asked, “that the wars of the future will be fought with Steel?” A few weeks later I talked with a German. “What about Aluminium?” he replied. “Some think,” he said, “that the next war will be fought with Electricity.” And on this a vista opens out of electrical rays which could paralyse the engines of a motor-car, could claw down aeroplanes from the sky, and conceivably be made destructive of human life or human vision. Then there are Explosives. Have we reached the end? Has Science turned its last page on them? May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?

Churchill further worried that such weapons could allow “a base, degenerate, immoral race” of people to “make an enemy far above them in quality” their slaves on the basis of their possessing and being willing to use novel technological weapons.5

I don’t believe that Churchill’s article had a major public impact on the thinking about “atomic bombs,” but it doesn’t really need to have: it reflects that this discourse about science fiction weaponry had made it to what would very soon be the highest echelons of public policy in at least the United Kingdom (Churchill was on the political “outs” in 1924, but would soon come back), and joined into security debates. Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler in particular shared a common belief in the value of “wonder weapons” produced by scientific research, a shared “lesson” of the Great War for all of them. It is part of the context of why each of these nations were willing, to differing degrees, entertain the possibilities of fantastical wartime research, including atomic research.

There were other minor references to “atomic bombs” across the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the discovery of nuclear fission. The most important and perhaps famous inspiration was that of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who famously credited H.G. Wells for his development of the concept of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, over five years before the discovery of nuclear fission. He later described it this way:6

In 1932, while I was still in Berlin, I read a book by H. G. Wells. It was called The World Set Free. This book was written in 1913, one year before the World War, and in it H.G. Wells describes the discovery of artificial radioactivity and puts it in the year of 1933, the year in which it actually occurred. He then proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of Europe. […] The book made a very great impression on me, but I didn’t regard it as anything but fiction.

I was no longer thinking about [H. G. Well’s book] until I found myself in London about the time of the British Association [meeting] in September 1933. I read in the newspapers a speech by Lord [Ernest] Rutherford. He was quoted as saying that he who talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial scale is talking moonshine. This sort of set me pondering as I was walking the streets of London, and I remember that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row. As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large a mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might in fact be possible became sort of an obsession with me. […]

In the spring of 1934 I had applied for a patent which described the laws governing such a chain reaction. This was the first time, I think, that the concept of critical mass was developed and that a chain reaction was seriously discussed. Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.

It isn’t that Wells’ book gave Szilard any strong technical inspiration — Carolinum, it isn’t. Szilard’s neutron-based chain reaction is his own. But Wells did clearly provoke Szilard’s imagination about atomic bombs, and helped frame how he thought they might matter if they were possible. And thus Szilard’s first impulse was towards secrecy, towards believing that such a chain reaction would be vastly important development for humankind. And that impulse set off its own historical chain reaction, leading to Hiroshima, the H-bomb, and beyond.7

Szilard didn’t have a candidate reaction for his concept of the chain reaction, and while he did some research to search for one, he ended up essentially shelving the question for several years. Nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassman, and Otto Frisch in late 1938, and became global news in early 1939. The moment that Szilard heard about the discovery, he was ready to understand what it might mean:8

[The physicist Eugene] Wigner told me of Hahn’s discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron; this it the process which we call fission. When I heard this I saw immediately that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted in this fission process, then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

This is also one of the clearest examples we have of the complicated relationship between scientific research (radioactivity, transmutation), scientific popularization (Soddy), science fiction (Wells), a feedback loop back into scientific inspiration (Szilard), and broader policy decisions (Churchill).

The pre-fission history of atomic bombs is important, not just for Szilard, but for a vast number of other people, including scientists, statesmen, and the everyday public. It created a context for understanding what “atomic bomb” even meant prior to their invention, and towards thinking about the idea of a vastly powerful science-borne weapon as a possible concrete reality. It is why, in 1945, when the United States announced that it had invented an “atomic bomb,” people understood immediately that this meant a vastly powerful, possibly game-changing weapon, and not, say, a very tiny explosive.

The atomic bomb in Wells’ book may have been “strange even to the men who used them,” but Wells’ book made the concept considerably less strange than it might have otherwise been.

Just this week, the filmmaker/special effects artist Peter Kuran, of Trinity and Beyond fame, released a restored version of the film that is such an improvement over the muddy, pixellated version that had been made available to the NSA. You can view it in its entirety on his YouTube channel:

There is so much one can say about it, but for the moment I want to focus on one aspect of it that I have been obsessed with for some time: its war plan. There are three war plans discussed in The Power of Decision: WAR DANCE, which is a described as “a typical war plan for our heavy units”; QUICK STRIKE, which is the dramatized war plan shown in the bulk of the film, and the one shown in the most close-up detail; and FOLLOW THRU, which is an operation that was meant to be running directly after QUICK STRIKE. Because it is the most detailed and most carefully discussed, I am going to focus entirely on QUICK STRIKE.1

I have been pouring over the details of QUICK STRIKE for some years now. I put off writing this post until after Kuran’s restored version was posted (I had gotten wind of it a bit earlier) because I thought it would help me resolve a lot of unanswered questions to be able to see the “Big Board” — yes, that is what it is called — more clearly. Kuran quite generously also allowed met to access a version without a watermark for this post.

What has made QUICK STRIKE a fascination of mine for so long is that it is devilishly hard to get information on “real” war plans for any period, much less this bomber-centric one, in a period in which the US had vast forces to deploy. We have had previous releases that gave a sense of targets, and we know where many of the weapons were located, and we know what some of the planned “movements” were, and we know what the general philosophy of these planes were… but it’s another thing to see something that is meant to be a “realistic” nuclear war plan, made for internal, classified consumption. It is, we should note on the onset, not an actual nuclear war plan — as I will discuss, many of the details are clearly fuzzed/fabricated — and it is, even within its own context, meant to be a future war plan, but I believe it does reflect much of what we know war planning in this period looked like, and vividly so.

I’ve created a mosaic out of all of the screenshots of the Big Board showing QUICK STRIKE in the film. This was done with over a dozen carefully selected images of the restored film and trial-and-error with Photoshop’s Photomerge feature, careful hand-masking of layers to get the highest resolution possible, and then an overall straightening of the piece. Here it is in its “raw” form:

This map does not read itself. There’s a lot going on in it. The black spots are not redaction marks — they are just areas that do not appear in any particular frame, or if they do appear, it is at such a distance (and they have so little information in them) that it just distracts from the overall image (e.g., that small area in the Pacific, which you can see in the first film screenshot above — fitting in that extreme angle into this was not within Photomerge’s capabilities, and it did not seem worth it). I have not “filled in” any missing areas for the sake of aesthetics.

I have also made an annotated version of the above mosaic, which I will use to help “decode” and analyze the plan below. I will explain the various annotations in turn.

First, our orientation: this is a polar projection, centered on the North Pole, looking “down” at the planet. This is common for Cold War “face off” visualizations for reasons that are somewhat geo-strategically obvious: a “side-on” project (e.g. Mercator) projection obscures the distances quite a bit when talking about travel over or near the poles (especially Mercator, which dramatically distorts near the poles). So to get your bearing, take note of the North Pole (where the thick vertical black line and a thin horizontal meridian meet), and look at North America in the lower right, and Eurasia in the upper left.

There a few different pieces of information shown on this map. First is, of course, the map itself, with its representation of geographic locations. Note that the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Warsaw Pact states (Eastern Europe) are essentially undifferentiated and treated as one large, pink-tinged entity. We know that the war plans of this period did not allow for “de-selecting” China or other countries — it was assumed that all of Communism was the target, and the SAC planners actually resented and feared the idea that a civilian authority (like the president) would ever want to have a more “limited” plan, as Daniel Ellsberg writes disturbingly about in The Doomsday Machine.2

There are two additional sets of borders added to the “base” map: early warning radar lines (or “nets” as they say in the film). The black line with red and white borders around Eurasia is the Soviet warning network, and the yellow-on-red line around North America is its American equivalent (i.e., the Distant Early Warning Line and other radar stations).

Let’s zoom in on a screenshot of the United States:

Dotting the Allied countries are red and black dots. The black dots are “launch bases”: bases that American attacks would emanate from. The red dots are “recovery bases”: friendly airfields that any plane that has survived its attacking run, or any damaged plane, could land at after their attack, potentially refueling and then participating in a future attack wave (e.g. FOLLOW THRU). In the above, you can see that all of the bases in the continental United States are “launch bases,” and that the only “recovery” bases visible are in Alaska and Canada. In the larger mosaic, you can see lots of “recovery” bases abroad (more on bases abroad in a moment).

The lines that emanate from the black dots and make their way to the Soviet Union are the attack themselves. They come in six colors: black, blue, red, green, orange, and yellow. Some of the lines converge at large colored circles with shapes on them; these are aerial refueling points, and each of them have their own code names: SUN SPOT, ROBIN HOOD, RAIN DROP (shown over northern Canada above), HOT ROD, HEN PECKED, and LIL’ LADY. Each of the different “plans” has different code names for its refueling points. These are where outgoing long-range bombers would rendezvous with aerial refueling planes, like the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, and take on more fuel before making their bombing run.

One important thing: the bases marked in the United States are mostly nonsense. The location of SAC bases in the USA is not (and was never) secret, and we also know (from declassified reports) where SAC stored nuclear weapons in 1958. A few of those “launch bases” are correct-enough — e.g., Amarillo AFB, March AFB, and Biggs AFB are in cities marked as bases — but a lot of actual bases are missing, and a lot of the labeled bases are just totally wrong/nonexistent. The base locations in The Power of Decision are bogus. This is something I can say with much more authority now that we have the restored version of the film, as it was harder before to see really where everything was located. Again, this is meant to be evocative of an actual war plan, and I think it is that, but it should not be mistaken for an actual war plan.

What do the colors of the lines mean? To the left of the big board, behind our narrator, is a table of lines of the same colors showing their flight times to targets. It’s not easy to see the whole thing in detail, but you can see some of it in the above screenshot. Each line in the table is labeled with one of three acronyms: BW, GMS, and SRW, each of which also has either a number (e.g. 203 SRW) or letter (e.g. “E” GMS) in front of it. So the group of lines at his elbow, above, are 491 BW (blue), 581 SRW (black, very long), “E” GMS (short yellow), and 10 BW (blue).

In Air Force lingo, a BW is a Bomb Wing, a SRW is a Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, and a GMS is a Guided Missile Squadron. The coloring of the BW and SRW lines appears to be inconsistent and without any obvious rhyme or reason; I am not sure how you would correlate the table on the left with the map on the right at all. The GMS lines are always yellow, and the short timing on the table is pretty consistent with them being surface-to-surface missiles of the sort that were just going online in the late 1950s, like the AGM-28 Hound Dog. The yellow lines are also the only ones that never branch.3

The thicknesses of the lines also seem rather arbitrary. Sometimes a thick line branches into many smaller lines, implying the thickness correlates with the number of planes, but a lot of the times thin lines also branch to similarly thin lines, and some thick lines do not branch at all. Two massive red lines that emerge from the eastern USA intersect at refueling point HEN PECKED, combine, and then just as abruptly end at the Soviet early warning line. Only red, orange, and green lines are ever thick — blue lines never are. Some of the red, orange, blue, and black lines are spindly thin. What does it mean? Perhaps nothing, in this case, but it would make sense if these lines did have meaning in an “actual” war plan, and not this “evocative” version of one.

Above is a detailed screenshot of Western Europe, which I have flipped on the vertical axis so it is oriented with north being up. I want to use it to talk about both the foreign bases, and the targets.

First, on foreign bases: as you can see, there are launch bases and attack lines emanating out of bases outside of the United States. In Europe, these are set in the United Kingdom, Spain, Morocco, and Libya. As with the US detail, there are some things about this that are correct, some things that appear to be erroneous. The UK sites do not align with actual SAC bases at the time very well. The Spanish lines appear to emanate from Torrejón, but are missing the SAC bases at Morón and Zargoza. The Morrocan lines appear to emanate from a place far to the east of the actual bases (Sidi Slimane, Ben Guerir, and Nouasseur); the left-most red dot (a return base) could be Ben Guerir, but the black dots look like nonsense. Wheelus air Base, in Libya was an important coordinating base for SAC, but did not host nuclear weapons per its own internal (now declassified) lists.

One could try to make excuses for this: the verbal description of the plan in the film says that aircraft have already been deployed to forward bases, and that can mean that weapons have been moved around prior to attack. But I think it is far simpler and more likely to just assume that the map locations were intentionally obfuscated by people who wanted the attack to resemble an actual strike (with plausible countries and locations) but were not going to give actual detailed target or base information to the film crew if they didn’t need to.

Similarly, the orange lines coming out of the Azores (another detail that had confounded me until the restored film was available) are in a similar category as Wheelus: as far as I know, the Azores did not store nuclear weapons, but do have important US air bases in them.

The launch bases in Okinawa, Guam, and Greenland (Thule) do seem accurate. It is less clear with (mainland) Japan what is going on — are the bombers rendezvousing there and then continuing on, or are they meant to be actually based in Japan? Are they Strategic Reconnaissance or bombers? Japan did not (willingly) host nuclear weapons during the Cold War, although it is clear that the US did host them at Okinawa and some other US bases at times. But definitely not, say, in Tokyo, as indicated on the map.

For the sake of comparison, I’ve created a quick little map, below, that approximates the same map projection as the screenshot of the United States above, with actual SAC bases, including nuclear-armed ones, shown as dots, for around the period of the film’s creation and its near-term projected future. This is not a complete map of SAC deployments at the time: the projection necessarily leaves out many, such as the weapons deployed in French Morocco (Ben Guerir, Nouasseur, and Sidi Slimane), Greenland (at Thule), Guam, Okinawa, Spain (Morón, Torrejón, and Zaragoza), and the United Kingdom (at Brize Norton, Fairford, Greenham Common, Lakenheath, and Mildenhall).4 The point here is that one can readily see that these maps do not have much in common — the data does not line up, except in a few places that might just be random.

The targets of the attack similarly look somewhat vaguely accurate, but also somewhat bogus. Yes, Moscow was heavily targeted — no secret there! As are a few other major areas, like Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Tomsk, and what looks like areas in East Germany, Poland, and Soviet Ukraine. But there are a lot of more specific targets that are conspicuously missing. The scale and scope of US targets against the Soviet Union in the late 1950s is known to have been vast.

It is also difficult, I would note, to judge exactly what is targeted. The lines of the planes sometimes end in “target icons,” but more often than not they just end in some part of the map without anything indicated. The rhetorical stance of The Power of Decision is that most of the targets are defensive or counterforce, with not much discussion of the targeting of cities or even industry. Magnitogorsk, a major site of Soviet industry, is not indicated with any target labels (you can see its label on the map), but there are some bombing routes that terminate near it. I do not suggest, again, that these bombing routes or labels are accurate, but just suggest that the plan as displayed seems to be far more extensive than the target labels would let on, presuming those planes aren’t just going to those unlabeled spots on the map and simply turning around to go home again.

The labels for the target types are mostly pretty straightforward — and primarily counterforce. “SAM” (large black circles) are surface-to-air missiles. “F & T Control” (yellow circles) are sites that coordinate fighters and tactical responses, and possibly early warning radars stations. “Control” (maroon squares) appears to be “government control” (see below) which suggests command and control sites. “A & TN weapons sites” (black squares) are nuclear weapons storage sites. “LRAA HQ” (purple triangles) are Long Range Air Army headquarters, where LRAA is essentially the Soviet equivalent of SAC (at least in SAC documents from the time). “Liquid fuel” (large gray circles) storage sites and “transportation centers” (large red cirlces) speak for themselves. The only strange one, not explained at any point in the film, is “M Center” (green circles). I had wondered if it was “military centers” but based on their placement — along the Soviet/Chinese borders, except to the south — my guess is that the M standards for “missile.”

Later in the film, they do a “preliminary strike report” (above) with categories that mostly overlap with the map categories. You can see that a single category, “Missile Sites,” has perhaps absorbed both “SAM” and “M Center.” We also have a clarification that “Control” is probably “Government Control.” We also have two categories not indicated explicitly on the map: “air supp[ort] industries” and “war sust[aining] industries.” Again, all of the rhetoric of these targets is about counterforce targeting.

Lastly, let’s talk about the timing of this attack. The film explains that QUICK STRIKE is meant to elapse over 20 hours or so — QUICK by the standards of world war, to be sure, but slow by the standards of the missile age. Those concentric black lines going into the interior of the USSR, with H+0, H+1, etc. indicated on my annotated version, are estimates of a bomber’s flight time once it has hit the Soviet early warning net. So in principle a bomber could make it all the way to the heart of the USSR in 4 hours. In practice, many of them would not be trying to do that, and many would probably be shot down by enemy defenses. But, of course, they’ve planned for that. As our narrator explains:

Remember, this is a “bomb as you go” concept. Targets are bombed progressively, shallow targets first, with the strike continuing to deeper targets. This enhances the penetration capability of succeeding waves. This pattern is essential because we are playing the Soviet’s game. He picked the time of day, he knows we’re coming, we must use every trick to overwhelm him.

So if you bomb one target and then get shot down, that’s one less target for the bomber behind you to worry about.

There is no mention in the film of targeting Soviet cities, and no attempt made to estimate enemy casualties. The only casualty estimates are American ones: 60 million “personnel casualties,” 20 million wounded and 40 million dead. The 1958 US population was around 175 million, so that is a third of the country rendered dead or injured.

As a point of comparison, in the introduction to The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg described an official report he received in 1961 that he received which suggested that the deaths in the Soviet Union and China from an all-out thermonuclear attack by the United States would start at around 275 million at the moment of war, and rise to 325 million over the next six months. Including deaths in Eastern Europe, as well as collateral deaths from fallout from just American attacks in other nations, would raise the total deaths to around 600 million, “a hundred Holocausts,” as Ellsberg puts it.5

So what is the take away of all of this? The specifics of the QUICK STRIKE war plan shown in The Power of Decision are certainly made up for the purposes of the film. But the general feel of the war plan is probably correct: in the late 1950s, the United States could, within a few short hours, mobilize a bomber force so vast, and with so much firepower, that it could exterminate the populations of multiple nations. And, in fact, this system was so rigidly constructed that they really did not have any options to limit that destruction, even if someone (say, the President) had wanted to.

The rhetorical stance of the film is meant to one of responsibility and constraint: in the film, the Soviets have started World War III, but the United States is going to end it. The actors — and again, they are all actors — do not appear to ever relish their role in the war, but they also appear satisfied to grimly carry it out. There is no hand-wringing. There is no, “my god, what have we done?” moments, as they contemplate a slaughter that would out-do the Holocaust by an order of magnitude. “Sir, we have failed in our primary mission: deterrence,” a colonel briefing on the outcome of QUICK STRIKE begins, with a dark tone to his voice. “However,” he continues, brightening, “our second mission, of destroying the enemy, is apparently fulfilled.” It’s more than a little chilling.

I’ve been teaching with the diagrams of QUICK STRIKE for over a decade now. I think there’s real value in showing how the abstractions of deterrence theory were rendered into a horrific, tangible, effective killing machine at the height of the Cold War. I sometimes have students who (adorably, naively) ask: “but would they actually have used the bomb in this way?” And being able to point to this proud, in-house, top-secret, self-congratulatory film is one easy way to answer that question. It sure looks like they would have.

There is something, too, I think, in the fact that these 1950s plans were all bomber-based: that human beings, at every step of the way, would need to carry out this horror, this atrocity. It was not a “push button” affair; while the system’s wheels were well-oiled, as the film makes clear, it was hardly automatic. You can’t blame the logic of machines for this one.

When I call this kind of thing an atrocity, I am not saying that the people who designed it, or served in it, were themselves evil. I understand full well the logic of deterrence: build the system, and perhaps it will never have to be used. But if you have, indeed, failed at your mission of deterrence — and the film is explicitly based on the premise that deterrence has failed — then what have you got? What moral shelter can one take, as one sets into motion the largest act of civilian slaughter in human history?

The first, from October 1951, was titled “The Clergy in Civil Defense” (AG-25-1) and prepared under the supervision of a Religious Advisory Committee of the FCDA.1 Its use of the term “clergy” is, it clarifies, meant to be pan-religious — “the clergy of all faiths” — although the committee was composed of four Christians (of different sects) and one rabbi.

The role of the clergy (thus defined) is divided into two phases: “pre-attack” and “post-attack.” Pre-attack is perhaps the most interesting: they are charged with the task of reinforcing a particular ideological stance:

(a) Maintenance of firm resolution and composure of the people through preaching and worship.

(b) Through pastoral care of families and individuals, creation of a sense of responsibility and spiritual security among the people to meet the possible exigencies of attack on a scale never experienced before in the United States.

(c) Maintenance of courage and spiritual well-being of children through regular programs of religious education (especially in respect to parent groups and teachers).

(d) Encouragement of the enlistment of volunteers for the civil defense services.

(e) Acting as chaplains to the various civil defense services such as warden, rescue, and fire fighting, during training and in actual operation.

(f) Planning, organizing, and preparing services of the clergy and other religious activities in time of attack or other emergency.

(g) Planning and arranging the part of the clergy and members of religious organizations in mutual aid and mobile support programs.

(h) Planning for religious ministry in evacuation reception areas.

(i) Planning with chaplains of adjacent military installations for cooperation and mutual assistance in case of attack.

The first four in this list strike me as quite different from the rest. It is one thing to conclude that pre-attack (or pre-disaster) preparation means thinking about the organizational responses to the attack (or disaster). But the first three are about creating some kind of spiritual or psychological sentiment in their congregations, which seems to go well outside the normal role for the federal government to recommend. An encroachment of “turf,” one might say. And the fourth, actively encouraging participation in the Civil Defense program, assumes that said program is in fact in alignment with the beliefs of these different organizations — something, perhaps, that they could take for granted in 1951, but, as we will see, becomes a trickier assumption as the decade continued.

In the post-attack phase, the role of the clergy shifts to being of “great help in sustaining and restoring the morale of the community.” This is pretty much what you would expect: they are to administer religious rites for “for the seriously injured, dying, and dead,” to conduct burial services (“including possible mass burials”), comfort the survivors, lead ministry and worship “where appropriate,” attend to the religious needs of civil defense workers, and participate in “mutual aid” activities as is possible and appropriate. All of which strikes me as quite practical by comparison to the pre-attack directives.

In 1954, when “The Clergy in Civil Defense” was issued, Civil Defense programs were not yet especially controversial. There are a variety of reasons one could point to for this — the thermonuclear age had not yet arrived, the threat of atomic war against the continental United States still felt somewhat remote to most Americans, and Americans could by and large simply ignore Civil Defense if they thought it was not for them. The amount being expended on it was never large, and it largely did not intrude into American lives one way or the other with the exception of some mild indoctrination for children like “Duck and Cover” drills.

Starting in 1954, however, this situation changed significantly. The Castle Bravo nuclear test accident made it quite evident that the thermonuclear age was at hand and it meant that the destructive capacity for nuclear war had increased dramatically. Both the US and the Soviets began speaking publicly, in much more dramatic terms than before, about what nuclear war would mean. And the FCDA and local Civil Defense authorities began a series of national drills, known as “Operation Alert,” in which they mandated that everyday citizens participate in mock Civil Defense exercises.

The latter point is probably the most important, from the perspective of public opinion about Civil Defense. When your city shuts down for a few hours so that you can pretend you have been obliterated, it forces one to take stock of the situation. Political scientists would say that it increases the salience of the risk: it goes from something abstract to something tangible.

And while most people went along with the exercises, one finds the emergence of a small but significant group of people who began objecting to them on both practical and moral grounds. When the 1955 “Operation Alert” exercises came around, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers of America refused to participate, instead handing out pamphlets:

We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.

Over two dozen people were arrested for their non-participation in the drill. While the anti-Civil Defense arguments would broaden over the years — by 1960, over a thousand people would be arrested in NYC for protesting the drill — the fact that this initial argument against Civil Defense was rooted in a religious pacifism, and a specifically Catholic organization, is what strikes me as being interesting in this context. The 1951 pamphlet and its authors assumed, perhaps correctly for its moment, that Civil Defense was religiously uncontroversial. Three years later, however, serious religious objections to Civil Defense had emerged, and consensus could not be taken for granted.

Which is interesting context to consider for the revised version of pamphlet AG-25-1 that was released in October 1956, now re-titled as “The Church and Civil Defense” (AG-25-1 Revised).2 Gone, apparently, is the council of religious advisors — in fact, no author is listed whatsoever. Instead, it appears that the FCDA Administrator since 1953, former Nebraska Governor Val Peterson, created a Religious Affairs Office which consolidated the functions of the previous council and made them a more integrated part of the FCDA. Heading this office, since 1954, was one Dr. Fred W. Kern, a Lutheran reverend — and Peterson’s brother-in-law — who ran the office for the next seven and a half years.3

What was Kern’s agenda? Kern gave a talk at a Civil Defense conference in 1956 describing in vivid his approach to the job, and the world:4

When I came with civil defense, no one knew exactly what I should do and I didn't either. I think there was in the minds of some people the idea that the church is such a big institution and has so many millions of people that somehow we ought to get them behind us — we ought to get the church to support civil defense . Now, how are we going to do that? We know very well that everyone in any public office knows that you are not going to go to the church and tell them the government wants them to do so and so, the government says that this is what you ought to do If you ever tried that approach, you know from very clear experience that the opposite may have happened, because the church in this country is free, and that is one of our cherished freedoms. We don't have the government interfere in any way with what we do in our religious life, so long as it isn't contrary to the interests of our government or our citizenship.

I had to do some studying on this business of civil defense because I knew very little about it. I started reading books on civil defense and on communism. Naturally when we think about the question, “Why do we have civil defense," we conclude, "Well, we have to protect ourselves, we have to be ready to live, to preserve our life, we have to be ready to do something for the preservation of our country, our properties. "And, of course, you have to ask yourself, Against whom? "Well,” you say, "only one source, and that is communism.

This is quite an interesting jump — that the role of the church in civil defense is rooted in a deep anti-Communist sentiment. This is clearly what animated Kern, beyond the more prosaic functions that religious organizations could serve after a major disaster. Kern’s talk frames the entire issue in theological–ideological terms:

It has been my contention that we have civil defense because of an ideological friction and conflict in the world. […] The cause of all the friction and conflict and the struggles between East and West and democracy and communism rest with the idea or the concept that we have concerning the true nature of a human being. What is man? It’s a moral issue, because it is a moral judgment applied to the nature of human life and human beings. And there’s only one institution in the whole world and certainly in our country that is dedicated to this problem of the moral judgment of life, to the nature of man, to his origin, the value of his life and his destiny. And that is the church. […]

In the Soviet Union there is no God. It is strange how philosophy can even presume to be logical and rational without the acknowledgment of a Creator. The Russians believe there is nothing spiritual in the world, there is no God, no spirit; there is nothing spiritual about a man — he is material.

And so on, and so on. “Civil defense,” he concluded, “should include spiritual civil defense.“ Because even after a nuclear war, Communism would still exist, even if “every living Communist” was killed. Because Communism was an idea, and as such, “you can’t kill it with a bullet. The only way to meet it is on its own grounds, and that is basically an ideological basis, ideological counteroffensive.”

It seems likely to me that Kern’s expansive mandate was a reaction to exactly the kind of skepticism of Civil Defense that had been developing in the intervening years. Whereas “The Clergy in Civil Defense” could take for granted that Civil Defense was essentially seen as a positive activity, Kern is trying to sell it as an essentially holy war.

The pamphlet, “The Church in Civil Defense,” is not nearly as fiery as Kern’s own speeches, but one sees his beliefs in it:

The very existence of Western civilization is endangered. Our present state of culture, developed over centuries, is threatened with extinction. Not only democratic government, the highest form of political order yet evolved, which offers the greatest degree of individual and group freedom while guarding the rights of all, but religion itself, is challenged by a godless, totalitarian tyranny. The church cannot do its work effectively in a state which stifles it If civilization is to continue to make progress and if democratic government is to exist, then the church must be free to continue its mission.

Communism is a substitute religion. At its deepest level the conflict between Soviet communism and the free world is a religious conflict. We are not dealing with an inconsequential perversion of philosophy and religion. Communism tries to interest mankind in religious terms in spite of its avowed godlessness. It has its substitute god and utilizes all the facets of religious motivation The Party tries to usurp the place of the church and to give the writings of Marx and Lenin the status of sacred scriptures. The kingdom of God is promised in the classless and stateless, that is, governmentless society . […] The old Marxian charge that religion is an opiate used to oppress people can be dispelled only by an alert and positive church, a church motivated by its tenets of love of God and love of man, and therefore, a church actively interested in any program of human welfare. Civil defense is a program of human welfare devoted to saving and sustaining human life.

Other than the introductory notes, the actual recommendations are not all that different from the 1951 pamphlet. The only notable difference that jumped out to me was that each clergyman involved with Civil Defense was entitled to a helmet and special armband that would so identify them in time of disaster:

There is also a fascinating organizational chart that divides the work into three functions: the spiritual, self-protection, and mutual aid. I have to admit that having “mass burial” and “panic prevention” being put next to one another raised an eyebrow.

There are a smattering of records of Kern’s work beyond this pamphlet. He was apparently still in the role when the FCDA was consolidated into the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in 1958, and stayed in the role until the early 1960s. He gave talks to many religious groups and organizations, and was the one who led the opening “invocation” at official FCDA meetings. His office facilitated the donation of thousands of religious books for post-apocalyptic use, as shown in the photo below.

The official accounts of Kern’s talks to religious groups tend to be pretty positive. A PhD thesis from Matthew Justin Hall at the University of Kentucky on Southern Baptists in the Cold War suggests that the main concerns that at least that group had with Civil Defense were rooted in whether the post-nuclear state would impose too many requirements on religious organizations, weakening separation of Church and State. Kern, in both his pamphlets and talks, urged that this was not the case, that the plans were only to strengthen existing religious activities.5

Aside from the fact that “clergy” and “church” in this time was limited exclusively to Christian and Jewish faiths (with even latter’s inclusion feeling a bit tokenish), I would also just note that like all Civil Defense at this point in time, it is extremely focused on white audiences. Which is not all that interesting in the context of Eisenhower-era Civil Defense, except inasmuch as neglecting African-Americans when targeting religious communities is, well, excluding a potential audience that would possibly have been quite engaged. There is undoubtedly more that could be said on this point.

Ultimately, both of these pamphlets are interesting artifacts from Cold War America, and the shifting ways in which the efforts at Civil Defense were framed in both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The push towards an increasingly ideological interpretation of the question of what the role of religious institutions ought to be in preparing for, and recovering from, a nuclear attack, is likely both a reflection of the changing strategic context, as well as possibly a reaction to the growing skepticism towards Civil Defense within the United States. This axis of national security, ideology, and religion is of course quite a potent one in the United States, particularly during certain administrations — Eisenhower, Reagan, Trump — that have sought to explicitly imbue religious sentiment into their ideological pronouncements.

For post-nuclear apocalypses, the trope frequently takes the form of the survivors having only the dimmest or confused memories of what a nuclear weapon actually is. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), this manifests as a hidden, subterranean religion carried on by mutant human survivors who worship a massive Doomsday bomb emblazoned with the symbols for Alpha and Omega. In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), the memory persists linguistically as the “Bad Time.”

One of the works that engages with this question of forgetting in a sustained way is Walker M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). The novel is a compilation of three short stories (written independently but then “fixed up” into a singular story) that looks at three distinct far-future periods after a nuclear war. As with the Roman Empire, some institutions have survived the fall: notably, the Catholic Church, that enduring institution.2 In the novel, the Church once again becomes a repository for old knowledge, which, over the course of many centuries, leads to the reinvention of a technological civilization — and to yet another nuclear war.

This cyclical (and perhaps cynical) message is at some intersection of a statement about human nature and technological inevitabilities: once invented, the bomb cannot be un-invented, and once they have the bomb, humans will inevitably use it again, it is just a matter of time. It would be an interesting variant to imagine the same story but without the Church’s role; is the problem that the knowledge was preserved, or would that rediscovery have been inevitable eventually anyway?

A relevant and provocative argument from the sociology of nuclear technology can be found in Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi’s “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1995.3 The argument that MacKenzie and Spinardi make is about the nature of knowledge and forgetting, and its possible relevance to nuclear weapons.

The core of the argument revolves around an idea that was by then quite common in the sociology of science and technology known a tacit knowledge. They explain the distinction early on in the article:

Explicit knowledge is information or instructions that can be formulated in words or symbols and, therefore, can be stored, copied, and transferred by impersonal means, such as in written documents or computer files. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that has not been (and perhaps cannot be) formulated explicitly and, therefore, cannot effectively be stored or transferred entirely by impersonal means. Motor skills supply a set of paradigmatic examples of tacit knowledge in everyday life. Most of us, for example, know perfectly well how to ride a bicycle yet would find it impossible to put into words how we do so. There are (to our knowledge) no textbooks of bicycle riding, and when children are taught to ride, they are not given long lists of written or verbal instructions. Instead, someone demonstrates what to do and encourages them in the inevitably slow and error-ridden process of learning for themselves.

Anything you can communicate by writing down is explicit: the Pythagorean theorem and instructions on how to use it, for example. Or a nuclear weapons blueprint. But not all knowledge is of this form. “Tacit” means wordless — it is knowledge that you feel in your hands, in your body, in your experience. Riding a bicycle, as above, is the paradigmatic example.

One could write down how to ride a bicycle, but reading that description would not make one capable of doing it. Indeed, the best text about how to ride a bicycle is essentially one that gives instruction as to how to teach oneself how to ride a bicycle:

1. Acquire a bicycle.

2. Understand that the goal will be to continually propel it forward while balancing on top of it and turning the pedals with your feet, in a forward “running” motion. Your hands will need to turn the front wheel to change direction. Observing someone else doing this first would help. You will be continually shifting your balance to maintain stability.

3. Attempt to do this over and over again until your brain figures out how to coordinate your movements and balance in a way that gives you control over the bicycle. You will fail frequently in the beginning. Wear a helmet.

This isn’t really a recipe that you can just follow, it is a program for education, and the actual acquisition of the understanding will come when some nebulous connections “click” in the brain. And like so many things involving tacit knowledge, you can’t really forget it either: if you go 10 years without riding a bicycle, you can still probably do it, you will not need to re-learn anything.

I think the above description gets at both the benefits and difficulties of this term. It does seem to describe certain kinds of knowledge well, although the barriers between it an explicit knowledge are not as iron-clad as they may at first seem. Just because something is tacit does not mean it cannot be learned or taught, it just means that the written word is insufficient for doing it by itself. A lot of what we call experience and know-how is tacit knowledge: the kinds of embodied understandings that one gets over time with close familiarity with any subject that goes well beyond what one can find in a textbook. And this is why, incidentally, “experience” matters so much more than formal knowledge in most contexts: because we recognize there is a difference between “mere book-learning” and “hands-on work.”

Ask anyone who has gotten a post-graduate higher degree and they will tell you that most of the “work” of that experience is essentially an apprenticeship where one “learns by doing.” This doesn’t negate the value of book learning — you need that, too, for a lot of things — but it emphasizes that true mastery isn’t just the book learning, it’s the tacit knowledge, too.

So what is the relevance to nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons are complex technical artifacts that require even more complex technical artifacts to produce the components that make them work. As a whole, “nuclear weapons” aren’t even just the weapons themselves, but the entire large technical system that is required for them to exist and be sustained. Obviously many of the technical details of these systems can be, and are, written down. But MacKenzie and Spinardi argue that much of their production must also be in the form of tacit knowledge, locked up in the heads and hands of the people who build and maintain them.

The article, written in that immediate post-Cold War glow, asks the question: what if nuclear weapons are never tested again? What if, after decades of not making them, the tacit knowledge is lost? It is not fanciful, as an idea. Indeed, MacKenzie and Spinardi base their argument itself on interviews with weapons laboratory scientists at the time who voiced exactly this kind of concern, fearing that the future generations of scientists would become increasingly distant from the hard-earned experience needed to even maintain nuclear weapons capabilities, much less imagine innovate in them.

Are there any examples of this happening? The most concrete example of this “forgetting” actually happening is with a mysterious substance known as Fogbank. Fogbank was a classified component used inside certain US thermonuclear weapons. As one weapons worker put it: “The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.” It was later indicated that it is an “interstage material,” used in the transferring of energy from the fission primary to the thermonuclear secondary inside a multi-stage nuclear weapon. It is also clear that it is fairly exotic: it is not something used in many other contexts, or produced regularly, and has apparently rather unusual properties.

Whatever it is, the point of bringing up Fogbank is because the US government “forgot” how to produce it. As a Los Alamos publication put it:4

Produced by skilled hands during the 1980s, Fogbank is an essential material in the W76 warhead. During the mid-1990s, Fogbank production ceased and the manufacturing facility was dismantled. As time passed, the precise techniques used to manufacture Fogbank were forgotten.

When it came time to refurbish the W76, Fogbank had to be remanufactured or replaced. In 2000, [the National Nuclear Security Agency] decided to reestablish the manufacture of Fogbank. Officials chose to manufacture Fogbank instead of replacing it with an alternate material because Fogbank had been successfully manufactured and historical records of the production process were available. Moreover, Los Alamos computer simulations at that time were not sophisticated enough to determine conclusively that an alternate material would function as effectively as Fogbank.

Although Fogbank is a difficult material to manufacture, scientists soon discovered that restoring the manufacturing capability would prove an even greater challenge. Scientists faced two major challenges:

• most personnel involved with the original production process were no longer available, and

• a new facility had to be constructed, one that met modern health and safety requirements.

Despite efforts to ensure the new facility was equivalent to the original one, the resultant equipment and processing methods failed to produce equivalent Fogbank. The final product simply did not meet quality requirements.

The full article explains (in ever-elliptical descriptions) that the scientists went back into the archives to look at the historical data on Fogbank’s production, discovering that there were indications of similar problems in the past. They found that maintaining a specific level of “impurity” was partially responsible for the quality of the final product, but that the historical records gave no indication about how that was accomplished.

They ultimately discovered that it was actually their newer processes that were causing the issue: they were doing too good a job of removing impurities that would otherwise have been in the original material. The later scientists ultimately discovered that the earlier scientists who knew how to make Fogbank were not themselves totally aware of what it was that was contributing to its success: “The historical Fogbank production process was unknowingly based on this essential chemical being present in the feed material.” Which is an interesting wrinkle on the question of forgetting: the original “knowers” likely have incomplete knowledge themselves!

So can one un-invent the bomb? MacKenzie and Spinardi say, perhaps: one could deliberately un-invent the bomb, by eliminating them and destroying the records of how to make them, but one could also accidentally un-invent the bomb, by simply not making more of them and maintaining that store of tacit knowledge to adequate levels.

The authors try not to overstate the case, though. They acknowledge that there more-or-less simpler ways to make nuclear weapons than the most advanced varieties that make up the bulk of the warheads currently in the world, that there is considerable overlap in some aspects of weapons knowledge with other fields of knowledge, and would certainly not argue that even an “un-invented” technology could not be re-invented. We may not know exactly what the ancient recipe for Greek Fire was, but that has not stopped people from developing other kinds of incendiary weapons.

Still, the argument an interesting and provocative one, even as it raises some obvious objections. There are ways to reduce dependence on tacit knowledge, for instance: that is exactly what many instruments and machines are invented to do, it is the nature of automation.

As a very simple example, a 3D printer is a machine that reduces the tacit knowledge required to manufacture certain kinds of small components. Instead of learning how to sculpt a small figure out of plastic, I can instead take a data file (explicit knowledge) and command the printer to make me the figure. Even this will have some tacit component — I gather than using 3D printers well requires some hard-earned experience — but now we’ve shifted the tacit component from one domain (sculpting plastic) to another (maintaining the machine), and probably reduced it (becoming a competent sculptor takes years of specialized experience; learning to keep a printer functioning probably does not).

Are we locked into these technologies forever? Even after, as A Canticle for Leibowitz suggests, the technologies may have destroyed the civilization that produces them? It is a grim thought. One hopes not. The idea is what my colleague Benoît Pelopidas calls nuclear eternity, and is implicitly built into many discussions about nuclear weapons, even by those who argue against them, without being interrogated.5

One can imagine ways out of the bind. Despite widespread believe that technology has its own driving momentum, technologies do not exist for their own sake. Their creation and maintenance requires an immense about of work and effort. If you have doubt about that, you don’t have to trust the historians or sociologists, just look at the budget requests for “modernization” of American nuclear weapons: if the US does pledge billions, perhaps trillions, for ongoing maintenance and improvements, then its arsenal will wither away to nothingness. While presented as a problem to be (expensively) solved, it is actually a rather encouraging idea, restoring a much-needed sense of human agency to these conversations. As abstract as they seem, nuclear weapons are still just machines.

The most familiar of these photos was taken by S/Sgt. George Robert (“Bob”) Caron, the tail gunner on the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima:

This photograph is surely cropped in the darkroom from a larger negative; it has the gauzy appearance of too little resolution being blown up to too large a size. It is, from a technical perspective, not that great a photograph — the lighting is poor, the focus is poor. This is not an artistic critique, as it was essentially an amateur snapshot taken by a soldier in a combat zone. It does highlight the separation between the “head” of the mushroom cloud and the “stem” of it, a consequence of the weapon’s height of burst.

There is another photograph by Caron that gives us a sense of how much the previous one was cropped. This one is far less commonly used, but I prefer it greatly:

I feel that whatever the cropped version gains in terms of getting a better view of the cloud, it loses its sense of scale and immediacy. The wider shot allows one to better imagine what it would look like to be seeing this in real life, from the air, and gives a better sense of scale — especially since most of us today are very familiar with the view from outside of an airplane.

Is the first photograph simply the cropped version of the second? I think not. If you superimpose them, as I have done below, you can see that there are some key differences:

Even barring my own alignment issues, the cropped photograph (581589 A.C.) seems to have been taken a bit earlier than the second one, as the “head” and “stem” separation is a bit different, the “head” is reaching a bit more upward in the second photograph, and, importantly, the entire cloud is rotated slightly along the axis, presumably because of the movement of the plane. It is difficult to tell but one suspect that the cropped photograph was used (and cropped) because it had slightly more definition in the final cloud than the second one.

There is another photo of Hiroshima after the bombing that is often used to illustrate its cloud:

It is an impressive sight. Taken at a much greater distance, the cloud here is much higher than the previous ones, and casting quite a shadow. But this does not actually show the mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb at all; this was taken several hours later, well after the initial mushroom cloud had stabilized and been blown away in the wind. Rather, this is a pyrocumulus smoke cloud caused by the firestorm in the city. For the sake of simplicity I will call this the “smoke cloud,” to differentiate it from the “mushroom cloud” created by the immediate detonation of the atomic bomb.

The photo above was taken by a reconnaissance plane several hours after the attack. From the perspective of the Army Air Forces, these were not successful attempts, because the smoke from the fires obscured their attempts to photograph the ground for at least another day. Here is another photograph, from much closer, of a later reconnaissance attempt, where the cloud is not really meant to be the subject, but is obscuring the subject — the city:

It would not be until August 8, 1945, that they would succeed in getting a completely “clean” (smoke-free) photograph of Hiroshima.

There is one more photograph that I have seen listed as a view from above, supposedly from the collection of a member of the 9th Photographic Technical Squadron, and only “rediscovered” fairly recently:

The above photograph also shows a pyrocumulus smoke cloud. Is it of the Hiroshima smoke cloud, or some other attack? I can’t really tell visually; the landscape looks like a lot of Japan does from the air at that time, and I’m not versed enough in aerial reconnaissance to really pass judgment. It seems plausible, anyway, but given as the owners of the photograph were listing it as the centerpiece of an eBay auction with a ridiculous price tag, I am wary of taking self-interested claims at face value without some confirmation. It does resemble the other smoke cloud photograph geometry, but perhaps many firestorm clouds look somewhat similar. (I have no idea what price was ultimately achieved on the auction, if any.)

Lastly, there is also 16 mm film footage of the Hiroshima cloud, shot from the instrument aircraft, The Great Artiste, by the physicist Harold Agnew. A copy has been digitized by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, which houses the original:

The technical quality is, again, understandably poor, and the movement of the plane dominates it. The two sequences show different times of the clouds evolution. Both look to be somewhat after Caron’s photographs, as the cloud head in the first one is quite broader and looks more stabilized. In the second one, it appears that the cloud head is starting to break apart in the winds. The separation between the head and the stem is quite visible in the first one, as is the fact that there is some significant horizontal displacement between the two; this is present in Caron’s photographs but less obvious.

These are, to my knowledge, the main photographs of the cloud itself from “above”: the view of the bomber, or the reconnaissance plane. It is a view of destruction from several miles up, quite different than the view from the ground. There are a few photographs from the latter perspective, which I will write about at a later time. For now, I just want to highlight a few other photographs of the cloud and smoke itself: these ones taken by the Japanese. The Hiroshima Peace Museum said in 2013 that it knew of 21 confirmed photographs of the mushroom cloud from the ground. I have only seen half a dozen or so, shown below.

The first set are a sequence of three photographs taken by the photographer Mitsuo Matsushige, who was at home some 7 km / 4.3 miles north of ground zero. He appears to have rushed outside and photographed the cloud within a minute or two of the detonation:

The above photograph is really perhaps the most amazing photograph of the cloud that I have seen. The immensity is obvious. The houses give it an immediacy and some sense of scale. Anyone who has tried to photograph large clouds or buildings knows that it is very difficult to really capture the lived sense of scale, so if this is what the photo looks like, the reality must have been even more awesome. We are, I think, looking up at the mushroom stem, with the separated mushroom head much further above and harder to make out.

At this distance from ground zero, Matsushige was far-enough away that blast, acute radiation, or thermal radiation were not a threat. He may have been in an area that would be exposed to “black rain” — precipitation caused by the aforementioned smoke clouds — which contained some amount of radioactivity. The question about whether the black rain from Hiroshima measurably increased cancer rates is a controversial and tricky one.

Matsushige has another photographs of the cloud from the ground, presumably taken shortly after the first one:

Again, it is a striking photograph, and again, I think this is only the “stem.” The “poor” quality of the negative — my photography teacher in high school would have rejected this for its spots and problems — adds to the reality-effect in this case, given the context.

Mitsushige also took one more photograph, at what looks like a later time, and from a different vantage point:

This photograph was apparently taken around noon, several hours after the attack, and as such is a complement to the aerial photographs of the smoke fire.

There are a few other such photos from the ground, such as this one taken from Kure Naval Arsenal, some 20 km / 13 miles to the southeast of Hiroshima:

This looks either like a quite late mushroom cloud, or an early stage of the smoke cloud. I suspect the latter, just based on its particular size and geometry, but it is hard to tell. Whatever it is, it is not very mushroom-like in its appearance at this point; mushroom clouds do look more like “columns” after they stabilize, so it is not impossible, although I suspect it is the smoke cloud. The Library of Congress lists it as an “unusual photo of the Hiroshima bomb explosion,” which is an odd choice of words. Do not all of the photographs qualify, in some deep way, as “unusual”?

There is also this photograph that is listed on Wikipedia as being “found in Honkawa Elementary School in 2013 of the Hiroshima atom bomb cloud, believed to have been taken about 30 minutes after detonation of about 10km (6 miles) east of the hypocentre”:

That is definitely the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, with a clear separation of the “head’ and “stem.” I do not think this is 30 minutes after the attack; this looks to be only a few minutes after the bombing, on par with the cloud shown in the Agnew film. My guess is that it is still before the mushroom head had reached its stabilized altitude (in which is temperature and density matched the air around it, which stops its ascent), so that would put it at 10 minutes or less after detonation. Apparently the Hiroshima Peace Museum put the time at 20-30 minutes, but even 20 minutes feels a bit late to me. The photographer is unknown.

The last one I will put here is from a very remarkable perspective:

It is a remarkable photograph — a truly literal “view from below.” The above image comes from the Chugoku Shimbum newspaper’s Hiroshima Peace Media Center, who say (per Google Translate) that it was taken by Seizo Yamada, an employee of the Chugoku Shimbun, and that he was some 6.5 km / 4 mi from ground zero at the time, visiting a friend. Yamada described the fireball as “dark red” when he took the picture. The Chugoku Shimbun says that if he had been at work as usual that day, he would have been more definitively under the cloud. The perspective gained by being just a bit further out than Matsushige’s photographs is striking: close-enough to look like it is right on top of the photographer.

The scale of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, and the smoke cloud, is immense, and hard to fathom. In fact, it is hard to know the exact height: while later equations were developed for generalizing the stabilized heights of mushroom clouds as a function of weapon yield, the “raw data” of these, derived from nuclear testing, shows considerable messiness. But from a human perspective, they are huge — many multiples of our tallest buildings. The next time you are at the base of a building like One World Trade Center in New York City, consider that the Hiroshima cloud was well over 10 times taller than it.

In a future post, I will talk about the similar cloud photography from Nagasaki — which has many interesting differences in terms of appearance and documentation — as well as other kinds of “on the ground” accounts of the atomic bombings.

Building up a plausible “scenario” for such a war is hard. To do that, you need a sense of targets, of attack capabilities, and targeting philosophies — as well as some sense as how these might be adjusted as things unfold. These matters are, understandably, highly classified. We have some sense of what all of these things looked like in the past, but even then there are some pretty murky areas and strong differences of opinion. And given how an actual full-scale nuclear war has never taken place — which is a very good thing! — we have a dearth of data on how these things might actually happen in the real-world.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t think about it — or that we shouldn’t. Thinking about these kinds of “scenarios” is important if we are to have a grounded, tangible, and concrete understanding of what these weapons are and what they imply about the world. And, as I think is pretty clear by now, I am one of those strange individuals who actually finds thinking about the “end of the world” quite interesting.

“PLAN A” was a project that I worked on with three researchers at the Princeton Science and Global Security Program — Alex Glaser, Moritz Bastian Kütt, and Tamara Patton — in 2017. I have only vague memories of the earliest conversations and meetings we had about it (my e-mails from the time about this start in media res, and so that suggests that we first had conversations and meetings about it prior to writing anything down about it), but my basic recollection is that there was going to be an art exhibition at Princeton about nuclear weapons, and Alex Glaser, a physicist who I have known for many years now (and written about a bit) had reached out to me about an idea they had for visualizing a nuclear exchange as part of the exhibition.

Here is the final video output, which is useful to watch before I talk about how it works “under the hood”:

At the time, I was doing a lot of programming and teaching with D3.js, a Javascript library for data visualization that has a very good support for geographic data.1 So what I believe I suggested (again, my memory is hazy on the details nearly 10 years later) is that it would be relatively straightforward to build a quick-and-dirty browser-based Javascript application that would allow one to “plug in” some data files about your nuclear attack “scenario,” and then it would allow you to visualize what it would look like. Then they could make screen captures of the Javascript application and integrate those into the final piece of video art.

I also ran the final list of “detonations” through NUKEMAP’s casualty calculator to come up with some rough numbers as to how deadly the attack would be, at least as a result of the initial effects (NUKEMAP’s casualty calculator does not, at present time, estimate possible fallout casualties).

A few years later, well after the exhibit had ended, Alex G. uploaded the output to YouTube, where it has enjoyed an amount of exposure (several million views) that nobody really expected. Because Alex G. generously (?) listed me first on the Princeton website about the video, I get e-mails periodically from people — journalists, scholars, random people — wanting to know details about the simulation. I generally send them to Alex G., because that wasn’t really my part in the whole thing.

My understanding is that Alex, Moritz, and Tamara, along with some input from the late Bruce Blair and the thankfully-still-with-us Sharon Weiner and Zia Mian, came up with the “scenario,” which unfolds over several “phases.” First the had to define a list of “locations,” each of which corresponded to icons on the map, and could be the origins or destinations for attacks. Here is an example of what the “locations” file looked like:

I (very unhelpfully to future me) did not document what these fields meant, but I can reconstruct most of them. “State” was either “NATO” or “Russia,” and was mostly for internal record-keeping (I don’t think it changes anything about the output). “Type” specified categories that would correspond with how the data appeared on the visualization (there was a separate file that defined what each of these appeared like, if they appeared at all — one kind of “type” was basically an invisible waypoint that planes could fly to).

Each “location” clearly had a unique ID (e.g. “saratov_1”). The latitude and longitude were its initial location, obviously. “no_of_dv” defined the number of delivery vehicles (which could be missiles or planes), “wh_per_dv” was how many nuclear warheads were contained on each delivery vehicle, and “subtotals” looks like it is just the total warheads per location if it had warheads (which I think was just for our own record-keeping; it is not used in the code). “yield_per_wh” is the explosive yield per warhead and does not seem to have been used (that would only have been used for the casualty calculation and I don’t think we used these files for that). I think “mirv_target_group” was something used for planning purposes because it doesn’t show up in the visualizer code anywhere.

Then we have the “phases,” which are the attacks themselves. These were scripted also using data files. Here’s a selection from phase 2:

These described how and when different attacks would be taking place. “attackid” is a unique identifier, and “type” is the kind of thing that was launching the attack (e.g., an ICBM silo, a submarine, a mobile ICBM launcher, a tactical fighter, a tactical missile). The “launch_id” is the location (from the previous “locations” file) sending out this attack.

The “target_id” is a list of locations that are being aimed at by the weapon. In some cases there would be a single location, but in some, as above, you can tell they are MIRVed, and a single missile is meant to hit several different targets. “trigger_at” was a timestamp (in the above, they are set to begin immediately) at which this part of the attack would take place.

These lists were all made by hand, which is definitely not the easiest way to do it, and I’m sure it was very time-consuming! I am glad I did not have to do this part — the programming was much more fun than the tedious compilation of lists.

The code could read these data files and then “step” through the time in regular intervals, triggering, say, a missile launch, and then locating (and visualizing) where that missile ought to be at any given time after the attack. We used some very simple assumptions for the speed of everything, reasoning (if I recall) that the fine-grained differences a) would not likely be visible at this scale of the map anyway, and b) didn’t matter for the evocative purposes of this visualization (which was not meant to be any kind of “perfect” simulation). For MIRVs, the code treated all of them as the same missile until about 50% through the trajectory, in which it then split them into multiple warheads. This was, again, somewhat arbitrary.

Here is what the “visualizer” looked like in its most basic state:

As you can see, it is a little different than the final product. It allows one to load any given “phase” datafile, and rearrange the visual display of the map, and then “start” the attack. The default time factor for development, as you can see, is 100X realtime, because realtime is slow.

How slow? Below a little screen capture I made showing the first minute of phase 2 at 1X speed.

I actually sort of love it in realtime, because while it is slow, it is not imperceptibly slow. It is disturbing to imagine that those are actual missiles, and that their slow crawl would mean that they would find targets in 20-30 minutes or so. There’s a Weeping Angels quality to it, where it barely seems to be moving at all, but if you look away and look back, you perceive the jump.

The visuals of “PLAN A” were quite deliberately and obviously inspired by the “Big Board” shown in the 1983 film WarGames:

Alex G. is fairly blatant about his nostalgia for 1980s digital culture (he snuck a Space Invader-inspired sprite into a paper in Nature, which takes some chutzpah), and I’m not opposed to it either.

I also appreciate that by doing that kind of retro visual riff, you are signaling to the savvy viewer that this is not pretending to be some kind of perfect modern simulation. I am deeply suspicion of anything that really pretends to be a perfect simulation, and with NUKEMAP and MISSILEMAP have gone to some lengths to make sure that it is visually clear that they are meant to be evocative and back-of-the-envelope, not perfect simulations.

I don’t recall it coming up in active discussions, but the game DEFCON (2006) probably informed some of my aesthetic thinking on it, too, particularly with the planes, submarines, and other little icons, which are not part of the original WarGames maps (they just have little white dots for targets). DEFCON, of course, also took its aesthetic cues from WarGames.

Another thing that I am sure we had in mind for the overall inspiration was Isao Hashimoto’s 2003 video art project of nuclear explosions, titled “1945-1998.” I am sure that at the time I said something like, “this is the kind of art that would have been pretty hard to make still in 2003 but could be basically programmed in a day a decade later,” because I am prone to say things like that.

I like Hashimoto’s piece a lot, and often show it to students in class. The almost unbearable slowness of its early periods is offset but the sudden, musical cacophony of the years of heavy testing. When things like the test moratoriums occur, their sudden silence is also quite profound, and leads to interesting conversations.

“PLAN A” is, thankfully, a work of fiction. It is a work of creativity and imagination for all involved — no less so for the programmer/designer (me) and the people coming up with the target lists and sequences (the Princeton crew). That does not mean it is not plausible or grounded. Plenty of fiction can be plausible and grounded, and plenty of even implausible or ungrounded fiction can and does reflect some kind of fundamental truths about reality. All simulations are fictions, really, and that does not mean they cannot be useful. Is it “accurate”? I don’t really know what exactly that means in this context (or how we would know).

Again, the terms I personally prefer for talking about it are evocative and plausible. At its best, it is meant to give a view of modern nuclear war that is more grounded than “everybody would die” (lots of people would die, but not everybody, for both better and worse), and is probably within some order of magnitude estimate as to what the immediate effects would be of a war of this sort, and is a not-at-all-impossible scenario that could be imagined occurring (although it is not the only possible scenario that one could imagine occurring). Evocative and plausible are really is about as ambitious as I personally would be for its predictive power, but I’m also not a scientist of any sort (“just” a historian), and so not under any obligation to aspire to much more than that.

“PLAN A” has definitely been a lot more successful, in terms of audience exposure, than anyone involved expected it to be: it was designed to be a very localized kind of art, part of a specific in-person exhibit. I think the exhibit “toured” a bit, but any art exhibit’s audience is necessarily pretty small. Its second-life on YouTube increased its reach exponentially. To what end, I have really no idea. Does watching “PLAN A” alter or affect the viewer’s understanding of nuclear war? If so, how? In what directions? Would it impact how they thought about different kinds of nuclear policies? (Does asking such a thing signal that I am thinking too functionally about art? Is it art, or some kind of design, or what? Does it matter?)

I don’t have the slightest clue about such things, to be honest — and I’m not the target audience — but I like asking the questions, and I like to believe that things like “PLAN A” might cause others to ask questions, as well.

The “problem” tackled by the Top Secret–Limited study on “Atomic Bomb Production” was simple: “To determine the United States requirements for atomic bomb stocks in the interim post-war era.” The phrase “interim post-war era” is an interesting one — what, at that moment, are they in between?2

The study makes four assumptions for tackling the “problem”:

a. The United States must be prepared to conduct offensive operations against any other world power or combination of powers.

b. The United States will maintain sufficient bases and air forces capable of attacking the strategic heart of any potential enemy.

c. The immediate destruction of the enemy’s will and capacity to resist is the primary objective of the United States Army Strategic Air Forces.

d. Extensive research regarding the strategic vulnerability of all major powers will be conducted later and will permit a more complete analysis of bomb requirements.

These are both bland and interesting at the same time. Should it really be US policy, in the waning days of World War II, to assume that it needs to be able to wage war against “any other world power or combination of powers”? That is quite a requirement — to take on the entire world. The issue of bases is similarly grand in ambitions: at this time, the US does not really have “intercontinental” capabilities, so having sufficient bases to strike “any potential enemy” is quite a lot. And the goal of “the immediate destruction of the enemy’s will and capacity to resist” is also a serious assumption, particularly with the requirement of immediacy (US strategic capabilities in World War II were not “immediate” and took years to develop and deploy).

All of which is to say that this document, so far, makes perfect sense from the context of the strategic bombing of World War II, and perfect sense from the context of a later Cold War, but is actually quite audacious in its assumptions from the perspective of the immediate end of World War II and the beginning of the postwar period. It reflects no sensibility about war being over, or that the goal of US policy should be to prevent future world wars.

It then launches into its analysis of how the atomic bomb, which it acknowledges is not “just another bomb,” would be used in such a war in the future:

It is assumed that the United States may be required to conduct military operations against any other nation or combination of nations in the world, and that, finding herself at war with these powers, the United States would be desirous of immediately crippling the ability of the enemy to wage war. It is to be noted that the requirements established in this paper contemplate an M-Day force capable of being employed immediately upon initiation of hostilities and the estimated quantities of bombs required must be available at that time. There has been no attempt to estimate the quantity of atomic bombs which would be required to conduct a prolonged war of attrition. Therefore, the assumption was made that the initial mission of the air force units allocated for preparation, transportation, and delivery of these atomic bombs should be the immediate destruction of the enemy centers of industry, transportation, and population.

Again, this is certainly not the only way one could imagine that atomic bombs would be used in a future war, although it is unsurprising that the strategic bombing analysts would approach it in this way. This “M-Day” force would be tasked with an immediate destruction of a hypothetical enemy, a nearly overnight thing.

And who is the hypothetical enemy? The study claims agnosticism about what the future might be, but, for the sake of argument, settles into the obvious one:

During the period 1945 to 1955 it is probable that at the beginning of any war, bombs will still be delivered by the conventional airplane. It is also obvious that during this period Russia and the United States will be the outstanding military powers. For the purpose of this study the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war has therefore been used as a basis upon which to predicate the United States atomic bomb requirements. It is to be noted also from a geographical aspect alone, Russia is in the most favorable strategic position of any major power.

Perhaps I am cynical, but this feels like a bit of a fig leaf — “we’re only looking at Russia (the USSR) because it’s going to be very powerful and we have to pick someone.” One somewhat just wishes they came out with it: “we are assuming that in a future war, the Soviet Union would be the possible aggressor, and certainly the one worth planning for.”

To tackle the issue, the stockpile estimate relies on the data of Intelligence Research Project No. 2532, “A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchurian Urban Areas,” dated August 30, 1945. This was produced by analysts in the Air Plans Section of Operations Division of the War Department, and consisted of tables of major cities in the Soviet Union and Soviet-controlled Manchuria. Each of these cities were listed by population, approximate area, and their “strategic importance” as measured by their industry, oil, and transportation infrastructure. A fantastic map of the target areas was produced:3

This intelligence study did not restrict itself purely to targets, though. What good is a target if you cannot reach it?

The atomic bombs of World War II were delivered by then state-of-the-art B-29 aircraft, but the range of the B-29 was still quite limited relative to the expanse of the Soviet Union and its distance from the United States. Indeed, the report contains a graphic showing what those limitations were, if one were assuming the continental United States as the launchpad:

The same oceans that provided the United States with a great sense of security from foreign attack, in this case, worked against it: the range between the United States and the Soviet Union was just very far.

There are answers to this problem, of course. One is to create the means for longer-range delivery of bombs. Another is to station bombers closer to the potential target. The analysts embraced both ideas: the next generation of bomb, the B-36, was planned to have much greater range than the B-29, and certainly in the meantime you could put B-29s much closer to Soviet soil. This, again, they illustrated with a map:

Of note is that this plan requires continual American access to bases in a number of countries, as well as expanding coverage to other possible bases that the US did not have a current hold in.

This is a bombers’ view of the problem; the planners were aware that there were “unlimited possible applications of the fundamental atomic energy in conjunction with future developments of rockets and guided missiles, both in their propulsion and in their explosive characteristics,” and limited themselves only to the next ten years as a way of reducing the analysis to something feasible.

So they had targets, and they had the means of hitting them (hypothetically). To figure out how many bombs they needed, they would need to make some assumptions about the damage-potential of the weapons, as well as the reliability and accuracy of the weapons. They had very little data on either of these fronts.

For the damage-potential, they had a preliminary survey by the Joint Target Survey, dated September 1, 1945, of the specific damage done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, baed entirely on aerial photographs of city. (Only after the formal Japanese surrender, the next day, would US troops and scientists be allowed to actually visit the cities and conduct a more thorough survey.) They concluded that within about 6,000 feet (1.3 mi / 1.8 km) of ground zero, the number of buildings damaged was 100%. As you moved outward from ground zero, the percentage dropped off, until around 18,000 feet (3.4 mi / 5.5 km), at which it became negligible.

Based on this, and other analysis of the Japanese attacks, they came up with an estimate of how many bombs they would need to do devastating damage to each city in the Soviet Union and Manchuria, assuming the weapons available were the same as the ones used against Japan. They ended up with a table of “Estimated Bomb Requirements for Destruction of Russian Strategic Areas” for 66 Soviet cities, over 900 square miles of which to destroy, requiring 204 atomic bombs.

The biggest cities — Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Tashkent, Novosibirsk, Kiev (Kyiv), Kharkov (Kharkiv), Riga, Kaliningrad, Odessa, and Ulan-Ude — required 6 atomic bombs. Seven more cities required 5 bombs, and another seven required 4 bombs. Twelve required 3 bombs, and fifteen required 2. The final fifteen took just 1 atomic bomb to destroy. None of the Manchurian cities were assigned bomb counts; the report reasoned that they weren’t as important as the Soviet ones. The number of bombs assigned appears to have been largely a function of size, although there seems to be some variance or judgment there.4

Even just attacking the top 15 priority cities would put the Soviet Union into a terrible position, as they contained “the bulk of all major industries” in the country. “It is obvious that the immediate destruction of the complete list of 66 cities would have an even more devastating effect on Russia,” the report notes. “Therefore, an optimum requirement for atomic bomb stocks would be the number necessary to obliterate all of these cities.”

From this kind of reasoning, the report then moves on to set some idealized numbers. To destroy the first 15 high priority targets would require (by their logic) 39 atomic bombs. Add 10 more for “neutralization of possible enemy bases in the Western Hemisphere,” another 10 for “strategic isolation of the battlefield” (tactical use) and you end up with 59 desired bombs. But, they reasoned, the weapons will not be all accurately delivered. They assume that through enemy action and inaccuracy, only 48% of the bombs launched might reach their targets. So you divide 59 by 48% and end up with a minimum need for 123 atomic bombs in the American stockpile.

If you do the same math, but assume the full 66 city list, with its requirement for 204 bombs, plus the 20 “other” bombs and the 48% effectiveness factor, then the optimum number of weapons would be 466 atomic bombs.

466 atomic bombs is a small number by the later standards of the Cold War, when thousands of bombs were produced per year. It is an absolutely massive number for 1945, however, when the maximum output of the Manhattan Project infrastructure was planned around the idea of a few bombs per month. As it turned out, the US stockpile grew very slowly in the first years after World War II, for a variety of reasons, and the US did not reach these kinds of numbers until 1949 or so. Interestingly, the US likely had enough fissile material for the “minimum” requirement by around early 1947, but its weapons assembly system was so anemic that it had essentially zero bombs “ready to go” at that time, and the parts for maybe a dozen weapons.

A copy of the overall report and recommendation was sent to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. He viewed it with not a small amount of professional offense — he felt the requirements were unrealistically high because the analysts had underestimated the power of the atomic bombs (he felt they were twice as effective as the report claimed) and overestimated how much destruction was actually required. “It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy its effectiveness,” he wrote back. “Hiroshima no longer exists as a city even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total.”

This wasn’t really a “war plan,” although it was a plan made in preparation for a war. The purpose of the document was to think through the questions that might come up for a future atomic war, without getting into the real details of it, and with very little knowledge about the weapons themselves. It would not be for several years until more realistic “war plans” were developed, and even these started more as “studies” than “plans”: exercises in thought that could guide policy decisions, not actual operations that could be put into practice, because they didn’t have the bombs, the bombers, or the bases yet. These are still works of fiction and fantasy, however rooted in analysis they attempt to be, and there is some difference between such fictional scenarios and, say, the reality of a ready-to-go war plan that could actually be executed.

Still, it seems telling that one of the first things the American strategic bombing staff did once their war with Japan was over was contemplate how best to kill an entire country with their new weapon. They make no attempt to estimate casualties, of course. Let us imagine that their population statistics were correct, and that their attacks were calibrated to kill an approximate equal percentage of those cities as the Hiroshima bomb did for Hiroshima. The “minimum” (15 city) list was estimated to contain 10.1 million people, and the “maximum” (66 city) list was estimated to contain 21.8 million people. At Hiroshima, around 28% of the city was killed within the first few weeks. Apply that number above, and we end up with a range between 2.8 million (minimum) and 6.1 million (maximum) dead.

By the standards of the later Cold War, where estimates in the hundreds of “megadeaths” were routine as a consequence of thermonuclear assaults and fallout plumes, 3-6 million doesn’t sound like that much. But it is sobering, and perhaps depressing — whatever one thinks of its necessity or appropriateness — to consider that the fires from World War II had hardly been extinguished before at least one of the armies of its victors, deep within the labyrinth of official secrecy, was contemplating another Holocaust’s worth of civilian dead.

There are many variations of this conundrum that have been explored in well-known and often well-loved films. Some of these films have themselves come to embody these problems expertly: Dr. Strangelove (1964) evokes the mad generals and the Doomsday Machine; WarGames (1983) raises the problems of automation, cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence; it is too soon to know if House of Dynamite (2025) will have such a cultural relevance, but if it does, perhaps it will be about the problems of attribution, confusion, and the short time-scales for nuclear decision-making.

By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) is not a well-known or well-loved film. It was an HBO “original movie” — read: made-for-television film, before HBO got good at such things — about the conduct of nuclear war. In almost every respect it is a very Cold War film, having been adapted from William Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child (1983), with a little bit of Glastnost window-dressing adding to keep it slightly topical.

I recently tried to explain the plot to someone briefly, and he seemed outright skeptical that I was relating it correctly, as it is a bit over the top. The basics are thus: the US detects a nuclear missile launch from Turkey to the Soviet Union which it has not ordered. The Soviets launch a number of their own missiles in retaliation at the USA. The Soviet president tells the American president that they determined, belatedly, that the Turkish missiles were launched by anti-Soviet separatists, but that automated Soviet defensive systems assumed they were in a war with the United States. The President is encouraged to stand down, but the Soviets will also agree to accepting a retaliation in kind, and end the conflict thence. Should the United States engage a larger counterattack, then the Soviet Union will escalate as well.

Thus far, this is something of a reverse Fail-Safe (1964) situation, which is not a terrible concept. Things start to go off the rails soon after. The President (played by Martin Landau) is apparently incapable of basic self-preservation and allows himself to get both partially nuked at the White House and later apparently dies when his helicopter encounters another Soviet nuclear detonation.

This causes a search for the next legal successor, who is an utterly unqualified Secretary of the Interior, who is given the code-name “Condor.” Having assumed the President’s duties onboard TACAMO — a presidential airplane equipped for nuclear war fighting — Condor quickly shows himself to be obsessed with “winning” the nuclear war and with little interest in deescalation.

A belligerent Colonel Fargo (Rip Torne), who is clearly regarded as an extremist by his military contemporaries, feeds Condor’s paranoia and desire for ultimate justice, encouraging him to issue a strike on Soviet command and control. The head of the Strategic Air Command, code-named “Alice” (James Earl Jones), himself on board Looking Glass (another command and control airplane), believes this is madness, but passes on the orders anyway.

A large part of the film is focused on the crew of a particular B-52 bomber, code named Polar Bear 1, that is scrambled in the early part of the crisis. Its crew are surprisingly dysfunctional, apparently having not prepared much for the job of thermonuclear war, or unable to deal with the stress of it. The pilot (Powers Boothe) and his co-pilot (Rebecca De Mornay) are engaged in an illicit sexual relationship (“fraternization”).

Over the course of their part of the film, they are attacked by Soviet MiGs (which they defeat and evade) and penetrate Soviet airspace. They are given the orders to conduct the strike on Soviet command and control. The co-pilot refuses to carry them out, claiming that they are madness — if you kill their leaders, who will be able to stop the war? The pilot demands compliance, to the point of offering the co-pilot a cyanide tablet, but ultimately backs down and agrees to turn the bomber back.

This, in turn, leads to one of the crew members who had previously exhibited some mental instability to attempt to take over the plane (calling them cowards), a situation that resolves itself when he uses an ejector-seat to (presumably) commit suicide, which ejects the other crew as well. And thus the pilot and co-pilot find themselves the only people on the plane.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the original President has not died, but was just injured, and was taken to a FEMA bunker. He regains consciousness (but has lost his eyesight), and attempts to wrestle back control of the situation. Having seen Polar Bear 1 turn back, the Soviets turned back some of their own bombers as well, as a sign of mutual desire for deescalation. In several hours, however, US submarines will surface to receive their own launch orders, which the Secretary of the Interior has given.

The President contacts the Secretary of the Interior, but cannot convince him to relinquish control — because the Secretary of the Interior doesn’t want to, we understand — and as the President’s copy of the authentication codes was lost in the attack that took his eyesight he cannot simply override him. Ultimately. the President contrives a way to issue his own orders to the submarines, but if the submarines receive two sets of contradictory orders, they will default to orders for war. Still with me?

To resolve this, the SAC commander, “Alice,” agrees to ram Looking Glass into TACAMO. This, however, appears to be impossible, as the Secretary of the Interior’s aircraft is too far away for Looking Glass to catch up to it before the final deadline, but the pilot on TACAMO aircraft realizes what is happening and turns his plane so that Looking Glass can collide with it, giving a final salute to “Alice.”

Having destroyed the Secretary of the Interior, the President’s orders to cease hostilities (apparently, somehow) go into effect.

Meanwhile, Polar Bear 1 was confronted by US forces who had been ordered (by the Secretary of the Interior) to shoot it out of the sky, but circumstances conspire to spare them. They fly eastward into the sunrise.

As a film, this is not that great. It probably works better as a mass-market paperback of the Tom Clancy variety; it certainly has that feel to it, and, at least according to Wikipedia, it is a relatively faithful adaptation. The acting is adequate. The overall feel is fairly cheap: most of the action takes place in a few cramped rooms (a very limited number of sets), with the action shots being obviously model planes or limited to computer screen readouts that are narrated by the characters. There is one nuclear mushroom cloud, but it is clearly a matte painting with a model plane in front of it. It definitely feels like a made-for-TV movie of this era.

The question to ask, I think, is not “is this a good film” — no, not really — but rather, what are the anxieties that this particular take on nuclear war represent? And in this department, if you get away from the rather silly aspects (planes ramming other planes, etc.), it does end up probing some interesting issues.

The first and most obvious one is the initiating attack: a separatist group (non-state actor) somehow hijacking an existing nuclear weapon and using it to provoke a nuclear war between major powers. Similar plots exist, although I primarily associate these with the post-Cold War (e.g., Clancy’s Sum of All Fears, 1991). So neither the 1983 source material nor the 1990 HBO adaptation are really behind the times on that one. This particular plot combines the non-state-actor provocation with an attribution problem and an automated defense system, so that is wrapping up a few anxieties into one package.

But that isn’t really what the film is about; that is just what kicks it off, and it doesn’t get talked about much after it happens. What the film is really about is the psychological state of people involved with nuclear weapons choices. I appreciate that it focused on both a “high” and “low” aspect of this question. The “high” involves the people at the very top of the chain of the command, like the President, the Secretary of the Interior, the top generals and colonels. The “low” are the people in charge of actually dropping the bombs, the B-52 crew.

On the “high” end of the chain of command, the problem one of appropriate judgment (prudence), madness, and the problem of succession during time of war. A Secretary of the Interior is not chosen for that role on the basis of their ability to conduct a nuclear crisis, even though they are indeed eighth in the line of succession. It is bad enough, perhaps, that a single person — the President — has this responsibility (for any President, really), but to then contemplate how eighteen other people might handle suddenly being put into that situation is, well, rather heavy.

In the case of the film, jostling for authority among the high end of the chain of command provides much of the film’s dramatic material. And who is to say how anyone would react to such a situation? In the film, many millions of Americans have already been killed by the war in practically an instant — how would any of us react to that, given these terrible options?

On the “low” end of the chain of command, the problem is multiple. How will a bomber crew react to learning that its home base has been eliminated, and any family it had behind are likely dead? Will they continue to function as a cohesive unit? How will they react to opening up their orders and finding them to be something they judge as madness? And how will the personal relationships between these crewmembers affect these discussions, if they happen at all?

Wikipedia says that in the original book, the pilot and co-pilot, though of mixed sex, are not in a relationship, and that this was an alteration made for the film. It is an interesting choice, as it evokes another common anxiety about how men and women would interact in military situations generally. In this case, it is the female co-pilot who refuses to go through with the orders that she believes will lead to madness, and the male pilot who initially insists upon following them, but relents when faced with the possibility of his lover’s individual death. These are, of course, pretty stock gender roles, but the question they are trying to get at — that individual relations and states of mind may play a role in how these sorts of things work in practice — are interesting ones.

Ultimately, the plot feels too contrived, and the bomber drama feels, well, unrealistic. The bomber crew in particular do not feel much like actual military personnel to me: they seem barely prepared, at least mentally, for their mission, and I just do not find it very believable that they would refuse to follow out these kinds of orders. Millions of Americans have died by this point; they know this. As far as they know, the escalation has already occurred. At that point, even one of their own crewmembers has died from the fighting. What are the odds that they are going to get moralizing? Much less turn back? What are they even turning back to? Even they do not know.

Still, the value of centering that part of the “action” around a bomber crew is that they do have some time to deliberate, their actions are not wholly automatic, and they could, in principle, rebel. It’s much harder to imagine ICBM launch commanders doing that sort of thing. There is a decent exchange to this point between the pilot and the copilot: “You would have turned a Minuteman key without thinking!” “They gave me time to think.”

Could one imagine some kind of struggle for authority playing out at the higher levels, in the event of a contested succession? Could we imagine someone utterly unqualified for the job aligning him or herself with escalatory elements, and ignoring the suggestions from other military officers? Could we imagine those senior generals following such orders anyway? These are trickier questions, and perhaps the more interesting ones, ultimately. They are rendered a little ridiculous in the film by making both “Condor” and Fargo so over-the-top — you’re never really tempted to agree with them at all. When Fargo pushes to “cut off the head of the Soviet chicken,” you are not tempted to see that as the product of a rational mind.

By Dawn’s Early Light isn’t in the running to be considered a great nuclear crisis film, but it’s not the worst possible nuclear crisis film, either. It raises a few interesting issues and has its moments, if you are willing to overlook the plot contrivances and the very obvious budget limitations (which necessarily means that no sense of what is happening “on the ground” is possible).

The film was surprisingly well-received at the time (although the reviews seem to be cutting it quite a lot of slack given its relatively humble made-for-TV status), although it doesn’t seem to have had much of any lasting impact on the cultural zeitgeist. It has not aged particularly well, and comes off as cheaply-made and fairly hokey. Still, some of the issues it gestures at — if you can focus on them and not the “thriller” contrivances — are interesting ones.

It makes for a curious pairing when watched alongside House of Dynamite (2025), Fail-Safe (1964), and other films that have tried to capture the psychological aspects of a failure of nuclear deterrence and the horrible choices that they may require.

Wiseman’s documentaries are essentially a genre unto themselves, a fly-on-the-wall approach to institutional ethnography. Wiseman’s subjects are all social organizations, institutions, or spaces of widely varying types, and the titles are typically spare and descriptive: High School (1968), Hospital (1970), Juvenile Court (1973), Racetrack (1985), Central Park (1990), Boxing Gym (2010). Some of them are even more simple and declarative, such as Primate (1975), which focused on the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, or Meat (1976), about a slaughterhouse.1

Wiseman’s films typically eschew any added soundtrack, informative text overlays, or obvious “plot.” Somehow, over many, many decades, he talked himself and his crew into these often quite sensitive places and was allowed to just film, film, and film. Out of vast amounts quantities of filming — hundreds of hours per film, probably — the people who he films appear to just forget he is there, and he then edits the eventual footage into what could be described as a profile of his institutional subject.

They are not, of course, truly narrative-free. The films always tell some kind of “story,” although not often one with any kind of clear narrative resolution. They always tell you something about the kind of people who come together in whatever place he is profiling. Wiseman doesn’t tell you how a hospital works in Hospital, for example, but he shows you the kinds of spaces that hospitals are: collisions between people of all walks of life, under circumstances both mundane and exceptional. The identities of the characters in his film are usually unclear except in their relationship to others: the teacher and the student, the doctor and the patient, the researcher and the monkey.

Wiseman’s films can have an illusion of unvarnished objectivity, although Wiseman was clear that this was truly just an illusion:

What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it... all of those things... represent subjective choices that you have to make. … The compression within a sequence represents choice and then the way the sequences are arranged in relationship to the other represents choice. All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are therefore manipulative. … I think what I do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense, but accurate in the sense that I think they’re a fair account of the experience I’ve had in making the movie.

One of Wiseman’s least-heralded films, in my experience, is one that came out in 1988 with the simple title Missile. Missile is about the training of Minuteman launch officers at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and appears to have been filmed in 1986 (at the end there is a reference to the recent Challenger accident). It is exceedingly rare to get this kind of “access” to missileer training, and over time it has also no doubt become something of a time capsule of that particular Cold War moment.

Like most of Wiseman’s films, Missile is interesting in what it shows, but the act of watching it is one of incredible boredom, and requires considerable patience. The film begins with what feels like the first class in a 14-week training sequence, and these classes are not meant to be exciting. Missiles are not meant to be exciting: if working in a nuclear weapons facility is exciting then something has probably gone very wrong. The boredom of it all is contrasted with the “awesomeness of this responsibility,” as the first instructor puts it, of the task at hand: being the ones who would, if called upon it, be turning the keys that launched thermonuclear-tipped ICBMs.2

The first 20 minutes of the film are just this class, in fact, and the focus of the class is on the ethics of the US nuclear weapons system. It is a meandering discussion, with the instructor asking the students what they knew about the My Lai massacre, and about the Nuremberg trials and the “just following orders” defense. The students were aware of these things, but the instructor never really (at least in Wiseman’s showing) hammered home any particular conclusion about them. If anything, he seemed to defend aspects of My Lai, emphasizing the civilian-appearance of the Viet Cong.

So what does it all add up to? The instructor never really resolves any of the ethical or even legal questions on film, other than to be very clear that while they do not want their launch officers to be “robots” (a word he pronounces almost like “ribbits,” an accent affectation that fiction could never capture), they also do not want any launch officers having any kind of second thoughts before they take the role. Anyone who has the slightest doubt, or ethical or moral hesitation, about following through on a properly-authenticated Emergency War Order (EWO, pronounced ee-woe), is explicitly told to leave before they waste too much of everyone's time.

Which is a bit awkward. One student — one of the few women — offers up the notion that the mere presence of the missiles deters nuclear war, and that this makes the mission a moral one. The instructor doesn’t really appear to take her up on this with much enthusiasm, even though it is a standard line about these jobs.

Perhaps he understands why this doesn’t really solve the issue he’s posing: the moral/ethical question is not would you accept maintaining deterrence, the moral/ethical question is, if deterrence fails, would you follow an order that could result in the deaths of millions of civilians. Which is to say, deterrence can perhaps create the moral “cover” for doing nuclear-weapons related work… but if you’re actually going to be turning those keys, you need a bit more than that to fall back on.

Or perhaps he doesn't care all that much. Because the goal does not appear to give the candidates that kind of moral absolution. Rather, the goal of this moral discussion appears — to me at least — to be about weeding out anyone who will be a problem. Which is to say that the goal doesn’t appear to create rigorous moral or ethical justification for actually turning the launch keys, but to simply make sure that nobody who is proceeding with the training actually requires that kind of justification.

Which is not necessarily a critique, although bringing up this issue in the context of My Lai and Nuremberg lends itself to a certain kind of critique, and that seems to be Wiseman’s point. The entire training, and its Southern California setting (which Wiseman occasionally shows us), is, well, banal. It’s not necessarily the banality of evil, but it’s banal nonetheless. There are a few high-level discussions about things like ethics, the domestic legal authority for using nuclear weapons, and even the goal of nuclear deterrence, but for the most part this feels tacked-on to the main part of the training, which is about technical procedures for making sure the missiles are ready to launch at all times, and then launching them when ordered to do so.

What is the mission of the Minuteman missile system? An instructor asks the candidates this question, and they dutifully refer to a manual in front of them where they read:

The mission of the Minuteman hardened and dispersed weapon system is to deliver thermonuclear warheads against strategic targets from hardened underground launchers in the continental United States.3

That’s the mission. Not deterrence. Not preserving freedom. Those things, to the degree that they are at play at all, are the more abstract justifications for the system. The system itself is an immensely complex sociotechnological arrangement of materials, electronics, regulations, and, at the heart of it, people. It is mundane, it is banal, it is tangible. This is what Wiseman is showing us — the banality of deterrence, perhaps.

And of course, as with all instruction, there is a bit of banter and humor, even about grim topics. Some of the candidates have previously worked with liquid-fueled Titan II missiles, and one of the instructors joked about how much easier the maintain the solid-fuel Minuteman missiles are:

Titan is, in a word, a volatile system. You drop a wrench, you can launch a missile — something like that. No, I’m just kidding.

He smiles and raises his eyebrows, and we can tell he’s only somewhat kidding. (In 1980, a dropped wrench set off a chain of events in a Titan II silo in Damascus, Arkansas, which resulted in the missile fuel detonating, ejecting its thermonuclear warhead, and killing one officer. Perhaps the influx of Titan candidates is because they began to decommission Titan II bases after that.)

As one of the instructors tells the candidates, the classroom work is abstract, and the real learning, and telling who has learned, takes place inside the simulated Launch Control Center where the candidates will drill on both the day-to-day aspects of being a missileer and the act that will hopefully never occur — the launch of the missile. Wiseman’s crew is allowed to see this in some detail, and we watch various candidates stumble through the procedures with varying degrees of confidence, observed all the while. “When you get into the EWO [Emergency War Order] part of the mission, that’s the job,” one observer lectures them. “Launching missiles is your job.”

Wiseman tacks between the classroom, the simulator, and the even more truly mundane activities on the base — a cookout and a softball game. The classroom is where abstract discussions take place about the nature of nuclear war. Like all people who work with these things on a daily basis (myself included) they lapse into an easy familiarity with horrible ideas. The ethical and legal issues appear to be reserved exclusively for day one, and further talk becomes about “the job” and is lack of individual responsibility to do anything other than to launch the missiles if asked to. As one instructor puts it:

The thing you want to do is get your [launch] key turn in when you’re supposed to. And to do that, it needs to be very rudimentized [sic], very structured, you don’t want to let anything bother you, just get the task done, and leave it at that. Get a successful launch and take care of any other problems that happen afterwards.

There is a lot of discussion, both in the classroom and in meetings between instructors (which, again, somehow Wiseman had access to) about making sure that weak candidates are either rejected or improved. We get to see one instructor giving a candidate test-taking strategies. If you have four options and don’t know which one is correct, choose the longest one, it is usually correct. If you have four numerical values and don’t have a clue which one it is, throw out the extremes and guess between the remaining ones. Perhaps these are decent test-taking strategies, but it feels a bit insane to imagine telling someone good strategies for guessing on a test about nuclear weapons use.

Wiseman’s eye is clearly drawn to the presence of women in the training, and the fact that it appears to be a novelty; some of the classes look like women make up roughly 25% or so of those present, while some seem to have none. All of the instructors and senior officers appear to be male. In one discussion, apparently with all men, the issue of “fraternization” is raised, with male candidates warned that while they do not need to shun friendship and camaraderie with the women, they should make sure that, “just don’t get it to the point where people start thinking that something’s going on.” In another class, where everyone appears to have put in for assignment at Whiteman Air Force Base (Missouri), the women there make the point that Whiteman was at that time the only Minuteman base that had women launch officers.

One of the final sequences in Missile is of two women candidates running through a full simulation of an Emergency War Order, launching the ten (simulated) Minuteman missiles assigned to them. The women do a great job; they have studied the procedure, they know what they are doing, even if it is clear they are still new at this (they both attempt to put the launch keys in upside down the first time, for example, but quickly resolve the issue). They are efficient, working together to prove, to anyone who might doubt, that they would be perfectly capable of fighting a nuclear war if called upon to do so.

Is Missile a good film? Yes. Is it an important film? Yes — everyone seriously interested in nuclear weapons ought to see it, in my mind, because it gives an insight into these “people of the bomb” that is otherwise hard to capture, and informs common questions even today like, “would the launch officers carry out nuclear launch orders under any circumstances?” (Answer: probably; that is plainly a large part of what they were selected for.)

Is Missile fun to watch? No. It’s boring. And that’s the point. It makes perfect sense that films about nuclear weapons that are trying to capture the interests of a disinterested public are often thrillers, but the everyday reality is just… reality. It’s just another facet of life. The part that’s not normal is that these activities, if taken down certain roads, lead to the death of thousands, millions, even possibly billions. It’s the juxtaposition, between the tedious checklists and acronyms on the one hand, and those terrible possible futures on the other, that makes everything about nuclear war feel a little surreal.

Wiseman’s Missile captures these juxtapositions beautifully. The best shot, for my money, is the one (above) of a female candidate turning her launch key in the simulator. It is a portentous image: if this had been a real launch, some 30 nuclear warheads would now be on their way to the Soviet Union, each capable of releasing around 20 times the energy as the Hiroshima bomb. Wiseman is zoomed in on her hand as she turns the key, and we can see her red nail polish, a very different kind of signifier. After the indicators signal that the missiles are out, and her job is completed, she concludes dutifully: “And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.”

It’s not that Gibson’s work was uniquely dystopian, or the idea of “science fiction in a world full of dirt and decay” was so unheard of itself — the aesthetic of the original Star Wars is also a juxtaposition of the worn-out and the futuristic — but Gibson’s rendering of a future based around digital computation, urban sprawl and pollution, cybernetic humans, rogue artificial intelligences, and a political environment where faceless and shadowy corporate organizations matter more than nation states, still feels fresh.

What Gibson does so well, in his ice-cold prose, is the act of juxtaposition: it’s the intermingling of the high-tech and the low-world, globally distributed. It’s one generation’s marvels turning into the next generation’s normal, and eventually, their trash. It’s a world of in which the future and the past are intimately mingled, often glitchy, never quite as utopian as one might want to believe. It is an aesthetic that we see all around us, all the time, these days — intentional, and not.

(Above: Accidental cyberpunk in a Whole Foods parking lot, Edgewater, New Jersey.)

Most of Gibson’s books do not concern themselves with apocalypse, though. Neuromancer and the rest of his Sprawl trilogy — Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) —  are set in a world that one might not want to live in, but they’re hardly worlds that have ended, either in a positive “End of History” sense (in which the world has settled into generally positive a post-political state) or a negative “End of the World” sense. The wheel of history continues to grind on in the Sprawl, for better and worse — it is not static.

Gibson has two other trilogies after the Sprawl (Bridge and Blue Ant), neither of which are apocalyptic, either. If anything, Gibson’s work could be said to get progressive less dire, the further away one gets from Neuromancer.

But his current trilogy, known as the Jackpot, of which only two books have yet come out (the next is vaguely hinted to come out later this year), is of a very different nature. The Peripheral (2014) the first in the series (and perhaps the best so far), takes place in two interconnected time periods: a possible future only a few decades from the present one, and another future set some seventy years beyond the first, whose agents are capable (I am being deliberately vague here) of communicating and interacting with the past. Let us call these “future A” and “future B” to distinguish them.1

The jackpot is what happens between “future A” and “future B.” It is simply called “the jackpot” (uncapitalized) in the book, and of course it is only people in “future B” who are aware of it. It is the disaster — Gibson’s apocalypse, of sorts.

So what is the jackpot?

The term, taken literally, is of course associated with winning, and gambling. It conjures to mind the wheels of a slot machine, each spinning, spinning, spinning, until, by some lucky whim of chance, they all independently align for the big, noisy, exciting payout.

Except, of course, if one tells you that “jackpot” is a negative, horrific thing, then the meaning shifts: what was once lucky becomes unlucky, and the loud clamor of lights, bells, shouting, and the clink of coins transform into something else —  sirens and breaking glass, perhaps.

Gibson’s yet-unpublished third book may elaborate more on the nature of the jackpot in his fictional world — it is apparently going to be simply titled Jackpot — but the basic conceit of the idea as it appears in The Peripheral is that in between future A and future B, the world undergoes a dramatic change. It’s not a single event — no instant moment of horribleness, no monolithic threat, no singular moment of “payout.” It is, as a post-jackpot character describes it (via a plot device I am deliberately not-elaborating on) to a pre-jackpot character “it was no one thing”:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns […] or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic, he [post-jackpot] said, and she [pre-jackpot] knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

The jackpot is what scholars call a slow disaster. I really like how Scott Gabriel Knowles, a historian of disasters, talks about the concept slow disasters in this article of his from 2020:

The Anthropocene is also a disaster, but a slow one, moving according to a different temporal logic. The traditional definition of disaster describes an overwhelming event delimited by spatiotemporal limits that are tightly bounded with clear cause-and-effect relationships. “Slow disaster” is a way to think about disasters not as discrete events but as long-term processes linked across time.

The slow disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeterminate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as “disaster,” but in fact claim much more life, health, and wealth across time than is generally calculated. The slow disaster is the time scale at which technological systems decay and posttraumatic stress grinds its victims; this is the scale at which deferred maintenance of infrastructure takes its steady toll, often in ways hard to sense or monetize until a disaster occurs in “event time.” The experience of war victims fits the concept well, as does the process of climate change, sea level rise, the intensification of coastal flooding, and heat waves.2

Slow disasters aren’t the ones that populate most disaster films or post-apocalyptic media. But the major catastrophe of our time — the Anthropocene generally, whatever this late-20th and early-21st century modernity is shaping into — is the slow disaster.

This isn’t to discount the possibilities of fast disasters. Nuclear war could still happen, along with a lot of other things that would produce disastrous effects over the course of days or hours. But what the idea of the slow disaster is getting at is that we should see many things that we tend to chalk up to just be “social or environmental problems” as being similarly devastating, just on a stretched-out timescale. This is, incidentally, how serious historians today think about some of the “major disasters” of the far past — the “fall of the Roman Empire,” inasmuch as historians are willing to talk about it as a “fall” at all (it’s a long story), was a slow disaster, a multi-causal transformation spread out over centuries, not just one night of Visigoths and fire in Rome.

So what does Gibson have in mind for specifics of the jackpot? He leaves it deliberately, and I think appropriately, vague:

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now [in future A], collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

This is evocative and disturbing, more so than attributing it to any one cause. If you are being threatened by a singular force, you can imagine a singular response. If you’re being threatened by a non-linear world whose complexity has outstripped its capacity to handle it, who has for centuries taken for granted that its resources were infinitely exploitable when they were in fact plainly not, and a civilization that has created political and economic entities that are capable of destroying the world but not saving it… there’s no obvious solution there.

The character in future A who is hearing about Jackpot isn’t really surprised by it:

So now, in her day [future A], he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway.

And we’re not surprised by it either, really, are we? This is all the stuff that informed people today simultaneously worry about and ignore to varying degrees.

And how do we ignore it? Sometimes by just focusing on our day-to-day (what else can we do?), sometimes by hoping that somewhere, somehow, a fix will be found. The most common fix, of course, is the technological one — maybe we’ll discover something that makes these problems just go away. Gibson’s Jackpot has an interesting take on that, too:

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

The culmination of the jackpot, which unfolds over five decades or so, is a dramatically depopulated world: 80% of the human population dies off. Apocalyptic by any definition. And yet, those 20% of survivors live in a technologically-impressive, wealth-abundant future.

This is both necessary for the plot of the book (how else does “future B” have the technology to communicate and meddle with “future A”), but it also is a very direct argument for the idea that even if scientific and technological progress keeps going on, it will be insufficient in the face of such broad system collapse.

It is both a perversion of the faith in techno-salvation while also, in its own way, an embrace of it. And it is not without historical precedent: how many narratives about the Black Death are about how the transformed world afterwards ended up ultimately being much the better? What is not our narrative about World War II than one about how despite the horror and atrocity and tragedy, the survivors ended up being healthier, wealthier, and vastly more powerful? It is reminiscent of how economists sometimes talk about vast social disruptions, like those brought about by automation: yes, it’s pretty bad for you now, but don’t worry, on the aggregate, in the future, everyone will be much happier on average.

But Gibson’s post-jackpot is no utopia; the jackpot had lasting consequences to how people organized themselves. Human society was part of the cause of the jackpot, and it didn’t come out of it necessarily having learned the “right” lessons:

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced eaten by these towers they’d built […]. And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

And he just nodded […] and went on, about how London, long since the natural home of everyone who owned the world but didn’t live in China, rose first, never entirely having fallen. […]

“Who runs it, then?”

“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”

In other words, as the world came apart, liberal democracy utterly failed. What rose in its place was “the klept,” oligarchical forces who were able, through graft and violence, to seize power in chaos. Where Gibson’s Sprawl books imagine centralized cyberpunk dystopian power as being along the pattern of Japanese zaibatsus, with a tinge of yakuza, “the klept” seems modeled on Putin’s Russia, and the model they have, with some success, managed to export Westward.

It must be said that Gibson’s work is definitely not an attempt to predict the future. It is self-consciously a commentary on our early 21st-century anxieties. What makes Gibson good at this is that he’s capable of diagnosing anxieties that the bulk of us feel but often haven’t quite gotten around to articulate. I find it very telling that Neuromancer, a book that has been vastly influential in how we think about the darker potentials of a deeply-digital future, and at times feels prophetic, was written on a mechanical typewriter, by someone who did not own a computer. As he later wrote:

Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they’re about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they’re actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.

Similarly, the Jackpot books (so far) are not really about climate change, or a deeply-nuanced argument about the correlations between corruption, authoritarianism, and generalized collapse. It’s a book about that anxious, nagging feeling that many of us have had for the last decade and a half (or so) that perhaps the best days are not ahead for us as a civilization, but that the end of the world won’t be some obvious event, but a slow decline. Of a thousand little tragedies, all seemingly disconnected from any singular force, but linked by a shared context.

The fast disasters are terrifying enough, but one can imagine tackling them. Avoiding nuclear war, even in these dark days for arms control, still seems to me like an infinitely easier problem than solving the overlapping challenges of our unfolding slow disasters. Only a handful of states have nuclear weapons. They are governed, at least nationally, by laws. They are highly centralized, difficult to produce, and can be monitored from afar. They’re just machines, in the end, that can be taken apart. And there is some logic, however unreliable, mitigating against their use. All of these things make them much easier problems to tackle than climate change, poverty, ecological collapse, the rise of an oligarchical class, and so on.

So where does that leave us? Gibson’s Jackpot books, so far, are not unrelentingly dark at all. They contain within their plots the possibility for change, for course correction. Neither futures (A or B) are truly written in stone.

Knowles’ article on slow disasters concludes:

Or is there another option [beyond Anthropogenic collapse]? I don’t think any of us would be willing to work on slow disaster and Anthropocene research if we didn’t actually, maybe quietly, hold onto the idea that a course correction is possible, that a path away from the apocalypse is at hand, that we don’t have to die in the Anthropocene after all, that the field notes of the Anthropocenic DMZ excavation may indeed someday be collected by a person visiting a wildlife refuge.

To imagine such a thing, Knowles argues, it will at a minimum require us to think about these disasters correctly. If we only prepare for fast disasters, and do not understanding how systemic problems evolve into grand-if-slow disasters, then we will be lost. This is, I think, the social value of Gibson’s jackpot: not a prediction, but a warning.