SAC had first established the “military requirement” for the weapon in December 1954, and then reasserted that “requirement” twice over the course of 1956. AEC commissioner Thomas Murray wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in July 1956 inquiring whether “the stockpiling of a weapon of this size is in the national interest,” questioning whether it was “necessary or useful for military purposes” and whether its use would “be consistent with the dictates of the moral law with regard to the moderate and discriminating use of force in warfare.”1 Eisenhower bumped the question to the National Security Council, who did not complete their study until August 1957.

In January 1957, Murray gave further testimony to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy which criticized the plans for the stockpile, and the 60 megaton bomb proposal. Subsequently, in February 1957, the Deputy Chiefs of Staff met to discuss the 60 megaton bomb question — the Army opposed it, the Air Force and Navy supported it, but again, there is more to this story that I am glossing over. Morse wrote his own analysis of Murray’s position in a letter to Strauss a few days later.

Morse’s own position on the 60 megaton bomb question appears to have been complicated. He did not believe that Murray, “nor any other civilian,” was in a position to “properly or successfully challenge the mathematics or the military factors” which were necessary for making sense of whether a “military requirement” was valid or not.

But he did believe that he had the qualifications necessary to discuss such matters, as he had served for three and a half years as the head of Atomic Planning within General Lauris Norstad’s Air Operations Directorate in European Command. And so Morse’s memo was primarily about why he believes that the methods for the military requirements of nuclear weapons was “still in the ‘stone age’ of development,” and that he felt the AEC commissioners should be aware of this fact.2 His critique starts as an organizational one:

Two major handicaps restrict military atomic planning. First and most important is the inferiority complex still common to most senior officers. They tend to consider atomic weapons to beyond their understanding without extensive study for which they have neither interest nor time.

Atomic planning is therefore delegated to junior officers who have completed various “effects” courses. They frequently lack the maturity and judgment normally provided by guidance from their seniors. When these junior planners confront their seniors with effects terminology and apparent complex calculations, the senior officers are unable to exert normal guidance. Instead, they are prone to endorse the computations without close questioning and without understanding procedures or implications, and often in spite of personal misgivings. I have seen this reaction time and again in the European Theater.

So what we have here, in Morse’s description, is nuclear planning being done by fairly inexperienced officers who are then deferred to by senior officers because of a lack of confidence on the latter’s part in contesting technical analysis.

The second issue is one of national policy in general:

Another major handicap lies in our National Policy which establishes no specific war objectives from which the military can deduce any limitation on the destruction to be inflicted on the enemy. Consequently, no limitations are planned.

This is quite damning and a fascinating observation: if the war objectives do not provide any requirements for limitation of damage, then the planning will not contemplate such limitations.

Morse then continued, analyzing the difference between how the Army and the Air Force saw these issues. The Army, he argued, were focused on how to defeat “men” — tactical issues in battle. As men are “mobile and unpredictable,” they had a much harder time justifying any military requirements for the stockpile. (The Army might have opposed the 60 Mt bomb, but at that same time they were pushing for over 150,000 tactical nuclear weapons to be built for their own use.)

The Air planner, however, thought in terms of “facilities,” and had a very simple “arithmetic” for calculating their requirements, which Morse explained:

The “arithmetic” of the Air planner is important. He first studies each target in the dim light of four important guesses: his bombing error, his desired probability of success in achieving a selected degree of damage to selected elements of the target. (Single rather than multi-weapon attack on each target is the rule in order to conserve delivery forces.) As an example, the planner may estimate a 3000 foot CEP (explained below), and require a 50% probability of achieving 50% damage to concrete structures. After these selections of guesses the answer comes by “arithmetic”. The answer is highly sensitive to all initial selections.

All of the emphasis in the above is in the original, and meant to indicate what “variables” could be tweaked, with the exception of the last sentence, which is just emphasized.

Morse explains CEP (which in the original he first calls “DEP” in an apparent typo), a common measure of projectile or bombing accuracy:

CEP means “Circular Error Probable,” and is the radius of the circle within which 50% of the bombs dropped on a specific target may statistically be expected to fall. It is a measure of bombing accuracy and is established by average peacetime bombing performance. The degradation factors for war conditions are largely guesswork. SAC says 3000 feet in peace, 10,000 feet in war. 5 miles is the specified CEP for the ICBM. Arithmetic with this CEP and a 50% probability produces a requirement for 20 [megatons] to crater runways. Raising the probability to 90%, same CEP, calls for 110 MT. By such arithmetic the Air planner can establish “requirements” for 60 MT, 120 MT (as SAC now talks in briefings) or any other number without limit. For example, such arithmetic applied to the ICBM can justify 300 MT or higher. As one pushes probability toward certainty, required yield approaches infinity.

What a lovely explanation of the relationship between accuracy, certainty, and required yield. The last sentence is one for the ages regarding overkill: if certainty is required, then overkill is inevitable, if accuracy is fixed. This paragraph also hints at the idea that SAC did not even consider a 60 Mt bomb to be the end of its ambitions for that time.

Morse then notes that SAC’s goals of cratering runways meant that it was contemplating ground bursts. He noted (and underlined) that “fallout from such attacks has been largely ignored to date by all planners except SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who prohibits ground bursts.”

Morse further pointed out that at SAC’s planning process was focused on individual targets, not systems of targets. This also led to overkill:

The distinction between analysis by individual targets rather than by systems of targets is most important because by its very nature it insures no allowance for the cumulative effects of weapons upon targets or operations other than those which each individual weapon was intended to destroy. The destructive and disruptive nature of nuclear weapons, particular megaton weapons, is such that cumulative or ancilliary effects may often be as great or greater than primary damage. Yet in today’s nuclear weapon planning they are dismissed as “bonus” effects adding to the certainty of success. Radioactive fallout upon enemy and friend alike, as well as world-wide, are among those effects so lightly dismissed as “bonus”.

In other words, by focusing on individual targets, particularly hard ones, SAC was focusing on a tiny range of potential damage: the highest blast pressures obtainable, used for cratering airfields and the like. It thus ignored the fact that these multi-megaton weapons were also doing vast “lighter” damage to the same area, including to other targets in that “complex,” as well as creating fallout, fire, and other longer-range damages. The latter were all “bonus” compared to that desire for cratering the airfields. (And how many targets are we talking about? A list of potential targets used by the USAF for nuclear planning from 1956 was released a few years back, and included some 1,100 individual locations.)

Morse noted that this concludes here was not just his own view of things:

A current DOD [Department of Defense] study questioned this procedure, pointed out that “bonus” effects result in tremendous over-kill, and concluded that analysis by systems rather than by individual targets, using the same procedures and calculations, would show that kilotons rather than megatons are more than sufficient to achieve desired destruction. This study was rigorously suppressed and all copies destroyed. It lent support, however, to the growing doubt regarding the validity of current military requirements for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

What suppressed study is he referring to? The late Bill Burr suggested it might have been a forerunner to Project Budapest, an Army-Navy study that critiqued Air Force nuclear planning that was completed in August 1957.

Morse continued by noting there were other areas of “guesswork” used to inflate requirements, like questions about how many bombers would actually reach their targets. The result of all of this, he concluded, was that:

…the planner for air attack with nuclear weapons can generate requirements for any number or yield of weapons which he desires. By his interpretation of intelligence he can select an almost infinite number of targets for destruction, and of characteristics justifying any yield he wishes. It is he who estimates losses and aborts before penetration of enemy defenses. He also estimates losses to the latter. And he makes allowances for destruction of his own weapons by initial enemy attacks. Weapon requirements are directly proportional to the choice of such factors, but the remaining factors of the problem can multiply requirements manyfold.

What limiting factors were there, ultimately, in such a situation? Only three, Morse argued: conscience, financial resources, or production capacity. Of these:

Since the first is flexible and the second has imposed no restraint as yet, only production capacity has so far limited weapon requirements. The close correlation between SAC requirements and AEC production capacity over a period of years is not coincidence.

Morse takes a slightly more positive view of the Army’s planning, noting that the Army’s perspective was much more respectful of the consequences of such weapons, given their proximity to their effects:

[The Army planner] is acutely aware of the damage that explosives can do, to him as well as to the enemy if he is not careful. He has often seen high explosive effects, although not nuclear, at first hand. The air planner has seldom seen the results of his own bombing. Consequently, the Army nuclear planner is subject to almost automatic restraints, which do not apply to the reasoning of the air planner. And the results are quite different.

As for the Navy (Morse’s own service), Morse acknowledged that he was largely going to skip them, as its approach “hovered between the two extremes” of Army and Air, but tended to side with Air just because their own nuclear planning at that time involved using similar platforms (planes launched from carriers).

Again, Morse concluded that while he felt Murray was probably right about the lack of a military need for very high yield weapons, he did not think that Murray’s “guesses” for military requirements were any less arbitrary than the military ones. The point of the memo was not to provide even his own “guesses,” but to create a context in which the AEC Commissioners could evaluate why the different branches had such different apparently “requirements,” and why the Air requirements should be viewed with a grain of salt. If these military methods were “not tempered by good judgment and restraint,” then they would result in “questionable estimates,” to put it lightly.

The estimating of military requirements for atomic weapons is still in the “stone age” of development. Certainly you among the Commissioners should be fully aware of this fact in weighing Commission response to requirements expressed by the military.

Morse’s memo is vivid, clear, and sharp in its critique. It contains many of the same critiques that later analysis, such as Daniel Ellsberg and Lynn Eden, have since levied at nuclear war planning in the Cold War: arbitrary systems, swathed by secrecy and apparent technical precision, with little room for consideration of larger effects, conscience, or the big picture.

But Morse was no dove by any definition— and neither was Murray, nor Strauss, nor Eisenhower, nor anyone under discussion here. Morse would become a major force pushing for increased use of tactical nuclear weapons, limited nuclear war, and the “neutron bomb.” All of these were hawkish in their own way, but still recoiled from the horrors of the “infinite” targets and “infinity” yields that he saw as indicative of the “stone age” approach to planning by the Air Force.

“The Shelter” opens with a birthday celebration of a physician, Dr. William Stockton, thrown by his family and neighborhood friends. Along with singing the praises of the good doctor’s generosity, the celebrants also give him some gentle ribbing about how much time and effort he has put into building a bomb shelter:

Well, I'm afraid we'll have to forgive him for all that despite the fact that what the doctor thinks of as farsightedness on his part has been a real pain in the neck to the rest of us, what with all the concrete trucks and the nocturnal hammering and all the rest of it.

But the party quickly turns sour when Dr. Stockton’s son, Paulie, runs him to tell him that the radio program he had been listening to had abruptly shut off after announcing that people should turn to the CONELRAD station. Today this would require a bit more explanation, but in 1961 I suspect the audience could be expected to know that the CONELRAD station, which was even marked on many American radios from the time with a triangle, was for emergency information, particularly related to Civil Defense and nuclear war.

Dr. Stockton takes this seriously, as befits a man with a bomb shelter. The station announces that “unidentified flying objects” had been detected by America’s ballistic missile warning systems, and that people were advised to go into their shelters if they have them. If they did not have them, they were advised to move supplies of food, water, and medicine to a “central place.” The guests hastily run home.

At this point, Serling’s introductory monologue cuts in:

What you’re about to watch is a nightmare. It is not meant to be prophetic, it need not happen. It’s the fervent and urgent prayer of all men of goodwill that it never shall happen. But in this place, in this moment, it does happen. This is the twilight zone.

The partygoers have left. Stockton and his wife, Grace, are preparing their supplies. Grace is filling up jars full of water at the sink, although the water pressure is waning and finally ends. Grace and Bill move their supplies to the basement and send Paulie out to grab some more.

While he is gone, Grace kneels in desperation or prayer. Bill tries to comfort her:

– Grace. Now, if it is a bomb, there's no assurance it'll land near us, and if it doesn't...

– But if it does, Bill, New York is only 40 miles away. And New York’s gonna get it, we know that. So we'll get it, too, all of it. The poison, the radiation, the whole mess. We'll get it.

– We'll be in a shelter, Grace, and with any luck at all, we'll survive. We've got food and water enough to last us for two weeks. Maybe even longer if we use it wisely.

– Then what, Bill? Then what? We crawl out of here like gophers to tiptoe through all that rubble up above? The rubble and the ruin and the bodies of our friends? Oh, Bill, why is it so necessary to survive? What's the good of it? Wouldn’t it just be better and easier, just quicker if we just...

Before she can finish the sentence, Paulie is heard up the stairs. Bill gestures upwards:

Grace, that’s why we have to survive. That’s the reason. He may only inherit rubble now, but he’s 12 years old. He’s only 12 years old, Grace.

Grace seems somewhat reassured, and collects herself.

We cut to Bill upstairs, in the kitchen, grabbing some final jugs of water. A knock comes at his window — it is one of his neighbors, asking that Bill might allow him and his family share the Stocktons’ shelter. Bill tells him there is no room and tells him that he should instead go into his own basement. But his friend notes that his own house doesn’t have a basement; it is modern construction, with all the electric conveniences of the time, but no basement, no protection. Bill gives him a lecture:

I kept telling you, Jerry... all of you... Get ready, build a shelter. Forget the card parties and the barbecues for maybe a few hours a week, forget them, and make the admission to yourself that the worst was possible. But you didn’t want to listen. None of you wanted to listen.

To build a shelter was to admit to the kind of age we lived in, and none of you had the guts to face that. So now you've got to face something far worse! So, God, please, God protect you. It’s out of my hands. It’s simply out of my hands.

And so emerges the central tension of the episode. One by one, the neighbors who had been at Dr. Stockton’s birthday party show up at the house, begging for shelter. Bill, by now barricaded inside his bomb shelter, is adamant that this is impossible: they do not have enough space, supplies, or even air to spare. Bill has been the one who prepared, and the others mocked it, and now they were on their own.

The friends become increasingly agitated. They turn on one another. They argue about which of them is more deserving to live; one of them declares that another is a “foreigner,” a “pushy, grabby, semi-American” who does not deserve anything.

At the shelter door, they plead for the lives of their children. They threaten. Bill tells them that they are wasting their time, that he will not let them in, that they should be seeking shelter or preparations elsewhere.

Finally, the neighbors move to acquire the tools necessary to break down the door to the Stocktons’ shelter, to claim it for themselves. Hearing all of this, inside the shelter, the Stockton family process it:

– Bill… Who are those people?

– Those people... those people are our neighbors, our friends, the people we've lived with and alongside for 20 years.

The neighbors return with a battering ram. They force the door down, but the Stocktons have piled up furniture to slow them down.

Just as they make it through the door, the CONELRAD station pipes up:

This is CONELRAD. Remain tuned for an important message. The President of the United States has just announced that the previously unidentified objects have now been definitely ascertained as being satellites. Repeat. There are no enemy missiles approaching. Repeat: There are no enemy missiles approaching. The objects have been identified as satellites. They are harmless and we are in no danger. The state of emergency has officially been called off. We are in no danger.

The neighbors embrace their loved ones, crying with relief. The most aggressive neighbor attempts to apologize to his immigrant friend — “I went off my rocker… well, you can understand that, can’t you?” — who is clearly not reassured. They apologize to Dr. Stockton and offer to pay for the damage they have caused to his home.

Dr. Stockton emerges from the shelter, looking spent and haggard. One of the other neighbors suggests they have a big block party to celebrate their survival. While another nervous neighbor embraces the idea: “anything to get back to normal, huh?”

The doctor walks through them, shell-shocked. He turns, looking at them like they are madmen:

– Normal? I don’t know. I don’t know what normal is. I thought I did once. I don’t anymore.

– I told you we'd pay for the damages, Bill.

– Damages? I wonder. I wonder if any one of us has any idea what those damages really are. Maybe one of them is finding out what we're really like when we're normal... The kind of people we are just underneath the skin. I mean all of us. A lot of naked, wild animals who put such a price on staying alive that they'll claw their neighbors to death just for the privilege. We were spared a bomb tonight, but I wonder. I wonder if we weren’t destroyed even without it.

And so the episode ends. Serling gives his outro monologue:

No moral, no message, no prophetic tract. Just a simple statement of fact: For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the twilight zone.

Like many episodes of The Twilight Zone, the themes are not subtle, nor obscure. The question of “fallout shelter morality” was a commonly-discussed one at the time. If you prepare for nuclear war, and your neighbor does not, are you obligated to help them, even if it comes at the expense of yourself or your own family? Conversely, is the neighbor under the obligation to simply suffer under those circumstances, or are they justified in trying to protect themselves and their loved ones?

And the idea that friends could become instant enemies when the world was at the door, and that civilization and civility are only thin veneers that wash away at the first sign of threat, is a common threat in literature, sociological musings, and post-apocalyptic fiction. (And many other episodes of The Twilight Zone.)

But “The Shelter” does a very good job of putting these things together in a way that befits the context of a call for national shelter building. Unlike some of Serling’s other episodes that invoke nuclear disaster, nuclear war isn’t just a metaphor here, it is part of a very real concern at the moment, referring to very real questions at the time. There is no indication that this episode is taking place on an Earth-like planet (like some other episodes), or any place other than the here and now. It’s not even fanciful: there had already been several major “false alarms” of nuclear warning systems that reached the public, and many other secret alarms that had not resulted in any public warning. The episode aired only a month after the Berlin Wall had been erected, and about a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis — pretty much the most dangerous period of the Cold War.

Serling was interviewed on the radio about the episode on a radio station apparently about a month later, asked about the reaction to the episode. He told the interviewer, Bob Crane that:

We had about 13,000 letters and cards inside of two days. I think we hit some kind of nerve. […] I wrote it because I felt that it had great immediacy. We’d be talking at home, my wife and me, about the possibility of building a shelter, and we were struck with the moral and ethical problem of what would happen if there were an alert sounding, and we got into our shelter happily, because we’d built one, and neighbors with children came to the door and said, “please let us in.” Well, that was the problem. I can’t answer it. I don’t know what is the ethical rightness and justice of this. I haven’t figured it out yet.

The interviewer noted that he had heard several “knowledgable men” on a panel debating exactly these kinds of ethical questions, and asked Serling about the ending, and whether he wanted “to leave it a little bit stronger than that,” in terms of providing answers to the moral question posed. Serling was emphatic:

No, because I’m not one of those quote “knowledgable men,” Bob, I don’t know. I was up in the air about it, morally and ethically. I didn’t know how to end that thing. I didn’t know what position, philosophically, I could take.

The interviewer then asked Serling about his own shelter plans. Serling said they weren’t building one now, but for awhile “they had thought very seriously about it.” But they decided they weren’t going to build one. “Why?”

Well, for very realistic, you know, stringently realistic reasons. It’s my feeling now that if we survive, what’ll we survive for? What kind of world are we going to go into? You know, if it’s rubble and poisoned water, and inedible food, and my kids have to live like wild beasts, I’m not particularly sure I want to survive in that kind of world.

The only character who voices this specific point of view in “The Shelter” is that of Grace, Dr. Stockton’s wife. Both Dr. Stockton, and the neighbors, took the imperative for survival as a given. But Grace had to be convinced, and only supported the effort after her husband reminded her that it was really about the survival of their child.

Serling also invoked the lives of his children his children’s lives, but to support the opposite conclusion of Dr. Stockton, from the episode: that he could not bear to put them through such a “survival.”

At first I was just amused by it, because it seemed to embody the paradox of American Civil Defense during the early Cold War: lots of rhetoric about how important it was that was absolutely detracted from by the relatively modest effort being made. The main headline from their first issue, in November 1951, is just… humorous: PAPER CUPS STOCKED FOR EMERGENCY USE.

Georgia has a stockpile of 1,000,000 paper cups and containers, which will insure an adequate supply of these important utensils for every town and city in the State, in the event of air attack or other disaster, it is revealed in an announcement by Ernest Vandiver, Georgia Director of Civil Defense.

The paper supplies are stockpiled in a warehouse in the Griffin area and plans have been perfected to transport a sufficient supply to any section of the State affected by atomic explosion or other disaster, the Director pointed out. The exact location of the stockpile will not be made public for security reasons.

The paper supplies become highly essential in emergency hospitals and feeding the homeless when water supplies are knocked out, making dishwashing impossible, Mr. Vandiver said.

That this is the lead story of their premiere issue — paper cups, wow! — is funny enough. Yes, paper cups do seem like they would be useful in an emergency. And taking mundane problems like “how do we distribute water to people in a way efficiently and in a way that won’t spread disease?” is exactly what all emergency preparation efforts have to consider if they are serious at all, because disaster relief is really nothing but a series of mundane challenges. And perhaps the temptation to steal or otherwise use 1,000,000 paper cups would be enough to warrant their being kept at a secret location.

But the idea that paper cups are going to be the key to surviving a nuclear war is, well, inherently amusing. Pretty much any single response to an atomic explosion is going to look amusingly inadequate by comparison. Much less focusing on paper cups, of all things.

And it wasn’t just that they used it for the feature story — they kept going on about the paper cups in the interior pages, with a photo of the State Director of Civil Defense posting in front of boxes of the paper cups, labeled FOR DISASTER USE ONLY, demonstrating a “portable hot and cold drink dispenser” with a secretary:

Again, I’m not saying these things are wrong… they just seem so woefully inadequate to the task at hand. And this is what they are choosing to publicize?

But it was really this photograph from the same issue, of the Civil Defense office’s staff, that suddenly put all of this in a different light for me:

Oh, right. Georgia. That Georgia. The American South. The Deep South. Georgia, where the Civil Defense headquarters are located on Confederate Avenue (which was renamed United Avenue in… 2019). Georgia, the state that in 1956 adopted the Confederate Battle Flag as part of its state flag as part of its self-proclaimed “massive resistance” to forced integration after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Which means that the woman posing with the Confederate battle flag in the above photograph from 1951 is not posing with the Georgia state flag — it’s “just” the Confederate flag, a symbol of “Southern heritage” — the war flag of a successionist government that fought the bloodiest war in American history in order to preserve the state’s “right” to enslave human beings. Ah. Yes.

I skimmed over the issues from 1951 through 1955, and found zero photographs of any African Americans, and exactly one reference to their existence at all: in a list highlighting “women’s activities in CD in Georgia,” from March 1953, one woman is listed as having been asked by the Superintendent of Schools for Richmond County “to assist in setting up a plan for the protection of children in the schools, white and colored.”

Looking at the newsletters from 1955-1958 turns up a story about Girl Scouts distributing a Civil Defense pamphlet in 1958 which also says that “a Colored Cub Scout Troop helped make deliveries to the Negro sections.” A news round-up story about a flood in Savannah in 1956 mentioned that 75 “negro children” were rescued. And a photo caption from July 1956 describes a mock “air raid alert” in Toccoa, Georgia, that was held in “both city schools,” and then mentions that one of them was “the white school” — suggesting, even only by omission, that the other school was for the non-white population, and that they too participated in the alert exercise.

That the 30% or so African-Americans in Georgia are basically invisible in their Civil Defense publications from this time is hardly surprising. But it does stand out. It raises the question of how segregation was handled in Civil Defense planning. If one took these newsletters at face value, one would not be remiss in thinking that Civil Defense in Georgia was about preserving the white population exclusively. It puts the portable drink dispenser in a different light: in a state with segregated drinking fountains, were such supplies going to be made available to the entire Georgia public?

In a 2011 journal article about Civil Defense planning in Savannah, Georgia, by Jonathan Leib and Thomas Chapman suggests that this omission was characteristic of planning at the time.1 Looking at the 1955 “Hydrogen Bomb Evacuation Plan” for Savannah, that while there was no explicit discussion of Jim Crow segregation, a close reading of the plan suggests that the assumption was to maintain segregation even while trying to evacuate areas before or after an atomic attack. They conclude:

Facing the total destruction of Savannah and the surrounding region, it is both absurd and unremarkable that evacuation planners would be concerned enough to create an evacuation plan that sought to preserve Jim Crow racial segregation. It is absurd because a hydrogen bomb dropped on the city would likely result in a massive number of deaths that would not discriminate based upon one’s race. However, the tenets of the plan are also unremarkable in that it did not appear to have escaped the long fingers of the Jim Crow system of institutional segregation.

It is indeed “unremarkable,” in the sense that it is exactly what we would expect. But both the authors and I are, of course, remarking upon it, because it is a useful reminder that even in the face of existential risk, societies carry their “baggage” forward with them. For me, it also raises a question that I think about a lot in the context of the video game I am working on: if you were rebuilding society after a nuclear war, would you want to rebuild it to be the same society it was before the nuclear war? Or would you desire something radically different?

One would hope that the prospects of thermonuclear destruction would be enough to at least temporarily put aside base prejudices in the name of group survival. Would the survivors of such an attack be more open-minded and understanding than the people who were planning for it? One would hope… despite all evidence to the contrary.

Understanding the answer to this question, at different times in history, is often quite hard to do, because these kinds of war plans are, even decades later, often still highly classified. But it’s an important thing to study, because without some real, tangible data on it, it is hard to know exactly what could have happened if the Cold War had gone hot. And seeing what they did and did not plan for also gives important insights into how these organizations worked — or didn’t work.1

I recently stumbled across a fascinating discussion of the consequences of nuclear war in an Executive Session between the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) and representatives from the US Army from June 1956. The JCAE was the Congressional oversight committee for all matters relating to the US nuclear stockpile, and these Executive Sessions were highly-classified briefings that were never intended to see the light of day, but the transcripts of many of them have since been declassified, and are a historical treasure-trove.2

What makes the transcripts so valuable is that they are often far more blunt and direct than official reports and documents — one is seeing an actual conversation that took place, between people who thought that nobody outside of that room would ever get to hear the conversation. It doesn’t mean that people are necessarily more honest with one another, but it does mean that the show they are putting on is for a much more select audience.

In this particular hearing, the JCAE was only its Subcommittee on Military Applications, with only three members: Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), Senator John W. Bricker (R-OH), and Representative James E. Van Zandt (R-PA). The Army had sent some ten people to this hearing, but for the excerpts below the two who matter were Lt. General James M. Gavin, the chief of Research and Development and the ranking officer there, a Colonel Robert E. Coffin, and a Colonel George M. McHaney. I don’t know much about McHaney or Coffin — but what a name — but the point of the hearings, ostensibly, was to talk about the Army’s projected needs for nuclear weapons. And those needs were quite large, to hear them tell it: the Army alone was projecting a need for 151,000 tactical nuclear warheads, with yields ranging from “a tenth of a kiloton” up to a megaton, with the possibility of using over 420 per day of “intense combat.”

But it’s their presentation of a 1955 study of the consequences of a thermonuclear war in the bomber age that really grabbed me. What follows are selected excerpts from a much longer hearing.

GENERAL GAVIN. I would like to consider first the psychological and political aspects of thermonuclear war and in doing so I would like to present a chart that outlines the probable results from the use of a specific number of thermonuclear weapons against targets on the Eurasian land mass. This presentation has been made to the Chiefs of all services and the yardsticks used in developing the fall-out pattern are those accepted by all services.

This outline of fall-out shows the casualties that would occur if wind conditions were on this chart you are looking at now generally from to west to east and it is based upon the use of eight [11 characters redacted]3 weapons — surface bursts against airfields. This happens to be an arbitrary number and an arbitrary system of targets. It is not a precise plan. However, it is related to planning considerations.

SENATOR JACKSON, The primary first mission of our SAC [Strategic Air Command] would be to destroy their ability to hit us —

GENERAL GAVIN. That is right, sir.

SENATOR JACKSON. So that would be directed at their airfields.

GENERAL GAVIN. That is correct.

SENATOR JACKSON. This isn’t an inordinate number from that standpoint.

What is being described here is a “counterforce” attack on a massive scale, not unlike the one depicted in the contemporaneous USAF film, The Power of Decision. That it is largely “surface bursts” — weapons set to detonate on contact or very close to the Earth’s surface, in order to heavy damage to the airfields in question — is significant, because this means they would be heavily fallout generating. (Airbursts, of the sort used to destroy cities, produce considerably less “local fallout,” the intensely radioactive plumes that most people associate with nuclear fallout. Surface bursts produce lots.)

This is a massive attack — all the more so considering that the Soviet ability to attack the United States from those airfields was at that time still fairly limited.

When Senator Jackson notes, “This isn’t an inordinate number [of casualties] from that standpoint,” what I think he means is, “the casualties you are imagining inflicting upon the Soviets is not so high given that the goal is to keep them from being able to inflict huge casualties against us.“

Gavin continued to flesh out the numbers, helpfully painting the picture of the unseen map in our minds:

GENERAL GAVIN. Although numbers vary a great deal — this figure was projected into the future when this study was made a year ago — it is to be noted the casualties in the satellite countries were 324 million. The USSR — 142 million and allied 2 million.

Now I would like to show you the pattern of fall-out based upon a shift of winds that would put the winds generally east to west in mid-Europe with a little fishtailing into Japan and the Asiatic area, It is interesting that the gross casualties remain about the same — approach on the order of a half a billion, except if the wind blows one way someone else gets [more?] than if it blows the other way.

In this case it is to be noted that the casualties go up half way through the United Kingdom; the 80 percent line through the Scandinavian Peninsula; half of Spain, down into the Balkans, into Greece, into Turkey and of course a great deal of the fall-out pattern goes over Japan.

The capriciousness of the wind, and its ability to change which millions die, is a stunning concept. So is the planning of an attack that they believe would kill two million citizens of nations that are allied with them.

Another part of the discussion clarified that the “80 percent line” referenced was a line on the map depicting “80% civilian casualties.” They also clarified that they are talking about casualties — fatalities plus injuries — not just fatalities. Still, it is a massive number.

324 million casualties is still an incredible number. To put that into context, consider that the total number of deaths during World War II was on the order of 70-80 million people.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. These casualties are based on fall-out alone?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir, fall-out alone.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. What about shock wave and so forth?

GENERAL GAVIN. No, I am incorrect, sir. These are total casualties. The heaviest losses would be from fall-out. Of course there would be complete destruction of people —

SENATOR JACKSON. And pre-supposes a lack of cover, of course.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Those are all surface bursts?

GENERAL GAVIN. These are surface bursts, yes sir.

SENATOR JACKSON. Which they, of necessity, would be if they were directed at destroying their airfields.

The problem posed by fallout is, of course, immense here. And this study seems to presume that only counterforce (airfields) are being targeted, which it is clear was not the sum total of the US military’s nuclear war plans at the time. That is, they likely also were going to target cities directly, but that seems to be taking a back seat to the fallout problem in general.

All of the casualties discussed thus far are non-American casualties. Gavin did turn to the question of what might happen if the Soviets attacked in kind:

GENERAL GAVIN. There are various estimates of what casualties might occur under an attack on the United States. One figure that is pretty generally accepted is that, for example, a 60 megaton weapon over population centers of the United Stares would destroy about 50 percent of our population. One can take any number of weapons and come up with figures something of the order of these. I am not intending to be precise, but I would like to point out the problems one must face in making a decision to launch an attack like this. This is the psychological and political aspect of it.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. What is the world population — about 2 billion?

COLONEL COFFIN. Two billion.

SENATOR JACKSON. Two and one half. We have 7 percent of whatever it is.

The numbers here are a little imprecise. The current UN global population estimate for 1956 is that the world had 2.7 billion people at the time. The US Census estimate for the 1956 population was around 167 million. So the United States was more like 6% of the global population at the time.

The idea that the Soviets would use 60 megaton weapons on all US population centers not very realistic. Soviets never fielded weapons that large in reality. The US Strategic Air Command, was, however, quite interested in developing and fielding 60 Mt bombs. They had requested them in 1954, and twice again in 1956. SAC had first said that they wanted them to attack “hardened” targets, but they later suggested they would be more economical for destroying “target complexes” that were large-enough to require several smaller weapons, like greater Moscow. Ultimately Eisenhower vetoed the idea, after several years of pining.

There is a longer story to be told about this, at some later time, but I just want to emphasize this is an interesting example of “mirroring”: SAC wanted 60 megaton bombs in 1956, so they are imagining that the Soviets would be using that weapon against the US, even though the Soviets did not possess 60 megaton bombs at the time.

But just back to those numbers. If the US attack would create 342 million casualties, and the world population was 2.7 billion people, that means that the US attack alone would make military casualties out of about 12% of the entire global population. But if you go with the numbers the Congressmen were using, it’s more like 25% of the entire global population. World War II, by comparison, had a global casualty rate of around 3%, and was, well, rather remarkable for it.

The fallout discussion continued, with some discussion about “global fallout” — the general raising of background radioactivity that comes from the detonation of nuclear weapons, as opposed to the more direct “local fallout” previously discussed:

SENATOR BRICKER. Would the atmosphere in an atomic attack such as this pictured here become generally contaminated around the world?

GENERAL GAVIN. The strontium 90 content would go up significantly.

SENATOR BRICKER. How high do you figure?

GENERAL GAVIN: I am not sure I could any what the damage would be world-wide to people; that is through the United States, Canada and so on. I don’t know.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT: Isn’t it true, General, that those who study fall-out now tell us that when you use high yield weapons, that is a megaton, you throw it up into the troposphere and about two pounds [of fallout] for every 20,000 [tons of yield] and it spends anywhere from five to ten years up there?

GENERAL GAVIN. I don’t know, sir. That is very interesting.

Van Zandt’s numbers (he later clarifies that he means two pounds of fallout for every 20 kilotons) likely derive from someone explaining to him that fallout is mostly made up of fission products, and the rule of thumb is that 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) of material fissioning completely corresponds to around 18 kilotons of yield. So his numbers were a little off, but close-enough. It doesn’t really tell you that much, though, since the impact of one kilogram of fission products dispersed in the air (much less in the upper atmosphere) does not correspond in some obvious way to a given situation on the ground. Hence the difficulty of fallout modeling.

After some more discussion on fallout (and the desire, by the Congressmen, for developing “clean” nuclear bombs), and some questions about prevailing wind directions in Europe, the discussion of casualties continued:

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Do you suppose these nations concerned — these neutrals now are familiar with the results of fall-out in the event of an atomic war?

GENERAL GAVIN. I think a lot of them know more about it, sir, than we give them credit for knowing. This worries people very, very much in Europe in my opinion. Very much.

SENATOR BRICKER. What percentage of the 80 percent of civilian casualties there would come from fall-out?

COLONEL MCHANEY. I would say, well over 90 percent of them, sir.

GENERAL GAVIN. Again sir, the purpose of this chart was to make a point. This question was raised last year and in response I pointed out the psychological and political aspects would make the decision a very difficult one indeed.

SENATOR BRICKER. I have just one more question. That wouldn’t mean they would all be killed. It means incapacitated for warfare.

COLONEL, MCHANEY. That is right, sir.

SENATOR BRICKER. Some might survive.

COLONEL MCHANEY. Yes sir.

“Some might survive” is a grim way to put it. Later discussions appear to indicate that they are talking about around 250 rem and up, so “death and sickness” were combined into one blunt category.

Jackson asked about shelter assumptions, suggesting that if people took cover, those numbers would go down:

SENATOR JACKSON. You would reduce fall-out casualties very substantially if you could assume that the people in the fall-out area could obtain cover. This pre-supposes, I take it, a complete surprise.

COLONEL MCHANEY. No sir, if I might correct that impression. Those charts were drawn up under the assumption every man, woman and child in this area was taking advantage of any available cover. This was actually [based on] surveys made of normal building, housing structure in some of those regions. Most of the houses are stone. And in those regions the shielding effect of their homes was given appropriate credit. In other regions they are just frame houses and the shielding would be less.

SENATOR JACKSON. In other words you predicate [sic?] upon the home environment and made your decisions according to what the known environment is in each country.

COLONEL MCHANEY. That is correct, sir, so we have taken account of any natural shielding they could take today.

So that seems to indicate that these are the most “optimistic” numbers. If people didn’t take shelter, the numbers would presumably much higher.

At one point they go off the record when talking about American troops who would be exposed to fallout, but when they come back, they had this interesting exchange:

GENERAL GAVIN. I might say this is the first time we have ever brought these charts to any Congressional Committee. We have worked hard on them.

SENATOR JACKSON. We had one a couple years ago, as I recall, when General Ridgeway was up.

GENERAL GAVIN. It was a different one. It had a lot of bananas on it. I remember that one too.

Bananas, you say? I do seriously wonder if they are talking about the same map, and are making the same semi-serious association with those “Bravo” clouds and “bananas” that I did. The timing is not impossible!

There was one last discussion about global radiation increase from this much fallout, with Colonel Coffin (again, what a name):

COLONEL COFFIN. The exact effects of the massive fall-out on a world-wide basis are not known. We can arrive at such conclusions as 25,000 megatons will double the gamma radiation background in the world. The next question is what is the effect of that. Nobody knows.

SENATOR BRICKER. Genetically and otherwise. […]

COLONEL COFFIN. The effect on genetics is a tremendous increase in stillbirths. Nobody can give an exact figure, but a very definite increase. […]

SENATOR BRICKER. It isn’t a happy picture, is it?

COLONEL COFFIN. It is a very dismal picture at present.

To put this discussion of 25,000 megatons into context, in 1956 the United States nuclear arsenal was just shy of 9,200 megatons, and growing rapidly. By 1957, it had over 17,500 megatons. At its peak, in 1960, it was over 20,000 megatons. So 25,000 megatons is not an insane number to use for projecting what might be “expended” in a full-scale thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union (who would presumably add some of its own megatons to that total) in the near future, particularly given that the context of the entire discussion was about the ever-larger stockpile requirements requested by the US military.

After this discussion of worldwide fallout, Gavin tried to clarify why they were giving them this briefing on nuclear in the first place:

GENERAL GAVIN. Again, sir, the purpose of this chart was to respond to an inquiry of last year as to what is meant by psychological and political difficulties in making a decision to launch a strategic offensive. This is only mentioned in relationship to the overall purpose of this presentation to comment on the Army’s tactical atomic requirements.

SENATOR BRICKER. You have definitely arrived at this conclusion that if a strike is made, it will be an all-out strike?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir. The great significance of this to the Army is that the Soviets are aware of this. We are aware of it. As they arrive at the point of being able to deliver a blow like this against us, then they will be in a position if they have other forces able to wage war on a lesser scale to be aggressive around the periphery while all the time blackmailing us and never giving us a black and white decision. It will always be grey. They will always be doing something less than this. This is the problem that worries us most. We are arriving at that point we feel now.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. In other words, a continuation of the cold war?

GENERAL GAVIN. Yes sir, in the atomic era.

And so the full logic of this grim presentation, by the same Army requesting over a hundred thousand nuclear warheads, is reached. The presentation is meant to be horrifying. It is meant to feel overwhelming and terrible. It is an Army presentation of an attack plan that was largely developed by the Air Force, one that would result in an unimaginable scale of death and destruction. And, as Gavin emphasized, the plan was all-or-nothing: there was no option for anyone to “limit” the destruction of the US nuclear war plan at this point.

And given all of that, Gavin says, what are the odds that the Soviets would set such a thing off? What are the odds that the US would ever initiate it? And couldn’t, then, the Soviets then wage a much lower-scale conflict, something that would not warrant this level of attack, and thus make such a massive threat seem impossible and impotent?

Hence the need for the Army to have tactical nuclear weapons — smaller-scale weapons that could lower the threshold for nuclear use in a credible way, and avoid nuclear war being rendered entirely all-or-nothing, genocide-or-capitulation.

At this point, there is one more amusing question from Representative Van Zandt:

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. May I put one question at this point? I am thinking of the Russian propaganda machine putting something like this in print and distributing it to that part of the world affected and charging us with having capabilities of doing that job. From a propaganda standpoint, we would be behind the eight ball.

GENERAL GAVIN. If you handle it like that, we would.

REPRESENTATIVE VAN ZANDT. Yes sir. I imagine the Russians are thinking about the same as we are.

GENERAL GAVIN. I think they are too. They know about it.

Wouldn’t it be awful if the Soviets just told our allies that our plans would kill so many of them, and told the world that our war plans were so genocidal in nature? Wouldn’t that make us look like the baddies? It’s a good question — but nobody in this hearing really seems to think that the problem is that they are acting like the bad guys, here.

Which to me is an interestingly unspoken concern at this moment. Do the “good guys” actively spend their time planning for operations that would kill millions upon millions of non-combatants, including your own allies? If you assume they’ll never be carried out, that the act of planning for such mega-slaughter is enough to discourage it from ever occurring, one can certainly preserve some kind of moral position, although it’s still a pretty grim one.

But if you think that there’s a chance that position might slip, that deterrence might fail, and that you might actually then carry through a plan that would possibly kill or injure around 25% of the world’s population — as these people clearly thought was the case… that feels like a much worse moral position, to put it bluntly. And I think the fact that they were worried that the Soviets could use the reality of the American’s own nuclear war plans as moral propaganda against them shows, at some level, that these people understood that, in some way.

The film was famously inspired by the Castle Bravo accident in March 1954, in which the first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb at the Bikini atoll by the United States resulted in a radiological catastrophe, with a massive and intense fallout plume that required the evacuation of native Marshallese islands and American observers. A Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Fifth Lucky Dragon”), was also accidentally exposed to its fallout, and after returning to port in Tokyo, its crew began to suffer from the characteristic symptoms of radiation poisoning. One of the crew eventually perished. Prior to this, the tuna catch was released to the Japanese fish markets, leading to a public panic as authorities sought to identify the radioactive tuna. The consequence was a temporary boycott on the eating of tuna, a staple of Japanese food, across the country.

The Bravo accident was an important moment for the Japanese public, who were only two years independent of the American Occupation of Japan, under which discussions about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seriously curtailed, out of fear that they would lead to anti-American or pro-Communist sentiments. Bravo re-opened the issue, centered around (rightly or wrongly) the notion of the Japanese status as atomic victims, a status now doubly implicated. And so Bravo is seen in retrospect as a turning point for the emerging Japanese political movement against nuclear weapons.1

This was, according to those who worked on it, part of the context of deciding to make Gojira, and to make the film and creature a complicated metaphor for nuclear weapons, Japan’s status as a nuclear victim, and even a reminder of Japanese civilian suffering during World War II. I had heard (and taught) this story many times, because it is always interesting in retrospect to see that something that is often dismissed as a rather trivial pop culture phenomena (giant radioactive monsters) be rooted in a much broader political and social movement that can be traced back to a specific event (an American hydrogen bomb test).

But I was recently digging around a bit more in the history of Gojira/Godzilla, and was surprised to discover that Bravo was only half of the equation. The other half was something quite different: another radioactive monster film. What became Gojira was conceived of by its producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, as a merging of the post-Bravo mindset with a now-forgotten American film that had come out the year before, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which has its own radioactive monster going on a rampage. I was also surprised to learn that the working title for Gojira was even The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was directed by the Russian–French filmmaker Eugène Lourié, produced independently, and distributed by Warner Brothers. A decent quality scan is available to download or stream for free on Archive.org. Its title comes from a short story of the same name by none other than Ray Bradbury which ran in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951.

Bradbury’s story, later anthologized as “The Fog Horn,” has almost nothing to do with the film as made. It was apparently quite popular, and so the filmmakers decided to buy the rights to it for their already-in-production monster movie, but other than a vague similarities and a single scene (involving a light house), the influence of the story feels rather absent. I had gotten my hopes up that one could trace Godzilla back to Ray Bradbury, but it’s a stretch.

The plot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is as follows (feel free to skip to “THE END” — you’ll see it — if you don’t care about the recap, and just want the analysis). It starts in the arctic (it is later implied to be somewhere near Greenland), where the military and the US Atomic Energy Commission are conducting a nuclear test detonation with the deeply uninspired codename of Operation Experiment. The details of the experiment are unclear, but we see some good stock mushroom cloud footage from the 1940s (one part of the sequence is even cribbed from the Trinity test).2

Afterwards, two AEC scientists go outside to take measurements. One of them sees a gigantic lizard creature, and is so shocked that he falls off of a ledge. The ledge only looks like it is 15 feet tall, and he falls onto snow, so it is perhaps a little silly that this results in an apparently fatal condition. While searching for him, his companion, a German-American physicist named Thomas Nesbitt, also catches sight of the creature, before he is himself injured in an avalanche. Nesbitt is found by others and brought back to the base in poor condition, and quickly relocated back to the United States for treatment.

Nesbitt heals physically over time from his traumatic event, but psychologically everyone thinks that he has perhaps lost his mind. Quite a lot of the film is Nesbitt attempting to convince others that he saw a gigantic lizard monster in the arctic, and them more or less politely suggesting that he must be delusional.

But, of course, we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not delusional, because we are watching a monster movie. The creature, brought to life by the famed stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, makes his way south through the water, causing havoc as he goes. He destroys a few boats, and later attacks a lighthouse — the latter being the only real connection to the Ray Bradbury story, which is about a lighthouse that gets attacked by a giant monster. Nesbitt hears of these attacks and connects them with his own story.

Nesbitt contacts Dr. Thurgood Elson, a world-esteemed paleontologist, to ask about whether the creature could have been some kind of dinosaur that had become frozen in the ice, in a state of suspended animation for millions of years, and was awoken by the nuclear testing. Elson points out the many, obvious flaws in this idea. Elson’s assistant, the comely Lee Hunter, however, is intrigued by Nesbitt. She later meets up with him to show him drawings of different dinosaurs, on the off-chance that he can identify his monster. He concludes it was a Rhedosaurus, a (fictional) dinosaur that looks to me like a wingless dragon.

In order to prove that he didn’t imagine the whole thing, Nesbitt and Hunter work to find survivors of the other attacks. Nesbitt eventually connects with one of the sailors, and convinces them to return with him to New York, where, in the presence of Dr. Elson, he looks over the same dinosaur drawings that Nesbitt had and picks out the Rhedosaurus. Elson is convinced and lobbies the military to take Nesbitt’s claims seriously. While briefing the military, Elson notes that plotting the Rhedosaurus attacks on a map shows a definite southern movement, perhaps towards a deep sea canyon where many Rhedosaurus fossils had been found — perhaps an old breeding grounds.

Elson convinces the military to allow him to descend in a diving bell to scout for the Rhedosaurus. After a pointless but extended sequence of a shark fighting an octopus that looks half-real and half-puppet (one wonders if this is recycled footage made for some other film), he finds the lost dinosaur, and is delighted. Of course, it eats him. This is about the 3/4ths of the way through the film — it has taken this long for Nesbitt to be conclusively validated.

The Rhedosaurus soon after surfaces in southern Manhattan and begins wrecking havoc. A police officer shoots it with a pistol and is eaten for his troubles. The Rhedosaurus destroys some cars and crashes through some buildings. Air-raid sirens scream. Crowds flee in a great panic. Somehow the police and military lose sight of the monster. We transition to a newscaster who tells of the lockdown in the city — visualized with news footage of a 1951 Civil Defense exercise in NYC, I would add — and are told that it is “what is already the worst disaster in New York’s history,” with 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and, god forbid, $300 million dollars in property damage.

The Army mobilizes. When the creature is next spotted, they attack it with heavy weaponry, including a bazooka that actually injures it. It flees, again, and the soldiers pursue. But the creature’s blood makes them mysteriously sick, and it is theorized that it has some kind of prehistoric disease that has also hitched a ride in hibernation across the millions of years. The fear grows that if they kill the creature in some spectacular way, it will spread its plague along with it. Nesbitt proposes that they use a “radioactive isotope” to destroy the monster and “all that diseased tissue” it carries.

The creature next attacks Coney Island. Nesbitt and the army, including a sharpshooter, pursue. (Hunter, Dr. Elson’s attractive assistant, goes along with Nesbitt on most of this, but doesn’t do much other than serve as a growing love interest. He seems only moderately interested.) While the creature is inside a large wooden rollercoaster, Nesbitt (with the isotope) and the sharpshooter done radioactive protection gear and ascend in one of the coaster’s cars. Nesbitt loads the isotope weapon and the sharpshooter fires it into the wound on the creature. While this happens, the rollercoaster car they used to ascend gets out of their control and, somehow, starts a massive fire. Nesbitt and the sharpshooter precariously descend the burning rollercoaster structure.

The creature, although wounded by the isotope, escapes the fire and staggers around. Nesbitt gets a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek from Hunter. The Rhedosaurus emits a Godzilla-like scream, and then dies. The words “THE END” appear over its corpse. That’s all, folks.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is not that great of a film. The stop-motion animation of the creature is really the only thing it has going for it, and it looks pretty good in the slightly-jerky, slightly-uncanny-valley way that all stop-motion creatures from this era looked.3 Almost all of the creature work is in the last 1/4th of the film, however, and the lead-up to that is rather tedious since we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not insane and that the creature is real, and we are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to him.

It is, however, interesting to compare the film with Gojira (meaning specifically the Japanese version from 1954, not the Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, from 1956). The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms exists in a very different thematic space as Gojira, and a very different relationship to nuclear technology.

Both Gojira and Rhedosaurus are awoken by nuclear testing. But other than one line spoken by Nesbitt right after the test — “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell” — there is no real depiction of nuclear weapons as “a problem” in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Nesbitt is an active and willing contributor in the test experiment that wakes it up. The US has made its own monster, but nobody ever explicitly frames it that way.

By comparison, in Gojira, the nuclear testing is an external force that the Japanese are being subjected to, and nuclear weapons are explicitly invoked as a harmful, threatening aspect of the modern world. I re-watched Gojira after watching The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and it was very clear how overt Gojira is about this. There is a conversation on a Tokyo train later in the film (but before the attack on Tokyo) between several people that goes along these lines:

— “It’s terrible, huh? Atomic sea life, radioactive fallout, and now this Godzilla to top it all off!” […]

— “I guess I’ll have to find a shelter soon.”

—“ Find one for me, too!”

— “The shelters again? That stinks…”

Gojira ties the monster, the atomic testing, nuclear fallout, and the need for shelters together, and “the shelters again?” strikes me as a reference to the sheltering that was done during the firebombing campaign in World War II, less than a decade before. Similarly, later in Gojira someone asks: “Isn’t Godzilla a product of the atomic bomb that still haunts many of us Japanese?”

Gojira also has more subtle allusions. The earliest scenes are of a ship undergoing an unexpected (and at the moment, unexplained) catastrophe — something much closer to the Bravo accident than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The attack on the village on Odo Island has scenes from the inside of houses that are collapsing that are strongly evocative of victims’ descriptions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the monster attacks Tokyo, the capital city is set aflame, which to the Japanese at that time must have felt compelled to append the word “again.” Its imagery seems deliberately evocative of these past horrors, in other words, something entirely absent from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Nesbitt, the scientist in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, never renounces his life’s work in any way. He believes that nuclear technology is the future (there is much ado about paleontology being about the past, and nuclear work as being about the future, and this is even turned into flirtatious banter between him and Hunter), and he saves the day thanks to his “isotope.” Yes, the atomic test woke up the Rhedosaurus, but atomic science is also what put it in the ground.

The only “themes” I really detected in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms were about scientists themselves. In particular, Dr. Elson’s death is the result of his own naivety and scientific fascination, his unwillingness to take seriously the threat that he is trying to study. He encourages the military not to try and kill the beast, because of its value to science, and he believes he understands it, because he is studying it. After it eats him, Hunter tells Nesbitt that he really shouldn’t let it bother him too much: “Nobody is to blame. And everybody is to blame. We all did what we thought was right.” I don’t actually think this was meant to be an indictment of a particular mindset, but it feels like it ought to be considered one — the road to hell, and all that.

The death of Gojira is a very different kind of affair. Without getting into all of the details, a different scientist, working in secret, develops a new scientific weapon known as “the Oxygen Destroyer.” But he doesn’t want to use it, because he believes it will lead to a new arms race, to new destruction, and would be “a new super-weapon to throw upon us all!” He finally agrees to use it, but insists on using it himself, and ends up destroying Gojira, himself, and the secret to his new weapon, all in one go. Which is a very different attitude than Nesbitt exhibits towards his “isotope” (“WHICH ISOTOPE?” I mentally screamed every time someone invoked about “the isotope”) or the killing of the Rhedosaurus.

Gojira is also just a better film overall. The story’s pacing is better and clearly better thought-out. In Gojira, the identity and nature of the creature is not at all clear in the beginning of the film, making the investigations into it a collective understanding for both the characters and the audience. Whereas in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the audience pretty much knows what the creature is from the beginning, but there is a long, protracted sequence in which Nesbitt tries to convince others of this fact.

Nesbitt is also just not a very relatable character, and his “role” in Gojira is split into several different characters (including the always wonderful Takashi Shimura, recognizable even to Americans from his appearances in the films of Akira Kurosawa, including his role as the primary samurai in Seven Samurai, which came out the same year as Gojira) who are given far more emotional depth and thematic complexity than Nesbitt. (And nothing is ever done with the fact that Nesbitt is German, for example. Whose side were you on during zie war, Herr Doktor Nesbitt?)

The one place where The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms outshines Gojira, in my opinion, is the creature special effects. Gojira, the monster, does look like a guy in a rubber suit. It detracts from the seriousness of its endeavor. Rhedosaurus, for all of its clumsiness, looks and acts more like a wild animal. But I noticed that there seemed to be many more action shots of Gojira than there were of Rhedosaurus, and I suspect that’s the advantage of a guy in a rubber suit: it’s probably cheaper, and quicker, than having Ray Harryhausen do your special effects for you, and so you can have more of them.

Putting them side by side, it is clear where Gojira took inspiration from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. But it is also just as clear what the creators of Gojira did to turn their film into something much better, by infusing it with the complex cultural associations that the Japanese public had with nuclear weapons, turning a fairly schlocky idea (a monster is awoken by atomic bomb testing and goes on a rampage until put down by scientists) into something that also carries considerable thematic heft.

“Only a nightmare dream”

The earliest case I am aware of this idea being put into circulation dates to 1903, where the atomic pioneer Ernest Rutherford was reported by a colleague to have suggested that “it was just conceivable that a wave of atomic disintegration might be started through matter, which would indeed make this old world vanish in smoke.” This supposedly referred to a “joke” of Rutherford’s that “some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares.” It was, the colleague reported, merely a “nightmare dream.”1

Rutherford’s collaborator, the chemist Frederick Soddy, also invoked the "nightmare” of death-by-transmutation in his public lectures. In a 1903 lecture on “Some Recent Advances in Radioactivity,” Soddy considered that:2

The knowledge [of radioactivity must] make us regard the planet on which we live as a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.

The next year, Soddy gave on radium the next year at the Corps of Royal Engineers, in which he suggested that:3

It is probable that all heavy matter possesses—latent and bound up with the structure of the atom—a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in shaping the world’s destiny! The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose. […] The fact that we exist is a proof that [massive energetic release] did not occur; that it has not occurred is the best possible assurance that it never will. We may trust Nature to guard her secret.

Soddy did not mention the possibility of either a weapon or global destruction in his 1909 book, The Interpretation of Radium, which is an interesting omission. The idea was resurrected and further popularized some years later, in May 1922, by the British chemist Francis William Aston, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year for his work on isotopes. Aston gave a lecture at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in which he warned that:

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction; but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event the whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

And Aston repeated this paragraph in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture later that year. Aston’s lectures led to a spate of newspaper articles, not unlike an anonymous “Oxford scientist” of the same year who warned both of atomic bombs and possible global annihilation: “it is conceivable, too, that such terrific force might eventually be liberated as to blow up the world.”

Newspaper headlines globally ran headlines about these warnings: “Tinkering With Angry Atoms May Blow Up the Earth,” “Earth as a Bomb,” “Will the Atom Blow Up the World?” But dismissing this idea, in the 1900s-1920s, was, as Soddy illustrated, simple enough: if it was that easy to turn the world into a run-away nuclear reaction, then surely it would have happened at some point over the course of the Earth’s long history. What are the odds that humanity, that johnny-come-lately species, is going to be the one who set it all aflame?

And it was all still quite hypothetical, as humanity had no sign of this level of control over transmutation, no “detonator.”

“Atmospheric ignition”

This would change in the 1930s. The discovery of induced radioactivity in 1934 meant that the possibility of chain reactions was possible: that one nuclear reaction could lead to many more nuclear reactions. The discovery of nuclear fission in uranium in late 1938, and the fact that neutron-induced fission reactions produced additional neutrons, gave a practical way to accomplish nuclear transmutation at a whim. That the world had not already in the long past exploded from nuclear fission reactions suggests these reactions are not easy to start or propagate. And, indeed, the issue was quickly discovered: only some isotopes of uranium are easily fissioned, and most are not, and so it requires quite a lot of artifice to create the conditions for such chain reactions to occur.4

But the possibility of explosive nuclear reactions was, eventually, pursued for military purposes. And so we jump ahead to the famous meeting at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 1942, where J. Robert Oppenheimer assembled a coterie of nuclear physicists to discuss the theoretical basis for designing an atomic bomb, prior to the formation of the Los Alamos laboratory. And into this mix, the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller suggested a new nightmare: “atmospheric ignition.”

Accounts of the discussion vary. Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine (2017) contains an excellent summary of many of them.5 The gist is that Teller laid out the possibility that in the event that they created and detonated a bomb powered by an explosive uranium-235 fission chain reaction, it would produce, among other things, an intense and concentrated source of heat. This heat would be enough, he argued, to cause fusion reactions in light elements, like hydrogen. Teller’s primary interest, here, was the idea of the Super, or hydrogen bomb.

But this was linked with another idea, that these fusion reactions would also take place in the Earth’s atmosphere, notably hydrogen (in its water content) and nitrogen (which makes up 78% of our air). If the atomic bomb started such a fusion reaction in the atmosphere, and the fusion reaction was hot enough to cause additional fusion reactions in that same atmosphere, then a runaway fusion reaction would, within seconds, traverse the globe, burning everything, and leaving dead rock in its wake.

This kind of problem, to a nuclear physicist, is equal parts interesting and distressing. The assembled group, which aside from Oppenheimer also included the meticulous German physicist Hans Bethe — who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the 1930s in uncovering the fusion reactions that power stars — picked over Teller’s equations and reasoning. A fatal flaw was soon found: the heat of any fusion reactions created would dissipate quickly in the atmosphere. This would likely make such a run-away fusion reaction impossible, as the cooling would prevent it from spreading. Thus Bethe, nearly instinctively, judged the scheme as “impossible.”

“The ultimate catastrophe”

However, that this was considered far from proven. Oppenheimer himself subsequently traveled to Chicago talk with Arthur Compton, the Nobelist physicist running the Metallurgical Laboratory to create the world’s first nuclear reactors there, to share news of the possibility. Compton wrote of this some 14 years later in his memoir:6

I’ll never forget that morning. I drove Oppenheimer from the railroad station down to the beach looking out over the peaceful lake. There I listened to his story. What his team had found was the possibility of nuclear fusion—the principle of the hydrogen bomb. This held what was at the time a tremendous unknown danger. Hydrogen nuclei, protons, are unstable, for they could combine into helium nuclei with a very high temperature. But might not the enormously high temperature of an atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen of sea water? Might the explosion of an atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself?

Nor was this all. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might it not be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?

These questions could not be passed over lightly. Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!

This is, as Ellsberg later noted, quite a proposition: if the atomic bomb had any chance of killing the entire planet, then it was better to accept the possibility of a Nazi victory than total suicide. We will come back to this proposition, later.

In many later recollections, particularly in the 1970s when this issue became raised again, many Manhattan Project participants, like Bethe, outright dismissed the idea that they ever considered atmospheric ignition even a remote possibility. One finds this sentiment in many modern-day discussions of it. Ellsberg argued, and I think he is correct (for both his reasons, and others that I will come back to later), that this latter-day denial is bad history.

It is perhaps quite true that Bethe himself never took it seriously, for reasons that we’ll get to below. But it is also clear that there were some who did take it more seriously, and that even up to the moment of the Trinity test there were those who feared, in some small way, that the “ultimate catastrophe” might still be in the cards. And the insistence that this was not a legitimate concern was in part an effort to retrospectively paper over that any kind of uncertainty about a risk that might have been taken.

Because to acknowledge any sense of uncertainty on the issue is to suggest that these scientists were willing to take a secret gamble on humanity even more so than they did by merely ushering these weapons into the world. And to acknowledge that would be to undermine the story that the atomic scientists were telling after World War II that they were the responsible experts whose views should be taken seriously when shaping the future of the world.

In 1959, Compton told the writer Pearl S. Buck that:

scientists discussed the dangers of fusion but without agreement. Again Compton took the lead in the final decision. If, after calculation, he said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in a million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less—and the project continued.

This suggests the issue was a more drawn-out discussion than the “never took it seriously” narrative would imply, and also the firm-but-arbitrary limit of three-in-a-million as the “acceptable odds” for this catastrophe. Those are indeed long odds, but not as long as winning lottery jackpots.

What was the source of these estimates? Teller did write up a paper in 1943 on the subject (cited in some literature as LA-001), but it has never been made available that I have seen. The internal, top secret Manhattan Project History, commissioned by General Groves, with its Los Alamos section written by the physicist David Hawkins and finished in 1947, describes the work thusly:

It should be mentioned at this point that in the early period of the project the most careful attention was given to the possibility that a thermonuclear reaction might be initiated in light elements of the Earth’s atmosphere or crust. The easiest to initiate, if any, was found to be the reaction between nitrogen nuclei in the atmosphere. It was assumed that only the most energetic of several possible reactions would occur, and that the reaction cross-sections [probabilities] were at the maximum values theoretically possible. Calculation led to the result that no matter how high the temperature, energy loss would exceed energy production by a reasonable factor. At the assumed temperature of three million electron volts the reaction failed to be self-propagating by a factor of sixty. This temperature exceeded the calculated initial temperature of the deuterium reaction by a factor of one hundred, and that of the fission bomb by a larger factor.

The impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was thus assured by science and common sense. The essential factors in these calculations, the Coulomb forces of the nucleus, are among the best understood phenomena of modern physics. The philosophic possibility of destroying the earth, associated with the theoretical convertibility of mass into energy, remains. The thermonuclear reaction, which is the only method now known by which such a catastrophe could occur, is evidently ruled out. The general stability of matter in the observable universe argues against it. Further knowledge of the nature of the great stellar explosions, novae and supernovae, will throw light on these questions. In the almost complete absence of real knowledge, it is generally believed that the tremendous energy of these explosions is of gravitational rather than nuclear origin.

It is not clear whether this perfectly reflects the reasoning of 1943-1945. Ellsberg interviewed Hawkins about the question in 1982, and says that Hawkins told him that he had “done more interviews with the participants on this particular subject, both before and after the Trinity test, than on any other subject,” and that the atmospheric ignition question was continually “rediscovered” by other, younger researchers, and had to be dismissed anew again and again. This suggests another origin of the early defensiveness about this topic — and part of the its seemingly conclusive inclusion in the Manhattan District History, which was explicitly meant to serve as a classified record of activities to be consulted in the event that there was a need for justifications of actions taken during the war. Hawkins would tell Ellsberg that by “impossibility,” he had really meant “for practical purposes,” as opposed to literal “impossibility.”

“A colossal catastrophe”

In March 1946, the question was raised from another source. In the months prior to Operation Crossroads, there was considerable public controversy regarding the safety of two underwater tests that were planned. One was a shallow underwater test (Baker), and the other was a deep underwater test (Charlie, which was ultimately cancelled for other reasons). These underwater shots appear to have generated similar fears about fusion ignition, this time of the oceans.

The Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman, whose high-pressure lab had generated data on plutonium’s equation of state during in the Manhattan Project, and who had received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1946, was so alarmed by the idea that he wrote to Bethe on the subject, and his fears were forward to General Leslie Groves:

What is worrying to me is the possibility that if the bomb is exploded in the ocean the hydrogen may be converted to helium with an astronomical release of energy. […] If the history of physics teaches any one thing, it is that long-range extrapolations are hazardous. Even the best human intellect has not imagination enough to envisage what might happen when we push far into new territory. […] To an outsider the tactics of the argument which would justify running even the slightest risk of such a colossal catastrophe appears exceedingly weak. […]

If I am right in thinking that the tactics of the argument are weak, then it would be wrong to drop the bomb whether or not the ocean explodes. Suppose the bomb is dropped as [is] at present planned, the ocean does not explode, and later it should become known to the general public that the argument had been weak and that the scientists had permitted the taking of a stupendous chance without doing everything in their power to safeguard all possibilities. There might be a reaction against science in general which would result in suppression of all scientific freedom and the destruction of science itself.

This appears to me as cause for greater concern than the blowing up of the ocean, which after all would not very much affect a world of dead men.

That it was forwarded to Groves points to some concern about it. It is possible that someone like Groves might have been worried less about the reality of Bridgman’s fears, but about the way that having such a thing in writing could, inadvertently, bring Bridgman’s fears about later accountability into reality. How “weak” was the argument, and how would they be later judged if someone — including Bridgman himself — made this point publicly?

The immediate outcome from Bridgman’s letter appears to have been a “debunking” article by Hans Bethe, which appeared in the March 15, 1946 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. By this point, Bethe notes, there had been “much public discussion” about the possibility of atmospheric or oceanic ignition. Bethe says that the concern is “very well taken,” but is thoroughly discouraging of the idea. His basic argument is that because an atomic bomb contains a lot of non-reacting material — everything beyond the part that is fissioning — that will necessarily lower the temperatures that are transmitted to the atmosphere, and that the temperatures needed for fusion are very high indeed. He concludes that while there were unknowns, safety seems guaranteed by wide margins.7

It is an interesting and different argument than any of the other ones given here. He also, per his expertise, discourses at length on the conditions inside of stars, and how different they are from those on Earth, even those places that are near exploding atomic bombs. It is perhaps the best evidence we have for how Bethe himself would have thought about it, which is interesting because it is not how, say, Teller seems to have considered the question. Bethe’s answer from 1946 is far more categorical than any of the other ones offered up so far.

“The dangerous temperature”

The concerns about Crossroads might provide some context for the formal writing up of a paper tackling the atmospheric ignition problem by Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Cloyd Marvin, Jr., titled “Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs” (LA-602), dated to August 1946.8 It might be, for example, the “due diligence” desired to show that the “argument” about ignition was, in fact, not weak. But it only concerns itself with atmospheric ignition (not oceanic ignition), so perhaps not. But it is otherwise not entirely clear why this was written up nearly a year after the Trinity test, particularly if there is an earlier paper from 1943 on the same subject.

The Konopinski–Marvin–Teller paper is extremely technical but not too difficult to follow if one is familiar with the basic terms. The question they try to tackle is, what would the easiest possible atmospheric ignition reaction be, and are there conditions under which it could ever occur, based on what was known at the time?

They assume that a nitrogen–nitrogen fusion reaction would be “easiest” fusion reaction to induce in the Earth’s atmosphere. They did not know how easy it would be to induce, because they did not know the probability of that fusion reaction under different conditions of temperature or pressure (they did not know its cross-section, in technical terms). Given these uncertainties, they advocated a risk-adverse philosophy: “because of the uncertainties in the knowledge of these processes, the policy should be adopted of exaggerating the dangers at any point which appears at all questionable.”

So they made some conservative guesses as to what seemed reasonable based on what they did know, and then then reasoned about how this reaction might propagate in the atmosphere if it started, balancing the processes that would produce heat, and those that would dissipate it.9

All of their results were that no reaction would propagate. A major question of interest for the paper, though, was how confident they were in that answer. This came in the form of a “safety factor,” the ratio of energy losses to gains. If that ratio of losses to gains is >1, then the reaction is a net loss — no propagation, no global thermonuclear apocalypse. If it ever gets close to 1, however, that is a problem. They performed their equations with different assumptions about how much energy was being generated by the bomb, and found that for all reasonable numbers, the “safety factor” was very safe indeed.

But they found that if the initial energy was high-enough, it would get to a “safety factor” that was only around 1.6. That was still “safe,” but was close-enough to 1 to indicate that any major errors in their understanding could be quite dangerous indeed. This corresponded to an initial temperature of 10 MeV, which was very hot indeed. They explained that this would be the total energy of a weapon on the order of 27,000 megatons was entirely pumped into the air as heat. In reality, they explained, most of that energy would not be converted into heat, so even this was unrealistic situation — a weapon over a million times more powerful than the weapons of World War II — was not very plausible.10

They continued, though, and suggested that if somehow the energy of 3 tons of fissioning material was dumped into a very small volume of air — a sphere with a 7 meter radius — that might get closer to the “dangerous” temperature of 10 MeV. This is still not that plausible: the weapons of World War II each fissioned only about 1 kilogram of material, so we are still talking about something thousand times more explosive, on the other of 50 megatons.11

But this much lower number, they noted, does start to get one into the mindset of Teller’s contemplate Super bomb, which was assumed to be possible of being thousands of times more powerful than the weapons used against Japan, and would also release more of its energy in a “useful” form for heating the air than the fission bombs. Thus a fusion reaction in “a sphere of liquid deuterium only 1 to 1.5 meter in radius may suffice,” which in the range of the future multi-megaton Super bombs being contemplated during the war were imagined to be.12

Still, even in this situation, the authors have faith that the cooling effects would win out. The abstract of the paper is categorical: “The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions.” But the actual conclusion of the paper couches its work in more uncertainty than this:

There remains the distant possibility that some other less simple mode of burning may maintain itself in the atmosphere.

Even if the reaction is stopped within a sphere of a few hundred meters radius, the resultant earth-shock and the radioactive contamination of the atmosphere might become catastrophic on a world-wide scale.

One may conclude that the arguments of this paper make it unreasonable to expect that the N+N reaction could propagate. An unlimited propagation is even less likely. However, the complexity of the argument and the absence of satisfactory experimental foundations makes further work on the subject highly desirable.

Now, again, this particular paper was finished after the Trinity test, so its conclusion that the atmosphere would not be set aflame by Trinity was presumably considered pretty valid. In his memoirs, Teller says that he, Konopinski, and Marvin, “demonstrated” with their equations that “such a cataclysm could not occur,” but that the famed physicist Enrico Fermi was not satisfied:13

But when we had completed our proof, Fermi insisted that we go one step further. All we had proved, he pointed out, was that such an explosion could not occur according to known laws of physics. But what presently undiscovered phenomena might exist that, under the novel conditions of extreme heat, might magnify the consequences and lead to an explosion? Considering that question occupied my time immediately before the test. I explained the possibilities I had considered and asked for suggestions from everyone who would listen to me.

Fermi’s question is a bold one, and perhaps is the reason for the expressions of doubt, and desire for future research, at the end of the 1946 paper. After all, if all of this is new physics, what is to say that they’ve actually got it all figured out? They knew they didn’t even know the exact cross-section of the reaction they are talking about — what about the things they didn’t know they didn’t know?

In October 1945, Teller wrote up a short paper for Fermi about the possibility of the Super, as part of the postwar planning purposes. In it, he mentioned atmospheric ignition in the context of an even bigger weapon:14

Careful considerations and calculations have shown that there is not the remotest possibility of such an event [ignition of the atmosphere]. The concentration of energy encountered in the super bomb is not greater than that of the atomic bomb. In my opinion the risks were greater when the first atomic bomb was tested, because our conclusions were based at that time on longer extrapolations from known facts. The danger of the super bomb does not lie in physical nature but in human behavior.

Which is an interesting data point in Teller’s own thinking on the matter, and the question of the unknown unknowns.

“Disastrous consequences”

The matter was not, for Teller, apparently resolved completely. In 1951, as work on the hydrogen bomb was moving forward to the point of a planned test in late 1952, he asked the physicist Gregory Breit, then at the Yale University, to independently re-consider all of the calculations with fresh eyes. Teller apparently told Breit that “the considerations of the wartime period might have been too hurried,” and that the plans to test a Super “have increased the importance of the question.”15

By this point, much more was known about fusion reactions, and the fact that they were in fact much harder to start and propagate than Teller had imagined in the 1940s. Breit and his “group” of postdocs and graduate students tackled the problem and had answers by the fall of 1952, prior to the first megaton-range thermonuclear test, Ivy Mike.

The Breit group’s recalculation was able to substitute much more definite data than had been available in 1943-1946. They concluded that, as before, there was a “dangerous temperature” in which the possibility of energy gains might overcome energy losses, and even revised it downward from the original — they agreed with 10 MeV as a dangerous temperature, but thought it could possibly go as low as 5 MeV. But they noted that the energy of the bomb being contemplated (on the order of 10 megatons) were 500 to 1,000 times too low (only 10-15 keV). “In the fall tests,” they concluded, “there is no danger that one can see.” They considered as well that “although one does not know all the factors with certainty it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be off to a degree which would matter.”

Even here, though, they felt the need to add a bit of critique. The original paper, and perhaps their own, suffered from the possibility of unknown unknowns:

The theory of nuclear forces is still in a rudimentary stage and while it is generally agreed that very large effects of this kind are improbable it would be unfortunate if one were mistaken and if one were the cause of disastrous consequences through overconfidence in present day nuclear theory. Much of the latter [the report] is based on incomplete evidence. The attitude regarding what constitutes certainty in question under discussion Is necessarily different from that taken in deciding what constitutes a good Ph.D. dissertation problem or even what constitutes a suitable subject for inclusion in an ordinary bomb test.

We are back, again, at Ellsberg’s question: how much risk is allowable if you are talking about the possibility of global annihilation? Should “normal” scientific attitudes towards risk and uncertainty prevail, or are they inadequate when the risk of being wrong is so large? Can one know, in advance, how wrong the unknown unknowns could be? It is interesting to consider that in only a few years, the second American thermonuclear test, Castle Bravo, would become a major radiological accident in part because of the inability of scientists to predict the physics involved in the test. Even the Trinity test itself was several times more explosive than had been anticipated ahead of time.

“The necessary conditions”

In the 1979, two Livermore scientists, Thomas A. Weaver and Lowell Wood, published a paper that re-studied the atmospheric and oceanic ignition problems with the benefit of many decades’ of data and advanced computing capabilities. Instead of asking whether kiloton- or megaton-range nuclear detonations could set the atmosphere of Earth on fire — they already knew it could not, plainly — they instead asked what the “necessary conditions” would be if you were to set off a runaway nuclear chain reaction in an atmosphere.16

They concluded, as I have written about in the past, that the “easiest” way for such a thing to happen would involve increasing the deuterium content of the ocean by twenty times, at which point it could be ignited by a 200 teraton (20 million megaton) explosion. Which is a very precise way to say “impossible.”

By this point, in 1979, I think it is fair to say that no scientists took seriously the possibility of atmospheric ignition. If anything, they were perhaps all too quick to dismiss it even retrospectively. By the 1970s, the idea of the paternal scientific expert giving wise counsel was coming under widespread attack as a result of the deep linkages that had formed between the scientific community, the weapons industry, and the perceived role that they played in enabling and perpetuating the Vietnam War.17

But it is worth returning to Ellsberg’s question, which, as we have seen, is echoed in many of the earlier discussions by the historical actors themselves: What level of risk is tolerable in this situation, particularly when these risks are being taken by agents who are not being subject to even the oversight of scientific peer review, much less democratic oversight?

Let’s say that we decide that Compton’s criteria of anything less than a 3 in a million chance is too much, when we are talking about killing everyone on Earth. One might still find that to be a dangerously risky proposition given the unknowns and the potential consequences — again, one-in-a-million odds events do occur, sometimes.

But let us imagine that we are at least somewhat comfortable to imagine that, under the circumstances of World War II or the early Cold War — where these bombs are hardly being developed and tested for mere interest but as part of a major global confrontation — that we might imagine that we could agree that these are somewhere on the order of magnitude of odds we might accept. One in a million. If the odds of atmospheric ignition were imagined by experts to be, say, one in a hundred, would the Trinity test have been vastly irresponsible? I think undoubtedly.

But here’s where someone like Ellsberg wants us to flip things around. It’s not just about atmospheric ignition. Ask yourself: what do you think the odds are for a nuclear war occurring in the next century? My sense is that most people who study this question seriously would consider them to be much more likely than one-in-a-million, and that the historical data we have — with a few very “close calls” within the first eight decades of the nuclear age — suggest that it might be very high indeed.

The fears of atmospheric ignition, in retrospect, seem perhaps quaint, and attackable by both mathematics and experience. But the underlying problem, the underlying question of how much risk is acceptable, seems to be as potent as ever.

“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.