5,113

The Obama administration announces for the first time the number of nuclear weapons we have:
5,113.

BEGINNING OR THE END TRAILER 1947 ATOMIC BOMB

Atomic Slaves

From a 1946 Socialist Party pamphlet: "The slaves of the machine must not now become the slaves of the atom."

Quoted in Boyer (1994:143)

Atomic Taxi

John W. Campbell provided a cautionary voice to those who imagined an atomic Utopia:

"If an atomic-powered taxi hit an atomic-powered streetcar at Forty-second and Lex, it would completely destroy the whole Grand Central area."

Quoted in Boyer, 115

Mushroom Cloud Cake Photo Op

Admiral Blandy and his wife on Nov 7, 1946 celebrating the Bikini tests.

New York Attacked!

Philip Morrison's scenario of an atomic bomb attack on Manhattan:

"There was no one of the eight million who had not his story to tell. The man who saw the blast through the netting of the monkey cage in Central Park, and bore for days on the unnatural ruddy tan of his face the white imprint of the shadow of the netting, was famous. The amateurs who collected radioactive souvenirs from the strong patch of radioactivity which sickened Greenwich Villagers fir weeks were matched by those who found scorched shadow patterns in the wallpaper and plasterboard of a thousand wrecked homes.

New York City had thus suffered under one bomb, and the story is unreal in only one way: The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and no our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish."

From "If the Bomb Gets out of Hand" in One World or None (2007:15).

What to expect when you are expecting an atomic bomb

Federal Civil Defense Act's pamphlet 'Survival under Atomic Attack' (1951).

Naturally, there is also a movie version.

Revenge of the Radiated Nerds

Hanford Site: worker's badge and 'radiation pencils'.

Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring

In 1946, Kix cereal offered a 'Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring'.

Here is yet another case of mixed messages - the pioneering of the atomic project.





750,000 American children sent orders for the ring! (Boyer, 1994:11)

More here: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/spinthariscopes/ring.htm

Atomic Cocktail

Within hours of the announcement of the atomic bombing of Japan, the bar at the Washington Press Club began offering an 'Atomic Cocktail' consisting of Pernod & gin.

Boyer (1994:10)

Prometheus, American citizen

Life magazine's August 20, 1945 issue:

"Prometheus, the subtle artificer and friend of man, is still an American citizen."

O! the grand hubris of the USA!

Space, Time, the Bomb

Paul Boyer suggest that "the Bomb has become one of those categories of Being, like Space and Time, that, according to Kant, are built into the very structure of our minds, giving shape and meaning to all our perceptions. Am I alone in this feeling? I think not."

- By the Bomb's Early Light (1994:xx)

Degeneration

"I remember so plainly, we all knew and all suspected what we were doing, but we didn't call it the atom bomb. We called it degeneration."

- Betsy Stuart, troubleshooter for Du Pont at Hanford

In Sanger, p.170

By the way...

"By the way, have you ever held a piece of plutonium in your hand? Well, you want to do that because there is something it does for you. People at Los Alamos gave me a piece to hold. It was shpaed like a half of a hollow sphere. It was nickel-placted so that the alpha particles from it would not reach the skin. But the marvelous thing about it was the temperature of it. Here, day in day out, producting enough heat to keep itself quite warm, not for 10 years, not for a hundred years, but for thousands of years. It gives you an immediate sense of energy capacity."

- -John Wheeler, chief physicist at Hanford.

From Sanger, p.159.

Plutonium Romance

"Hanford is a song that hasn't been sung properly. there was a great romance about it. The way to gt the feel of that romance is to put yourself back at that meetin gin Wilmington, when we had a map of the United States spread out in fornt of us, and differnet possibilities there for where this plant might be sited. Great expanses of land, it was almost as if you were Columbus deciding where you would go exploring, or as if you were setting up a new respublic. Then, to pick that particular place, a most fantastic place. Whoever thingks of that northern state of Washington having a hot desert in its middle.That's onestory one person in a hundred knows. And that beautiful, bright blue, ice cold Columbia River coming down through it, from the ice fields of Canada. Then, the history of the place, the pioneer settlers who had desperately tried to irrigate it, and had irrigated it. Then pouring in, all this caravan, all different ways of getting there during the war. Railroad, airplanes, cars. The variety of people there, that too was romantic. Those Okies and Arkies coming in, several hundred a night, being unloaded there at Pasco. Those beer joints with windows close to ground level so that tear gas could be squirted in. The immense mess halls, accomodating those thousands of people. To see all those table, table after table of people. Gobble, gobble, gobble."

- John Wheeler, leading physicist in residence at Hanford

From Sanger Working on the Bomb, 157-158

Sins of the Father

"I was the daughter of a radiation monitor" - Debora Gregor

* From the poem 'Adam's Daughter' in the collection Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters

Richland High School

Richland High School's mascot was (and still is!) the Bombers and the school ring had a mushroom cloud.

http://www.richlandbombers.org/

The poetics of plutonium

Nuclear physicist, John Wheeler looking back on the Manhattan Project in 1982:

"An observer from afar, looking upon the scene in 1944, would have been convinced that he was looking at one alchemist's dream inside another. It was preposterous enough to think that dead uranium, put into regularly-spaced crannies in tons of dead black graphite, would come alive. It was still more preposterous to imagine this life, this silent darting back and forth of invisible neutrons, as producing in the course of time not merely a few atoms of plutonium, but billions upon billions of them, the philosopher's dream of synthesizing a new element achieved in kilogram amounts."

Quoted in Sanger, Working on the Bomb, 148.

Obsession with Dimes

Tech Area Show and Tell: July 17 & 18, 1955

To commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Trinity test, Los Alamos opened up its 'Tech Area' to visitors - thousands of people came.

One exhibit was called 'cooking your dimes'. Here visitors placed their dimes in a counter that measured radioactivity. The units of measurement were 'rare, medium, or well-done' depending on how much radioactivity they had soaked up (it was never explained just how the dimes became radioactive in the first place).

- Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, 188-189.

What's in a Name?

The three reactors at the bottom of Los Alamos Canyon: Topsy, Godiva, Jezebel.

Cold War Games - Operation Alert

In the early 1950s, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) initiated a program called 'Alert America'. A key element of this campaign was called 'Operation Alert', which staged mock atomic bomb attacks on hundreds of American cities in order to determine civilian preparedness.

At the end of the annual drills the FCDA would issue a report. In 1956 the organization estimated that 8 million 'died', 6 million were 'injured,' and 24 million 'left homeless'.

- Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, 179

Intercourse through the fence

In Hanford Washington, otherwise known as secret 'site W' the women's barracks were surrounded by a fence.

As one site worker, Sam Campbell described the situation: "Some of the women were prostitutes, or making a little side money. There was quite a bit of that. I have heard of cases of intercourse done through the fences around the women's barracks. I do think we had some bush business along the river." (Sanger, Working on the Bomb, 125).

I am skeptical about this claim.

In Sanger's oral history, former Hanford worker, Jane Jone Hutchins recalled: "I look back now and realize this was a free country but we were living behind barbed wire at Hanford, all to protect womanhood. I know that where women were concerned, Hanford could either make you or break you. Gals who had never had male attention before were, you know, popular. You could either become a slut, I suppose, if you wanted to, or you could become very strong, and be able to say 'No'." (143)

Church of the SAC (Strategic Air Command)

Does Virilio know about this?!

"...the Strategic Air Command Memorial Chapel at Offutt Air Force Base was built in 1956. It includes a sanctuary with seating for 360 people, stained glass windows and an educational-administrative center...The stained glass window on the north wall of the narthex, or vestibule, features words from the Air Force hymn, and the seals of the Department of the Air Force and the Strategic Air Command. Windows on the east wall depict significant events of duties associated with the Second, Eighth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Air Forces. A detail from the Sixteenth Air Force window shows the famous Red Telephone, symbolic of the Strategic Air Command's global alert readiness. Small windows near the chapel's main entrance and on the west wall represent specific air divisions and wings within the Strategic Air Command. The windows reflect the cold war missions of the 389th Strategic Missile Wing, the 72d bombardment Wing, the 451st Strategic Missile Wing, and the 99th Bombardment Wing. The stained glass windows of SAC's Memorial Chapel depict the duality of its mission — messages of hope and guidance are mixed with the grim imagery of global nuclear warfare."

http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/stories/0901_0130.html

Fear of Ellipses

Originally, scientists felt that fallout from nuclear weapons would be relatively contained. Once they realized that this was not the case and that radioactive particles could travel great distances, they began to develop maps suggesting what area would be affected based on wind patterns. These maps were composed of a series of dots (assumed targets) and ellipses (assumed fallout patterns). They were cartographic representations aimed at guessing the size of the bruise after a punch.

Nuclear Nebraska Take 2

Just found this excellent resource: http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/stories/0901_0130.html

Complete with interactive maps so that you can bomb the hell out of Nebraska and then figure out how to escape!

Nuclear Nebraska

STRATCOM - US Strategic Command, which is the nation's control center for its nuclear arsenal is located in a teensy town called Bellevue in Nebraska of all places.

Not only this - Nebraska in the 1960s led the civil defense effort in the creation of public shelters in case of nuclear attack. And because we know that nothing makes us snacky like the threat of nuclear Armageddon a special munchie was created called Nebraskits!

People of the Bomb

"The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our diplomacy. Next it became our economy. Now it's become our culture. We've become the people of the bomb." - E. L. Doctorow

The Manufacture vs. Joe 1

The Soviets called their first atomic bomb 'The Manufacture". The US nicknamed their first atomic test Joe-1.

Los Arzamas

The Soviets, just like the US, had lots of cheeky names for their secret sites and atomic projects. Their original main site was Sarov, a former monastery, yet it was called Base-112, Centre-300, Arzamas-16, or sometimes 'Los Arzamas'.

Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, 153

Vegetable Wars

According to John Hunner in Inventing Los Alamos, at the time of the Bikini tests the cloud was referred to not as mushroom, but rather cauliflower.

Its My Party

When Oppie expressed his reservations about the Bikini Tests, President Truman put pen to paper and in a letter to his Under Secretary of State, Dean Acheson called my boyfriend a "cry-baby scientist."

The Gall!


- - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 349-350.

Orson Welles Announces Wife's Appearance on Atomic Bomb

Insane, indeed

After learning of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, spontaneous parties broke out in Los Alamos, one resident, Phyllis Fisher, in a letter to her mother, wrote: "By comparison the excitement on the Hill today [August 6, 1945] has put that of July 16 [date of the Trinity test] far down on the scale of insane rejoicing."

Quoted in Hunner, p.77

Testes, testes, 1, 2, 3?

July 16, 1945: The countdown to the world's first atomic bomb test is underway. A local radio station's broadcast intrudes the wave length the Trinity site was using; the result an interspersing of numerical lessening with Tchaikovsky's Nutcraker Suite.

Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, p. 68.

Oppenheimer, zombie?

During the staging of 'Arsenic and Old Lace' at the Los Alamos' Little Theater Group, "Oppenheimer surprised the audience when he appeared as the first corpse, followed by corpses played by Nobel Prize-winner Enrico Fermi, theoretical physicist Hans Bethe, and other men prominent in the Tech Area."

- John Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos p. 57

My Boyfriend's Brother

J. Robert's brother, Frank, was also a physicist. Can you imagine? He wanted to be a flautist, but big brother convinced him not to. This life is full of difficult choices.

Frank worked for a bit in Oak Ridge, then Los Alamos. He helped Dr. Atomic out with security during the Trinity Test.

Violence Against Women

"There are 140 times more U-238 atoms than U-235 atoms in natural uranium, and separating these 'sisters' would be necessary before a bomb could be made. Since the two isotopes were of the same element, separation could not be done chemically, only physically."

- S. L. Sanger, Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, p.11-12

Sorry Ladies

Oppenheimer's my boyfriend.