David Stairs
When the scientists of the Manhattan Project solved the technical challenges for the first atomic bomb, they were under the impression they were in a race to the death with evil forces, their Nazi counterparts in occupied Europe. As it turned out, there was no race, and the forces of evil were much closer to home.
Upon their proof of concept at the Trinity Test in July 1945, a story widely circulated by Christopher Nolan in his 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer, physicists became captives of the incipient military industrial complex. Over the next dozen years many of these same scientists would become dedicated to the industrialization of nuclear war.
The Baker shot of Operation Crossroads, 1946
As early as the 1946 Operation Crossroads tests, the first post-WWII event staged to let Stalin know America had many more nukes, the Joint Chiefs were warned by a panel of scientists and military brass that, “as a military weapon” atomic bombs were “a threat to mankind and civilization.” But with the impunity of victory and the myopia that accompanies it, this same panel advised the JCS to stockpile more bombs. The U.S. was the sole atomic power in the world, and hoped to remain so.
Unfortunately, three years later the Soviet Union detonated its own bomb, thanks to the efforts of the atomic spy and former Manhattan Project participant Klaus Fuchs. Where the U.S. had 13 bombs in 1947, by 1949 it owned 170. After the Russian test, that number expanded to 299 in 1950, and to 438 in 1951, until by 1952 there were 841 atom bombs in America’s nuclear arsenal, made possible by the Mark 4 bomb, the world’s first mass assembled atomic weapon. Planners knew this was more than twice the number needed to reduce any adversary to cinders, an indication of the extent to which the military was losing its grip on reality.
In a series of atmospheric tests, conducted in both Nevada and the Marshall Islands, scientists and engineers refined their devices attempting to reduce physical size and enhance explosive yield, culminating in the “Mike” shot of November 1st 1952, the debut of the world’s first fusion device, also known as the Hydrogen Bomb or Super. This weapon required an atomic explosion to trigger the much larger thermo-nuclear output.
Ivy Mike, the world’s first hydrogen bomb
The Mike detonation was much larger in every way. The device itself, a “wet” bomb powered by tritium, weighed over 80 tons. Its fearsome output yielded 10 megatons, orders of magnitude greater than the Hiroshima bomb. The Bikini archipelago Island of Elugelab was completely vaporized in the explosion. Enrico Fermi and I.I.Rabi wrote to President Truman, declaring the Super to be “an evil thing.” Their protest fell on deaf ears.
Thus began an arms race the likes of which the world had never seen. By the 1950s war games testing, which had moved to Nevada, exposed thousands of troops to live fire detonations only a few thousand yards from ground zero. Eventually, by the 1970s the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had combined reserves of some 70,000 atomic weapons, including everything from nuclear cannon shells to Russia’s freakish Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton monster unusable because it would be a danger those launching it. The fear Manhatten scientists had once had of igniting the atmosphere was beginning to seem possible.
U.S. servicemen within sight of ground zero, completely exposed to ionizing radiation and nuclear fallout, 1951
Changes of regime, and movies like The Day After, eventually led to new attitudes about nuclear war. The results of arms control and reduction agreements in the 1980s brought the number of these doomsday weapons nearer 10,000 total, but this is hardly comforting. As early as 1960 military planners knew that nuclear war was neither winnable nor survivable, not only for the combatants, but for human civilization.
In her recent book Nuclear War: A Scenario Annie Jacobsen reminds us of the things we have forgotten since the end of the Cold War. Jacobsen’s previous work, a history of America’s Area 51 base, revealed just how much secrecy pervades the military establishment. With a current decline in amicable relations between east and west and thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles on “ready for launch status,” both Russia and America are perched upon a precipice they have not occupied since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, unlike with that watershed moment, many of today’s nukes are on submarines, neither detectable nor stoppable.
Jacobsen’s book is hardly the first to document America’s sad track record in dealing with nuclear material. From Louis Slotin’s horrific demise in a 1946 accident at Los Alamos through the exposure of the Atomic Vets in 1950s war games, authors like Norman Soloman have traced our infamous history handling atomic resources.
In a world challenged by overpopulation, climate change, and the regional conflicts these things engender, tensions are high. The “nuclear club” of nations has expanded to include unpredictable rogue states like North Korea, whose paranoia is not fueled only by a deranged autocrat, but by the fact that the United States has always been first in the nuclear arms race, including the only nation to use these weapons in combat.
The history of post-Trinity America is an unflattering portrait of a place where veterans are feted everywhere they go, military displays occur at every sporting event, and trillions of dollars have been squandered building and maintaining an arsenal of weapons that are too deadly to use ($5.5 trillion at current accounting). The psychopathology of American militarism is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. In the nuclear era the military has consistently either lied outright, or invoked national security as an excuse to exercise secrecy. The reality that American military leaders would sooner destroy the world than back down in a confrontation is the horrific conclusion one comes to based upon past performance.
Jacobsen’s book takes the reader through the disastrous first 72 minutes of a nuclear exchange between North Korea, Russia, and the U.S. The conclusion is the same as it has been for the past 70 years: any use of nuclear weapons escalates in an unstoppable exchange of what Hitler called “Vergeltungswaffe,” or “vengeance weapons,” resulting in the immediate annihilation of one billion people, and the eventual deaths of billions more in the nuclear winter that would follow. Deterrence only works until it doesn’t, and then there is no escaping total destruction.
During the 1980s Carl Sagan was among the first scientists to talk openly about nuclear winter, a topic the military denied at the time despite their own research from the ’60s. Why anyone would entrust the Pentagon with the future survival of humanity is an ironic question. The extent to which the American populace has been hoodwinked and lulled to sleep by the collaborative sleight-of-hand between the military and industry has seldom been challenged since Eisenhower’s famous farewell address at the end of his presidency.
Perhaps if fewer Americans considered the military as a desirable career path there would be some hope. But in the land of delusion, where military war mongers and capitalistic opportunists are in control, this hope seems naive. The specter of mushroom clouds still hangs over us all. And nationalistic patriotism is just the thing to make the unthinkable a reality. Never mind those “duck and cover” drills. They won’t save you, and there is absolutely no point in entertaining the delusion that they might.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
