tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12320196339062489792024-03-05T00:13:46.111-05:00jkmhoffman the only daughter(flesh and blood) of John f HowellThe only daughter(biological flesh and blood) of John f Howell.
John f Howell was the principal engineer of the Pinellas Plant
He was traveling to Oak Ridge,Ge Milwaukee,Ge Largo,Rocky Flats,Pantex,Los Alamos,Sandia National Lab for 40 years.
John f Howell has nine patents to his name.
John f Howell only kids(flesh and blood)are jeffory john Howell,James David Howell,Kathy Hoffman.
Jane Howell is the mother of Kathy,jeff and James David.
Jane Howell died in 1980.
John Howell died in 1995.
jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comBlogger9545125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-65689688306651058842021-02-21T14:02:00.001-05:002021-02-21T14:02:08.301-05:00john e jacobs<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CNLJkg17c0k/YDKtytKx6lI/AAAAAAAAyLc/Fcz1U88Ezx8tokNObSA1OXdQrqliP5xoQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1008/john.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="1008" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CNLJkg17c0k/YDKtytKx6lI/AAAAAAAAyLc/Fcz1U88Ezx8tokNObSA1OXdQrqliP5xoQCNcBGAsYHQ/s400/john.png"/></a></div>
ID: SIA Acc. 90-105 [SIA2008-4343]
Creator:
Form/Genre: Black-and-white photographs
Date:
Citation: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No. SIA2008-4343
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Summary
john f howell has a patent with this man
Dr. John E. Jacobs, Manager of the Advanced Development Laboratory, X-Ray Department, General Electric Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Subject
Jacobs, John E
General Electric Company
General Electric Company X-Ray Department
Cite as
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No. SIA2008-4343
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Smithsonian Institution Archives Capital Gallery, Suite 3000, MRC 507; 600 Maryland Avenue, SW; Washington, DC 20024-2520
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No access restrictions Many of SIA's holdings are located off-site, and advance notice is recommended to consult a collection. Please email the SIA Reference Team at osiaref@si.edu
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X-rays
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Black-and-white photographs
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SIA Acc. 90-105 [SIA2008-4343]
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Gelatin silver prints
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jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-55647411309754223142021-02-19T13:42:00.023-05:002023-07-17T09:01:57.192-04:00john f howell<iframe width=512 height=330 src='https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?156558-1/compensation-nuclear-workers' allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' frameborder=0></iframe>
Jeanie Gueretta, CRMArchives and Information Management TeamJuly 9, 2015
2OverviewHistory of the Pinellas PlantPinellas Record HoldingsSupport for Pinellas EEOICPA Claims
In 1942, the U.S. began developing technology to produce nuclear weapons under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan Engineer District◦Known as the Manhattan Project◦Facilities established to develop nuclear weapons ◦In 1945, the first atomic bombs were used to end World War II“Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima, Japan“Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki, Japan3“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”
After World War II ended, there was still a threat of nuclear weapons in enemy hands◦The Soviet Union had begun developing its own atomic bomb◦As tensions grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a new “war” began known as the Cold WarIn 1946, nuclear weapons development and production was transferred to a newly created civilian organization called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)AEC developed and managed a network of research, manufacturing, and testing sites◦Focus was on building a nuclear weapons stockpile4
Jeanie Gueretta, CRMArchives and Information Management TeamJuly 9, 2015
2OverviewHistory of the Pinellas PlantPinellas Record HoldingsSupport for Pinellas EEOICPA Claims
In 1942, the U.S. began developing technology to produce nuclear weapons under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan Engineer District◦Known as the Manhattan Project◦Facilities established to develop nuclear weapons ◦In 1945, the first atomic bombs were used to end World War II“Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima, Japan“Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki, Japan3“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”
After World War II ended, there was still a threat of nuclear weapons in enemy hands◦The Soviet Union had begun developing its own atomic bomb◦As tensions grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a new “war” began known as the Cold WarIn 1946, nuclear weapons development and production was transferred to a newly created civilian organization called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)AEC developed and managed a network of research, manufacturing, and testing sites◦Focus was on building a nuclear weapons stockpile4
Jeanie Gueretta, CRMArchives and Information Management TeamJuly 9, 2015
2OverviewHistory of the Pinellas PlantPinellas Record HoldingsSupport for Pinellas EEOICPA Claims
In 1942, the U.S. began developing technology to produce nuclear weapons under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan Engineer District◦Known as the Manhattan Project◦Facilities established to develop nuclear weapons ◦In 1945, the first atomic bombs were used to end World War II“Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima, Japan“Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki, Japan3“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”
After World War II ended, there was still a threat of nuclear weapons in enemy hands◦The Soviet Union had begun developing its own atomic bomb◦As tensions grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a new “war” began known as the Cold WarIn 1946, nuclear weapons development and production was transferred to a newly created civilian organization called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)AEC developed and managed a network of research, manufacturing, and testing sites◦Focus was on building a nuclear weapons stockpile4
StepProcessMajor Sites1Uranium Mining, Milling, and RefiningUranium milling and processing sites, commercially-owned mines and mills, government-owned mills, foreign suppliers, Fernald, Middlesex, Weldon Spring, Oak Ridge, Paducah, Portsmouth2Isotope SeparationOak Ridge, Paducah, Portsmouth, SavannahRiver3Fuel and Target FabricationSavannah River, Fernald, Ashtabula, Hanford, Oak Ridge4Reactor OperationsHanford, Savannah River5
StepProcessMajor Sites5Chemical SeparationsHanford, Savannah River, Idaho6Weapons Component FabricationPinellas, Rocky Flats, Hanford,Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Mound, Savannah River7Weapons OperationsPantex, Oak Ridge, Mound,Kansas City, Sandia8Research, Development, and TestingNational Laboratories: Los Alamos, LawrenceLivermore, Sandia (New Mexico and California)Test Sites: Nevada Test Site, Bikini and Enewetak Atolls; Christmas and Johnston Islands, Tonopah Test Range, Salton Sea Test Base6
With Cold War tensions rising, the U.S. had an urgent need for a facility to fabricate weapons componentsSite Selection Criteria ◦Good labor supply◦Best possible climate for uninterrupted and rapidconstruction of the facility7
Jeanie Gueretta, CRMArchives and Information Management TeamJuly 9, 2015
2OverviewHistory of the Pinellas PlantPinellas Record HoldingsSupport for Pinellas EEOICPA Claims
In 1942, the U.S. began developing technology to produce nuclear weapons under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan Engineer District◦Known as the Manhattan Project◦Facilities established to develop nuclear weapons ◦In 1945, the first atomic bombs were used to end World War II“Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima, Japan“Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki, Japan3“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”
After World War II ended, there was still a threat of nuclear weapons in enemy hands◦The Soviet Union had begun developing its own atomic bomb◦As tensions grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a new “war” began known as the Cold WarIn 1946, nuclear weapons development and production was transferred to a newly created civilian organization called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)AEC developed and managed a network of research, manufacturing, and testing sites◦Focus was on building a nuclear weapons stockpile4
StepProcessMajor Sites1Uranium Mining, Milling, and RefiningUranium milling and processing sites, commercially-owned mines and mills, government-owned mills, foreign suppliers, Fernald, Middlesex, Weldon Spring, Oak Ridge, Paducah, Portsmouth2Isotope SeparationOak Ridge, Paducah, Portsmouth, SavannahRiver3Fuel and Target FabricationSavannah River, Fernald, Ashtabula, Hanford, Oak Ridge4Reactor OperationsHanford, Savannah River5
StepProcessMajor Sites5Chemical SeparationsHanford, Savannah River, Idaho6Weapons Component FabricationPinellas, Rocky Flats, Hanford,Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Mound, Savannah River7Weapons OperationsPantex, Oak Ridge, Mound,Kansas City, Sandia8Research, Development, and TestingNational Laboratories: Los Alamos, LawrenceLivermore, Sandia (New Mexico and California)Test Sites: Nevada Test Site, Bikini and Enewetak Atolls; Christmas and Johnston Islands, Tonopah Test Range, Salton Sea Test Base6
With Cold War tensions rising, the U.S. had an urgent need for a facility to fabricate weapons componentsSite Selection Criteria ◦Good labor supply◦Best possible climate for uninterrupted and rapidconstruction of the facility7
The site selected for the new Plant was in Pinellas County at Largo, Florida8
In 1956, the Pinellas Plant was built on approximately 100 acres of land in a sparsely populated area of Largo, FloridaThe land was previously used as a dairy farm
The primary mission of Pinellas Plant was to produce precisely timed neutron generatorsThe purpose of this internal component was to start the chain reaction in the nuclear weapon serving as a “trigger” for detonation
Specialized electronic and mechanical nuclear weapons components◦Neutron detectors◦Radioisotopic thermoelectric generators◦Lightning arrester connectors◦Thermopiles◦Specialty capacitors and switches◦Sophisticated product testersTest laboratories were used to evaluate gases, metals, ceramics, and other materials
Non-weapons related products and technology◦Battery-life technology◦Research of environmentally safe solvents to replace hazardous solvents for cleaning and coating applications◦Ultra-clean, high-vacuum technologies◦Test equipment◦Specialized electronic components such as lightning arresters, capacitors, vacuum switches, crystal resonators, and shock transducers◦Sophisticated, computer-aided engineering
BuildingFunctionBuilding 100 –1stfloorOffices/Production/LaboratoryBuilding 100 –2ndfloorOffices/UtilitiesBuilding 100 –MezzaninesOfficesBuilding 200Environmental TestingBuilding 400Small BusinessBuilding 500Utilities/Deionized Water FacilityBuilding 550Industrial Wastewater Neutralization FacilityBuilding 600ChemicalStorageBuilding 700Vehicle/FireMaintenanceBuilding710Maintenance Shed
BuildingFunctionBuilding 800Linear AcceleratorBuilding 900Fire TrainingBuilding1010New ContainerStorageBuilding 1000/1040Waste Storage/ManagementBuilding 1100Special StorageBuilding 1200Security (County Use)Building 1400Remote ReceivingBuilding 1500/1600Partnership School/Child Development CenterHydrogen Storage Tank FacilityBulkGas Storage
End of Cold War brought an end to the weapons mission1994 -Nuclear weapons component production at the Pinellas plant ended 1995 -Department of Energy sold the facility to the Pinellas County Industrial Council
171985 -1997◦Removal of soil and buried drums containing plant waste◦Groundwater treatmen
In 2001, the industrial complex became the Young–Rainey STAR CenterToday the site houses more than 30 tenants◦Includes a variety of manufacturing operations◦About 1,600 employees18The nation’s 1stsuccessful conversion from a former DOE defense manufacturing facility to a commercial, high-technology cente
19•Prime Contractors•General Electric Company•Martin Marietta (also known as Lockheed Martin Specialty Components, Inc.)•Employment at the plant site reached its peak in 1992 with more than 2,000 workers •The potential for beryllium exposure existed at the site throughout the period of operations due to beryllium use, residual contamination, and decontamination activities
20EEOICPA Coverage◦Operations & Remediation: 1957–1997, 1999, 2008-2009Contractors◦General Electric Company: 1957–1992◦Lockheed Martin Specialty Components, Inc.: 1992–1997◦MACTEC Environmental Restoration Services: 1999◦S. M. StollerCorporation: 2008-2009
The DOE Office of Legacy Management (LM) manages hard copy and electronic records for Pinellas◦About 1,000 cubic feet of records at the LM Business Center in Morgantown, West Virginia, and at the LM Grand Junction, Colorado, office◦154 cubic feet of permanent records at the Atlanta Federal Records Center◦About 29,000 electronic recordsCollections include operational and site cleanup records, environmental monitoring records, and personnel information
LM has recorded more than 650 Pinellas records requestsThe majority of Pinellas records requests are to support EEOICPA claims
Part B -(DOL Employment Verification)◦Employment dates if available ◦Medical, radiological, industrial hygiene, and personnel records, as neededPart B -(NIOSH)◦Radiological dose, x-ray results, industrial hygiene, and medical recordsPart E -Document Acquisition Requests◦Records per DOL requests (e.g., personnel, industrial hygiene, medical, radiological dose, and job descriptions)
Pinellas records are searchable through LM’s electronic recordkeeping systemPinellas records include:◦Personnel Records◦Medical Records◦Radiological Information◦Industrial Hygiene Records◦Limited Job DescriptionsRecords are in electronic andpaper form
Finding aids housed in the LM electronic recordkeeping system provide a single, consolidated search tool for locating responsive documentsMore comprehensive indexing of Pinellas records to improve records retrievalDeveloped a centralized tracking system to manage the processing of EEOICPA claims
27LM successfully completed a major project to digitize nearly 400,000 deteriorating medical X-rays, including x-rays for former Pinellas workersThe x-rays were in various stages of “vinegar syndrome” deterioration, a chemical process that destroys mediaDigital images and metadata were uploaded to the electronic recordkeeping system to enhance records retrieval
Jeanie GuerettaU.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management2597 Legacy Way, Grand Junction, CO 81503Phone: (970) 248-7634E-mail: jeanie.gueretta@lm.doe.govGordon WeaverSource One Management Office of Legacy Management2597 Legacy Way, Grand Junction, CO 81503Phone: (970) 248-6680E-mail: gordon.weaver@lm.doe.gov<a href="http://energy.gov/lm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-86658006305214610082021-02-19T13:40:00.003-05:002021-02-19T13:41:04.630-05:00GE to Quit Nuclear Trigger Plant: General.. GE to Quit Nuclear Trigger Plant: General...
LAT Archives
Nov. 28, 1990 12 AM PT
From Times Staff and Wire reports
GE to Quit Nuclear Trigger Plant: General Electric Co. confirmed that it plans to give up its $6.9-million-a-year management contract at a Florida plant that makes triggers for nuclear weapons. GE said it found unacceptable Department of Energy changes in an agreement that call for contractors that run government plants to assume responsibility for environmental liability at the facilities. In the past, the government has borne such responsibilities. The DOE, which oversees the contract at the Pinellas plant in Largo, said the estimated 1,600 employees at the plant likely will continue to work there for the new operator. GE will quit the facility by May 31, 1992.
<a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4975-story.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-25840712811284482362021-02-19T13:38:00.006-05:002023-07-17T09:01:21.256-04:00PINELLAS PLANT FEASIBILITY STUDYFINAL REPORT<a href="https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/017/28017922.pdf?r=1&r=1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
<iframe width=512 height=330 src='https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?156558-1/compensation-nuclear-workers' allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' frameborder=0></iframe>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-11618312768640165932021-02-15T15:08:00.005-05:002021-02-15T16:45:15.492-05:00Soviet-era military aviation<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/none-of-our-technologies-has-managed-to-destroy-humanity-yet?utm_source=pocket-newtab" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far would we go to stop it?
A monument to the glories of Soviet-era military aviation. Tiraspol, Transdniester, 2004. Photo by Jonas Bendikson/Magnum
Nick Bostrom
is professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford where he is director of the Future of Humanity Institute. His books include Anthropic Bias (2002) and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014).
Matthew van der Merwe
is a research assistant at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He writes about AI policy for the weekly newsletter Import AI.
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One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent ideas, discoveries and inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted many balls. Most have been beneficial to humanity. The rest have been various shades of grey: a mix of good and bad, whose net effect is difficult to estimate.
What we haven’t pulled out yet is a black ball: a technology that invariably destroys the civilisation that invents it. That’s not because we’ve been particularly careful or wise when it comes to innovation. We’ve just been lucky. But what if there’s a black ball somewhere in the urn? If scientific and technological research continues, we’ll eventually pull it out, and we won’t be able to put it back in. We can invent but we can’t un-invent. Our strategy seems to be to hope that there is no black ball.
Thankfully for us, humans’ most destructive technology to date – nuclear weapons – is exceedingly difficult to master. But one way to think about the possible effects of a black ball is to consider what would happen if nuclear reactions were easier. In 1933, the physicist Leo Szilard got the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Later investigations showed that making an atomic weapon would require several kilos of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, both of which are very difficult and expensive to produce. However, imagine a counterfactual history in which Szilard realised that a nuclear bomb could be made in some easy way – over the kitchen sink, say, using a piece of glass, a metal object and a battery.
Close-up footage from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the Operation Teapot nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site on 7 March 1955
Szilard would have faced a dilemma. If he didn’t tell anyone about his discovery, he would be unable to stop other scientists from stumbling upon it. But if he did reveal his discovery, he would guarantee the further spread of dangerous knowledge. Imagine that Szilard confided in his friend Albert Einstein, and they decided to write a letter to the president of the United States, Franklin D Roosevelt, whose administration then banned all research into nuclear physics outside of high-security government facilities. Speculation would swirl around the reason for the heavy-handed measures. Groups of scientists would wonder about the secret danger; some of them would figure it out. Careless or disgruntled employees at government labs would let slip information, and spies would carry the secret to foreign capitals. Even if by some miracle the secret never leaked, scientists in other countries would discover it on their own.
Or perhaps the US government would move to eliminate all glass, metal and sources of electrical current outside of a few highly guarded military depots? Such extreme measures would meet with stiff opposition. However, after mushroom clouds had risen over a few cities, public opinion would shift. Glass, batteries and magnets could be seized, and their production banned; yet pieces would remain scattered across the landscape, and eventually they would find their way into the hands of nihilists, extortionists or people who just want ‘to see what would happen’ if they set off a nuclear device. In the end, many places would be destroyed or abandoned. Possession of the proscribed materials would have to be harshly punished. Communities would be subject to strict surveillance: informant networks, security raids, indefinite detentions. We would be left to try to somehow reconstitute civilisation without electricity and other essentials that are deemed too risky.
That’s the optimistic scenario. In a more pessimistic scenario, law and order would break down entirely, and societies would split into factions waging nuclear wars. The disintegration would end only when the world had been ruined to the point where it was impossible to make any more bombs. Even then, the dangerous insight would be remembered and passed down. If civilisation arose from the ashes, the knowledge would lie in wait, ready to pounce once people started again to produce glass, electrical currents and metal. And, even if the knowledge were forgotten, it would be rediscovered when nuclear physics research resumed.
In short: we’re lucky that making nuclear weapons turned out to be hard. We pulled out a grey ball that time. Yet with each act of invention, humanity reaches anew into the urn.
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Suppose that the urn of creativity contains at least one black ball. We call this ‘the vulnerable world hypothesis’. The intuitive idea is that there’s some level of technology at which civilisation almost certainly gets destroyed, unless quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented degrees of preventive policing and/or global governance are implemented. Our primary purpose isn’t to argue that the hypothesis is true – we regard that as an open question, though it would seem unreasonable, given the available evidence, to be confident that it’s false. Instead, the point is that the hypothesis is useful in helping us to bring to the surface important considerations about humanity’s macrostrategic situation.
The above scenario – call it ‘easy nukes’ – represents one kind of potential black ball, where it becomes easy for individuals or small groups to cause mass destruction. Given the diversity of human character and circumstance, for any imprudent, immoral or self-defeating action, there will always be some fraction of humans (‘the apocalyptic residual’) who would choose to take that action – whether motivated by ideological hatred, nihilistic destructiveness or revenge for perceived injustices, as part of some extortion plot, or because of delusions. The existence of this apocalyptic residual means that any sufficiently easy tool of mass destruction is virtually certain to lead to the devastation of civilisation.
This is one of several types of possible black balls. A second type would be a technology that creates strong incentives for powerful actors to cause mass destruction. Again, we can turn to nuclear history: after the invention of the atomic bomb, an arms race ensued between the US and the Soviet Union. The two countries amassed staggering arsenals; by 1986, together they held more than 60,000 nuclear warheads – more than enough to devastate civilisation.
If a ‘safe first strike’ option existed, mutual fear could easily trigger a dash to all-out war
Fortunately, during the Cold War, the world’s nuclear superpowers didn’t face strong incentives to unleash nuclear Armageddon. They did face some incentives to do so, however. Notably, there were incentives for engaging in brinkmanship; and, in a crisis situation, there was some incentive to strike first to pre-empt a potentially disarming strike by the adversary. Many political scientists believe that an important factor in explaining why the Cold War didn’t lead to a nuclear holocaust was the development, by the mid-1960s, of more secure ‘second strike’ capabilities by both superpowers. The ability of both countries’ arsenals to survive a nuclear strike by the other and then launch a retaliatory assault reduced the incentive to launch an attack in the first place.
But now consider a counterfactual scenario – a ‘safe first strike’ – in which some technology made it possible to completely destroy an adversary before they could respond, leaving them unable to retaliate. If such a ‘safe first strike’ option existed, mutual fear could easily trigger a dash to all-out war. Even if neither power desired the destruction of the other side, one of them might nevertheless feel compelled to strike first to avert the risk that the other side’s fear might lead it to carry out such a first strike. We can make the counterfactual even worse by supposing that the weapons involved are easy to hide; that would make it unfeasible for the parties to design a trustworthy verification scheme for arms reduction that might resolve their security dilemma.
Climate change can illustrate a third type of black ball; let’s call this scenario ‘worse global warming’. In the real world, human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to result in an average temperature rise of between 3.0 and 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. But imagine that the Earth’s climate sensitivity parameter had been different than it is, such that the same carbon emissions would cause far more warming than scientists currently predict – a rise of 20 degrees, say. To make the scenario worse, imagine that fossil fuels were even more abundant, and clean energy alternatives more expensive and technologically challenging, than they actually are.
Unlike the ‘safe first strike’ scenario, where there’s a powerful actor who faces strong incentives to take some difficult and enormously destructive action, the ‘worse global warming’ scenario requires no such actor. All that’s required is a large number of individually insignificant actors – electricity users, drivers – who all have incentives to do things that contribute very slightly to what cumulatively becomes a civilisation-devastating problem. What the two scenarios have in common is that incentives exist that would encourage a wide range of normally motivated actors to pursue actions that devastate civilisation.
It would be bad news if the vulnerable world hypothesis were correct. In principle, however, there are several responses that could save civilisation from a technological black ball. One would be to stop pulling balls from the urn altogether, ceasing all technological development. That’s hardly realistic though; and, even if it could be done, it would be extremely costly, to the point of constituting a catastrophe in its own right.
Another theoretically possible response would be to fundamentally reengineer human nature to eliminate the apocalyptic residual; we might also do away with any tendency among powerful actors to risk civilisational devastation even when vital national security interests are served by doing so, as well as any tendency among the masses to prioritise personal convenience when this contributes an imperceptible amount of harm to some important global good. Such global preference reengineering seems very difficult to pull off, and it would come with risks of its own. It’s also worth noting that partial success in such preference reengineering wouldn’t necessarily bring a proportional reduction in civilisational vulnerability. For example, reducing the apocalyptic residual by 50 per cent wouldn’t cut the risks from the ‘easy nukes’ scenarios in half, since in many cases any lone individual could single-handedly devastate civilisation. We could only significantly reduce the risk, then, if the apocalyptic residual were virtually entirely eliminated worldwide.
That leaves two options for making the world safe against the possibility that the urn contains a black ball: extremely reliable policing that could prevent any individual or small group from carrying out highly dangerous illegal actions; and two, strong global governance that could solve the most serious collective action problems, and ensure robust cooperation between states – even when they have strong incentives to defect from agreements, or refuse to sign on in the first place. The governance gaps addressed by these measures are the two Achilles’ heels of the contemporary world order. So long as they remain unprotected, civilisation remains vulnerable to a technological black ball. Unless and until such a discovery emerges from the urn, however, it’s easy to overlook how exposed we are.
Let’s consider what would be required to protect against these vulnerabilities.
Imagine that the world finds itself in a scenario akin to ‘easy nukes’. Say somebody discovers a very simple way to cause mass destruction, information about the discovery spreads, and the materials are ubiquitously available and cannot quickly be removed from circulation. To prevent devastation, states would need to monitor their citizens closely enough to let them intercept anyone who begins preparing an act of mass destruction. If the black ball technology is sufficiently destructive and easy to use, even a single person evading the surveillance network would be completely unacceptable.
Resistance to a ‘freedom tag’ might subside once a few major cities had been wiped out
For a picture of what a really intensive level of surveillance could look like, consider the following sketch of a ‘high-tech panopticon’. Every citizen would be fitted with a ‘freedom tag’ (the Orwellian overtones being of course intentional, to remind us of the full range of ways in which such a system could be applied). A freedom tag might be worn around the neck and equipped with multidirectional cameras and microphones that would continuously upload encrypted video and audio to computers that interpret the feeds in real time. If signs of suspicious activity were detected, the feed would be relayed to one of several ‘patriot monitoring stations’, where a ‘freedom officer’ would review the feed and determine an appropriate action, such as contacting the tag-wearer via a speaker on the freedom tag – to demand an explanation or request a better view. The freedom officer could dispatch a rapid response unit, or maybe a police drone, to investigate. If a wearer refused to desist from the proscribed activity after repeated warnings, authorities could arrest him or her. Citizens wouldn’t be permitted to remove the tag, except in places that had been fitted with adequate external sensors.
In principle, such a system could feature sophisticated privacy protections, and could redact identity-revealing data such as faces and names unless needed for an investigation. Artificial intelligence tools and human oversight could closely monitor freedom officers to prevent them from abusing their authority. Building a panopticon of this kind would require substantial investment. But thanks to the falling price of the relevant technologies, it could soon become technically feasible.
That’s not the same thing as being politically feasible. Resistance to such steps, however, might subside once a few major cities had been wiped out. There would likely be strong support for a policy which, for the sake of forestalling another attack, involved massive privacy invasions and civil rights violations such as incarcerating 100 innocent people for every genuine plotter. But when civilisational vulnerabilities aren’t preceded or accompanied by such incontrovertible evidence, the political will for such robust preventive action might never materialise.
Or consider again the ‘safe first strike’ scenario. Here, state actors confront a collective action problem, and failing to solve it means civilisation gets devastated by default. With a new black ball, the collective action problem will almost certainly present extreme and unprecedented challenges – yet states have frequently failed to solve much easier collective action problems, as attested by the pockmarks of war that cover human history from head to foot. By default, therefore, civilisation gets devastated. With effective global governance, however, the solution is almost trivial: simply prohibit all states from wielding the black ball destructively. (By effective global governance, we mean a world order with one decision-making entity – a ‘singleton’. This is an abstract condition that could be satisfied through different arrangements: a world government; a sufficiently powerful hegemon; a highly robust system of inter-state cooperation. Each arrangement comes with its own difficulties, and we take no stand here on which is best.)
Some technological black balls could be addressed with preventive policing alone, while some would require only global governance. Some, however, would require both. Consider a biotechnological black ball that’s powerful enough that a single malicious use could cause a pandemic that would kill billions of people – an ‘easy nukes’ type situation. In this scenario, it would be unacceptable if even a single state failed to put in place the machinery necessary for continuous surveillance of its citizens to prevent malicious use with virtually perfect reliability. A state that refused to implement the requisite safeguards would be a delinquent member of the international community, akin to a ‘failed state’. A similar argument applies to scenarios such as ‘worse global warming’, in which some states might be inclined to free-ride on the costly efforts of others. An effective global governance institution would then be needed to compel every state to do its part.
None of this seems very appealing. A system of total surveillance, or a global governance institution capable of imposing its will on every nation, could have very bad consequences. Improved means of social control could help protect despotic regimes from rebellion; and surveillance could enable a hegemonic ideology or an intolerant majority view to impose itself on all aspects of life. Global governance, meanwhile, could reduce beneficial forms of inter-state competition and diversity, creating a world order with a single point of failure; and, being so far removed from individuals, such an institution might be perceived to lack legitimacy, and be more susceptible to bureaucratic sclerosis or political drift away from the public interest.
Yet as difficult as many of us find them to stomach, stronger surveillance and global governance could also have various good consequences, aside from stabilising civilisational vulnerabilities. More effective methods of social control could reduce crime and alleviate the need for harsh criminal penalties. They might foster a climate of trust that enables beneficial new forms of social interaction to flourish. Global governance could prevent all kinds of interstate wars, solve many environmental and other commons problems, and over time perhaps foster an enlarged sense of cosmopolitan solidarity. Clearly, there are weighty arguments for and against moving in either direction, and we offer no judgment here about the balance of these arguments.
What about the question of timing? Even if we became seriously concerned that the urn of invention contained a black ball, we might not need to establish stronger surveillance or global governance right now. Perhaps we could take those steps later, if and when the hypothetical threat comes clearly into view.
We should, however, question the feasibility of a wait-and-see approach. As we’ve seen, throughout the Cold War, the two superpowers lived in continuous fear of nuclear annihilation, which could have been triggered at any time by accident or as the result of some spiralling crisis. This risk would have been substantially reduced simply by getting rid of all or most nuclear weapons. Yet, after more than half a century, we’ve still seen only limited disarmament. So far, the world has proved unable to solve this most obvious of collective action problems. This doesn’t inspire confidence that humanity would quickly develop an effective global governance mechanism, even should a clear need for one present itself.
Developing a system for ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ means incurring a risk, even if the key isn’t turned
Even if one felt optimistic that an agreement could eventually be reached, international collective action problems can resist solution for a long time. It would take time to explain why such an arrangement was necessary, to negotiate a settlement and hammer out the details, and to set it up. But the interval between a risk becoming clearly visible and the point when stabilisation measures must be in place could be short. So it might not be wise to rely on spontaneous international cooperation to save the day once a serious vulnerability comes into view.
The situation with preventive policing is similar in some respects. A highly sophisticated global panopticon can’t be conjured up overnight. It would take many years to implement such a system, not to mention the time required to build political support. Yet the vulnerabilities we face might not offer much advance warning. Next week, a group of academic researchers could publish an article in Science explaining an innovative new technique in synthetic biology. Two days later, a popular blogger might write a post that explains how the new tool could be used by anybody to cause mass destruction. In such a scenario, intense social control might need to be switched on almost immediately. It would be too late to start developing a surveillance architecture when the specific vulnerability became clear.
Perhaps we could develop the capabilities for intrusive surveillance and real-time interception in advance, but not use those capabilities initially to anything like their maximal extent. By giving civilisation the capacity for extremely effective preventive policing, at least we would have moved closer to stability. But developing a system for ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ means incurring a risk, even if the key isn’t turned. One could try to mitigate this by aiming for a system of ‘structured transparency’ that builds in protections against misuse. The system could operate only with permission from multiple independent stakeholders, and provide only the specific information that’s legitimately needed by some decision-maker. There might be no fundamental barrier to achieving a surveillance system that’s at once highly effective and resistant to being subverted. How likely this is to be achieved in practice is of course another matter.
Given the complexity of these potential general solutions to the risk of a technological black ball, it might make sense for leaders and policymakers to focus initially on partial solutions and low-hanging fruit – patching up particular domains where major risks seem most likely to appear, such as biotechnological research. Governments could strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention by increasing its funding and granting it verification powers. Authorities could step up their oversight of biotechnology activities by developing better ways to monitor scientists and track potentially dangerous materials and equipment. To prevent do-it-yourself genetic engineering, for example, governments could impose licensing requirements and limit access to some cutting-edge instruments and information. Rather than allowing anybody to buy their own DNA synthesis machine, such equipment could be limited to a small number of closely monitored providers. Authorities could also improve whistleblower systems, to encourage the reporting of potential abuse. They could admonish organisations that fund biological research to take a broader view of the potential consequences of such work.
Nevertheless, while pursuing such limited objectives, one should bear in mind that the protection they offer covers only special subsets of scenarios, and might be temporary. If you find yourself in a position to influence the macroparameters of preventive policing or global governance, you should consider that fundamental changes in those domains might be the only way to stabilise our civilisation against emerging technological vulnerabilities.
This article draws on the paper ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’ (2019) published in the journal ‘Global Policyjkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-87499268320639690942021-02-15T09:45:00.004-05:002021-02-15T16:44:27.992-05:00Unbelievable Photos From The Detonation Of The First Atomic Bomb<a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/manhattan-project-photos/kellie-kreiss?ref=search" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>v
Photography
21 Unbelievable Photos From The Detonation Of The First Atomic Bomb
Kellie Kreiss
Updated December 15, 2020 192.9k views22 items
At 5:30 AM on the morning of July 16, 1945, the world's first atomic explosive was detonated in the isolated desert outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. What began as a nuclear research effort during WWII quickly became an assertion of US military power and global dominance, eventually paving the way for a global nuclear conflict dominated by the desire of the world's most powerful nations to attain nuclear capabilities.
In its entirety, the Manhattan Project cost well over $2 billion (the equivalent of nearly $28 billion in 2018), and originally involved a partnership between the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Over the span of the project, multiple detonation sites were used – both on land and in water – with the most well-known being the Trinity test site. At the Los Alamos Laboratory (also known as "Project Y"), a team of scientists developed and tested an implosion-type device composed of plutonium, nicknamed "the Gadget," on American soil before it was unleashed upon the world.
Only one month after the detonation of the first explosive at the Trinity test site, the US proceeded to launch attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the notorious "Fat Man" explosive, a device nearly identical to the Gadget.
If the tensions from this period in history have taught anything, it is that harnessing nuclear energy not only measures the human capacity for knowledge but also destruction.
On July 16, 1945, The Manhattan Project Was Launched In New Mexico
On July 16, 1945, The Manhattan Project Was Launched In New Mexico
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
"The Gadget" Had To Be Loaded Onto A Crane And Transported To The Test Site
"The Gadget" Had To Be Loaded Onto A Crane And Transported To The Test Site
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
Explosives Were Dropped Off At The Trinity Site
Explosives Were Dropped Off At The Trinity Site
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
Cameras Were Set Up All Across The Trinity Test Site To Document The Explosion
Cameras Were Set Up All Across The Trinity Test Site To Document The Explosion
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Gadget Was The World's First Nuclear Device Used To Test The Explosive
The Gadget Was The World's First Nuclear Device Used To Test The Explosive
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
Wires On The Gadget Used To Correctly Measure, And Later Detonate, The Device
Wires On The Gadget Used To Correctly Measure, And Later Detonate, The Device
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
An Excess Velocity Gauge Used To Measure The Speed Of The Nuclear Blast
An Excess Velocity Gauge Used To Measure The Speed Of The Nuclear Blast
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Test Tower Served As The Detonation Platform For The Gadget
The Test Tower Served As The Detonation Platform For The Gadget
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
After Detonation, The Test Tower Is Replaced By An Outline Of The Atomic Blast
After Detonation, The Test Tower Is Replaced By An Outline Of The Atomic Blast
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
Detonated At Exactly 5:29:45 AM, The Flames Quickly Engulf The Tower
Detonated At Exactly 5:29:45 AM, The Flames Quickly Engulf The Tower
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
Diagram Of The Energy Waves Echoing From The Core At Detonation
Diagram Of The Energy Waves Echoing From The Core At Detonation
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: .006 Of A Second
The Progression Of The Fireball: .006 Of A Second
Photo: ENERGY.GOV / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
The Progression Of The Fireball: .016 Of A Second
The Progression Of The Fireball: .016 Of A Second
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: .025 Of A Second
The Progression Of The Fireball: .025 Of A Second
Photo: Fotosearch / Stringer / Archive Photos
The Progression Of The Fireball: .062 Of A Second
The Progression Of The Fireball: .062 Of A Second
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: 2 Seconds
The Progression Of The Fireball: 2 Seconds
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: 6 Seconds
The Progression Of The Fireball: 6 Seconds
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: 9 Seconds
The Progression Of The Fireball: 9 Seconds
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: 10 Seconds
The Progression Of The Fireball: 10 Seconds
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Progression Of The Fireball: 30 Seconds
The Progression Of The Fireball: 30 Seconds
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
The Developers Examine The Remains Of The Once 100-Foot Test Tower
The Developers Examine The Remains Of The Once 100-Foot Test Tower
Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory / Contributor / The LIFE Picture Collection
The Trinity Test Site's Base Camp
The Trinity Test Site's Base Camp
Photo: Historical / Contributor / Corbis Historical
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© Ranker 2021jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-36981294249206178832021-02-15T09:44:00.006-05:002021-02-21T13:28:45.874-05:00Hiroshima and Nagasaki<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1UsAgtoQJvk/YDKmFLSE9MI/AAAAAAAAyKs/Tqr_6eOLw485Vv2MNkUV356yClfjrzVhACNcBGAsYHQ/s700/japan.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="700" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1UsAgtoQJvk/YDKmFLSE9MI/AAAAAAAAyKs/Tqr_6eOLw485Vv2MNkUV356yClfjrzVhACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/japan.webp"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T8tHSOG3Hrg/YDKmVBFpC8I/AAAAAAAAyK0/33j9Pk_MkgEqcguJNLDJeXTNo0IgR5C6QCNcBGAsYHQ/s700/ja.webp" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="700" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T8tHSOG3Hrg/YDKmVBFpC8I/AAAAAAAAyK0/33j9Pk_MkgEqcguJNLDJeXTNo0IgR5C6QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/ja.webp"/></a></div><a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/nagasaki-hiroshima-after-the-bomb/bailey-benningfield?ref=search" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>vote on
Lists about life in the Empire of Japan from 1939, at which point it was already at odds with China, to the aftermath of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki post-1945.
WWII Japan
Photo: Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps)
Weird History
Japanese Citizens Describe What Life Was Like After The United States Dropped The Atomic Bomb
Bailey Benningfield
Updated July 17, 2019 98.0k views13 items
The United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. Together, the atomic devices instantly vaporized thousands of Japanese citizens, seriously harmed others, and permanently burned victims' shadows into the ground. The devices leveled two cities and changed the history of armed conflict forever.
It was a tragic end to WWII, but since then, survivors have shared their stories of the horrific experiences. The devastating effects of the attacks have been immortalized in photographs, but the immediate destruction often overshadows those who continued to suffer decades after. Japanese citizens who survived the atomic attacks have faced serious illness, PTSD, and stigmatization due to a lack of understanding about the effects of radiation. Despite their tragedy, many have dedicated their lives to eradicating atomic devices so the same atrocities can never happen again.
They Had To Decide What To Do With The Remains Of Their Loved Ones
Photo: Wayne Miller / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
They Had To Decide What To Do With The Remains Of Their Loved Ones
Yoshiro Yamawaki recalls the aftermath of the blast in Nagasaki. Thousands of families were left with the decision of how to dispose of their loved ones' remains. Yamawaki and his brothers found the remains of their father inside a factory. They made the decision to cremate him.
The Yamawaki brothers propped their father against a pole outside the factory where they discovered him and set his remains on fire. When they came back the next day, however, things had not gone according to plan:
When we returned the next morning to collect his ashes, we discovered that his body had been partially cremated... I could not bear to see my father like this... my oldest brother... [suggested] that we take a piece of his skull - based on a common practice in Japanese funerals in which family members pass around a tiny piece of the skull with chopsticks after cremation - and leave him be.
As soon as our chopsticks touched the surface, however, the skull cracked open like plaster... My brothers and I screamed and ran away, leaving our father behind. We abandoned him, in the worst state possible.
Those Who Survived The Blast Were Stigmatized
Photo: Photograph Curator / Flickr / Public Domain
Those Who Survived The Blast Were Stigmatized
Those who survived the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, called hibakusha, faced discrimination in Japan. Because of misconceptions regarding how radiation poisoning occurs, many communities shunned survivors for fear the radiation would be passed onto them. For instance, survivor Chiyono Yoneda recalls giving lotus roots to her neighbors then finding them in the trash the next day. A child at Yoneda's daughter's school told her his parents tossed the roots for fear that they would transmit the genbaku, which means "atomic bomb" in Japanese.
Japanese citizens continue to live with the fear of radiation sickness - many not fully understanding how it's contracted. The discrimination also affects children of survivors. One woman was engaged to be married until her fiance discovered her father was a survivor. Another man recounted not receiving a job offer after he disclosed his mother was a survivor.
Hiroshima Became 'The City Of Yakuza,' Notorious Japanese Gangsters
Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Hiroshima Became 'The City Of Yakuza,' Notorious Japanese Gangsters
Hiroshima became known for its high concentration of Yakuza members, which Emiko Okada attributes to the large number of orphaned children left to provide for themselves after the atomic attacks wiped out their families:
They [committed unlawful acts] to get by. They were taken in by the wrong adults. They were later bought and sold by said adults. Orphans who grew up in Hiroshima harbor a special hatred for grownups.
Okada, too, attributes the atrocities inflicted on Japan to adults. After the attacks, she lost her sister and grew so ill that she vomited and her gums bled. Okada now calls on adults to protect the "lives and dignity" of children.
Young People Had To Raise Their Siblings After Their Parents Passed
Photo: National Archives at College Park / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Young People Had To Raise Their Siblings After Their Parents Passed
Kumiko Arakawa, who was only 20 when the US attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, recalls having to provide for her younger siblings. Her mother, her father, and four of her sisters passed, all within three days of the attacks.
Forced to support her surviving family members, Arakawa couldn't recall how she managed to provide food or put her remaining sisters through school. In fact, she can't remember much of the attack at all:
Some people have asked me what I saw on my way home the day after the [attack], on August 10 - "surely you saw many... bodies," they would say - but I don’t recall seeing a single corpse. It sounds strange, I’m sure - but it is the truth.
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© Ranker 2021jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-42624839965064864652021-02-15T09:40:00.006-05:002021-02-15T16:42:30.067-05:00nuclear weapons<a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/j-robert-opennheimer-facts/josh-wingo?ref=search" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>vote on
Updated June 14, 2019 13.1k views13 items
Few scientific breakthroughs in the past century were more pivotal than the discovery of nuclear weapons. What would humanity with the power to level cities in an instant?
American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer helped create the atomic bomb with a group of scientists and was later dubbed the "father of the atomic bomb." The son of a German-born, Jewish immigrant and a Baltimore artist, Oppenheimer's was considered to be a true genius. However, much of his life falls far beyond scientific achievement. Facts about J. Robert Oppenheimer's life show he was not only a brilliant scientist, but a political activist, an educator, and a father.
He Supported The Communist Party Before World War II
He Supported The Communist Party Before World War II
Photo: Jacob Lanzer / WikiMedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
In the 1930s during the Great Depression, Oppenheimer became involved in left-wing politics after seeing the effect on his students. Specifically, he became very interested in Communism. While he never officially joined the Communist Party, his mistress was a member, and his wife, Katherine Puening, was a former member who had been previously married to a communist who died in the Spanish Civil War fighting for Spain's left-leaning government.
Unfortunately for Oppenheimer, after World War II Communism was not something good to "previously associated" with in America. In the late '30s, he began to separate himself from the party, possibly for two reasons. One was that communist Joseph Stalin had greatly damaged the ideals. Second was that Oppenheimer was most likely trying to strengthen his credentials in order to be approved for a spot working on the Atomic Bomb.
Though he attempted to sever all ties with the party, the association would follow him for the rest of his life.
He Knew Several Foreign Languages
He Knew Several Foreign Languages
Photo: Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons
Oppenheimer was big on learning, and was also a believer in reading books in their original translation, which he often did. He read all four volumes of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the original German while riding on a train from San Francisco to the East Coast. On another similar train ride he read Proust in French, "which he later said was one of the great experiences of his life." When he was 30, he learned Sanskrit so he could read the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita. It was this scripture that provided the now famous quote he uttered after watching the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” While on a trip to the Netherlands, he spent six weeks learning enough Dutch so he could give a lecture there, and later learned Latin and Greek while studying at Harvard University.
He Was A Brilliant Teacher And His Students Were Obsessed With Him
He Was A Brilliant Teacher And His Students Were Obsessed With Him
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
When he wasn't studying astrophysics, J. Robert Oppenheimer teaching it. After earning his PhD in Germany, Oppenheimer moved back to the US and split time teaching between Caltech and the University of California Berkeley.
At these two schools Oppenheimer developed a following of hundreds of young physicists that were obsessed with him. Students would follow him from campus to campus taking his classes at both colleges, and some of the would even copy his dress and mannerisms.
Oppenheimer Was Hand Picked To Lead The Manhattan Project
Oppenheimer Was Hand Picked To Lead The Manhattan Project
Photo: Berkeley Lab / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
In 1939, the US learned German scientists split the atom, thus providing the potential to build weapons that could turn the tide of the war. In retaliation, the US government began recruiting scientists from around the country to build their own weapon in an attempt to beat the Germans. They called the massive undertaking "The Manhattan Project."
The construction of the pieces of the atomic weapon was initially dispersed across several universities. Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves was so impressed by Oppenheimer he chose him to oversee the task of assembling those different pieces into one working bomb. Groves made this choice despite Oppenheimer being a well-known Communist sympathizer which, was typically an instant red flag for security clearance. Groves considered Oppenheimer a "real genius," and a Nobel laureate said that "No one in his age group has been as familiar with all aspects of current developments in theoretical physics."
Because of his broad range of expertise, Oppenheimer was probably the most qualified person on the planet at the time to lead a project of that magnitude. Groves more than once ignored security concerns as he thought Oppenheimer was essential to the project. It was this role that earned him the title "Father of the Atomic Bomb," and turned him into a national icon almost overnight.
He Named The Atomic Bomb's Test Site In Tribute To His Deceased Mistress
He Named The Atomic Bomb's Test Site In Tribute To His Deceased Mistress
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Jean Tatlock and Robert Oppenheimer met in California in 1936 and had an affair that would continue even after Oppenheimer married Katherine Puening in 1940. When they met, she was an active Communist and introduced Oppenheimer to many people associated with the party.
In 1943 Oppenheimer, who was already under intense observation by US officials, went on an overnight visit to Tatlock's, causing a major security incident. He was interrogated, and many years later, the visit would cause Oppenheimer to have his security clearance revoked.
In 1944, Tatlock was found dead, and her death was ruled a suicide. She had suffered from depression most of the time that Oppenheimer knew her, but nonetheless there are conspiracy theories surrounding her death.
Oppenheimer later used the name "Trinity"for the test site where the first nuclear weapon was detonated in 1945. Most believe that it was named in tribute to Tatlock, who loved the poet John Donne, author of the poem "Trinity".
Oppenheimer Is Considered A Founding Father Of American Theoretical Physics
Oppenheimer Is Considered A Founding Father Of American Theoretical Physics
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
As the "Father of the Atomic Bomb," Oppenheimer was so influential in the science community he helped father American theoretical physics. While studying for his PhD in Germany, Oppenheimer and his professor Max Born developed the Born-Oppenheimer approximation which outlined "separating nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules."
When Oppenheimer returned to America, he was already known in the science community for his work in theoretical physics, and he would go on to make contributions in astrophysics, nuclear physics, spectroscopy, quantum field theory, cosmic ray showers, and work that led to a description of quantum tunneling.
He Was The First To Suggest The Existence Of Black Holes
He Was The First To Suggest The Existence Of Black Holes
Photo: Paramount Pictures
In 1939, Oppenheimer wrote a paper titled "On Continued Gravitational Contraction." Oppenheimer's research accurately predicted the existence of "dying stars whose gravitational pull exceeded their energy production." Or, as they are called today, black holes. Many before him had observed relativity and the degeneration of stars, but Oppenheimer and a team of scientists were the first to realize there was a bubble inside the collapsing stars where time stopped.
He Campaigned Against Nuclear Weapons After The War
He Campaigned Against Nuclear Weapons After The War
Photo: United States Department of Energy / WikiMedia Commons
Following WWII, Oppenheimer became a key advisor in the development of US atomic policy. From 1947 to 1952 he was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee.
When the Soviet Union detonated a fission bomb in 1949, many in the US government wanted to move forward with work on a hydrogen fusion bomb. After the war, Oppenheimer felt guilty over the massive loss of civilian life the bombs caused in Japan. As a result, he decided not to support further development of nuclear weapons. His committee openly opposed the construction of the hydrogen bomb, but were overruled by President Harry Truman.
This opposition would become another major factor in the loss of his security clearance in the coming years.
At Age 12, He Was Invited To Speak At The New York Mineralogy Club
At Age 12, He Was Invited To Speak At The New York Mineralogy Club
Photo: Tim Evanson / Creative Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Oppenheimer enjoyed a privileged childhood as the son of a wealthy textile importer. He became interested in mineralogy as a boy and began writing letters to the New York Mineralogy Club. The group was so impressed by his knowledge on the topic, that they invited him to come and speak at one of their meetings. At the time, the club had no idea that Oppenheimer was only 12 years old.
He Still Holds The Longest Tenure As Director Of The Institute For Advanced Study
He Still Holds The Longest Tenure As Director Of The Institute For Advanced Study
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930 as "a haven where scholars and scientists could regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory." The Institute was designed to serve as a headquarters where the smartest people in the world could come to work on any project. The institute's mission statement explains that they allow the "pursuit of knowledge with no view to its immediate utility or the expectation of meeting predetermined goals" and the program was given immediate legitimacy when Albert Einstein signed on as one of their first professors.
Oppenheimer became the director of the IAS in 1947 and fulfilled that duty while simultaneously serving as Chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission until 1952. He was well-suited for the position given his broad range of knowledge in the sciences, and he would stay on as director until 1966. To this day, he still holds the longest tenure as director of the institute.
He Was Put On Trial And Lost His Government Status In 1954
He Was Put On Trial And Lost His Government Status In 1954
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In the 1950s, a nationwide fear of Communism exploded and Oppenheimer's previous communist connections were no secret. He had openly admitted to it in security interviews before he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, and had still held on to most of his left-leaning political views. Even though many prominent members of the scientific community came to his defense, Oppenheimer's communist connections along with his opposition to the hydrogen bomb led to him losing his security clearance in 1954.
The scientific community was deeply disturbed by the decision, and many began to question the voice and role of scientists in government. It was also an early example of government bi-partisanship's affect on that role, a subject that Oppenheimer would often write about later in life.
He Was Presented The Enrico Fermi Award in 1963
He Was Presented The Enrico Fermi Award in 1963
Photo: Pinterest
After being exiled from government service, Oppenheimer retreated to the Institute of Advanced Study where he was the active director. In 1961, President Kennedy invited Oppenheimer to a dinner for Nobel prize winners where the president expressed his admiration for Oppenheimer's work. In 1963 Oppenheimer was given the Enrico Fermi award for his "many contributions to theoretical physics and to the advancement of science in our nation," by Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy later nominated Oppenheimer for the award, but he was assassinated before the award was officially given to him.
J. Robert Oppenheimer Never Won A Nobel Prize
J. Robert Oppenheimer Never Won A Nobel Prize
Photo: John Cummings / WikiMedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Unfortunately, Oppenheimer's most well known achievement doesn't qualify for Nobel status since the committee does not recognize military technology. Most of Oppenheimer's achievements, specifically his prediction of black holes, might have led to a Nobel prize had he lived long enough to see the discoveries he laid the foundations for come to fruition. Others feel Oppenheimer never won the award because he never specialized in one area of physics.
And because the Nobel Prize is not given out posthumously, we most likely won't ever see one in Oppenheimer's name.
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© Ranker 2021jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-30440199952017924802021-02-15T09:39:00.006-05:002021-02-15T16:41:34.752-05:00Here’s What Life Was Like At Los Alamos While Building An Atomic Bomb<a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/los-alamos-history/genevieve-carlton?ref=search" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
Here’s What Life Was Like At Los Alamos While Building An Atomic Bomb
Genevieve Carlton
Updated November 21, 2019 10.4k views15 items
What was it like to live at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project? As thousands worked to build a top-secret atomic device, the US military tried to keep the entire city secret. All mail was screened and sent through a fake address at the University of California. The security team warned residents to never use their real names, and to cancel all their magazine subscriptions. And the FBI even investigated the head librarian, suspecting that she was sharing secrets with the communists.
Yet at the same time, residents attended square dances, went on horseback rides, and drank ethyl alcohol at raging parties. Los Alamos history during WWII contains contradictions. It was both a military facility and a scientific research project. Civilian residents had to obey the orders of a military commander and follow strict rules of secrecy. However, with its own radio station, soda fountain, and frequent social events, Los Alamos could, at times, feel like any close community in the USA - rather than a secret project to build the most destructive device in history.
These photographs from the detonation of the atomic bomb stunned the world. They also stunned the very people working on the Manhattan Project. As physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer told the men and women of Los Alamos after the first successful atomic test, “You are heroes today, but in a very short time you will be criticized for what you have done here.”
Billboards Warned, 'Keep Mum About This Job'
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Billboards Warned, 'Keep Mum About This Job'
Secrecy was the top priority at Los Alamos during WWII. But with 150,000 people participating in the Manhattan Project, keeping the work top-secret was a major challenge.
The government chose Los Alamos because it was so remote, but secrecy required more than geographic isolation. Everyone living at Los Alamos needed security clearance and went through multiple security checkpoints to access the facilities. Armed guards protected the perimeter, along with barbed-wire fences.
Residents were constantly warned not to leak any information, with one billboard warning, "Keep mum about this job."
Scientists Took Ethyl Alcohol From The Labs To Throw Raging Parties
Photo: The Day After Trinity / PBS
Scientists Took Ethyl Alcohol From The Labs To Throw Raging Parties
Scientists worked long hours at Los Alamos, convinced that their efforts could turn the tide in WWII. They also made time for parties.
"Everybody in my dorm would get together, chip in, and give a dorm party. Because it was dusty, muddy, rainy, snowing, you wore boots and things to work," says Rebecca Diven, an engineer and the wife of a Manhattan Project scientist. "We’d have a crew set up and clean up and then we would have punch in which somehow alcohol would magically appear, and we could make punch and different things."
That punch came from the scientific laboratories. Physicist Albert Bartlett recalls, "The basic ingredient of the punch in the dorm parties was ethyl alcohol from the laboratory stock... A lot of times, the punch was pretty strong."
The Librarian In Charge Of Secrecy Was Investigated By The FBI
Photo: United States Army / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The Librarian In Charge Of Secrecy Was Investigated By The FBI
Charlotte Serber was a close friend of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer asked Serber to serve as the librarian at Los Alamos.
Serber struggled to maintain strict rules of secrecy in the library. She instituted nightly sweeps of the library to make sure that top-secret documents were never left out in the open. One night, Serber confronted a scientist who left out technical documents. According to Serber, "He argued that since the report was completely wrong, giving it to the enemy would be a service to the war effort."
Still, the FBI suspected Serber of serving the enemy. She was investigated in 1943 on suspicion of communist sympathies. Although the US Army recommended firing Serber, Oppenheimer insisted she was trustworthy.
Babies Born At The Secret Facility Had PO Box 1663 On Their Birth Certificate
Photo: United States Army / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Babies Born At The Secret Facility Had PO Box 1663 On Their Birth Certificate
During the years of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos experienced a baby boom. According to Dolores Heaton, who grew up at the facility, "Los Alamos had no crime. There was no kidnapping. It was an ideal situation to have children - to be able to have this kind of freedom, to grow up in this environment."
But babies born at Los Alamos were also shrouded in secrecy. Instead of their birth certificates listing a location of birth, they simply read PO Box 1663, New Mexico.
As John Mench, an engineer at Los Alamos, explains:
My daughter’s birth certificate says... that she was born in Post Office Box 1663 in New Mexico, because that’s the only way this place was designated. And everything that came to Los Alamos, whether it was a 10-ton machine or whether it was a postcard, came to Post Office Box 1663. And that’s where my daughter was born, still has her birth certificate.
Physicist Richard Feynman Got In Trouble With Censors For Exchanging Coded Letters With His Wife
Photo: United States Army / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Physicist Richard Feynman Got In Trouble With Censors For Exchanging Coded Letters With His Wife
All mail to Los Alamos went through rigorous screening from the Office of Censorship. Strict rules stated that residents were never allowed to state their precise location, "except that it is in New Mexico." Residents also could not describe how many people - "either military or civilian" - were participating in the project. Letters could never mention the names of anyone working at Los Alamos, and, of course, censors blocked any information about the work on the atomic device.
Scientists not used to the strict rules sometimes fought the censors. Physicist Richard Feynman, known as the town prankster, got in trouble with censors by flaunting the rules. His wife, Arline Greenbaum, lived in Albuquerque while Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project. Greenbaum mailed coded letters to Feynman, which he deciphered and returned.
Feynman also irritated censors by whiting out words and passages in his letters. He and his wife practiced their cryptography skills under the nose of the censors - who didn't appreciate the joke.
One Couple Went Undercover In A Santa Fe Bar To Trick Spies
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
One Couple Went Undercover In A Santa Fe Bar To Trick Spies
During the Manhattan Project, scientists and civilians sometimes tried to help the effort by throwing people off their tracks. In Santa Fe, where the new military installation at Los Alamos was hard to miss, residents began wondering what, exactly, the scientists were building at the top-secret facility.
Physicist Robert Serber and his wife Charlotte, the head librarian at Los Alamos, decided to spread some misinformation. They visited a bar in Santa Fe, spreading a lie that scientists were working on "an electric rocket" at Los Alamos.
However, the Serbers discovered it was much harder to spread false information than they suspected. While dancing with a local man, Charlotte pressed him: "What’s your guess about what cooks up there?"
He responded, "Beats me. Don’t care. May I have another dance later?"
Residents Were Ordered To Cancel Their Magazine Subscriptions
Photo: The Day After Trinity / PBS
Residents Were Ordered To Cancel Their Magazine Subscriptions
When civilians moved to Los Alamos, they had to cut off contact with the outside world. The military police took over the mail, censoring all correspondence. The town's mail was also routed through a secret address at the University of California to throw off potential spies.
Scientists at Los Alamos couldn't receive magazine subscriptions. The military worried that if too many scientists' names appeared on subscription lists, it might look suspicious.
Scientists Rebelled Against The Strict Rules Of Military Life
Photo: United States Army Corps of Engineers / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Scientists Rebelled Against The Strict Rules Of Military Life
Los Alamos was both a military facility and a scientific research project. However, scientists often chafed under the strict rules of military life.
General Leslie Groves, the commander at Los Alamos, tried to enforce compartmentalization to maintain secrecy. Oppenheimer, the head scientist, insisted on weekly scientific colloquia between the top scientists, but Grove demanded no communication between other divisions.
The scientists also rebelled against the military's plan to use an atomic bomb. A group of scientists reached out to the Minister of War, urging him to avoid using the device on populated areas.
Physicist Victor Weisskopf lamented, "We never managed to shake off the searching question as to whether it was morally acceptable to use a weapon with such enormous destructive force."
Los Alamos Had Its Own Radio Station, An Orchestra, And Square Dances
Photo: The Day After Trinity / PBS
Los Alamos Had Its Own Radio Station, An Orchestra, And Square Dances
Though hidden from sight behind military fences, Los Alamos was a town like many others in the United States. Residents threw dance parties featuring the Keynotes, a Los Alamos band.
Resident Berlyn Brixner says that both the military and civilian populations enjoyed the social event:
Dancing was also a favorite. Square dancing. The military base commander was particularly interested in square dancing, so he naturally was all for it and was generally the head man there at the square dance.
Los Alamos also featured an orchestra and theatrical plays. Residents could listen to the Los Alamos radio station, KRSN, which played music and skits.
“In retrospect, it is pretty funny: in a place that was so obsessed with secrecy, certainly you could hear the radio station outside the fence,” says Ellen Bradbury Reid, who grew up at the facility.
Everyone Lived Under A Secret Name In The Secret City
Photo: The Day After Trinity / PBS
Everyone Lived Under A Secret Name In The Secret City
Los Alamos housed the world's top scientists, and everyone at the facility lived under a secret name.
Secrecy was strictly enforced, and scientists weren't allowed to even tell their spouses about their work. They had to request authorization to leave the facility or order new equipment.
Los Alamos was known as a "secret city." As the military leaders reminded residents, "What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here!"
Scientists Nearly Spilled The Secret By Visiting The Public Library
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Scientists Nearly Spilled The Secret By Visiting The Public Library
Sometimes, the scientists at Los Alamos wanted to escape the facility to visit Santa Fe, but one visit to the Santa Fe Library nearly outed the project.
The public library kept records listing the visitors who checked out books. At one point, the library sent a letter to borrowers, many of whom were Los Alamos scientists. That created a crisis with a Los Alamos security team. They demanded to know how the library obtained the real names of so many project scientists.
Charlotte Serber recalled, "A dark and cryptic gentleman appeared to find out how this flood of mail happened to be sent them and where All Those Names were obtained."
The scientists, who checked out books using their real names, were scolded for committing a major security violation.
Even Children At Los Alamos Had Security Cards
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Even Children At Los Alamos Had Security Cards
At Los Alamos, children attended a school run largely by the wives of the scientists and workers. The secret city even had its own school bus to transport children to school.
The arrangement was chaos at first, says Robert Howes Jr., who was a child during the Manhattan Project:
The first time [the bus] drove down the street, it opened the door and kids got out like hamsters all over the place. Nobody was expecting them not to be civilized. Cars had to screech to stop and everything, and after that the parents got together and tried to make rules for such things.
Children also had to follow the facility's strict rules, with those as young as 6 receiving security IDs to enter and exit Los Alamos.
"If parents didn't want their children going off of the Hill, all they had to do is take their ID card away from them and they weren’t going anywhere," recalls Dolores Heaton. "Because at that time to get in and out of Los Alamos you had to have your badge and your ID card. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about that."
The Remote Facility Created Major Challenges For Residents
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The Remote Facility Created Major Challenges For Residents
It wasn't easy getting to Los Alamos. Built atop a plateau in New Mexico, it could only be accessed by dirt roads. During the rainy season, the roads turned into a muddy mess.
Residents were allowed to leave the facility one day a month. "You couldn’t buy a thread - a spool of thread - anything on the Hill," says Rebecca Diven. "And if you made the mistake of saying, 'I’m going to town,' you left with a long list of purchases for people."
The facility did have a bus to Santa Fe, which Diven says operated on a "sort of" regular schedule that enabled residents to reach the stores around the time they opened. As Diven recalls, "I could get back in half a day and go hiking, whatever, and do the shopping we needed because there was nothing here in '44. I loved it. I thought it was wonderful - mud, dust, wind, that's all right."
On Days Off, Physicists Took Horseback Rides
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
On Days Off, Physicists Took Horseback Rides
Scientists and workers from across the country came to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project. Many were stunned by the beautiful scenery in New Mexico.
"More than once, somebody would bang on my door before breakfast and say, 'Wake up! It's snow. Let’s go skiing!'" remembers Rebecca Diven. "I’d jump up and we’d ski, and miss breakfast incidentally, and then I’d get to work in time. I thought that was heaven. Imagine being able to go right out of your dorm room into a place where you could ski or hike in the mountains."
Dolores Heaton recalls the natural beauty: "It was one of the most beautiful settings I think that I’ve ever seen in my life. We were covered by mountains on all sides - north, south, east, west were nothing but huge, huge mountains. They were absolutely incredible."
On their days off, scientists sometimes explored the setting on horseback.
After The Trinity Test, Things Changed At Los Alamos
Photo: The Day After Trinity / PBS
After The Trinity Test, Things Changed At Los Alamos
Life in Los Alamos blended the normal routines of work, school, and chores with a massive scientific undertaking to build a devastating device. As the Trinity test drew closer, that reality overwhelmed normal life.
John Mench remembers:
There were a lot of serious moments when the Trinity shot began to come into being. We worked very hard. Some of us worked sixteen hours a day, not because we were paid a lot of money, but because we knew that this could be the end of [WWII], and we put our heart and soul into getting that bomb prepared.
After the Trinity test succeeded, J. Robert Oppenheimer made a speech to Los Alamos residents: "You are heroes today, but in a very short time you will be criticized for what you have done here."
Mench says, "He was very right."
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© Ranker 2021jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-36286136040944438232021-02-15T09:28:00.003-05:002021-02-15T16:40:43.379-05:00In The 1960s, The US Government Built Two "Floating White Houses" AKA Doomsday Ships<a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/floating-white-house-doomsday-ships/stephanroget?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=historypost&pgid=642850749204637&utm_campaign=floating-white-house-doomsday-ships" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>vote on
In The 1960s, The US Government Built Two "Floating White Houses" AKA Doomsday Ships
Stephan Roget
Updated December 5, 2018 13.4k views15 items
Even in tumultuous times, individuals with serious doomsday plans are viewed with healthy doses of skepticism and judgement. A few decades ago, however, such apocalyptic preparation was the norm, and the United States government has maintained several well-known Presidential security plans since the conclusion of World War II - to be used in the event of a nuclear war that once seemed almost inevitable.
Every modern president - from Truman to Trump - has had a multitude of locations to escape to if an attack were to occur. That’s led to some pretty strange features on Air Force One, but the US government once looked to a different sort of vehicle when it came to the president’s nuclear getaway ride.
The US Government Started To Invest Serious Resources Into Doomsday Prep Under President Truman
The US Government Started To Invest Serious Resources Into Doomsday Prep Under President Truman
Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
As the ‘40s turned into the ‘50s, the era of World War II concluded and the nations of the world dug in for a decades-long Cold War. On the American side of things, President Harry Truman recognized the stakes had been significantly raised after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - for the first time in human history, global annihilation was now a distinct possibility.
In an effort to prepare for doomsday, Truman ordered the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which operated under the premise that a nuclear war didn’t have to be the end of the road for certain US citizens.
The Ultimate Goal Of The US Doomsday Plan Was For The Government To Survive A Nuclear War
The Ultimate Goal Of The US Doomsday Plan Was For The Government To Survive A Nuclear War
Photo: Ryanicus Girraficus / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 1.0
The Federal Civil Defense Administration had a number of goals and aims, but its chief mission statement was to ensure the continuity of the United States government in the event of a nuclear war.
To achieve this aim, the government created several alternate command posts that could be used to house the president’s administration and military leadership. If the White House or Pentagon were ever threatened - or outright destroyed. These highly secretive locations were the most important assets of the United States’s official doomsday plan.
To Qualify As An “Alternate Joint Communication Center,” A Site Had To Meet Three Key Criteria
The United States went on a bit of a bunker-building spree as the ‘50s began, so there have always been a number of places in which the president and other government officials could wait out a nuclear bombing.
However, a bunker only ensured the survival of political leadership, not the “Continuity of Government” mandated by the creation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, so Americans began the hunt for Alternate Joint Communication Centers (AJCCs) that could safely house the president’s administration and military higher-ups in the event of a nuclear war while simultaneously allowing them to continue leading the country.
To qualify as an AJCC a site had to meet three key criteria: the president had to be able to reach it safely, it had to be relatively well protected from the effects of nuclear war, and it had to have secure communication links no matter the circumstance.
The Government Created Several Complex Bunkers And Specialized Doomsday Planes, But They Had Some Drawbacks
The Government Created Several Complex Bunkers And Specialized Doomsday Planes, But They Had Some Drawbacks
Photo: US Air Force / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
In the name of “Continuity of Government,” the US built several Alternate Joint Communication Centers to house the president and other members of the country’s leadership in an emergency. They constructed multiple super-bunkers like The Greenbrier, “Site R” under Raven Rock, and Cheyenne Mountain, but their stationary measure made them vulnerable to a direct attack.
Boeing planes were outfitted to serve as National Emergency Airborne Command Posts - codenamed “Night Watch” - but aircrafts can only remain in the air for so long. In lieu of these issues, the United States government remained on the lookout for an apocalypse-proof solution.
As The ‘60s Turned Up The Heat On The Cold War, The US Government Began To Look To The Sea For Answers
The drawbacks of the stationary and airborne Alternate Joint Communication Centers led the government to look to the sea. Ships could stay afloat for lengthy periods without returning to port - as long as they were well-supplied - and it was thought the Soviets would struggle to track a “doomsday ship” amidst the mass of the Atlantic Ocean.
Thus began the National Emergency Command Post Afloat initiative. A special unit of helicopter teams codenamed “Outpost Mission” were on call to ferry the president from the White House to one of these aquatic vessels in the event of a nuclear attack.Once the president was on-board, they’d set sail to lead the United States government from some unknown oceanic location.
Two Doomsday Ships Were Upgraded Into Floating White Houses To Protect The President
Two Doomsday Ships Were Upgraded Into Floating White Houses To Protect The President
Photo: US Navy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
To outfit the National Emergency Command Post Afloat, the US Navy reconfigured the USS Northampton cruiser in March of 1962. The ship served as the first of two official apocalyptic vessels.
The second doomsday ship, a light aircraft carrier named the USS Wright, was similarly upgraded in 1963, at which point the two “floating White Houses” began their duty awaiting the outbreak of nuclear war.
For the better part of the next decade, the sister doomsday ships served as Plan A for the president’s escape in the event of an impending nuclear attack.
The Sister Doomsday Ships Alternated Two-Week Stints Of Duty Awaiting Disaster
The USS Northampton and the USS Wright had an incredibly important job, and the US government couldn’t afford to be caught unawares if a nuclear war were to ever break out. This necessitated at least one of the doomsday ships being on alert at all times, resulting in a system of two-week alternating stints at sea.
For an entire fortnight, one of the ships dispatched to somewhere off America’s East coast to await the president’s potentially sudden arrival while the other vessel took a much-needed break in port.
The sister doomsday ships passed one another silently in the night as they traded places - taking turns carrying the bulk of the responsibility for the American Continuity of Government strategy.
Whichever Ship Was On Alert Duty Was Third In The Chain Of Command In The Event Of A Nuclear War
Whichever Ship Was On Alert Duty Was Third In The Chain Of Command In The Event Of A Nuclear War
Photo: US Naval History & Heritage Command / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Those who operated the USS Northampton and the USS Wright were aware of the massive responsibility their vessels might undertake in the event of a nuclear confrontation. If such a war were to break out, whichever doomsday ship was on alert duty would automatically become the third site in the chain of command, just behind the Strategic Air Command and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).
However, when the president reached one of the ships, one can presume it immediately became the site of chief authority in the United States of America - a floating White House and Pentagon all wrapped into one vessel.
The Doomsday Ships Had Anti-Fallout Capabilities
The two doomsday ships needed to be able to keep the president and other key government officials alive on a post-apocalyptic globe. Government scientists in the ‘60s were well aware of the potentially devastating effects of a nuclear winter, and so the USS Northampton and USS Wright were each outfitted with some anti-fallout capabilities to keep everyone onboard healthy.
These nuclear-proof technologies included an exterior salt-water wash down system, which kept the hull free of airborne fallout, and a number of interior pressurization spaces that could keep their inhabitants safe from outside contaminants.
Each Ship Had A Miniature Version Of The Pentagon’s War Room
Each Ship Had A Miniature Version Of The Pentagon’s War Room
Photo: Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The White House’s Situation Room has been the host of numerous tense scenes over its years of existence, but less well-known is the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center - commonly referred to as the War Room.
America’s armed conflicts are largely conducted from the War Room, so the USS Northampton and the USS Wright each carried a miniature version of it. This allowed the United States’s military leadership to operate with a sense of familiarity even in the extremely unfamiliar event of a nuclear attack.
A Series Of Covert Roving Vans Kept The Doomsday Ships Connected To All Vital Communications
The undercover government van is a staple of pop culture, but it’s actually one of the ways Americans planned on keeping their doomsday ships plugged into the rest of the country no matter the circumstances.
The government arranged a series of covert vans around the nation to cover the president’s most frequent travel paths, and they all reported back to to a permanent UHF station that kept the various Alternate Joint Communication Centers connected. This ensured the president could maintain control of the country even if they had to endure a lengthy stay aboard one of the doomsday ships.
Presidents Kennedy And Johnson Visited The Apocalyptic Vessels
Presidents Kennedy And Johnson Visited The Apocalyptic Vessels
Photo: Unknown/National Archives / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Though the two American doomsday ships never had to be called into action for their ultimate purpose, they still played host to the Commander in Chief on occasion. President John Kennedy and his successor President Lyndon Johnson each visited the USS Northampton and Johnson took a tour of the USS Wright after its upgrades were finished in 1963.
Other than a few brief hot spots in the Cold War, the two presidents were fortunate enough to not need to consider any sort of lengthy stay onboard a doomsday ships. Whenever the president traveled, however, one of the ships is sure to have followed - lurking somewhere nearby in case its services were suddenly required.
The Ships Went On High Alert On Multiple Occasions
The Ships Went On High Alert On Multiple Occasions
Photo: L.A. Bowers/US Navy / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The Cold War never erupted into nuclear hellfire, and so the USS Northampton and the USS Wright never had their apocalyptic-readiness put to the test. However, the two vessels were put on high alert on at least two occasions.
The first alert came during the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the instances in which the world came close to outright atomic conflict. The other came in 1968 when North Korea captured the USS Pueblo under the Johnson administration. Neither incident resulted in open conflict, so the ships were simply kept at the ready.
The Mysterious Comings And Goings Of The Doomsday Cruisers Sparked Rumors Along The East Coast
Whichever doomsday ship was on alert duty would typically sit just off the East Coast of the United States in some undisclosed location. As the existence of the vessels was top secret, the seemingly random and unexplained appearance of a giant ship off the coast caused a lot of local speculation, especially when the ships disappeared as mysteriously as they’d arrived.
While most locals likely made the correct assumption - that the doomsday ships were the result of some secret government project - others almost certainly thought of them as a supernatural phenomenon.
The Floating White Houses Were Sold For Scrap When Satellite Technology Rendered Them Obsolete
The Floating White Houses Were Sold For Scrap When Satellite Technology Rendered Them Obsolete
Photo: US Naval History & Heritage Command / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The logic behind the National Emergency Command Post Afloat relied heavily on the Soviets’ inability to track the doomsday ships at sea, and that logic fell completely apart once satellite technology became readily available to both sides of the Cold War.
As a result, the program was deemed obsolete and ended in the early ‘70s. Despite their years of service, both vessels received a rather ignoble end when they were eventually scuttled for scrap - though their existence remained top secret for years to come.
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© Ranker 2021jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-58072585085850678842021-02-12T16:22:00.007-05:002021-02-21T13:38:47.223-05:00Was Milwaukee Once Surrounded By Nuclear Weapons?<a href="<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ikN8iEJHZ2k/YDKn-ogxFRI/AAAAAAAAyLA/euYXpg90gDQ82jkotf39wRBOXumzIzh9ACNcBGAsYHQ/s602/lake.gif" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="417" data-original-width="602" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ikN8iEJHZ2k/YDKn-ogxFRI/AAAAAAAAyLA/euYXpg90gDQ82jkotf39wRBOXumzIzh9ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/lake.gif"/></a></div><a href="https://youtu.be/sX6n0oFXR8Y" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q6_BQdVGyi0/YDKoYf7sSPI/AAAAAAAAyLI/1RU6BLDvvs8kPBfvEIXe8LIoEuDJto6fwCNcBGAsYHQ/s767/missile.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="721" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q6_BQdVGyi0/YDKoYf7sSPI/AAAAAAAAyLI/1RU6BLDvvs8kPBfvEIXe8LIoEuDJto6fwCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/missile.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QiUgvyr2HiA/YDKorVh3w9I/AAAAAAAAyLQ/yTMVqhT3ujobjUqdAsvMD20LEpPJxrl5ACNcBGAsYHQ/s2048/sw.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1431" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QiUgvyr2HiA/YDKorVh3w9I/AAAAAAAAyLQ/yTMVqhT3ujobjUqdAsvMD20LEpPJxrl5ACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/sw.jpg"/></a></div></a>/0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
Was Milwaukee Once Surrounded By Nuclear Weapons?
By Joy Powers • 10 hours ago
Nike Ajax anti-aircraft missile site in front of the San Francisco skyline in the 1960s. This San Fransico site is set up very similarly to Milwaukee's lakefront site.
Nike Ajax anti-aircraft missile site in front of the San Francisco skyline in the 1960s. This San Fransico site is set up very similarly to Milwaukee's lakefront site.
Wikimedia Commons
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For this Bubbler Talk, Lake Effect's Joy Powers looks back at Project Nike Ajax.
The 1950s are seen as a golden age for the U.S., a time when the country was prosperous and the nuclear family reigned supreme. But the nation had another nuclear obsession — a looming, existential threat that seemed imminent, if not guaranteed.
The country was embroiled in a war unlike any it had seen before, a Cold War with the nascent Soviet Union, a superpower fighting for its place on the world stage.
The U.S. feared a nuclear attack. One solution? Project Nike Ajax — an anti-aircraft missile system surrounding every major U.S. city.
WUWM's Bubbler Talk has received a number of questions about these old sites in Wisconsin.
“They were generally clustered around very large cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, and they call them rings of supersonic steel, because they were the ones that would be guarding as a last line of defense from incoming Soviet bombers that we were fearful we're going to use nuclear weapons and blow us up,” explains Chris Sturdevant, chairman of the Midwest Chapter of the Cold War Museum.
In 1956, Nike Ajax sites were built around the Milwaukee area. There were eight in total: one in Waukesha, River Hills, Franklin, Lannon, Cudahy, Muskego, and two in Milwaukee itself.
Map detailing the eight Nike Ajax anti-aircraft missile sites built in the surrounding Milwaukee area.
Credit Milwaukee County Historical Society
Although most have been destroyed, some structures still remain — like the ones in Waukesha’s Hillcrest Park. Brett Blomberg has been working on restoring a Nike site in Vernon Hills, Illinois and he describes how it would’ve worked: “The missiles were stored horizontally underground in roughly a 50 by 60 square foot concrete box underground. The missile would come up to the surface by a hydraulic elevator, one missile at a time, bring it to the surface. It would move to one side or the other, two are remote launcher above the magazine, and then the elevator will go down and pick up another missile and bring them up."
But, as one Bubbler Talk question asker wondered, were there really nuclear weapons at these sites?
Although some of these sites eventually had nuclear warheads, they came later as part of Nike Hercules — the next generation of missiles.
This illustration, from a US Army booklet, shows the evolution of the Nike Ajax and Hercules missiles, and their associated support equipment.
Credit US Army Rocket and Guided Missile Agency / Wikimedia Commons
“[The Nike Hercules] were the nuclear fitted — more powerful, longer range, triple the range. The Ajax had a range of 30 miles. Hercules had 90 miles distance to intercept intercept bombers. At a higher payload, obviously, they were a lot heavier. They could take out multiple Russian bombers and a whole squadron as opposed to the Ajax was more like a bottle rocket trying to go up there with a conventional warhead and try to get the get the bombers off course,” Sturdevant explains.
The Hercules was a much more powerful system, which meant the army didn’t need as many sites to protect the area. So in the early 1960s, most of the sites were closed — leaving just three with nuclear warheads: Waukesha, River Hills and the most famous site in Milwaukee, now known as the Summerfest grounds.
The Summerfest grounds in 1971, a year after the land was converted from an old Nike Ajax site to the central location for the yearly music festival.
Credit Milwaukee Journal
But they didn’t last long. By 1971, every Nike Missile site in Milwaukee had closed. There were a number of reasons why: They were expensive to maintain and man, and the arms race was heating up.
“Quite frankly, they became irrelevant eventually because the fight started focusing on intercontinental ballistic missiles,” Sturdevant says.
Most of these sites faded into obscurity. And as they did, much of their history died with them. But people like Sturdevant and Blomberg hope to change that. By preserving the site in Vernon Hills, Blomberg hopes to shed some light on this era.
Part of the Nike Ajax site in Waukesha, Wisconsin that still stands.
Credit Ched Cheddles / Flickr
“The goal would be to have this open to the public, let them come and look at it. We’d have volunteers that would explain the system, the how and the why, and try to explain some of the political thinking about this, of why and where they put them, and that kind of thing,” says Blomberg.
Milwaukee never had to use these missiles, and Sturdevant says that’s probably for the best.
“The missile leaders confided that we would be lucky to get two to three missiles in the air in that point because if they had penetrated this far, to be able to take out squadrons of Russian and coming Soviet bombers, would have been a tall tall order. So thankfully they never had to be used,” he says.
Thankfully. The greatest fears of the Cold War were never realized. And long after the Soviet Union dissolved, the remnants of these missile sites remain — a legacy to the looming threat of nuclear war and the people who ensured it never happened.
Have a question you'd like WUWM to answer? Submit your query below.jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-19265974422977735702021-01-09T17:12:00.007-05:002021-01-25T14:17:37.700-05:00when milwaukee went to war<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-moSki9S_CGc/X_oqwjydxGI/AAAAAAAAx98/4KDEgb0SC38sJFt3YgCNzayWpuoBhY-7QCNcBGAsYHQ/s600/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers0-600x486.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-moSki9S_CGc/X_oqwjydxGI/AAAAAAAAx98/4KDEgb0SC38sJFt3YgCNzayWpuoBhY-7QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers0-600x486.png"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_FMoJ0Mx8ao/X_oqwehIYlI/AAAAAAAAx90/e-gFsVe1G-wvSo3RfHSE_pVQvjhResHawCNcBGAsYHQ/s600/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers1-600x442.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_FMoJ0Mx8ao/X_oqwehIYlI/AAAAAAAAx90/e-gFsVe1G-wvSo3RfHSE_pVQvjhResHawCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers1-600x442.png"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w72ofT2jKQA/X_oqwTXPgRI/AAAAAAAAx94/0TuCpycDQ-wDzOUmoWznWrhn3Rr4jRsoACNcBGAsYHQ/s600/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers2-600x433.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="433" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w72ofT2jKQA/X_oqwTXPgRI/AAAAAAAAx94/0TuCpycDQ-wDzOUmoWznWrhn3Rr4jRsoACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers2-600x433.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NZ1Xc7r7Y4M/X_oqw6hmdZI/AAAAAAAAx-A/vI5zkyOZhGMksWElUKSk0Chx5AmUXPKQQCNcBGAsYHQ/s600/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers3-600x537.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="600" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NZ1Xc7r7Y4M/X_oqw6hmdZI/AAAAAAAAx-A/vI5zkyOZhGMksWElUKSk0Chx5AmUXPKQQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/when-milwaukee-went-to-war-part-one-allis-chalmers3-600x537.jpg"/></a></div>
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WHEN MILWAUKEE WENT TO WAR
PART ONE: ALLIS-CHALMERS
This is the first of a series of articles that will highlight contributions of Milwaukee-area industry to the war effort during the World War II. Many thousands of Milwaukeeans, men and women, helped to provide the munitions to make Victory possible.
Prior to the Japanese attack upon the Navy base in Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the United States had allowed its military arsenal to deteriorate. Counting on distance and a policy of neutrality, the country did not believe it was necessary to fund its munition industry. As one example, the United States had fewer than 1,300 combat airplanes—most of which were technologically obsolete.
However, when Germany invaded Poland, president Franklin Roosevelt called for an international trading quarantine on nations that were sparking conflict throughout the world, and began petitioning Congress to remove the ban on selling arms to those at war. The so-called ‘cash-and-carry’ program allowed sales of military implements to the ‘Allied’ nationals at war with Germany, but prohibited U.S. Ships from entering conflict zones.
The program was particularly helpful in enabling the United Kingdom to acquire much needed military equipment. It also stimulated U.S. Manufacturing interests to rebound from the Depression. When Roosevelt announced plans to produce 50,000 planes a year, Hitler scoffed, “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood?” He was to find out.
Roosevelt told the American people that he was going to ask private industry to help and intended to tap key men in American business. On May 28, 1940, he invited Bill Knudsen, Chief Executive Officer of General Motors to Washington. Almost immediately, Knudsen left his job and signed up as the first ‘dollar-a-year’ man to head up the newly formed National Defense Advisory Commission. Knudsen got to work and invited a number of other manufacturing executives to join him.
Milwaukee industry was on the forefront of this military build-up. Military orders began pouring in, as the United States and other countries sought goods from Milwaukee industries. According to Richard Pifer, in his book entitled A City at War, over $175 million in military contracts were received by Milwaukee-area industry prior to the Japanese attack. This was particularly true for Allis-Chalmers, A.O. Smith and Bucyrus-Erie. Allis-Chalmers received orders for steam-turbines for destroyers, baby flat-top escort carriers and ‘Victory Ships.’
Allis-Chalmers began work on new factories to produce turbo-supercharges for high-altitude bombers and to expand its steam-turbine production. The company produced over 100,000 superchargers during the war, totaling over 16-million horsepower. Superchargers allowed aircraft engines to operate efficiently at high altitudes (20-30,000 feet), where the air density is lower, where they were less vulnerable to enemy fire. Superchargers effectively increase the mass of air that can be drawn into the engine.
WOMEN ARE SHOWN WORKING TO PRODUCE SUPERCHARGERS AT A NEW ALLIS-CHALMERS FACTORY DURING WORLD WAR II. THE COMPANY BUILT OVER 100,000 SUPERCHARGERS DURING THE WAR EFFORT.
ALLIS-CHALMERS MADE STEAM-TURBINE PROPULSION SYSTEMS FOR MANY DESTROYERS AND BABY FLAT-TOP ESCORT CARRIERS DURING WORLD WAR II. SHOWN ABOVE, WORKERS ARE ADDING BLADING TO THE TURBINE SPINDLES. NOTE THAT BOTH MEN AND WOMEN WORKED ON THE ASSEMBLIES. THEY ALSO MADE NUMEROUS PROPELLER SHAFTS FOR NAVAL VESSELS.
Allis-Chalmers manufactured critical assemblies that were employed in the top-secret Manhattan Project for the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium. It also built the compressors used to handle uranium hexafluoride used in the gaseous diffusion process. Both processes were used to separate the fissionable U-235 from U-238 to produce the atomic bomb.
IT IS UNLIKELY THAT THE A-C EMPLOYEES HAD ANY IDEA OF WHAT THEY WERE PRODUCING. YET, A WOODEN WALL WAS CONSTRUCTED TO PREVENT EMPLOYEES WORKING ON PARTS (ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE PHOTOGRAPH) TO SEE THE ASSEMBLED COILS. THE COILS FOR THE MAGNETIC SEPARATION PROCESS WERE WOUND WITH SILVER ON LOAN FROM THE U.S. TREASURY, DUE TO THE SHORTAGE OF COPPER DURING THE WAR.
THIS SIGN, LOCATED OUTSIDE OF ALLIS-CHALMER’S HAWLEY PLANT WHERE WORK WAS CARRIED OUT FOR THE MANHATTAN PROJECT, EMPHASIZED THE IMPORTANCE OF SECRECY AND SECURITY DURING WWII.
jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-83288144629605200202021-01-09T17:10:00.006-05:002021-01-09T17:11:04.248-05:00oak ridge
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From Treasury Vault to the Manhattan Project
By Bruce Cameron Reed
The U.S. War Department borrowed 14,000 tons of government silver in its drive to make the world's first atomic bomb
Physics Policy
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This Article From Issue
January-February 2011
Volume 99, Number 1
Page 40
DOI: 10.1511/2011.88.40
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The U. S. Army’s World War II Manhattan Project was a drama unlike any other, with larger-than-life starring personalities, a supporting cast of more than 100,000, cutting-edge science, espionage and diplomatic intrigue. If that wasn’t enough, billions of dollars were gambled in the construction of enormous secret facilities to produce materials for a devastating weapon that might not work.
All this played out against a background of worldwide conflict and the profound threat that Nazi Germany might achieve the world’s most powerful weapon first.
Any compelling drama includes subplots, and the Manhattan Project was no exception. While the main veins of the science, engineering, ethics and geopolitical implications surrounding the development of nuclear weapons have been well mined by historians, some aspects of the Manhattan Project have attracted less study. Over the past few years I have researched several, including the so-called Silver Program. The program was fundamental to finding a means to safely and quickly produce the tens of kilograms of uranium necessary for a weapon of mass destruction.
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The secret government project to build the bomb was handed from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the War Department in 1942. Management fell first to Colonel James C. Marshall of the Syracuse District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Marshall was ordered to establish a new district with no geographical boundaries. Its first offices were at the Atlantic Division headquarters on Broadway in New York City, hence the origin of the “Manhattan Engineer District” (MED), later called the Manhattan Project. Colonel (soon to be Brigadier General and later Major General) Leslie Groves was appointed commanding general of the new district in September 1942, a position senior to that of Marshall, who remained District Engineer until August 1943 when his deputy, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, replaced him.
The paramount problem for the MED was finding means to produce sufficient enriched uranium for an atomic bomb. By early 1942, only milligram-scale quantities of uranium-235 (235U) had been isolated and it was by no means clear if any of the laboratory methods in use then could be ramped up to an industrial scale. Research into several techniques was fast-tracked and three ultimately were used at Oak Ridge. (A fourth approach to securing fissile material, synthesis of plutonium, was used in giant reactors located in Hanford, Washington.) From the beginning, electromagnetic mass spectroscopy was identified as a promising method, and it quickly became clear to Marshall and Nichols that massive quantities of copper would be needed for the magnets’ windings. But copper—used in shell casings—was a high-priority commodity during the war. So Marshall and Nichols struck on the idea of using silver as a substitute. Congress had authorized the use of up to 86,000 tons of Treasury Department silver for defense purposes. Not having to divert mass amounts of copper was a huge boon for the project’s secrecy.
Nichols met with Undersecretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell on August 3, 1942, to inquire about borrowing 6,000 tons of silver from Treasury vaults. In his memoirs, Nichols relates that Bell indignantly informed him that the Treasury’s unit of measure was the troy ounce—though not all present at that meeting recall any unpleasantness. Many MED documents do report quantities of silver in troy ounces and fine troy ounces. At 480 grains, a troy ounce is somewhat heavier than a common avoirdupois ounce, which weighs in at 437.5 grains. Fine troy ounces (FTOs) refer to the purity of the bullion: a 1,000 troy ounce “silver” bar of fineness 0.900 contains 900 FTOs of pure silver. For convenience, I quote weights in pounds of metal here after accounting for fineness.
It is not uncommon to read Groves described as arrogant, arbitrary, insensitive, overbearing and high-handed. More appropriate labels might be mission focused and supremely competent. Groves graduated fourth in his 1918 West Point class and also trained at the Army Engineer School, the Command and General Staff School and the Army War College. His career in the Corps of Engineers was marked by steady advancement. When he assumed command of the MED, he was deputy chief of construction of the Corps of Engineers and was responsible for all domestic military construction. He had just overseen the building of the Pentagon and was well versed in the capabilities of large-scale contractors. It was Groves who selected J. Robert Oppenheimer to be the scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was designed and built. The biographer Robert Norris described Groves as the project’s “Indispensable Man.” In Nichols’s blunter words: “General Groves is the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical.… He is abrasive and sarcastic.… He is extremely intelligent … abounds with energy … if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss I would pick General Groves.”
Cyclotrons and Calutrons
One of Groves’s first actions at the MED was to acquire a large tract of relatively isolated land in eastern Tennessee that had been deemed suitable for establishing enrichment facilities. The army evicted some 1,000 families to take possession of a roughly rectangular tract of about 90 square miles, located 20 miles west of Knoxville, to establish the Clinton Engineer Works. The electromagnetic-separation plant, code-named Y-12, was to be built there. Construction of Y-12 was an enormous undertaking, requiring 67 million hours of labor by a workforce that peaked at about 20,000. The complex included more than 200 support buildings and required some 5,000 operating and maintenance personnel. Most had no idea what they were producing until President Truman announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.
Photograph courtesy of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The need for so much silver at Y-12 emerged from the physics underlying electromagnetic mass spectroscopy. In an optical context, spectroscopy refers to using a prism to separate light into its constituent wavelengths. Similarly, mass spectroscopy separates atoms or molecules by their masses, with a magnetic field playing the role of the prism. The mass spectroscopes used at Oak Ridge were derived from Ernest O. Lawrence’s Nobel Prize–winning cyclotron, which he invented in 1931. Lawrence’s original device had nothing to do with enriching uranium. He invented it in response to a growing crisis in nuclear-physics research. Throughout the 1920s nuclear physicists depended on purely natural phenomena such as alpha decay to supply the “projectiles” used to bombard target elements and induce reactions. But alpha particles (helium nuclei) arising from natural decays are of rather low energy and are readily repelled by the protons residing within the nuclei of even middleweight target elements. For practical purposes, experimenters were restricted to lighter target elements such as aluminum and magnesium. By the late 1920s, they were rapidly running out of potential targets and needed a means to artificially speed up the bombarding projectiles.
Photograph courtesy of Y-12 National Security Complex.
Lawrence’s cyclotron opened a vast new experimental horizon for nuclear-reaction researchers. In the device, two D-shaped metal vacuum tanks were placed back to back, with both perpendicular to a strong magnetic field. Ions injected at the center of the tanks were accelerated toward their sides by alternating the tanks’ electrical polarities at high frequency. Meanwhile, the magnetic field, enacting the Lorentz force law, would try to nudge ions into spiral paths. The ions consequently moved in spiral trajectories and would eventually strike the outer walls of the tanks where they reached targets set up to induce the reactions under study. Lawrence’s first cyclotron was about five inches in diameter. By 1939 he had developed one with a 60-inch diameter that required a 220-ton magnet.
In Lawrence’s calutron (a contraction of California University Cyclotron), ionized and accelerated uranium tetrachloride molecules were released into vacuum tanks, which stood vertically between coils of massive electromagnets. Because the force that a magnetic field exerts on a charged particle is perpendicular to the velocity of a particle, the field can do no work on the particle. That is, its speed does not change but its direction does, a textbook application of centripetal force. That is what makes the ions’ trajectories circular.
In this context, researchers discovered that the radius of a given ion’s orbit depends on the strength of the magnetic field, the extent of its ionization, the speed at which it enters the magnetic field and, most importantly, its mass. Ions of greater mass will travel in orbits of larger radii than those of lesser mass. In the case of uranium, two separate ion streams result: one for the rare, fissile isotope of atomic mass 235, which accounts for only 0.7 percent of natural uranium, and one for the common, nonfissile isotope of mass 238. Since the separation of ion streams is widest after only half an orbit, isotopes were collected there. Subsequently, 235U was chemically separated from the tetrachloride molecules.
The design and power requirements of the calutron tanks were simpler than those of the cyclotrons because it was not necessary to generate an electric field inside the tanks. Despite the simplicity of this method on paper, a host of confounding issues arose at Oak Ridge. To sort uranium ions, the magnetic field needed to be very uniform. Molecules ionized differently than what was ideal for the radius of the vacuum tanks splattered against the tanks’ inner walls and had to be scraped out. The resulting collection efficiency was only about 10 percent. Random thermal variations in the ions’ initial velocities inevitably led to some mixing of streams, producing enrichment rather than separation. Complicating things even more, the mass difference between the two uranium isotopes is close to just 1 percent, meaning the stream separation was miniscule unless the magnetic field was extremely strong. And the like-charged ion streams repelled each other and hence displaced the trajectories from ideal curves. This effect limited production rates in individual vacuum tanks to a scant 100 milligrams of 235U per day. To produce the nearly 50-kilogram critical mass of 235U, Y-12 eventually was fitted with more than 1,000 tanks, many containing multiple ion sources.
Alpha, Beta and Silver
Lawrence and his Berkeley colleagues developed two basic designs for the Y-12 enrichers: Alpha and Beta units. Alpha units enriched uranium to about 15 percent 235U. That processed material was then fed to the Beta units, which enriched it to bomb-grade level, 90 percent 235U. This meant that the Beta units could be smaller, resulting in savings of power and precious materials. Continuous innovation was a hallmark of the Manhattan Project, and designs for both types of enrichers evolved considerably with experience.
Photograph courtesy of Y-12 National Security Complex.
Early in 1943, Groves authorized construction of five Alpha-I enrichers containing 96 tanks with square-shaped coils. The components were arranged in oval configurations called “racetracks.” But the tanks at the curved portions of the oval racetracks were difficult to regulate. In the fall of 1943 the enrichers were supplemented by four Alpha-II tracks, which also contained 96 tanks but were laid out in a rectangular configuration with single units lined up on each side of the racetrack. Beta units contained 36 tanks laid out in a rectangular configuration and used D-shaped coils. Groves initially authorized two Beta units but eventually approved eight, the last of which came on line after the war ended in late 1945. Eventually, nine Alpha and eight Beta units contained a total of 1,152 vacuum tanks.
Illustration by Tom Dunne.
This is where all that Treasury Department silver comes in. The metal was needed to produce coils to make the calutrons’ giant solenoids, which produced a needed high-intensity magnetic field in accordance with the Biot-Savart law, which describes the strength and orientation of a magnetic field created by an electric current. For the Alpha units, the combination of practicable ion speed and magnetic field yielded ion streams about 3 meters in diameter with a maximum separation of just over a centimeter. Based on a 3-meter side length for the coils and estimating 30 windings for each, one can calculate that the current that flowed through them must have been about 30,000 amperes. At its peak of operations in the summer of 1945, the Clinton Engineer Works consumed about one percent of the electrical power produced in the United States, much of it flowing through those silver coils.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson formally requested the silver in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. on August 29, 1942. Stimson gave no indication of what the silver would be used for, saying only that the project “is a highly secret matter.” His letter stipulated that the silver should be of fineness 0.999, that title would remain with the United States, and that any silver received by the War Department would be returned in the original quantity, form and fineness to the place from which it was removed. The stated deadline for returning the silver was five years from its receipt or upon written notice from the Treasury that all or any part of it was needed for reasons connected with monetary requirements of the United States. Stimson assured Morgenthau that the metal would be installed only in government-owned plants.
The War Department eventually withdrew more than 400,000 bullion bars of approximately 1,000 FTO each from the West Point Bullion Depository in West Point, New York, a Treasury facility known as “The Fort Knox of Silver.” That amount is equivalent to the weight of about 7,500 midsize automobiles today or some 250 fully loaded World War II B-29 bombers.
The first bars were withdrawn on October 30, 1942, and were trucked about 70 miles south to a U.S. Metals Refining Company facility in Carteret, New Jersey. The next day, the plant began casting the bars into cylindrical billets weighing about 400 pounds each. By the time casting operations ceased in January 1944, just over 75,000 billets weighing nearly 31 million pounds had been cast. Remarkably, this weight exceeded the 29.4 million pounds withdrawn from the Treasury, This was due to very careful cleanup operations of the fabrication facilities. Machines, tools, furnaces, factory floors and storage areas that had accumulated years worth of metal shards were dismantled and scraped clean. Any silver found was separated and cast back into bullion bars. Even workers’ coveralls were vacuumed clean. Armed guards observed every processing step to ensure that all trimmings were recovered. Scrap recovery and cleanup operations were so successful that over the course of processing, more than 1.5 million pounds of silver were collected and returned to Treasury, much of it likely originating from earlier and unrelated silver processing. That more than offset a much smaller amount—11,000 pounds—of borrowed Treasury silver that was unaccounted for.
Once cast, the billets were trucked a few miles north to a Phelps Dodge Copper Products Company plant in Bayway, New Jersey. There the billets were heated and extruded into strips that were 3 inches wide by 5/8 inches thick and 40 to 50 feet long. If all the Manhattan Project silver was shaped today into one strip of that same width and thickness, it would reach from Washington, D. C., to outside Chicago. After being cooled, the strips were cold-rolled to various thicknesses depending on the particular magnet coils for which they were intended. Then they were formed into tight coils (not yet the magnet coils) that were about the size of large automobile tires.
More than 74,000 coils were produced. Most were shipped to Wisconsin for magnet fabrication, but some 268,000 pounds were sent directly to Oak Ridge to be formed on-site into nearly 9,000 busbar pieces. The busbars were massive conductors about a foot square that carried current to the magnet coils. During their manufacture, armed guards again stood by, this time with pieces of paper positioned to catch drill dust as workmen bored holes in pieces of silver in preparation for fastening them together.
Photograph courtesy of Milwaukee County Historical Society.
The coil strips were shipped from New Jersey to Wisconsin by rail, usually in shipments of six sealed cars, with each shipment containing about 300 coils. The coils were under 24-hour guard—no fewer than three armed guards rode along in a special caboose on each trip. At the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company in Milwaukee, coils were unwound and joined together with silver solder to form larger reels, which were fed into a special machine that wound them around the steel bobbins of the magnet casings. Between February 1943 and August 1944, 940 magnets were wound. On average, each contained about 14 tons of silver. Those coils were then shipped to Oak Ridge on flatcars. These didn’t require guards because the silver was inside welded-shut steel casings.
Illustration by Barbara Aulicino.
The pace of work at the Y-12 facility was swift. Ground for the first Alpha building was broken in February 1943, before the facility’s design was even complete and just as the first load of coils was being shipped to Tennessee. The first Alpha track started up just nine months later, on November 13, although its initial operation was short-lived. The windings shorted out because the coils were too close together and because an insulating oil was contaminated with organic material. Operations were halted, and 80 Alpha-I magnets had to be returned to Milwaukee for rebuilding. The second Alpha track entered service on January 22, 1944, and the rebuilt first track on March 3. By late January 1945, nine Alpha racetracks containing 864 calutrons and six Beta racetracks containing 216 calutrons were operating in eight sizable buildings within the Y-12 complex.
Success and the Postwar Era
The needed isotope accumulated gradually at Oak Ridge. By April 1945, the Y-12 facility had produced only 25 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium and, in conjunction with other enrichment methods, was producing more at about 200 grams per day. By mid-July the facility had produced slightly more than 50 kilograms. By this time Y-12 had consumed about 1.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, about 100 times the energy yielded by the bomb called Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima on August, 6, 1945. Essentially every atom of 235U used in Little Boy was processed in Lawrence’s calutrons. By the end of 1946, Y-12’s cumulative production amounted to just more than 1,000 kilograms of 235U, the equivalent of about 15 Little Boys.
Photograph courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
By late 1946, the gaseous-diffusion method of uranium separation was operating much more efficiently than the electromagnetic process, so uranium enrichment in all but one Y-12 building was shut down that December. The last of the Manhattan Project silver, however, wasn’t returned to West Point until June 1, 1970, just a few weeks before Groves died. Some of the Y-12 calutrons continued to be used to separate every element in the periodic table.
Photograph courtesy of Y-12 National Security Complex.
After the war, many calutrons were refitted with copper windings. But not the calutrons in what was called the Pilot Plant. They operated until 1974—with 67 tons of silver in their magnet windings until 1970—to separate isotopes other than uranium, some of them used in the graphite reactor in nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That facility created radioactive tracers used in medical tests, an example of wartime technology transformed into a humane use. Other calutrons developed for the Manhattan Project separated stable isotopes until 1998, when cheaper isotope sources forced the operation to close. Sadly, part of the reason that this country faces a shortage of medical isotopes today is because these facilities were shut down.
With the transfer of Manhattan District assets to civilian control under the Atomic Energy Commission on January 1, 1947, Groves saw his influence on nuclear policies wane rapidly, helped in part by the fact that he had offended many influential people over the years. He served as chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project for one year but resigned from the army in February 1948 to become vice president for research at Sperry Rand Corporation, a technology innovator with large contracts with the U.S. military. He held that position until his 1961 retirement. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Ernest Lawrence continued his advocacy of government-sponsored “big science” projects after the war, including the development of fusion weapons. Frustrated with the slow pace of the fusion program, he teamed with theoretical physicist Edward Teller to lobby for a second weapons laboratory to complement and compete with Los Alamos. In response, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was established in California in 1952. In July 1958 President Eisenhower asked Lawrence to travel to Geneva for negotiations with the Soviet Union to develop a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. The scientist’s long-standing chronic colitis flared up, however, and he was hospitalized. Lawrence died the following month. Element number 103, discovered in 1961 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was named Lawrencium in recognition of his many contributions to high energy physics research.
Looking Backward and Forward
Most of the original buildings in Los Alamos where the bomb was developed were torn down decades ago, but some have been preserved. Los Alamos National Laboratory is still the nation’s primary nuclear-weapons design center, employing more than 10,000 people employed in the stewardship of weapon stockpiles and the manufacture of plutonium cores. The three World War II–era plutonium production reactors at Hanford, Washington were shut down in the 1960s. Two have been sealed up in concrete shells but B-Reactor, the first plutonium production reactor, recently was declared a National Historic Landmark and is being converted into a museum. Environmental remediation at the Hanford site will continue for the foreseeable future.
Photograph courtesy of Y-12 National Security Complex.
The Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge still operates as a Department of Energy “National Security Complex” under contract with the Babcock & Wilcox Company. As described in the April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review Report, the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility was recently dedicated there as part of the facility’s mandate to retrieve and store nuclear materials. The ultrasecure warehouse replaces multiple aging buildings with one state-of-the-art storage facility. The report also advocated that a new uranium-processing facility should be built at Y-12 to come online in 2021.
As Richard Rhodes has written, the mammoth scale of the Clinton Engineer Works stands as testimony to the sheer recalcitrance of heavy-metal isotopes. It also testifies to Groves’s desire that this country develop such an unassailable advantage in the production of fission weapons that no country would ever consider a Pearl Harbor–type attack on the United States again. The numerical advantage was secured, though not everyone celebrated the result. Between 1945 and 2009 the United States built more than 66,000 warheads as various designs were developed, tested, deployed and eventually retired, with their fissile material reused in later generation designs. Disarmament treaties have reduced the number of weapons stockpiled in this country in recent decades, although the number of countries worldwide with nuclear weapons has increased.
As this article was written, the National Park Service and the Department of Energy were preparing to submit to Congress a recommendation for a Manhattan Project National Historic Park that will include sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford. It is my hope that the sites will remain accessible to help future generations explore and understand the project. Historians will forever debate whether it hastened the end of World War II or obviated a bloody invasion of Japan. Some are not convinced that hurrying the end of the war was worth the cost in civilian deaths and the resulting damage to America’s perceived moral standing. But without doubt, the Manhattan Project was the world’s first “big science” undertaking. It affected immediate and long-term events unlike any other science-based endeavor in history. The project and its silver program are exemplars of what sound science and engineering, when conducted by competent practitioners under superb leadership, can accomplish in a time of pressing need. One wonders whether a similar effort could be mounted today.
Bibliography
Gosling, F. G. 2001. The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb. Washington: Department of Energy.
Groves, L. R. 1962. Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper & Row.
Hewlett, R. G., and O. E. Anderson. 1962. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Vol. I. The New World, 1939/1946. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Jones, V. C. 1985. United States Army in World War II. Special Studies: Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army.
Logan, J. 1996. The critical mass. American Scientist 84(3), 263–277.
Nichols, K. D. 1987. The Road to Trinity. New York: William Morrow.
Norris, R. S. 2002. Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press.
Parkins, W. E. 2005. The uranium bomb, the calutron, and the space-charge problem. Physics Today 58(5): 45–51.
Rawlins, B. 1969. Borrowed Silver Worth $1 Billion One of Oak Ridge’s Epoch Secrets. Chattanooga Times, July 14, 1969.
Reed, B. C. 2009. Bullion to B-Fields: The Silver Program of the Manhattan Project. Michigan Academician 39(3): 205–212.
Rhodes, R. 1986. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Microfilm set A1218 (Manhattan District History), Reel 10, Book V (“Electromagnetic Project”), Volume 4 (“Silver Program”).
Yergey, A. L., and A. K. Yergey. 1997. Preparative Scale Mass Spectrometry: A Brief History of the Calutron. Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry 8(9): 943-953.
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<a href="https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-52022726317416314542021-01-09T17:08:00.006-05:002021-02-15T16:47:33.512-05:00One factory's story is the state's, too: Allis-Chalmers site's changes reflect arc of Wisconsin economyhttps://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/08/20/1817675.htm
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[August 20, 2006]
One factory's story is the state's, too: Allis-Chalmers site's changes reflect arc of Wisconsin economy
(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Aug. 20--West Allis -- As many as 17,000 workers once labored on the 166-acre campus of the Allis-Chalmers Corp. in this gritty Milwaukee suburb, making everything from tractors to parts for the first atomic bomb.
By 1986, most of them were gone, victims of the spectacular bankruptcy of the onetime industrial giant. Employment dropped to 340.
Today, about 5,500 people draw paychecks on the site, but their typical task has morphed from forming metal at a lathe to processing data at a computer. Only about 10% of them still manufacture things -- complicated, specialized things, such as the massive industrial kilns produced by a dozen well-paid employees of the A-C Equipment Services Corp.
So it is with Wisconsin as a whole. Pushed by the forces of globalization, the state's economy is evolving at an increasing pace, with service companies becoming more important as less-skilled manufacturing jobs move overseas. But as with all evolution, the best of the future builds on the successes of the past.
Manufacturing, now backed by increasing amounts of technology on the surviving factory floors, still provides the steel of Wisconsin's economic backbone, just as it did a quarter-century ago in the recession-racked year of 1981.
In fact, manufacturing output has grown faster than the rate of inflation:
According to calculations based on data from the state, in 1981, about 23% of Wisconsin's work force produced $18 billion worth of manufactured goods. In 2004, about 15% of the state's workers manufactured $43 billion worth of goods. Over that period, the number of manufacturing workers fell from about 550,000 to 521,000, meaning output per worker increased by more than 2 1/2 times, well above the inflation rate.
Agriculture changed similarly
As for the future, "I continue to see manufacturing jobs diminish," said Beverly Gehrke, a veteran economist for the state Department of Workforce Development based in Hayward.
Gehrke compares the change in manufacturing to what happened to agriculture in the 20th century. Then, the kind of machinery produced at the Allis-Chalmers plant increased food output but decreased the number of farmers needed to grow it, a trend continuing on state farms today.
"Manufacturing took the farmers out of the fields and put them in the factories," Gehrke said. "That same change is occurring now; you will see fewer and fewer people in factories."
The question is: What will happen to them?
"They certainly are not going back to the farms," Gehrke said.
Some are going to the government. Between 1981 and 2004, when Wisconsin's population grew about 20%, government employment grew about 30%, including 48% at the local level.
Another part of the answer can be seen at the old Allis-Chalmers complex, where the main office park is known as Summit Place. There, in a bit of symbolism worthy of a novel, an old A-C crane has been transformed into a skywalk to carry not steel but office workers between two buildings.
In what was once a factory, many of the names on the doors have taken on a decidedly post-industrial tinge: eGlobalfares LTD, Paylocity, Securitas, Symbiont. In June, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin moved 750 jobs to Summit Place from downtown Milwaukee.
Where metal was once bent, medical bills are processed, health workers are trained, money is managed, airplane tickets sold, ballet taught, professional associations run and dozens of other services performed. Warehouse operations also fill part of the campus. Like their manufacturing counterparts, service workers are backed by an increasing amount of technology, marrying computers with the Internet to make their time more productive.
"Twenty-five years ago, I didn't even have a computer on my desk," Gehrke said.
The development of Summit Place was a deliberate strategy by West Allis, said John F. Stibal, the city's director of development. After the jobs at Allis-Chalmers left, the municipality really had no choice, he said. Similar actions have taken place across the state, if under less-immediate stress.
From Superior to Kenosha, development officials have worked to bring in new service and retail industries. One result is growing complexes of office parks, subdivisions and big box stores, such as those that have sprouted east of I-39 in Portage County.
"Twenty years ago, there was nothing there," said Paul Adamski, chairman and chief executive officer of the Pineries Bank in Stevens Point.
The growth around Stevens Point has come even as the papermaking industry in central Wisconsin was submerged in a flood of globalization. As international markets came to dominate the industry, local mills were gobbled up by larger companies with deeper pockets from as far away as Finland. In the past 25 years, Wisconsin employment in that sector has fallen by about 18%. At the same time, employment at Stevens Point-based Sentry Insurance has grown about 35% in the state.
Of the top 10 private employers in Wisconsin in 2004, only one, the Kohler Co. in Sheboygan County, is principally a manufacturer. Most of the others are retailers such as Wal-Mart Corp. and Menard Inc., according to a list compiled by the state.
In shifting jobs away from manufacturing to services, the state is following the nation. But, because Wisconsin always has been a leader in manufacturing nationally, especially of capital goods, the trend has been slower. Some state leaders think it might become slower still. They see a limit to how well an economy can be built upon selling insurance to each other.
"We will always need people who make things and create wealth by making things," said Jim Haney, president of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state's largest business lobby. "Somebody has to make the gears and the blades and all that stuff."
In Haney's view, the contribution of manufacturing to the state's economy has been understated statistically in recent years. Not only did the government change the way it classifies workers in the mid-1990s, but businesses also changed the way they organized themselves.
'Hoopla around technology'
Increasingly, manufacturing companies outsource, hiring outside companies to do things such as calculate payroll, run lunchrooms and maintain grounds. Many of the firms providing such services fill new offices in developments such as Summit Place.
But the people who do those things are classified as service workers now, Haney noted, whereas when they were hired by the factory directly, they counted as manufacturing employees.
Another thing that Haney finds interesting is "all of the hoopla around technology and the jobs of the new economy."
"There is no question that is important, and we are starting to see some of the fruits of the (high-technology) research.
"But the actual number of jobs created is very small so far. We should pay attention to them, but it is frequently done in the vein of 'Manufacturing is dying, and this is the salvation.' "
But given how much computers and robots are populating factory floors, "I would argue that manufacturing is as high-tech as you can get today," Haney said.
The high-tech and biotech firms being developed around the University of Wisconsin-Madison "aren't enough to overwhelm the larger economy that was already in place and was growing more slowly," agreed William A. Testa, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which serves most of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin also should emphasize its beauty as a place to vacation and retire, Testa said.
"People are becoming wealthier and looking for beautiful places to live," he said. Wisconsin fits that bill, especially for some people in Illinois, where "everything has been plowed acre to acre."
As Wisconsin's farms have consolidated and factories modernized, tourism and retirees have become much more important parts of the economy in her part of the state, said Gehrke, the state economist in Hayward.
The result has been fewer small, family-run fishing resorts, more condominium development and an increase in year-round service industries, such as medical clinics and banks catering to an older, more affluent population.
A general aging of the population in coming years will serve to turbocharge the service sector statewide, Gehrke said.
Haney said, "There is no question but what the demographics of the state is driving some of this health care stuff."
Beyond broad strokes, however, it is difficult to predict where the Wisconsin economy will be in 25 years. A quarter-century ago, no one would have predicted the demise of Allis-Chalmers, let alone the rise of computers, the decline of the influence of organized labor or the promise of stem cells.
The keys to prosperity include diversification and flexible minds, said Stibal, the West Allis development director.
"We have to be prepared to reinvent ourselves every half-generation," he said.
Copyright (c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]<a href="https://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/08/20/1817675.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-38043418548986606872021-01-09T17:05:00.003-05:002021-01-25T14:18:46.761-05:00Sussex in on parts for WWII’s atomic bomb<a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/2017/03/27/retrospect-sussex-parts-wwiis-atomic-bomb/99683170/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
OPINION
Retrospect: Sussex in on parts for WWII’s atomic bomb
Fred H. Keller
Fred Keller takes a look at historical events in the Sussex area.
Unknowingly, Sussex had a little part during World War II in the manufacturing of the atomic bomb, as two local businesses supplied made-to-order parts and pieces of equipment for the effort.
Just immediately after the dropping of the bombs, the Waukesha Freeman ran a little feature about the Schley brothers, Gil and Milton, who ran a little shop in what is today Paul's Service Station on the southeast corner of Maple Avenue and Main Street in Sussex.
This July 1995 photo of Sussex's Paul's Service (or N&A Auto service) was taken almost 50 years after August 1945 when this building on Maple Avenue and Main Street in the Village of Sussex was used as an unknowing manufacturing location site to make needed parts for the then-vast U.S. government atomic bomb project.
Meanwhile, Elsie Mae Wileden (later married to Elmer Weyer of Lannon) was a graduate of the two-year Sussex High School in 1943. Then following her sophomore year at Sussex High School, she went on to complete her high school career at Waukesha High School. She was only a little older than 16 when she caught on as an office girl for the Schley brothers, a business about a block west of Elsie's lifetime home. She eventually married and had two sons, retired and moved to Sussex senior citizen housing and is in retirement at a Greenfield home on 92nd Street and Layton Avenue in Milwaukee County.
At this plant, Elsie Mae processed payroll, the office billing and company bookwork — normally a job well beyond her teen age at the time. Later on, she would do a couple decades of work at the Sussex Mills and Lawns and Garden as the company bookkeeper.
I personally worked with Elsie at Sussex Mills and over the years she told me of her youth years working for a small machinery parts maker at the 1917-built multi-use, formed concrete structure. It once sold farm machinery, Nash cars and even sold the Sussex Fire Department a firetruck during the multiple lives of the structure that is now 100 years old.
Among the businesses that evolved was the Schley Brothers machining of small parts business that took hold during WWII. According to Elsie, the company got a piece of business making small parts for more than a year to exacting specifications. The war parts were shipped to the Clinton Engineering Works company at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Then when the bomb was dropped, and a second one later that week, the Clinton Engineering Works was tied in with the secret atomic bomb efforts of WWII.
The specialized small parts were made of heat-treated metal to very exact specifications, to a very high number shipped.
As a side story, Elsie told me that in November 1944, the Gib Brothers hit upon the idea to make a quick sale product for the Greater Milwaukee Area Christmas trade, and in-and-out construction of a unique children’s coaster wagon, using some excess steel they had acquired, and using wood slats as side boards for the Christmas market. The little red Christmas wagon had a unique handle attachment, as they used what they had — it sold out quickly, and was never repeated. When Sussex started its community museum, historical society member Sonny Mehringer saw a "Sussex Wagon" at an estate sale, and eventually purchased it for $85, and today it is on display at the new Sussex Museum in the Community Building. It is believed to be one of only two that are left from the November 1944 production cycle (as some years ago someone in Maine called me about having one of them).
There was a second atomic bomb production parts business in Sussex, the Plein Manufacturing Company, headed up by John and the leader Adam. John would become a member of the Sussex Fire Company in 1932, serving until 1960 (28 years). The Plein brothers had their little fabricating business in the backyard livery stable at present day N62 W23431 Silver Spring Drive, Sussex.
During WWII, the West Allis-based Allis Chalmers got into building a secret plant off of Hawley Road, that Oak Ridge ordered them to make "super chargers" to filter out Uranium particles that were needed for the bomb. Allis Chalmers asked the Plein brothers to make a series of carts and handling equipment for the Hawley super charger plant, which they dutifully did, not knowing that they were a small part of the multi-million dollar search for and completion of the atomic energy bomb that introduced the Atomic Age, and dramatically ended WWII's war with Japan.
Today, the late John Plein in his alternate life with the Sussex Fire Company is considered one of the all-time heroes of the department in a July 24, 1951, incident.
But that is another story.
jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-51308832876825197472021-01-09T17:02:00.008-05:002021-01-25T14:20:20.441-05:00 The B-29 and the US Auto Industry in World War Two<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N-mBk3fmxJI/X_yuvTgMBSI/AAAAAAAAx-8/1KaguKYgJdIqtVxPEZdbzAx7_cNuEuQHgCNcBGAsYHQ/s258/b29.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="196" data-original-width="258" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N-mBk3fmxJI/X_yuvTgMBSI/AAAAAAAAx-8/1KaguKYgJdIqtVxPEZdbzAx7_cNuEuQHgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/b29.jpg"/></a></div>The B-29 and the US Auto Industry in World War Two
This page added 6-15-2016.
The B-29 project was the largest and most expensive project undertaken during World War Two. It was even more expensive than the Manhattan Project. The American Automobile Industry was instrumental in supplying airframe components and engines for the B-29. Below are the automobile companies and their suppliers known to have participated in the building of the most complex aircraft to date.
The US Auto Industry's involvement in the B-29 was immense yet has been unheralded and forgotten. The auto industry supplied everything from bearings for the remote control gun systems to the major fuselage and wing components, and engines.
Boeing's initial work on the concept of a long range bomber started with the February 5, 1940 receipt of specification "R-40B" from the U.S. Army Material Command at Wright Field in Dayton, OH. The specification was written for a long range four engine bomber with a range of 5,333 miles with the speed and bomb load of a B-17. Boeing had been expecting the proposal, and had been working on several conceptual bomber models starting in 1939. The Model 341, which Boeing felt met the requirements, was submitted in March 1940.
In late March the Army Air Corps realized that the requirements needed to be changed. A supplementary specification went to Boeing which included more bomb capacity, leak proof fuel tanks, and more defensive armament. Due to these requirements, the Model 341 evolved into the Model 345. The Model 345 added seventeen more feet of wing span than the Model 341 and was eight feet longer. Each Wright radial engines had 200 more horsepower at take-off than the engines designated for the Model 341. The Model 345 would have a maximum bomb load of 16,000 pounds, a crew of twelve, four remote controlled turrets, a rear turret, and a maximum speed of 382 MPH at 25,000 feet. This was then designated the XB-29.
As with all military designs, weight of the B-29 went up over time with the addition of new requirements by the military. The final B-29 design had grown to an aircraft with a design gross weight of 105,000 pounds, while the XB-29's design gross weight was 100,000 pounds, the Model 345 was 97,700 pounds, and the Model 341 76,000 pounds. The added requirements caused the weight to increase by 29,000 pounds over three years, while the airframe and engines remained constant since the Model 345.
When it came time for production of the B-29 in 1943, the US Auto Industry was deeply involved as suppliers of airframe components, engines, and many of the internal components of the aircraft. General Motor had seventeen of its divisions providing parts and structural components. They were: AC Sparkplug, Allison, Brown-Lipe-Chapin, Buick, Chevrolet, Delco Appliance, Delco Products, Delco Radio, Delco-Remy, Fisher Body, Frigidaire, Harrison Radiator, Hyatt Bearings, Moraine Products, New Departure, Packard Electric, and Rochester Products. Chrysler's DeSoto, Dodge, and Plymouth divisions contributed heavily to the B-29 project. Hudson was the third automaker to supply B-29 components. Auto suppliers contributing to the construction of the B-29 were Briggs Manufacturing, Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, and Libby-Owens Ford.
The US Auto Industry and the B-29 "Enola Gay": The first three Silverplate nuclear bombers were built at the Boeing Wichita, KS plant. The "Enola Gay" and the of remaining 43 Silverplate nuclear bombers were all built at the Martin Omaha, NE B-29 plant. All were modified for the nuclear mission at Martin Omaha.
As the Martin information from WWII shows, the US auto industry was the major supplier of airframe and structural components to Omaha.
The B-29 "Enola Gay" is currently on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum at the Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Author's photo.
Author's photo.
The bombardier's front Plexiglas nose section was built by Libby-Owens-Ford, a prime supplier of glass to the US auto industry. The front eighteen foot fuselage section was built by Chrysler's DeSoto Division on Warren Avenue in Detroit. Author's photo.
The Fisher Body Plant # 1 in Cleveland, OH built the rear turret and gun assembly. Goodyear built the rudder, the vertical stabilizer and the leading edge to the vertical stabilizer. It also built the horizontal stabilizer and elevators on the "Enola Gay". Goodyear had aviation plans in Akron, OH and Goodyear, AZ. The three rear fuselage sections behind the wings, to include the tail gunner's location, were built the Hudson Motor Car Company in Detroit. Author's photo.
Goodyear produced the two bomb bay fuselage sections. Chrysler furnished the engine cowlings and the leading edge sections for the wing center section. Fisher Body Cleveland #1 or Fisher Body Lansing built the engine nacelles and inside the nacelles the Fisher Body furnished the engine exhaust manifolds and the engine oil tanks. Hudson provided the ailerons, outer wing sections, outer wing leading edges and wing tips. Briggs supplied the flaps and bomb bay doors. Inside the wings were four Firestone fuel tanks. The engines are shown as Government Furnished Equipment. Dodge in Chicago produced Wright R-3350 engines. Author's photo.
The name "Enola Gay" is written on the Chrysler DeSoto Division built nose fuselage section. The eighteen foot long section parting line can be seen about two feet behind the square window. Chrysler workers installed 50,000 rivets, four miles of wiring and 8,000 different types of parts in the nose section. Behind the nose section are two Goodyear built bomb bay fuselage sections. On normal B-29s built there was provision for a Goodrich built auxiliary fuel tank in the rear bomb bay. For the nose gear and main landing gears the doors were produced by Goodrich. Author's photo.
Because modifications were made to the Silverplate B-29s, several of components supplied by the American auto industry were not included. The bomb bay doors were modified to accept the large atomic weapons. The bomb bay doors normally supplied to Omaha B-29s were not used or were modified. It is unknown. Also, the Silverplate aircraft used Curtiss reversible electric propellers, and not the normal Hamilton Standard propeller built by Frigidaire Division of GM .
Nose Section: The photos below are of the interior of the nose section from B-29A 44-62139 at the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton, OH. This A model nose section is representative of all nose sections built. Most likely this one was built at the Boeing Renton, WA plant. B-29s built in Marietta, GA by Bell and Boeing in Wichita, KS had Chrysler built nose fuselage sections. The photos below show some of the 50,000 rivets, 8,000 parts and four miles of wiring. All of the displays are behind Plexiglas.
Author's photo.
The left or port side of the bombardier's station. Author's photo.
The pilot's station. Author's photo.
The flight engineer's station. Author's photo.
Factory Photos:
This photo is an exploded view of an actual B-29, showing many of the main components. The Chrysler DeSoto nose section is separated from the Goodyear built bomb bay fuselage sections. The Hudson built rear fuselage sections with the Goodyear vertical and horizontal tail and control surfaces can be seen. The main wing center section was built by Martin Omaha but the outer wing section components built by Hudson are visible. The Fisher Body engine nacelles have Chrysler built engine cowlings attached. Frigidaire props are off the Dodge built engines.
There was more to just stamping out the aluminum sheet metal pieces and then riveting them together with 50,000 rivets to make the fuselage. DeSoto-Warren assembled all of the interior of the B-29 nose section, which included four of the eight miles of wiring in the B-29. The workers shown above are installing some of the 8,000 parts that went into the construction of the Superfortress fuselage. The B-29 was the first insulated and soundproofed bomber and the insulation can be seen in this photo The fuselage sections were shipped via rail to Omaha using oversized boxcars, which were foot wider and one and a half foot taller than the normal boxcar of the period.
Working on B-29 engine cowlings at the DeSoto Warren Plant in Detroit.
This is the Fisher Body Cleveland plant #2 making horizontal stabilizers. Fisher Body either made them along with Goodyear, or was a sub-contractor to Goodyear for these particular B-29 components.
B-29 engine nacelles on the assembly line at Lansing Fisher Body. Photo courtesy of UAW Local 602.
Hudson workers building B-29 rear fuselage sections.
B-29 rear fuselage end caps under construction at the Hudson plant.
B-29 Components built by the US Automobile Industry in World War Two
Manufacturer B-29 Components Location Comments
Briggs Manufacturing Aft bomb doors and forward bomb doors, nose wheel doors, and outer wings. 31,000 employees in ten Detroit plants, one in Youngstown, OH and one in Evansville, IN produced parts for the B-29.
Besides B-29 components the company also provided parts for the A-20, B-17 and many other war products.
Briggs components were supplied to the Martin Omaha, NE plant for final assembly into B-29s including the "Enola Gay" and "Bockscar".
Briggs was also a supplier to the other three B-29 final assembly plants.
Chrysler - DeSoto and Dodge (568) fuselage nose sections, (559) leading edges, (4,752) engine cowling sets, and (18,413) R-3350 radial aircraft engines. The airframe components were built by DeSoto on Warren Ave. in Detroit and the R-3350s were built Dodge in a new, dedicated plant in Chicago. DeSoto provided airfrafme components for the Martin Omaha, NE plant for final assembly into B-29s including, the "Enola Gay" and "Bockscar". DeSoto also supplied all of the engine cowlings for the B-29 assembly plants in Renton, WA and Marietta, GA.
Dodge built R-3350 engines went to all four B-29 assembly plants.
Before supplying B-29 parts to Martin it had previously provided (1,586) nose and fuselage sections for assembly into the B-26 Marauder.
Firestone Wing Fuel tanks The Coshocton, OH plant built disposable auxiliary fuel tanks for the B-17, B-24 and B-29, The outer wing fuel tanks consisted of seven cells and held 1,320 gallons of aviation fuel, while the inner tanks consisted of four cells and held 1,425 gallons of fuel.
Fisher Body Div of GM (13,772) B-29 Engine Nacelles - These were the most complex component of the B-29 and had 1,300 sub-assemblies in them.
Horizontal stabilizers, vertical stabilizers, rudders, elevators, outboard wing sections, flaps, exhaust collectors, engine cowlings, tail gun assemblies and rudder pedals, engine oil tanks along with many other miscellaneous B-29 parts.
Nacelles were produced at the Cleveland, OH Plant #1.
Flaps, vertical and horizontal stabilizers were produced at the Cleveland, OH Plant #2.
Elevators, nacelles and tail sections were made in the Lansing, MI plant.
Parts and Assemblies - Grand Rapids, MI, Pontiac, MI Ternstedt in Detroit, MI, Cleveland, OH Plant #1, Fleetwood, MI, Memphis, TN, Central Development, Detroit, MI, Experimental Unit, Detroit, MI, and the Detroit Aircraft Unit.
Fixtures, jigs and tooling - Flint #1, Detroit Die and Machine Unit and Detroit Stamping Unit.
Fisher Body Division of GM provided the following components to the Martin Omaha, NB B-29 assembly plant.
For each engine: Exhaust manifold or exhaust collectors, the engine nacelles, engine oil tanks.
Fisher Body also supplied the rear turret assembly, which on the "Enola Gay", "Bockscar" and the other Silverplate B-29 nuclear bombers was the only method of self defense. All of the other gun turrets and sighting equipment was removed to reduce weight.
Many of the B-29 components built by Fisher Body were supplied to Martin in Nebraska by other suppliers indicating that Fisher Body B-29 built components were being provided to the other three B-29 plants, or subcontracted to the first tier suppliers. These components would include the engine nacelles as Fisher Body built enough to supply 86% of the 3,970 B-29s built and Martin only used 2,124 or 15%. Also horizontal stabilizers, vertical stabilizers, rudders, elevators, outboard wing sections, flaps would have been supplied to Bell in Marietta, GA and Boeing in Wichita, KS and Renton, WA.
Goodyear Forward and rear bomb bay fuselage sections, Akron, OH
Hudson (802) rear fuselages, bulkheads, wing tips, rear turrets Detroit, MI
Frigidaire Div. of GM (54,737) four Blade Propellers for both the B-29 and P-47. Dayton, OH
Goodrich
Libby-Owens-Ford Bombardier's glass nose section Toledo, OH
New Departure Division of GM 1,417 roller bearings for B-29 Fire control system Bristol, CT
Packard Division of GM Packard supplied high altitude ignition cable for the B-29 engines. Warren, OH
In the table below is the production schedule that the auto companies had to meet for the supply of components for the Martin Omaha, NB built B-29s. Note that in several months there is no production or at least no accepted production. It could have been that there was a parts shortage that did not allow the aircraft to be finished and accepted by the US Army Air Force. I do think the work stoppages were intentional.
Aircraft in WWII were built in Block Numbers, which had frozen designs and did not allow for any changes to the aircraft while coming down the production line. This allowed mass production of aircraft without having to make the constant changes and improvements that were needed due to information that was coming back from testing and operational units. When a new block was started it contained updates and improvements. However, even then to facilitate production, not all of the upgrades would be included and afterwards the aircraft would go to one of nineteen modifications centers for the latest updates. The modification centers were an important part of the process needed to keep the aircraft production lines operating in a timely manner. In the case of Martin Omaha it had its own modification center.
Serial numbers reflect the year the aircraft were ordered as indicated by the first two numbers in the sequence. The first B-29 built at Martin Omaha was the 65202nd aircraft ordered by the US Army Air Force in 1942. The last one off the assembly line in August of 1944 was the 86273rd aircraft ordered in 1944.
Of the four plants making B-29s during WWII, Martin in Omaha, NE was chosen to build and then modify the operational B-29s for the nuclear bomber Silverplate program. Martin was considered by the US Army Air Force to have the best quality of the four plants. The first fifteen came directly off the assembly line and went to Wendover Army Air Field, UT, where they were converted to the Silverplate configuration and then used in training.
The fifteen operational Silverplates that went to Tinian were also built at Martin and modified at the adjacent modification center. Modifications included but were not limited to replacing the Hamilton Standard Propellers with Curtiss Wright Electric reversible props, eliminating all of the gun turrets, gun sights, and gun control computers with the exception of the tail turret, and modifying the bomb bays to accept the large atomic devices.
The Martin Plant received the Army-Navy "E" for Excellent Award on December 13,1943 and then later 3 stars for on-time delivery. The awards were given for the previous B-26 production at the plant.
Martin Omaha, Nebraska World War Two B-29 Production Schedule
Month Number built Block Number First Serial Number Last Serial Number Comments
1944
May 3 B-29-MO-1 42-65202 42-65204
June 7 B-29-MO-5 42-65205 42-65211
July 0
August 8 B-29-MO-10 42-65212 42-65219
September 16 B-29-MO-15 42-65220 42-65235
October 28 B-29-MO-20 42-65236 42-65263
November 0
December 50 B-29-MO-25 42-65264 42-65313
1944 Total 112
1945
January 69 B-29-MO-30 42-65315 42-65383
February 18 B-29-MO-35 42-65384 42-65401
February 67 B-29-MO-35 44-27259 44-27325 The B-29 "Bockscar" was serial number 44-27297 and came off the Martin Omaha assembly line in February 1944.
March 0
April 0
May 33 B-29-MO-40 44-27326 4-27358
May 35 B-29-MO-40 44-86442 44-86276
May 39 B-29-MO-45 44-86277 44-86315 The B-29 "Enola Gay" was serial number 44-86292 and came off the Martin Omaha assembly line in May 1944.
June 55 B-29-MO-50 44-86316 44-86370
July 55 B-29-MO-55 44-86371 44-86425
August 48 B-29-MO- 60 44-86426 44-86473
1945 Total 419
Grand Total 531
Below are two other B-29s built by Martin built with US Auto Industry fuselage and wing components.
This Martin built B-29 42-65281, seen here at the Travis AFB Heritage Center, came off the assembly line at Omaha, NE in December 1944.. Author's Photo.
This Martin built B-29 44-27343, seen here at the Tinker AFB Heritage Display, came off the assembly line at Omaha, NE in May 1945. Author's Photo.
Martin built B-29 44-86408 is also displayed at Hill AFB in Ogden, UT. Five of the 531 Martin B-29s therefore survive.
<a href="http://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/b-29-usautoindustry.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-67173087722142901892021-01-09T16:54:00.005-05:002021-01-09T16:57:35.996-05:00 West Allis Wartime Silver [By Dave Herrewig #2382]<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hFKobMjr_S8/X_omYsBTKhI/AAAAAAAAx9U/aSWviu2Fl9UqEmwBAUYJV7Mow2FVEKh3QCNcBGAsYHQ/s431/aa.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="311" data-original-width="431" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hFKobMjr_S8/X_omYsBTKhI/AAAAAAAAx9U/aSWviu2Fl9UqEmwBAUYJV7Mow2FVEKh3QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/aa.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UvKUmpvqac0/X_omkbEP-7I/AAAAAAAAx9Y/XI0TUmmvsI8TcyApkgdi5OhH5RTvDjayACNcBGAsYHQ/s441/aaaa.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="248" data-original-width="441" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UvKUmpvqac0/X_omkbEP-7I/AAAAAAAAx9Y/XI0TUmmvsI8TcyApkgdi5OhH5RTvDjayACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/aaaa.jpg"/></a></div>
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West Allis Wartime Silver
[By Dave Herrewig #2382]
There has never been a United States Mint in West Allis, Wisconsin, but in 1943 and 1944 there could have been one. The amount of silver that passed through the city in those two years surpassed the combined usage of the Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco mints (for the same years) by a large margin.
I had never heard this story of silver until my wife's book club was reading The Girls of Atomic City, the story of women who worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She mentioned that the narrative involved an enormous loan of silver from the Treasury Department for the project. The Manhattan Project led to the building of the first atomic bomb, the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Westward Travel Yields Little-Publicized Numismatic Attraction
I started reading and learned that the final manufacturing process before Oak Ridge was at Allis Chalmers in West Allis. What intrigued me most was the huge amount of silver that went into and out of the area. My first thought was that this was a huge melt of silver coins, but it appears that only ingots were used, from the West Point Bullion Depository in New York. Cameron Reed, a physics professor at Alma College in Michigan, has done extensive research on this project and I have relied substantially on his material.
Once the decision was made to pursue an atomic bomb, one question was how to produce enough enriched uranium. The process selected required massive amounts of copper for the windings of the required electromagnets. Copper was in high demand during the war, so silver was selected as a substitute. Without getting into the physics of the process, one needs to know that the silver could make coils which were used to produce a high-intensity magnetic field needed to separate out the critical uranium 235 isotopes.
The War Department would not inform the Treasury Department of the exact use for the silver, but still obtained over 29 million pounds from the West Point Depository. The final total consisted of over 400,000 bullion bars, each about 1,000 fine troy ounces. I'm not certain if the ingots were 0.999 fine but eventually the silver ended up at that level of purity. The metal went first to a refining plant in Carteret, New Jersey where the amount was actually increased with extremely careful cleanup processes which recovered metal lost there in previous years. From there it went to a nearby Phelps-Dodge plant where the final product was coils of silver strips about the size of large car tires.
Westward Travel Yields Little-Publicized Numismatic Attraction
This wartime photo at Allis Chalmers shows the magnet spools being wound with strips of silver. (Photo courtesy of Milwaukee County Historical Society.)
Most all of this was sent to Allis Chalmers in West Allis, though a small amount went directly to Oak Ridge. The shipments to Allis Chalmers were in sealed cars, all under 24-hour supervision by armed guards. In West Allis, the coils were unwound, combined into larger coils, and wrapped around the steel spools of the magnet casings. This operation took place between February, 1943 and August, 1944. All the work was at the Hawley Works, a roughly two-and-a-half block long building that faced Hawley Road at W. Pierce Street.
Extra security was not needed for the silver once it left Allis Chalmers for Oak Ridge as the coils were inside welded-shut steel casings. When finished, Allis Chalmers produced 940 coils, each about 14 tons. Professor Reed lists Allis Chalmers as producing 27,418,294 pounds of silver magnet coils and 268,745 pounds of silver busbars (conductors); a total of 27,687,039 pounds as a comparison figure with the US Mints. Using figures from the 2016 Red Book, I calculated during the same years the three US Mints used 2,642,429 pounds of pure silver for nickels; 4,022,002 pounds for dimes; 4,063,059 pounds for quarters and 3,763,535 pounds for half dollars; a total of 14,491,025 pounds. Allis Chalmers processed almost twice as much silver as the US Mints!
I haven't read the Milwaukee or West Allis papers for this period but would guess that there wasn't any mention of the nature of this project at Allis Chalmers. In fact, most of the 5,000 employees in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, didn't know what they were working on, either. An interesting note is that President Franklin Roosevelt made a surprise visit to Allis Chalmers in September, 1942, five months before this project began. The company was working on other military projects, too. In fact, Allis Chalmers made three other components for the Manhattan Project besides the silver coils.
Westward Travel Yields Little-Publicized Numismatic Attraction
The K-25 (Manhattan Project) plant in Oak Ridge,
TN -circa 1944
After the war ended, the understanding between the Treasury and War Departments was that the precious metal would be returned. It was, eventually, but the last of the silver wasn't transferred back to West Point until 1970. Though the process for making weapons grade uranium evolved away from use of electromagnetic coils, the coils were used to separate other atomic elements.
Today, the Hawley Works are long gone, as is Allis Chalmers. Their location on Hawley Road, just south of the Hank Aaron State Trail, is occupied by an office complex, Renaissance Place, which appears to have about the same footprint as the earlier building. Tenants in the complex include Johnson Controls, US Bank, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare, and CBS 58. There's no sign that so much silver passed through there, but that's what makes history so much fun.
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jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-87548549781987366232021-01-09T16:06:00.006-05:002021-02-16T10:34:03.626-05:00day care at gend<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-625WKcxJdxI/X_ocilHbVQI/AAAAAAAAx8w/TvyhhDtTuYEXiCayA4z3onwG46SfPZ0pACNcBGAsYHQ/s964/adm%2Bwatkins.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="964" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-625WKcxJdxI/X_ocilHbVQI/AAAAAAAAx8w/TvyhhDtTuYEXiCayA4z3onwG46SfPZ0pACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/adm%2Bwatkins.JPG"/></a></div><a href="https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/EA-0642-FEA-1990.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>Alarm SystemsHeating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning SystemEmergency Exit LightingTraffic FlowOPERATIONSEMERGENCY PLANIMPACTS OF THE PROPOSED ACTIONIMPACTS ASSOCIATED WITH OPERATION OF THE SCHOOLIMPACTS ASSOCIATED WITH ROUTINE RELEASES FROM PLANT OPERATIONSRadiological ReleasesChemical ReleasesIMPACTS ON SCHOOL OPERATIONS RESULTING FROM ACCIDENTS INVOLVING PLANT OPERATIONSSevere AccidentDESCRIPTION AND IMPACTS OF THE NO ACTION ALTERNATIVELISTING OF AGENCIES AND PERSONS CONSULTEDREFERENCESDISTRIBUTIONU.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY FINDING OF NO SIGNIFICANT IMPACTLIST OF FIGURESFigure 1. Location of the Pinellas Plant in Pinellas CountyFigure 2. Seismic Risk Map of the United StatesFigure 3. Location and Population of the Five Largest Cities in Pinellas CountyFigure 4. Generalized Geoligic Cross Section in the Vicinity of the Pinellas PlantFigure 5. Locaion of the Child Development Center/Partnership School on the Pinellas SiteFigure 6. Pinellas Plant Child Development Center/Partnership School Site Location PlanFigure 7. Pinellas Plant Child Development Center/Partnership School Floor Plan and Evacuation RoutesFigure 8. Risk Matrix for the Child Development Center/Partnership SchoolLIST OF TABLESTable 1. Percentage Frequencies of Wind Direction and Speed Over a 10-Year PeriodTable 2. Percentage Occurrence of Windspeeds
Table 3. Tornado Occurrences by Month, Pinellas County,1950 Through 1980Table 4. Occurrence by Month of Hurricanes Within 100 Nautical Miles (1866-1982)Table 5. Occurrence and Intervals of Hurricanes (1866-1982)Table 6. Accident Summary for the Child Development Center/Partnership SchoolTable 7. Qualitative Accident Frequency IndexTable 8. Qualitative Accident Hazard Severity IndexTable 9. Air Emissions Exposures From Pinellas Plant OperationsNEED FOR AND PURPOSE OF THE PROPOSED ACTIONThe U.S. Department of Energy Albuquerque Operations Office (DOE/AL), through the DOE Pinellas Area Office(PAO) and GE Neutron Devices (GEND), is proposing a joint venture to operate a Partnership School and ChildDevelopment Center at the Pinellas Plant. This venture would be based on a partnership with the local county schoolsystem. The county school system would provide the teachers, supplies, and classroom furnishings for the operation ofthe partnership school for kindergarten, first, and second grade students during regular school hours. DOE wouldprovide the facility and its normal operating and maintenance costs.The benefits of providing child care and elementary education were previously recognized by DOE. The ExemplaryContractor Child Care Initiative [1] outlines the Secretary of Energy's commitment to the development of programsthat will contribute to the quality of the Department's workforce. The Secretary stated that such programs are necessaryto accomplish the missions of DOE and will contribute substantially to employee welfare and morale, recruitment andretention of highly qualified individuals, increased job satisfaction, and attainment of such statutorily established goalsas equal employment opportunity, retaining valued employees, reducing absenteeism and tardiness, and increasingproductivity and efficiency.As the result of the DOE Exemplary Contractor Child Care Initiative, the Child Development Center/PartnershipSchool proposal has been developed. The building has been constructed, teachers and staff selected, and the buildingmade ready for immediate occupancy. The proposed action addressed by this environmental assessment is theoperation and utilization of the school as a Partnership School (kindergarten through second grade), a preschool ChildDevelopment Center, and a before- and after-hours child care facility.In compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) [2], the potential impacts from theoperation of the proposed action are assessed. Additionally, since the proposed school is located next to an industrialfacility, impacts on the school population from routine plant operations, as well as abnormal events, are analyzed, andchanges in plant operation that may be prudent are considered.DESCRIPTION OF THE ALTERNATIVESNo Action
The No Action Alternative is not to operate the proposed Partnership School/Child Development Center facility. Childcare and elementary education for the children of Pinellas Plant employees would be provided at other public orprivate institutions, in which DOE would have no involvement.Alternative Sites for the SchoolPrior to construction of the building on the plant site, alternative locations were considered, and no reasonablealternative nearby sites for the Partnership School/Child Development Center were identified that would be available inthe near term.Properties off the plant site that are in reasonable proximity to the plant site were not available. Proximity is a maincriterion and basic precept of the Exemplary Contractor Child Care Initiative. Based on available information, therewere no reasonably proximate off-site properties of suitable size available for purchase at which to locate a newfacility. Alternate locations on the plant site, likewise, were not considered reasonable in light of past waste handling,treatment, or disposal.The use (by lease or purchase) of existing facilities off the plant site also is not reasonable due to lack of a suitablebuilding in the vicinity of the plant site.Accordingly, only the Proposed Action and the No Action alternatives are examined in this document.DESCRIPTION OF THE EXISTING ENVIRONMENTDESCRIPTION OF THE PINELLAS PLANT SITEThe Pinellas Plant is owned by the Department of Energy. It is operated by GEND as a prime contractor for DOE.Construction of the Pinellas Plant commenced in 1956, with production operations beginning in 1957. The plant isengaged in the production of equipment for nuclear weapons application. The facility is part of the nuclear weaponsproduction complex administered by the DOE Albuquerque Operations Office.The Pinellas Plant is located in Township 30 South, Range 15 East, on an approximately 99-acre site in PinellasCounty, Florida (see Figure 1). The county is situated along the west central coastline of Florida on a peninsula thatseparates Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The City of Tampa is located approximately 30 miles east of the plant,while St. Petersburg is about 6 miles to the south. The plant site is centrally located within the county, bordered on theeast by Belcher Road (County Road 27), on the South by Bryan Dairy Road (County Road 135), and on the west byCSX Railroad Tracks.The Pinellas Plant employs approximately 1700 people. An additional 27 people work in the DOE Pinellas Area Officelocated within the plant. The plant is approximately 700,000 square feet in size. The plant was built in 1956 tomanufacture neutron generators, a principal component in nuclear weapons. Production of these devices necessitatedthe development of several uniquely specialized areas of competence and supporting facilities. The existence of thesecapabilities has led to the assignment of other weapon application products. In addition to the manufacturing facility, aproduction development capability is maintained at this plant. The products of the plant include: neutron generatorsand detectors, vacuum switch tubes, electromagnetic devices, thermal batteries, radioisotopically-poweredthermoelectric generators, frequency control devices, quartz digital accelerometers, lightning arrestor connectors,ceramics, and foam support pads.
The hazards presented by operations on this site are typical of those associated with other commercial electronicdevelopment and manufacturing facilities. The principal hazards present on this site include: 1) radiation andradioactive materials in some areas, 2) industrial and occupational hazards throughout the site and in various facilities,and 3) packaging and transportation of radioactive and hazardous materials. Solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes (bothradioactive and nonradioactive) generated at the site are stringently regulated. This is accomplished by a variety oftreatment, control, and monitoring systems.Figure 1. Location of the Pinellas Plant in Pinellas CountyCULTURAL SETTINGPinellas County and the Tampa Bay area in general have experienced dramatic increases in population over the last 30years. When the plant was originally built in 1956, the central area of Pinellas County was a lightly populated farmingarea. Today, light industry, office complexes, and warehousing operations are in the area immediately surrounding thesite. The closest residential areas are approximately 0.25 miles from the plant site. Based on the 1980 census, PinellasCounty is the most densely populated county in the State of Florida; it has 3,064 residents per square mile. Populationestimates for the major cities surrounding the site are: St. Petersburg - 243,000; Clearwater - 98,000; Largo - 63,000;and Pinellas Park - 41,000 [3].CLIMATOLOGY/METEOROLOGYClimateThe Tampa Bay area has a subtropical marine climate which is characterized by long, humid summers and short, mildwinters. Rainfall is abundant, especially during the summer months.PrecipitationThe outstanding feature of the local climate is the summer thundershower season. On the average, thundershowersoccur 90 days a year, mostly in the late afternoons from June through September. On average, 30 inches of the normal44 inches of annual rainfall occur during these months. The two driest months of the year are April and November,accumulating an average of 2.10 and 1.79 inches of rain. The driest year on record was 1956, with 28.29 inches of rain.The highest 24-hour rainfall occurred in July 1960 with 12.11 inches. Snowfall in the area is negligible. Traces haveoccurred in January through March. A maximum snowfall of 0.2 inch occurred January 19, 1977 [4]. Night groundfogs occur frequently during the cool weather season.TemperatureThe waters of the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent bays cause moderate temperatures in the Pinellas County areathroughout the year. Average temperatures range from 60.4_F in January to 82.2_F in August. Normal dailyfluctuations in the winter months are from the low 50s to the low 70s, while during the summer months they rangefrom the low 70s to low 90s. The highest temperature recorded on several occasions has been 98_F.
Freezes may occur once or twice a season. The winter of 1976-1977 was the coldest on record, with the temperaturesdropping below freezing on eight occasions. The coldest recorded temperature, 18_F occurred in December 1962 [5].Windspeed and DirectionPrevailing winds are from the north and northeast during the winter months and predominantly from east and south forthe remainder of the year. A westerly seabreeze commonly occurs during the afternoons in the summer months. Theseconditions result in a fairly uniform distribution of wind directions. A summary of ten years of hourly observations atthe Tampa Weather Station is presented in Table 1. The overall average windspeed is 8.8 mph, while the highestrecorded windspeed was 84 mph in September 1935. Table 2 shows the percentage occurrence of various windspeedranges.Table 1. Percentage Frequencies of Wind Direction and Speed Over a 10-Year PeriodDirectionFrequency (%)Average Speed (mph)N88.7NNE89.2NE88.4ENE98.9E108.2ESE68.5SE58.4SSE59.2S610.0SSW410.3SW48.9WSW59.6W59.9WNW510.6NW410.0NNW49.5Calm30Table 2. Percentage Occurrence of WindspeedsRange (mph)Frequency %0-415.65-1474.115-249.9
25 and above0.4TornadoesTornadoes are not uncommon in Florida. By far, the most common and usually the least destructive tornadoes inFlorida are the warm season tornadoes. These occur most frequently between May and September, when most large-scale weather disturbances are well to the north of Florida. Warm season tornadoes may form over land or water andmove in almost any direction. They owe their existence to convergence caused by the local land-seabreeze effect or bylocal air mass thunderstorms. Most warm season tornadoes reported in Florida are more analogous to the fair weatherwaterspouts of the tropics than to the tornadoes of the Midwest, usually being mild and comparable in size to the #dustdevils" of the Southwestern United States.The cool season tornadoes are sometimes very destructive; they account for a disproportionately large share of thetornado damage in Florida. They are most common from October to April. Cool season tornadoes form mostfrequently in Florida along the Gulf Coast. They are usually associated with large-scale weather disturbances andsometimes occur in groups along fast moving squall lines. The most common direction of movement is from southwestto northeast, with the tornado's vortex occasionally moving across the land at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour.They may raise and lower several times, and sometimes make their first contact with the ground many miles inland.Tornadoes can form at any hour during the cool season, but they seem to form most frequently between 6 a.m. and 10a.m. [4]The tornadoes associated with tropical storms are most frequent in September and October, when the incidence oftropical storms is greatest. Tornadoes usually occur around the perimeter of the leading edge of the storm, and theysometimes occur in outbreaks of several tornadoes.Florida's extensive coastline offers excellent opportunity for waterspouts to come ashore and be classified as tornadoes.However, waterspouts usually dissipate soon after reaching the shoreline, hence affecting only a small area.Historical information regarding tornado incidence in Pinellas County for the 31-year period from 1950 through 1980was obtained from the National Severe Storm Forecast Center. During this period, 50 events occurred. Of these, 37were classed as tornadoes and 13 as waterspouts moving ashore. They caused 7 deaths and 214 injuries and occurredduring every month of the year (see Table 3).Table 3. Tornado Occurrences by Month, Pinellas County,1950 Through 1980MonthNo.MonthNo.MonthNo.January3May9September4February1June8October2March2July4November2April4August8December3Classed by intensity, 16 tornados were termed very weak, 22 weak, 6 strong, 2 severe, and 1 devastating. Three werenot ranked. The one devastating tornado occurred on April 4, 1966. It was first observed near Clearwater and movedeast northeast across the entire state through Hillsborough, Polk, Osceola, and Brevard counties.Based on the historical data for Pinellas county, the probability of a tornado striking any particular location in thecounty during a year can be determined. The occurrence rate (50 tornadoes in 31 years) is 1.61 tornadoes per year. Ifthis rate is multiplied by the average path area as determined from the data (47.7 acres) and divided by the area of thecounty (179,310 acres), the resulting probability is 4.3 x 10-4 per year, or one chance in 2335. With regard to the
Pinellas Plant, this probability is most likely an overestimation of the potential. This is because, as mentioned above,waterspouts moving ashore are classed as tornadoes and were included in the calculations. Waterspouts usuallydissipate soon after reaching land and have little potential for reaching the plant site.HurricanesHurricanes are a very real potential in Florida. Jutting out into the ocean between the subtropical Atlantic and the Gulfof Mexico, Florida is the most exposed of all states to these storms. Hurricanes are defined as tropical cyclones withsustained winds equal to or exceeding 75 mph.A review was made of all reported hurricanes which have passed within 100 nautical miles of Tampa during the past117 years (1866 through 1982) [4]. Table 4 lists their occurrence by month and shows that, for the Tampa Bay area,the greatest potential exists during the months of September and October. Of the 25 hurricanes which occurred duringthis period, 14 passed within 50 nautical miles of Tampa. The average occurrence intervals, based on these historicaldata, are shown in Table 5. Hurricanes Elena and Katie of 1985 were not within 100 nautical miles of Tampa.Table 4. Occurrence by Month of Hurricanes Within 100 Nautical Miles (1866-1982)MonthNo.June2August4September10October8November1Table 5. Occurrence and Intervals of Hurricanes (1866-1982)Distance from Tampa (Nautical miles)NumberAverage TimeBetween OccurrencesYears)100254.750148.4Although hurricane winds can cause considerable damage, by far the greatest hazard to life and property is due tohurricane tidal flooding. The highest tide ever recorded in this area occurred at the northern end of Tampa Bay duringa hurricane in 1848. The tide during this storm reached a height of 14.1 feet above mean sea level. The designhurricane postulated by the U.S. Corps of Engineers shows tide heights ranging from about 10 feet near the southernpart of Tampa Bay to 14 plus feet at the northern end of the bay. The Pinellas Plant is located about 6.3 miles from theGulf of Mexico and about 4.4 miles from Tampa Bay and has a minimum floor height of 18.5 feet above mean sealevel. No damage, therefore, is expected from hurricane storm surge or tidal flooding [4].SEISMOLOGYAlthough Florida is not usually considered to be subject to earthquakes, minor shocks have occurred. Historically,eight events have occurred in Florida. The most recent shock of record occurred approximately 90 miles northeast of
the plant site in 1973. Other smaller events probably have occurred and escaped detection because of the distance tothe nearest seismic station and because of the tendency of the residents to identify these with rockets or airplanes.There is, however, no reasonable expectancy for damaging earthquakes at the Pinellas Plant. The seismic risk map ofthe United States (Figure 2) shows central and southern Florida to be in Zone 0. This is defined as a #No Damage"zone [4].DEMOGRAPHYPinellas County contains 24 municipalities in which 73% of the population resides [4]. Largo and Pinellas Park are thetwo closest to the plant site. The locations and populations of the five largest municipalities are shown in Figure 3.With regard to race, 91.5% are white, 7.6% are black, 0.1% are Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut, 0.4% are Asian or PacificIslander, and 0.3% are other races. Of the county's residents, 1.4% are of Spanish origin.The Tampa Bay area and especially Pinellas County has experienced a dramatic increase in population during the past20 years. During the 1960s, the county population increased at an average of 12,300 per year. During the 1970s, theincrease was 20,600 per year. Pinellas County is the most densely populated county in the the state, with 2850residents per square mile. The 1980 census showed the county population to be 728,409; the April 1981 populationestimate was 755,937, and the July 1, 1988 estimate was 821,000 [3].A large number of the new residents are retirees. These individuals are a significant factor in the economic base of thecounty. The Social Security Administration estimates that 228,800 Pinellas County social security recipients areinjecting $113.6 million into the local economy each month [6]. The 1980 census showed that social security paymentsaccount for 12.7% of the household income in the county.In addition to the permanent residents, Pinellas County is also a tourist center. The number of tourists visiting PinellasCounty during 1989 was 3.7 million. The estimated expenditure of tourists for the same period was $1.8 billionaccording to estimates from the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce [7].ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORICAL LANDMARKSPinellas County contains a number of sites of historical and archaeological significance. However, none are in closeproximity to the Pinellas Plant [4].Figure 2. Seismic Risk Map of the United StatesFigure 3. Location and Population of the Largest Cities in Pinellas CountyECOLOGYThe Tampa Bay area contains a diversified population of plant and animal life [4]. The Pinellas Plant is located in apine flatwoods habitat area. The site itself, which was once used as a dairy farm, would fall into the Cultivated Landscategory.THREATENED AND ENDANGERED SPECIESjkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-21765142605122468592021-01-09T16:04:00.006-05:002021-02-16T10:34:20.333-05:00pinellas day car e at gend Archive
On-the-job schools keep children near
By AMELIA DAVIS
Published Oct. 17, 2005
Until recently, General Electric Co. employee Richard Reynolds never saw his 4-year-old daughter, Eileen, in the mornings. "She used to never get up before 9," Reynolds said. "By then, I was gone to work."
That changed when school started last week.
Now the two get up about 6:30 a.m. They get dressed, have breakfast and then drive to preschool and work _ which are at the same location, the Department of Energy/GE plant on Bryan Dairy Road in Largo.
"I love the added time we have together," Reynolds said. "She loves the school. When I picked her up after the first day, she didn't want to leave."
This year, for the first time in Pinellas County, employees of two large corporations can be near their young children while they work.
On-site partnership schools, projects of the school district and the corporations, opened last week at Honeywell on U.S. 19 in Largo and at the Department of Energy plant.
Partnership schools are housed on the property of businesses or nearby, said Alison Bellack, who is in charge of the program for the school district. The pupils, in kindergarten through second grade, are children of employees of those businesses.
The school system provides teachers, equipment and furniture. Businesses provide a building, utilities and maintenance. The schools are satellite campuses of nearby elementary schools.
Advantages for company employees include not having to worry about transportation or day care before or after school. Parents drop off their children when they arrive at work. Child care is available at both sites from 6 a.m. until school begins and from dismissal until 6 p.m.
At noon, some parents walk from their work site to the school to have lunch with their children.
"It's such a convenience," said Bobbie Shasteen, a marketing representative for Honeywell. "For a parent-teacher conference, you just have to walk to the next building."
She said her daughter Jasmine, a kindergartener, likes to tell friends that "My mommy works at Honeywell, and I go to the Honeywell school."
Advantages for the school district include savings on school construction costs. And that isn't all.
"We believe these parents will be more involved with their children's educations," Mrs. Bellack said. "This will result in children having better attitudes toward school."
As for the companies, spokesmen say the schools are a bonus that potential employees consider when job hunting.
It also encourages employees to stay with the company, said GE worker Reynolds.
"They count up their children and the number of years until they get through second grade and say the company's got them at least until the kids get out of school," he said.
In addition to the Honeywell and the Department of Energy plant's partnership schools, the school district is considering establishing others in downtown Clearwater, at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg and at Paradyne Corp. in Largo, Mrs. Bellack said.
Preliminary results from employee surveys at several downtown Clearwater businesses indicate interest in kindergarten and first grade classes, she said.
A partnership school there is a possibility for the next school year.
"A teacher's dream'
Back in the southwest corner of the 1-million square feet of Honeywell property in mid-Pinellas, 29 kindergarteners and 10 first-graders are learning reading, writing, arithmetic and more with two teachers and a classroom aide.
The portable classrooms were assembled in record time by Honeywell and school district employees. A boardwalk connects the classrooms, which have different- colored, brightly painted doors. On one side of the complex, there is a multipurpose room where children eat lunch and participate in group activities.
Honeywell's initial investment in the buildings was $75,000, spokeswoman Mary Babin said. "We might have gone over that by now."
Late last week, grounds keepers were laying sod and filling sandboxes. New playground equipment was going up.
Thursday morning, while sprinklers watered new grass on a portion of the play area, kindergarteners in teacher Sheila Jordan's class were cavorting nearby.
"A boy made me fall down and get my dress dirty," complained 5-year-old Stephanie Konzen.
The teacher brushed her off.
"It's nice to be outside," Mrs. Jordan said.
Inside, teacher Marilyn Caldwell's first-graders were studying quotation marks.
Such a small class, she said, "is a teacher's dream. I'm so happy to be here."
Room to grow
The Department of Energy has invested more than $1-million in a permanent school building for children of its employees.
Although security at the plant is tight, the building can be seen from Belcher Road near Bryan Dairy. It's the new stucco building with the bright, multicolored trim around the windows and doors.
Twenty-two children are enrolled in a combination first- and second-grade class, and 18 are in kindergarten. Adjoining buildings offer preschool care through an employee-run day-care center.
Reynolds, who also is chairman of the school's board of directors, said the school eventually might operate year-round.
"We're trying to meld education and industry," he said. "Well, industry goes on 12 months a year."
Friday at lunch, parents had wandered over from work to eat sandwiches, vegetable sticks and macaroni salad with their youngsters.
"I like the idea of having my daughter close to me," said GE employee Sheila Jones, whose daughter Sheena attends kindergarten at the school.
"It's a family thing for me," said Greg Seay, father of 5-year-old Tameka. "I like the atmosphere. The personal touch is best for my daughter and myself. "
Christie Anderson, project manager for GE, said the companywanted to give its Pinellas employees "the first facility of its kind to offer every service a parent could need."
Reynolds said the company already has gone a long way toward fulfilling its intent.
"This last month, everything has come together. It has been well worth the wait," he said.
Up next:Nice save<a href="https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/09/03/on-the-job-schools-keep-children-near/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-47433711299168254802021-01-07T22:34:00.007-05:002021-01-25T14:20:40.998-05:00Atomic Exposure: USAAF navigator photographed first nuclear missions<a href="https://www.dvidshub.net/news/216842/atomic-exposure-usaaf-navigator-photographed-first-nuclear-missions" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>
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Atomic Exposure: USAAF navigator photographed first nuclear missions
Atomic Exposure
Photo By Master Sgt. Brian Ferguson | Russell Gackenbach was the navigator aboard the B-29, Necessary Evil, one of three... read more
CLEARWATER, FL, UNITED STATES
12.07.2016
Story by Tech. Sgt. Brandon Shapiro
Airman Magazine
Subscribe 35
In a small one-bedroom apartment in Clearwater, Florida, 93-year-old Russell Gackenbach sat on his floral patterned sofa thumbing through a photo album containing original prints of some of the most iconic people and events in United States military history.
“This is me and Tibbets (Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay),” Gackenbach said, as he pointed to two U.S. Army Air Force officers standing next to one another. “This was me and Necessary Evil, the plane I flew on as we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (Japan).”
As if it were yesterday, Gackenbach joined story to photo and name to face. Though 70 years had passed, the vivid details of his tale and the sincere expression in his voice showed that each of those people and moments were near to his heart.
Gackenbach was a second lieutenant, aircraft navigator and photographer who flew into the heart of Japan on Aug. 6, 1945, where “Little Boy”, a 9,000-pound uranium-235 atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Unbeknownst to him at the time, the mission signified the first time a nuclear device had been used in warfare.
Before “The Bomb”
Upon graduating from Allentown High School, Pennsylvania in 1941, Gackenbach prophetically took a job at the Bethlehem Steel Company as an inspector of bombs and shell casings for the military. A short while later, 20-year-old Gackenbach decided to follow his childhood dream of becoming a pilot and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
“I was originally classified for training as a pilot; however, during school I was unable to conduct my solo flight in the allotted time and was eventually ‘washed out’ of the program,” said Gackenbach. “Then, I was sent to navigation school where I earned my wings and my commission.”
After earning his navigator certification and completing the radar operators coarse in Boca Rotan, Florida, Gackenbach was shipped off to Wendover, Utah. There, just seven months after receiving his commission, young Gackenbach embarked on an unimaginable journey, one that would change the course of history.
“In September of ‘44, we were approached by an unfamiliar colonel who stressed that he was ‘forming an elite group that was to be made up from the best in the Air Corps,’” said Gackenbach. “The missions were to be dangerous and if anyone was not able to deal with the secrecy of the group, they may leave.”
Honored by the recognition and intrigued by the opportunity, Gackenbach accepted without hesitation.
Shortly thereafter, Gackenbach and his crew came face to face with Tibbets for the first time; it was then, they finally got a glimpse of what the mission would entail.
“Tibbets came over to us and said ‘there is a new bomb under construction and, if successful, it will shorten the war,’” recalled Gackenbach. “He was not able to tell us exactly what it was or any more details about it. He informed us that we were going to be under tight security, our movements would be limited, and we need to learn to keep our mouths shut.
“Before he left he pointed to a sign posted up on the outside of the gate, which read ‘what you see here, when you leave here, let it stay here’ –and he meant that.”
Preparing for the unknown
The newly formed crews spent day in and day out transitioning from the B-17 Flying Fortress to 15 mission specific B-29 Superfortresses modified to accommodate the new atomic bombs.
From September 1944 to April 1945 they trained tirelessly out of Wendover Field; until, in May, they packed up their operation and transitioned to the island of Tinian in the Marianas.
The island was secured by the 4th Marine Division Aug. 1, 1944, after a bloody campaign to wrest control from 9,000 Japanese soldiers.
Tinian, along with the neighboring islands of Saipan and Guam, was now home to the 20th U.S. Army Air Force and, after 15,000 Seabees built six 7,900-foot runways to accommodate the B-29.
“The transition to the Marianas put us about seven and a half hours away from Japan; although we were in a new location, we trained the exact same way had been doing in the states,” said Gackenbach. “Our only focus was to follow orders and polish our skillset for what we were told was to be ‘a perfect mission.’”
The group trained for nearly a year, dropping what they called “pumpkins;” inert test bombs built by a special ordinance group, the 216th AAF Base Unit. The inert bombs were dropped by B-29s during training to furnish information on ballistics, electrical fusing and detonators, release mechanisms, and the effect on the flying characteristics of the aircraft.
Preparation missions continued through Aug. 5, 1945, the day prior to the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
New weapon, new mission, new world
On Aug. 5th, the crews scheduled for the bombing mission were called in. Upon arrival, they were searched, told to empty their pockets and proceed to the briefing room. At the briefing, they were given only the information needed for the flight—route, targets and individual job assignments.
“We did not know what type of bomb we had; did not know what type of blast to expect; did not know the effect of it,” said Gackenbach. “The only thing we were told was, 'don't fly through the cloud.’”
The following morning, the assigned crews huddled for a last minute special mission brief; they finalized details and a grabbed a quick breakfast. Then, around 3 a.m., three B-29s, the Enola Gay, the Great Artiste, and the Necessary Evil, took off for Japan’s southern coast.
“As we approached Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay and The Great Artiste went forward, as we stayed behind and did a looping 360 degree turn,” recounted Gackenbach. “When we came out of the turn, the radios went dead; and when the radio went dead, we were alerted, ‘bomb bay doors open, bombs away.’”
Immediately, the Enola Gay and The Great Artiste made diving turns to the right, to get as far away from the bomb as they could. Gackenbach and the Necessary Evil, lagged behind the first two aircraft and the bomb exploded directly in front of them. As a huge mushroom-shaped cloud boiled skyward, Gackenbach raised a camera to his eye and triggered the shutter.
“The delay between our aircraft was planned; we were to document the event,” said Gackenbach. “The photographs seen around the world were ones I had taken approximately one minute after detonation, at a height of 30,000 feet, roughly 16 miles from the city.”
From the first training flights to their arrival over the target, the crews knew that this was no ordinary bombing mission, but nothing prepared them for what they witnessed 47 seconds after the call of “bombs away”.
“We were awestruck; we didn't know what to say, or do, or anything. We made three turns around the cloud and headed home to Tinian,” said Gackenbach. “I did not hear the word atomic until the next day.”
The magnitude of the event was not evident to the crews until days later, when they were shown photographs of Hiroshima--that is when they truly understood the devastating effect of the weapon they had deployed.
“We never really talked about what we did—I stayed mute for a very long time. Even during our reunions, we only talked about each other and the time we spent together,” said Gackenbach.
Military planners had already scheduled Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu, for Nov. 1, 1945. It would be followed by the invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu in 1946.
Given the unprecedented American losses during the battle for Okinawa that spring -- one third of the invasion force was killed, wounded or missing -- U.S. government casualty estimates for an invasion of the Japanese home islands were 1 million American dead and wounded.
Instead, the atomic bomb missions, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, led to Japan’s unconditional surrender on Aug. 14, 1945 and the end of World War II.
“Looking back at the event 70 years later, I still believe the right decision was made and I think that President Truman knew that as well. Can you imagine if people found out we had a device that would save millions of lives and did not use it? He would have been in a peck of trouble,” Gackenbach said.
To this day, Gackenbach, the lone-surviving member from the first atomic bombing, travels from school to school, city to city, shaking hands and giving his firsthand account of one of the most defining moments in U.S. military history.
When asked if he would do things differently, he responds with a stoic: “I do not regret the part I played in it; it was the right decision.”
LEAVE A COMMENTjkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-7701461936962514172021-01-07T22:24:00.006-05:002021-02-15T16:47:11.611-05:00Inside America’s Shocking WWII Propaganda MachineU.S. forgers distorted Hitler’s image on stamps like this one, which mimicked a real German stamp of Hitler. These fakes were placed on mail that was air-dropped into Germany as a form of covert propaganda.
Courtesy of Kenneth W. Rendell, Museum of World War II, Boston
Inside America’s Shocking WWII Propaganda Machine
More than half a century ago, the U.S. used provocative posters and fake news to influence its soldiers, its citizens, and even its enemies.
3 Minute Read
By Becky Little
PUBLISHED December 19, 2016
The United States was about six months into World War II when it founded the Office of War Information (OWI). Its mission: to disseminate political propaganda.
The office spread its messages through print, radio, and film—but perhaps its most striking legacy is its posters. With bright colors and sensational language, they encouraged Americans to ration their food, buy war bonds, and basically perform everyday tasks in support of the war effort. In one, a woman carrying her groceries is compared to soldiers carrying guns. The poster implies that by walking instead of driving, she is doing her patriotic duty, since “trucks and tires must last till victory.” (Read “WWII Ads Pushed Products No One Could Buy.”)
World War II Battleship Wreckage Discovered
Posters about dutiful sacrifice may inspire nostalgia today, yet the U.S. also created posters that can seem a bit shocking to modern eyes. Venereal disease posters told male soldiers that every attractive woman was a potential “booby trap” (yes, they went there). Others warned, in quite dire terms, against something called “careless talk.”
Loose Lips Sink Ships
Both the Allies and the Axis powers feared that leaked information could sabotage their troops. With that in mind, the OWI in the U.S. and Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in Germany produced posters urging people to keep sensitive information to themselves, lest enemies overhear.
According to Stephen G. Hyslop, co-author of the National Geographic book The Secret History of World War II, the OWI struggled to find the best way to convey this message. As an example, he points to a poster that depicts a mysterious figure in a German helmet and warns “He’s Watching You.”
Picture of a wanted poster
This U.S. poster emphasizes the lethal consequences of “careless talk.”
Courtesy of Kenneth W. Rendell, Museum of World War II, Boston
“The point of the poster is it’s a German soldier” who could overhear what you say, Hyslop explains, but its message was a little too subtle. “It was actually used in war factories and it gave workers the impression that they were being watched.”
Consequently, the U.S. began to favor posters that didn’t mince words. In one of these, a woman’s image appears alongside the words “WANTED! FOR MURDER. Her careless talk costs lives.”
Even though it got right to the point, the message was still a bit strange. Most civilians didn’t have access to sensitive military information, yet the images telling them to zip their lips were pretty aggressive.
“If you compare the [U.S.] propaganda in the totalitarian countries like fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, [the latter] might tend to be more sensational and more threatening,” Hyslop says. “But I find a number of the ones that were produced in the U.S. and Britain also go pretty far in that direction and do create a feeling of, ‘Are the authorities on my side or are they after me?’”
The OWI’s propaganda was made for people at home and abroad, and it was always clear that these messages were coming from the U.S. government. However, the U.S. did have another propaganda arm. Unlike the OWI, it produced propaganda specifically for the enemy, and made it look like this propaganda was coming from inside the enemy’s country.
Attacking Enemy Morale
The U.S. wasn’t the first to use propaganda that hid or misrepresented its source. In 1939, Germany’s Propaganda Ministry joined with the country’s Foreign Ministry to establish the Büro Concordia. This office transmitted radio messages to France, Britain, and other countries that appeared to originate from inside those nations.
Picture of a propaganda poster that says "someone talked"
An Allied sailor is drowning at sea. Why? Because someone talked!
Courtesy of Kenneth W. Rendell, Museum of World War II, Boston
Along with Britain, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) responded with its own “black propaganda,” as the practice was known. One mission, called Operation Cornflakes, involved dropping mailbags into Germany containing fake newspapers that looked as if they were made by Nazi resisters rather than OSS operatives. Some of the mail bore stamps with a picture of a deathly, skeletal-looking Hitler with the words Futsches Reich (“Ruined Empire”).
Like the Büro Concordia, the Allies also transmitted radio messages that appeared to come from inside Germany. Compared to dropping mailbags, this was actually an easier way to get information into the country, Hyslop says.
The thoughtful reader will notice that three-quarters of a century later, technological advances have made it even easier to sneak information into a country without going there yourself. As an example, Hyslop points to Russia’s use of the Internet to spread propaganda during the U.S. election.
“The Internet is perfect for it, because you just don’t know where things come from,” he says.
Could this mean that when future scholars write history books about our current era, they’ll be illustrated with political Internet memes, just as today’s history books are with propaganda posters? It’s not unthinkable. For who of us can tell what memes may come?jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-53884461238900599822021-01-07T22:18:00.004-05:002021-01-08T18:21:29.616-05:00Einstein Feared a Nazi Atom Bomb—But Immigrants Made Sure the U.S. Got There First<a href="https://time.com/5641891/einstein-szilard-letter/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>Einstein Feared a Nazi Atom Bomb—But Immigrants Made Sure the U.S. Got There First
Portrait of physicist Albert Einstein, sitting at a table holding a pipe, circa 1933. Portrait of physicist Albert Einstein, sitting at a table holding a pipe, circa 1933.
Lambert/Getty Images
By Trevor Lipscombe
August 2, 2019 11:00 AM EDT
Chaos reigns at the border as the United States confronts a massive influx of immigrants. Some, in fear for their lives, seek asylum from brutal regimes. Others seek the ever-elusive American dream. But first, they are held, sometimes in appalling conditions, until processed by immigration authorities.
This is not the U.S.-Mexican border in 2019, but Ellis Island in the 1930s. As the Nazis seize power and stamp down their jackboots on Jewish communities and left-leaning intellectuals throughout Europe, many flee to the United States. One of the new arrivals is Albert Einstein, who arrived in 1933 and several years later became a naturalized citizen, taking the oath of allegiance in Trenton, N.J.
Einstein’s entry to the United States was smoothed by his having already received a Nobel Prize in physics, even if his work was dismissed as mere “Jewish physics” by another Nobel Laureate, Philipp Lenard, who served as Chief of Aryan Physics for the Third Reich. Einstein, whose special theory of relativity had been published in 1905, had achieved international fame, even if — as he quipped — no one really understood why. He was not the only refugee scientist to land on American shores, but his influence dwarfed the others.
As war approached, Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, did something out of character and out of necessity. On Aug. 2, 1939, he signed a letter addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warning that the Nazis might be developing nuclear weapons. Einstein urged the United States to stockpile uranium ore and begin work on its own atomic weapons.
Einstein did not write the letter — that was the work of Hungarian émigré Leó Szilárd, with whom Einstein shared a patent for a novel refrigerator. Szilárd composed it with help from two other Hungarian physicists, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner who (with Hans Bethe) would be jokingly referred to as the Four Hungarians of the Apocalypse. With the letter freshly typed, Teller drove Szilárd out to Peconic, Long Island, where Einstein was staying, to get his signature.
No one else signed it. No one else had to. Thus the Manhattan Project was born.
Aug. 2, 1939: The first page of a letter from the physicist Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt raising the possibility that Germany could build an atomic bomb.
Aug. 2, 1939: The first page of a letter from the physicist Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt raising the possibility that Germany could build an atomic bomb.
MPI—Getty Images
Six years later, on two fateful days in August 1945, the bombs known as Little Man and Fat Boy were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan – on soldiers, sailors, women and children alike. These detonations accelerated the end of the Second World War, but presaged the Cold War that dominated the latter half of the 20th century.
Einstein regretted the letter. In a 1947 Newsweek article headlined “The Man Who Started It All,” he was quoted as saying, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger.”
In fact, the Nazis could not muster the breakthroughs necessary to achieve the nuclear weapons Einstein and his fellow physicists feared. So many scientists had fled Nazi-occupied territory that the Third Reich was short of the brain power they needed to develop the bomb. Yes, they had Lenard and Werner Heisenberg, but the ranks of first-rate nuclear scientists in Germany were deeply depleted due to Hitler’s policies.
And the Nazis’ loss was the United States gain.
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Emigres brought their expertise to bear on the Manhattan Project. Enrico Fermi fled Italy because of the anti-Jewish laws that pertained to his wife. Emilio Segrè ran afoul of those laws, too. Rudolf Peierls, who settled in Britain, was a German-born Jewish physicist and Felix Bloch, who like Peierls also briefly worked on the bomb, was likewise a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. Together with Szilard and Wigner, these rank among the superstars of 20th century physics.
Did the United States understand what they were getting when they allowed the physicists in? A stream of future Nobel Prize winners, a group of people committed to work to defend the freedom of their new country against the tyranny of their homelands? A group of people whose research not only enabled the development of the bomb, but later allowed the stars and stripes to be planted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969? Did the Nazis comprehend what they had lost, by developing a culture that saw so many of their internationally recognized scientists leave Europe? Probably not.
But we have learned. The Brain Drain caused by the Nazis established the United States as a scientific superpower. The Nobel Prize in Physics might be awarded in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, but it is now as American as apple pie. Many of those who get a Nobel nod live here in the United States, whether born here or attracted here by the vibrant scientific research community.
The challenge, though, is to keep this research coming. To starve a nation of its scientists, or its scientists of funding, is a losing strategy. In the last quarter of 2018, a quarter of all applications for H1-B visas, those that enable businesses to bring highly skilled technical workers to the United States, were declined. That’s up from only 5% in the same period of 2014. And if Silicon Valley and others can’t bring skilled workers in to innovate and remain competitive, those same companies could outsource their operations overseas. Perhaps it is time to look closely at visa numbers for those with significant technical expertise and to increase them substantially.
Now that would be a letter to a president that Einstein could sign without regret.jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-76466201490963458902021-01-07T22:12:00.006-05:002021-01-27T11:54:28.992-05:00Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki<a href="https://www.historynet.com/michie-hattori-eyewitness-to-the-nagasaki-atomic-bomb-blast.htm" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-the-japanese-illusion-1438793428" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a>About WSJ
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Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki
We prisoners know the blasts were necessary to end the war. No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender in August 1945.
By Lester Tenney
Updated Aug. 7, 2015 6:46 pm ET
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What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a “hell ship” to Japan, and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.
For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace. Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.
Like its erstwhile ally Nazi Germany, Japan was fighting an ideological war. A superior race was destined to guide those less graced. Death for the empire earned a blessed afterlife in the emperor-god’s eternal favor. For a loyal subject, surrender was a betrayal of everything that sustained the empire’s system of patriotic values. The only option in the face of certain battlefield defeat was to fight to the death.
Japan tried to keep fighting long after any chance of victory was gone. On the mainland, women, children and the elderly were armed with sharpened bamboo sticks. Beginning in May 1945, schools for disabled children were ordered to organize military units and women ordered to serve in volunteer combat units. Young men were recruited by the hundreds for kamikaze missions aboard wooden gliders or small boats.
Michie Hattori: Eyewitness to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Blast
Ichiro Miyato, of the 27th Radar Squad (Southern Kyushu), returned to his radar screen after helping carry material for the new construction, which, when completed, would provide a more powerful and well-camouflaged radar installation intended to detect, at a great distance, the anticipated invasion by American forces.
Miyato, his tour scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., noticed the wall clock showing 10:45. He initialed the logbook under the date August 9, 1945. No sooner seated, he spotted a blip moving southward. He watched the radar make two more sweeps; still only the one blip appeared. Scanning frequencies, he found interference indicating the blip was using its own radar.
‘Looks like a lone B-San running radar…I’d guess it’s mapping,’ he advised his command headquarters. ‘Altitude…probably 10,000 meters…out of triple A and fighter range.’ After a couple more sweeps he plotted the vector and reported, ‘Their course will take them over Nagasaki…if you want to alert Civil Defense.’ Nagasaki lay 25 kilometers south of the radar station.
Miyato poured himself a cup of green tea. He knew Japanese fighter planes would not scramble. The Boeing B-29 was too high, and they couldn’t afford to waste the fuel in a futile attempt to bring down the bomber.
Back on the line to headquarters 10 minutes later, he had just gotten the words out: ‘They should be over Nagasaki now…,’ when his screen went blank. A distant flash filled the room with light, and the walls of the radar shack shuddered.
Michie Hattori Bernstein was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. She never forgot that day.
I may not have been the brightest student in high school, but I was probably the most obedient. When the city sounded the air raid warning, I ran as fast as I could to the cave the government had dug into the side of a hill for us students. I always made it to the shelter ahead of the rest of my class. I say always because Nagasaki had been bombed five times before that day. Out at our school we heard the explosions or saw the sparklers coming down, but they never came near us. Even the sounds were muffled by the hills around our location.
We thought the warning on August 9 would be like the others. That’s why a lot of the girls just hung around the school. At that point, the government had not announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima three days before. The teachers made us all leave the classrooms, telling us to run to the shelter. I did, but most of the others just stood around talking in the schoolyard. It was not that unusual to see B-San [‘Mr. B’] flying over. That’s what most of us called a B-29. A single B-San had never caused trouble — just checking the weather or taking pictures of the coast, we assumed.
When the bomb exploded, it caught me standing in the entrance to the shelter, motioning for the pokey girls to come in. First came the light — the brightest light I have ever seen. It was an overcast day, and in an instant every object lost all color and blanched a brilliant white. My eyes couldn’t cope, and for a little while I went blind.
A searing hot flash accompanied the light that blasted me. For a second I dimly saw it burn the girls standing in front of the cave. They appeared as bowling pins, falling in all directions, screaming and slapping at their burning school uniforms. I saw nothing for a while after that.
Immediately, a powerful wind struck me. It propelled me farther into the cave; then in an instant it threw me out the front entrance. I guess the shockwave hit the back of the cavern and bounced. It took me with it and others who had sought refuge in the shelter. We came tumbling out onto the ground.
What a terrible feeling! I could see nothing. My hands and face singed, intense pain gripped my body. I tried to walk a little and stumbled over a fallen tree. I lay there, not knowing for sure where I was or whether something else might happen to me.
When my senses, including my sight, began returning, I heard crying from the girls in front of the shelter. All, except one, were now standing and blowing on their skin. Looking at the one lying down, I saw her leg twisted at a crazy angle. To this day, we don’t know how it became broken. The face and hands of the other girls quickly turned bright red. I guess my being partially inside the cave provided some protection because my stinging began to disappear before long.
We told Haruko, the girl with the broken leg, to lie still; we would go for help. Fires started all around us. Flames leaped from paper and wood scraps, some from collapsed structures. Thick smoke and dust filled the air. The fires gave the only real illumination. Even the noontime sunlight, filtering through the clouds, darkened. The word I kept hearing the girls say, jigoku, means hell. That’s the closest I ever want to come to jigoku.
‘Let’s go back to the school. It’s only a couple hundred meters,’ one of the classmates suggested. We traveled slowly because each step caused pain. Our thoughts were that a bomb must have gone off near the shelter and burned a short distance around us. We didn’t even dream what devastation covered our entire city.
The route to the school seemed strangely flat and empty. Someone asked, ‘Weren’t there houses here when we came to the shelter?’ The whole world appeared so surreal we just accepted that structures could disappear off the face of the earth. We were living a terrible nightmare.
My classmate Fumiko scampered about 50 meters ahead of us. When I looked up to see why she was calling, I saw her pointing to a large form on the ground.
‘Look over there,’ she shouted. ‘It has escaped from the zoo. It’s an alligator.’ It lay in our path to the school, so we approached with caution. Fumiko found a rock.
She drew back the rock above her head as she approached the creature. Then, Fumiko froze in her tracks, screaming hysterically. I ran to her side. The face looking up at us from the crawling creature was human. The shrieking in my ear kept me from hearing what the face was trying to say. I could just see it pleading for something — probably water. No clothes or hair were visible, just large, gray scalelike burns covering its head and body. The skin around its eyes had burned away, leaving the eyeballs, huge and terrifying. Whether male or female I never found out.
The head fell forward — face in the dirt. It didn’t move after that. Fumiko crumbled to the ground and I dropped beside her.
We were both 15. The wartime schedule of year-round attendance would allow us to graduate in another month. We were lucky. At the end of spring, the Student Mobilization Order closed many of the other girls schools and moved the students to Yawata. It’s a steel-mill town near Kokura where the girls worked all summer. The boys schools also closed. Those boys who had not enlisted in the military ended up working in the Nagasaki shipyard.
When we felt like standing up, we plodded on toward the schoolhouse. Fumiko and I encountered two or three groups of people. They appeared numbed, standing around victims who were on the ground. We saw nothing we could do to help, and we moved on.
Because of the dust and debris, we couldn’t see the school building until we were almost upon it. It appeared to have remained sound, except the windows were blown out. We soon saw the other students who had stayed in the schoolyard. Fortunately for them, most were on the opposite side of the building from the blast.
Two girls wore makeshift bandages on their arms. Flying glass from the windows had caused their lacerations. Many of them displayed the bright red faces and hands, which I have come to know as characteristic of second-degree burns. The reinforced concrete-block building offered protection in case of additional explosions, we thought. So, we remained with the group for about half an hour.
It seems a little petty to me now, but I wanted to go into the building to retrieve my books and belongings. A student in our group said, ‘I think one of the teachers is dead.’ It’s funny how my books seemed so important, but my parents had purchased them from their meager income. I was determined to enter.
The blast knocked out our electricity, which added to my dread as I made my way along the hall. Only the dimmest light filtered through the thick dust and smoke. Though a little disoriented, I found room 1-Kumi, my homeroom. Glass littered the floor and lay on the desks, but my books were intact. I tucked them under my arm and retrieved my hat, pulling it tightly to my ears.
Once again in the hallway, I heard a person’s voice. The door to 3-Kumi, the room next to mine, stood ajar. The voice from inside called, ‘mizu, mizu‘ — water, water. The door seemed stuck with his body lodged against it, so I pushed with all my might to get in. He screamed in agony when the door moved his body. I recognized Sakamoto Sensei — Teacher Sakamoto. He had wrapped his shirt around his bloody leg. Blood also oozed from the side of his neck. Lifting the crimson-soaked shirt, he motioned to his thigh by nodding his head.
The only sounds he made were gurgling grunts. I saw the wide, gaping slice in his leg. His thighbone showed white in the bloody pool. He looked up at me and mouthed the word mizu. I ran to my homeroom because I knew where cups and a full teapot sat. Returning, I held the cup for him to drink.
He emptied it and motioned with his head toward a pile of overturned desks. I missed the word he whispered. Holding my ear closer I barely heard him say, ‘Tani.’
‘Tani Sensei?’ He nodded. I walked behind the pile of desks and saw on the floor a woman’s body with a slab of broken window glass on her chest. I wrapped one of my books around the edge of the glass and attempted to move it. I probably screamed when I saw her head; I don’t remember. The head had been virtually severed, but her eyes remained open. The sight of the inside of her windpipe haunts me to this day.
I filled Mr. Sakamoto’s teacup with more tea and left it for him. I could do nothing more for him or for Miss Tani.
Almost out the back door, I was nearly crushed by my classmates rushing into the building. ‘Look at my arm,’ one said, showing it to me. I saw large dark wet spots. ‘The rain is black…large drops and they hurt when they hit you.’
Before I returned to the school from the shelter, four of the students who suffered the most painful burns had departed for the river. They planned to bathe their wounds in the cooling water. The explosion apparently knocked over the city’s water towers, bringing the pressure to zero at our school. The Urakami River runs through the middle of the town and drains into Nagasaki Harbor. Our school was located a couple hundred meters from the river.
In such a state of shock I don’t know if I made sense, but I attempted to tell the group about the fate of the teachers. I continued trying to get my story out when the four girls returned from the Urakami. All were crying. Two girls could only be described as hysterical. The others attempted to hug us and then quickly pulled away in pain from their burns.
They told us how they reached the river where hundreds of severely burned people were trying to cool their injuries in the water. The girls described many as looking like dead trees with their bark peeling off — skin hanging from their faces and hands. Along the shoreline floated bodies, some stacked two or three deep. A few still moved, lacking the strength to pull themselves out onto the bank.
The parents of several of the girls came to the school and escorted their daughters away. Mine did not. I fretted considerably about that fact. Had they been killed or injured? Trying to brace myself for whatever tragedy I might find at home I set out walking. Two classmates departed with a crutch made from a tree branch to help Haruko with her injured leg.I dutifully strapped my schoolbooks on my back and headed off from the others. On two occasions I found myself lost. The streets were covered with debris and most landmark structures had been demolished by the blast. A ridge of land, some 30 meters high, formed a wall between the river delta of our school and the district containing my home. Guiding on a saddleback in the ridge, I found the path that led to my neighborhood.
Coming off the ridge, however, a completely different world greeted me. No damage met my eyes, grass appeared green, a truck moved along a street. I stopped and asked myself if the past two hours had just been a terrible nightmare or were they real.
As I walked through my neighborhood I saw a number of people in the streets. Most knew something terrible had happened — they didn’t know what. I didn’t either. After relating to them a few of the scenes I had witnessed, I hurried on.Turning onto my street I saw my mother and dad coming out of the house. On their way to look for me, they had reached home only a few minutes before me. Both my parents worked at a small neighborhood factory assembling airplane parts. Those in the factory saw the flash and felt their building shake, but they put it down to an earthquake. Eventually the factory manager realized something more serious had occurred and released all of the employees.
That evening our civil defense block captain roused everyone in the area and formed rescue squads. We walked to the damaged sections. Initially, seeing the extent of the devastation stunned those in my group, but we all pitched in. That first evening chaos reigned, but over the next week we helped set up a makeshift morgue and treatment center.
I thought, only a week ago I would have been horrified at a paper cut on my finger. Now I found myself helping carry dead people whose skin was tearing off in my hands. I saw bodies where the blast had tattooed the pattern of their kimonos onto their skin.
I was assigned the task of keeping flies off of the injured. From nowhere, it seemed, a huge contingency of flies arrived. They swarmed around the wounded, attempting to lay their maggot eggs in the open wounds. Flies crawled under my makeshift bandages. At nightfall my parents would send me home to rest while they worked on.
People were telling us the war had ended — an event for which we had waited years, and yet it seemed insignificant in light of the efforts we were engaged in. By the end of August, victims were still dying of radiation sickness. We didn’t know at the time what was killing them. Civilian groups and returning soldiers cleared most of the debris from the streets.
About that time we saw our first Americans. The citizens of Nagasaki didn’t welcome them as I am told occurred in other cities. The universal horror experienced by those living in the atom-bombed areas could not be shaken off by even the promise of peace. We knew war is appalling and has few rules, but what the enemy did to our innocent civilians on a mass scale we felt to be outside the purview of a civilized nation’s warfare.
Was it the unseen hand of some providential power that directed the bomb’s ground zero squarely over the largest Christian church in Asia and its surrounding Christian neighborhood? Did that same hand spare the great Shinto shrine Suwa-jinja in the center of town? Are we to be pariahs the rest of our lives, disfigured and frightening others because of our radiation ailments? These were among the questions I heard my parents discussing with their friends.
Over the next few years such dark thoughts eroded away as America’s help rebuilt schools and encouraged businesses. I completed my education, majoring in English. When around Americans, I listened carefully to their pronunciation, trying to imitate each word. It worked out well for me. General [Douglas] MacArthur’s headquarters hired me, and I moved to Tokyo.
I became quite fluent in English, working closely with American officers, translating documents and explaining Japanese customs and mores. My early life in Nagasaki, however, I kept to myself. For many years after the war no one understood radiation sickness and many feared those exposed might somehow transmit it to others around them. In addition, I couldn’t bring myself to dredge up those awful memories people were sure to ask about. After all, Japan was becoming a different country.
Many months passed before I revealed the secrets even to my future husband, Raymond Bernstein. Serving as a civilian attorney employed by the War Crimes Commission, he frequently called on me to help with his cases. More than 500 war criminals stood trial, and lawyers called up close to 1,000 witnesses.
When we started dating, life became quite heady for this young girl. He escorted me to diplomatic functions, and we met with high-ranking judges and lawyers from many countries. More than once, newsreel cameras caught me standing by his side as he gave an interview.
Of course, I said yes when he asked me to marry him and move to America. However, I readied myself for months — maybe years — of red tape before we would actually say our vows. Ray just said, ‘I’ll pull a few strings,’ and in a short time we were on a plane headed to the United States. After living in Washington for two years, he took a job with the federal prosecutor’s office in Dallas.
His work took him all over Texas and to surrounding states. I found myself more and more left at home when he traveled. His circle of American friends seldom included me.
One day, after seven years of matrimony, he presented me with divorce papers, saying our marriage had been a mistake. He offered to pay my expenses back to Japan, but I felt this country offered better opportunities for a single woman.
A Japanese friend living in Fort Worth arranged a job for me with a loan company. Ray had converted me to his Jewish faith, but I guess you could say I reconverted to Christianity. The Baptist Church keeps me active. I remained with the loan company through a buyout by a mortgage business from which I retired in 1994. My plans call for my moving to Mississippi, where I understand the climate resembles that of southern Kyushu.
I have undergone an operation for cancer, but no one can determine if it is related to my ordeal in Nagasaki.
I have been reluctant to talk in any detail about my experience as a youth during the war. Now I believe the Lord has left the memories so vivid in my mind so that I may pass them on to other generations, instead of taking them to my grave.
Michie Hattori Bernstein moved to Mississippi and died in 2003. William L. Leary was trained in Japanese by the U.S. Army. After the war, he conducted interviews with civilians in Japan for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and continues to interview Japanese expatriates living in America. For further reading, see The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Kyoko Seldon.
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jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-42097690728699064552021-01-07T21:47:00.005-05:002021-01-24T15:42:19.985-05:00los alamos<a href="https://coldwarpatriots.org/inside-the-1983-los-alamos-hack-part-i/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Hexa
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Inside The 1983 Los Alamos Hack: Part I
Hexa
Hexa
Dec 28, 2020·4 min read
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Preface
This essay uses Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) documents to illustrate one of the earliest recorded remote operations against a major US Government agency. Special thanks to the employees of Los Alamos National Labs who were responsive to my FOIA request and even reached out after my initial thread on the topic.
June, 1983 — The Cold War was raging, leg warmers were in and a movie called WarGames was premiering in theaters. WarGames introduced the public to a subculture that had been thriving long before the fearsome ideas the movie’s plot dealt with. It showed the public a glimpse of something that wasn’t fully understood by the public, or even the hackers of the time. It showed a future where young, technically talented people could inadvertantly shape geopolitics.
1983 turned out to be a banner year in the history of technology. Mobile phones were hitting the consumer market for the first time ever, Microsoft Word was first released, causing perpetual headaches for countless generations of suffering Americans and ARPANET began using TCP/IP which would pave the way for the Internet that we all know and hate today.
It was just after working hours on May 9th. John F. Davis, an employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory (or ‘LANL’ for short) was working from home when something unusual happened. Davis (operating under the computer account ‘087061') was connected to the LANL network through a cutting edge VAX/VMS terminal when he received a system mail message (a more localized form of email) from a user with an odd username. This mysterious user messaged Davis directly looking for games that could be played on the network. A dumbstruck Davis, who was probably not used to being asked about games on a nuclear research network, continued the conversation
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As the discussion between Davis and the unknown-but-oddly-named account proceeded, Davis began to question the professionalism of those on the other end of the communication.
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After an hour, it became clear to Davis that he was dealing with someone who wasn’t authorized to be on the network.
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Ten minutes later, Davis had lost his patience with the interloper using the ‘DEMO’ account.
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The next morning, Davis sent a system message to supervisors about the interaction that he had the previous night.
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Although it’s hard to read, the message Davis sent from his 087061 account on the LANL network says: “Two users were on G last evening who didn’t even know what state they were in???? They repeatedly sent me mail asking questions about games, etc. The user names were GATE and DEMO. How did they gain access to this machine? Via Telenet???? I left additional details in mail to 089207 (another user account) last evening.”
An investigation was opened into the discussions Davis had with the mystery accounts, and details about the source of the attack were quickly discovered. A group of kids from Wisconsin calling themselves the “414s” had used home computing terminals to “war dial” numbers they had found in online “phreak” forums.
In 1983, government entities were in the early days of migrating services and critical information to computer-based platforms. In many cases, networks like the Los Alamos National Laboratory network had been connected to the internet to facilitate this new computing effort. At the time, the general public had not yet been introduced to the dangers this would present to the country’s most sensitive information.
This temporary innocence would be broken less than a month from Davis’ first conversation with the kids from Wisconsin.
The details of the LANL breach wouldn’t be made public until after the release of WarGames starring Matthew Broderick. The effect that WarGames would have on the psyche and confidence of US officials was profound. It would compel military commanders to turn to younger generations with their questions about how possible it would be for teens like the ones Broderick’s character represented to get access to real missile control systems.
The May, 1983 breach of LANL would not be the last time the 414s would gain unauthorized access to the lab network. Investigations into this breach would take years and include public testimony which shook the US government to the highest levels.
In part II of this series, we will look at the investigative effort and learn how the government handled one of the earliest government network breaches.
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jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1232019633906248979.post-45424076717969087282021-01-07T09:31:00.006-05:002021-01-26T02:58:07.530-05:00Blast From the PastLog inSign up
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Blast From the Past
In 1979, a U.S. satellite detected signs of a nuclear explosion. An analysis of the evidence today points to a clandestine nuclear test, a Carter administration cover-up, and only one country that was willing and able to carry it out: Israel.
Foreign Policy
William BurrAvner CohenLars-Erik De GeerVictor GilinskySasha Polakow-SuranskyHenry SokolskiLeonard WeissChristopher Wright
Read when you’ve got time to spare.
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President Jimmy Carter at his desk in the Oval Office, talking to his new Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, White House, Washington D C, July 19th 1979. Photo by Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite’s transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion—something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.
Nuclear proliferation was just one of the Carter administration’s headaches in late 1979. The president was dealing with a slew of foreign-policy dilemmas, including the build-up to what would become the Iran hostage crisis. Carter was also preparing for a reelection campaign in which he had hoped to showcase his foreign-policy successes, from brokering Israeli-Egyptian peace to successful arms control talks with Moscow. The possibility that Israel or South Africa, which had deep clandestine defense ties at the time, had tested a nuclear weapon threatened to tarnish that legacy. And the fact that South Africa’s own nuclear weapons program, which the Carter administration was seeking to stop, was not yet sufficiently advanced to test such a weapon left just one prime suspect: Israel. Leading figures within the administration were therefore keen to bury the story and put forward alternative explanations.
Those alternative explanations were widely dismissed by many members of the scientific and intelligence community at the time; four decades years later, they look even more questionable.
Foreign Policy assembled a team of scientists, academics, former government officials, and nonproliferation experts to analyze the declassified documents and data in the public domain, explain the political and strategic objectives of the key players at the time, and argue why a mysterious flash 40 years ago still matters today.
—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Foreign Policy’s deputy editor
When America Caught a Nuclear Violator Red-Handed—But Stayed Silent
by Victor Gilinsky
A nuclear explosion light signal typically starts with a powerful millisecond-long light spike from the surface of the explosion’s dense early fireball, followed by a dark period of several milliseconds as the fireball expands and its surface temperature drops, and then a drawn-out powerful light as the expanding fireball becomes transparent and radiates a light signal from its interior as well. The signal is usually drawn on a graph using logarithmic scales on both axes, where it appears to have two comparable humps, hence a characteristic double hump. Nothing in nature produces such a double-humped light flash. The spacing of the humps gives an indication of the amount of energy, or yield, released by the explosion (see below).
The United States had launched the Vela satellites, orbiting as far as one-third of the way to the moon, to monitor compliance with the PTBT. Until 1979, they had not detected any illicit explosions among the 41 recorded nuclear events. The satellite in question, Vela 6911, had in fact been retired. Although not all of its systems were operable, the two principal light detectors were still functioning. It had previously distinguished itself mainly for detecting strong gamma-ray bursts from distant galaxies, an important scientific discovery. When it recorded a double flash in 1979, the signal could have come from anywhere within a diameter of several thousand miles.
Suspicion quickly fell on South Africa, which was known to be working on a bomb, and even more so on Israel, which had close military connections with South Africa and had an untested nuclear arsenal. U.S. President Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary for Sept. 22, 1979: “There was indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa—either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing.”
An Israeli test would force him to deal not only with violation of the PTBT, but also with U.S. nonproliferation legislation. The 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive U.S. sanctions, if the president determined any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. To complicate matters, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union was at that moment held up in the Senate, in part because of concerns about the United States’ technical capacity for verification. An inability to identify the culprit of the apparent nuclear test would strengthen the hand of the agreement’s opponents.
The Carter administration set about developing a public relations strategy in case the information leaked. They believed their problems would go away if they could cast doubt on the satellite data. That is, if it could be argued there was no characteristic bomb signal, then there would have been no nuclear explosion, and therefore no need to do anything. That became the administration’s line.
* * *
In October, the president’s science advisor, Frank Press, a distinguished geophysicist but also an official tuned to his boss’s interests, set up a panel of scientific experts to examine the Vela event, and in particular whether the observed flash could have a non-nuclear explanation. The panel consisted of eight respected physicists and engineers, including a Nobel Prize winner, and was led by Jack Ruina, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with long experience as a government advisor on weapons systems.
The panel issued its final report in May 1980, after just three meetings. It concluded, “It is our collective judgment that the September 22 signal was probably not from a nuclear explosion.” Its members dismissed all evidence that suggested otherwise. This included the Naval Research Laboratory’s analysis that had located the blast’s ground zero near the Prince Edward Islands, about 1,000 miles from South Africa’s southern coast, using hydroacoustic (underwater sound) data, and claims regarding possible detection of radioactive iodine-131 in thyroids of Australian sheep, which if established could only have come from a bomb test (see following article).
The prevalent view among White House insiders was clearly very different from the one they put out for public consumption. Carter, obviously influenced by the NRL’s analysis, wrote in his diary for Feb. 27, 1980: “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.”
Yet the panel decided to ignore both hydroacoustics and radioactivity, arguing that the apparent explosion-identifying signal could not be distinguished from the background “noise.” Its report did remark in passing, in reference to possible detection of radioactive products of nuclear fission, that “positive results from the debris collection effort would provide conclusive evidence of a nuclear explosion.”
But instead of seriously evaluating the hydroacoustic and radioactive fallout data, as Lars-Erik De Geer and Christopher Wright would later do, the panel put forward at some length, a rather contrived alternative explanation—speculating that a micrometeor impact on the satellite might have ejected a shower of smaller particles that reflected sunlight in just the right way to mimic the light signal from a nuclear explosion. In the end, though, they did not stand behind it: “We do not maintain that this particular explanation is necessarily correct,” they wrote. Later analysis showed it was essentially impossible.
But for the Carter White House, all that mattered was the panel’s “probably not.” It classified key documents and closed the book on the subject.
Perhaps the most important document it classified was the Naval Research Laboratory’s 300-page June 1980 report. The highly regarded research organization tasked several dozen staff members with an analysis of the hydroacoustic signals.
While the NRL report remains classified, the gist of it can be gleaned from a Dec. 11, 1980 letter NRL research director Alan Berman sent to the White House after a futile attempt to draw the panel’s attention to his report. Berman was confident that the Navy’s sensors had indeed picked up the hydroacoustic signals of a nuclear explosion and that, taking into account the speed of sound in the ocean and the potential paths from the Prince Edward Islands, it came at a time consistent with the satellite observation of the light signal. According to Berman, “There was a large impulsive release of energy which coupled acoustic energy into the deep South Atlantic Sound channel.” Moreover, he wrote, the hydroacoustic signal stood out prominently from the random background noise.
* * *
The Carter administration was so afraid to enforce the PTBT against Israel’s 1979 violation that it did what it could to erase or keep hidden evidence of its detection of a test. Subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, went along with this, and the U.S. government still pretends it knows nothing about any Israeli nuclear weapons.
It is an outcome—and a danger—that an arms control expert foresaw long ago. In the period before the PTBT, when the debate over nuclear nonproliferation agreements centered on the adequacy of technical means to detect Soviet cheating, Fred Iklé, in a classic 1961 Foreign Affairs article, reminded the arms control community that while technical means to verify performance are essential, compliance ultimately depends on a willingness to respond to detected violation. Iklé worried that, for political reasons, a democracy like the United States might decide to overlook an arms-control treaty violation. Most important, Iklé wrote, was to make sure a would-be violator could not expect to benefit from a violation.
That’s not what happened after the Vela event. Israel’s nuclear program went on to acquire weapons deliverable by land, sea, and air, with the means of delivery provided by French-designed missiles, German submarines, and American airplanes. If anything, Israel’s nuclear weaponry gained a stronger political position vis-à-vis the United States. A June 2018 New Yorker article reported that Israel demanded, and got, secret letters from U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, which Israeli leaders interpreted as a U.S. promise to protect their nuclear weapons. And indeed, these U.S. presidents did protect Israel’s nuclear weapons from scrutiny and criticism in the United Nations and other international forums. It is part of a pattern that has destroyed America’s credibility on nonproliferation.
What Israel says—or doesn’t say—about its nuclear weapons is its own affair. But the United States should not agree to muzzle itself. It was always a humiliating role that opened the United States to the charge of hypocrisy. Now, in the face of strong confirmation of Israel’s violation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, it has become an insupportable one.
From Sheep to Sound Waves, the Data Confirms a Nuclear Test
By Lars-Erik De Geer and Christopher Wright
Since the early days of nuclear weapons, there have always been forces trying to put the genie back in the bottle. That has proved difficult in a polarized world, but there have at least been a few partly successful attempts.
The first multilateral nuclear test ban was the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which outlawed tests of nuclear explosions in all environments except underground. It went into force in 1963, with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States as the original signatories. Within a few months, many other countries ratified it, including Israel and South Africa.
Crucially, the Partial Test Ban Treaty regime didn’t include a system to verify compliance but relied on individual countries’ technical capabilities, some that were available to any state (such as atmospheric radionuclide surveillance) and some that were available only to a few (such as satellite-based detectors, known as bhangmeters, looking for optical flashes typical of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere).
The treaty has largely been respected by its member states. There was, however, one case that stood out. Exactly 40 years ago today, one such U.S. satellite detected a double flash of light that is typically emitted by nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.
This news was not welcomed by the U.S. government, because the most reasonable suspects were Israel and South Africa, two countries that the United States had delicate relations with at the time. The Camp David accords, catalyzed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, were just a year old, and the United States was involved in intense negations with South Africa to persuade it to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Indeed, one declassified document from the time lists options for what the U.S. government’s public posture should be on the Vela event; one of them was to “Emphasize that one cannot tell whether September 22 event was nuclear or non-nuclear.” Clearly, that option had an impact on the mandate of the panel appointed by Carter known as the Ruina Panel, which included the instruction to study whether the flash could have been “of natural origin.”
In May 1980, the panel finished its report, and it was made publicly available in July. As requested, it delivered an alternative explanation: The flash could be solar light scattered into the bhangmeters’ view by debris ejected from a meteoroid impact on the satellite.
An intense debate followed in the scientific community with contributions from scientists at U.S. National Laboratories with expertise and deep knowledge of the technical matters. All potential corroborating information was rejected by the Ruina Panel—but the suspicion that the panel deliberately ignored key data for political reasons has not gone away.
We recently published two articles in the journal Science & Global Security that analyzed physical data about the Vela event that has become available in declassified documents. Original radionuclide data in the form of notebooks and ledgers from the laboratory of the late Lester VanMiddlesworth, who was in 1979 a professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, that detected traces of iodine-131 in thyroid glands of sheep were also dug out from the Nuclear Testing Archive in Las Vegas. This enabled a new and independent analysis based directly on the raw data.
Vela Records a Double Flash
The first investigation dealt with the event-defining double-humped light pulse. Based on modern hypervelocity impact physics and several recently declassified documents, this new analysis showed the panel’s meteoroid collision hypothesis and variants of it to be much less likely than they might have appeared 40 years ago.
The Ruina Panel noted that there was a discrepancy in the second, longer pulse between the more and the less sensitive bhangmeters onboard. This was essentially explained as an electronic background modulation artifact in papers written by relevant U.S. laboratories such as Sandia and Los Alamos before and after the Ruina report and declassified many years later. The conclusion in our 2017 research was that the nuclear explosion scenario had gained enhanced credibility and that the minimum and second maximum of the double pulse indicated an explosive yield of approximately 2 to 4 kilotons.
The second paper focused on corroborative evidence from hydroacoustic and radionuclide observations. There was a strong signal detected from the south by hydrophones near Ascension Island that could be associated with an explosion close to the water surface at the time of the satellite’s detection of the double flash. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory concluded that the likely explosion point was near the Prince Edward Islands in the South Indian Ocean, with the hydroacoustic signal echoed from the East Scotia Ridge, a prominent underwater ridge near the Antarctic in the South Atlantic.
The Naval Research Laboratory carried out a detailed 300-page study that the Ruina Panel did not seriously consider at the time. It remains classified to this day, although useful information has become available in a declassified 1980 letter from the laboratory research director Alan Berman to the Executive Office of the President.
Based on accepted models and experience from French nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, Berman concluded that the strong Ascension signals had been generated by an explosion near the surface of a fairly shallow part of the ocean and that the path length had been about 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles). This gives an event time estimate less than two minutes before the flash and points quite persuasively to the waters around the Prince Edward Islands as the event location.
Such sensitive measurements can be made because the temperature, salinity, and pressure gradients in the ocean form a kind of wave guide about 3,000 feet below the surface that allows sound waves to travel relatively unattenuated thousands of miles from their source; that is why whales can communicate at long distances.
The Vela bhangmeters’ field of view extended well into the Indian Ocean and past the Prince Edward Islands, but the searches for debris by special sampling aircraft were concentrated on the South Atlantic, which, given the strong westerly winds at the time, explains why no debris was detected. It was, rather, to be found in air masses heading from the Prince Edward Islands east toward Australia.
No nuclear debris was detected from routine air samples in Australia and New Zealand. But it so happened that the Tennessee professor, VanMiddlesworth, had for decades collected thyroid glands from sheep and cattle around the world to study the uptake of radioactive iodine disseminated from nuclear tests in the atmosphere. This is an extremely sensitive method of detecting iodine fallout, as the thyroid gland very effectively absorbs iodine and sheep graze over large areas of land and are normally slaughtered shortly after the grazing season.
The thyroid gland samples from sheep slaughtered in Melbourne, Australia, had shown no evidence of nuclear exposure since the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific ended in 1974, but in October and November 1979 they showed signs of the short-lived fission product iodine-131. It was not taken seriously by the Ruina Panel.
Slaughtered Sheep and Underwater Sound Signals
A few years ago, when VanMiddlesworth’s raw data was found stored at the Nuclear Testing Archive, a new and very careful analysis clearly showed the presence of iodine-131. Combined with meteorological transport calculations that show the paths taken by air from the Prince Edward Islands and the fact that 5 millimeters of rain had fallen when the cloud passed the southeast corner of Australia and the grazing fields of the sheep later slaughtered in Melbourne, the iodine detections became very strong corroborative evidence that Vela had detected a nuclear explosion.
With the defining double pulse validated and the combined corroborative evidence from hydroacoustic and radionuclide detections, the latest analysis of raw scientific data that was dismissed in 1979 suggests that the Vela event was indeed a 2 to 4 kiloton nuclear explosion.
Politicians May Lie. The Archives Don’t.
By Avner Cohen and William Burr
The Vela controversy has continued for decades, but its details, involving sensitive scientific and political intelligence, remain mostly classified. In recent years, the state of the debate around the 1979 incident has changed dramatically. New detailed scientific analysis and new declassified documents have emerged in a manner that decisively support the view that the satellite known as Vela 6911 detected a nuclear detonation.
Informing that view are a number of documents declassified in recent years, posted on the National Security Archive website, that reveal the high level of skepticism, anger and disagreement over the report from the U.S. government panel convened to study the incident, known as the Ruina Panel. We have published these documents in two electronic briefing books on the Vela incident, first in 2016 and then on the anniversary this month. In our view, the documents make clear that the true mystery of Vela is not whether the double flash showed a nuclear explosion but how top officials at the Carter White House collaborated to blur and conceal a politically uncomfortable truth.
The archival files of Ambassador Gerard C. Smith, who served as a special presidential representative for nonproliferation matters from 1977 to 1980, were declassified in 2016. They include a great deal of new information on the Vela controversy within the U.S. government. Here are some of the highlights:
A secret CIA scientific panel. Within days after the Vela event, the CIA formed a three-man distinguished scientific panel—with Harold Agnew (a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory), Richard Garwin (a former hydrogen bomb designer and senior scientist at IBM’s Watson laboratory), and Stephen Lukasik (a former director of DARPA and chief scientist at the Rand Corp.)—to review the Vela data. By October 10, they produced a preliminary technical document in which they agreed that the Vela “signals were consistent with detection of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere,” but they also acknowledged that “the Vela sensor outputs were less ‘self-consistent’ than usual” (a reference to the fact that the two bhangmeters on the Vela satellite did not “yield equivalent or ‘parallel’ readings for the maximum intensity of the second flash.”) They noted that it was unusual to stage a test at night and that the measured yield, 1.5 to 2 kilotons, “was probably lower than the design yield.”
Richard Garwin’s initial view on the double flash. In a letter that Garwin sent to Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Spurgeon Keeny on Oct. 19, 1979, several weeks after the Vela flash, he maintained that “on the basis of the information which we obtained and the analysis we were able to do, I would bet 2 to 1 in favor of the hypothesis” that the incident was a nuclear explosion. He changed his mind while subsequently serving on the Ruina Panel, which Frank Press (Carter’s science advisor and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Carter’s national security advisor) established later that month.
Fallout in New Zealand and Australia. State Department telegrams from November 1979 reviewed efforts by New Zealand scientists who had reportedly detected small amounts of fallout in rainwater; the initial analysis was found to be a “false alarm,” and an official with the Air Force Technical Applications Center secretly confirmed that the data was “flimsy.” Nevertheless, by the end of 1980, the Defense Intelligence Agency had learned that the thyroid glands of sheep slaughtered near Melbourne during October 1979 showed “abnormally high levels” of iodine-131, a “short-lived isotope that occurs as the result of a nuclear event.” The sheep had grazed in an area where it had rained during Sept. 26 and 27, 1979. The Defense Intelligence Agency pledged to investigate whether the iodine could have been ingested as a result of nearby industrial or pharmaceutical activities. This is the first mention by the U.S. government of the data reviewed by the researchers Lars-Erik De Geer and Christopher Wright (see previous article), demonstrating that some parts of the U.S. government took the evidence seriously even while Carter’s appointed panel dismissed it.
The South African-Israeli nuclear connection. In 1977, the Carter administration was aware and concerned about Israeli-South African nuclear cooperation, but Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin denied any weapons development cooperation existed, while evading any questions about nuclear weapons development cooperation. At the end, Carter decided that “we shouldn’t push [the issue] any more for now.”
Defense Intelligence Agency views on the Ruina report. According to Jack Varona, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, hydroacoustic data analyzed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory strongly indicated signals that were “unique to nuclear shots in a maritime environment.” The source of the signals was the area of “shallow waters between Prince Edward and Marion Islands.” The Naval Research Laboratory report is still unavailable, but a declassified State Department memorandum included Varona’s statements, including his view that the Ruina report was a “white-wash, due to political considerations.”
* * *
Notwithstanding the useful material in Smith’s files, most of the Vela archival record remains classified. For example, for decades rumors have circulated about relevant signals intelligence—communication intercepts—that were collected by the National Security Agency. But no signals intelligence material has ever publicly surfaced.
Furthermore, major Vela-related files in the Carter Library remain classified, although they have been requested for declassification review. Their release may probably provide a fuller and detailed picture of the Carter White House’s reaction to the Vela event, and especially the role and communication of both Brzezinski and Press.
Recently disclosed informal comments by Brzezinski suggest why no one at the top was eager to pursue the Vela matter. On June 21, 2016, the writer Kai Bird, while working on Carter’s biography, sat with Brzezinski (eight months prior to his death) for a one-on-one broad conversation on Carter’s foreign policy. During that interview, Bird touched on the controversial Vela matter, almost in passing. According to Bird’s transcript:
Kai Bird: Do you recall the intelligence issue over the Vela satellite?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Oh, near South Africa?
Kai Bird: Near South Africa.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Yeah. We knew something happened. We didn’t know precisely what happened. We had our suspicions. For political reasons, I think. I think. It wasn’t pursued to the very end because it wasn’t clear. Suppose we find out, what do we do then?
Kai Bird: And if it’s the Israelis, it becomes even more awkward.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Well, that’s what I had in mind. Yeah.
While Brzezinski spoke rather vaguely, he seemed to admit that the Carter White House found the Vela issue awkward and that the result was a deliberate effort to avoid a comprehensive investigation. In the absence of documents, this admission is very important.
It is worth noting that a previously released but heavily redacted CIA study from December 1979 titled “The 22 September 1979 Event” was written under the working assumption that the event was a nuclear explosion.
The study examined the possibilities that either South Africa or Israel—or both jointly—conducted a nuclear test. The study’s “key judgements” are withheld, but it appears that the authors viewed Israel as the more likely perpetrator. The report ends its unredacted section on Israel by noting the following: “Indeed, of all the countries which might have been responsible for the 22 September event, Israel would probably have been the only one for which a clandestine approach would have been virtually its only option.”
Incidentally, more than two decades later, one of us had a chance to discuss the Vela event with Stansfield Turner, the CIA director at that time. On that occasion, Turner said that he never “bought” the Ruina report and he had always accepted the prevailing view within the agency that the double flash was an Israeli nuclear test.
* * *
While no public smoking gun has surfaced that conclusively ties Israel to the Vela event, and no credible and identifiable Israeli source has ever openly confirmed an Israeli test, we believe, based on a great deal of documented and anecdotal evidence, that the Vela event was indeed the detection of a low-yield Israeli nuclear test consisting of the boosted primary stage of a two-stage hydrogen bomb—an atomic bomb sparking a thermonuclear reaction. The test was technically necessary to demonstrate Israeli mastery of that design. Here we summarize some of the circumstantial and anecdotal Israel-related evidence.
Israeli nuclear program. What the aforementioned CIA study does not provide (at least in any of its released versions) is an assessment of the Israeli nuclear program in the mid-late 1970s and what the motivations for an Israeli decision to conduct a secret test were. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s biggest national trauma, the country appeared to be approaching the abyss. Top leaders and their nuclear advisors recognized that the country’s small nuclear arsenal—consisting of first-generation implosion (Nagasaki-style) weapons—was inappropriate and perhaps even irrelevant to the military situation in which Israel found itself during the early stages of the Yom Kippur War.
This realization had a profound impact on the Israeli nuclear program in the post-1973 era. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission was carrying out a broad research and development program, with a focus on completing the mastery of two-stage thermonuclear weapons design. It was in this period that Shimon Peres, the man who is credited with the birth of the Israeli nuclear program in the late 1950s, took the role of defense minister and supported that push. A commitment to a two-stage design necessarily entails a need to test.
A high-level firing. Shalhevet Freier, the director-general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission starting in 1971, was fired in 1976, and his replacement by Brig. Gen. Uzi Eilam was allegedly directly related to the preparations for the 1979 event—the implication being that the swap was due to Freier’s opposition to the test. Freier himself used to talk rather openly about his firing, stressing that it was not about “personal or moral conduct” and hinting that it was about a major policy issue about which he disagreed with his superiors, in particular Peres. Freier even suggested that his direct boss, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, agreed with him on this classified policy issue, but for unrelated political reasons Rabin decided to defer to Peres and agreed to let Freier be fired. Freier, who died in 1994, never disclosed what the policy disagreement was.
A press leak from Israel. A CBS Evening News story about the Vela event on Feb. 21, 1980, was based on exclusive reporting from a young Tel Aviv-based American correspondent, Dan Raviv. The report claimed that CBS had learned that the Vela event was indeed an Israeli nuclear test. Raviv filed his report from Rome in an effort to evade Israeli military censorship. As a result, Raviv lost his press credentials after a direct order from then-Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman. Decades later, Raviv told one of us that he had an additional high-level and reliable Israeli political source who confirmed the Vela story, the late Eliyahu Speiser, a well-connected Israeli politician and member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 1977 and 1988. Speiser was in those days close to Peres.
The MIT connection. Other documents in Smith’s file disclose that in February 1980, Jack Ruina, the chairman of Carter’s controversial panel and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received anecdotal information from a “personal contact” at MIT relating to the “theory of Israeli involvement” in the Sept. 22 event. The documents do not elaborate on what exactly that information was, but it is noted that Ruina considered it “significant but inappropriate for discussion on telephone.” It appeared that Ruina flew to Washington to discuss this information with Keeny and John Marcum, Frank Press’s executive secretary, who dismissed it as “speculative.”
According to Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option (published in 1991), Ruina’s source was an unnamed Israeli missile expert, who in 1980 to 1981 was a visiting fellow at MIT in a program that Ruina directed. That missile engineer was Anselm Yaron, as MIT records from that period indicate. Yaron was one of the founders of Israel’s weapons development authority, known as Rafael.
While the White House dismissed Yaron’s information, Hersh’s suggestion that Yaron had implied that the Vela incident was an Israeli-South African test was corroborated to us by an individual who got to know Yaron well during his time at MIT. This individual recalled vividly an awkward moment around the spring of 1980, when Ruina gave a talk at MIT on the unclassified version of his panel’s report indicating that a test was unlikely. Yaron, who was in the audience, commented aloud on Ruina’s conclusions: “Don’t be too sure.”
The Naval Research Laboratory. Alan Berman had been director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory and played a crucial role in a June 1980 report that concluded that the preponderance of evidence based on a wide variety of data from specialized sensors, including underwater acoustic signals, supported a nuclear test. In the years that followed, when he was dean of the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, he became suspicious that the government of Israel was involved with South Africa in the conduct of the apparent test.
As dean, he met with many visitors in the physical sciences and “those from Israel always gently tried to steer the conversation toward what I may have detected,” he said. According to Berman, “they were very interested in what I knew about how to detect a nuclear explosion.”
Even if the declassification process continues to hold back important intelligence reports and findings, the accretion of information, direct and circumstantial, makes the case for an Israeli nuclear detonation on Sept. 22, 1979, look more respectable than ever.
It’s Time for Jimmy Carter to Come Clean
By Leonard Weiss
On Sept. 26, 1969, a fateful meeting occurred between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No one else was present, but Nixon briefed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger afterward. The meeting took place at a time when the United States was urging membership in a universal treaty that, a few months later, formally became the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Kissinger wrote a memo for the president on Oct. 7, 1969, that said: “You emphasized that our primary concern was that Israel make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program.” In another memo, on Nov. 6, 1969, Kissinger recommends that “we not press the Israelis any further on this subject at this time.” On Feb. 23, 1970, Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin asked Kissinger to tell Nixon that Israel had no intention of signing the NPT and would regard any attempts to link arms sales to the treaty as “extremely unfortunate.” There was no recorded pushback by Nixon. And so the United States became an enabler of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, a policy adopted in essence first by President Lyndon B. Johnson, refined by Nixon, and sustained by every U.S. president since.
The now-overwhelming evidence is that the tacit U.S.-Israel understanding that Israel would refrain from visible nuclear testing was violated on Sept. 22, 1979.
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At the time of the Vela event, I was working in the Senate, specializing on nuclear policy matters. I was invited to briefings by Carter administration personnel that caused me to conclude that the Vela event was a nuclear test. The manner in which I was prevented from stating this opinion publicly caused me to conclude further that Israel was the perpetrator.
The intelligence agencies at the time had little doubt that the signal was from a nuclear test. In an email on Oct. 18, 2012, H.T. Hawkins, who served as a senior scientist for global security at Los Alamos National Laboratory, described the intelligence community’s reaction at the time, using the Air Force’s reference for the event, A-747:
After we received the A-747 bhangmeter traces, [Defense Intelligence Agency] Director General Eugene Tighe asked me to hand carry them out to Los Alamos where I met Herman Hoerlin, who had led the development of the bhangmeter. Without being told anything about the origin of the two signals, Herman traced them with his finger like a maestro might look at a piece of music he had written. I asked him, “What do you think about these data?”
“No doubt about it,” Herman responded, “An atmospheric nuclear explosion, several kilotons in yield, probably surrounded by lots of mass like a barge or the likes of it.”
I flew back to Washington and briefed General Eugene Tighe on Herman’s assessment. General Tighe looked at me and said, “Colonel, if that is the position of Los Alamos, then that will be the position of this agency.”
The Carter White House quickly went into crisis mode and clamped down on reports regarding the satellite information. President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for congressional affairs was quoted as saying the State Department was in “sheer panic” over the Vela event and that Israel might be involved. Carter was planning to run for reelection in 1980, and the Vela event touched on several issues that could influence the public’s view of his record.
After all, Carter had been touting his support for nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. In his second debate with Gerald Ford during the campaign for the presidency in 1976, he advocated that “we move immediately as a nation to declare a complete moratorium on the testing of all nuclear devices, both weapons and peaceful devices; that we not ship any more atomic fuel to a country that refuses to comply with strict controls over the waste which can be reprocessed into explosives.”
As president, Carter had taken a hard line toward Pakistan in 1977 and 1979, cutting off economic and military assistance because of Pakistan’s violations of laws forbidding the import of nuclear reprocessing technology and unsafeguarded enrichment technology. In addition to its requirements against reprocessing, the Glenn Amendment, passed in 1977, forbade nuclear explosive testing. Less than a year later, Carter would sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978—a law I took the lead in drafting while working on nonproliferation issues in the Senate—that was motivated by India’s 1974 nuclear test, under which nuclear trade with India would ultimately cease.
Carter also tried to forge a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty with the Soviets in the face of conservative political opposition claiming that verification of such a treaty was problematic and perhaps impossible. The Vela event presented several political dilemmas for Carter: If the administration claimed that Vela did not detect a nuclear test, then the disagreements from expert scientific observers of the satellite system would suggest a large element of uncertainty as to whether the satellite system for detecting nuclear explosions was reliable, which would translate into the unreliability of verification of a comprehensive nuclear testing ban.
On the other hand, if the administration admitted that Vela detected a nuclear test, then it would have to identify the perpetrator. If Carter named Israel as the perpetrator, he could not avoid the imposition of sanctions under the Glenn Amendment without declaring in essence that the United States had a double standard in its policy on nonproliferation and that Israel was subject to different rules than Pakistan and India.
And imposing sanctions on Israel would have caused a furor among the large pro-Israel element in the Jewish diaspora, an important locus of political support for the Democratic Party and for Carter himself, especially after the success of his efforts to broker the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt.
Because the panel was kept from delving into intelligence information relevant to the Vela event, they could not consider whether reports of Israeli nuclear and missile cooperation with South Africa could have been motivating factors for a nuclear test involving both countries. The panel was tasked instead with searching for technical explanations of the double flash other than a nuclear test.
In defense of the Ruina Panel’s conclusion, Richard Garwin has put forth arguments suggesting uncertainty in the Vela signal because of specific phase anomalies in the recorded bhangmeter data. These arguments have been countered by observers like Hawkins who contend that such anomalies were the result of aging of the bhangmeters and began to be seen so regularly that their appearance became a mark of authenticity in judging whether a test had occurred.
The sensitivity of the U.S. government on the subject of Israel’s nuclear weapons is such that federal employees with security clearances are still today regularly admonished to refrain from publicly discussing Israel’s nuclear capabilities, as I was in 1979, and this wall of silence extends to subsequent presidential administrations. As a result, the full political ramifications of an Israeli test have been avoided thus far. After four decades, there is a constituency within government, arms control think tanks, and political organizations for letting sleeping dogs lie.
In the age of President Donald Trump, it is natural to avoid raising an uncomfortable issue that is now 40 years old when there are virtually daily assaults on the U.S. Constitution and the liberal international order. But if there is any hope of a successful international movement toward a world without nuclear weapons there must be a serious commitment to the enforcement of international treaties, regardless of the diplomatic or domestic political problems such enforcement might create.
Carter famously ran on a promise of never lying to the American people. While Carter did not lie about the Vela event, he allowed the truth to be obscured by means of a White House panel whose creation was politically motivated. In his golden years, he should consider setting the record straight as yet another important contribution to his legacy as a peacemaker committed to nonproliferation.
How the 1979 Flash Might Test Us Yet
By Henry Sokolski
Admitting Israel did so could not only trigger U.S. legal sanctions, but affirm Israeli violation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which Israel ratified in 1964. Although it might be distasteful and galling for the U.S. government to now admit that it should have confirmed the Israeli nuclear test long ago, the national-security hazards of not doing so—think Iran and other near-nuclear weapons states violating their nuclear pledges—would be worse.
To its credit, the Trump administration has made treaty enforcement the sine qua non of U.S. participation in international nuclear limitation agreements. In its Nuclear Posture Review, it emphasized the importance of effective compliance, enforcement, and enforceability of nuclear arms controls as a condition for U.S. support. Not long after the review’s publication, the administration withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran, noting Tehran had violated its terms regarding heavy-water production and inspection of military sites.
Then, several months later, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Russians, he argued, fielded missiles that were in clear violation of the agreement. Now, there is talk that the administration may not extend its New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, has drafted bipartisan legislation urging the administration to continue the treaty “so long as it maintains the strongest possible enforcement.”
Even if the U.S. government is today exceptionally attentive to nuclear compliance, it wasn’t always. In 1979, to override the Central Intelligence Agency’s early determination that Israel had likely conducted nuclear testing, the White House immediately formed a panel of experts to come up with an “alternative explanation” for the worrying Vela satellite readings. The panel actually didn’t come up with an explanation it thought was very likely, but it nonetheless concluded the satellite observation “probably” was not nuclear in origin. That seemed good enough.
Nor were the Nixon, Ford, or Carter administrations all that perturbed by India’s 1974 violation of its pledge not to use U.S. nuclear exports (in this case, heavy water) to make bombs. When India used “peaceful” U.S. and Canadian nuclear assistance to build its first nuclear weapon in 1974, Canada cut off further nuclear exports. The United States did not. Instead, the State Department concluded that India’s test did not violate any U.S. agreement, lied to Congress about India’s use of American heavy water, and continued U.S. nuclear fuel exports to New Delhi.
More recently, U.S. President George W. Bush looked the other way when the International Atomic Energy Agency found evidence that South Korea and Egypt were in breach of its nuclear safeguards obligations. Trump’s recently ousted national security advisor, John Bolton, who was then under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, urged his superiors to refer the South Korean case to the United Nations Security Council. He was quickly overruled.
Given the mounting evidence, including the most recent analyses relating to the 1979 explosion’s radioactive fallout, the question now is whether the the U.S. government might finally share what it knows about the event. This would seem to make sense, as it would help discourage future violations of pledges not to test by countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, and other aspirational nuclear states.
The bureaucracy isn’t likely to back it, though. Although the Trump administration is a stickler for compliance and enforcement of nuclear understandings and treaties, Israel is a special case. Every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has refused to acknowledge Israel had a serious nuclear weapons program or arsenal. It would be risky at best for any U.S. official’s career to confirm Israel should be shamed as a violator of an international nuclear agreement it signed and ratified. That, after all, is what Israel accuses Iran of doing.
Then, there are the legal implications of a violation confirmation. In 1976, 1977, and 1994, U.S. senators succeeded in securing legislation known as the Symington and Glenn amendments. These laws banned U.S. foreign, financial, or military assistance to any countries—apart from the five nuclear weapons states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—that acquired uranium enrichment or nuclear reprocessing technologies or who set off a nuclear device.
Of course, the law allows the president to waive these sanctions, but Israel, which receives billions of dollars in U.S. assistance, would hardly welcome such treatment. This would be doubly so if Trump should persist in pushing a formal mutual security pact with Israel; Israel’s critics would have a field day.
Still, if the president is asked whether Israel has nuclear weapons or has ever tested them, he might just blurt out the truth. And, then, there is the prospect of a progressive Democratic president who, eager for more nuclear controls, might add to what former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has already confirmed regarding Israel’s nuclear program. With time and increasing evidence that Israel did test in 1979, the odds of confirmation only increase.
The question is just when such a confirmation will be made. Will it come before an Iran or South Korea, a Turkey or Egypt or Saudi Arabia, treat Israel’s violation as precedent and take comfort in the United States’ denials to ease their way toward testing themselves? Or will it come later, when the last vestige of nuclear constraints, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Partial Test Ban Treaty, have fully fallen into disuse and decay? If so, a return to order may require nothing less than the kind of political shock that came in 1945 with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
A Former Soviet Spy Remembers the Vela Incident: an Interview With Dieter Gerhardt
by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Dieter Gerhardt was appointed as commanding officer of South Africa’s Simonstown dockyard a few weeks after the Vela incident in 1979. Previously, he had been a senior officer working on force development under the South African Defense Force’s chief of staff for operations. He was, at the time, also a high-level Soviet spy working for the GRU military intelligence service. Foreign Policy spoke to him via email about his recollections of the Vela incident.
Foreign Policy: Simonstown naval base was closed for a few days around the time of the Vela incident. Were you given any explanation at the time—and where did the order to close come from?
Dieter Gerhardt: No direct explanation was given. Orders came directly from the [defense] minister’s office. Often one can deduce that an activity is highly confidential when senior responsible officers are extremely tight-lipped and dodge seemingly reasonable questions.
FP: When South Africa was caught preparing an underground nuclear test in 1977, you played a role in tipping off the Soviets, whose satellite detected the test preparations. In 1979, do you remember any of the people involved in South Africa’s nuclear program reacting to news of the double flash?
DG: Individuals involved in the program disappeared from the scene and were isolated from their previous colleagues. The brightest of the bright were suddenly no longer reachable. The gaps left by their sudden absence told a significant story itself.
FP: Do you recall any Israeli ships visiting Simonstown in the months before or after September 1979?
DG: A visit by Israeli vessel was not noticed or recorded. Visiting ships of another so-called pariah state were present, i.e., Taiwan. The significance of that is not known to me.
FP: Do you think Israel could have carried out an atmospheric nuclear test completely on its own?
DG: It is entirely possible for Israel to have conducted the test on its own without South African direct participation other than giving the go-ahead for the test to be carried out in the region and giving normal ship support such as fuel, water, and vittles. I do believe, however, that this was a joint project from which South Africa’s own nuclear program would have benefited.
FP: Are there any facilities on the Prince Edward Islands?
DG: Facilities on island are limited to a small research station. No landing strip as such. Helicopter pad perhaps for South African research vessels’ infrequent visits to drop off and collect researchers.
FP: The CIA report on the Vela event suggests that it could have been done by two to three medium-size ships and a few dozen people. How could South Africa provide “normal ship support” to such Israeli ships?
DG: Transfer at sea—a normal exercise for support logistic and refueling activity. But it’s unlikely that the Prince Edward Islands were used as a support or jump-off point. They take ships several days to reach from Simonstown.
FP: Did you ever meet Ezer Weizman, who was Israeli Defense Minister from 1977 to 1980, during your trips to Israel—and did you ever see him in South Africa?
DG: I never met Weizman and do not know of his movements. The only individual of significance that I met was Uzi Eilam [the director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 to 1986], but no discussion on nuclear matters took place between us.
FP: In what context did you meet Uzi Eilam?
DG: I was tasked by the minister of defense (at that time P.W. Botha), I think in 1975 to take Uzi and his wife, Naomi, on a familiarization, R&R trip around the country. No aspects related to the topic were mentioned during the duration of the week’s tour.
FP: How did the Soviets react to news of the 1979 double flash? Did they suspect Israel was behind it—and were they concerned or threatened by Israeli testing?
DG: I have no idea how the USSR reacted. They were well informed on many aspects of the South African nuclear program and were certainly concerned about proliferation—to the extent that observation satellites were launched and U.S. authorities alerted [when underground test preparations were detected in 1977]. They were fully aware of the close military ties between South Africa and Israel and many of the joint projects being conducted.
FP: In the 40 years since the flash, has anyone within South African military or intelligence circles ever said anything to you suggesting that they personally observed or had knowledge of the Sept. 22 event?
DG: No, not a peep! Military personnel would not have been directly involved. Perhaps [the state arms manufacturer] Armscor or Atomic Energy Board personnel were.
* * *
William Burr is the director of the Nuclear Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Avner Cohen is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a global fellow with the Wilson Center. He is the author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain With the Bomb. Twitter: @avnercohen123
Lars-Erik De Geer is a retired official from the Swedish Defense Research Agency and served on the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization.
Victor Gilinsky, a physicist, was a commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. He is the author of Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy and The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Twitter: @sasha_p_s
Henry Sokolski is the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future. He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993.
Leonard Weiss is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a former professor of applied mathematics and engineering. For over two decades he was Sen. John Glenn’s staff director at the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and the Glenn Amendment of 1977.
Christopher Wright is an associate professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.
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This post originally appeared on Foreign Policy and was published September 22, 2019. This article is republished here with permission.jkmhoffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16349550585928067705noreply@blogger.com