“Only a nightmare dream”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Atmospheric ignition”

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

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

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

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

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

“The ultimate catastrophe”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A colossal catastrophe”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ignition of the atmosphere by nuclear bombs”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Disastrous consequences”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The necessary conditions”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above: a 3.5 minute excerpt from an RKO/Pathé film of a “Desert Rock” exercise from the 1952, via the Prelinger Archive/Archive.org.1 This is not the detonation described below, but it’s one of the most evocative films of a nuclear test I have ever seen, as it gives a much better sense of scale than most test footage.

These “Desert Rock” exercises, conducted at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1957, are “infamous” because of the large number of “atomic veterans” they created. Although ostensibly designed to be safe in terms of radiation exposure, there have been thousands of claims of subsequent cancers among this population.

What follows is an unusual and evocative first-hand account of a Desert Rock exercise, shot SHASTA of Operation Plumbbob on August 18, 1957, from one of the researchers, William E. Montague.2

This account comes from a longer report on the psychological impacts of the exercises, and is, I think, unusually well-written and compelling read for what is essentially a research report, and a snapshot into an unusual experience that may, with any luck, never be recaptured. I found it impossible to put down once I started it. I have transcribed it from a messy PDF and bad OCR, so apologies if any of the typos slipped through. Where possible I have tried to add simple annotations or links to thinks that might not be obvious.3

Saturday night, August 18, we were sitting around on the patio of the Officers Club about 2230 “socializing” and wondering when Shot Shasta would go. This was the 19th day, or so, that it had been postponed. A vehicle roared up. Loudspeaker called, “Attention all personnel! Attention all personnel! Shasta is on! Shot Shasta is on!”

We immediately went to tell the others. Then I went to bed for three hours so I’d be rested.

At 0130 on Sunday morning [Dr.] Boyd Mathers shook me awake and I was so jumpy I came up swinging. I dressed and went to the VIP mess here I had been told coffee was being served. I noticed they had real cloth table cloths. While having coffee and cake a major came in and said he thought it would go tonight; weather was good over the flat and it was very unusual to have a shot rescheduled to go at such a late hour, so the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] must think conditions were just right.

I left the mess hall and [Dr. Robert] Vineberg drove up with a carryall (station wagon) full of our people. We drove out of [Camp] Desert Rock and passed through the check points at Mercury [base of operations at Nevada Test Site] & couple of miles up the road, then drove 25 miles to Yucca flat. We arrived at our observation point, which is called Goose Nob, at 0230, not to be confused with News Nob, which is nearby for wheels [VIPs] and reporters.

I had been there twice before, and both times the shot had been postponed at the last minute. Bob parked the vehicle and we climbed out for our third go at the thing. This time the loudspeaker was playing slow hill billy or cowboy music. The other times it had featured such things as Beethoven’s Tenth Quartet. Goose Nob is situated on the slope of a hill or mountain at the south end of Yucca Flat. A square pebbled area of about a hundred feet on a side has been leveled off and brightly illuminated by two enormous hooded lights on a thirty foot pole. In the forward portion of this square is the “pig pen,” as Vineberg called it, a fenced-in section containing twelve rows of 25 foot long wooden benches painted gray. I went through the opening and sat down on the rear bench. Soon Pete [Christian Peterson?] joined me. A couple of Army sedans were there at the site before us, and a few minutes after we arrived two buses of soldiers pulled up and the troops spread out over the area, some to talk, some to read and some to lie down on the benches and sleep.

I sat there and took notes and talked to Pete, who used to teach Physics. He pointed out the constellation of Cassiopeia to me, and we finally located Orion low on the eastern horizon under the half moon. we think we found Polaris, though the Big Dipper was too much for us. Pete said it was partly hidden by the ridge of mountains barely discernible against the night sky to our north across Yucca Flat.

At 0255 the music went off the air and a voice made substantially the following announcement: “This is Dragnet. Five minutes until H minus two hours.”

Three more vehicles arrived: a jeep, an ambulance and a sort of truck with a crane, perhaps for recovering any cars that should get stuck off the road. The men parked their cars and dispersed over the observation point. Some of the officers and men collected around the small snack bar building which, though well lighted and supplied with a telephone, contained no snacks or refreshments whatsoever.

The loudspeaker cackled on again: “This is Dragnet. Stand by for time hack.4 In one minute the time will be H minus two hours. H minus two hours ... thirty seconds ... ten seconds... five, four, three, two, one, hack.” At the instant of hack we saw a small, bright hemisphere of orange fire silently blossom and die far out on the blackness of Yucca Flat.

Then the voice continued: “Next time hack at H minus one and one-half hours. Next time hack at H minus one and one-half hours.”

“That was the metering charge,” I said. Pete had his watch out and was timing the interval until the sound of the explosion reached us. “That’s twelve hundred pounds of TNT”, I said. “At least that’s what I hear it’s supposed to be.”

Pete said that for the last two times we had come out to the site the charge had contained twenty-four hundred pounds. In any event, we never heard it. Apparently the wind was away from us. The first time we came to the site I had counted fifty-seven seconds before the sound reached us. With sound traveling at about a thousand feet per second I calculated the charge had been detonated about eleven and a half miles from us. On that first evening I hadn’t knows about the charge, and the flash had made me flinch my eyes away. I was set to hide my eyes from any nearly detonation and the TNT had triggered me off. “Well”, I said. “Since we couldn’t hear the metering charge, maybe that means the wind is right. Away from us and Las Vegas. Maybe they won’t postpone the shot again.”

A growly metallic voice from a jeep’s radio chanted: “Earthquake calling, this is Earthquake calling,” followed by some other words I could not distinguish.

The floodlights illuminated the grotesque little Joshua trees and low clumps of brush for about fifty yards beyond the wire down the slope to our front. Beyond the light the vast expanse of the valley was inky black, pinpointed here and there by the many-mile distant lights of a road marker, a tower, or a vehicle traveling on some late, pre-shot business.

Pete and I discussed the expanding universe and the red shift. The night was cool. At intervals we heard two other time hacks. We watched what we presumed was the light of a weather balloon ascending from Yucca Lake, a dry lake bed off to our right. The balloon seemed to drift very slightly to the south as it rose, its light blinking constantly.

At H minus forty five minutes all personnel were instructed to move into the wired-in area. A few troops and officers who bad been outside the wire came in and took seats. The voice from the loudspeaker instructed us regarding the operation.

“The shot you are to witness this morning is Shasta. It is expected that the yield will be approximately half of nominal.5 We are viewing the shot from a position approximately twelve miles from ground zero. Personnel wearing density goggles can observe the fireball. Personnel wearing goggles — approved four point two density goggles or higher — can observe the fireball. However, they must not look directly at the fireball until after the detonation — look to the right or left of the fireball. Look directly at the fireball only after the initial intensity of the light has faded. Personnel without goggles will turn and face away from the direction of the shot three to five minutes before zero and shield their eyes with either the right or left arm. After the shot you will be told when to turn around and view the fireball. This will be approximately five seconds after zero. In the event of a miss-fire remain in position with the eyes shielded until given instructions. When told to turn, you can turn and observe the fireball and the cloud. The cloud is expected to rise thirty to thirty-five thousand feet with fall-out to the west and north, then northeasterly at fifteen degrees.”6

The loudspeaker gave some additional information regarding certain projects that would track the cloud, then cut off. Vineberg said, “I’m cold!”

We noticed some vehicle lights coming back across the flat. I wondered if they had armed the device. Pete unwrapped a sandwich and offered some of it to the rest of us, but I was not interested. I noticed that the person two benches in front of me had brought a pillow and blanket and was making good use of them.

“This is later than we’ve ever been,” someone said. “Maybe they won’t cancel it this time.”

The loudspeaker came on again to tell us that the time was H minus thirty minutes and to repeat the instructions regarding the protection of our eyes. A jet whined high over us and looking to my right I noticed that the air strip was lit up. Immediately in front of us a group of six or seven soldiers was gathered out beyond the wire. Someone said they were Army photographers. Another jet went over. I noticed an increase in nervousness as the time approached. I wanted to face away even though it was much too early. I was afraid of a premature detonation. Those around me denied similar feelings, but I noticed some of them no longer looked in the direction of the shot. We sat leaning forward, looking at the ground.

At H minus twenty minutes I heard a background voice over the loud-speaker say to someone near the microphone, “It’s hooked up now, Boy!” Then the loudspeaker spoke to us: “This is Dragnet. In one minute it will be H minus fifteen minutes, and so on, with a time tone every minute thereafter.”

Pete said, “This is the tape. The machine is committed.” I smiled and thought of [Dr. Robert] Baldwin’s idea for a “manual override for electric safety.”

Two men were still asleep, at least ostensibly. Seasoned troops. Most of us were inclined to laugh at anything as time ran down. I gestured out toward the thing in the dark and said “Poof!” throwing my hands wide. Everyone laughed. I asked [Dr.] Ralph [Kolstoe] if we were going to go through with the “Shut up and deal” routine when everyone turned to stare at the fireball. We thought we would not.7

The time tones were coming every minute and with each one the tension went up a notch. At H minus eight minutes I stopped taking notes. I didn’t want to clutter up the subjectivity of the experience. At H minus five minutes we turned around on the benches without waiting for the order to do so and covered our eyes. I removed my glasses and held them firmly by the temple piece in my right fist. I buried my eyes is my left elbow and pressed my left arm tight against my face with my right fist. It was dark and lonely in there. I began to tremble. My stomach muscles knotted up. Then the tenseness spread to my chest muscles. I became irritated at myself and made a definite effort to relax, which relieved the muscular strain but did little to reduce my mind’s tension. I imagined running away, then thought of how trivial would be the increase in distance that I could add by running for the short remaining time, since a twelve mile distance already separated us from the device.

“H minus one minute.”

I pressed my arm tighter against my face.

“H minus thirty seconds.”

The awful, marching inexorability of the thing came over me. Zero time was speeding toward me like a car you cannot dodge. In the darkness I heard Boyd say, “It’s going to be too late to postpone it!” I thought rapidly for something witty to say, such as yelling “Shasta is postponed for another twenty four hours!” but gave it up.

“H minus twenty seconds. . . H-minus ten seconds. . . five, four, three. . . (I scrunched my eyes shut and pulled my arm in on them). . . two, one, zero.”

At zero time I saw, in the darkness, a dim far off pink glow that brightened and spread, held steady for a second, then dimmed and shrunk. I knew it was the light from the device and I knew how blindingly bright it must be to reach our eyes at all under such protection. It really felt as though nothing had happened — just the soundless soft pink glow. A voice behind me (probably someone who had been through the count-down for Diablo, the shot that was a dud) cried, “Yeah! It went off!!!”

The loudspeaker said, “Turn!” As I uncovered my eyes I noticed it was still dark. Nothing had changed. Then we turned and I saw the thing that had been created. Far out across the miles of wasteland below us there was now dimly visible in the first morning light the golden fireball boiled and churned like a genii from a bottle, cooled to orange splotched with deep dirty brown, cooled to heavy violet and as it cooled its shimmering blue corona contracted and glowed around it. The fireball rises at a speed of sixty miles an hour, but at this distance its ascent seemed slow.

“Brace yourself,” the loudspeaker said. “The shockwave will be here any time now.”

We got set. Some of us debated whether the shock wave could exceed the speed of sound. I didn’t know whether to expect a crack, or a roar, or what. Then I heard what sounded exactly like a long line of freight cars “bumping” in the distance, a low quickly punctuated rumble that lasted three or four seconds and faded away. The cloud, subtending the same angle to the eye as a fifty-cent piece held at arm’s length, bad lost its brilliance. Raggedly oval, it lifted up from the desert. Beneath and around it the dust stood in almost static silhouette.

A quick bright flash startled me! Just the photographers with their flashbulbs. Then the floodlights were cut off, which made it easier for us to observe the mushroom. It was decidedly lopsided. Pete said that the stem of the mushroom should shear off. A weather balloon went up from the fat. Then a group of vehicles could be seen in the dim morning light taking off down the read to recover certain test equipment. A jet flew through the edge of the cloud, collecting samples. A moment later a rocket blazed upward and slanted into the cloud, disappearing abruptly as it entered. The cloud was very large now, much higher than the mountains in the background.

The radio in the jeep came on with a crackly last voice, “Earthquake-Two-Step-this-is-Earthquake-over.” At H plus fifteen minutes the first vehicles left our areas. “Well,” someone said. “Let’s go.” As we rose I noticed that the top of the cloud was pinkish white on its eastern face where it caught the first rays of the morning sun. Pete pointed out that the bottom of the stem was lifting clear off the ground and slanting away. He called this a good shear. On the ride back to Desert Rock and breakfast we watched the pink cloud over the hills behind us as it split slowly into three or four separate strata, each thinning and drifting away on the morning air. Frankly, it had been a little disappointing. But then, it was only a half-size shot, and we had been twelve miles away.

Google Ngrams, while hardly the arbiter of linguistic truth, gives some sense of the phrase’s use:

Different variations on the search phrase yield fairly similar results: some small amount of usage prior to the 1940s-1950s, then a huge spike in the early 1960s, and then the early 1980s, with the post-Cold War period showing a slow but steady growth.

As the fact that there is use of the phrase prior to 1945 indicates, the phrase pre-dates the nuclear age. The idea of the living “envying the dead” appears to derive from a sort of evocative, non-literal translation from the Book of Jeremiah, book 8, which says that:

¹ “‘At that time, declares the Lord, the bones of the kings and officials of Judah, the bones of the priests and prophets, and the bones of the people of Jerusalem will be removed from their graves. ² They will be exposed to the sun and the moon and all the stars of the heavens, which they have loved and served and which they have followed and consulted and worshiped. They will not be gathered up or buried, but will be like dung lying on the ground. ³ Wherever I banish them, all the survivors of this evil nation will prefer death to life, declares the Lord Almighty.’

The above is the New International Version of the English translation of the Old Testament. I am no Bible scholar, but a quick perusal of other translations does not reveal any that use the specific phrase “envy the dead.” Nor does “envy the dead” appear to be a direct translation from the original Hebrew.

But I suspect this is one of the primary origins for the “envy the dead” wording, only because one does find pre-nuclear invocations of this phrase specifically with Jeremiah.1 For example, here is the English translation of Stefan Zweig’s Jeremiah: A Drama in Nine Scenes (1922):

Touch me not. Better, far better is darkness, for the hour is at hand in Israel when the living will envy the dead, and when those that wake will envy the sleepers.

The other places I have found several pre-nuclear invocations of the phrase, without explicit reference to Jeremiah (but I assume may have connection to it), are in newspaper accounts of persecution in Europe at various times. In 1854, the Baltimore Sun carried an address from John Mitchell, an Irish exile, on the “relentlessly oppressed Irish nation,” in which he proclaimed (to “cheers” from the crowd) that:

…the social and political condition of Ireland is no whit improved, but is now precisely the same that it has been for fifty years—no better and no worse—insomuch that one might “envy the dead, who are already dead, more than the living who are yet alive.”

I’m not sure why the above address uses quotes for that part — again, it is not quite Jeremiah, and I haven’t find other uses of it. There is also an account from the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1905 about an anti-Jewish Pogrom in Odessa, in which the mother of a ten-year old boy says that:

We hear that nearly all the Jews in Odessa are slain. … All Russia is aflame. Blood is flooding Russia. There is wailing and moaning. The living envy the dead. I cannot write any more. I hear shooting and screams.

There are other accounts leading up until World War II that follow similar patterns. The point to be taken away here is that the phrase certainly existed, even if its exact origins and referent seem a little unclear. Personally, I think “prefer death to life” is not quite the same thing as “envy the dead.” But we’ll come back to that distinction.

Now let us move on to the atomic age. Searching through Google Books, ProQuest, Archive.org, and other such repositories of text, I found the phrase being used in conjunction with anti-nuclear war (i.e., pro-control, pro-peace, etc.) activism here and there at least as early as the late 1940s — not immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Here is the progressive American physical sciences educator Oliver Schule Loud in 1948:

…it has been calculated by leading scientists that the first twenty four hours of an attack, a generation hence, upon the continental United States, by guided missiles carrying atomic war-heads, will leave our cities and industries in ruins and forty million of our citizens dead and dying. Our high command, to be sure, is preparing so that they can promptly mount a superior counter-attack in kind. But within a week of such warfare, all participating nations will have been destroyed. There will be no victors. The survivors will envy the dead as the fabrics of economies and social orders disintegrate.

And here, in 1951, is the socialist and pacifist speaker/political candidate/minister/etc. Norman Thomas testifying before the House Congressional Committee on Armed Services in 1951:

I need not take your time to tell you how completely destructive would be a new world war. The survivors might well envy the dead. We are concerned with a program to avert a third world war while we gain time to lay the foundations of peace.

And here is Thomas again, in the beginning of his 1959 book The Prerequisites for Peace, in a chapter titled “The Race to Death”:

Something new has happened in the world. It is now possible for the human race to commit collective suicide. It will do just that if it blunders into thermonuclear war, for which it is making frantic preparation. Already the Great Powers have in their possession the weapons, nuclear and biological, utterly to destroy civilization. Survivors of thermonuclear war, if such there are, will envy the dead. That world war might mean annihilation is acknowledged by scientists, rulers, and the people, yet the arms race goes on. It is a race which may end in the peace of universal death.

Now, do I think that these are the first people who used the phrase in an atomic context? Not really. I suspect that tracking down the first usage is hindered by sourcing issues — it may have been in speeches, talks, etc. that were not written down — and I don’t see much sign that anyone else thought that anyone, prior to the 1960s, was being particularly original or clever in using it. My guess, which is pure supposition, is that the phrase made its way into progressive circles over the course of the 1940s.

My sense is that the phrase did not become fully associated with nuclear war until the 1960s. Two things lead to this. The first was the publication of Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (1960), that most paradigmatic of nuclear strategy books directed at somewhat general audiences. Kahn’s book dedicates an entire chapter to the question of whether the survivors will “envy the dead.”

This is quite an interesting shift in framing. Instead of asserting that the survivors will envy the dead, Kahn tries to flip the idea around into a question: “How much tragedy can we live with and still not have ‘the survivors envy the dead?’?” He quickly reduces this to a more measurable question than one of envy, and to instead ask, essentially, at what level of nuclear war would it become impossible to consider one’s self (in some amount of time) as living to a comparable standard of living prior to the nuclear war.

With this framework, Kahn is able to “attack” the question in a variety of ways. Ultimately, Kahn’s argument rests very hard on a table of “TRAGIC BUT DISTINGUISHABLE POSTWAR STATES,” showing different associations between mega-deaths and the time for “economic recuperation”:

And at the bottom, again, he adds the “envy the dead” question. Here is what Kahn says about the table and this framing:

Perhaps the most important item on the table of distinguishable states is not the numbers of dead or the number of years it takes for economic recuperation; rather, it is the question at the bottom: “Will the survivors envy the dead?” It is in some sense true that one may never recuperate from a thermonuclear war. The world may be permanently (i.e., for perhaps 10,000 years) more hostile to human life as a result of such a war. Therefore, if the question, “Can we restore the prewar conditions of life?” is asked, the answer must be “No!” But there are other relevant questions to be asked. For example: “How much more hostile will the environment be? Will it be so hostile that we or our descendants would prefer being dead than alive?” Perhaps even more pertinent is this question, “How happy or normal a life can the survivors and their descendants hope to have?” Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.

Kahn further says that he and his colleagues came to this conclusion “reluctantly,” because it felt so hard to believe.

If you’re familiar with Kahn, this is, indeed, classic Kahn. It’s a line of reason that feels pure and solid… so long as you don’t start poking it at all. There, to my mind, a vast difference between asking, “how long would the economy take to recover after a nuclear war?” and asking, “would survivors of a nuclear war envy the dead?”

In fact, I think there is actually a pretty big difference between asking, “would the survivors of a nuclear war think that the dead had an easier time of things” (what I think envy the dead implies in a literal sense) and asking, “would the survivors of a nuclear war literally wish for their own death/be suicidal?” These are quite different states of mind, as I see them. And they have more to do with psychological factors more than they do, say, economic recovery (of all things).

But let us put Kahn to the side for a moment, because this isn’t about him, really. This is about the phrase. My sense is that Kahn’s dwelling on it probably did much to associate the idea of “survivors will envy the dead?” with nuclear war in a broader cultural sense, even if — ironically — Kahn’s entire argument is based on showing that, with the right circumstances (and civil defense and shelters and so on) the survivors would not envy the dead. That is, I don’t think Kahn was particularly successful in a broader sense of convincing people that the survivors would not envy the dead, but I think he was probably the most to immediately credit for the phrase gaining a broader association with a post-nuclear existence.

But a funny thing happens between 1960 and 1963 or so — the phrase becomes very common in the West, but becomes almost exclusively attributed to Nikita Khrushchev. President John F. Kennedy, in his Address to the Nation on July 26, 1963 about the Limited Test Ban Treaty, is probably the original case for this attribution:

A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, “the survivors would envy the dead.” For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward final annihilation.

The question arises: did Khrushchev actually say this? Bartleby’s, in 1989, concluded that he had not: “No form of this quotation has been verified in the speeches or writings of Khrushchev.” But I suspect this reflects the limits of what was easy to track down in the West circa 1989, as opposed to reality.

On July 19, 1963, Khrushchev gave a speech at a “Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Meeting,” which was reprinted the next day in Pravda. Here is an English translation from the Foreign Language Publishing House:

But when it is said that a people who had accomplished a [socialist] revolution should start a war that would be a world nuclear war, that they should start such a war so as to create a more flourishing society on the corpses of millions upon millions of victims, on the ruins of the world—that, comrades, is impossible to understand. Who would remain on this “flourishing earth” after such a war? We cannot agree with this contention.

I wonder if the authors of these assertions know that if all the nuclear warheads are detonated the earth’s atmosphere will be so contaminated that nobody can tell in what condition the survivors will be and whether they will not envy the dead. Yes, yes, comrades, that is how the question stands.

The “authors of these assertions” is apparently a reference to a statement attributed to Chairman Mao Zedong (from May 1958) about the benefits of a nuclear war, and this entire speech was in the context of the emerging Sino-Soviet split. (The official response from Beijing, in late August 1963, was to assert that the Soviet view that nuclear weapons had “changed everything” was “the philosophy of willing slaves.”)

The exact, original Russian from the speech seems to be: “в каком состоянии будут оставшиеся в живых люди — не будут ли они завидовать мёртвым?” — literally, “of the conditions of the surviving people — won’t they envy the dead?”

What is different from Kennedy’s quotation of it is that Khrushchev’s formulation is a not an assertion, but a question — but it is a leading question, because, unlike Kahn’s version of it, it is pretty clear that the point is for you to agree that indeed, the survivors might envy the dead in this situation. So I think Kennedy’s attribution of the phrase to Khrushchev, a mere week later (!), is not incorrect, nor does he contextualize it erroneously, even if Khrushchev is not quite baldly asserting that “the survivors would envy the dead” in the original.

Did Khrushchev get the phrase from Kahn? I have no idea. I have seen it speculated that the Russian version of the phrase is more directly traced to a particular translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but tracing Russian origins of a phrase go beyond my ken. I think that Kahn is probably important in the Anglophone world for this association, and is why the Khrushchev quote would have been picked up on in particular. But who can say?

In any event, once you get beyond 1963, the phrase becomes quite commonly associated with nuclear war. It often gets attributed to Khrushchev directly, via Kennedy, which does not perfectly describe its origins and associations, but is not totally wrong, either.

So, to come back around to the main question at hand — whether Kahn’s or Khrushchev’s or whomever’s — would the survivors envy the dead in the event of a nuclear war? I think this very much depends on what one means by the phrase “envy the dead,” and I think it probably depends on who one is counting as among the “survivors.” Without being specific about those two things, the phrase is more evocative than useful. Nuclear war would be horrible and devastating and almost unthinkably destructive and wasteful.

Would the survivors literally prefer death over life? I am sure some would — because we know survivors of any kind of horror sometimes do. Would all survivors feel that way? Of this, I am doubtful. Not because the horror would not be great or that it would be bearable. But because, if we look at people historically, we see that the survival instinct is strong, and that people are remarkably resilient sufferers.

LeMay has always given me the creeps. His deeds are bad enough — we’ll come to those in a moment — but his entire affect is, in a word, reptilian. If the eyes are the windows into the soul, there’s a certain deadness reflected in every photograph of LeMay that I’ve seen. I thought that for years, before I learned that there was an additional dimension: that his unsmiling appearance was literally pathological, a result of having developed Bell’s palsy during his city-bombing campaigns of World War II, which left him unable to project happiness. There’s something almost Dickensian about that fact.

LeMay was the quintessential bomber-engineer. His reputation was as someone who demanded efficiency above all else, and the subject that he put his efforts towards was mass destruction. There are other more Strangelovian generals out there — but he’s really almost beyond parody.

If I extolled all of LeMay’s biographical details here, it would be too much to read. He was the architect of the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II. He considered his actions to be indistinguishable from those of a war criminal, and did them anyway. He bragged that he out-did the Nazis for bombing cities by far.

He created the Strategic Air Command and turned it into the most effective and efficient organization for planning and executing the mass destruction of civilian populations that the world has ever seen. At its height he probably held the capability to kill half a billion people almost overnight. Worried that World War III might break out and the President might not be able to — or might not be willing to — give the orders to unleash that hell, LeMay worked out, during the Truman administration, protocols by which he could just seize the weapons illegally. This is a fact he later talked about openly, and can be corroborated with documentary evidence from the time. (I talk about these aspects of LeMay in my forthcoming book, which is available for pre-ordering now...)

What I really want to dwell on here, though, is a book that LeMay published in 1965, co-written with MacKinlay Kantor, called Mission with LeMay: My Story. It’s billed as a memoir, but that feels insufficient as a description. It is more like a drunken oral history, with almost no attempt by LeMay (or Kantor) to make coherent its stream of consciousness rambling.

Here’s how he talks about the firebombing of Tokyo, for example:

…Again it’s an April morning twenty-nine months later (strangely enough. Let the numerologists look into this one: instead of B-17’s we are using B-29’s). The place is the limestone-and-coral isle of Guam instead of a tired bomber base on the Bedfordshire-Northants border in England. And I’ve been pounding that floor until my feet are ready to crack at the ankles. But good news is beginning to mount up. ...Here comes Tommy Power — he’s stooged around for two hours after completing his bomb run, taking pictures of the destruction of Tokyo. We will examine those photos while they’re still wet. We have never seriously wounded the largest city in the world before, but this time—

In a few hours, and operating from the seemingly suicidal altitude of only five to seven thousand feet, we have burnt the belly out of Tokyo. We know that we have shortened the war by many months. Each of those fourteen crews who went down on that mission have saved American lives, perhaps by the scores of thousands. We don’t pause to shed any tears for uncounted hordes of Japanese who lie charred in that acrid-smelling rubble. The smell of Pearl Harbor fires is too persistent in our own nostrils.

I want to emphasize that I have not edited any of the above whatsoever. The ellipses, the dangling hyphens, the strange punctuation, that is all directly from the original. Just bizarre.

If you pick up Mission to LeMay and open it to almost any page, you find just unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness madness. William Burroughs couldn’t do better. Here’s LeMay talking about the nuclear firepower of a Convair B-58 “Hustler” bomber (again, unedited):

And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage—half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly — the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that.

It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London ... rubble of Coventry and the rubble of Plymouth. ... Blow up or bum up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg’s buildings, and sixty per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen and Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again.

The force of all these, in a single pod.

And LeMay apparently didn’t even like the B-58, because its range was so limited. The above is how he talks about a bomber he doesn’t particularly care for.

Imagine yourself at a bar, and a heavyset, dead-eyed man who is physically incapable of smiling started in with that rant. I’d almost rather have a drink with Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, I think.

Here’s LeMay riffing on the Strategic Air Command (again, unedited):

The B-58 was and is symbolic of SAC, as is the B-52, as could be the B-70 if we had them standing on the line (where they should be standing this minute. Maybe their advanced prototypes will stand there in the future).

If you removed that plate from the body of SAC, you could look in and see people and instruments. They would be as the intricate electronic physiology of an airplane today: each functioning, each trained, each knowing his special part and job — knowing what he must do in his groove and place to keep the body alive, the blood circulating. Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers. All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.

“Peace is our profession,” say the folks in SAC. Couldn’t be more correct, either.

There is a sequence about LeMay and the firebombing in Errol Morris’ The Fog of War (2003) that is just worth watching if you have not seen it. The film as a whole, which is an extended interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, is itself a must-see, but this sequence in particular, in which McNamara discusses what it was like to work as an aide to LeMay during World War II, what he was like as a person, and the question of whether they were “behaving as war criminals”:

Out of all of the parts of Mission with LeMay, though, the most telling part, I think, is the final paragraph of the introduction, in which he addresses his feelings about the bombing of Japanese cities. Here it is in its entirety:

I have indeed bombed a number of specific targets. They were military targets on which the attack was, in my opinion, justified morally. I’ve tried to stay away from hospitals, prison camps, orphan asylums, nunneries and dog kennels. I have sought to slaughter as few civilians as possible.

What can one say to such callousness? It is strange even by the standards of his time and his contemporaries. “I have sought to slaughter as few civilians as possible.” What madness.

I don’t think LeMay came up with “Peace is our profession” as the motto of SAC, but it remains associated with him. When SAC was replaced by Strategic Command in 1992, they got rid of the motto. Years later, when General John Hyten became head of Strategic Command, he very deliberately worked to restore its “status” within the military, and part of that was bringing back the motto, but with one change. See if you can spot it:

Here’s Hyten explaining it during an address in 2018:1

There’s one change that is made to that motto that you’ll see if you look carefully as you go around the command. The key is actually on that chart. Go all the way to the bottom, below my name. You see “Peace is our profession”, right? But if you notice the little thing at the end, because the legend has it that Gen. Curtis LeMay back in the 1950s when he heard that motto said. “I really like that motto. That’s who we are and that’s what we do. But you know what? You need a dot, dot, dot at the end." The dot, dot, dot at the end says peace is our profession, however, if you want to cross the line, we’re coming.” And we’re coming in the most unbelievable, powerful way and we will change the game, and you never want to cross that line.

And so that’s the change: the addition of the ellipses (…). I think LeMay would have approved, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. A few years after “writing” his memoir, he appeared in his final act as the Vice Presidential candidate for the ill-fated, pro-Segregationist Presidential run of Alabama governor George Wallace — as if everything else wasn’t enough.

This was a real question that Frederick Reines, a 30-year old theoretical physicist at Los Alamos was contemplating in the spring of 1947.1 The result of his work is a report that I recently received as the result of a FOIA request I made to the National Nuclear Security Administration: “Radioactive Pollution of the Earth’s Atmosphere,” dated March 25, 1947.2

Reine’s paper is an interesting one, and the timing is interesting as well. This is not long after the US Atomic Energy Commission took over the operation of the American nuclear infrastructure, and Los Alamos was on a more firmer postwar mission than it had been in the first year and a half since the end of World War II had put its future into limbo. They were now, truly and unambiguously, in the business of building up a postwar nuclear arsenal, even if the question of international control of nuclear weapons had not yet been settled.

So it was perhaps appropriate that they began to contemplate a truly dark, future question about what a much larger nuclear war might look like globally. Reine’s study was a very preliminary and in many ways oversimplified one, but it may have been the first to really look at the question in a structured way.

The basic question Reines is tackling is how the ambient radioactivity of the Earth’s surface would be impacted by the detonation of vast numbers of atomic bombs. His introduction makes clear that he is well aware that this is a very rough calculation, one that does not take into account the ways that meteorological conditions would affect the movement of radioactive materials globally, or the fact that the weapons would be detonated in different locations and at different times.

Reine’s model, as I understand it, first looks at the total radioactivity produced by the detonation n number of Nagasaki-type atomic bombs, looking exclusively at the gamma emissions of their fission products, the most intense part of nuclear fallout.3 He then asks, if those radioactive byproducts was in a spherical shell around the Earth — think of it as a uniform layer of clouds — and falling down over time, what would the exposures be for people on the ground?

From this he produces several tables that give the radioactivity at a given point as a result of a given number of bobs and the altitude and height of the radioactive “shell” around the Earth. The culmination of this, as I read it, is a table that gives the “number of bombs to give assumed total doses for uniform distribution of activity.” At left, what he has labeled as R_os, is the total radioactive dose received on the ground, globally, in Roentgen units. 100 R produces radiation sickness and is where long-term cancer effects are very unambiguously seen in the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 500 R is considered to be probably fatal; 1000 R is definitely fatal. 10 R would increase one’s lifetime fatal cancer risk a bit but should be otherwise unnoticeable.

The other column, n, refers to the total number of Nagasaki-style (20 kiloton or so) bombs that would produce the dosage. So for a uniform, global dose of 100 R, you would require 0.9 x 10^6 = 900,000 Nagasaki bombs. Which is a phenomenal number of Nagasaki bombs. That does, however, work out to “only” 18,000 megatons, which, in the thermonuclear age, is not so much after all — that is less than the peak megatonnage of the US Cold War nuclear stockpile.4 So while Reines’ conclusions are, in 1947, fairly optimistic at a time when the global nuclear numbered in the dozens and the weapons were all Nagasaki-style, projecting only 15 years or so into the future, they were more troubling.

In April 1947, the top-secret Manhattan District History chapter on technical work at Los Alamos recorded a different conclusion to the same question:

The most world-wide destruction could come from radioactive poisons. It has been estimated that the detonation of 10,000 – 100,000 fission bombs would bring the radioactive content of the Earth’s atmosphere to a dangerously high level.5

This sentence is uncited, so it is not clear where the calculation comes from. If it is from Reines’ report, it would only work if “dangerously high level” was defined as being well between 1 R and 10 R. That’s not high-enough for worldwide extinction — this is not an On the Beach scenario — but that would be a high-enough level that one would expect the global cancer rate to rise.

The other report that I got from the same FOIA request was from a slightly later period. This one was written by Ernest C. Anderson, a graduate research assistant who worked with Willard Libby on his pioneering development of the carbon-14 radioactive dating technique. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that he was assigned to update Reines’ calculation, taking into account new weapons possibilities: “Radioactive Contamination of the Atmosphere by Super Bombs,” dated November 29, 1949.6

As the title suggests, this is concerned with the “Super,” their term at the time for thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs. This report was written during the H-bomb debate, which would be resolved in late January 1950 with Truman giving the project the go-ahead. At this point, they did not really know how to make Super bombs, and the Super being conceived was what later became referred to as a the Classical Super (and would ultimately be proven to be an unworkable design).

Anderson’s approach was a bit different than Reines’. They didn’t actually know how to make (much less have) a Super in 1949, so they didn’t have precise data to compare it to. But they understood that a Super as they conceived it then would produce a lot of neutrons, which could activate (make radioactive) a lot of otherwise stable atoms near the explosion, particularly nitrogen in the atmosphere (which would create radioactive carbon-14), and would also potentially create a lot of additional fission products. Unlike Reines, Anderson was attentive to the biological aspects of fallout — something that was much better understood in 1949 than in 1947, and is probably reflective of Anderson’s deeper experience modeling radioactivity in general.

Anderson’s assumption was that the Super would be about 1,000 times more powerful than the stockpiled atomic bombs of 1949, and so around 40 megatons each. He then goes through a series of equations looking at how many neutrons would produced per Super detonation, and how many of these could produce carbon-14, and how much of that radioactive substance would likely end up in the human body.

He also looked at fission products, which gives some interesting insight on their ideas about the Super at the time. According to Anderson, a workable but “crude guess” at how much “active material” it would need to start the Super reaction was 80 kg of fissionable material — which is a lot, about 25% more than the amount used in the very-inefficient Little Boy bomb. This is consistent with some other accounts of the early Super work, which imagined that a massive gun-type device might be needed to initiate the reaction properly.

As essentially all of this fissionable material would fission under the neutron flux of the Super, it would mean all 80 kg would be turned into fission products. By comparison, a “normal” atomic fission bomb at that time would only release about 2 kg of fission products (corresponding to a ~40 kiloton yield).

Anderson further assumed that this 80 kg would be all of the fission products produced, and that no materials would be used that might deliberately create more fission products or induced materials. In reality, that is not how hydrogen bombs were designed — they deliberately captured the neutrons from the fusion reaction and used them for further fission reactions.

Ultimately he concludes that 1,200 Super detonations “could be tolerated” without raising the background radioactivity beyond the “tolerance dose,” which was the maximum permissible dose for radiation workers at the time. He does not calculate any higher doses than that — which is a bit of a shame. At 40 Mt each, that does add up to a respectable 48,000 megatons, so perhaps he figured that he had made his point that the world was not in imminent danger of irradiating itself to death as the result of the Super.

But one should remember, though, that Anderson was only using a figure of 80 kg of fissionable material per Super — so these are very “clean” weapons, with only about 1.4 megatons their energy coming from fission. So another way to read his figure is that it is more like 1,700 fission megatons to reach “tolerance dose,” which is a much more, er, achievable number.

It is of some interest that a different paper tackling the same question, but using some different assumptions, was prepared in early December 1949 for President Truman by the Atomic Energy Commission using 10 Mt Super (still nearly all fusion) as its benchmark, and concluded it would take around 50,000 Supers exploding to hit the “danger point.” I do not think that this had any impact on Truman’s thinking, but it is interesting to see how these kinds of models were deployed.7

The Manhattan Project History section from 1947, incidentally, argued that perhaps only 10 to 100 Supers would need to be detonated to reach an equivalent radioactivity to 10,000 – 100,000 Nagasaki style bombs. It assumed that these Super bombs would be around 10 megatons in power, but get a substantial fraction (it does not specify, but it is implied a lot) of its output from fission. It optimistically suggests that “presumably Supers of this type would not be used in warfare for just this reason.”

So what does this all add up to? It is interesting that these estimates from 1947 and 1949 both somewhat hover around the same idea, which is that these kind of back-of-the-envelope models imply that it is pretty difficult to contaminate every square inch of the Earth with a lethal amount of radioactivity. Which is all very true. Later work would continue on this topic in the 1950s as the (extraordinarily euphemistically named) Project SUNSHINE of the Atomic Energy Commission and the RAND Corporation, which had been pushed by Libby as a result of the development of working H-bombs in 1952, and new concerns about fallout. They too would conclude that it would take much more than tens of thousands of megatons to make the entire world uninhabited from a radioactive point of view.

The more depressing reality, of course, is that you don’t have to uniformly raise the background radioactivity to such high rates for nuclear war to destroy nations, and even civilization itself. But these documents do give some insights into how the existential threat of nuclear weapons was being conceived of by scientists at a time when the arsenals were still quite small compare to what they would become.

If one reads the accounts of Preppers (or Survivalists, as they were known in the 1970s-1990s) on their own origins, they often suggest that a precursor to their way of thinking was a brief “movement” advocating the idea of “Retreat,” with the people doing it calling themselves “Retreaters.” While I’m not sure it warrants its own “-ism,” I am going to call this Retreatism and treat it as if it was a coherent philosophy, for the sake of argument and narrative, and in this post will be discussing what I have been able to find about its origins, its “moment,” and the both practical and ideological similarities and differences between it, Civil Defense programs, and the later concepts of Survivalism and Prepperism.

The origins of Retreatism

Who were the Retreaters, and what did they believe? In a nutshell, Retreatism was born in the late 1960s and appears to have continued through the mid-1970s, and can be thought as an explicitly Libertarian response to the possibility of social collapse. The “retreat concept,” as I will elaborate on more later in this post, is basically the idea that people should develop both a mindset, an education, and, ideally, the physical means to “retreat” from a failing society on a moment’s notice.

The name that is most often associated with Retreatism is that of Don L. Stephens, who, along with his wife, Barbie, were the co-authors of a publication known as The Retreater’s Bibliography, the first edition of which appears to have been printed in 1967.1

The Retreater’s Bibliography was, in brief, a list of books and resources that would be useful for any “Retreater.” I’ll get into its contents (and what a “Retreater” really is) in a moment, but as just an interesting item, one of the only easily-accessible sources that mentions The Retreater’s Bibliography from the time is Steward Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog (Fall 1968), which includes a mention the publication in their section on “Nomadics.” It treats The Retreater’s Bibliography as a publication not unlike The Whole Earth Catalog itself, and notes that on overlapping category, “we’ve found that sometimes we have more complete information, sometimes the Stephens do.”2

This is an interesting thing in and of itself, I think, as The Whole Earth Catalog sits at an odd intersection of counter-culture, hippies, techno-utopianism (lots of Buckminster Fuller), and Libertarianism. It is also interesting that at no point does the Catalog attempt to describe what a “Retreater” is, other than something to do with “living outside a system.” The other books in the Catalog’s “Nomadics” category include books on “survival” (all of which seem to be about mundane survival, not nuclear war), camping, and “outdoor life” more generally (the L.L. Bean catalog is not only given two half-pages, but is listed as the “model” for the Whole Earth Catalog).

The Whole Earth Catalog also puts the Stephens’ bibliography next to another publication, Innovator, which they describe as a publication for people who are “very dubious about Society’s chances just now… they expect an Atlas Shrugged sort of collapse, and they are preparing for it by defining and becoming proficient at a ‘libertarian’ way of life: philosophic and bodily survival amid order or chaos.” This is pretty on the money, as far as I can tell.

Don Stephens, according to a short biography appended to a 1976 article he wrote for Reason (another Libertarian magazine), “was trained in architecture but has spent an ever-increasing portion of his time since 1964 researching, writing, and lecturing on personal survival and retreat preparation.” In the article, Stephens characterized his and his wife’s interest in the subject as such:

Over 12 years ago Barbie and I decided this country was headed for trouble that might well result in a complete breakdown of its economic, political, and social structure. Since that time we've seen little to change our minds. Hard coinage has been replaced in general circulation by near-worthless sandwich tokens; the state’s “reserve notes” are no longer redeemable in anything but more paper; product prices have doubled or even tripled while the quality of workmanship has steadily declined; deficit spending, public and private, has mushroomed, as has the probability of falling victim to property theft or personal violence.

Added to all that, we have become increasingly concerned with the vulnerability of domestic and international food supplies, global population trends and their consequences, environmental decay, and the depletion of those fossil fuels on which world industry and transportation have become so dependent. Finally, we are aware of the threat presented by the growing number of countries in the "nuclear club" and the possibility of being caught in the midst of an exchange of force between its numbers.3

One will notice that nuclear war is literally last on his list of concerns, but it’s on the list. My sense is that Retreatism was not spawned directly by fears of nuclear war. Although Stephens says his interests in this were sparked in 1964 — which is still very much a time of nuclear war awareness, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the same year as Dr. Strangelove — the mobilizing concerns in his writings in the later 1960s and 1970s were of a different kind of catastrophic mindset: economic collapse, followed by accompanying social collapse.

Stephens, interestingly enough, appears to have, some 17 years ago, edited both the Wikipedia pages for himself and for “Survivalism.” The original “Survivalism” article jumped directly from Cold War Civil Defense programs to the 1970s, and Stephens added a section on the 1960s, injecting himself into the story:

With the increasing inflation of the 1960s and the impending US monetary Devaluation (predicted by in his 1970 book How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation), as well as the continuing concern with possible nuclear exchanges between the US and the Soviet Union, and the increasing vulnerability of urban centers to supply shortages and other systems failures, a number of primarily-conservative and Libertarian thinkers began suggesting that individual preparations would be wise. Mr. Browne began offering seminars on how to survive a monetary collapse in 1967, with Don Stephens, an architectural design innovator, providing input on how to build and equip a remote Survival retreat and including a copy of his original Retreater's Bibliography (1967) for each seminar participant.

Articles on the subject appeared in such small-distribution Libertarian publications as The Innovator and Atlantis Quarterly. It was also from this period that Robert D. Kephart formulated the publication of Inflation Survival Letter (Later renamed Personal Finance) which included a continuing section on personal preparedness by Mr. Stephens for several years, and which sponsored high-ticket seminars around the US on the same cautionary topics, in which Stephens participated, along with James McKeever and other defensive-investment, hard-money advocates.

Now, any good historian is going to be wary when a putative historical actor inserts themselves into the history of something, and so we need not take Stephens’ account of this as gospel. But it is telling, and dovetails with the actual contents of The Retreater’s Bibliography, and other writings from the time (which will be discussed in the next section), that again the origin of Retreatism is found explicitly in Libertarian fears of economic collapse leading to social collapse and government overreach, not nuclear war.

Harry Browne was a major figure in the American Libertarian party, and was their presidential nominee for two elections. He wrote many books from 1970 onward about how American and global monetary policy were going to lead to a total economic collapse, and giving the reader the secrets to weathering that storm. We’ll come back to that, and his seminar; for now, let’s look at the Stephens’ book itself.

The Retreater’s Bibliography

The Retreater’s Bibliography was first published in 1967, but was expanded into a second edition in 1970. Tracking down a copy was a bit of a bear, but I am grateful to my friend Patrick McCray for lending me the copy of the second edition that the University of California has in its library system. I have scanned it in its entirety and you can download it here.

Most of the The Retreater’s Bibliography is, as it suggests, a bibliography, with lists of books, some of which also contain a sentence or two of annotation. Its headings are instructive as to its framing: “Survival and Camping [Camping and Survival],” “Gold and Silver,” “Finding a Proper Location,” “Food Supply [and Domestic Animals],” “Electricity,” “Waste and Water Disposal,” “Communications,” “Building Your Own Home,” “Medicine,” “Education,” “Recreation,” “Protection [and Hunting],” “General.” The bracketed text is how the heading were added to or changed in the “Supplement” appended to the first edition, which also got rid of “General” and replaced it with “Land Mobility,” “Water Mobility,” “Book Sources,” and “Miscellaneous.”

The original 1967 edition appears to have made just on a typewriter; the 1970 edition is professionally typeset. Materials in the 1970 edition further clarify that the original Bibliography was “assembled… as a feature" of Harry Browne’s “Surviving a Monetary Crisis” seminars, and that it was “was tailored to parallel the topics covered by the speakers.” It also says that the original seminar was “oriented toward the fixed, land based retreat,” but that since then, “a good deal of interest has been shown in land or water mobility as an approach to retreat freedom.” The Stephens’ also, in the 1970 edition, are advertising their own services of “personal counseling on retreat problems and architectural design of libertarian homes and retreat structures.”

Most of the actual bibliographic entries are pretty dull, as one would expect of any bibliography. There are only a couple references to nuclear war: a reference a pro-Civil Defense book mixed into the “Survival and Camping” section (that these two terms are combined is fascinating in and of itself), and the 1964 (revised) edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and its “nuclear bomb effects computer,” are both included under “General” (along with the Sear’s catalog, a book on fox trapping, and a catalog for camping gear, among other things that feel rather small beer compared to nuclear war).

“The retreat concept”

Also included with the second edition of The Retreater’s Bibliography is a copy of the April 1968 issue of The Innovator (“applications, experiments, and advanced developments of liberty”), a Libertarian newsletter that was defunct by 1970. The issue in question was headlined “RETREAT ???” and was edited by the Stephens, and is dedicated specifically to the question of what they called “the retreat concept.”

The issue starts out with a fictional news story, dated May 1969, about the US president declaring a national emergency and using his new emergency powers to suspend political elections, censor the press, prohibit leaving the country, confiscation of privately-owned gold and silver, and the rounding up “all persons advocating dissent, including but not limited to political activists, preachers, poets, philosophers, anarchists, libertarians, capitalists, racists [!], peaceniks, civil rights advocates, beatniks and hippies” and putting them into camps for “reorientation and education.” It then transitions out of the fictional story to do a “it can happen here!” sort of rhetorical move, indicating that some of these things happened in the past in the United States and elsewhere.

For the “Libertarian” who finds the above threats to liberty abhorrent, “the retreat concept is a promising source of freedom,” the Stephens’ argue, and suggest that the United States was essentially founded by people seeking such a “retreat” from Europe, and that the drive of the Western frontier was made up by such people, and so on. Along with Harry Browne, they also appeal to Ayn Rand’s concept of the “intentional community retreat” as espoused in both Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.

This article also includes the only concrete definition of “the retreat concept” that appears in the entire Bibliography:

Noel [sic] Webster defines retreating as “an act or process of withdrawing, especially from that which is difficult, dangerous or disagreeable” and a retreat as “a place of privacy or safety — a refuge.” Basically, there is a point for each of us when the restrictions and dangers of life in the populated areas of the country outweigh all the positive factors. This point will be different for each individual and to a large degree will depend on his ability to establish a comfortable, safe life on his own.

By making preparations now — either by gaining knowledge necessary for self sufficiency or by establishing and stocking your retreat — you will not be forced to stay when dropping out would offer greater freedom and safety. And preparing yourself can be a source of pleasure as well as an insurance policy. As you become more able to live, not just survive, on your own, you will feel less trapped by the decay all around you. As you learn each new life skill you will feel confidence and pride in your growing efficacy. And by establishing a retreat in advance, you will have a vacation spot that you can enjoy and improve year by year even if you never use it on a full-time basis; you’ll have great piece of mind, just knowing it’s there.

I think this is remarkably revealing. The “retreat concept” is a response to anxiety about the future state of the world, a way to get “great piece of mind” by feeling like you’ll always have options, a “refuge” to go to if things get too awful. It’s about creating a “source of pleasure” to offset your apocalyptic premonitions, and if you set it up in advance, you get a vacation home, to boot. So it’s one part insurance policy, one part property investment, and at least one part placebo — you haven’t actually guaranteed you’d be safe if any of those things in the “news story” happened. If a totalitarian government starts rounding up all “dissidents,” your vacation home is not going to be a truly safe refuge. (There is later discussion that suggests that the Stephens are not above essentially unregistered or illegal “retreats,” as “if government agencies are aware of the retreat, it will be subject to their coercion as long as the State continues to function.”)

We will note, again, that nuclear war isn’t really part of this. The framing is entirely about hostile government and perhaps social collapse. There is one section in the issue, under a discussion of “where to retreat,” which mentions nuclear war as a possible factor: “Is danger of nuclear attack a factor in retreating? If so, is the retreat site away from probable targets and fallout patterns? (Check with Civil Defense).” But otherwise, the main enemies in mind appear to be “looters” and “bureaucrats.”

The other articles in The Innovator describe other, alternative approaches to “retreat,” including mobile retreat (people using boats or vans as a way to keep moving as they “retreat” — the obvious subject of fuel availability and access is interestingly not discussed!), and “retreating on a shoestring,” which is what one can do to prepare for a potential “retreat” if one does not have the capital to buy a second home. The latter is interesting to me as it feels closer to the Survivalist/Prepper mindset than the “vacation home” approach: the creation of an “emergency retreat locker” (basically a large “bug-out bag”), and preparation activities that are focused on self-education (read books, practice).

I appreciate that Don Stephens, in his articles, appears to have been very attentive to the idea that a lot of the work of “preparation” is mental, and that the benefits are also psychological in nature: “TRAIN YOUR MIND to be adaptable. Learn to accept the fact that things may change quite suddenly for the worse so that if this happens you can be acting while others panic. … As you make these preparations, any eventuality will become less threatening. Only those who are prepared for the worst mentally and materially can afford to think optimistically. I do.”

As an aside, the division of labor (or interest) between Don and Barbie is not entirely clear. The main publications are listed as co-authored. Within the issue of The Innovator, they each have separate by-lines on specific articles. Don seems to be the main contributor, but Barbie wrote the article on “Preparation for Good Eating,” which, traditional gender roles notwithstanding, is pretty solid. I particularly liked her discussion of the value of a seed library, beyond the difficulty of growing them, which she does not underemphasize: “Under retreat conditions, seeds may prove a better form of small coinage than copper-nickel slugs, so taking along a few extra for trading purposes might be a good idea. … Lastly, try gardening by the organic method at home now before it’s a matter of survival. Now is the time to have those ‘crop failures,’ while the local grocery store is there to offer aid.”

Lastly, the Retreater’s Bibliography also contains a “BASIC CHECKLIST” appended to it, of items one would want available at one’s “retreat.” Most of them are pretty standard “survival”/”camping” equipment — fishing hooks, insect repellent, first aid supplies, matches, tents, canteens, but the inclusion of “weapons” as an unspecified final category makes it a bit more post-apocalyptic, and its list of “Books” you might want to have is fascinating:

I appreciate that even the Stephens’ seemed to question whether Rand’s Atlas Shrugged actually merited being included in the “BASIC CHECKLIST” for a “retreat.” And without wanting to beat a dead horse about it, I will just note that they did not include a radiation detector, dosimeter, and other Civil Defense hardware in their list for the “BASIC CHECKLIST.” Again, this is not a plan for dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war.

From “Retreat” to “Survival”

So if “Retreatism” wasn’t quite “Survivalism,” and wasn’t quite about nuclear war, how do we get from one to the other? I’ll talk more about that in the next entry in this series, which is about the emergence of “Survivalism” in the 1970s. But the basic gist is that while “Retreatism” was definitely not “Survivalism” (or “Prepperism”) in many ways, one can see the seeds of the latter in the former. At a minimum, the “Retreatism” feels like the first explicitly individual approach to "survival” to be articulated, deliberately contrasting itself with the collective approach of Civil Defense, which it not only is skeptical of, but regards as possibly sinister in regards to how “the government” would handle a massive social crsis.

I don’t get the sense that the “Retreat” movement was ever very large or influential outside of Libertarian circles, which was itself already pretty fringe. Don Stephens’ 1976 article in Reason, “In Defense of Retreats,” makes for an interesting addendum here. While saying that there were many interested in the “retreat concept” — he says he has consulted with “nearly 500 families over the years, talked with over 2,000 more at seminars and lectures, and received letters from several thousand others describing their retreat plans” — the entire article is pitched against what feels like a very sharp critique of the idea coming from within Libertarian circles.

The critique, in a nutshell, is that “retreat” is not really social survival, and that anyone who thought they’d last very long in a vacation home during a total social collapse or authoritarian takeover is fooling themselves both about how other people are going to react (if there are bands of looters, or an authoritarian government, they will find you), and one’s own ability to survive in the absence of modern social-economic structures (“a large-scale market, mass production, and the division of labor”).

Stephens’ replies to these criticisms aren’t all that compelling — they are a mix of “it’s worth a try” and “anyone who believes that they are dependent on the state isn’t much of a Libertarian.” Which doesn’t really address the issue so much as declare it out of bounds, and the lack of a strong reply perhaps hints at an actual underlying issue with Libertarianism.

Stephens did, however, have an interesting discussion about fallout shelters and Civil Defense, arguing that “retreat” was not a “passing fad, like the bomb shelters of the ‘60s”:

In several ways that is far from true. First, the pressure to build family fallout shelters was exerted vertically downward, from the government to the people, in a temporary admission that it couldn’t protect us from all eventualities. When the government stopped pushing shelters, people stopped building them. Retreating, on the other hand, is far from a government-backed program. It is a horizontal, grassroots movement arrived at by individuals and passed on from one to another. It’s based on a real concern for what is happening and where it seems to be leading.

Second, unlike the shelter fad, which ran out of steam when the government changed its supportive policies, the motivation for retreat preparation will continue as long as our complex system of production, distribution, and exchange remains vulnerable. With the trend toward ever-greater intervention in the market, that looks to be an ongoing threat.

When I wrote in the previous post that Civil Defense and “Survivalism”/”Prepperism” were antithetical to each other, I wasn’t just applying my own analysis — it’s pretty clear that the Survivalists, and the Retreaters in this case, felt that way themselves, and Stephens illustrates the difference in mindset very directly above.

In my next post in this series, I will talk about the origins of “Survivalism” as a separate development from “Retreat.” There are some obvious ideological overlaps, but I will say that my sense is that the “Retreaters” feel much more benign and less hard-line (or “hard-core”) than the later “Survivalists.” There is something almost quaint about “retreat”; although the Libertarian ideology comes through, the Stephens’ efforts were less about writing an anti-social, post-apocalyptic manifesto, and more about giving people a good excuse to learn some camping skills, buy a vacation home, and have a self-consciously psychological balm against the (very real) uncertainty in the world. In his article “In Defense of Retreats,” Stephens is quite open about the latter:

Even if never needed, a well-planned retreat will yield most of its benefits anyway. It can provide peace of mind, a place to get away from it all for temporary respites, recreation, a sense of efficacy and, a store of useful consumable goods to fall back on, even if there is never a general crisis requiring its use. Most retreaters would be quite happy if, by some miracle, their havens never would be used for anything other than family outings.

This is a sentiment that I do not think would be easy to find in the writers of the later “Survivalists” or “Preppers”: an acknowledgment that at some level this is a hobby, and that it would be better for everyone if that is all it had to stay as. I don’t get the sense, in other words, that the Stephens’ were actually longing for the end of the world, and that is a very important distinction to make between their mindset, and those that would follow.

What is a Prepper? Where did the idea come from? When did this kind of behavior start? These are interesting questions for a historian, and I’ve been looking into the matter a bit. I would have thought that there were serious academic studies of it, but my sense is that this is not really the case at the moment. Most of what has been written about the history of this mindset or “movement” has been written either by journalists, by Preppers themselves, or has been done as form of anthropology (studying current Preppers) rather than history.

Journalistic approaches to history can be useful first drafts, but a journalist’s approach is not usually a historian’s approach. “Self-histories” by Preppers are valuable inasmuch as they tell us how they situate themselves into narratives about the past, but they tend to suffer from certain obvious biases (the Prepper histories I have seen, for example, tend to distance their movement from the figures in their movement who have shown themselves to be ultimately noxious over the years, however influential they were at the time). And anthropological studies of Preppers are valuable for understanding the mindset, but don’t tell us about where it came from.

So what I have decided to do is to try and sketch out an outline of “a brief history of Preppers.” This will be a multi-part series (over an unknown amount of time) that pulls together my sense of how the history of this behavior might be understood. It is something I have been thinking about for several years now, and I have been slowly piecing together parts of this. I think understanding the history of Preppers is an important part of understanding the modern post-apocalyptic mindset.

Major caveats: This is not an in-depth study; it is scattershot, and more intellectual history than archival history. These are preliminary categorizations. And it is entirely US-centric; I have not looked at how these ideas have manifested in other countries, or the differences (subtle and not) between US Preppers and other Preppers (or if one wants to even apply the term “Prepper” to non-US movements).

My current plan (subject to change) for this series:

• Part 1: Civil Defense and Preppers. Defining our scope of study and talking about the “pre-history” of Preppers. You are here.

• Part 2: Retreatism and Survivalism. The emergence of hyper-individualistic survival movements in the late 1960s through the and 1980s.

• Part 3: From Survivalists to Preppers. The deeper tarnishing of Survivalism in the late 1990s, and the mainstreaming (and mocking) of individual survival mindsets post-Y2K and 9/11.

Who is a Prepper?

We need to start by defining our terms. The term “Prepper” is a fairly recent one: It doesn’t start appearing as a common term for this kind of behavior until the early 2000s. The show “Doomsday Preppers” (2012-2014) probably helped popularize the term and the idea, although it is clear that the concept predates the show. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the more commonly-used term was “Survivalist” and the movement was called “Survivalism.” My sense is that the terms carry slightly shifted connotations. A “Survivalist” is generally someone participating in or advocating an -ism (Survivalism), which is to say, an apocalyptic ideological conception of the world. “Prepper” can include that, but people can also be somewhat more casual “Preppers” without buying entirely into the mindset of Survivalism. To put it another way, “Prepper” is a more “mainstreamed” idea than Survivalism, a consequence of Y2K fears and 9/11. (I plan to discuss this distinctions and shift at some length Part 3.)

For my purposes, a “Prepper” is someone who believes that the likelihood of social and civilizational collapse is plausible-enough that they believe it is worth time and resources to plan for that eventuality today. Their goal for survival is relatively constrained: they are trying to protect themselves and their families, and perhaps a small subset of other close people, but they are not trying to protect an entire community, nor is their goal to rebuild “society.” It is an individualistic approach to preparedness, and not a collective one, even if, in their pursuit of it, they communicate and share ideas with other like-minded people. The degree to which they engage in a fantasy of post-social existence seems to vary, but I want to make a distinction between people who store a few weeks of food and water in case of a temporary emergency (e.g., a localized national disaster) and people who are expecting a society-wide collapse that could endure for an extended people of time (months to years to forever).

So someone who follows FEMA preparedness guidelines is not necessarily a “Prepper.” FEMA guidelines are not about surviving the apocalypse, and the level of investment required to satisfy those guidelines — although not at all minimal, and I doubt most “non-Preppers” satisfy them (I definitely don’t!) — is much smaller than the level of investment that would be required to survive a prologued social collapse. At the same time, I suspect there are people who align with the “Prepper” mindset who have done essentially no actual “preparation” work other than read about it, and are probably well below FEMA guidelines. So being considered a “Prepper” is about a mindset more than it is about your actual level of “preparation.” We could get into sub-definitional questions (Are Mormons Preppers?) but I think for my purposes this is good-enough to start with.

Preppers and Civil Defense

Prepper-written histories of their “movement” vary quite widely in what they identify as its “pre-history.” Some of them want to draw a real sense of continuity to the deep past: that all human beings prior to the development of modern civilization were “Preppers” in some deep sense, and even in civilized times there have been people, like the American Pioneers, who had to engage in “Prepper” activities as they went “off the grid.” I find this interesting as a work of self-history — an attempt at “normalizing” the mindset, and also one that highlights it deep antipathy to concepts like “civilization” and “society” — but it is not very useful as an historical starting point. Pioneers were not preparing for the collapse of society; their End of the World preparations were more spiritual in nature.

A more sensible place to start is Civil Defense: the various programs run by different agencies of the US government during the Cold War that were designed to mitigate the effects of a nuclear war on American civil society. “American civil society” here is meant to differentiate Civil Defense from other, related concepts, like Continuity of Government, which is about mitigating the effects of such an attack on the American government (e.g., plans to make sure Congress and the office of the Presidency are able to continue in some form), and military defense (e.g., fighter craft trying to shoot down bombers before they reach their targets, civilian or otherwise).1

The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was created in late 1950 by President Truman as a result of public and Congressional pressure (he was himself fairly ambivalent about the utility of Civil Defense) in the wake of the detection of the first Soviet nuclear test (September 1949) and the beginning of the Korean War (June 1950). Over the course of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, its focus was split between trying to organize federal-, state-, and local-level governmental efforts to prepare for nuclear war’s effect on the civilian population (e.g., stockpiling food, water, and medical supplies, and creating organizations and plans for how to organize the post-attack environment) and creating preparation messaging meant for civilians.

It is the latter that we are most concerned with for this study. You are probably familiar with some of this messaging already. The short film Duck and Cover (1951-52) is the most famous of these messaging efforts: a short film, aimed at an audience of children and meant to be shown in schools, it gives instruction as to how to recognize a nuclear attack and increase one’s chances for survival from its immediate effects. This includes getting away from windows, making one’s self a smaller target for flying debris, keeping one’s face and body out of direct line-of-sight to the fireball, using shelters if they are available and one has time to get to them, and, of course, hiding under one’s school desk.

One could spend a lot of time dissecting this particular film (and someday, dear reader, we will do just that), but the general point to really take away here is Duck and Cover was:

• a work of communication aimed at a segment of the general public (hello, kids!)

• largely about individual action (you gotta save yourselves, kids!)

• premised on the idea of relatively short-term survival and deference to officials/authorities who will be leading up the post-attack reconstruction effort (the Civil Defense man is your friend, kids!)

• ultimately part of an overall plan (however well-conceived, however earnest) for collective survival (you gotta survive so the country can recover, kids!)

There’s a lot more one can say about this film and its goals (and the “goals” of Civil Defense more broadly), but the point that this is about individual action in concert with larger planning for a collective purpose is what I want to get across here as the “essence” of Civil Defense.2

Films were not the entirety of Civil Defense; there were drills, there were endless pamphlets (including those that targeted specific subsets of the “general population,” like farmers and mortuary practitioners), and there were efforts to create group shelters and underground schools and just a whole lot of things. They all follow this broad outline, though, of being part of a collective plan, but still generally relying on individuals to become educated and take initiative toward that end.

The exact recommendations and tactics shifted along with the Cold War. As the imagined attack increased in scope, for example, the possibility of urban centers surviving through the use of “bunkering” techniques dropped considerably, and the emphasis shifted towards tactics of evacuation and suburban fallout shelters.

It is really vitally important to emphasize that Civil Defense is not the same thing as Survivalism or Preppers. Survivalists and Preppers draw upon the research and some (but not all!) of the strategies formulated by Civil Defense programs, but their imagined goals are very different.

The Survivalist/Prepper mindset is about individual survival. It is often (as we will see in Part 2) explicitly anti-statist at its core: it carries with it a deep distrust of, and even antipathy to, government authority. Its adherents tend to be deeply skeptical that the government will protect them, fix things, or even be reconstructed after a major catastrophe. The goal of Civil Defense is always about reconstruction of the status quo, in the same way that Continuity of Government is about maintaining some form of the status quo politically. The goals of Survivialists/Preppers are usually about the survival of their individual selves and their family unit, and about creating some kind of new post-apocalyptic order.

Home fallout shelters

So what is the inflection point between Civil Defense and Preppers? I’ll talk more about that in Part 2, but I want to suggest, for now, what I think the conceptual “bridge” is between the two: the home fallout shelter.

The home fallout shelter program was inaugurated in the 1950s after the development of high-yield thermonuclear weapons made clear that huge areas downwind of military and urban targets would be possibly subjected to high-levels of dangerous radioactive particles descending from the remains of mushroom clouds as they were smeared across the upper atmosphere by the wind. The only possible “response” to such a threat, assuming war happened, was to get the people downwind of the threat into bunkers that would cut their exposure, especially during the early period of the fallout in which the dose rates were lethally high. If they could make it through that period, there would still be a threat of contamination to deal with, but that would be a more chronic threat than the immediate, acute threat.

In 1956, the Federal Civil Defense Administration submitted a $30 billion budget request to the Eisenhower administration for the building of public shelters. Other proposals around the same time put a serious, government-run fallout shelter system in the realm of $20 billion to $150 billion. Eisenhower felt these costs untenable and feared the emergence of a “garrison state.” The idea of spending vast sums of money on shelters was politically unpopular. The plans for a national fallout shelter system were scrapped.3

In its place emerged a much cheaper approach: try to convince people to build their own shelters, at their own cost and with their own labor. So instead of spending (a lot) of money on building infrastructure, you are spending money on making pamphlets and advertising, exhorting people to save their own families by building up cinderblock areas in their basements.

This, of course, presumes that a) people own houses and have basements or other convertible spaces, b) people have the necessary money and time, and c) people believe this is a worthwhile activity. All of which are large presumptions, and the evidence is that very few people actually built home shelters, even after the bigger fallout shelter push made during the Kennedy administration. (The Kennedy administration, along with pushing for personal shelters, also pushed to identify spaces in existing building that could be used as community shelters — the source of the once-ubiquitous fallout shelter signs. That is a different program to talk about a different day.)

The ideal fallout shelter was not meant to be used for very long. The decay rate for nuclear fallout is very steep: within 48 hours, the radioactivity will have reduced 100 fold. The most contaminated areas were imagined to require perhaps 1-2 weeks of sheltering; many would require only a few days to reach “safe-enough-to-leave” levels. Even two weeks in a basement, much less a buried metal tube, sounds fairly hellish to me, but the point is that this is a relatively short amount of time.

Which is to say, these were not "bunkers” in the Prepper sense. They are not meant to be occupied for long periods of time, they are not meant to be self-sufficient. They are not even totally cut off from the outside world. They are temporary shelters that would serve a very specific, short-term purpose: protect against the worst acute radiation, and then allow people to emerge and participate in the great task of rebuilding society.

But I think this push for self-sufficiency is where we can see the embryonic link between the collectivist, statist project of Civil Defense and the the self-sufficient, individualist goals of the Preppers and Survivalists. However you dress it up, the message of the home fallout shelter is you’re on your own. If you have doubts that the government will survive such a war, then the movement from survive for a few weeks to you might need to survive a very long time, indeed is not such a big one.

In conclusion: it is important to see that there is a pretty big distinction between Civil Defense and Preppers. They are conceptually and historically linked, with the home fallout shelter as arguably the “bridge” between the two approaches. But the Civil Defense administrator doesn’t even want Preppers. They want prepared citizens, but citizens who will follow orders — not hyper-individualists, certainly not anti-statists. They want people who will participate in an orderly rebuilding of the pre-existing society, of a restoring of the “old order.”

In part 2 of this series, I will talk about the emergence of the first true “Prepper” types in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the full-fledged development of Survivalism.

WEDS MOD I

The first version of the WEDS was developed at Livermore in 1966 by its Military Applications Group. It was realized in practice as an analog computer system. The implementation was very similar to the one described in the proposal documents described in the previous post: the user could input information about the weapon parameters and the environmental parameters, and translate those into a visualization of weapons effects as circles and fallout plumes onto a projected map image. There were of course other ways to computer this information, both with machines and by hand, but what WEDS would do is allow for a faster and more intuitive display of the information. A report in October of that year described the motivations very succinctly:

Primarily, the objective of WEDS is to provide a better visualization of nuclear weapon effects. This has been accomplished by simplifying the interface between the man and the information. Widespread experience with nuclear weapon effects is virtually nonexistent, nor can these effects be readily compared to conventional weapon effects. The detrimental effects of misjudgements with conventional weapons are of limited magnitude when compared to those of nuclear weapons, where misjudgements could be catastrophic. For example, a significant deviation in the yield of a conventional weapon could result in limited collateral destruction. A significant deviation in the yield of a nuclear weapon, however, could result in very extensive collateral destruction. In a given situation, the inability to rapidly assess nuclear weapon effects in advance might very well prevent their use altogether. The WEDS provides this rapid assessment capability. It displays the effects data so that it can be evaluated, changed, and reevaluated very rapidly in a simple, readily understandable manner.

Here’s what the full system looked like: a control console, a numerical display, and a map display:

This version of WEDS was described as a “breadboard model,” meant to determine the feasibility of the concept, and was not miniaturized or finalized. The control panel in particular seems more simplified and off-the-shelf than the one from the proposal, ditching the trackball for a simpler joystick and with use of a system of imprecise-looking analog meters for inputting settings:

There was also an optional “Weapons Effects Plotter” addition which would allow the printing of a “permanent graphical plot of any weapon parameter versus any other parameter,” which is an interesting addition.

Of course, the main show is the display of the system:

The numerical display (left) shows various information about the inputs and outputs requested, and the map display (right) projects the effects circles onto the map.

This first version of WEDS was, as a later report described it, “large and immobile, since it was designed and built from off the shelf components to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept.” It used an analog computer, and could not calculate fallout. The latter was a major detriment to what the designers wanted, so they began work on the fallout system that would be made to work with it, known as the Fallout Display System (FODS), which was completed by 1969.

Getting into the details of the FODS would take another post, and the number of people who would be interested in it is probably a bit small. For those people: it is a very simple disc thrower that they adapted from a model developed by the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in 1960.1 A later paper comparing different fallout models describes it simply as “a simple but realistic model that is capable of giving first-order approximations.” Not the highest praise, but good for its task. (Perhaps I will try to adapt the model for NUKEMAP, someday.)

WEDS MOD II

Livermore appears convinced that WEDS was worth pursuing, and appears to been working on it for several years at a low level of interest. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission and the US Army came to an agreement to evaluate WEDS “in the field,” and this spurred Livermore to rapidly finalize a new version that they dubbed WEDS MOD II. This was a much more serious-looking piece of hardware:

As you can see, they’ve integrated the system into a single, large console, which unites the features of the original “breadboard” model. You can also see that they’ve integrated FODS into it (the fallout plume). Under the hood, WEDS MOD II was a totally different animal: a fully digital computer known as Varian Data Machine 620/i. This was required for the fallout modeling, and also added more capabilities over the analog original. This bad boy had a core memory capacity of 4096 words, and magnetic disc memory up to 1.1 MB! I mean, what else do you want?

The actual programs are pretty horrific to try and read; they’re some kind of assembly language. The reports on the programs, though, are conveniently illustrated with logical flow diagrams that make it much easier to make sense of what they would be doing. There are also copious other diagrams meant to explain how they did various things. I was very pleased to see that they used the same method I developed for NUKEMAP to deal with the complicated “knee curve” for overpressure as a function of height of burst. Instead of doing anything from first-principles, or trying to do an analytic approximation, they just hand-entered the data from the graph I posted previously and then wrote a script that could properly interpolate the data:

That made me feel pretty good: I can program about as good as a government weapons designer from over 50 years ago! (Well, maybe not: I have access to a lot more memory, and pre-existing code tools, than they did. But let me have this.)

WEDS in the field

WEDS MOD II was designed to be used “in the field.” Deploying a homemade computer console into “the field” is easier said than done. Rather than worrying about how you’d package this all up, assemble it, and get it working wherever you wanted to use it, the Livermore people “trailerized,” as they put it, the WEDS MOD II.

Which is to say, they built it inside of a trailer that could be driven, flown, or shipped wherever needed, and could be attached to a mobile power supply and atmospheric controls:

To test it “in the field” for the first time, in March 1971, they shipped it to Patton Barracks, at the 7th Army Headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. This involved putting the whole trailerized system onto a cargo ship:

Once it arrived at the barracks, they were able to set it up and get it running by the end of the first day. They then showed it off to various officers and “special visitors” while they prepared it for “classes.”

The Livermore scientists reported the initial pilot run to be a success:

WEDS generated considerable interest… Each [attendee] saw in it something of value to him. Every attempt was made to get across the idea that WEDS is a prototype and that it should be viewed as a technique for handling effects information rather than a peculiarly designed piece of hardware.

The “classes” were held over the course of several weeks, with 16 students — officers and enlisted personnel — attending. Training them to use WEDS appears to have been easy, although having exactly one machine made it difficult to give the “operators” a lot of time with it, but after two weeks, they could not only use the machine, but train others to use it, too.

Training them to maintain WEDS was very difficult. I have some of the maintenance manuals for WEDS, and they are a nightmare: there are a lot of delicate parts involved, and they can all break, and they all need to be kept clean, and the amount of electrical engineering and computing experience seems considerable. The Livermore scientists concluded that two weeks was not enough to get up to speed as maintenance personnel.

The machine performed adequately for the 3 weeks it was in Germany. The trailer did not; the power system gave them a lot of problems, and a substitute generator was required.

The Livermore scientists’ conclusions about WEDS were positive:

Once seen and demonstrated, WEDS MOD II was well received. The enthusiasm seemed to increase wit h time. This was true of both [United States Army Europe] staff and the students. Although they had seen a movie2 concerning WEDS and had been briefed, this had less effect than the equipment itself. This could be of value in future operations.

At our leaving Europe we were left with the idea that WEDS as a technique was a valuable tool and suitably designed for field use according to Army specifications would be a useful addition to the field forces. Of course WEDS is also a prototype hardware system which must be maintained. It was stated earlier that there is a lack of maintenance proficiency among the Army personnel we trained. This could cause difficulties in keeping the system running and in turn tend to cloud the objectivity of the system's evaluation.

WEDS MOD II was apparently planned to be moved around around to various commands in Europe from April to the end of November 1971, and then shipped back to the United States.

What happened to WEDS?

What happened to WEDS? Here the trail runs dry. Livermore generated at least two patents from the WEDS systems (one in 1971, another in 1973, corresponding roughly with WEDS MOD I and WEDS MOD II, respectively). Other than that, I don’t find any mentions of it after the early 1970s.

If I had to guess, I would conclude that, while the Livermore scientists clearly enjoyed making and deploying this project, the amount of work required to make WEDS workable, and the cost of the system (which is not in any of the reports I have, but must have been high), and the difficulty of maintaining it, probably added up to a quite sensible conclusion that while this was cool as hell for 1969-1970, it was probably not actually worth all of that effort.

It’s not clear to me that the advantages of WEDS outweighed the disadvantages of it, especially when it was entirely possible to train people to calculate the effects in question by hand. The fallout system would have been the hardest thing to replicate by hand, but it’s not clear that WEDS’ fallout model was all that great anyway, so what’s the point? Over time, of course, as computing technology got smaller, cheaper, and faster, a computational approach would win out, but the 1960s-70s was arguably “too early” for trying to pull this off efficiently.

Still, it is cool as hell. It would be amazing if Livermore had stuffed the WEDS MOD II trailer into a vault somewhere. It’s far more likely that it was dismantled. But who knows? One can dream that somewhere, in a dusty and dark storage facility, the ultimate retro nuclear weapons effects simulator is sitting dormant, waiting to be remembered…

And a group of scientists and engineers at the Systems Development Corporation, in sunny Santa Monica, California, have just finished a preliminary study at the behest of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory on a new kind of computer. In their report on the work, they explained the problem they’ve been trying to address:1

Weapons design scientists, military strategists, field commanders, civil defense authorities and other personnel using nuclear weapons effects data currently must go through a tedious, time consuming process to solve the various problems associated with their work. Solving problems of this type usually involves the use of numerous charts, tables and graphs in a rather unwieldy procedure that requires frequent interpolation and transformation of data. Besides being difficult to manage, the existing procedures are so drawn out and the data so abstract that it is extremely difficult for interested personnel to acquire a comprehensive grasp of what happens in the real situation. The functional relationships that exist between weapon characteristics and the effects they can achieve remain buried in abstraction.

This is true. While there were (and are) unclassified books that explain nuclear weapons effects, the process of manually using the equations and graphs contained in them to generate specific results is incredibly tedious. If one wanted to know, for example, the distance at which a given amount of blast pressure (say, 5 pounds per square inch, enough to destroy most civilian structures) extended from a given nuclear explosion at a given height of burst in the air, one might crack open Samuel Glasstone and Philip Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd edition (1977), which contains several useful charts to aid in this work, such as this one:

This “knee” chart, so called because of the way in which its curve jut out, is showing the relationship between peak overpressure, the height of burst of a nuclear detonation, and the distance at which that blast pressure would be felt. It is all for a 1 kiloton explosion. The “knee” shape is caused by the fact that at certain heights of burst, the blast pressure of the explosion reflects off of the ground in ways that increases its strength dramatically (a phenomena known as Mach reflection).

So imagine that we want to know how far the 5 psi overpressure range extended from the Little Boy detonation at Hiroshima, which was a 15 kiloton weapon detonated at about 2,000 feet. We would first convert the actual height of burst for a 15 kiloton weapon to a scaled height of burst for a 1 kiloton weapon using the cubic root relationship for blast scaling:

h´ = h / (W^1/3) = 2,000 / ((15)^1/3) = 400 feet.

Then we would look at that graph up above with a ruler at the height of burst (y-axis_ for 400 feet (which we would have to eyeball, since the scale only shows us increments of 500 feet). We then go across from there to a spot about halfway between the 4 psi and 6 psi curves. We find that it is it a bit more than half of the way between the ground distance (x-axis) between 1,500 and 2,000 feet. Let us say 1,800 feet. Then we have to re-scale that back to 15 kilotons:

d = d´ × (W^1/3) = 1,800 × ((15)^1/3) = 4,439 feet.

Which is about 0.8 miles. Now, there’s sufficient wiggle room in there in our eyeballing to introduce a lot of error. But this is the easy way to do this kind of thing — to actually try and calculate it from first principles is much, much harder.

Of course, if we were really smart, we wouldn’t do this by hand with graphs. We’d use a “pocket-computer,” like the “Nuclear Bomb Effects Calculator” that was tucked in the back of the Glasstone and Dolan book:

Which is a nomograph, basically an interactive graph, which allows you, by spinning its little discs and lining them up properly, to approximate the same process we just went through more quickly. But even this takes a bit of time (and experience), and trying to imagine doing this for multiple effects, and multiple detonations, and so on, gets very tiresome, very quickly.

So that is the problem — it is tedious to do these kinds of calculations, and these kinds of calculations are important if you are trying to think seriously and precisely about the effects of nuclear weapons.

To remedy this, Livermore contracted with the System Development Corporation to explore the possibility of creating what was called the Weapons Effects Display System (WEDS), a computer system that would not only do these calculations for you with minimal effort, but easily and intuitively show you the output of them.

Computers are very good at math. Making a computer that can solve the above sorts of problems is not that hard. But making a computer that is easy to use in the 1960s was not easy, and making one whose output was intuitive and graphical was extremely difficult, especially at the time! And what they had in mind was drawing these effects on maps, which adds another gigantic level of difficulty to the problem.

The SDC report explains that they considered several possibilities. Wouldn’t it be neat if it could show you a crumpled house in the right blast area? Yes, but it wouldn’t be very feasible. Wouldn’t it be neat for it to be portable? Well, sure… but unless you consider a washing machine “portable,” it was pretty hard to do “portable computing” in the mid-1960s.

Ultimately they concluded that you could do it with the right combination of computational power, display technology, and specialized, analog controls that would be designed around the considerations of the end user. Here was the proposed physical setup of the display and control units:

An operator would sit at the Star Trek-looking console at the left, pushing buttons and twirling knobs, and the results would be displayed on that Star Trek-looking display behind it. (The original Star Trek premiered a year after this report was finished, by the way. The more likely inspiration were things like the NORAD and SAGE consoles. Compared to those, this is portable.)

Their tentative control panel would look like so:

As you can see, their plan was to show quite a number of important nuclear weapons effects. At left, you have the blast effects. (VN is the “Vulnerability Number,” a specialized number allows a user to specify the “hardness” of a target; Pk is the “kill probability”; PSI is the raw blast pressure. One could either use VN/Pk, or PSI.) To the right of that is the thermal effect, the radiant heat from the explosion (in calories per square centimeter). To the right of that are the acute ionizing radiation effects, including knobs to take into account shielding from certain forms of radiation. And to the right of that were a knobs to account for nuclear fallout, primarily by manipulating wind conditions. At the very bottom are controls for the explosive yield and height of burst, as well as what looks like a toggle between “fission” and “fusion,” which presumably would impact how the fallout was calculated.

At the right is the really ambitious part: they wanted to include maps. That is, their approach to making these effects intuitive was to display them on a map. As they explain:

The solution is to be shown in numerical terms as well as .in a pictorial format relating the situation to the physical world, as represented by a map or aerial photograph. The pictorial display depicts the radial distance from ground zero to which specified weapons effects extend .

This had been done since the 1940s, of course: it was what one usually did with things like overpressure and fallout data — draw it on a physical map. But adding maps as part of the computer system added a huge amount of potential complexity: the entire world makes for a lot of data! The idea is that the user would load the computer up with a variety of slides of maps, and then they could, using the map selector, toggle between them. If the maps were at pre-set scales, then the circles, fallout, etc., could be drawn to the correct scale. The bit labeled “Ground Zero Center” on the control panel was a trackball (a “rolling ball”) that would allow the map display itself to be moved.

If you put it all together, here’s their idea of what the visual output would be:

It’s the classic “circles on a map” drawing of nuclear weapons effects — but this one would be dynamic, easy to instantly change parameters of without tedious hand calculation. Being able to do this kind of work quickly and easily changes the game: it widens the audience who could use this information, and lets them immediately see the answers to a barrage of questions about nuclear effects without the cost of time.

NUKEMAP. It’s NUKEMAP. But in the 1960s. I was gobsmacked when I saw the reports on the Weapons Effects Display System for the first time, a few years back, because every aspect of it is hauntingly similar to the thought processes that went into programming NUKEMAP over a weekend in 2012. But in the 2010s, there were mapping APIs that were free to use (today, it’s a bit more complicated than that!). People carry around computers on their person that are tens of thousands of times more powerful than the supercomputers available in the 1960s. “High level” programming languages exist that make it much easier to do all sorts of programming tasks.

In 1965, every aspect of this thing, from the physical console to the means of generating the display output, had to be basically cooked up from scratch. Combining computer output and maps was still pretty novel. Trying to do it cheaply and compactly was very novel, indeed. The seemingly simple question of of “how do you dynamically draw a circles on a map?” invited them to look into a number of different possibilities. Here’s one of them, called the “moving cone projector,” in which they would use moving parabolic mirrors to produce their image:

This “moving cone” method — which I am not savvy enough in either optics or electrical engineering to really understand — would, they say, be reliable, but the circle edges would be pretty blurry.

Another approach imagined a triangular bundle of fiber optics (very cutting-edge for 1965!), which could be rotated and manipulated to project circles (somehow):

The fiber optic approach was the one they deemed “the most promising approach from the viewpoint of elegant simplicity of operation,” but it was also expensive — $5,000 for the bundle alone. But of all of their imagined systems, this was probably the cheapest, even if getting it figured out would be harder than some of the more tried-and-true approaches, like using film projectors (they imagined having four projectors, at a cost of $2,000 film apiece). They don’t give any estimates for the total cost of the machine. It seems not cheap. The map projector would cost something like $1,600–$2,400 by itself.

Those prices would feel pretty expensive even if those were the modern costs. To translate those numbers into present day currency, multiply them by a 10. So the cheapest method, the $5,000 fiber optic bundle, is really more like $50,000. Per unit. So what would the full hardware cost be for this? If the map projector and the circle projector cost $70,000, what’s the cost of the computer unit, and the physical consoles? It’s easy to imagine each unit costing $100,000 or so. And that doesn’t include labor, or whatever costs were spent on this preliminary study.

The costs associating with making, maintaining, and hosting NUKEMAP have added up over the years, but if had cost me $100,000 just to get it up and running… it never would have happened!

There’s just so much hardware. They couldn’t abstract any of it away. That’s the main issue at every level, from the physical components to the actual programming. SDC didn’t describe the computer unit at all, other than to say they imagined it would be analog. That work would be done by a different contractor, the famed firm of Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (EG&G), who had deep experience photographing and doing diagnostics of nuclear weapons tests. EG&G produced its own report on how the computer system, featuring this lovely block diagram of the WEDS system as a whole:2

To get into the details of EG&G’s described programming would take up a lot of space that only a few readers, I suspect, would appreciate (if you’re in that group, read the report), but it’s fascinating from the perspective of a modern programmer. For example, the complex curves involved with blast pressure, which do not have exact numerical solutions, would be represented on “mechanical cams” which would rotate as necessary so that their values could be read off of them electronically. Amazing. There were also a whole host of amplifiers, optical filters, and other electronic devices that I have a poor understanding of, as someone whose only experience with this kind of thing is software.

So far, the above describes the concept of a computer system. Surely such a thing would be too extravagant, too complicated, too unclear of its benefit to get built, right? Well… about that…

They actually built not one, but TWO versions of WEDS. And get this: they were technically portable! For more on that, read part II of my series on WEDS…

If one looks up data on this, one usually finds a simple graph of warheads. Here are two such graphs that I have made of this data, which originates from sources like the Nuclear Notebook, as well as some official releases by the United States government in particular. Here’s a graph of what might be considered the first half of the Cold War, 1945-1969:2

I’ve included the national leaders at the top, just as a means of giving some very rough political context to the numbers. What always jumps out to me about this graph is the plainly exponential nature of the US stockpile size, once you get into the mid-1950s, and then the reaching of a “saturation point” in the mid-1960s, around 31,000 warheads. Some of those year-by-year jumps are astounding. And, of course, the disproportionate nature is something to marvel at: in terms of warheads, the US during this period had a plain numerical advantage several times more than that of the Soviets.

When you look at the rest of the Cold War, separately, the story flips a bit:

The scale is the same as the previous graph. That slow rise of Soviet warheads simply does not abate until the mid-1980s, topping out around 40,000 warheads. Because the US arsenal numbers appear relatively stagnant, even decreasing, it is easy to come away with the impression that by the 1980s the Soviets not only reached a state of parity with the United States, but even arguably obtained a quantitative advantage.

Assessing what kind of “advantage” that is, though, is harder than this warhead-counting approach lets on. The weapons of the 1940s were all gravity bombs, dropped out of airplanes, but by the 1950s and 1960s a tremendous variety of weapon types were developed, including warheads for a variety of types of missiles, torpedos, nuclear land-mines, and whole “families” of different kind of gravity bombs meant for different targets. Some weapons were extremely high yield (tens of megatons of TNT equivalent), some were (for nukes) extremely low yield (on par with the largest conventional weapons). A nuke is a nuke — but they varied in terms of their destructive power by several orders of magnitude, and were meant for different “roles.”

If we parse the same warhead data, but instead look at the “primary mission” of the warhead, we get a very different type of graph:

Here I have used estimates of which weapons were designated for “strategic” and “non-strategic” missions.3 These are both tricky and blurry categories, but the essence of them is that a “strategic” weapon is one you are aiming at enemy cities, infrastructure, and nuclear forces, while your “non-strategic” weapon is one you are aiming at specific military units (e.g., tanks and troops and incoming bombers) or otherwise using in a “battlefield” or “defensive” role.

Divided up this way, the data tells a different story: the extreme warhead growth by both the United States and the Soviet Union were in the area of “non-strategic” weapons, not “strategic” ones, which I think contradicts what most people assume when they see the original warhead graphs. This doesn’t make the “strategic” situation much saner: +10,000 strategic warheads is still a lot of nuclear weapons for each side to have had in their stockpiles.

This particular graph changes the narrative of the previous warhead graph in another way: the Soviets don’t actually have more strategic warheads than the United States at any time, and their strategic numerical disadvantage is still pronounced for quite a long time. Of course, one could ask: how important are these numerical differences, after a point? When the US had 15,000 strategic warheads and the Soviets “only” had 3,000, was that difference a meaningful one in terms of actions taken or not taken?

We could parse these kinds of numbers in different ways, as well. The Natural Resources Defense Council produced estimates a while back on the composition of US and Soviet strategic forces:4

The data here is a bit more speculative, and the numbers across these datasets don’t totally match up, but still, the general trends seem plausible. This is a more complicated graph and warrants a bit of explanation. These are the “force loadings” for strategic nuclear warheads during the Cold War, which is to say, the estimates for how many strategic warheads were deployed on different “delivery vehicles.” It is not an estimate of how many actual vehicles there were — because many of them could carry multiple warheads, especially by the later Cold War. So this gives more of a sense than the other graphs of how many weapons were “in play” at any given moment, and how they were situated.

Some important features jump out from dicing up the data this way. One is that one can plainly see that the US and USSR followed different trends early on: the US was deeply invested in nuclear bombers for its early program, an outgrowth of its World War II approach to strategic bombing, whereas the Soviets primarily saw ICBMs as their path towards a strategic arsenal. (I have previously written a bit about the US side of this trend here.)

Both of these last two datasets also serve up the perhaps surprising conclusion that the Soviet Union did not even have strategic nuclear weapons until the mid-1950s. This is one of those things that both is and is not true — they had a number of gravity bombs in the early 1950s, and where one drops them depends on whether they are “strategic” or “non-strategic.” But the general idea is that the Soviet capabilities for delivering the weapons in this period were so limited that their weapons were, at best, a threat to forces in Europe or Asia, and not the continental United States, which was too far away.

This is where these categories get so tricky. The Soviets invested huge resources into missile categories whose presence in the above data is unclear: intermediate- and medium-range missiles that could threaten both strategic and non-strategic targets in Western Europe. Given their geopolitical position, this makes sense: if you can’t credibly threaten your adversary directly, threaten something important to them, like their friends. Which would be a strategic role, but these aren’t ICBMs. Do they show up in the data estimates in that table? I’m not sure, but I suspect not.

There are other forms of stockpile data we could look at, each of which shed different light on its nature. For example, the US Department of Energy has released data about the total yield of the US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War:5

Which is an impressive and frightening bit of data. The “peak” value in 1960 was 20,491 megatons. That’s about 1.4 million Hiroshima bombs, as one way to think about that (or 205 Tsar Bombas, if one wants to go the other direction — though this mostly emphasizes how horrific the Tsar Bomba’s explosive output was). We don’t have a Soviet equivalent of this graph (one could try to estimate it), but one has to imagine it follows its own horrific curves. The global radiological implications of a nuclear exchange involving thousands of megatons is incredible by itself, much less considering the broader ecological and possible climatological impacts from the amount of burning that would imply.

If we take the megatonnage data and divide it by the warhead data, we end up with another interesting graph, showing the average yield per warhead (in kilotons) of the US nuclear arsenal:

Which tells another interesting (and somewhat different) story, one that dovetails nicely with the observation about the difference between the strategic and non-strategic weapons, but also about changing US weapon priorities. It also highlights something that is often unclear to non-wonks: that late Cold War (and current) strategic US weapons are actually quite lower in yield than the monster H-bombs of the 1950s, because they are optimized for smaller volumes and masses (so that they are easier to deliver to a target). They are still, however, generally many multiples of the weapons of World War II.

One could imagine further parsing up of the data to really get a sense of what the stockpile numbers really mean. And there would be possibly advantages and insights by doing that: even just the data above shifts one’s understanding of things a bit, even in the crudest “number of warheads” form. My sense is that most people who haven’t taken much time to study these issues assume that the US and USSR were roughly at parity for most of the Cold War, but it’s clear that this wasn’t (numerically) the case.

At some point, though, I always feel the need to step back and ask something more fundamental. Like: How many weapons does one need? Is the meaning to be gotten from such data about strategic advantage or disadvantage? How ought we understand the forces that produced these outcomes, something that the data can be suggestive of, but cannot itself actually answer?

I recently read a new article by Benoît Pelopidas and Neil C. Renic that was published in Ethics & International Affairs that made me think about some of these things in a somewhat different way. The article as a whole pushes back on the characterization of the Cold War (and other things) as “tragic”: as an unfortunate thing that could neither be predicted nor avoided. Pelopidas and Renic argue that such narrative framings tend to avoid the sense that choices were made and indeed outcomes were often quite predictable, and that the “tragic” framing tends to erase any sense of “moral agency” from the historical actors.6 They write specifically of the stockpile:

In 1967, the U.S. arsenal peaked at thirty-one thousand weapons. This number should not be portrayed as an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence tragically driven by the actions of the Soviets, the demands of allies, or the interaction of the two. On the contrary, the nuclear arms race, and the insecurity and enormous expenditures it created, was largely foreseeable: these outcomes were overdetermined by the assumptions made about nuclear weapons and international politics by the players setting the requirements of the nuclear policy they advocated.

They then go into the specific ideas and contexts that lead to arsenals that vastly out-stripped any sense of proportion and “need.” Which is exactly what is really needed to make sense of these numbers, because the numbers and graphs do not speak for themselves. They are, at best, a place to start asking questions. Why do we see the trends we do? What is missing from this representation? Are these numbers accurate? These are questions that history (and disciplines that engage with it) can answer well, if done right. If done wrong, you get either a hand-waving answer (“it was a mutual arms race” — yes, but this is not explanatory of the specific results) or a non-answer (it was a “tragic” result). If done right, you learn something important about the past — and perhaps lessons that give insights into our present, and possible futures.

One of Stephenson’s conceits in the book is that because it is not Earth, some of the terms in the narrator’s language are not directly translatable to Earth concepts, and so he invents words that are sort of halfway between two English words to represent the ambiguities of the translation. So the title, anathem, is a mash-up of anthem and anathema, and refers to the chant that is sung when one of these scholar-monks is expelled from their university-monasteries.

Another idea that comes up several times in the book is that of an emergence, which is deliberately meant to invoke both the literal sense of the word in English (something coming into view), but with an inflection of the term emergency. It refers to the difficulty of being able to identify when a true emergency has arrived: “the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse.”

I think about this a lot. Especially these days. Most people, I think, have various in-built biases against recognizing “emergencies” and acting on them swiftly. This takes place at difference scales, of course, from the immediacy of ignoring an alarm (even a nuclear attack alert), to the difficulty of acting upon longer-term, broader problems like climate change. As individuals, we’ve all known the tension, I suspect, between wondering if things have gone too far, or if we’re being overly paranoid, hasty, fearful. How do we simultaneously avoid worrying about everything, all the time, while also making sure that we don’t miss the serious warning signs? And more importantly, if we do see the warning signs, do we know what to do then, and do we have the means to do it?

I’ve been fortunate to have only been in an “Emergence” a few times, myself. Below is one of the times, and while like all memories one has worked over many times, it is, as far as I can remember it, essentially true.

It must have been a morning in fall 2005 or so, when I was making my way to my Russian class in graduate school. I was walking down the familiar red-bricked sidewalk in Harvard Square, along the south side of the university’s main wall, along Massachusetts Avenue, when suddenly I perceived that something had simply manifested, out of nothingness, on the sidewalk maybe ten feet in front of me, slightly to my left. I had no conception of this thing having traveled there in time and space: there was nothing there, and suddenly there was something there. It was one of those rare moments when my confusion about my basic perceptions was so profound that I felt like I could feel gears turning in my brain, trying to make sense of it. The thing was, I concluded: a squeegee. Huh, was about all I consciously thought.

In what felt like nearly the same moment — but in retrospect, my perception of time was itself dramatically slowed down as a result of my confusion — something else appeared at around the same distance from me, but slightly to my right: a man, lying on the ground, face down, motionless.

Again, that feeling of mental gears, gnashing. Squeegee? And a man?? I perceived them both appearing instantly, with no apparent cause, creating a ferocious puzzle that my mind struggled to solve. How? Why? What!? I am grateful, I suppose, that I have rarely been as truly confused as I was in that moment. (Perhaps this is what animals are thinking when they see magic tricks?) My brain’s computation felt like it was going as slow as molasses, putting together a coherent narrative that explained its visual input. No doubt, on some subconscious level, my mind understood that something was wrong, which is why it spurred the conscious portion of it to figure out what.

My gaze then panned from the man on the right, to the squeegee on the left, and then, finally, up the building next to it. And in a small window, jutting out of the third floor of a very old yellow building — Wadsworth House, the second-oldest building on campus — was a small and pointedly empty scaffold for a window washer.1

Finally, my pathetically slow conscious mind put together the narrative: the squeegee and the man were both sitting on that rig, and both fell off of it, to ill effect. When it had happened my gaze had been down and my thoughts had been elsewhere, and so I perceived their appearance as something like teleportation. At this point, I looked back at the man, and saw he still not moving, and that blood was in fact seeping out of his head, onto the bricks.

The above must have only taken a few seconds in real time, but through some mental process, in subjective time it felt like it took several minutes. At that point, my perception of time became something more like normal, and I looked around and saw that there were other onlookers in a state of shock.2 Perhaps some of them saw the full action happen and thus were less confused about what had occurred than I was. A few were even starting to approach the man, asking if he was OK. He was plainly not OK.

I was a Boy Scout, even longer ago, and although I was not a particularly good or enthusiastic Boy Scout, I did learn enough about basic first aid to know when someone is beyond the help of basic first aid, and that you should not touch people who have possibly suffered a neck or back injury. This is beyond our capabilities, I remember thinking, and immediately whipped out my (pre-smart phone) cell phone, dialed 9-1-1, and told the people approaching not to touch him.

“What’s your emergency?” “A window washer fell out of a window!” “A window washer fell out of a window!?” “Exactly!” I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but it went something like this — I very distinctly remember the shock of the emergency responder repeating back what I had said, though.

Fortunately for the man, there was a hospital of sorts immediately across the street from where he had fallen, and so an ambulance arrived within a minute or less of my making the call. My recollection is that they came, scooped him into the ambulance rather quickly, and took off. Police also arrived, and someone cleaned the blood of the sidewalk. Amazingly, only about five minutes had passed since I first perceived the squeegee. I continued on my way to class and wasn’t even late. (I attempted, in my terrible second-semester Russian, to explain what had happened to my Russian teacher, and she reacted with appropriate incredulity that I meant what I was trying to say.)3

I think of the above incident from my life whenever I am thinking about the conditions that are required to take action when something has veered off of the rails — about recognizing that an Emergence has occurred, in Stephenson’s language. I am reasonably sure I was the first responder in this instance, and I believe I was the first person on the scene to a) piece together what had happened, b) comprehend its medical seriousness, c) overcome that fear we have, in such situations, of either overreacting or somehow making a bad situation worse by “escalating” it to the point of calling for help, and thus, d) actually act upon the situation. It required all four of those things to actually get a useful result.

This was despite the fact that I was evidently quite hampered in accomplishing the first bit of this sequence, because my proximity to the man made it hard for my brain to understand exactly what sequence of events had transpired. In the comprehension of the medical seriousness, I benefited from a little bit of training (as a Boy Scout), which allowed me to immediately conclude that a man who in motionless and whose head is bleeding after falling out of a window requires serious medical attention from professionals and should not be moved. This also, in turn, allowed me to overcome the aversion engage emergency services, because I was totally confident that this was neither an overreaction nor an escalation.

I say this not to give myself too much personal credit. I had just enough training to be useful (enough to recognize my individual limits), and enough self-awareness about these things to know that someone has to take on the responsibility for action very consciously, and that in such situations it is common for no one to do it. I don’t know if the latter was somehow absorbed from the Boy Scouts, or other aspects of my upbringing, or maybe just the fantasies of being “the hero” (fed by an endless stream of “heroic” media), but the end result is the same, either way.

The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard — the same one who in 1939 co-wrote a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt warning of the possibilities of atomic bombs — told a story that I have long found to be rather profound its relevance to the question of “Emergence” and action. It is about when he decided that it was time to leave Germany in the spring of 1933.

He dictated a somewhat long version of it in 1960 for use in potential memoirs, which I quote here (and have tidied up and corrected a bit):4

Perhaps because such an important part of my life evolved during the first World War. I had the tendency to limit my possessions to what could be held in two suitcases. I think I would have preferred to have roots, but I couldn’t have roots because I wanted to have wings, and to be able to move at a moment’s notice came to be important to me. Now that, for a second time, there was a major upheaval in Europe — now that there was war again — I benefited from having wings and of not having roots.

After the Reichstag was put on fire, I lingered for few more days in Berlin. Having given up my apartment there, I lived in the Harnack House of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, and was thus in close touch with the scientific community of this Institute. My colleagues found it difficult to bring themselves to believe that the Reichstag was set on fire on orders of the German Government. Germany has always been a very orderly country and setting fire to the Reichstag appeared to be a very disorderly thing.

After a few days, having listened to all of my friends give their interpretation of the situation, I took a taxi — I locked and picked up my two suitcases and drove to the railroad station where I took the night train to Vienna. I expected the train to be packed; it was empty. There were Nazi guards on the frontier, but they didn’t bother any of the few passengers who were on the train.5

In contrast to this, the same train which reached the Austrian frontier on day later, was jam-packed. The passengers were asked to leave the train on the Austrian frontier and their luggage was searched and their purses were searched. Many were turned back and were refused permission to leave.

From the above incident, Szilard drew a conclusion that says much about his mindset:

All this goes to show that in order to succeed in this life, you do not have to be clever. All you have to be is a tiny little bit cleverer than most other people are. You don’t have to know what the future may bring. All you have to do is understand what the future may bring one day before most of the others do.

This is an interesting idea, and not so far from the concept of the Emergence. But Szilard’s account, here, misses a few key details. It is not just that he saw things were going in a direction that was going to lead to ruin if he did not escape quickly. It is that he was willing and able to act upon it. And part of that comes from this idea of the “wings” versus the “roots.”

Szilard, I think, misidentifies possessions as the “roots.” Of course, they can be that, especially in a world where certain possessions — like property — can represent a substantial investment of resources. But possessions are probably the easiest “roots” to shed. The hardest “roots” are people: what if Szilard had needed to “uproot” a family to make this move? How likely would it have been that he would have made it, then? A family would add stakes to the problem in both directions: higher consequences for being “right” and “wrong.” And all of this ignores the fact that Szilard was confident that he would not starve if he simply picked up and left — something that reflects not more than a little bit of privilege.6

The people in Stephenson’s book who talk about the concept of Emergence emphasize, at a later point in the book, that it is not just about observing that an emergency is occurring. It is about being in the position for action, for knowing that in the moment of the emergency it is too late to spend time planning things out in detail. You either have to be trained to adapt to any situation, or have the plans worked out well ahead of time. And that’s a very tall order.

There are a not-insignificant number of Americans who don’t have to speculate to answer this question, because they received just such a message in January 2018, as part of the Hawaii missile alert false alarm. Not much research has been done on what people felt and did on that day, which I think is a huge missed opportunity.1

There’s only one article that I’ve seen that tried to capture that information after the fact, and it doesn’t quite answer the question of “what did people do?” with great specificity. As its abstract concludes: “Participants sought additional information and cues about the potential threat, observed others engaging in milling, and some accounts of fatalism (during the event) and lingering symptoms associated with traumatic stress (after the event).”2

That’s not nothing, and the article has a few more interesting conclusions and responses, but it leaves me with so many questions. When people “sought additional information,” what kinds of sources did they turn to? How did those sources reinforce their views or behavior? How did people react who were alone, versus those in groups of people they knew, versus those in groups of strangers? How did locals react versus tourists? How much did a person’s gender, race/ethnicity, level of education, occupation, etc., change how they reacted? Did having children, or pets, change how people reacted? How many people actually tried to “seek immediate shelter,” as the warning advised them to? What did that look like? What was the role of businesses, especially hotels (again, Hawaii!), in organizing any kind of activity? How many people were these messages even sent to?

These are the kinds of questions I think we’d be asking if we wanted to draw conclusions about what would possibly have happened if it hadn’t been a false alarm. And this is not the kind of thing you can reliably study in an experimental environment: you can’t tell thousands people that they might be dying soon and see what they do as a response (for good reason). And people who know at some level that the threat is definitely not real do not respond the same way as people who have been told it is real.

So this kind of accident/”natural experiment” provides some of the “realest” data we might have… if someone bothered to collect it. But as more time passes since the event, it becomes harder and harder to “recapture” those events after the fact.

If the research agenda I’ve laid out looks really focused and specific, it’s because I have cribbed it primarily from a study that was published in 1961 under the unwieldy title of “The Occasion Instant: The Structure of Social Responses to Unanticipated Air Raid Warnings.”3 Published as part of the “Disaster Study” series of the “Disaster Research Group” of the National Research Council, “The Occasion Instant” is, in brief, a study of what people did in the late 1950s during three nuclear false alarms. The unintuitive title comes from a quote from Hippocrates: “Life is short and the art long; the occasion instant, decision difficult, experiment perilous.” As the Foreword more evocatively explains:

The Occasion Instant of the title of this publication refers to a crucial moment of urgent decision which requires action here and now, if only to decide not to act. The decision must be made quickly, and its consequences may be enormous. To meet the Instant we have to interpret signs of safety and signs of danger. Fortunate is the occasion in which we really know what we are doing.

The study’s three false alarms had quite different circumstances, and took place in different cities and under different conditions:

WARNING YELLOW, Oakland, California: “On the morning of 5 May 1955, the United States Air Force was unable to identify a squadron of bombers flying over the Pacific Ocean. The bombers were headed in the general -direction of the central west coast of the United States. An order was given to sound the alert warning sirens for a probable attack. … Sirens sounded Berkeley and in Oakland, California. Radio stations went off the air in San Francisco. Local warnings in schools and business offices (which had internal warning systems) were sounded almost immediately… It took the Air Force only a few minutes to identify the bomb squadron as an American one. All was back to normal in approximately ten minutes. In the same length of time, if the squadron had been enemy-manned and undeterred, it could have delivered a lethal blow.”

WRONG NUMBER, Washington, DC: “At four-thirty in the afternoon of 25 November 1958, telephone workers in Washington, D.C. accidentally tied in the downtown Washington circuit with the Montgomery County Civil Defense System. Air raid warnings sounded immediately in several parts of Washington, in the downtown area, and inside several establishments which had internal air raid systems connected with the central warning siren. Several thousand Federal government employees, among many others, were thus suddenly exposed to an unannounced and unexpected warning siren, a signal which means literally to prepare for an imminent air attack. The warning signal that sounded was the same one that had been used up to that time only for previously announced practice alerts. However, it should be kept in mind that this was an accidental sounding of the system. Consequently, there were no informed civil defense leaders on hand who knew for sure that this was not a real attack.”

JOY IN MUDVILLE: Chicago, Illinois: “After forty futile attempts in forty successive years, the Chicago White Sox finally won an American League baseball title in 1959. The pennant was clinched when the White Sox won a night game from the Cleveland Indians on September 22, 1959. The game was broadcast and telecast from Cleveland. Just a few days earlier, the Chicago City Council had ‘... resolved that bells ring, whistles blow, bands play and general joy be unconfined when the coveted pennant has been won by the heroes of 35th Street.’ The evening of the ball game, the fire commissioner (also acting director of the city's civil defense corps) decided to sound the civil defense sirens to add to the spirit of the city council's proclamation. The baseball game ended at 9:50 p.m. Chicago time. Live telecasts and broadcasts from the dressing room of the victorious team were received for about 15 to 20 minutes immediately afterward. Then at 10:30, some forty minutes after the game had ended, the air raid alert signal went off. A steady blast for a full five minutes sounded, a signal which means that an air attack is possible but is not expected for least minutes. Prior to his sounding of the siren, the commissioner properly notified the police and fire departments, the public utilities, and all radio and television stations and newspapers. But only a very few minutes elapsed between the arrival of this notice and the sounding of the siren. Thus, the public had no warning of the event.”

The evocative titles used above are the chapter titles of the 1961 study for each of the alerts. One might summarize the causes of them even more succinctly as: “unidentified bombers,” “a crossed wire,” and “a guy who didn’t take his job seriously enough.” The different contexts are, as the authors of the study point out, both make it hard to come up with generalized responses, but also add a level of comparative contrast that is useful:

Here is an opportunity to seek parallels in social responses in three quite different situations, each laden with the warning of impending disaster. In Chicago, responsible officials were aware that the siren was sounded in a mood of carnival, but the citizenry could only guess a choice between celebration and catastrophe. In one case, we find government employees at work in the nation's capitol, civil defense instructions for identifying warning signals generally posted on the office walls, and supervisors and civil defense personnel assigned to the organization to structure interpretations and guide responses. In contrast, Oakland housewives were at home, their husbands at work, units of the basic primary groups ecologically segregated from one another. Chicago's experience is unique in that an urban community's enthusiasm for its baseball heroes had a large proportion of the population following the exploits of the athletes in a familial setting. Unlike Oakland, Chicago had its families clustered in primary group solidarity; unlike Washington, it had them removed from organizational constraints.

“The Occasion Instant” is what would be considered a pretty old-school anthropological/sociological study these days. Its main basis of data comes from surveys, completed some years after the fact, which it acknowledges is limiting. It does not use any significant statistical analysis for reporting its findings, and its interpretations are made through the psychological and sociological lenses that were in vogue at the time. So there are ways in which it feels like a very “dated” study in retrospect, something that would not pass muster (for both better and worse) in a modern academic context.

But it also tries to ask the big questions I mentioned earlier, because it was commissioned in the context of people actually caring how their population might respond during a nuclear attack and wanting to use this kind of study to give insights into what might be changed about nuclear communications. Which likely explains why the more recent study doesn’t ask these questions, and why there really isn’t that much research along lines at all — my sense from talking to colleagues is that this kind of thing has just not really been part of the “research agenda” of the post-Cold War social sciences, for better or worse.

There were significant differences in the three cases between whether people believed the sirens were real. 43% of Chicagoeans surveyed thought it was a “real air raid alert,” but only 22% of Oaklandians did, and a mere 7% of Washingtonians. 3% of Chicagoeans thought it was “practice drill,” 25% misunderstood the sirens as being a fire alarm, and only 16% thought it might be associated with the ball game. In Oakland, 46% thought it was a practice drill. In Washington, 32% thought it was a practice drill, and 26% thought it was a test of the signaling system.

This is kind of striking. If I had been asked to guess, in the abstract, which city groups would take it more seriously, it probably would be the Washingtonians at the top (because of their governmental/”target” context), and Chicago at the bottom (because of the “ball game” context). And the low number by Oaklandians is also particularly interesting because it was the only one of the alerts that was actually meant to be an air raid alert — it was a false alarm, but not an accidentally or trivially triggered one. It was, in fact, a “real alert.”

Of course, one can make theories that fit the data. The Washingtonians, for example, were working in a context where practice drills and signal testing were common. The study found that many Washingtonians surveyed believed that the signal was only used for practice drills: “Clearly, these people have accidentally been so conditioned [by drills] as to render the signal used completely ineffective as a warning for a real attack. The same can be said for another 10% of the sample, who stated flatly that they ignore all warning messages that have not been previously announced.”

So what did people actually do? Very few actually took protective action of any sort, like going into a shelter. There is an interesting contrast between Chicago and Washington here. The Chicagoeans took it more seriously, but did not know what protective actions to take, and only 2% took any kind of action that “could be even loosely interpreted as protective.” In Washington, the number who took shelter was as high as 20%, which is large compared to Chicago but still remarkably low, especially because the Washingtonians actually did know what they were supposed to do and where they were supposed to go, as they were in federal buildings and drilled on it regularly.

Some people did nothing; they behaved as nothing unusual was happening, as if it were a nuisance to be ignored. The main action of people who actually did something was to seek more information about the signal. They tried to validate it — was it for real, or not? This meant turning to those around them if they were not alone, as well as turning on a radio or television if one was around. And a major predictor for how people with others responded depended on those around them: they took it as seriously as their immediate peers did.

How people responded, and how seriously they took the alert, correlated in complicated ways to various social categories. One of the most significant factors for determining who took it seriously was one’s “belief in the probability of war.” That is, if someone felt that war was unlikely because of a lack of “tension” in the “international situation,” then the signal could dismissed, and if you believed war was possible, then you took it seriously. This is the kind of logic that seems plausible but is quite fallacious: most people don’t actually have a great sense of the “international situation,” and have no idea what is happening on the other side of the world at the present moment.4

The study found that there was an interesting relationship between education and taking the signal seriously, but perhaps not an obvious one. Essentially, people who were “poorly educated” didn’t take the signal seriously; the authors concluded that they didn’t know what it was. But people with college educations were more likely to dismiss it than those with just high-school educations. The authors offered up two not-mutually-exclusive explanations for this. One is that the college-educated were “sophisticated and blasé enough to treat the siren cynically.” The other is worth quoting directly:

The higher the rank of an individual within a given social category, the more likely he is to interpret as invalid a signal intended to preface a disastrous situation. A plausible explanation of this is that persons who have achieved or enjoy high social status are less willing to entertain the possibility that a disaster could occur which would spoil everything.

That is, that the dismissal of the warning signal is a sort of psychological defensive mechanism meant to keep one from acknowledging the real possibility of losing everything one has — and those who have more may thus have more incentive to dismiss it. This is an idea that far transcends just nuclear alerts, and feels like it has real relevance in the present moment.

Another factor that was significant was gender: women tended to take the warning signal more seriously than men, and to report a stronger emotional response to it, and they also were more apt to seek out more information about it. The study’s authors suggested that this is because of their having a “generally lower status” than the men (and thus not falling into the defense mechanism posited above), as well as being “covered by a norm which allows them more expression of concern and fear for the well-being of others.” Men, in other words, are afraid of looking scared, and concerned.

They found that race did not prove to be a significant variable; any differences that existed in the raw comparisons disappeared when education was controlled for. They also found that people who lived in smaller towns, or had small-town backgrounds, were less likely to take the signal seriously than those who were living in cities.

And they found that the most significant variable with regards to age was that it was inversely correlated with taking the signal seriously — that is, the older they were, the less likely the citizens were to think the signal really meant a nuclear war was beginning. The authors weren’t sure exactly why that was, but surmised it might be a mix of the other factors (education, etc.), as well as the lack of understanding of the meaning of the signal, and, more speculatively: “Older people are more likely to hold traditional views and ideas, and full-scale nuclear destruction is not among them.”

Ultimately, the authors of “The Occasion Instant” appeared somewhat frustrated by the results. People received a signal that should have been understood to mean that they ought to take shelter. In many places, the people ignored it — believing it to be a drill. It was definitely not a drill in any case; again, in one case it was a “real” alert (Oakland), in another it was a mishap (Washington, DC), and in the other (Chicago) it was deliberately caused by a foolish official.

And even those people who did believe it was possibly real largely did not do very much about that fact, not because they were fatalistic, but because they didn’t know what to do. Which is its own failure.

The study authors lead the work with a line of argument that works well for this particular example as well as later hazards:

In ancient times or modern, social and cultural factors must be taken into account. A signal is not enough. It must have meaning in its cultural context. People must be taught its meaning so that they interpret the signal correctly and act upon it automatically. Society must be organized into groups and organizations which will help individuals interpret the signal and guide them to correct behavioral responses. The need to understand, predict, and control the social and cultural part of a total warning system is demonstrably imperative today for the survival of society.

“A signal is not enough” — this is, I think, what often gets misunderstood by many modern doomsayers as well.

What I think makes “The Occasion Instant” so interesting, despite its methodological weaknesses, is that it takes these “social and cultural factors” very seriously in its analysis. As they say elsewhere in it, the signal was heard, in that the technical equipment worked appropriately (except for, you know, the crossed wires), but that it failed to produce the appropriate human response. And that, I think, is a critique you could make of a lot of Cold War Civil Defense planning, and of a lot of attempts to get people to mobilize for various risks and causes today.

One thing that the study’s authors don’t get involved in is the question of how do you restore faith after a false alarm. Because that seems of some importance with both their examples, and the Hawaii one. Once you know that the emergency warning system has gone off inappropriately before, how do you avoid people assuming that the same thing has happened again if it goes off in the future?

What the officials in Hawaii did, along with promise it would never happen again and fix the (in retrospect, absurd) system they had in place that enabled it, was basically eliminate their ballistic missile warning preparedness altogether. That is, they came to the conclusion that another false alarm was a political risk, one that outstripped the risks that caused them to think they might need to warn their population about an incoming ballistic missile attack in the first place.

It would become one of the most-cited reports on the possible consequences of a nuclear attack within the Civil Defense literature — and just as often in the anti-Civil Defense literature. It was, for the time and for a while afterwards, one of the most detailed attempts to consider the consequences of a full-scale nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, particularly during what it terms the “survival period” of a few weeks to a few months after the attack. 1

The basic war scenario is one developed by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DPCA), the Department of Defense-based predecessor of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had the internal name of CRP-2B.2 This “attack pattern” was developed as a hypothetical list of targets that the Soviet Union might aim at, based on assumption that the Soviets would be targeting, in order of priority:

1. U.S. military installations

2. Military-supporting industrial, transportation, and logistics facilities

3. Other basic industries and facilities which contribute to the maintenance of the U.S. economy

4. Population concentrations of 50,000 or greater.

A list of targets that met that criteria was then combined with assumptions about Soviet nuclear capabilities in 1980, and from that the “hypothetical attack” was generated, assuming the Soviets had 1,444 “detonated weapons,” with yields ranging between 1 and 20 megatons each, against many hundreds of targets in the contiguous United States:

Now, is the CRP-2B attack plan a realistic one? That’s a separate question, and one I’ll return to in a later post. Certain aspects of the assumptions are not totally in line with what we now know about Soviet arsenals and their targeting philosophies. But the point of the plan wasn’t to be a prediction. It was meant to be a place to start from in terms of making plans for survival, and is probably intentionally pessimistic in certain respects.

The CRP-2B plan assumed that only 470 (32%) of these detonations would be fallout-producing ground bursts, but that because of the high yields of these weapons (as the map above makes clear, they assumed that the attacks against ICBM silos would all be 20 megaton weapons), they would make up 77% of the total megatonnage: 5,051 out of 6,559 megatons would be fallout-producing.3 The authors used simplifying assumptions (constant wind speed, and all weapons detonating at the same time) to come up with a rather impressive map of fallout distribution:

None of the versions of the above map (or the original it is based on) are of such good quality that one can distinguish between all of the “high” levels of exposure, but they are so high that it feels almost pointless to want to. As a thumbnail rule, 100 R (Roentgens) is enough to make someone sick (and measurably increase their lifetime cancer risk), and 500 R (or thereabouts) is often used as the threshold for when it starts to get significantly deadly. Once you start talking about 1,000 R exposures, much less upwards of 20,000 R exposures, you are almost certainly talking about fatal exposures. So anything that is on that map that is not perfectly white is sickening at least, and all shadings above the lightest are fatal exposures.

Now, these are the exposure doses for someone sitting outside and doing nothing for two weeks. Any kind of barrier between you and the fallout would reduce these exposures by some amount. A good shelter could reduce it significantly — some purpose-built shelters might have a Protection Factor (PF) of 1,000, meaning that you would receive 1/1000 of the reference dose. Most shelters, they concede, would have a PF of less than 200. The ground story of a single-story house might have a PF of 2, for example (so you would receive 1/2 of the reference dose), while a basement of such a home might have a PF of 10 (so 1/10 of the reference dose). So if one is talking about a 1,000 R exposure over two weeks, then your basement might knock that down to 100 R (sickening, but not fatal), but just staying inside your home would only knock it down to 500 R (likely fatal).

Such is the grim calculus of such studies. This particular study has a lot of interesting aspects, which I will come back to in future posts, but it is no surprise that one of the two “major problems” for post-attack survival the authors identify is securing adequate shelter against fallout (the other one is food availability, which is not unrelated).

But what makes this particular study stand out is that it was commissioned by the DCPA with a very specific “Scope of Work” that defined very narrowly the assumptions that the scientists were required to make when performing the analysis. Specifically, the study was required to assume that (emphasis in original):

1. At a time in the not too distant future an international nuclear crisis has occurred;

2. The U.S. Crisis Relocation Plans in accordance with currently conceived elements have been implemented;

3. That radiological protection has been provided and used, again according to currently conceived ideas; and

4. That a nuclear attack on the U.S. of a magnitude within that considered consistent with current SALT weapons limitations has occurred.

Point #4 is the CRP-2B attack scenario, but points #1-3 are much more dramatic. They refer to (very hypothetical) plans in place that would involve simply moving everyone in a high-risk area somewhere else. Which is in some ways a very logical approach to surviving a nuclear war: don’t be around when the bombs go off! But as a practicable plan for the entire country, it is… well, it is a lot.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but there are times in which the study’s authors appear to be signaling to whomever is reading them that they understand that these are rather large assumptions, such as their introduction to their Conclusion:

Under the assumptions specified for this research program in the Scope of Work statement, we are to assume that people in high-risk areas are relocated “in accordance with currently conceived elements,” one of which was the ADAGIO computer program which assigns 89.6 million people to host areas. According to this assignment, about 90% of the U.S. population would be located remote from the blast and fire effects of the nuclear weapons of the 6,559 MT attack, and would therefore survive through the attack period.

Also, according to assumptions specified in the Scope of Work statement, we are to assume that “radiological protection has been provided and used during and after the attack,” again according to currently conceived ideas. The fallout radiation from the specific 6,559 MT CRP-2B attack is more severe than most attacks which have been considered in the past, and it may be necessary to increase the protection factor requirements of shelters to cope with the increased threat.

So this entire post-nuclear attack scenario, which is very carefully researched, is based on the premise that 90% of the US population has been relocated to places where nukes will not be aimed at several weeks before the attack occurred, and that they have already been given sufficient fallout protection during and after the attack, and that otherwise things are going pretty well. This is a very optimistic assumption to say the least.

Just think, for a minute, about what that would require. You’d need the US President to decide that things were dangerous-enough in the world that he was going to order 90% of the US population to leave their homes for an indefinite amount of time because of a fear of an imminent nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

The political costs of such an order are unimaginable. Aside from the panic it would generate, it would essentially shut down the entire economy of the United States. I think this is one of those areas where those of us in the 21st century have perhaps more experience, both with disasters like Hurricane Katrina (which highlighted so many issues and inequities with mass evacuation attempts) and the economic, political, and social impacts of suddenly having a large portion of the economy shut down during COVID (which of course would only have been a fraction of the consequences of the kind of evacuation the study contemplates).

The actual logistics of such an evacuation of tens of millions of people boggle the mind, especially when one considers the large number of Americans who would lack vehicles and could not transport themselves (because of age, medical status, etc.). Imagine then how the locals in these “low risk areas” would feel about suddenly having an influx of tens of thousands of fearful out-of-towners suddenly deposited in their jurisdictions for an indefinite amount of time. The study calculates the “relocating hosting factors” — the ratio of out-of-towners to locals — for a number of states, and the minimum factor is 3.5 (Colorado), and the maximum is 9 (California).4

How would this possibly work, in practice? How would freeways and chokepoints not become horribly clogged with fearful, angry, unhappy people? Would not the movement of 90 million people over the course of 14 days or so be one of the greatest mass migrations, in terms of density of people in time and space, ever accomplished in global history? As a point of reference, the partition of India in 1947 involved the swift movement of some 10-18 million people over the course of a few months. The conditions would not be quite the same — though one could hardly think that the nuclear relocation would much less politically and socially fraught — but up to 1 million lives are thought to have been lost during the partition.

And that’s just the domestic side of the problem. Such a mass relocation of people would not, of course, go unnoticed by the Soviet Union, and would be a sure signal that the US was expecting to engage in a nuclear war swiftly. What effect would such a thing have on US-Soviet tensions, which must have already been high if it such an order was going to go through in the first place? Would such an action not be taken as a sign by the Soviets that nuclear war was inevitable, given the political and economic costs that the US would be incurring in undertaking it? And what of NATO, US allies, the rest of the world? Again, it is hard to see under what conditions the US political and strategic system would actually believe that making such an order would be the appropriate choice, even if it believed nuclear war was very likely in the next few weeks.

There is at least one place in the report where the authors seem, again, to be undermining its assumptions: the “scope” assumptions imagine that practically every American at risk of being near a nuclear explosion has been relocated away from them. But what if that didn’t happen? The authors note that under those conditions, 125 million Americans would be exposed to around 2 psi of blast overpressure (enough to break windows and cause other kinds of “light” damage), and about 58 million would be exposed to 15 psi of blast pressure (enough to cause extreme damage to any civilian structures). Those are huge numbers! The authors point out that even without relocation, there would be a lot to be said for providing blast shelters for people but… that is a lot of blast shelters, for a lot of people at risk.

But such things aside, the authors dutifully try to remain optimistic about Civil Defense. If everyone was evacuated, and if everyone evacuated had adequate shelter, and if central control by government was continued throughout this totally overwhelming attack, and if actions were immediately taken to restore logistics, communications, electricity, food supply, water supply, petroleum production, and so on… then you can imagine a very large percentage of the United States surviving and rebuilding the nation.

Which, at least for me, sounds very improbable. In a way, this kind of report feels like a much worse condemnation of late Cold War Civil Defense plans than the anti-nuclear analyses that were being made at the time (and really flourished in the 1980s). Because the anti-nuclear studies tended to make much more pessimistic assumptions about the attack, about government response, about evacuations, etc., but this one uses what are quite possibly the most unrealistically optimistic assumptions one can make and it still sounds impossible.

This report is part of the 1970s-era of Civil Defense work (like the 1973 DCPA graph I previously profiled) that I find totally fascinating because it falls in a strange cleft of the “official culture” between the shelter-optimism of the 1960s and the Reagan-optimism of the 1980s. It tries to be optimistic, but they’re actually trying to crunch the numbers, and the numbers aren’t quite coming out all that well. They try to find ways to put positive spins on them… but one feels that, at some level, their heart isn’t entirely in it. Or maybe that’s just how it feels to me reading it back now.

The problem, at its heart, is that this kind of mass evacuation plan just doesn’t feel all that plausible. Arguably, evacuation plans of this scale could never be plausible — just try to get into or out of the New York City metro area (or Bay Area, or Los Angeles, or pick-your-urban-area) on a holiday weekend, and then imagine what would happen if it was done under imminent nuclear war conditions. Add the high yields of 1970s-1980s weapons with the fact that the flight times of ICBMs are measured in minutes, and you don’t have a lot of hope for urban areas unless you assume you can evacuate people well in advance. And that, it turns out, is a huge assumption in and of itself, for the reasons I’ve outlined.

But what’s the alternative for a Civil Defense planner? To admit that the cities are toast, essentially, and with them, a significant fraction of the national population. Which turns out to be a very hard thing to face up to, as obvious as it was, I think, to most people at the time. This was, and still is, a persistent failure of Civil Defense planners, I think, but at least in the 1970s, they don’t quite paper over it as thoroughly as they frequently did in other eras of planning.

One of their major publications was the Attack Environment Manual in 1973. It’s a bizarre document, and one I’ll be coming back to again. It is designed to help “the emergency planner understand what the next war may be like,” but it appears to have been pretty widely available in libraries. Its tone veers wildly. It has strange little cartoons at the end of each chapter, and even a Seventeen-style self-assessment quiz for determining whether you’re cut out to be a shelter leader. But it’s also a lot more honest than most public-facing Civil Defense output about how terrible a nuclear war would be, using that to emphasize the importance of Civil Defense planning.

The DCPA Attack Environment Manual has what is probably my favorite line graph of all time, labeled “A POSSIBLE CHAPTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY”:1

Here is the relevant text on the page that precedes the graph and describes how it is meant to be understood:

POSTATTACK RECOVERY

Another useful viewpoint for coping with the post-shelter environment is shown here. It is the view that might occupy the attention of the Nation's leaders or that might be described in in a history of the aftermath of a nuclear war.2

National well-being may be be considered as a composite of population, material resources, of material and social and economic institutions—the basic elements that make for a viable country. Prior to the attack, the national well-being is high, as shown at Point A. The immediate consequence of the attack is a sharp drop in well-being (Point B), with millions of dead and injured, great destruction of resources, and disorganization of institutions, such as government, banking, private ownership, and the like.3

It is reasonable to expect that the initial sharp drop would be followed by a further decline in well-being because of continuing fallout radiation exposure, deterioration of abandoned factory machinery, wastage of scarce resources, inadequate mutual aid, lack of communications, and general disruption of normal patterns of living. Initial coping efforts would attempt to “stabilize” the situation and satisfy the most pressing wants so that sooner or a later a minimum or “bottoming out” should occur (Point C), after which the Nation would begin its upward path to recovery (Point D).

There is a possible alternative history that the national leadership will strive to avoid. It is indicated by the downward dashed line at Point C, which implies that deterioration is so severe or management so inept or misdirected that national recovery does not occur at all, and the country degenerates into chaos and anarchy.

This viewpoint focuses on the need for national goals, goals widely shared at all levels of government and among the public at large. No local government nor wider region can recover by itself.4

There’s a lot that could be noted in the above (some of which I could not help but add as footnotes), but the main things that draws me back to this graph, again and again, are:

1. The drop from point A (pre-nuke “national well-being”) to point B (immediate aftermath) is realistically dramatic and immediate. This is such an obvious truism, yet is almost always totally lacking in any kind of public-facing discourse about nuclear war in Civil Defense literature. Sometimes one finds almost entirely unhinged optimism, an almost overt denial that even a few nuclear detonations (much less hundreds or thousands) would not have a dramatic impact on “national well-being.” At a minimum, it is usually just lacking in any acknowledgment of what everybody knows would be the case.

2. The gradual “bottoming out” from points B to C also feels like a realistic acknowledgment that “the day after” is not even the worst of it, that the death, injury, damage, disruption, contamination, etc., would continue to compound the misery considerably. That things would get worse before they would possibly get better. The scale of this graph is totally unspecified, but note that the difference between points B and C is about the difference between points A and B, just stretched out further in time.

3. Lastly, of course, I love what is happening with the dashed line coming off of point C, the acknowledgment that it is entirely possible to imagine that the situation would not improve, would spiral off into “chaos and anarchy.” The text uses this acknowledgment — which of course maps on to what most normal people thinking about this scenario would imagine the consequences of such an attack would be — as a way to frame what the entire goal of Civil Defense is: organizing and preparing so that instead of spiraling off into oblivion, you begin some kind of long, no-doubt difficult rebuilding process that, after some unspecified amount of time, returns the nation to its pre-war status of well-being.

In sum, what makes this graph unusual, for an official publication (albeit a very strange one), is that it actually gives at least some explicit voice to the idea that nuclear war would be extraordinarily painful and possibly not something that could be recovered from, even if it is done in the service of a message about the possibility of recovery.

The failure to acknowledge this very obvious and very commonly-held opinion, as most Civil Defense literature aimed at the general public does, contributes, I think, to the sense of unreality that people often have when it comes to Civil Defense messaging — and as such ultimately undermines the message. Even acknowledging this obliquely goes a long way towards establishing the the message being delivered is somewhat realistic, and the audience more receptive to the deeper, underlying message about the point of Civil Defense: trying (however well) to keep a bad state of affairs from becoming a permanent one. Whether that’s plausible, of course, is a separate question.

This graph is meant to be something to think with and not a realistic representation in any way, but it would be an interesting exercise to ask people what they believed the shape of the curve would be in “real life” under a presumed nuclear war scenario, and perhaps to imagine what scale the different axes might have.