Thanks for this excellent article. Kubrick met Hermann Kahn several times and both he and his wife Christiane were shocked by how intelligent the man was, quite a compliment considering that most of the people that worked with the director considered him a genius. This is a quote from Christiane Kubrick from the excellent "Reconstructing Dr.Strangelove", written by my friend Mick Broderick, sadly recently passed away. "I thought (Kahn's) brain has obviously run away from him a long time ago. He could think so fast. And he must have been so isolated from the rest of the world. Can you imagine being that much more intelligent than everybody else? Which he was. And at first it struck me a little bit like Rain Man, you know. A savant. (..] He just was that much more intelligent than other people. He could think that much faster than other people because he could speak that much faster than other people, and had this all round total recall of absolutely everything - a memory, I mean, just a much bigger computer. And we would sit there astonished. How boring it must be for him, sitting with two golden retrievers and trying to explain mathematical truths to them! That's what we both felt like, you know... in fact I think he slowed down considerably for us just so he had company. But that's what we felt. Sort of sitting up and trying to understand desperately."
I always assumed that the Bulletin's "Doomsday” (as per the “Doomsday Clock") referred to the last great conflagration; and the real doomsday machine was (is ?) the sheer quantity (and yield) of Soviet and US cold-war warheads ... peaking in the range of 40,000 deliverable nukes. That being many more nukes than there are cities, worldwide, with populations over 25,000. That would certainly be an unrecoverable event and therefore globally existential: i.e., a full-scale US-USSR war in the 1960s.
“Doomsday” was in the layman’s mind, a rational idea (it didn’t need to be a sinister idea; i.e., “if we can’t have the world, nobody can, threat) considering the forces and destruction of collective and immediate-term deployment of so many nuclear weapons. There was no need for a “Deadhand” under those circumstances. MAD equals Doomsday, plain and simple.
At that time (at least in common public parlance), Doomsday was not understood to be caused by post-detonation radiation effects; it was caused by conflagration (explosions and firestorms). Unknown to the public at that time ( of the Cold War), the now declassified Groves-Nicols Memo reveals that radiation effects were legitimately considered lethal ballistic effects of nuclear materials, and more likely the easier weapon to develop than fission weapons. But at MED they surprised themselves and were able to produce fission and fusion warheads much faster than anticipated. The MED idea of radiation weapons required the impossible high-volume cyclotron production of tons of radionuclides to be spread into the air over enemy cities. It was not physically feasible and timely to attempt to produce the quantities required for any wide-scale use of such a horrendous weapon (which was kept out of the public discourse). Blowing up and burning people in a few minutes being much more endearing weapons’ effects than weapons' effects causing weeks of torturous death from ARS (acute radiation syndrome).
What was not recognized at the time, or perhaps not palatable in the senior ranks of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) as a legitimate scientific or respectable weapons’ effect was the fact that nuclear weapons were already highly lethal radiation weapons. Death from ARS was a lethal contingent of any nuclear war. This effect in Japan was kept a secret from the US public by DoD for years.
Tritium and U238 can do it all. The idea of “radiation bombs” was really quite silly. Radiation is a physical and military reality of nuclear weapons. To make it into a new and optional ballistic effect was largely Cold War propaganda. I remember the public discourse at the time: it’s as if there is a choice to eliminate ionizing radiation and neutron-activation created fallout from the Bomb.
All nuclear fission bombs detonated adjacent to any mass, generate lethal radioactive fallout by neutron activation.
Lethal radioactive fallout is a function of optimized height-of-burst detonations, explosion geometry, and target interaction. Pulverize and entrain as much mass as possible. It’s that simple. The ingredients for fission boosting (U238, tritium) are already in the “conventional nuke” (couldn’t resist the oxymoron).
Nuclear war’s Doomsday was already the lethal radiation fallout causing death of enemy civilians for months after deployment and rendering their homelands uninhabitable, toxic wastelands. We didn’t need some silly salted-bomb construct to purge the original bomb of its radiation ballistics and try to bring righteousness into using radiation (tortuous slow death) as a legitimate military tactic.
By highlighting and redirecting attention from the horror of the inherent radiation effects of our bombs, by telling us radiation could be controlled, we would be less afraid of it. Perhaps more supportive of using it on others. And it wasn’t us, it was the Soviet Doomsday Machine (Deadhand) we had to fear. Playing into the narrative of public opinion management using a well-engineered anxiety and tension, so we don’t resist the nuclear program (military and domestic) because we can control it for war and peace.
Meanwhile, the third and most likely cause of Doomsday was left out of the conversation at that time: nuclear war precipitated climate change (i.e., Nuclear Winter).
My memory is that Robert Serber went by Teller's office at Los Alamos one day, and Teller was sketching possible bomb designs on the blackboard. One such bomb was labeled "Backyard," because all you had to do to destroy Russia was set it off in one's backyard. I suspect this was not a salted, doomsday-type device, but simply a very, very big classical Super. (As you know, Teller was later disappointed to discover that the blast effect of such very big bombs dissipated in the upper atmosphere.) Have you ever heard of Teller's "Backyard" bomb?
"The reports I have seen suggest that after further study, the US saw little military utility in “true” salted bombs, like Szilard’s cobalt bomb idea. Nuclear fallout of the “normal” sort (fission products) was bad-enough, and had the convenient property of becoming much less acutely radioactive on a timescale of weeks. A weapon whose fallout stayed deadly for months or years was not particularly useful if you were imagining that a nuclear war would not just be an “everybody dies” situation, but a situation where you might imagining being the “victor” in some way. A doomsday machine of the sort imagining by Szilard (or in Dr. Strangelove) is not something you’d want to have if you thought nuclear war was likely and you might be able to “win” it, in other words."
Intersting historical footnote to this.
Churchill found himself in a somewhat similar situation in late 1943 when the prospect of The War dragging on into at least 1946 was still a real possibility. WSC ordered study to be done on the possibility of drenching the Ruhr region with anthrax as a way of eliminating Germany's industrial capacity to wage war. Britain had been testing anthrax for use as a weapon for some time and had considered anthrax to be on par with the A bomb in some ways, so it seemed natural to Churchill to use anthrax to 'hit the Germans in a muderous place': it was available, Britain had it in quantity, and all that was needed was a plan to use it. By the time the study was concluded though the Allies were on the continent to stay and were advancing east toward the Reich. The report itself concluded that using anthrax in that way at that Stage might of itself prolong the Allied effort inasmuch as the advance east would be slowed down by the constant need and expense of decontaminating personel, equipment, and and the countryside itself so that the Allies themselves didn't fall victim to the anthrax weapon. The report also went on to describe the issues of postwar occupation in a countryside that was laced with anthrax spores, not only for the occupation forces but for the conquored civilian population as well. What it all boiled down to was that anthrax might defeat the Germans but it was a kind of defeat that had no victory inasmuch as the costs incurred by using the anthrax weapon outweighed the costs of fighting it out with conventional weapons. Churchill grudgingly shelved the idea after reading the report, not because he agreed with its conclusion but rather because he was already wrestling with the idea of what postwar Europe was going to look like, and a weapon that left the landscape contaminated and leathal didn't fit into his postwar designs. I suspect that he was also aware of what testing anthrax weapons had done to places like Gruinard AKA 'Anthrax Island' and had taken that into consideration.
I will send you specifications and a diagram of the BOMARC CIM-99B ground to air nuclear tipped missile on which I armed and disarmed the W40 ThermoNuclear bomb for some 14 months.
That is if you will remove from your thought your erroneous assumption that "I killed your dog" so to speak and will respond to me... which you must assume I have done as evidenced by your refusal to do.
I also have an American Friend in France who lives and farms there and knows much about the country and may be helpful to you, Good Doctor. He was the former Executive of an American computer company. He has also, on my behalf, tried to contact you with no success.
I have sent emails to your Stevens Institute email with no reply. I know no way to attach the diagrams and specifications here or contact you so I must unfortunately post this publicly for all to read. However, if you are so inclined to communicate with one of your blog readers... contact me at JCLParaCommando@protonmail.com
The Late Green Beret Legend, Colonel Sully H. deFontaine, was my second Father, born in France of the Family from the French 'cousin' of the American DuPont Company. His Grandson was and maybe still is the Assistant Director of French DGSE (French Intelligence).
Regardless, I hope you, your wife and dog (see, I didn't kill your dog) enjoy your stay in France. If I am reincarnated, I would like it to be in France... around my ancestors there in the Marseilles area.
Termini…
Jack Lawson
Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
“A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give up his life in defense of his convictions."
A quote of German Major General Herman Karl Robert Henning von Tresckow. Leader of the failed July 20th assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler in 1944.
A courageous man, even though he had been involved indirectly with German atrocities committed during World War II-This assassination attempt, code named “Valkyrie” and immortalized by the movie starring Tom Cruise, was conceived by Russian Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin and the Russian NKVD Secret Police. It was then carried out by German officers who were secretly members of or sympathetic to the German Communist Party or simply had a hatred of the death and destruction Hitler was creating in their homeland, the latter of which was General Henning von Tresckow’s motivation.
My grand OSS Friend and Second Father Sully, of our Special Forces Chapter, read the confidential file in Brussels, Belgium in 1946
From Jack Lawson… an American in 1RLI Support Commando and attached to Rhodesian “C Squadron” SAS Africa 1976-79
Thanks for this excellent article. Kubrick met Hermann Kahn several times and both he and his wife Christiane were shocked by how intelligent the man was, quite a compliment considering that most of the people that worked with the director considered him a genius. This is a quote from Christiane Kubrick from the excellent "Reconstructing Dr.Strangelove", written by my friend Mick Broderick, sadly recently passed away. "I thought (Kahn's) brain has obviously run away from him a long time ago. He could think so fast. And he must have been so isolated from the rest of the world. Can you imagine being that much more intelligent than everybody else? Which he was. And at first it struck me a little bit like Rain Man, you know. A savant. (..] He just was that much more intelligent than other people. He could think that much faster than other people because he could speak that much faster than other people, and had this all round total recall of absolutely everything - a memory, I mean, just a much bigger computer. And we would sit there astonished. How boring it must be for him, sitting with two golden retrievers and trying to explain mathematical truths to them! That's what we both felt like, you know... in fact I think he slowed down considerably for us just so he had company. But that's what we felt. Sort of sitting up and trying to understand desperately."
I always assumed that the Bulletin's "Doomsday” (as per the “Doomsday Clock") referred to the last great conflagration; and the real doomsday machine was (is ?) the sheer quantity (and yield) of Soviet and US cold-war warheads ... peaking in the range of 40,000 deliverable nukes. That being many more nukes than there are cities, worldwide, with populations over 25,000. That would certainly be an unrecoverable event and therefore globally existential: i.e., a full-scale US-USSR war in the 1960s.
“Doomsday” was in the layman’s mind, a rational idea (it didn’t need to be a sinister idea; i.e., “if we can’t have the world, nobody can, threat) considering the forces and destruction of collective and immediate-term deployment of so many nuclear weapons. There was no need for a “Deadhand” under those circumstances. MAD equals Doomsday, plain and simple.
At that time (at least in common public parlance), Doomsday was not understood to be caused by post-detonation radiation effects; it was caused by conflagration (explosions and firestorms). Unknown to the public at that time ( of the Cold War), the now declassified Groves-Nicols Memo reveals that radiation effects were legitimately considered lethal ballistic effects of nuclear materials, and more likely the easier weapon to develop than fission weapons. But at MED they surprised themselves and were able to produce fission and fusion warheads much faster than anticipated. The MED idea of radiation weapons required the impossible high-volume cyclotron production of tons of radionuclides to be spread into the air over enemy cities. It was not physically feasible and timely to attempt to produce the quantities required for any wide-scale use of such a horrendous weapon (which was kept out of the public discourse). Blowing up and burning people in a few minutes being much more endearing weapons’ effects than weapons' effects causing weeks of torturous death from ARS (acute radiation syndrome).
What was not recognized at the time, or perhaps not palatable in the senior ranks of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) as a legitimate scientific or respectable weapons’ effect was the fact that nuclear weapons were already highly lethal radiation weapons. Death from ARS was a lethal contingent of any nuclear war. This effect in Japan was kept a secret from the US public by DoD for years.
Tritium and U238 can do it all. The idea of “radiation bombs” was really quite silly. Radiation is a physical and military reality of nuclear weapons. To make it into a new and optional ballistic effect was largely Cold War propaganda. I remember the public discourse at the time: it’s as if there is a choice to eliminate ionizing radiation and neutron-activation created fallout from the Bomb.
All nuclear fission bombs detonated adjacent to any mass, generate lethal radioactive fallout by neutron activation.
Lethal radioactive fallout is a function of optimized height-of-burst detonations, explosion geometry, and target interaction. Pulverize and entrain as much mass as possible. It’s that simple. The ingredients for fission boosting (U238, tritium) are already in the “conventional nuke” (couldn’t resist the oxymoron).
Nuclear war’s Doomsday was already the lethal radiation fallout causing death of enemy civilians for months after deployment and rendering their homelands uninhabitable, toxic wastelands. We didn’t need some silly salted-bomb construct to purge the original bomb of its radiation ballistics and try to bring righteousness into using radiation (tortuous slow death) as a legitimate military tactic.
By highlighting and redirecting attention from the horror of the inherent radiation effects of our bombs, by telling us radiation could be controlled, we would be less afraid of it. Perhaps more supportive of using it on others. And it wasn’t us, it was the Soviet Doomsday Machine (Deadhand) we had to fear. Playing into the narrative of public opinion management using a well-engineered anxiety and tension, so we don’t resist the nuclear program (military and domestic) because we can control it for war and peace.
Meanwhile, the third and most likely cause of Doomsday was left out of the conversation at that time: nuclear war precipitated climate change (i.e., Nuclear Winter).
My memory is that Robert Serber went by Teller's office at Los Alamos one day, and Teller was sketching possible bomb designs on the blackboard. One such bomb was labeled "Backyard," because all you had to do to destroy Russia was set it off in one's backyard. I suspect this was not a salted, doomsday-type device, but simply a very, very big classical Super. (As you know, Teller was later disappointed to discover that the blast effect of such very big bombs dissipated in the upper atmosphere.) Have you ever heard of Teller's "Backyard" bomb?
"The reports I have seen suggest that after further study, the US saw little military utility in “true” salted bombs, like Szilard’s cobalt bomb idea. Nuclear fallout of the “normal” sort (fission products) was bad-enough, and had the convenient property of becoming much less acutely radioactive on a timescale of weeks. A weapon whose fallout stayed deadly for months or years was not particularly useful if you were imagining that a nuclear war would not just be an “everybody dies” situation, but a situation where you might imagining being the “victor” in some way. A doomsday machine of the sort imagining by Szilard (or in Dr. Strangelove) is not something you’d want to have if you thought nuclear war was likely and you might be able to “win” it, in other words."
Intersting historical footnote to this.
Churchill found himself in a somewhat similar situation in late 1943 when the prospect of The War dragging on into at least 1946 was still a real possibility. WSC ordered study to be done on the possibility of drenching the Ruhr region with anthrax as a way of eliminating Germany's industrial capacity to wage war. Britain had been testing anthrax for use as a weapon for some time and had considered anthrax to be on par with the A bomb in some ways, so it seemed natural to Churchill to use anthrax to 'hit the Germans in a muderous place': it was available, Britain had it in quantity, and all that was needed was a plan to use it. By the time the study was concluded though the Allies were on the continent to stay and were advancing east toward the Reich. The report itself concluded that using anthrax in that way at that Stage might of itself prolong the Allied effort inasmuch as the advance east would be slowed down by the constant need and expense of decontaminating personel, equipment, and and the countryside itself so that the Allies themselves didn't fall victim to the anthrax weapon. The report also went on to describe the issues of postwar occupation in a countryside that was laced with anthrax spores, not only for the occupation forces but for the conquored civilian population as well. What it all boiled down to was that anthrax might defeat the Germans but it was a kind of defeat that had no victory inasmuch as the costs incurred by using the anthrax weapon outweighed the costs of fighting it out with conventional weapons. Churchill grudgingly shelved the idea after reading the report, not because he agreed with its conclusion but rather because he was already wrestling with the idea of what postwar Europe was going to look like, and a weapon that left the landscape contaminated and leathal didn't fit into his postwar designs. I suspect that he was also aware of what testing anthrax weapons had done to places like Gruinard AKA 'Anthrax Island' and had taken that into consideration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vegetarian
AGAIN... Doctor Wellerstein,
I will send you specifications and a diagram of the BOMARC CIM-99B ground to air nuclear tipped missile on which I armed and disarmed the W40 ThermoNuclear bomb for some 14 months.
That is if you will remove from your thought your erroneous assumption that "I killed your dog" so to speak and will respond to me... which you must assume I have done as evidenced by your refusal to do.
I also have an American Friend in France who lives and farms there and knows much about the country and may be helpful to you, Good Doctor. He was the former Executive of an American computer company. He has also, on my behalf, tried to contact you with no success.
I have sent emails to your Stevens Institute email with no reply. I know no way to attach the diagrams and specifications here or contact you so I must unfortunately post this publicly for all to read. However, if you are so inclined to communicate with one of your blog readers... contact me at JCLParaCommando@protonmail.com
The Late Green Beret Legend, Colonel Sully H. deFontaine, was my second Father, born in France of the Family from the French 'cousin' of the American DuPont Company. His Grandson was and maybe still is the Assistant Director of French DGSE (French Intelligence).
Regardless, I hope you, your wife and dog (see, I didn't kill your dog) enjoy your stay in France. If I am reincarnated, I would like it to be in France... around my ancestors there in the Marseilles area.
Termini…
Jack Lawson
Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of the “Civil Defense Manual,” “The Slaver’s Wheel,” “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil” and “In Defense.” Go to www.JackLawsonBooks.com and JackLawsonBooks.Substack.com
“A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give up his life in defense of his convictions."
A quote of German Major General Herman Karl Robert Henning von Tresckow. Leader of the failed July 20th assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler in 1944.
A courageous man, even though he had been involved indirectly with German atrocities committed during World War II-This assassination attempt, code named “Valkyrie” and immortalized by the movie starring Tom Cruise, was conceived by Russian Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin and the Russian NKVD Secret Police. It was then carried out by German officers who were secretly members of or sympathetic to the German Communist Party or simply had a hatred of the death and destruction Hitler was creating in their homeland, the latter of which was General Henning von Tresckow’s motivation.
My grand OSS Friend and Second Father Sully, of our Special Forces Chapter, read the confidential file in Brussels, Belgium in 1946
From Jack Lawson… an American in 1RLI Support Commando and attached to Rhodesian “C Squadron” SAS Africa 1976-79
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