Category Archives: Nuclear Weapons

Expect the Unexpected

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Our review of a book on the safety – or lack of it – for nuclear weapons, got me thinking. One of the book’s points was that complex, interconnected systems are inherently difficult to predict and control. Many of our nuclear weapons were designed without thought to how they would eventually be decommissioned and destroyed. It reminds me of a saying I had posted over my desk on my first “real” job out of college: if you design only for steady state, you’ll have a system that cannot be started-up, shut-down, or maintained.

Our modern society has many complex systems where failures are serious – for example, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the electric grid, and commercial airlines. Also where people make up a large part of the system – for example, hospitals, pharmacies, and emergency response. We seem determined to insist people in these systems should be infallible, and many highly-skilled people strive to achieve this level of perfection. When something goes wrong, “blame was placed on human error, but ‘the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.'” Continue reading →

Nuclear Weapons and Safety

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command and controlSchlosser states his goal for Command and Control: “This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use… It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.” The book works very well this way. If you wonder “why would anyone want to blow up the world?”, this book shows the premise of that question is wrong. You will learn the “whys” behind the nuclear arms race. This is a long book: 448 pages of text, with 229 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. So even if you’re familiar with the Cold War, you’re bound to learn something.

Schlosser’s book covers efforts to ensure American nuclear weapons don’t “go off by accident, [or] by mistake.” Schlosser uses an accident with a Titan II missile as the frame for the book. He covers the accident in great detail from the view point of many of those involved, so stringing the chapters together would have been an information overload. Instead, he intersperses chapters on the accident with history of the Cold War, political battles among military and scientific factions, biographies of some of the people involved, and other accidents – especially with airborne warheads.

Schlosser shows how “trivial events in non-trivial systems” can lead to significant problems. Some of these incidents sound ridiculous: a janitor cleaning the floor in a nuclear reactor caught his shirt on a circuit breaker, tripped the breaker and shut the reactor down for four days; a plane on an aircraft carrier inexplicably rolled off the deck, sending the pilot, plane, and its nuclear warheads to the bottom of the ocean, never to be recovered.

In many of the accidents, blame was placed on human error, but “the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.” Continue reading →

The Truman Presidency: The History of a Triumphant Succession

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the truman presidencyThere are several books about Harry S. Truman, and I started this book by Cabell Phillips with a bit of skepticism. The book was published in 1966, and it does suffer from the fact that much of the information about Soviet spying was still classified at that time. The author therefore writes disbelievingly about reports of espionage activities by government officials. One example involves the separate revelations by two people who turned themselves in to the FBI admitting they had been Communists and couriers for large Soviet espionage networks. The author refers to them as “A tense, overwrought spinster named Elizabeth Bentley and a moody senior editor of Time Magazine.”  Their stories “…were so incredible that the FBI at first refused to countenance them.” It is true that the liberal media chipped away at the credibility of both people and their testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The media had stories that questioned the mental state of both people and portrayed them as unsavory or at least unattractive. The eventual declassification of counterespionage information and the opening of Soviet archives validated the testimony of both people.

Getting that quibble set aside, I did find the book to have good information that is well presented. The dustcover sets the tone of admiration the author has for Truman. He describes the Truman’s story as “…one of the most heartening and surprisingly personal success stories in the annals of politics. From the day in April 1945 when the news of FDR’s death shocked the nation, Harry Truman, the unprepossessing ‘little man from Missouri,’ grew slowly and haltingly to become one of the ‘great’ American Presidents.” That tone continues with the first two sentences of the Preface. “Harry S. Truman was a quite ordinary man. He was also a quite extraordinary President.” The author acknowledges the help of Dean G. Acheson, Clark M. Clifford, and Averell Harriman, three people I have read were trusted Truman confidants. I thought that gave the book a stamp of credibility. Continue reading →

Brotherhood of the Bomb

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brotherhood of the bombThe subtitle of this book by Gregg Herken is “The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.” Another book by the author, “The Winning Weapon” (a review was posted October 1) concluded that too much was made of Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project. “Brotherhood of the Bomb” reaches an entirely different conclusion. A footnote on page 126 states “Near the end of the war, because of Fuchs and other spies at Los Alamos, the Russians had a precise description of the component parts of Fat Man, including such engineering details as the makeup and design of the explosive lenses use to compress the plutonium core and the exact dimensions of the bomb’s polonium initiator. The device that the Soviets exploded in their first nuclear test, in August 1949, was essentially a copy of Fat Man.” “The Winning Weapon” was published in 1980 and “Brotherhood of the Bomb” in 2002. Much was learned about the extent of Soviet spying after the first book was published in 1980. For example, the Venona Project that revealed the massive extent of Soviet spying was declassified in 1995. Both books have value to someone interested in the atomic bomb and its impact on the Cold War, and the first gives a good idea of how much of the media looked at the issue of Soviet spying in 1980.

“Brotherhood of the Bomb” gives detailed insight into the scientists who became famous as the result of discovering what could be accomplished, mostly in the form of weapons, with atomic energy. Lawrence had announced in 1932 that “…heavy particles not only disintegrated readily but in the process seemed to release more energy than it took to break them apart.” He proposed a vista of cheap, reliable, and virtually limitless energy…” His “disintegration hypothesis” was greeted with skepticism verging on ridicule. Rutherford made his now famous statement that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine.” Continue reading →

The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945-1950

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I worked at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado where plutonium parts were made for nuclear weapons and have a natural curiosity about the policy decisions made by the government that led to that plant being built in the early 1950s. This book by Gregg Herken answers some of the questions. I do find it curious that the author mentions several times in the book that “too much was made” of the amount of information gained by the Soviet espionage on the Manhattan Project, code named “Enormoz.” My reading of other sources indicates the Soviets learned everything they needed to know to build and detonate an atomic bomb years before it had been predicted.

The dust cover of the book explains that American diplomats tried but “…failed to make the nation’s nuclear monopoly an advantage in negotiating with the Soviet Union. The author explains why the atomic bomb, supposedly the ‘winning weapon’ in military strategy and diplomacy, turned out to be a dud in such a confrontation as the 1948 Berlin crisis.”

Many American officials, including Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, believed that the bomb would make a decisive difference in postwar dealings with the Soviet Union. However, Byrnes was said to be humbled by the first meeting of the victorious powers when he observed that the Russians were going to be difficult. He said they were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don’t scare.” Diplomacy accomplished little after World War II. Churchill and later the United States accused the Soviets of raising an “iron curtain” as America began erecting what the author called an “atomic curtain shutting out the rest of the world.” Continue reading →

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics

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This book by Ruth Lewin Sime is a wonderful introduction to a fascinating person and a powerful example of the inequalities created by rigorous suppression of women in (hopefully) years past. The author says at six years old she must have seen a picture of Lise (pronounced Lee-seh) “in Life or The New York Times, or perhaps Aufbau, The German refugee’s newspaper…Lise Meitner was a celebrity:  the tiny woman who barely escaped the Nazis, the physicist responsible for nuclear fission, ‘the Jewish mother of the atomic bomb’—although she was a Jew by birth, not affiliation, and she had refused to work on the bomb…To me she was a hero…” Einstein referred to her as “our Marie Curie” for her physics research in Berlin.

The author was a chemistry teacher at a community college and was known as “…the woman the all-male chemistry department did not want to hire.” The author describes herself as a feminist; although it is doubtful she faced anything similar to the discrimination Lise experienced as a youngster wanting to gain an education and as a scientist. One of my favorite descriptions is about a research director (male, of course) who didn’t allow women in the laboratories because he was afraid they would set their hair on fire. Continue reading →