“Countdown,” continuing review of Sarah Scoles’ new book

“The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons”

  

 

 

Lots to continue to cover here. But, first, let's scare and depress the crap out of you. "What if we nuke a city?"

 Oh, and this was just released on Netflix.

 

Rather nicely done. I have both of the major Einstein biographies, by Clark and Isaacson. The docudrama squares fairly well, albeit in brief.

Before deep diving into Sarah's book, a quick (apropos?) diversion

KOKURA’S LUCK

On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan, and checked into room number 56 at the nearby Miyako Hotel. Once settled, they strolled through the former imperial capital, soaking up the city’s autumnal explosion of color, as the Japanese maples turned crimson and the ginkgo trees burst into a golden shade of yellow, their trunks rising above a bed of lush green moss. They visited Kyoto’s pristine gardens, tucked into the mudstone hills that frame the city. They marveled at its historic temples, the rich heritage of a bygone shogunate embedded in each timber. Six days later, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson packed up, paid their bill, and left.

But this was no ordinary tourist visit. The Stimson name in the ledger at the Miyako Hotel would become a historical record, a relic marking a chain of events in which one man played God, sparing one hundred thousand lives while condemning a similar number to death elsewhere. It was, perhaps, the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Nineteen years later, far from the Japanese maples, in the sagebrush-dotted hills of New Mexico, an unlikely group of physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y. It was May 10, 1945, three days after the Nazis had surrendered. The focus now shifted to the Pacific, where a bloody war of attrition seemed to have no end in sight. However, in this remote outpost of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: a new weapon of unimaginable destruction that they called the Gadget.

No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone at Site Y sensed they were getting close. In preparation, thirteen men were asked to join the Target Committee, an elite group that would decide how to introduce the Gadget to the world. Which city should be destroyed? They agreed targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they agreed on a target. The first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Kyoto was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. The Target Committee also noted a small, but perhaps crucial, point: Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history—and that the war had already been lost. The Target Committee agreed: Kyoto must be destroyed.

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. All they needed to do was wait for the bomb to be ready.

The Atomic Age dawned on July 16, 1945, with a successful test explosion in the vast emptiness of rural New Mexico. The Target Committee’s decisions were no longer theoretical. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. The intended blast site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier.

On August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima, dropped from the Enola Gay. As many as 140,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. Three days later, on August 9, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll.

But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki—a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target—destroyed? Remarkably, the lives of roughly two hundred thousand people teetered between life and death because of a tourist couple and a cloud.

By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. As a man without a uniform, Stimson felt it was his job to develop strategic goals, not to micromanage generals on how best to achieve them. But that all changed when the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction.

Stimson sprang into action. In a meeting with the head of the Manhattan Project, Stimson put his foot down: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” In a discussion with the commander of the U.S. armed forces, Stimson insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. It ticked all the boxes, the generals insisted. It needed to be bombed. Why, they wondered, was Stimson hell-bent on protecting a nerve center of the Japanese war machine?

The generals didn’t know about the Miyako Hotel, the majestic Japanese maples, or the golden ginkgo trees.

Stimson, unwavering, went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented. Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. Stimson had saved what the generals called his “pet city.” The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead.

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, cloud cover made it difficult to see the ground below. The clouds were unexpected. A team of army meteorologists had predicted clear skies. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, and the clouds parted at the last possible minute. The bomb fell at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945. Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a fleeting window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster…

Klaas, Brian (2024-01-22T22:58:59.000). Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Another killer read.

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SARAH SCOLES, cont’…

Some random quotes, jumping around.

Yeah.

 

We can attest.

 

Below, 1993. my wife (li'l cutey), 130 miles above the Article Circle, for the summer and fall, Point Hope, Alaska on the far NW Chukchi Sea. DOE Project Chariot nuke waste cleanup (long story). That's Dr. Joe Yeasted in the orange vest and cap. Major League dude. We all remain tight.

 

We'd just moved to Las Vegas the prior year for her to be QA mgr. for the Nevada Test Site remediation work as DOE prime contractor DOE foisted the Chariot gig off on her company. And, then, of course, took credit for a successful (mostly enviro PR) mission.

 

Cheryl and I got into nuke work in Oak Ridge in the 80's. From another of my posts:

 

Another personal history: In January 1986, just prior to my 40th birthday I got my "first day gig" at a radiation laboratory in Oak Ridge after getting my undergrad at UTK in 1985 (yeah, I'm slow; old washed-up guitar player). "ASL" ("Applied Sciences Laboratory"). It was founded by PhD nuclear engineer John A. Auxier, the nation's premier "certified health physicist" (CHP, basically a radiation dose/exposire epidemiologist). John had just retired as the Director of Industrial Health and Safety at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). He'd been a member of the Three Mile Island Commission. He was a pilot since his days in the military. He owned several fixed-wing aircraft and a helicopter, serviced by the Smoky Mountain Aero FBO at McGhee-Tyson Airport near Alcoa TN. 

My wife was the customer service manager there while I was in school at UT. She managed his aviation account.

Recognizing supreme talent (she's the smartest woman I ever met), he pilfered her to become his Customer Service/Marketing Manager (and eventually QA Lead). Through her he learned of my studies in applied statistics.

"We need to computerize our operations and QC analysis, Cheryl. Would Bobby like to come out and work for us?"

I arrived right after New Year's Day 1986. QC data were computed on yellow pads in pencil by old school scientists brandishing slide rules. Sums of squares done long-hand for QC Sigma limits.

Interesting.

I stayed 5 1/2 yrs. We went from a single building on Bear Creek Rd with 9 employees to a complex of 3 buildings running 24/7, employing many dozens of radiochemists, CHPs, technicians, and biz peeps.

I began using an IBM-XT, the only PC on the property. I wrote all of their code (what we now call "apps"), and installed and managed their Novell Network. I'd never touched a PC before. I was blissfully unaware that you couldn't do these things.

Eventually, ASL got bought by a growing company called "International Technology Corporation" (IT Corp), based in Pittsburgh. We became "IT/ORL."

 

IT Corp grew and grew and grew. in 1992 they won the DOE environmental remediation contract to assess and clean up the Nevada Test Site nuke mess. Cheryl was the QA Manager. I'd moved on to Digital Industrial Diagnostics (FFT analytics).

 

I quit. We moved to Las Vegas. We then lived there for 21 years.

 

IT Corp was now public (ITX), had grown massively via acquisitions, and had ironically now come into the takeover crosshairs of The Carlyle Group. The new CEO was essentially a plant.

Carlyle de-boned and BK'd them in short order. I'll spare you the myriad plunderers' particulars. The CEO made Bank.

Cheryl landed on her feet (most ITX people were not so lucky). ITX was sold to The Shaw Group of Baton Rouge (SGR). Shaw named her Director of Quality of the new "Environmental Division"—her entire former company. Those to whom she'd once reported now reported to her. (Like I said; crazy, scary smart.)

That was a wild period. She spent the entire fall post-Katrina working on the remediation. SGR was the contractor that pumped NOLA out, and ran the "blue tarp" and emergency mobile homes initiatives.

 

Eventually SGR had an internal political C-Suite dustup, the upshot of which was a demand for Cheryl to relocate from Vegas to Baton Rouge (surely for The Contrarian Bitch to be reined in).

 

She quit. Finished her career as worldwide Corporate Director of Quality for the esteemed Rhode Island-based Gilbane Building Companies, working out of Concord, CA.

Carlyle's Rubenstein—[bleep] you and your philanthropy and rep-washing PBS hustle. Y'all ruined a technologically adept and committed company. But, I'm sure you did well.

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"Buy time for our political leaders to find a better way..."

 

Do do what? Kill people more efficiently and "cleanly?" Not sure yet what he meant. Achieve durable global peace? Short of that, materially diminish the "false positives (innocent noncombatants) and false negatives (dangerous enemies missed)?" I'll have to keep digging on this guy to clarify. Beyond that, there're perhaps wafts of Steve Pinker-isms in the foregoing—and, there's no denying the aggregate worldwide collateral damage declining trend data (which won’t however, boost spirits in Gaza these days).

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Yeah. Tru' 'dat. "To the optimist the glass is half-full. To the pessimist the glass is half-empty."

 

To the engineer, the glass was designed and mfg'd 2x too large. Yeah, old joke.

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Once, during my Oak Ridge radlab tenure, we got called in on a dustup at the Mexico-TX border, where an incoming tractor-trailer rig had set off radiation detectors. The I-beams undergirding the flatbed were "hot" (radioactive). We gumshoe'd the stuff all the way back to its source.

Not far from where Cheryl and I lived in South Knoxville was a scrap yard, "Knox Metals," which had for many years been buying trace-level rad waste scrap stuff from the Oak Ridge Y-12 and K-25 weapons facilities. Some of this scrap steel got re-sold, re-smelted, and ended up in a truck bed that made it to Mexico and back, setting off the TexMex border detectors. Lordy.

 

BACKING UP A TAD: CHERNOBYL?

IT WAS LIVERMORE’S SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE THAT LED TO NARAC’S founding in the first place (National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center). The organization began, in a less official capacity, during the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, when an American nuclear power reactor partially melted down and later released radioactive gases into the air. As the almost-catastrophic event was in motion, the Jimmy Carter administration reached out to Livermore: Could the lab provide any useful information to teams headed to the affected area? They could, it turns out. In the 1960s and 1970s, the lab had worked on the global circulation model, which showed how air moved around the world. The model could also be refined, harnessed, and directed toward the catastrophe, revealing how contaminants would spread across the world and what their ultimate fate would be. [Scoles, Countdown, p. 146]

In April 1986 I was managing a database and reporting script I'd developed to track environmental rad baselines at a proposed civilian nuke powerplant startup in Perry, Ohio, part of a 5 yr requisite REMP study (Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program). Weekly environmental and bioassay baselines sampling across a breadth of matrices—soil, water, vegetation, dairy cow milk, fish, misc other local wildlife, and air.

My air assays always came back "below LLD," Below Lower Limit of Detection ("less than 0.04 picocuries per cubic meter"). I would just run a quick macro appending the data to reflect the latest "<0.04 pCi/cu.m."

 

A week after Chernobyl blew, we got significant quantifiable positive readings in all of the Perry air filter sampling stations. Airborne alpha-emitting Iodine-131 (I-131). Half-life 8.05 days, so by after a subsequent 4 weeks or so the assays had gone back down below LLD.

In the ensuing years, though, scientists were busily studying stuff like Cs-137 radionuclide uptake in arctic caribou.

 

Small world, 'eh?

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Much more shortly...

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