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My hot take on the Manhattan Project
I have not seen the movie Oppenheimer, but it has gotten me thinking again about a book I read recently, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser (highly, highly recommend).
I was a Chemistry major, which gives me a particular relationship with the Manhattan Project. At least half of everything I learned for my degree was discovered during the Manhattan Project or as a direct result. Every luminary of chemistry and physics alive at the time worked on it. It supercharged our understanding of those fields in a way that makes it hard to envision what our knowledge would be without it. It’s also often talked about as kind of science geek summer camp—that’s certainly the impression you get from books like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
I even worked for someone who worked on the Manhattan Project, when I was an intern in college. He’d been a grad student at the time, so certainly not one of the names that gets mentioned. He was well past retirement age but still puttering around with a lab and a couple of grad students, which gives an idea of the reverence attached to the people who did that early work establishing fields. (In the fifties, he’d done a lot of the baseline work on ESR spectroscopy.)
All that being said, I’ve come to believe that the whole thing should never have happened.
There’s a justification that is used—we had to develop nuclear weapons because the Nazis were going to develop them. In other words, the development was inevitable, so we had better be first.
I don’t believe that justification anymore. I don’t think nuclear weapons were inevitable.
Look at the absolutely mammoth effort that was required to develop them. And the fact that every other nation that has nuclear weapons either stole designs through spying or were given them. In reading Command and Control, it’s clear how spit and paperclips the whole process was. It required phenomenal leaps of insight in engineering and theoretical modelling of materials. If we hadn’t done it, I don’t think it was inevitable that someone else would have. That goes double for the hydrogen bomb.
Command and Control is mostly about the systems (or lack thereof) that the US had around nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It really pierces the story I was taught about nuclear weapons and deterrence I was taught in school.
The reality is nuclear weapons are really bad weapons. That is, they’re bad at being weapons. They’re monstrously heavy, unreliable, and impossible to aim. You can’t use them against an army battalion or a fleet of ships or enemy fighter planes. The only thing--the only thing--you can use them for is murdering civilians. Drop them on a population center and it doesn’t matter that you missed by several miles. During the height of the Cold War, the US had an operational plan that would eliminate the USSR’s military capacity in a single stroke. But because H-bombs are so unreliable, every target was going to be hit by three or four. The plan would have killed 90% of the population of the USSR and China.
(Also, if you're thinking nuclear weapons must be safe since they've only been used twice in war and have never had an accident--oh honey. There have been thousands of accidents with nukes. Thousands. You can't create as many nuclear weapons as we did and fly them around on planes with tens of thousands of service members working on them without every kind of thing going wrong. The Damascus Accident in the subtitle of the book refers to the time we very nearly blew up half of Arkansas.)
I remember being taught history in the “end of history” period of the nineties, where we were being taught that certain weapons so shocked the sensibilities that the world “agreed” to never use them again—weapons like nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. But you know what? No one used chemical weapons after WWI because they’re tactically ineffective. I mean—unless your goal is to kill your own civilian population. I think the same is true of nuclear weapons. I think if they were good at achieving tactical goals, they’d still be used. "Sensibilities" never stopped a nation from doing anything.
In the run-up to WWII, there was an effort by scientists in the field of nuclear physics to boycott further research into weapons applications. They were starting to see the possibility of their field, and tried to prevent further study. I really wish they’d succeeded. “If we don’t, someone else will,” is a flimsy, self-serving justification. Why don’t we see what happens if we don’t.
I was a Chemistry major, which gives me a particular relationship with the Manhattan Project. At least half of everything I learned for my degree was discovered during the Manhattan Project or as a direct result. Every luminary of chemistry and physics alive at the time worked on it. It supercharged our understanding of those fields in a way that makes it hard to envision what our knowledge would be without it. It’s also often talked about as kind of science geek summer camp—that’s certainly the impression you get from books like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
I even worked for someone who worked on the Manhattan Project, when I was an intern in college. He’d been a grad student at the time, so certainly not one of the names that gets mentioned. He was well past retirement age but still puttering around with a lab and a couple of grad students, which gives an idea of the reverence attached to the people who did that early work establishing fields. (In the fifties, he’d done a lot of the baseline work on ESR spectroscopy.)
All that being said, I’ve come to believe that the whole thing should never have happened.
There’s a justification that is used—we had to develop nuclear weapons because the Nazis were going to develop them. In other words, the development was inevitable, so we had better be first.
I don’t believe that justification anymore. I don’t think nuclear weapons were inevitable.
Look at the absolutely mammoth effort that was required to develop them. And the fact that every other nation that has nuclear weapons either stole designs through spying or were given them. In reading Command and Control, it’s clear how spit and paperclips the whole process was. It required phenomenal leaps of insight in engineering and theoretical modelling of materials. If we hadn’t done it, I don’t think it was inevitable that someone else would have. That goes double for the hydrogen bomb.
Command and Control is mostly about the systems (or lack thereof) that the US had around nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It really pierces the story I was taught about nuclear weapons and deterrence I was taught in school.
The reality is nuclear weapons are really bad weapons. That is, they’re bad at being weapons. They’re monstrously heavy, unreliable, and impossible to aim. You can’t use them against an army battalion or a fleet of ships or enemy fighter planes. The only thing--the only thing--you can use them for is murdering civilians. Drop them on a population center and it doesn’t matter that you missed by several miles. During the height of the Cold War, the US had an operational plan that would eliminate the USSR’s military capacity in a single stroke. But because H-bombs are so unreliable, every target was going to be hit by three or four. The plan would have killed 90% of the population of the USSR and China.
(Also, if you're thinking nuclear weapons must be safe since they've only been used twice in war and have never had an accident--oh honey. There have been thousands of accidents with nukes. Thousands. You can't create as many nuclear weapons as we did and fly them around on planes with tens of thousands of service members working on them without every kind of thing going wrong. The Damascus Accident in the subtitle of the book refers to the time we very nearly blew up half of Arkansas.)
I remember being taught history in the “end of history” period of the nineties, where we were being taught that certain weapons so shocked the sensibilities that the world “agreed” to never use them again—weapons like nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. But you know what? No one used chemical weapons after WWI because they’re tactically ineffective. I mean—unless your goal is to kill your own civilian population. I think the same is true of nuclear weapons. I think if they were good at achieving tactical goals, they’d still be used. "Sensibilities" never stopped a nation from doing anything.
In the run-up to WWII, there was an effort by scientists in the field of nuclear physics to boycott further research into weapons applications. They were starting to see the possibility of their field, and tried to prevent further study. I really wish they’d succeeded. “If we don’t, someone else will,” is a flimsy, self-serving justification. Why don’t we see what happens if we don’t.