Hamblin introduction

Hamblin is an environmental historian and historian of science

This book focuses on cold war efforts to develop environmentally damaging weapons

• how much can we use our science and technology to control the environment for harm?
• could we develop ways to modify the weather?  should we? (note that this is a topic with lots of conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails)
  
• to what extent can science give us mastery over nature?
  

• just war theory says that those making war must minimize harm to civilians
• but in WWII one goal was to reduce the other side's ability to build more weapons and to demoralize the population, which meant targeting industrial areas and civilians
• do you need more weapons than atomic bombs?  preparing the fuel for atomic bombs was slow and so they didn't have very many
  

• scientists did research that showed more about the vulnerability of the environment
• the military funded research on a large scale on environmental issues
• Eugene Odum at University of Georgia and the Savannah River Site
  

• military funded research caused scientists to focus on environmental change and vulnerability
  
• scientists came to believe that humans now had the power to change the environment on a large scale
  
• scientists saw such change as justified by the cold war

• Research into the properties of the nucleus was well under way before the war, and German scientists made many of the key discoveries in nuclear physics that made nuclear weapons possible
• some elements are unstable and will naturally change to something else and release radioactivity
  
• Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity as a property of uranium in 1896, Marie Curie discovered other radioactive elements, but they didn't know what was happening

  Lise Meitner

• Otto Hahn , Lise Meitner, and O.R. Frisch worked in the 1930s to understand the results of bombarding uranium with neutrons--realized that the uranium fissioned.
• by 1939 it was obvious and widely know that a chain reaction might be possible because each atom that fissioned released neutrons that could hit other atoms and cause them to fission
• Refugee scientists in the U.S. feared a German bomb. Leo Szilard composed two letters for Einstein to sign warning President Roosevelt of the dangers of a German atomic bomb, one in August 1939 and the other in April 1940.  Fear was widespread enough that U.S. and British journals voluntarily censored related scientific papers.
• Germans were indeed working on a bomb, but got stuck in a dead end.  Supporters of Werner Heisenberg say he did this on purpose.

• First organized under National Defense Research Committee (approval for project Oct. 1941) then turned over to the army in June 1942.  The army put General Leslie Groves in charge.
  
• The first thing to do was prove a chain reaction was possible.  That effort was led by Enrico Fermi , first at Columbia then at the University of Chicago.  The first successful chain reaction took place Dec. 2, 1942 in a small reactor built in a squash court at the Univ. of Chicago.
• Providing fuel for the bomb was a tremendous technical challenge--must separate uranium-235, which is less than 1% of the uranium mined and differs in weight by only .13%.  Two methods of separation: a cyclotron and gaseous diffusion of uranium hexaflouride (the only gaseous compound, but one that is both poisonous and corrosive) were set up at Oak Ridge , Tenn., using  TVA power.  The other alternative is to make plutonium by chain reactions--reactors to do this were built in Hanford, Washington.

  gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, photo from fas.org

• Robert Oppenheimer led the effort to design the bomb and said he needed to bring scientists together at a single laboratory.  Los Alamos opened in March 1943.  Developed two bomb designs, one using uranium and one using plutonium.  The plutonium design was tested in the Trinity test near Alamogordo NM on July 16, 1945.  Exploded with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT.

 Bombs used in Japan, photo from fas.org

• Germany was clearly defeated and the Japanese were retreating--was it necessary to use the bomb?  To intimidate the Soviets?
• Could there have been a demonstration and warning instead, as some scientists wanted?  Would it have been used in Europe or was racism a factor?
• After spending $2 billion would the government have been accused of wasting money if it wasn't used?
• when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, the bomb project was so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn't even know about it.  The bomb was used because having built it everyone assumed that having built it they would use it.
• three B-29 bombers set out for Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945.  The Japanese sounded the all-clear when they saw only 3 planes.  The Enola Gay dropped the 5 ton bomb and it exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT.  130,000 people died within 3 months, 68% of the buildings of the city were destroyed.
• A plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.  Exploded with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT.

 bomb damage in Hiroshima, photo from fas.org

• the advance of science leads to more power
• the government has figured out how to organize scientists to effectively produce new technologies
• science gives us power--is it going to be used for good or harm?
• fear of the side effects of new technologies--key example radioactivity from bombs in human milk
• technology comes to be seen as both helpful and dangerous

The first priority was to protect the U.S. advantage--we had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union did not

• the bomb was a secret until it was dropped, but then basic information was released
• some scientists thought we should share secrets as a basis for international control of nuclear weapons
• others focused on civilian rather than military control of US atomic research
• others worked to build more bombs and new, more powerful kinds of nuclear weapons
  

• debate over whether to research and build next generation bombs--the much more powerful hydrogen bomb
• the General Advisory Committee of the AEC (composed of scientists) studied the question and advised a hydrogen bomb was probably possible but should not be developed because it would do too much harm to civilians
• the researchers and military leaders interested in a hydrogen bomb argued that scientists should only advise whether it was possible, it wasn't their role to discuss whether it was a good idea, that should be decided by political leaders
• in Jan. 1950 a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb was approved
• one part of this was the building of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina
• new fear about keeping secrets and who might be a spy
• some scientists continued to push for international control of nuclear weapons and increasingly they were seen as a security risk

• The U.S. was already afraid of communism before World War II, but the Soviet Union was our ally against Germany
• Communism was a competing way of organizing society (opposed to democracy and capitalism) that sought to expand to the rest of the world
  
• World War II was a new level of total war, with key examples of purposefully killing civilians
  
• Once it was clear that Germany was falling, both countries rushed to occupy as much territory as possible.  One the reasons the U.S. used the Atom Bomb was to end the war faster so the Soviets would not take as much territory in Asia
• The Soviet Union wanted some control in what it saw as buffer states, and tended to move towards making them puppets.
• The U.S. saw this as the Soviets moving to gradually expand towards world dominion and developed a policy of containment.  The Truman Doctrine (1947)--the U.S. would help the people of free countries fighting communist takeover (either from without or within)
• mindset--everyone has to choose sides
• The U.S. supplied Berlin by air (which no one was sure would be possible) when the Soviets blockaded it in 1948 to try to take complete control.

 planes lined up for Berlin airlift

• Domino theory--fear of other countries falling to communism
• The Red Scare of the 1950s (Joseph McCarthy)--anyone who had had communist or disloyal ideas was a threat to the nation and should loose their job
• Korean War (1950-53)
• Cuban Missile Crisis , October 18-29, 1962.  The Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba.  Kennedy responded by blockading Cuba.  The Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, authorized the firing of nuclear weapons against the U.S. if the U.S. invaded Cuba.  After several days the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles.
• The Department of Defense got lots of money to develop new technology because it was seen as a wartime necessity

• expanding role of government
• government dependence on science for state power (both direct and in competition for prestige)
  
• rise of technocracy (government should turn to experts instead of voters for decisions)
• military-industrial complex
• new awareness of the dangers of scientific progress
• science and technology are more and more mixed together