The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

Friday Images: Atomic TIME (Magazine)

Friday, April 6th, 2012

Time magazine has featured the bomb on its covers regularly over the years, and its cover archives are actually searchable online. Some of them are pretty iconic, others are just plain weird. Below are a few of my favorites, annotated and in chronological order.

First on the list, chronologically and thematically, is the July 1, 1946 issue featuring Albert Einstein (“All matter is speed and flame”) and a mushroom cloud (which is interestingly an amalgam of the Trinity and the Nagasaki clouds) across which, amazingly, “E=mc²” is emblazoned. This is visually fascinating for at least two reasons: 1. Einstein = E=mc² = the atomic bomb! Has the connection between theoretical physics and nuclear weapons ever been stated in a graphically more oversimplified way? 2. Einstein is wearing a suit! This might not sound very exciting, but consider that in both of Einstein’s two other Time covers from his lifetime (1929, 1938), he was exclusively wearing pajamas. Because that’s what kooky, head-in-the-clouds theoretical physicists do, right? Until the bomb comes along, and then they get serious and put on a tie. (And shortly thereafter, the FBI shows up.)

Next we have our good buddy J. Robert Oppenheimer (“What we don’t understand, we explain to each other”), from November 8, 1948. Here we essentially have the emblematic physicist-of-the-state — a concerned, serious, well-dressed man surrounded by an ocean of equations. The drawing of Oppenheimer (which is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, I can attest) captures his likeness well (compare with this Eisenstaedt photo, which is very similar), and also captures the ice-blue cool of his eyes (something which is not evident in the black and white photos of him, but can be seen in some photos of him when he was elderly). But moreover, it is a stunning contrast to the Oppenheimerdepicted in 1954, just after losing his security clearance, who looks drawn and severe. Also note that when Edward Teller got his Time cover, in 1957, the visual scheme was essentially identical. I like to see this parallel as signifying, in a clean, visual way, Oppenheimer’s decline and Teller’s ascent as the model of what it meant to be a “government scientist” in the early Cold War. Both of these covers are framed in my office — the Yin and Yang of the early atomic age.

There are a lot of other “atomic portrait” photos — David Lilienthal (1947) and a flaming electric horse; Gordon Dean (1952) with a mushroom-cloud periodic table; Lewis Strauss (1953) with a searing radioactive sun, Archbishop Bernadin (1982) using his papal powers to bombard you with ICBMs and doves, just to pick a few creative ones — but none of them “do it for me” as much as the Oppenheimer one does.

The cover for the April 12, 1954, issue of Time is easy to underestimate. It’s clearly recognizable as the mushroom cloud from the first hydrogen bomb test, Ivy Mike, from November 1952. But it’s being shown in April 1954, not long after the Castle Bravo testing accident (in which an island of Marshallese and a Japanese fishing boat, along with a considerable amount of fish in the Pacific Ocean, were irradiated). Why didn’t they put this on the cover in 1952? Because the test was secret, and images from it weren’t widely released until April 1954. So even though it was a year and a half late, it still had a lot of symbolic relevance. And notice that Time chose not to depict it in color, but instead went with an austere black, white, and red scheme. (Life magazine also featured an Ivy Mike image on the cover that week, but chose the fireball instead of the cloud.)

Weekly Document: The Hiroshima Phone Call (1945)

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Telephone calls are one of those fairly ephemeral forms of communication that don’t usually end up in the archival record. There are exceptions, though, especially in areas where security was a top concern. FBI files, for example, often contain telephone transcripts recorded without the knowledge of the participants — an awful thing for civil liberties, but a fairly useful thing for an historian!

General Groves had several transcripts of his telephone conversations taken and written out. Whyis a good question — one I don’t know the answer to. But the ones that are in the archives are mostly of rather momentous importance, and so I guess it would not be unreasonable to assume that Groves considered them to be part of the essential record of the Manhattan Project, which he was fastidious about preserving — in part because he feared being endlessly cross-examined by Congressional committees in the early postwar period.¹

This week’s document is a rather amazing telephone conversation between Groves and Oppenheimer on the afternoon of August 6, 1945 — not long after Groves himself learned about the bombing of Hiroshima.

Some curious excerpts of this curious conversation between “Gen. G” and “Dr. O” follow!

NOTES

1. On Groves’ fears of death-by-committee, see esp. Stanley Goldberg, “General Groves and the atomic West: The making and meaning of Hanford,” in Bruce Hevly and John Findlay, eds., The atomic West(Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1998), 39-89. 
2. Citation: Transcript of a telephone conversation between Leslie R. Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer (6 August 1945), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 86, “Groves, L.R. Lt. Gen. – Telephone conversations.”

Weekly Document: Insuring the Bomb (1944)

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Nuclear technology has had an odd relationship to insurance in the United States. Why? Because it is high-risk, low-probability technology — no underwriter wants to contemplate insuring against a full meltdown disaster, as rare as they are. The result of this is that in the United States, under the 1957 Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, the American public essentially acts as the underwriters for all nuclear power plants. It’s an arrangement that is understandably controversial amongst a diverse group of critics.

But the history of odd nuclear insurance arrangements dates back much earlier.

In December 1942, the University of California agreed, at the insistence of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, to become the manager of the secret Los Alamos laboratory. Well, in truth, they agreed to manage some kind of laboratory — they didn’t know it was at Los Alamos. They didn’t even know what state it was in, much less what it was supposed to be doing. As manager, their job was to procure supplies and manage personnel employment.¹

And, as a consequence, purchase insurance for the lab. Which is one of many things that made the UC’s secretary and finance officer, Robert Mackenzie Underhill, unhappy. Because what prudent finance officer would let such a project be uninsured against hazards? But it’s awful hard to find insurance when you don’t know where the project is much less what is to be insured against.

Robert M. Underhill: the UC's financial watchdog, and the only Regent who knew about the bomb.

The amazing fact is, nobody in the UC management hierarchy had a clue what they were doing at this secret lab. It was really that secret. In February 1943, Underhill had finally managed to weasel out of the Army that the secret physics project was in New Mexico — so that they could purchase insurance for it.

It was not until November 1943 — nearly a year after the UC had taken on management responsibilities — that Ernest Lawrence decided it was necessary to let Underhill just a teensy bit in on the secret. Not because Lawrence cared too much what Underhill thought, but because he felt it mightexpedite Underhill’s activity (and general financial conservatism) if the latter considered the program an important undertaking.

In Underhill’s recollection, Lawrence went to Underhill’s office, locked the door, and pulled down the curtains. Lawrence asked him, “You know what they’re doing down in Los Alamos?” Underhill said no — he knew only that Oppenheimer was running a “scientific study in physics.” Lawrence then filled him in that the UC was now thoroughly enmeshed in the production of atomic bombs. Amazingly, Underhill remained the only top UC official to know the purpose of the project; even the UC President, Robert Sproul, was not filled in. (And in fact, he got in trouble later in the war for speculating publicly that they were working on a death ray — a little too close to the truth, as it turned out.)

This week’s document is a teletype from General Groves to Oppenheimer from February 1944, instructing the latter as to what to tell Underhill about the hazards to be insured against at an unspecified site.²

The “hazards present at the site,” Groves told Oppenheimer to relate to Underhill, involve:

1. Exposure to radiant energy or emitted particles from radioactive materials or from high voltage sources or machines “classify secret reference eidme” (I am not sure what this last bit means, other than perhaps to say that item #1 here is classified secret)
2. Exposure to explosion due to high explosives
3. Exposure to toxic materials comprising uranium [and?] any compound thereof fluorine or hydrofluoric acid

From the context, I would think the site was Los Alamos — high explosives, radiation, uranium. February 1944 seems a little late to be specifying this sort of thing, but it may either be a sub-site of Los Alamos, or they might just be back-dating things.

Norris Bradbury (L) and Robert Underhill (R), signing the UC lab management contract renewal in 1952.

Underhill is a curious figure in the history of the bomb. He saw the whole enterprise as a dubious matter for the UC to be tied up in, and shows up at various junctures trying to protect the UC’s financial and legal interests. That the UC would have and be able to act on its own financial and legal interests in this situation — and not just roll over at the request of the Army — is what I find so interesting about these little episodes.

It’s common to see the bomb as this immovable, in-opposable force in American life and politics, but there are all sorts of little compromises that had to be made, especially in the early days, to get it off the ground.

NOTES

1. The best one-stop shop for information about the early involvement of the University of California in management of Los Alamos and later Livermore is Gregg Herken, “The University of California, the Federal Weapons Labs, and the Founding of the Atomic West,” in Bruce William Hevly and John M. Findlay, eds., The Atomic West (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1998), 119-135. The change-over from UC management to privatized management in the early 2000s was quite controversial; Hugh Gusterson’s recent article in BAS, The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts, is a must-read on the current management situation. 
2. Citation: Teletype from Leslie R. Groves to J. robert Oppenheimer (January 1944), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0317507. 

Weekly Document: Atomic Access Categories from 1947

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

The English word “secret” comes from the Latin sēcernĕre, meaning “to separate, divide off.” Secrecy is the dividing of the world into those who know and those who don’t. With every act of separation comes an act of classification — you designate what is to be divided out, what is to be separated, what issecret.

So it should come as no surprise that so much of the work of secrecy is creating ever more baroque and detailed categorization schemes.

This week’s featured document is a case in point: a lettered list of categories of access to specific nuclear secrets, probably from sometime in 1947. It is a Borgesian encyclopedia of sensitive nuclear knowledge.

It’s an odd jumble of a list — some of the categories are categories are about access to knowledge, some to places, some to things.

NOTES

1. The document is undated, but its position within the file, and several specific details in the document, lend towards my guess at the date. Additionally, from its contents it is clear that it is postwar because it discusses stockpile storage issues — not a problem during the Manhattan Project, since none were being stockpiled — and assigns permission for that to General Groves, who would then have been head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. It refers to the Army Air Forces (AAF), which suggests it is not later than September 1947, when the US Air Force was split into an independent organization. The mentioning of Silverplate and the C-97 modification at the end suggests that it is in a window where B-29s are still be used, where the C-97 is being fielded, and the B-50 is not yet around, which also fits snugly into 1947. 
2. Source: Undated, untitled list of classification categories (ca. 1947), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 64, “Security and Intelligence.