Day 195: Cosmos

The conventional bombs of World War II were called blockbusters. Filled with twenty tons of TNT, they could destroy a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities in World War II amounted to some two million tons, two megatons, of TNT—Coventry and Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo, all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945: a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons. By the late twentieth century, two megatons was the energy released in the explosion of a single more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb: one bomb with the destructive force of the Second World War. But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons—but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.

The immediate causes of death from nuclear attack are the blast wave, which can flatten heavily reinforced buildings many kilometers away, the firestorm, the gamma rays and the neutrons, which effectively fry the insides of passersby. A school girl who survived the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the event that ended the Second World War, wrote this first-hand account:

Through a darkness like the bottom of hell, I could hear the voices of the other students calling for their mothers. And at the base of the bridge, inside a big cistern that had been dug out there, was a mother weeping, holding above her head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its body. And another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave her burned breast to her baby. In the cistern the students stood with only their heads above the water, and their two hands, which they clasped as they imploringly cried and screamed, calling for their parents. But every single person who passed was wounded, all of them, and there was no one, there was no one to turn to for help. And the singed hair on the heads of the people was frizzled and whitish and covered with dust. They did not appear to be human, not creatures of this world.

The Hiroshima explosion, unlike the subsequent Nagasaki explosion, was an air burst high above the surface, so the fallout was insignificant. But on March 1, 1954, a thermonuclear weapons test at Bikini in the Marshall Islands detonated at higher yield than expected. A great radioactive cloud was deposited on the tiny atoll of Rongalap, 150 kilometers away, where the inhabitants likened the explosion to the Sun rising in the West. A few hours later, radioactive ash fell on Rongalap like snow. The average dose received was only about 175 rads, a little less than half the dose needed to kill an average person. Being far from the explosion, not many people died. Of course, the radioactive strontium they ate was concentrated in their bones, and the radioactive iodine was concentrated in their thyroids. Two-thirds of the children and one-third of the adults later developed thyroid abnormalities, growth retardation or malignant tumors. In compensation, the Marshall Islanders received expert medical care.

The yield of the Hiroshima bomb was only thirteen kilotons, the equivalent of thirteen thousand tons of TNT. The Bikini test yield was fifteen megatons. In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of thermonuclear war, the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs would be dropped all over the world. At the Hiroshima death rate of some hundred thousand people killed per equivalent thirteen-kiloton weapon, this would be enough to kill a hundred billion people. But there were less than five billion people on the planet in the late twentieth century. Of course, in such an exchange, not everyone would be killed by the blast and the firestorm, the radiation and the fallout—although fallout does last for a longish time: 90 percent of the strontium 90 will decay in 96 years; 90 percent of the cesium 137, in 100 years; 90 percent of the iodine 131 in only a month.

The survivors would witness more subtle consequences of the war. A full nuclear exchange would burn the nitrogen in the upper air, converting it to oxides of nitrogen, which would in turn destroy a significant amount of the ozone in the high atmosphere, admitting an intense dose of solar ultraviolet radiation.* The increased ultraviolet flux would last for years. It would produce skin cancer preferentially in light-skinned people. Much more important, it would affect the ecology of our planet in an unknown way. Ultraviolet light destroys crops. Many microorganisms would be killed; we do not know which ones or how many, or what the consequences might be. The organisms killed might, for all we know, be at the base of a vast ecological pyramid at the top of which totter we.

The dust put into the air in a full nuclear exchange would reflect sunlight and cool the Earth a little. Even a little cooling can have disastrous agricultural consequences. Birds are more easily killed by radiation than insects. Plagues of insects and consequent further agricultural disorders are a likely consequence of nuclear war. There is also another kind of plague to worry about: the plague bacillus is endemic all over the Earth. In the late twentieth century humans did not much die of plague—not because it was absent, but because resistance was high. However, the radiation produced in a nuclear war, among its many other effects, debilitates the body’s immunological system, causing a deterioration of our ability to resist disease. In the longer term, there are mutations, new varieties of microbes and insects, that might cause still further problems for any human survivors of a nuclear holocaust; and perhaps after a while, when there has been enough time for the recessive mutations to recombine and be expressed, new and horrifying varieties of humans. Most of these mutations, when expressed, would be lethal. A few would not. And then there would be other agonies: the loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned, the blind and the mutilated; disease, plague, long-lived radioactive poisons in the air and water; the threat of tumors and stillbirths and malformed children; the absence of medical care; the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing; the knowledge that we could have prevented it and did not.

~~Cosmos -by- Carl Sagan

Day 81 : Book Excerpt : Hiroshima Nagasaki

A few medical teams survived the blast and acted immediately to help others: Tatsuichiro Akizuki, the only doctor to walk away from the wreckage of Urakami No. 1 Hospital, stayed in the stricken area to treat 70 in-patients and more than 300 seriously wounded who later arrived. He toured the bomb shelters, ‘fighting hopelessness to administer treatment to the fatally wounded’. Similarly, Dr Raisuke Shirabe of Nagasaki Medical College and his staff dragged themselves without rest around the smoking rubble, tending to hundreds of wounded; Dr Shirabe continued to treat people for weeks afterwards, despite the loss of his two sons.

Dr Takashi Nagai, the dean of the radiology department of Nagasaki Medical College, set a similar example – despite suffering from leukaemia. That morning, just before the plane approached, he walked to his office at the college, a ferro-concrete building 800 metres from Urakami Cathedral. He began preparing a lecture when an ‘invisible fist’ smashed through the windows. He lay under rubble with a deep cut to his right temple and mumbled for God’s forgiveness: the zealous Catholic convert had intended to confess three sins that afternoon.

Next door, in the X-ray room, Nurse Hashimoto clung to a bookshelf bolted to the floor. The room seemed to sway and bend; the primitive X-ray machines broke up and scattered. Through the window, beyond the smoke and wreckage, the formerly green Mount Inasa glowed red, like a large ember rising out of the bay. She ran down the hall, protected by the heavy walls of the X-ray department, and found five other survivors; they dragged out Dr Nagai and bandaged his head. ‘Help the patients!’ he cried. With wet hand-towels over their faces the nurses plunged into the smoke-filled wards and led or stretchered the patients out. Dr Nagai hurried downstairs to the underground emergency theatre, now flooded and useless. His illness and blood loss – his bandages now resembled a red turban – overwhelmed him. His colleague Dr Raisuke Shirabe used a novel technique to staunch the blood flow: he pressed a tampon into the wound and sutured the skin over it.

Thousands of near dead staggered up the Urakami Valley towards the hospital. The wounded carried the fatally wounded; children dragged their dying parents; parents clutched their children’s bodies. They bumped and shuffled up the hillsides, glancing back at the fires that drew closer, and one by one they collapsed from dehydration or exhaustion.

At the sight Dr Nagai and his team ‘started to lose our nerve’, he later said. The hospital and medical college were virtually destroyed; the ruins of five auditoriums later revealed the charred remains of hundreds of students sitting at their desks. A heavy roof had fallen on Dr Nagai’s First Year; all except for one died like butterflies pinned to a specimen board. Nothing useful remained in the college, no medicines or equipment. Sensing his colleagues’ despair, Dr Nagai issued an order: ‘Quick, find a Hi no Maru [a Japanese flag].’ This struck his friend Dr Ogura as absurd, but Dr Nagai insisted: when a flag could not be found, he grabbed a white sheet and smudged a red circle in the centre with his blood-soaked bandages. Dr Ogura tied the flag to a bamboo pole and drove it into a clearing on the hill above the hospital – a rallying point beyond reach of the fires. ‘It was so simple an act and yet the psychological effect was profound,’ he remembered. Dr Nagai then directed the construction of a field clinic on a stone embankment near the clearing.

Fires, not a firestorm, consumed Urakami; droplets of black rain extinguished the flames. Dr Nagai scoured the lines of refugees coming up the hill for any sign of his wife. When she did not appear his strength broke: ‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ he cried, and resisted a terrible urge to rush headlong into the smoke-filled valley to find her. His legs gave way and he fainted. He awoke on a stretcher in a field, looking up at a thinly curved moon. Men were building shelters for the injured as nurses boiled vegetables in air-raid helmets over open fires. Somewhere people sang, ‘Umi Yukaba’ (If I Go Away to the Sea), a popular patriotic song. He got up and took the hands of his medical staff; they sat in silence, looking out over the remains of Nagasaki.
...
Truman heard of the success of the Nagasaki mission through cables from Farrell and Groves. His reaction was sombre; gone were the exuberant speeches, fellow back-slapping, mutual congratulations. His mood was sober, defiant – and vengeful. The Japanese people had brought this on themselves, his radio address made clear that day. ‘We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor … against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.’ Truman drew no distinction between civilian and soldier; mother and murderer; child and monster. In a total racial war, there were no distinctions; the victor wrote the laws of war. The ‘Japanese people’ had inflicted these atrocities on America, Truman said in tones that suggested he protested too much. ‘They’ had broken the laws of war; ‘they’ must pay for the crimes of their masters. He reflected the feelings of mainstream America, for whom ‘the Japs’ were collectively guilty.

~~Hiroshima Nagasaki -by- Paul Ham

Day 52 : Book Excerpt : Japan's Favorite Mon-Star

According to legend, Godzilla was born aboard an airplane.

It was spring 1954. As the story goes, Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer with the Toho Motion Picture Co., was flying home to Tokyo from Jakarta, where plans for a Japanese-Indonesian coproduction titled In the Shadow of Honor had just fallen apart. The movie, the story of a Japanese soldier who fights alongside the Indonesians in their struggle  for postwar independence, was to be one of Toho's major releases later that year, and now Tanaka was under pressure to come up with a replacement for it— fast. Nervous and sweating, he spent the entire flight brainstorming.

Suddenly, he had a stroke of genius.

Taking a cue from the successful American science fiction film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), in which a dinosaur is resurrected by atomic tests in the Arctic and swims south to terrorize New York, Tanaka decided to make Japan's first giant celluloid monster, a creature that would not only be reanimated by nuclear weapons but serve as a metaphor for the Bomb itself, evoking the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts still vivid in Japan's consciousness. "The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the Bomb," Tanaka recalled decades later. "Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind." Nine years earlier, at the end of World War n, Japan had suffered a defeat unlike any other nation in history. In August 1945, America's twin atomic bombs had killed nearly 300,000 civilians, and an estimated 100,000 more lives had been lost the previous March when 6-29 planes firebombed Tokyo for three consecutive days. Cities across Japan were leveled, leaving millions dead, wounded, or home less. Factories that had been converted to military production were now either destroyed or rendered useless, crippling Japanese industry and bankrupting the economy. The country's massive empire in the Pacific region was lost, and six million repatriated soldiers and civilians returned to a Japan whose mighty spirit was crushed. Then came the seven-year-long Occupation (1945-1952), in which a nation that had remained unconquered for thou sands of years suffered the shame of being governed by foreign soldiers and forced to adopt a Western style constitution that reduced the Emperor to a mere symbolic figure, abolished State Shintoism, and threatened other long-held traditions and beliefs. The late 19405 and early 19505 were a time of political, economic, and cultural uncertainty in Japan.

During the war, the Japanese film industry was booming, due in large part to the government's use of the movie studios to disseminate heavily regulated nationalist propaganda. Then, after the defeat of Japan's militarist regime, the Allied powers likewise censored the movies and other media in their efforts to democratize Japan, forbidding discussions of the war, the Bomb and America's role in the tragedy. After the Occupation a handful of Bomb-themed films began to appear, notably Kaneto Shindo's Children of the Atom Bomb (1952), a semidocumentary about a schoolteacher who returns to Hiroshima looking for former pupils who were victims at ground zero. Hideo Sekigawa's Hiroshima (also 1952) was an angrier film that portrayed the atomic bombings as a racist act in which the Japanese people were guinea pigs in a U.S. nuclear experiment. But in the 40-plus years since the American forces left and censorship was lifted, surprisingly few movies have directly addressed Japan's status as the only nation to be attacked with nuclear weapons. Film scholars cite prevailing feelings of shame, repression, and guilt but are unable to fully explain the Japanese cinema's ambivalence toward the Bomb, a subject that would seem to be important and compelling movie material. During the 19505 and '60s, several Japanese movies made references to the atomic bombs and to radiation sickness, but only two major films tackled the Bomb as subject matter. The most critically lauded of the two was Akira Kurosawa's Live in Fear (a.k.a. Record of a Living Being, 1955), wherein Toshiro Mifune plays a man nearly frightened to death by the specter of another nuclear attack on Japan; the most commercially successful was Tanaka's barely disguised allegory of the Bomb, manifested in a gigantic monster.

By 1954, Japan was peaceful and relatively prosperous again, but fears of renewed annihilation were brimming below the surface, fueled by new nuclear threats. Cold War tensions were increasing and Japan was now caught — literally — between the two superpowers' nuclear-testing programs: the Soviet Union's on one side, and the Pacific Proving Ground established by the U.S. at the Mar shall Islands on the other. The Korean War was escalating, raising fears that a hydrogen bomb might be dropped on neighboring North Korea or China and rain fallout over the region. It may have been a divine act or it may have been pure happenstance, but around the same time that Tanaka was forced to quickly invent a major new film, a historic, horrifying event was unfolding in the equatorial Pacific, an event that would forever change monster-movie history.

~~Japan's Favorite Mon-Star -by- Steve Ryfle

Day 41: Book Excerpt: Countdown to Zero Day- Stuxnet and the launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

It was January 2010 when officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations body charged with monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, first began to notice something unusual happening at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran.

Inside the facility’s large centrifuge hall, buried like a bunker more than fifty feet beneath the desert surface, thousands of gleaming aluminum centrifuges were spinning at supersonic speed, enriching uranium hexafluoride gas as they had been for nearly two years. But over the last weeks, workers at the plant had been removing batches of centrifuges and replacing them with new ones. And they were doing so at a startling rate.
At Natanz each centrifuge, known as an IR-1, has a life expectancy of about ten years. But the devices are fragile and prone to break easily. Even under normal conditions, Iran has to replace up to 10 percent of the centrifuges each year due to material defects, maintenance issues, and worker accidents.

In November 2009, Iran had about 8,700 centrifuges installed at Natanz, so it would have been perfectly normal to see technicians decommission about 800 of them over the course of the year as the devices failed for one reason or another. But as IAEA officials added up the centrifuges removed over several weeks in December 2009 and early January, they realized that Iran was plowing through them at an unusual rate.

Inspectors with the IAEA’s Department of Safeguards visited Natanz an average of twice a month—sometimes by appointment, sometimes unannounced—to track Iran’s enrichment activity and progress. Anytime workers at the plant decommissioned damaged or otherwise unusable centrifuges, they were required to line them up in a control area just inside the door of the centrifuge rooms until IAEA inspectors arrived at their next visit to examine them. The inspectors would run a handheld gamma spectrometer around each centrifuge to ensure that no nuclear material was being smuggled out in them, then approve the centrifuges for removal, making note in reports sent back to IAEA headquarters in Vienna of the number that were decommissioned each time.

IAEA digital surveillance cameras, installed outside the door of each centrifuge room to monitor Iran’s enrichment activity, captured the technicians scurrying about in their white lab coats, blue plastic booties on their feet, as they trotted out the shiny cylinders one by one, each about six feet long and about half a foot in diameter. The workers, by agreement with the IAEA, had to cradle the delicate devices in their arms, wrapped in plastic sleeves or in open boxes, so the cameras could register each item as it was removed from the room.

The surveillance cameras, which weren’t allowed inside the centrifuge rooms, stored the images for later perusal. Each time inspectors visited Natanz, they examined the recorded images to ensure that Iran hadn’t removed additional centrifuges or done anything else prohibited during their absence. But as weeks passed and the inspectors sent their reports back to Vienna, officials there realized that the number of centrifuges being removed far exceeded what was normal.

Officially, the IAEA won’t say how many centrifuges Iran replaced during this period. But news reports quoting European “diplomats” put the number at 900 to 1,000. A former top IAEA official, however, thinks the actual number was much higher. “My educated guess is that 2,000 were damaged,” says Olli Heinonen, who was deputy director of the Safeguards Division until he resigned in October 2010.

Whatever the number, it was clear that something was wrong with the devices. Unfortunately, Iran wasn’t required to tell inspectors why they had replaced them, and, officially, the IAEA inspectors had no right to ask. The agency’s mandate was to monitor what happened to uranium at the enrichment plant, not keep track of failed equipment.

What the inspectors didn’t know was that the answer to their question was right beneath their noses, buried in the bits and memory of the computers in Natanz’s industrial control room. Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had quietly unleashed a destructive digital warhead on computers in Iran, where it had silently slithered its way into critical systems at Natanz, all with a single goal in mind—to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear bomb.

The answer was there at Natanz, but it would be nearly a year before the inspectors would obtain it, and even then it would come only after more than a dozen computer security experts around the world spent months deconstructing what would ultimately become known as one of the most sophisticated viruses ever discovered—a piece of software so unique it would make history as the world’s first digital weapon and the first shot across the bow announcing the age of digital warfare.

~~Countdown to Zero Day- Stuxnet and the launch of the World's First Digital Weapon -by- Kim Zetter

Day 34: Book Excerpt: American Arsenal

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt, vacationing at a favorite spa in Warm Springs, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Harry Truman, sworn in as president that evening, seemed an unlikely successor. He was a failed Kansas City haberdasher whose debts had been paid by the political machine of Kansas City’s Boss Pendergast, whose patronage interests he had faithfully served—he was known as “the Senator from Pendergast.” Under pressure from the Democratic Party’s leaders, Roosevelt had selected Truman to replace the incumbent vice president, the left-leaning Henry Wallace, as his 1944 running mate. Truman had shown little experience or judgment in foreign affairs. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Senator Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

Truman held his first cabinet meeting immediately after his swearing-in. After the meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson waited for the others to leave the room and then told the president that a project was under way to develop a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. The next day, James Byrnes, whom Truman would soon appoint secretary of state, told the president “with great solemnity” that “we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.”

Truman and his closest military and political advisors, with the exception of Stimson, seemed to have had no real understanding of the atomic bomb. Byrnes, a master Senate politician who had been Truman’s mentor there, would see the bomb as a club to be used to bully the Russians; Hap Arnold, chief of the AAF, likely saw it in the same way as did Curtis LeMay, who said that he understood that the bomb would make a “big bang” but that it “didn’t make much of an impression on me.” To them, it was just a bigger bomb. Stimson warned Truman that the United States could not keep its nuclear monopoly for long and urged the president to appoint a committee of leading citizens to advise him on its use and to consider international control. The president agreed, and named an Interim Committee that included Stimson, Byrnes, Bush, Conant, and Karl Compton. A scientific advisory panel, including Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur Compton, was formed to provide technical expertise to the Interim Committee. The advisory committee excluded scientists who were hesitant to use the bomb, such as Szilard, James Franck, and Urey.

On May 31, the Interim Committee made its recommendation. Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton had advised the committee that the bomb would have the explosive equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT and would kill about twenty thousand people if dropped over a city, with more injured by burns or radiation. (Both estimates were low. The estimate of those killed was based on the assumption that Japanese civilians would take shelter from an air raid, while the actual bombing was by a single plane without advance warning.) The committee discussed alternatives to bombing a Japanese city— arranging a demonstration of the bomb for the Japanese, dropping it on a preannounced target in Japan, or dropping it on a neutral area, perhaps an uninhabited island. All these ideas were rejected. Dropping the bomb on an uninhabited area would not show its destructive power. And what if the bomb fizzled, or what if the Japanese brought American POWs to a preannounced site? The Interim Committee’s minutes for May 31: “Secretary [Stimson] expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”
...
In his advice to Truman, Stimson showed his disconnection from the conduct of the war in Japan. After the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo, he had asked Arnold whether there had been any deviation from the policy of precision bombing. When Arnold told him that there had been no change in strategy, that the civilian casualties were only incidental, Stimson accepted his answer. As late as May 16, Stimson told Truman that insofar as possible he was holding the AAF to precision bombing, and that similar rules would be applied to the atomic bomb. But he must have known what was happening, as his decisions and advice to the president show. Stimson removed Kyoto from the target list for both conventional and atomic bombing because of its historic and artistic treasures, saying he “did not want to have the reputation of the United States outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” and he told Truman that he worried that Japan’s cities would be so “thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.” Truman’s response was to laugh and say he understood. Stimson deceived himself about the firebombing campaign in Japan, and he deceived his new president. The historian Tami Biddle has written that over Hiroshima, “no moral threshold was crossed that had not been crossed much earlier in the year.”

On June 14, the Joint Chiefs met to plan the invasion, and they acted almost as if the atomic bomb did not exist. The Army was certain that an invasion would be necessary, and the Navy and AAF agreed to plan for a conditional invasion if blockade and bombing failed to end the war. On June 18, the Joint Chiefs met with Truman, who expressed his concern about the American casualties that would result from facing Japan’s two-million-man homeland army. No one seemed able to offer a definitive alternative to an invasion. Gen. Ira Eaker represented Arnold, who did not attend. Like Arnold, Eaker was under orders to support Marshall, and he endorsed the decision to invade the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. As far as the Army was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. LeMay arrived for a meeting the next day, and Marshall slept through his presentation.

At the Potsdam Conference in July, Truman received news of the successful Trinity test in New Mexico of the first atomic bomb, and he mentioned to Stalin almost in passing that America had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin (who of course knew all about it from Klaus Fuchs and other spies) said that he hoped that the Americans “would make good use of it against the Japanese.” America, Britain, and China agreed on the Potsdam Declaration, a July 26 ultimatum to Japan to surrender or face “prompt and utter destruction.” It made no mention of the bomb, nor did it offer to preserve the emperor system. The declaration was delivered by radio broadcast rather than through neutral countries’ diplomatic channels, which may have led the Japanese to view it as propaganda.

~~American Arsenal -by- Patrick Coffey