Tag Archives: nuclear weapons
75 years after nuclear testing in the Pacific began, the fallout continues to wreak havoc
AAP/AP
Patricia A. O’Brien, Georgetown UniversityThis year marks 75 years since the United States launched its immense atomic testing program in the Pacific. The historical fallout from tests carried out over 12 years in the Marshall Islands, then a UN Trust Territory governed by the US, have framed seven decades of US relations with the Pacific nation.
Due to the dramatic effects of climate change, the legacies of this history are shaping the present in myriad ways.
This history has Australian dimensions too, though decades of diplomatic distance between Australia and the Marshall Islands have hidden an entangled atomic past.
In 1946, the Marshall Islands seemed very close for many Australians. They feared the imminent launch of the US’s atomic testing program on Bikini Atoll might split the earth in two, catastrophically change the earth’s climate, or produce earthquakes and deadly tidal waves.
A map accompanying one report noted Sydney was only 3,100 miles from ground zero. Residents as far away as Perth were warned if their houses shook on July 1, “it may be the atom bomb test”.
AAP/AP/Jack Rice
Australia was “included in the tests” as a site for recording blast effects and monitoring for atom bombs detonated anywhere in the world by hostile nations. This Australian site served to keep enemies in check and achieve one of the Pacific testing program’s objectives: to deter future war. The other justification was the advancement of science.
The earth did not split in two after the initial test (unless you were Marshallese) so they continued; 66 others followed over the next 12 years. But the insidious and multiple harms to people and place, regularly covered up or denied publicly, became increasingly hard to hide.
Radiation poisoning, birth defects, leukaemia, thyroid and other cancers became prevalent in exposed Marshallese, at least four islands were “partially or completely vapourised”, the exposed Marshallese “became subjects of a medical research program” and atomic refugees. (Bikinians were allowed to return to their atoll for a decade before the US government removed them again when it was realised a careless error falsely claimed radiation levels were safe in 1968.)
In late 1947, the US moved its operations to Eniwetok Atoll, a decision, it was argued, to ensure additional safety. Eniwetok was more isolated and winds were less likely to carry radioactive particles to populated areas.
Australian reports noted this site was only 3,200 miles from Sydney. Troubling reports of radioactive clouds as far away as the French Alps and the known shocking health effects appeared.
Dissenting voices were initially muted due to the steep escalation of the Cold War and Soviet atomic weapon tests beginning in 1949.
AAP/AP
Opinion in Australia split along political lines. Conservative Cold War warriors, chief among them Robert Menzies who became prime minister again in 1949, kept Australia in lockstep with the US, and downplayed the ill-effects of testing. Left-wing elements in Australia continued to draw attention to the “horrors” it unleashed.
The atomic question came home in 1952, when the first of 12 British atomic tests began on the Montebello Islands, off Western Australia.
Australia’s involvement in atomic testing expanded again in 1954, when it began supplying South Australian-mined uranium to the US and UK’s joint defence purchasing authority, the Combined Development Agency.
Australia’s economic stake in the atomic age from 1954 collided with the galvanisation of global public opinion against US testing in Eniwetok. The massive “Castle Bravo” hydrogen bomb test in March exposed Marshall Islanders and a Japanese fishing crew on The Lucky Dragon to catastrophic radiation levels “equal to that received by Japanese people less than two miles from ground zero” in the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts. Graphic details of the fishermen’s suffering and deaths and a Marshallese petition to the United Nations followed.
When a UN resolution to halt US testing was voted on in July, Australia voted for its continuation. But the tide of public opinion was turning against testing. The events of 1954 dispelled the notion atomic waste was safe and could be contained. The problem of radioactive fish travelling into Australian waters highlighted these new dangers, which spurred increasing world wide protests until the US finally ceased testing in the Marshalls in 1958.
Read more:
Sixty years on, two TV programs revisit Australia’s nuclear history at Maralinga
In the 1970s, US atomic waste was concentrated under the Runit Island dome, part of Enewetak Atoll (about 3,200 miles from Sydney). Recent alarming descriptions of how precarious and dangerous this structure is due to age, sea water inundation and storm damage exacerbated by climate change were contested in a 2020 Trump-era report.
The Biden administration’s current renegotiation of the Compact of Free Association with the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and its prioritisation of action on climate change, will put Runit Island high on the agenda. There is an opportunity for historical redress for the US that is even more urgent given the upsurge in discrimination against US-based Pacific Islander communities devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are peoples displaced by the tests.
Australia is also embarking on a new level of engagement with the Marshall Islands: it is due to open its first embassy in the capital Majuro in 2021.
It should be remembered this bilateral relationship has an atomic history too. Australia supported the US testing program, assisted with data collection and voted in the UN for its continuation when Marshallese pleaded for it to be stopped. It is also likely Australian-sourced atomic waste lies within Runit Island, cementing Australia in this history.
Patricia A. O’Brien, Historian, Visiting Fellow in the School of History, Australian National University and Adjunct Professor in the Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
315 nuclear bombs and ongoing suffering: the shameful history of nuclear testing in Australia and the Pacific
Tilman Ruff, University of Melbourne and Dimity Hawkins, Swinburne University of Technology
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware this article contains the name of a deceased person.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received its 50th ratification on October 24, and will therefore come into force in January 2021. A historic development, this new international law will ban the possession, development, testing, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately the nuclear powers — the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — haven’t signed on to the treaty. As such, they are not immediately obliged to help victims and remediate contaminated environments, but others party to the treaty do have these obligations. The shifting norms around this will hopefully put ongoing pressure on nuclear testing countries to open records and to cooperate with accountability measures.
For the people of the Pacific region, particularly those who bore the brunt of nuclear weapons testing during the 20th century, it will bring a new opportunity for their voices to be heard on the long-term costs of nuclear violence. The treaty is the first to enshrine enduring commitments to addressing their needs.
From 1946, around 315 nuclear tests were carried out in the Pacific by the US, Britain and France. These nations’ largest ever nuclear tests took place on colonised lands and oceans, from Australia to the Marshall Islands, Kiribati to French Polynesia.
The impacts of these tests are still being felt today.
All nuclear tests cause harm
Studies of nuclear test workers and exposed nearby communities around the world consistently show adverse health effects, especially increased risks of cancer.
The total number of global cancer deaths as a result of atmospheric nuclear test explosions has been estimated at between 2 million and 2.4 million, even though these studies used radiation risk estimates that are now dated and likely underestimated the risk.
The number of additional non-fatal cancer cases caused by test explosions is similar. As confirmed in a large recent study of nuclear industry workers in France, the UK and US, the numbers of radiation-related deaths due to other diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes, is also likely to be similar.
‘We all got crook’
Britain conducted 12 nuclear test explosions in Australia between 1952 and 1957, and hundreds of minor trials of radioactive and toxic materials for bomb development up to 1963. These caused untold health problems for local Aboriginal people who were at the highest risk of radiation. Many of them were not properly evacuated, and some were not informed at all.
We may never know the full impact of these explosions because in many cases, as the Royal Commission report on British Nuclear Tests in Australia found in 1985: “the resources allocated for Aboriginal welfare and safety were ludicrous, amounting to nothing more than a token gesture”. But we can listen to the survivors.
Read more:
Sixty years on, the Maralinga bomb tests remind us not to put security over safety
The late Yami Lester directly experienced the impacts of nuclear weapons. A Yankunytjatjara elder from South Australia, Yami was a child when the British tested at Emu Field in October 1953. He recalled the “Black Mist” after the bomb blast:
It wasn’t long after that a black smoke came through. A strange black smoke, it was shiny and oily. A few hours later we all got crook, every one of us. We were all vomiting; we had diarrhoea, skin rashes and sore eyes. I had really sore eyes. They were so sore I couldn’t open them for two or three weeks. Some of the older people, they died. They were too weak to survive all the sickness. The closest clinic was 400 miles away.
His daughter, Karina Lester, is an ambassador for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Australia, and continues to be driven by her family’s experience. She writes:
For decades now my family have campaigned and spoken up against the harms of nuclear weapons because of their firsthand experience of the British nuclear tests […] Many Aboriginal people suffered from the British nuclear tests that took place in the 1950s and 1960s and many are still suffering from the impacts today.
More than 16,000 Australian workers were also exposed. A key government-funded study belatedly followed these veterans over an 18-year period from 1982. Despite the difficulties of conducting a study decades later with incomplete data, it found they had 23% higher rates of cancer and 18% more deaths from cancers than the general population.
An additional health impact in Pacific island countries is the toxic disease “ciguatera”, caused by certain microscopic plankton at the base of the marine food chain, which thrive on damaged coral. Their toxins concentrate up the food chain, especially in fish, and cause illness and occasional deaths in people who eat them. In the Marshall Islands, Kiritimati and French Polynesia, outbreaks of the disease among locals have been associated with coral damage caused by nuclear test explosions and the extensive military and shipping infrastructure supporting them.
Pacific survivors of nuclear testing haven’t been focused solely on addressing their own considerable needs for justice and care; they’ve been powerful advocates that no one should suffer as they have ever again, and have worked tirelessly for the eradication of nuclear weapons. It’s no surprise independent Pacific island nations are strong supporters of the new treaty, accounting for ten of the first 50 ratifications.
Negligence and little accountability
Some nations that have undertaken nuclear tests have provided some care and compensation for their nuclear test workers; only the US has made some provisions for people exposed, though only for mainland US residents downwind of the Nevada Test Site. No testing nation has extended any such arrangement beyond its own shores to the colonised and minority peoples it put in harm’s way. Nor has any testing nation made fully publicly available its records of the history, conduct and effects of its nuclear tests on exposed populations and the environment.
These nations have also been negligent by quickly abandoning former test sites. There has been inadequate clean-up and little or none of the long-term environmental monitoring needed to detect radioactive leakage from underground test sites into groundwater, soil and air. One example among many is the Runit concrete dome in the Marshall Islands, which holds nuclear waste from US testing in the 1940s and 50s. It’s increasingly inundated by rising sea levels, and is leaking radioactive material.
US Defense Special Weapons Agency/Wikimedia Commons
The treaty provides a light in a dark time. It contains the only internationally agreed framework for all nations to verifiably eliminate nuclear weapons.
It’s our fervent hope the treaty will mark the increasingly urgent beginning of the end of nuclear weapons. It is our determined expectation that our country will step up. Australia has not yet ratified the treaty, but the bitter legacy of nuclear testing across our country and region should spur us to join this new global effort.
Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor, Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne and Dimity Hawkins, PhD Candidate, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This is what happened the morning the first atomic bomb created a new world
Daniel Cordle, Nottingham Trent University
Fifteen seconds before 5.30am on July 16 1945, above an area of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travellers christened it the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky. It was a little before dawn.
This strange, early daybreak was the Trinity Test: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Within a month two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy”, a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima; the second, “Fat Man”, a plutonium weapon of the implosion design tested at Trinity, on Nagasaki. Casualty estimates vary widely, but perhaps as many as 150-250,000 people died as a direct result of these two events. The following half century was one of intense nuclear testing, the residue of which might be the signature for the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene.
The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project, which led to this point, has been told many times. It begins with the realisation that atomic weapons, releasing vast amounts of energy via a nuclear chain reaction, were possible. It includes a 1939 letter, signed by Albert Einstein, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of a German atomic bomb programme, and tells how, following the United States’ entry into the second world war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the programme accelerated rapidly under the control of General Leslie Groves.
The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic programme, and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent. More than a purely scientific endeavour, it was an engineering and industrial enterprise on a massive scale, employing about 130,000 people at its peak, and perhaps half a million cumulatively.
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Site Y was a town built from scratch to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, under the scientific directorship of J Robert Oppenheimer – a complex, charismatic figure (so famous after the war that he was instantly recognisable by his porkpie hat) – scientists, including many who’d fled Nazi persecution in Europe and were acutely aware of what a Nazi bomb might mean, built the “gadget” tested at Trinity.
By then, though, circumstances had changed. In late 1944, as Allied forces advanced across Europe, it became apparent that the German bomb programme had stalled years before. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 and Germany’s defeat in May, the Trinity Test was prioritised so Harry Truman, the new president, would have news of it when he met Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam conference.
© National Archives and Records Administration
Trinity is a striking moment. Scientists, military personnel and observers gathered in observation bunkers 10,000 yards from ground zero, at a base camp ten miles away, and at Compañia Hill, 20 miles away. Overnight, thunder, lightning and rain swept across the area, imperilling the test.
Don Hornig, the last man to “babysit” the bomb in its metal shack at the top of a 100ft tower, recalls passing the time by reading an anthology of humorous writing, Desert Island Decameron, by the light of a 60-watt bulb. He hoped the wet tower would act as a lightning rod if there were any lightning strikes. The alternative was sobering, but he appears to have been philosophical: “It would set the bomb off. And in that case, I’d never know about it! So I read my book.”
At a 2am conference, Groves threatened hard-pressed project meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, insisting he sign his forecast predicting conditions would clear by dawn and promising to “hang” him if they didn’t. Groves then roused New Mexico’s governor by phone, warning him he might have to declare martial law if things went wrong. By 4am the skies were clearing.
As 5.30 approached, people readied themselves with welder’s glass to view the test. At Compañia Hill, the physicist, Edward Teller, passed around sun cream. At S-10000, the main control bunker, an exhausted Oppenheimer leaned against a post to steady himself as the final seconds ticked away, and was heard to mutter: “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”
The story of the Manhattan Project often ends with the controversial use of the bomb on Japan, or goes on to tell about the leaking of atomic secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the first Soviet atomic test in 1949. It might add that Oppenheimer, frequently portrayed as a tragic figure, had his security clearance revoked amid the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s.
A new world
Now, 75 years on, it’s worth isolating Trinity from this complex history to ask what that early morning moment in the remote desert meant. It was here, after all, that humans first encountered phenomena that were to haunt the cold war imagination, and still shape how many imagine potential nuclear futures: the atomic flash, the mushroom cloud and radioactive fallout.
Although this was a new human experience (Norris Bradbury, who succeeded Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, noted that “the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody”), it was processed through cultural traditions with long histories. It’s become an origin story in nuclear mythologies.
© U.S. Department of Energy
Writers return repeatedly to Trinity as a moment pregnant with meaning. In the 21st century alone, it’s featured in novels by, among others, Lydia Millet, Ellen Klages, Nora Gallagher, TaraShea Nesbit, Elizabeth J Church and Louisa Hall, and there are notable earlier examples, including those by Pearl Buck, Leslie Marmon Silko and Joseph Kanon. It’s been depicted by poets from William E Stafford to John Canaday and Hannah Cooper-Smithson, and on stage by Tom Morton-Smith. It features in music in genres ranging from rock to opera.
This fascination with Trinity shows how it’s not only an important historical moment, but a critical cultural one too. As the old sun crept above the horizon a few minutes after the test, many present were in little doubt it was rising on a new world.
The brightest light
In both eyewitness accounts and in fiction, Trinity is described as a moment of rupture and rapture: rupture because it marks the transition from a pre-nuclear to a nuclear age; rapture because the encounter with dazzling light and a power overwhelming the senses has the quality of religious experience.
Of course, there can be distortion in such accounts. The popular tendency to see the atomic bomb as the definitive nuclear technology marginalises fields like nuclear medicine and ignores the intellectual richness of the nuclear sciences.
And there are other candidates for the beginning of the nuclear age: Hiroshima, for sure, but also perhaps the creation of the first self-sustaining chain reaction by Enrico Fermi’s team in Chicago in 1942, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch’s description of fission in 1939, James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in 1932, and Ernest Rutherford’s “splitting” (depending how one defines this) of the atom in 1917. The very notion of a singular beginning to the nuclear age is a fiction: each moment exists only in the context of others.
Read more:
Hiroshima’s literary legacy: the ‘blinding flash’ that changed the world forever
Yet, Trinity was experienced as a new dawn. This is particularly apparent in the recurring metaphor of the explosion as a sun. For William Laurence of the New York Times, observing the test from 20 miles away at Compañia Hill, it was:
Sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling intensity.
Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, noted the transition “from darkness to brilliant sunshine, in an instant”.
Perhaps the description by Isidor Rabi, discoverer of nuclear magnetic resonance (used in MRI scans), is the most compelling:
The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision that was seen with more than the eye.
The experience is corporeal here: the light has heft and is felt by the body. Its revelatory characteristics are picked up in literature of the Trinity Test. In Lydia Millet’s novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the flash is a “sear of lightness”. In Joseph Kanon’s thriller, Los Alamos, the protagonist “closed his eyes for a second, but it was there anyway, this amazing light, as if it didn’t need sight to exist”. In John Canaday’s poem, Victor Weisskopf, “a sun erupted”.
Laurence, whose reporting on the bomb won a Pulitzer, saw Trinity as crystallising a new relation with the universe. There, he wrote, “an elemental force [was] freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years” as, for the first time, humans used an energy source that “does not have its origin in the sun”. “All seemed to feel”, wrote Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s deputy, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age – the Age of Atomic Energy”.
Fire from the gods
Stories of human acquisition of knowledge and power have deep roots in western culture. In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and is punished by being chained to a rock, his liver torn out daily by an eagle, only to grow back that he might be tormented again. One of the most substantial biographies of Oppenheimer names him, in its title, The American Prometheus.
In 1946, reflecting on the moment of the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer himself saw the analogy: “We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.”
© U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The most famous of Oppenheimer’s words to describe Trinity, the lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” – first appearing in print in 1948 but frequently repeated subsequently – reinforce this sense of an encounter with divine forces. They are, for instance, the final words in Tom Morton-Smith’s play, Oppenheimer. They are invoked, too, though not actually spoken or sung, when the chorus sings lines from the Gita in John Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic.
So much part of the mythology are these words, that it’s sometimes erroneously assumed Oppenheimer actually said them at Trinity. His brother Frank’s recollection was that he simply said: “It worked”. It’s important, too, to be wary of where the mythmaking might take us. As the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out, the words from the Gita are unlikely to be the hubristic statement of Oppenheimer’s triumph they might seem. They are often contrasted with the rather blunter assessment of Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, who commented to Oppenheimer, “Now we are all sons of bitches”.
The phrase’s attraction is, I think, its ambiguity. It’s portentous, but open to interpretation, gesturing toward something important in humanity’s encounter with greater powers (perhaps a Faustian bargain struck between the purity of physics and the real-world horror of military technology) without quite stating it. A similar suggestiveness surely accounts, too, for the proliferation of the famous (but possibly erroneous) story that Trinity was named by Oppenheimer for a metaphysical poem by John Donne:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
It opens up interesting creative possibilities. In her novel Trinity, Louisa Hall imagines Donne’s poem to be one admired by Jean Tatlock, with whom Oppenheimer had an intense relationship, but who died in 1944. In Doctor Atomic, the poem’s words comprise the lyrics of the moving aria closing the first act.
Unsurprisingly, Christian traditions of the acquisition of knowledge, and of the relation with God, are also invoked at Trinity. Oppenheimer famously stated in a lecture in 1947 that “the physicists have known sin”, a statement controversial among his colleagues.
There is, then, a furious mythmaking around both Trinity and Oppenheimer. It transforms Oppenheimer from an actual person into a compelling tragic figure. It transforms the atomic bomb into a technology that symbolises broader anxieties about the relations between ourselves, our technologies and the Earth.
Beauty and terror
Stories about the atomic explosion also conjure up the aesthetic tradition of the sublime, perhaps the dominant means through which encounters with nature have been processed in western societies since the Romantic period. In the art of the sublime, extremity of experience – the wildness and grandeur of nature one might encounter in a storm at sea, for instance – is emphasised.
The sublime evokes both beauty and terror. For Farrell, Groves’s deputy, the explosion was “magnificent, beautiful” and “terrifying”. In Ellen Klages’ young adult novel, The Green Glass Sea, a witness describes Trinity, saying “It was beautiful. It was terrifying”. These are experiences of awe in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine”.
Indeed, Edwin McMillan, one of the physicists, described “the immediate reaction of the watchers as one of awe” and Frisch, Farrell, Bainbridge and Robert Wilson all use the word “awesome” to describe their own responses.
Farrell said of the test that it appeared as “that beauty that great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately”. He is, in fact, remarkably eloquent, as this description of the desert landscape, lit by Trinity, shows:
The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.
Pearl Buck’s novel about the Manhattan Project, Command the Morning (1959), seems to draw on this description. Stephen Coast, a (fictional) project scientist, sees:
The sky burst into blinding light. Miles away the mountains were black and then glittered into brilliant relief in the searing light. Colour splashed over the landscape, yellow, purple, crimson, grey. Every fold in the mountain sprang into bold lines, every valley was revealed, every peak stood stark.
The proliferation of adjectives chase after the experience as if they can’t keep up with the boiling profusion of colours. Characteristically, here, the sublime exceeds language’s capacity to capture it.
Trinitite and transmutation
Of course, what’s important about eyewitness and literary descriptions is not merely that they fit Trinity into established aesthetic traditions, but that the fit is uncomfortable. There are religious connotations to the dazzling light and overwhelming power of the explosion, but the forces encountered aren’t divine. Feelings aroused by the sublime are displaced uncannily when the source is technology, not nature.
In an essay on the atomic sublime, the scholar, Peter Hales, shows how the threat of the mushroom cloud was eventually somewhat tamed by being mediated through the aesthetics of the sublime. Trinity, though, provides a compelling origin story in nuclear mythologies precisely because in 1945 it was too new to be contained by that tradition. Even the familiar term, “mushroom cloud”, wasn’t yet readily available to name what rose into the sky (Frisch thought it both “a bit like a strawberry … slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening stem of whirling dust”, and “a red-hot elephant standing balanced on its trunk”).
© United States Army
Trinity is unsettling. The experience evoked intimations of the world’s end that were later frequently associated with nuclear weapons. George Kistiakowsky, who led the group building explosive lenses for the gadget, said Trinity was “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine”.
As the mushroom cloud boiled upwards, one military official, perhaps spooked by Enrico Fermi’s mischievous taking of bets on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and, if so, whether it would destroy the whole world or just New Mexico (a possibility actually discussed, but ruled out well in advance of the test), apparently lost faith in the “long-hairs”, as the scientists were sometimes referred to by the soldiers at Los Alamos. “My God,” he’s said to have exclaimed, “the long-hairs have lost control!”.
Trinity presaged an era when the absurdity of extinction replaced a divinely ordained judgement day as the dominant vision of the end of the world: Dr Strangelove instead of the Book of Revelation.
Read more:
The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst
Frequently, then, Trinity is a story about entering an unsettling new era. The Green Glass Sea captures this beautifully. The desert sand was melted by the test into a glassy substance, dubbed trinitite or Alamogordo glass. The novel’s young protagonist traverses this beautiful, alien world, that came into being 75 years ago:
The ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Translucent jade-green glass, everywhere, colouring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see.
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Daniel Cordle, Associate Professor in English and American Literature, Nottingham Trent University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How an Australian scientist tried to stop the US plan to monopolise the nuclear arms race
From a collection at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Gift of Ms Vivian Wilson 2004
Darren Holden, University of Notre Dame Australia
Australian scientist Mark Oliphant, who helped push the United States to develop the atomic bombs in World War II, also played a major role during the war in attempting to stop the US dominating the UK in any further development of nuclear weapons.
Details of the Adelaide-born physicist’s efforts are included in new research published today in the CSIRO’s Historical Records of Australian Science, based on documents sourced from the UK Cabinet archives.
These archival documents reveal how Oliphant attempted a British rebellion against scientific collaboration with the US that escalated all the way to the top of Britain’s wartime leadership.
Read more:
How Melbourne activists launched a campaign for nuclear disarmament and won a Nobel prize
The rise of the physicist
Oliphant (1901-2000) described himself as a “belligerent pacifist” and his humanitarianism and compassion forms an indelible image of the gentle giant of Australian science.
After studying at the University of Adelaide he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in the UK. Oliphant joined a freewheeling cabal of atomic physicists led by fellow antipodean Ernest Rutherford. He later took up a position at Birmingham University.
But soon the war was to change everything for him.
In late 1938, nuclear fission of uranium was discovered in Berlin and within months the thunderclap of war clattered over Europe. After convincing the Americans of the potential of an atomic bomb in 1941, Oliphant joined the Manhattan Project in 1943 as a leading member of the collaborative British Mission.
At war with secrecy
Oliphant found that wartime secrecy was totally opposite to the usual culture of open science. The US military police opened his mail, and the FBI interrogated him on his casual attitude to rules.
In September 1944 Oliphant complained of his restrictions to the US Army’s no-nonsense military head of the project, General Leslie Groves. Groves was frustrated with progress and gave Oliphant a lecture on war and security.
In doing so, the cabinet documents on Oliphant’s notes show that the normally circumspect Groves also let slip that the US had no intention of honouring an agreement with the British to share atomic technology after the war. Groves stated that even after the war America needed to prepare for an “inevitable war with Russia”.
Oliphant’s notes added:
In this conversation Groves insisted that he spoke for the armed forces and for every thinking man and woman in U.S.A. He said that any effort U.K. might make must be confined to central Canada. He excluded specifically Australia or any other part of the Empire. Every possible source of supply of raw materials would be monopolised and controlled by U.S.A.-U.K.
How to warn the UK?
Oliphant saw weapons development as merely a vehicle on which to carry the potential of almost limitless energy and he was intent on resuming his open research after the war.
He could not risk his mail being opened again. So he headed from Berkeley, California to the British Embassy in Washington to write a secret report to London detailing his conversation with Groves.
Oliphant had a plan. He proposed that, without delay, the entire British Mission leave the Manhattan Project, return to Britain and restart their own programs. In late 1944 he seemingly had traction and the British project, code-named Tube Alloys, was reinvigorated with new plans tabled to construct uranium isotope plants.
Oliphant’s plan escalated up the chain to Lord Cherwell, then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s scientific advisor, and to Sir John Anderson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the authority on atomic matters inside the British War Cabinet.
James Chadwick, the scientific head of the British Mission, was furious at Oliphant’s cavalier approach and wrote to the British polity arguing that the British Mission must stay in America to complete the task at hand.
Oliphant’s bombast, confidence and directness is famous. As he approached the door of 11 Downing Street (the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer) on January 9, 1945, he was likely optimistic that his meeting with Sir John would result in a decision to follow his new plan.
But Sir John was in a pessimistic mood. There was still a war on, and the allies were being pushed back by the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Sir John put a stop to talk of this scientific rebellion, and ordered Oliphant back to America to complete the job.
The atomic bombs fell on Japan in August 1945. World War II soon ended.
Shutterstock/Everett Historical
After the war
In mid-1946 the newly formed United Nations debated control of atomic technology and Oliphant was in New York as an Australian advisor. He and other scientists pushed a plan to abolish weapons and throw the science open.
The alternative, the scientists argued, would be an escalation of an arms race. Only openness in science could reduce suspicion between nations.
The US and the Soviet Union almost agreed to the plan. But the Americans refused a Soviet request to first destroy their atomic arsenal and the Soviets refused to allow UN inspections.
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The US passed their Atomic Energy Act in August 1946 which prevented any collaboration on atomic technology. Oliphant’s prophecy came true. But the scientists had made another prophecy: atomic secrets cannot be contained.
As the critical mass of international scientists that had gathered together for war radiated back out around the world, they carried with them the secrets of the atom.
The British restarted their bomb project in 1947 and tested their first weapon in 1952, and the Soviets tested their first bomb in 1949. The US monopoly on atomic weaponry was a fleeting moment.
So the opportunity was lost in 1946 to abolish weapons, and today more than 14,000 nuclear weapons exist, held by nine countries. Even in a post-Cold War world this sword of annihilation hangs by a thread over the head of all us.
Darren Holden, PhD Candidate, University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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