Promoted by Steven D.
The prospect of a U.S. attack on Iran is unnerving. But the task of preventing that attack, and especially of preventing the use of nuclear weapons, is not helped by incorrect charges and information, such as yesterday’s panic in the blogosphere over a bomb test in Nevada long scheduled for early June. Unless everyone concerned is lying–which of course given this administration’s record, is entirely possible–it will be the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever seen. However big, and however related it may be to the effort to create a nuclear”bunker-buster” bomb, it is still non-nuclear. Calling it a “nuclear explosion” is not helpful. Because, well, it’s not. And the distinction matters.
Oppose it for any number of reasons, including its possible purpose, or the fact that it is being held on land long claimed by the Western Shoshones, a claim upheld by the UN. But please don’t call it nuclear.
Besides starting a dubious panic over an irradiated Yearly Kos,why it this important? What does “nuclear” really mean in the context of Iran? Please read on.
Not only does this feed the image of “wild speculation” that the Bushites would like to tar its opposition with, but in particular, the nature of so-called conventional weapons and of nuclear weapons should not be confused. That only plays into the strategy and perhaps even the beliefs of the Bushites.
As Senator Feinstein wrote last Sunday:
” There are some in this administration who have been pushing to make nuclear weapons more “usable.” They see nuclear weapons as an extension of conventional weapons. This is pure folly.”
Sy Hersh made the same point in his New Yorker piece. He quotes a former senior intelligence official:
He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout–we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”–remove the nuclear option–“they’re shouted down.”
Writing about the planning for an Iran attack, William Arkin in the Washington Post:
The new task force, sources have told me, mostly worries that if it were called upon to deliver “prompt” global strikes against certain targets in Iran under some emergency circumstances, the president might have to be told that the only option is a nuclear one.
The military understands the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear in terms of the physical effects and the geopolitical effects. The geopolitical effects have to do with the fact that no nation possessing a nuclear weapon has ever used it against an enemy, not in the 61 years since the U.S. bombed two cities in Japan, when it was the only nation in the world that had atomic weapons.
That nations have never used nuclear weapons has been perhaps the world’s only achievement in preventing civilization’s self-destruction.
That’s all I will say about the political difference in this post. I’ll also save the moral argument for another post. In this post I want to emphasize the physical difference of nuclear weapons. Even this won’t be complete in one go. So much of this is embedded in history. It will take some time to explain.
I am not a scientist. I am attempting to report as accurately as I can what has been written on this subject. First, on the nuclear attack on Iran. Then on a bit of early atomic history, to flesh out what this might mean.
Bunker Busting
The bomb in the US arsenal most often mentioned as the “bunker-buster” is the B61-11. There is some uncertainty about its yield. Some say it has a fixed yield of 10 kilotons. Others that it has a variable yield of up to 340 kilotons. Compared to other nuclear bombs the US possesses, this is relatively small. On the other hand, the yield of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were between 15 and 20 kilotons.
But the B61-11 can’t penetrate rock. To destroy a bunker 1,000 feet below the surface would require a larger bomb, on the order of 1.2 megatons, as in the proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the blast from this weapon would create a crater 1,200 feet wide, and the explosion would send some 300,000 tons of radioactive debris 15 miles into the sky. They estimate the total casualities could exceed one million.
In a scenario developed by Physicians for Social Responsibility, an attack on a bunker in Iran with a 1.2 megaton weapon would kill over 3 million people, and expose some 35 million people in Iran, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan to significant radiation, including the 20,000 Americans deployed in the region for the war on terrorists.
As far as we know, a “bunker buster” weapon with this size yield does not yet exist. So the US is apparently considering using the smaller yield B61-11 even though it can’t penetrate to 1,000 feet. Supposing it is used, what would be its effects?
The Physicians for Social Responsibility point out the common misconception that sending an atom bomb into the ground—an Earth Penetrating Weapon (EPW) lessens the radioactive fallout. That’s not true. “A nuclear EPW would actually create more fallout than a ground-burst or airburst weapon, due to the increased distribution of radioactive debris from detonation at a shallow depth in soil or rock,” the report says.
The report quotes the congressional testimony of Ambassador Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration:
“I really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in the administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fall-out. I don’t believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true. It is certainly not what we’re trying to do now. What we are trying is to get in the ground far enough so that the energy goes deep into the ground to hold at risk the deeply buried facilities. But it is very important for this committee to recognize what we on our side recognize… There is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive over a large area. No sane person would use a weapon like that lightly… I do want to make it clear that any thought of …nuclear weapons that aren’t really destructive is just nuts.”
Probably the major physical difference of nuclear weapons, apart from sheer power–which vaporizes and incinerates people– is lethal radioactivity. The effects of radioactivity alone kills people within 60 seconds, then in days, and then in weeks and months. In those it doesn’t kill, it suppresses the immune system and can cause cancers and other diseases, and it may cause genetic abnormalities in the next generation.
Radioactive fallout from a bunker buster carrying even a one kiloton bomb is not contained beneath the ground. It rises in the soil to the surface and into the air. Winds disperse it farther.
Standardizing Catastrophe
Atomic bombs have been used directly on people only twice. There are no exact statistics, but the ones generally accepted (I take them from “The Bomb: A Life” by Gerard DeGroot) are these: Some 75,000 people died immediately in Hiroshima in the blast and fire. After five years, some 200,000 had died from the Bomb. (p.95). The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 kilotons.
In Nagasaki, some 40,000 people were killed in the blast, “70,000 by the end of the year and perhaps as many as 140,000 in total.” (p.101) The Nagasaki bomb was approximately 20 kilotons.
Please note that more than half of those who died in five years had survived the blast in Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, it was more than two-thirds. No one knows how many cancers and other illnesses resulted.
To repeat: some say the bunker busters now in the US arsenal have a yield of 10 kilotons, but most believe the yield goes up to 340 kilotons, more than 22 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima, and reduced human beings to lumps of charcoal a half mile away. The first atom bomb ever exploded, in a New Mexico test, was about 17 kilotons. It killed every living creature for a mile radius, including insects.
In that summer of 1945, when Norman Cousins read the first detailed reports on the development of the atomic bomb in the same issue of the New York Times that told of that bomb’s first use in destroying Hiroshima, he wrote an essay that would be published within days in the magazine he edited, the Saturday Review of Literature. Though it may sound like a sedate and specialized publication now, it was widely read, with a circulation of over half a million. It became a well-known and much discussed essay, especially when Cousins expanded it into a small book, titled “Modern Man Is Obsolete”.
Cousins advanced several philosophical and political arguments in this essay, but he began with the most vital assertion: the dropping of the Bomb meant that humanity had entered an entirely new era. Total destruction of civilization and possibly of humankind, perhaps of most life on earth, was now possible. This fact had to brought into the consciousness of the species, so humanity could try to take control of its fate. “The power of the atomic bomb “must be dramatized and kept in the forefront of public opinion, ” he wrote. “The full dimension of the peril must be seen and recognized.”
But that task was always going to be difficult, as he learned just a year later. Cousins was one of the reporters who witnessed the first postwar atomic bomb test at Bikini island, in the summer of 1946. The bomb was dropped into the ocean, with numerous naval vessels in the vicinity to test the extent of its destructive power. But the observation ship was far away, and the bomb had missed the target so the devastation it caused was not immediately obvious. The first reports to the world gave the impression, Cousins wrote, “that the bomb had been `oversold’–that it was `merely’ another weapon.”
For at least the next 40 years, there were always people in government and the military who tried to minimize the Bomb, as just another weapon. At first they denied that radioactive fallout existed. Then they said it wasn’t very harmful. And then they said that death by radioactive poisoning was “pleasant.”
Then we were supposed to forget about the effects. Nuclear war was supposed to become normal. Cousins called it “the standardization of castastrophe.”
It soon became apparent, even in 1946, that the Bomb test Cousins witnessed had indeed been enormously destructive, and the second bomb exploded in this series surprised even the bomb-makers with its ferocious power, sending a half-mile wide column of water a mile into the sky in a single second, and spewing quantities of radiation farther than the military anticipated. These were the first tests at Bikini island, a place still too radioactive for human life today.
These first tests were called Operation Crossroads. I was born on the day of the first one. The atomic Bomb was a political and moral crossroads for humanity, because it was so powerful and so different. Today’s conventional bombs are themselves far more destructive than conventional weapons in the past. Depleted uranimum munitions and various chemical agents have long term effects. But even so, the Bomb is a difference in kind. It is the Bomb. We must never forget that. Never. And especially, not now.
You’re quite right to insist on the difference, & there is no way they could lie about an aboveground nuclear test blast. What I’ve read indicates they’re interested in seismic data relevant to bunker busters. The radioactive fallout from hitting Iran’s nuclear sites with conventional bombs shouldn’t be under-estimated though; esp. if all this talk about using nukes is intended to make us heave a sigh of relief if they go conventional.
I hadn’t heard of Cousins before, thanks. I just learned from Robert Fisk of another British reporter who wrote about the Bikini Atoll tests: James Cameron.
Amy Goodman has a number of articles (google “The Hiroshima Cover-up” for one) about Wilfred Burchett, who defied MacArthur’s orders, went to Hiroshima after the bombing, and wrote about what he saw in the London Daily Express:
In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly — people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague . . . Hirsoshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.
George Weller of the Chicago Daily News went to Nagasaki; his reports were spiked by MacArthur & remained unpublished until 60 years later when they were published in Japan.
On the payroll of the War Department was the New York Times’ science writer, William L. Laurence, who acted as the Judy Miller of the Atomic Age, filing whatever propaganda the governement wanted published on the front page of the Times. He wrote the military press releases for the test program. Three days after Burchett’s story was published in London, Laurence hit back in the Times, denying that radiation was killing people:
The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.
Laurence was rewarded with a Pulitzer for his efforts (see Cockburn’s The Pulitzer Farce for the relation to yesterday’s announcements) which helped shape much of the public discourse over the following decades.
I was just talking today with my partner who teaches college freshmen. She says they all come in having read the devastating anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” about World War I. We agreed that when we were in high school, we all read an antiwar novel about the US Civil War, “Red Badge of Courage.” I wonder whether a future generation will all read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” I wonder whether there will be a future generation.
John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” was probably the most famous of the eyewitness accounts. It ran originally in the New Yorker magazine.
“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a powerful, eloquent novel about the experience of war, and it still rings true. My niece read it in high school, too, which prompted me to re-read it. I was amazed how good it is, how well it stands up.
I certainly agree it’s important to accurately report that the scheduled blast in Nevada is not a nuclear blast.
I’d only caution that we not fall in to the clever rhetorical trap where when we do in fact distinguish between “nuke” and “conventional”, (and it says some pretty disturbing things about our society and mindset that we employ the term “conventional” to describe bombs and weapons of a non-nuke type, as though their use is commonplace and acceptable), we yield too easily to the use of the one as a convenient way of preventing the use of the other.
My belief that is that it’s the same madness, the same mental illness that drives the use of either form of weaponry. The fundamental difference between the 2, in the end, is simply one of magnitude, and not a difference in the nature of the pathology.
There is some danger that in distinguishing between conventional and nuclear, the conventional weaponry sounds tame and acceptable. However, I believe the danger of not distinguishing between them is greater.
In this post I outlined some of the physical effects, which are vastly greater. The geopolitical and moral effects are also likely to be vastly greater. What nuclear weapons have come to represent over 60 years cannot be underestimated.
I agree that the same madness is behind the war-making, and that’s part of my point: the Bushites apparently believe that nuclear weapons are just bigger payloads. They are much more, and using them would plunge the world into an incalculable darkness of barely imaginable violence.
Nothing I say is meant to suggest that only the use of nuclear weapons in Iran is wrong or immoral or disastrous. But even considering the use of nuclear weapons, or allowing the world to believe they are being considered, is extremely dangerous. So I am willing to take the chance of being misunderstood on the matter of attacking Iran, if I can begin to impress readers with the extreme seriousness of talking about “nuclear options.” It’s been more than a decade now since the Soviet threat supposedly ended, and the meaning of nuclear weapons has apparently slipped out of current consciousness. But we can’t let Hiroshima be forgotten any more than we can forget the Holocaust.
Yes! I agree in all respects with what you say, and I didn’t mean to imply that distinguishing between the types of weaponry led to more danger than that posed by the nukes themselves. Cetainly the nuclear ambition of the psychopaths running the Bush regime is in fact far more dangerous by several orders of magnitude.
My intent was simply to warn against the growing propensity in our progressively more dysfunctional culture to be so easily manipulated into congratulating ourselves for successfully opposing the nukes while all the while having been duped by the threat of nuke deployment into giving our tacit approval for a “conventional” attack.
Good diary. Just wanted to add one thought.
The physical amount of explosives being used for this Nevada test is far, far too large to ever be carried in a plane. It is therefore being mounded on top of the bunkers and exploded at ground level.
Why would a test like this benefit the US military? What’s the point of testing a bomb you can’t ever lift into the sky?
Pax
I don’t have any problem with people scrutinizing the Nevada test. It needs to be scrutinized. It is pretty suspicious. I hope that people will oppose a Bush attack on Iran that uses any kinds of weapons, and I hope they write stories and diaries, and contact Members of Congress, etc. to demand that Congress assert its role.
I am concentrating my efforts right now on the nuclear issue, because I see a lack of understanding of what it really means to have nuclear weapons “on the table” for Iran.
But in the overall effort to prevent a catastrophic US attack, credibility is important, and accuracy is important to credibility. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything about a post drawing attention to the Nevada test, except good catch.
Just to expand on my comment above: it bears repeating that a “conventional” strike on sites with nuclear materials is going to scatter them across the countryside & leave yet another radioactive mess.
The US needs its own Truth Comission to deal with the real history & legacy of our nuclear programs.
Laurence & the NY Times should have their Pulitzer revoked.
Did you know that Bechtel now manages the Nevada Test Site (Privatizing the Apocalypse?
FYI, “Shoshone” doesn’t need an “s” to form the plural.
be honored by the privilege of making any sacrifices necessary to help fight the war on terror and protect Is- oh wait.
You’re correct about “Shoshone.” One of those gremlins that creeps in while I’m trying to manage hyperlinks.
If we’re going to withdraw awards, we might start with Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize.