Peter Zimmerman’s review of Lynn Eden’s book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Physics Today, April 2005, page 62) strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bath water. Zimmerman appears to condemn the book’s real message about organizational dysfunction because he dislikes “her and [Theodore] Postol’s diatribe against the atomic establishment,” which he has labeled “her conspiracy theory.” My reading says that Eden provided useful and verifiable history about portions of the development of US strategic targeting procedures.
If there had been a conspiracy within the Department of Defense (DOD) to exclude fire damage from the development of US targeting plans and procedures, I would have had a role in it. There was no conspiracy. What are my credentials for making that declaration? My career in nuclear weapons effects research testing and analysis began in 1951, when I was present at Operation Buster/Jangle at the Nevada Test Site, and continues to the present. Until 1974 I was responsible for planning several DOD nuclear tests. I still consult for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency on matters related to the nuclear effects database compiled by that agency during the entire nuclear testing period that ended in 1992.
My recent review of the 1946 reports of the US Strategic Bombing Survey and my personal involvement with nuclear weapons effects are consistent with what Eden has described. In fact, the survey team’s extensive documentation in 1946 was soon put on the back burner by DOD scientists and engineers. The researchers at first used analyses of Japanese building responses to infer the weapon yields. Their analyses also suggested a simplified model for calculating a critical building-element response—a model that is still used in target damage assessment. However, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began atmospheric nuclear testing in 1948, DOD engineers quickly attached themselves to those tests.
Although we had experiments on thermal ignition and so forth, they were separated to avoid unwanted synergy in systems response. In addition, most structure-response test items were theoretical analysis models, not models of Japanese buildings. Consequently, as the Japanese structural-response database was replaced for US test planners by the sterile-structures tests at the Nevada and Pacific Proving Ground test sites, a unique feature of the Japanese data—the fire damage—faded in importance.
In reading Eden’s book and recalling my own experience during those years, I can visualize how our nuclear weapons effects community lapsed into a sort of “group-think” programmatic decision-making process. We could not demand that the AEC test at a rate that would satisfy requirements for good scientific method for instrumentation development, for preliminary scale-model tests, and for thorough analysis of test data before conducting the next test. The DOD engineers were not in sufficient control of their test beds and the timing of events, nor did they have enough time between tests to understand the data.
Conspiracy? Absolutely not. A historically relevant story from which to learn and move on? Yes! And, move on we did.
The real value of Eden’s book is in her thesis that entrenched organizational thinking can lead to unwanted results or ignore important factors, and in her suggestions about change. Zimmerman seems intent on finding inconsistencies in engineering and scientific details about the fire damage in Japan and in targeting in general. Certainly, fire damage was devastating in Japan. I started reading Eden’s book because I wanted to know what she had written about that, since I was actively reviewing the data. I soon found that her real message was more important and wasn’t just a criticism of military planners for not incorporating fires in target damage predictions.
