The nuclear-weapons-exist viewpoint

The view that nuclear weapons exist is nearly universal. The question “Do nuclear weapons exist?” is considered equivalent to the question “Is water wet?”. Nuclear weapons occupy a large part of our collective consciousness and there is seemingly no reason to question whether they exist. The lie of the existence of nuclear weapons - if that is what it is - is simply to great to comprehend.

Thus, a robust defense of the nuclear-weapons-exist is hard to come by. In this article, physicist and historian Cameron Reed responds to a report that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was similar to the destruction of other cities during World War II - thus raising the question of whether nuclear weapons exist. Our interaction - through email - is presented without editing - except for removing salutations and sign-offs.

Yim:

I write a newsletter of Substack, The Rise of Scientific Totalitarianism. I report on what I regard as government abuse of power.

You are one of very few writers to address the science of nuclear weapons and I am writing to you in that regard.

Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, as reported in the New York TImes, a survey of the destruction of those cities found that the damage was approximately equivalent to that produced by a 10 ton TNT conventional weapon. This raises the question to me - and others - whether we may have been misled on the weapons used in those attacks.

Have you considered that issue? If so, could you share your reasoning?

Reed:

I've heard of the nutty theory that the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were faked. Sigh. I usually don't pay much attention to this sort of thing. But, let me put together a longer message with some rebuttals and questions that would be raised by such an idea.

Reed:

Cameron Reed here again regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I have heard of Seversky; his name was brought to my attention a few years ago by someone who is convinced that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not struck with nuclear weapons at all. I couldn’t really read the NYT clipping you had sent. Is this what Seversky claims too, or does he contend that it was a nuclear weapon but of abysmally low yield? Either way, it seems just plain nuts. So, without knowing exactly what Seversky contends, let me offer some semi-random thoughts on the idea that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow faked.

First (and somewhat off the conspiracy topic), would 10 tons of conventional bombs have caused square miles of destruction? If a conventional WW II bomb was 500 pounds, we have only the equivalent of 40 bombs, which would have been a small raid, just a few bombers. I understand that a payload of 10 tons was about the limit for a B-29, so perhaps that is where the 10-ton figure is coming from; of course, the deliverable payload would depend on the distance to be flown. In the infamous firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945, 1667 tons of bombs destroyed about 15.8 square miles; the ~ 13-kiloton Little Boy bomb took out about 4.7 square miles of Hiroshima. By these figures, a 10-ton conventional raid would then correspond to about (15.8/1667)*10 = ~ 0.1 square miles. Even accounting for the fact that some of the Tokyo raid bombs were incendiaries, the 10-ton claim doesn’t seem to hold much water. Beyond this, would such a conventional bombing raid have created the searing heat to a range of thousands of feet as was experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – enough to ignite fires and leave shadows of vaporized structures and people burned into the ground? Now, the square miles destroyed per kiloton yield favors the firebombing raid (9.5 vs 0.36 sq. mi./kt), but the huge advantage with Little Boy was that instead of endangering nearly 300 planes each with a crew of ~ 10, only a single plane is needed to destroy much of a city!

Now as to the physics. If you want to mimic a nuclear weapon, you would have to disperse a lot of radioactive material in the process; does Seversky address this? And we are not talking of, say, just a few grams of radium. Many of the victims in Japan suffered radiation sickness. A rule of thumb for fission-weapons engineers is that each kiloton of yield gives some 30 billion Curies (yes, billion!) at a benchmark time of one minute after the explosion. This is equivalent to 30 billion grams of radium, or 30 million kilos, equivalent to about 33,000 US tons. So even if you wat to mimic a low-yield nuke, you’d still be talking hundreds of pounds of the stuff, probably more than existed in the entire world - let alone the problem of gathering it all into one place (talk about too hot to handle!). But there is more than that. It is not just the radioactivity, you would have to recreate the distribution of fission products that results from a nuclear explosion – dozens of isotopes. Material from the Trinity test in New Mexico is in fact still being analyzed to refine estimates of the yield of the test. Japanese scientists would have been able to figure out the difference between a dirty bomb and a true nuke; would the Emperor have been induced to surrender if it was known that this was just a big but dirty conventional bomb that would be unlikely to be made in quantity? Might as well just carry on with the big B-29 raids. Nagasaki showed that it was possible to make more than one.

And, what of the Trinity test, which is known to have distributed radioactivity around the continent? Was this too faked somehow (there were a lot of witnesses!)? In late 1945, the Kodak company began getting complaints from customers that X-ray films were spotted with imperfections. The culprit turned out to be not the film themselves, but paper liners that were used to separate them when they were packaged. The paper had been produced at a mill in Indiana, and Trinity fallout got into the water that was used in the processing and ended up in the paper, causing exposure on the films; a technical paper on this was published in 1947, with various fission products identified. Recreations of the Trinity fallout are also still being analyzed. Quite an elaborate conspiracy!

If somehow the Manhattan Project failed on a spectacular scale, there is also the pesky issue of keeping the failure secret for 80 years. Between Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos, and military and government officials – right up to Roosevelt, the Secretary of War, and later Truman (and Stalin!) – there must have been hundreds of people who were well aware of the purpose of the project. Not a single deathbed confession or document left for posterity by any of them, or by the bomber crews involved? The formal record of the project (“Manhattan District History”; https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan_district) runs to thousands of pages. All contrived with not single hint of inconsistency?

This also makes me wonder: What secret sauce was discovered between 1945 and 1946, when media and political observers were invited to the Bikini tests in the Pacific?

I hope these comments provide some food for thought - you can likely tell that I don’t put much credence in the idea that Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t as claimed!

Yim:

Thanks for your response.

(a) With regard to the de Seversky survey - short answer from Hiroshima Revisited: (page 5) "... [de Seversky] did not question the reality of the atomic bombs". Longer answer - the de Seversky survey findings were extraordinarily controversial at that time - same reference.

(b) With regard to de Seversky survey estimate of the strength of the bomb - I'm not sure what the justification for the de Seversky estimate - but he did seem to mean it - same New York Times article:

"The warplane designer, arguing against 'getting hysterical' about the atomic bomb, said at a news conference that he also doubted whether it could sink a battleship unless it scored a direct hit."

(c) Regarding: " It is not just the radioactivity, you would have to recreate the distribution of fission products that results from a nuclear explosion – dozens of isotopes." I do know some studies of fission-related isotopes were conducted - they do point to nuclear fission - but I'm not sure how much to read into that. (Hiroshima Revisited, Page 8).

(d) Regarding the secrecy issue - no - no deathbed confessions as far as we know. I will make one point - there may not have been such a large corps of personnel - assuming the whole enterprise was a fake.

Again, I appreciate your response. I will post this discussion as is - or with any further clarifications/comments.