Tag: Nuclear Weapons

The Atomic Bombs Are Not Controversial

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Every August 6 this comes around, and I have to give my take. No, the atomic bombs were not controversial and were entirely justified. Totally justified. When Japan was already being starved and firebombed, when the bloodbath of Okinawa was fresh in sight, to not use the superweapons would be wrong even by 2020s standards, much less 1940s ones.

Were they horrific? Definitely. Were they a magic win button that guaranteed a peaceful surrender in place of an invasion that could have killed a million Americans and ten-twenty times as many Japanese? Not by themselves. Could you have wished the war would have ended without them? Of course.

But there was no way they were not being used, and they very well could have prevented something worse. Much worse.

Nuclear Weapons Studies

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I have an idea for teaching a class that would combine traditional history with red-teaming. This is of course just a fantasy, but this is a fantasy blog. The course would be called “Nuclear Weapons Studies”. It starts off with history and physics even I can understand. Then comes The Assignment.

Students are given a fictional country with a set government, GDP, and domestic industry. They have to present the story of that country’s nuclear weapons program and will be judged not just according to traditional metrics but also according to how ‘plausible’ it seems to me. And the program doesn’t have to be a successful one, just seriously attempted.

Review: Atomic Steppe

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Atomic Steppe

Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe is the story of Kazakhstan and nuclear weapons. A Kazakh whose father was an advisor and think-tank head during the crucial early 1990s period, she’s well suited to write it. The bulk of the book is about the horrific environmental legacy of nuclear tests and infrastructure on the country, told excellently.

The problem with the main theoretical part of the book, the nuclear negotiations, is that despite her sincere efforts to show its complexity, the outcome was obvious and never actually in doubt. Kazakhstan had even less chance of preserving a nuclear arsenal than Ukraine or Belarus. That said, there’s plenty of finds from the almost video-game like saga of Americans retrieving super-enriched uranium for disposal to the Russian crews of the nuclear delivery systems flying bombers away and draining the fuel of ICBMs (SS-18s are liquid fueled) to skewer any chance of Kazakhstan being able to seize them.

It’s not a drama, but it’s a good look at atomic history.

Review: Seeking the Bomb

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Seeking the Bomb

Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb is another nuclear proliferation study, this one focusing on how the bomb was sought, not why. This is an incredibly frustrating to read (but very fun to review) book because of how it wobbles across both extremes of political scientist writing.

Right off the bat a gargantuan flaw comes into being: Having a central thesis heavily committed to theories and charts that simply don’t really translate well into an incredibly complex set of situations with a very small sample size. This is disturbingly common in works by political scientists, of which the author is one. It’s also adversarial in its nature and cites multiple kinds of “conventional wisdom” as wrong, including both other scholarly studies and pop-history claims. This feels like a college work in that it’s written to defend a thesis argument rather than simply study the subject.

Fortunately, this book has a lot of strengths as well. It is very well researched and has an effective categorization of nuclear seekers as either hedgers (building up the known capacity but holding back for political reasons), sprinters (just openly moving ahead at all costs), and hiders (trying to keep it concealed until too late). Its story of how India moved from hedging to blatant hedging (doing an unweaponized explosion in 1974 with obvious hints) to just open use is well done as a case study.

Yet I still feel it lacks somewhat in terms of applying technical capacity. This is not to say the book never acknowledges it-it recognizes that South Africa’s ability to make a domestic enrichment plant and other technologies contributed to it being the one successful hider, praises the scholarship of Unclear Physics even as it disagrees with its conclusions, and mentions that Libya’s program was doomed. But I think more detail, more appreciation for both technical challenges and opportunities, and a couple fictional “Nth Country” hypotheticals would have done better. Almost any reasonably advanced country could sprint to a bomb in the kilotons, even if cruder and more dangerous than established ones, if they really wanted to, and I don’t think Seeking the Bomb comes across as appreciating that in its text.

Still, if this is an uneven book it’s an interesting and well-done kind of uneven, and I don’t regret reading it.

Review: Quantifying Counterfactual Military History

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Readers of Fuldapocalypse should not be surprised to learn that when I saw a book called “Quantifying Counterfactual Military History“, I instantly bought and read it. The premise is simple: The authors use the Approximate Bayesian Computation method to get a large sample size in their various simulations-much, much larger than conventional wargames.

Starting off with one of the easiest and most popular ones, Jutland, that chapter made me go “a-ha! They got it.” My favorite quote is “but unlike in a wargame, our goal is to simply understand what is plausible and what is not.” This “War of the Spreadsheets” has its roles provided one knows its limitations, which the authors do. Then comes the Battle of Britain (where the goal is temporary German air superiority, along with a controversial conclusion. There’s Vietnam where the authors actually remember the large northern conventional forces that were always there. It concludes with Cold War game theory.

There’s some technical topics that are beyond me, but this is overall an excellent book whose authors know their own limitations. As someone who loves these kinds of simulations, I was delighted to read this.

Review: Dominion

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Dominion

CJ Sansom’s Dominion is a combination spy story and exploration of the classic Axis victory World War II alternate history. Britain is defeated but not “hard-conquered” in World War II, the Germans control the continent but continue to fight in the east, and with the Americans the only nuclear power, now everyone else wants the secret, with a man with nuclear knowledge trying to escape. And that’s basically about as much of a central plot there is in this novel.

It honestly reminded me a lot of Harry Turtledove’s In The Presence of Mine Enemies. Not the obvious divergence or setting, but rather the tone and pace. It’s a push through a dreary, dull, banality of evil world where evil triumphed over good. Which isn’t exactly the best to read about. Its biggest problem is that a lot of exposition is devoted to its background and worldbuilding, which just amounts to “the Germans won and a lot of bad stuff happened”. It’s a setting-first book in a setting that’s neither very pleasant nor interesting.

Plus while ‘plausibility’ is normally not the highest priority in alternate history, this just feels wrong. Britain becoming a satellite state of Germany without a military invasion and being able to not have its already eager-for-independence possessions secede? (Like India, which somehow hasn’t gone independent). I’d honestly accept a successful invasion over this.

The whole thing just feels unfocused, and when it does focus, it goes to the wrong thing. Not the best alternate history out there.

Review: Shopping for Bombs

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Shopping For Bombs

Gordon Corera’s Shopping for Bombs is a look at the then-recently busted AQ Khan nuclear network. It is very much an immediate-reaction book written in the close aftermath of an event aiming to capitalize on the media attention. Not surprisingly it has the strengths and weaknesses of such a thing. The strength is that it’s clear and understandable to a reader who isn’t a nuclear procurement nerd.

The weakness is that it feels a little shallow. Some of this isn’t Corera’s fault (how would he know at the time about the intricacies of Libya’s program). But it could have stood to have gone just a little deeper. And while being dated isn’t anything the writer can do anything about, it’s still an issue. Even for popular history about nuclear proliferation, there’s other stuff I would recommend more nearly twenty years on.

The SL-1 Disaster

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One of the most overlooked but the single most fatal (in terms of direct casualties) nuclear incident on American soil is the SL-1 disaster. Occuring at the height of the Atoms For Peace phase in 1961 in a remote part of Idaho, it’s understandable that it wasn’t as publicized. But it is an ‘incredible’ story, one that seems to combine the worst parts of Chernobyl and the Byford Dolphin.

The US army was experimenting with small reactors. One such reactor was the SL-1. On January 3, 1961, three men were performing maintenance on the ‘shut down’ reactor. John Byrnes moved a control rod too far, causing the reactor to go prompt critical and immediately explode in a blast of radioactive steam. Byrnes and fellow technicians Richard Legg and Richard McKinley were killed.

That Byrnes’ moving the control rod caused the disaster was well established. But since all with possible knowledge of why he did that died in the explosion, that part remains mysterious. The most likely explanation is simply that the ill-built reactor had a rod get stuck, and while Byrnes pulled he moved it too far. Other theories range from a distraught Byrnes over a failing marriage not paying attention, Legg pulling a prank that caused Byrnes to get startled and yank on the rod, and most infamously the theory that a love triangle involving Byrnes, Legg, and their spouses led him to intentionally cause a murder-suicide.

We will never know the why.

Review: Unclear Physics

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Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons

In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer takes a look at the ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programs of Saddam’s Iraq and Libya. Instead of a technical perspective, she looks at them from a political/organizational one, showing how poor state structures (in the case of Iraq) and nonexistent ones (in the case of Libya) hampered them. From the outside, there aren’t any shocking revelations: Iraq could have had a bomb by the mid-late 1990s without the Gulf War or a similar catastrophe, while Libya’s was going nowhere by 2003.

But from the inside, it’s a detailed look at human failure,in terms of dealing with low technology, dictator paranoia, dictators not understanding, and disorganized factionalism. Some of it comes across as legitimately fun to read.

Unclear Physics has two big apparent weaknesses. The first is its academese tone. The second and worse one along the similar nature is that she writes in a kind of inside baseball tone as if this an argument among nonproliferation academics, saying “the conventional wisdom says ______” when she means the previous conventional wisdom among people in that very small niche. It’s arguments that I’ve never even heard, for better or worse, as someone who’s for an amateur read up a lot about nuclear proliferation.

But this is still a great book at showing the soft human side of an otherwise hard technical issue.

The War Thermos

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Readiness issues with liquid oxygen rockets historically retired them from the ICBM role once alternatives became practical (be it storable liquid or solid fuels). Yet one technological curiosity was an attempt to work around the issue.

A variant of the R-9/SS-8 ICBM with the typically obtuse Soviet industrial designation of 8K77 had the vacuum flask principle applied to its oxygen tanks. At least in theory, it would keep the liquid oxygen cold long enough for a fueled missile to wait on alert in a crisis. Vacuum flasks are of course better known in the capitalist west by their brand name turned generic name, the thermos.

It would be very cold and then very, very hot.