July 17, 2018—Legacy of Fat Man and Little Boy!

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” ~ Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the then highly classified Manhattan Project, quoting from the Bhagaved-Gita Hindu Scripture, upon witnessing the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, NM.

Following its proof test 73 years ago yesterday, the plutonium “implosion” atomic “Gadget” developed by scientists and engineers in Los Alamos, NM became the atomic source of “Fat Man” and on August 9, 1945 was dropped from a B-29 called “Boxcar” and detonated above Nagasaki, killing some 39,000 – 80,000 Japanese. That event was preceded on August 6 by the detonation of a uranium “gun device” called “Little Boy,” which had not been previously tested so certain were its designers that it would work as designed. When it was dropped from the Enola Gay B-29 (now displayed in the Smithsonian near Dulles Airport in Virginia) and detonated above Hiroshima, some 90,000-146,000 Japanese died. See the photos of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” below.

So horrific were these results that literally instantaneously destroyed both cities that these two bombings successfully persuaded the Japanese leadership to surrender, saving even more (Japanese and American/allied) lives that most reviewers judge would have resulted had they continued to fight to the death as they had planned.

While it is debated by some, most believe the fire bombings of other Japanese cities, including Tokyo, with conventional weapons had already killed more Japanese than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs — but with far less shock value. With little doubt, the atomic bombings saved the lives of many American soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Previously, in the July 17-August 2, 1945 Potsdam Conference, President Harry S Truman told Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin on July 24, 1945 about the successful Trinity test. But Stalin seemed unsurprised, no doubt because his spies had known about and passed to the Soviets details of the Manhattan Project since the Fall of 1941 — including the designs of our first atomic bombs. Stalin’s scientists simply copied them and successfully tested their atomic bombs beginning on August 29, 1949 — years ahead of what we had then anticipated.

Notably, Sir Winston Churchill, who had led Great Britain through the June 6, 1944 D-Day that ended WWII in Europe, began the Potsdam Conference 73 years ago today to consider how to end the War in the Pacific. But he was defeated in the July 26^th British election and was replaced by the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, at the Potsdam conference. (Another example that “no good deed goes unpunished.”)

President Roosevelt had counted Churchill and some of his key scientists as partners in the Manhattan Project from the beginning. Notably, President Truman learned the Manhattan Project details on April 24, 1945, after becoming President on April 12, 1945.

A similar tale follows from a brief history of the invention and demonstration of the Hydrogen Bomb, a nuclear fusion device capable of much higher explosive power than fission weapons like Little Boy and Fat Man. Even during his Manhattan Project years in Los Alamos, Dr. Edward Teller became a strong advocate of developing this more devastating weapon, because he believed that the Soviets would surely do the same — and we should not fall behind them. The issue became contentious among the scientific community, and the then “powers that be” formed the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to pursue his ideas.

On November 1, 1952, the U.S. H-Bomb was first demonstrated in the Ivy Mike test on Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific, at a yield equivalent to 10.4 million tons (or 10.4 megatons) of high explosive — almost 1000 times that of Fat Man and Little Boy fission weapons dropped on Japan. Click here for a brief video of that momentous event that destroyed most of the island of Elugelab. In the late 1960s, while serving as Science Advisor to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, I visited and studied that mile-wide crater (shown below) and all the others on the South Pacific atolls as part of my study of blast and shock nuclear weapons effects to protect our strategic systems.

By the mid-1950s, we were producing lighter weight, weaponized, more accurate lower-yield versions to be carried by USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers (SAC was formed on March 31, 1946.) and planning how H-Bombs could be delivered by long-range ballistic missiles based on land and sea (to be launched from submarines) as their accelerated development programs began in the late 1950s — especially following the Soviet Sputnik satellite launched in 1957.

Notably, we again had been surprised by how quickly the Soviets developed their first H-Bomb — their first multi-megaton test was in November 1955. Andrei Sakharov, later a prominent dissident, author of Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom and winner of a 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, was instrumental in its design.

One lesson to be learned from this recounting of the early years of the nuclear era is how quickly a nuclear weapon capability can be achieved — e.g., some six-years after Albert Einstein in the summer of 1939 was persuaded to write to President Roosevelt about the potential of an atomic bomb, who in turn initiated what became the Manhattan Project, and about 3-years after the Los Alamos project began, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

In spite of an extraordinary effort to keep things secret, the Soviet Union shortly thereafter began testing its fission atomic bombs, based on the U.S. design. In another 10-years, both had demonstrated H-bomb capability. Only a few years later both had thousands of nuclear weapons that could be deployed on tactical and strategic delivery systems.

These facts should be borne in mind when contemplating the possible pace of nuclear proliferation, a fact for applauding President Trump’s announced initiatives press a “Nonproliferation” agenda, though it is a bit late for North Korea and Iran. North Korea has up to 60 nuclear weapons, according to reports quoting intelligence community sources, and has demonstrated many months ago its ballistic missile capability to reach any U.S. city.

And Iran is not far, if any, behind its ally North Korea. Click here for Sunday’s Washington Post report that Israeli spies recently discovered new details from a trove of Iranian nuclear documents showing that “Tehran obtained explicit weapons-design information from a foreign source and was on the cusp of mastering key bomb making technologies when the research was ordered halted 15 years ago.”

This claim should have been no surprise. Indeed, it is an understatement in my opinion. Click here for an argument that we understood North Korea long ago had nuclear weapons and that we should have assumed Iran already had nuclear weapons, presented in an February 2016 National Review article that I co-authored with President Clinton’s CIA Director R. James Woolsey, President Reagan’s Science Advisor Dr. William R. Graham, Former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council Fritz Ermarth and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, Former Executive Director of the EMP Commission foolishly canceled by Congress last year.

This is the proper context for viewing the unverifiable Iran Deal, the mislabeled Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that at a minimum assures Iran a pathway to its desired nuclear capability. I certainly agree with Israeli who was quoted as commenting that the JCPOA “did not block the path to a nuclear weapon. It paved the way.”

But I digress from my main purpose in this message.

Our nuclear laboratory scientists and engineers rapidly designed, tested and built innovative nuclear weapons via the Manhattan Project and within its legacy laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore and their engineering arm, Sandia. When I began working with them in the 1960s, they operated under the oversight of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and since then they have eventually found their home in the Department of Energy.

Concurrently by the late 50s, the Defense Department had assumed the role of understanding the effects of nuclear weapons and helping to design associated strategic and tactical delivery systems to survive and operate in such nuclear environments. To accomplish this objective, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project spun off,or morphed into, the Defense Atomic Support Agency, and then the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), which was especially responsible for testing and the development of simulators for testing our nuclear-armed systems against those effects. I was very active in these R&D programs in the 1960s and 70s, especially with the Air Force Weapon Laboratory plans and programs.

Key to these activities were two important committees made up of a number of the nation’s most competent physicists and engineers: DNA’s Scientific Advisory Group on Effects (SAGE) and the Joint Strategic Targeting Planning System (JSTPS) Scientific Advisory Group (SAG). Members of this important coalition had access to the most senior authorities of the Pentagon and beyond, and they had a profound influence on the development of survivable strategic and tactical nuclear systems. I often briefed them and eventually became a member of both.

For example, Fred Payne led the 1968 STRAT-X study that led to most of our second and third generation strategic systems; e.g., the Navy’s Ohio Class submarines and their associated Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), the Air Forces B-1 and eventually stealth aircraft, and sought (without success) a survivable replacement for the increasingly vulnerable ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and the Army’s second generation ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems… and of course designs for more survivable associated command, control and communications (C3) systems.

Fred also chaired the JSTPS SAG and was a member of the DNA SAGE, which was then chaired by Bob LeLevier an expert on high altitude nuclear effects who also served on the SAG.

Since the Director of DASA/DNA eventually was a three star military officer reporting directly to the Chairman of the Joint Staff of Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense during the apex of the Cold War, his views were particularly important.

Among the most important contributions of this arrangement occurred on the watch of VADM Robert Monroe as DNA’s Director. VADM Monroe essentially on his own personal active involvement blocked the United States from signing onto the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) during the Carter administration, permitting the continuation of our important underground nuclear tests.

Regrettably, President George H.W. Bush unilaterally ended all U.S. underground tests in 1992 — thereby ending not only testing to assure the continuing viability of our nuclear weapons (as well as new designs) but also DNA’s underground nuclear effects testing — and the role of DNA subsequently morphed to a fundamentally different focus — away from nuclear weapons effects toward conventional, chemical and biological weapons effects — and an arms control agenda.

Within another few years, DNA’s legacy organizations (the Defense Special Weapons Agency — DSWA and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency — DTRA) lost any focus on nuclear weapons effects and evolved toward the study of conventional and chemical/biological weapons and their effects and a growing role in arms control verification matters and other policy matters.

The SAGE was abolished in the mid-1990s and replaced by an advisory group that was not much associated with nuclear weapons effects, and today is called the Threat Reduction Agency Committee (TRAC) — intended to cover a much broader agenda including all “weapons of mass destruction” and a panoply of arms control issues. Including the important verification problem.

This is a pale shadow of the original DNA focus — and its robust support structure within the defense community focused on understanding nuclear weapons effects and how to protect our military systems against those effects. During those earlier days, the DOE Laboratories focused on building nuclear weapons — while DNA, its service laboratories and their contractors focused on nuclear weapons effects.

Today, the DOE Laboratories are trying to take over the old DNA role by reinventing what DNA mastered a half century ago — and has mostly forgotten. Meanwhile the Russians have generated a new family of nuclear weapons while we continue to dawdle without a testing agenda. And essentially no one within the Defense Department remembers the “hard knocks” lessons learned over 20-years ago by active theoretical and experimental programs dealing with nuclear weapons effects.

This situation reflects foolishness, perhaps uninformed misguidance but foolishness nevertheless.

Nowhere is this breakdown more important than in the lack of support for dealing with the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat, not only to our military systems, but also to the viability of our critical civil infrastructure, upon which the very survival of our Republic depends.

And the entire Department of Defense seems to be asleep at the switch. For example, DoD bureaucratic operatives last year fostered the end of the EMP Commission that had served with distinction for 17 years—and continue to slow role their reports.

For example, the Chairman’s unclassified report is still being reviewed for distribution almost nine months after it was submitted to the designated DoD authorities. Furthermore, this important report by Dr. Wiliam R. Graham, which reflects the views of the entire commission, is not intended to be made available via the Defense Department’s DASIAC webpage.

Click here for his briefing to the Dupont Summit last December for a summary of his views outlining our current state of unpreparedness, no doubt also included in his report that is still being withheld by DoD authorities.

So, Dr. Graham has purchased his own webpage to provide this unclassified report and several others to the wider private community that needs the information to harden our critical civil infrastructure. Click here for Dr. Graham’s webpage. We will also file the Commission reports on the High Frontier webpage.

This sad recent illustration shows how far the capabilities and responsiveness of the Defense Department has atrophied during the past 2-3 decades.

In conclusion, click here for VADM Robert Monroe’s June 30, 2018 The Hill article, “It’s time to re-nuclearize America’s defense policy,” a perspective with which I emphatically agree. I close by quoting his final three paragraphs:

“The Manhattan Project created nuclear weapons and won WWIII by excelling in two broad types of science — nuclear weapons design by civilian scientists, and nuclear weapons effects by military officers. We subsequently won the 46-year Cold War by excelling at these two types of science.

“The Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons labs excelled in the former, and DOD’s ‘national laboratory for nuclear weapons effects’ — the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) and its predecessors — excelled in the latter. Both organizations carried out robust underground nuclear testing programs. DNA then had the additional responsibility of training the entire Defense Department and the armed services worldwide in the rapidly advancing military science of nuclear weapons effects. But DNA was shut down in 1997, and today America’s military forces have little knowledge of nuclear weapons science.

“We’ve forgotten the lessons we learned the hard way in winning the Cold War. If we hope to become competitive in the business of saving America, we better do two things fast. Resume underground testing by the DOE nuclear labs, and re-create DOD’s Defense Nuclear Agency to resume their underground nuclear testing program and ‘re-nuclearize DOD.'”

Bottom Lines.

This sorry recent loss of memory from lessons learned long ago following “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” needs to be repaired as soon as possible. And regrettably, the Defense Department since 1992 has been a poor steward in retaining the lessons learned by the old DNA. This matter deserves the urgent attention of Defense Secretary James Mattis and JCS Chairman Joe Dunford.

Nowhere is this initiative more needed than to rectify the vulnerability of our critical civil infrastructure, particularly the electric power grid, to the EMP threat that is included in the military doctrine of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

Furthermore, President Trump should include these concerns in an appropriate Executive Directive empowering a competent individual reporting to the President through his National Security Advisor to take charge of the dysfunctional federal government that should be addressing the vulnerability of our critical civil infrastructure, particularly the electric power grid.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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