16 January 2007

King Canute



I am hooked on the television thriller “24” again. They aired another couple episodes of the new season last night. I went to bed with the image of a suit-case sized nuclear device being detonated in Los Angeles, someplace. It is just a small one, and I remember the technology from other times.

The rest of the season is going to involve the actor Kiefer Sutherland hunting down another few of the devices. It is pretty exciting, though the story-line does not encourage a good night's rest.

Nuclear technology is driving us toward other brinks today. The Little Prince in North Korea has acquired somewhere between a couple and a dozen weapons. Mahmoud Ahmadinead, President of Iran is committed to something as well. He says it is for peaceful production of power, though we know better.

William Langewiesche wrote about how easy it is to acquire the basic technology to produce an atomic bomb in the December 2006 issue of The Atlantic magazine. He is, perhaps, a bit simplistic in his assessment that we have devolved into an age where the garage hobbyist may aspire to join the Nuclear Club. But he is not far wrong.

He also strikes a point that is fundamental to understanding the history of the age. The greatest aggregation of brain-power of the age unraveled the potential of the atom. They included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr, Enrico Ferme and Leo Szilard.

With the successful test of the very first Gadget at Trinity Flats, the only question worth asking was answered. The bomb worked. After that, it was just a matter of engineering, not theory and intuition.

Langewiesche quotes a man named Ivan Oellrich, who is vice president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Strategic Security Project on the subject. FAS was founded by the fathers of the Bomb. He says their view was simple: “there is no secret. Any physicist anywhere can figure out what we did and reproduce it. There is no secret, and there is also no defense.'”

There is a stark difference between the Scientists and the people that were fighting the war. With the first bomb, the end of the conflict suddenly became possible. It might be said inevitable, though there was no immediate response from the Japanese. It might be possible that it was going to be over, and that everyone alive on the 8th of August might stay that way, and go home.

Anyone who has deployed far from hearth and home understands the concept of the “short timer.” In Vietnam, calendars were kept marking the count-down to the end of the one-year tour. There was superstition and myth about the culmination of the experience, and a point at which risk was avoided. When I was in Korea, calendars were sold to the troops in which the last days floated out of the conventional months and led to the steps of an aircraft.

The World War had no arbitrary end assigned, and no relief until victory was at hand. With the blast at Hiroshima on August 6th, everyone in the Pacific Theater suddenly became a short-timer.

It was possible that it was almost over. One more push and it might be done. The pivot point in the history of our march to the abyss comes with the second operational use of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki on the 9th of August, 1945.

Major Chuck Sweeney took the Fat Man device in search of a target. The mission itself, filled with ego and mischance, is a counterpoint to the cool professionalism of the first mission. Where Colonel Paul Tibbet ushered in the Atomic Age in the silver Enola Gay, the second mission has a surreal air of the afterthought.

Tibbet was a full Bird Colonel, mature in the art and operation of the Air Corps. He had been the hand-selected shepherd of the employment division of the Manhattan project. He had labored for years to bring this aspect of the mission to maturity. He had caused the B-29 Superforts to be lightened so that they might fly higher and faster than their conventional cousins. He trained his crews in secret, and personally flew the mission to Hiroshima.

The pilot of the second mission was a twenty-five-year-old Major named Chuck Sweeney. The mission he flew, the one intended to demonstrate that any continued resistance was futile, had aspects of the surreal. There was ego and a missed rendezvous en route the island of Kyushu; the primary target of Kokura was cloud-covered; the search for the secondary left the B-29 perilously low on fuel.

Sweeney had fuel for only one pass over Nagasaki. By chance a crack opened in the clouds, revealing  the industrial zone stretching from the Mitsubishi sports field in Hamaguchi-machi  to the Mitsubishi Steel Works in Mori-machi. The errant rift in the cloud selected the aimpoint, which turned out to be a tennis court in Matsuyama-machi.

Something profound had occurred between the 6th and the 9th of August 1945, and it is worth a moment to consider what it was.

There was a Tsunami of destruction headed for the home islands of Japan. The plans were declassified long ago for the invasion that was Codenamed DOWNFALL.

The first component was a massive assault in the south. It was called OLYMPIC, and the estimates of expected casualties in the annexes to the operational plan are often cited as justification for the second atomic mission.

If you seek a revisionist approach to history you will not find it here. Fourteen Army and Marine divisions were scheduled to land on heavily fortified and defended island where Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands, after an unprecedented naval and aerial bombardment.

The second, culminating assault was named CORONET, and was allotted 22 divisions to land on the Kanto Plain south of Tokyo.

The overall plan would have utilized the entire Marine Corps, the complete Pacific Fleet, everything that the Army Air Corps had available, including the Mighty Eighth, fresh from Europe. In rough numbers, there would be more than a million soldiers and Marines supported by other millions in the two assaults.

It does not take a nuclear scientist to estimate that casualties would have been extraordinarily high, since the Japanese were preparing for a defense to the last woman and child.

Executing the war plans would have caused the most catastrophic event to culminate the most horrific sequence in human history. Being an apparatchik in the atomic machine of later days, I am ambivalent.

There will never be an end to the debate about where the weapons should have been dropped, perhaps in Tokyo Bay, or alongside Kokura where the shock and awe of the blast would have caused capitulation. I have been to Nagasaki, and left it sobered and sad.

But what is, is.

In the weeks that followed Japan's surrender, the Tsumani continued to flow, but it changed. The mighty Fleet began to steam for Tokyo Bay, but with cautious optimism. Formulas were devised to ensure that those who had been out the longest would be the first to return home.

Everyone was a short-timer.

As to the Bomb, the technology was wrested from the hands of the scientists and given to the Admirals and the Generals.

There would be not returning it to the land of theory, no way to put the cork in the bottle.

Robert Oppenhiemer, the lead scientist who gave us the Gadget, was horrified by what he had done. At Trinity, he is said to have uttered the words “I am become Shiva, the destroyer of Worlds.”

Later, he was more like King Canute, brought down to the water's edge to command the tide.

“Waves, stop your rolling! Surf, stop your pounding! Do not dare touch my feet!"

It was funny, really. The Bureaucrats who now owned the Bomb wound up taking away his clearances. They did not understand what he was trying to teach them.

But that was later. There was much to be done, even in the new and unsettling peace. The Fleet was arriving in Yokosuka, in the Sagami-wan south of Tokyo.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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