Cold War

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

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Sometimes I worry about the British.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. […] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)
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It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’¹ since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.²

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.³

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts, as I have previously argued.⁴ Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.⁵

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

The A-bomb won:

I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the W30 nuclear warhead; the airship thing was just a bonus. The test, codenamed Stokes, was part of Operation Plumbbob, a series of 29 above-ground detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site between May and October 1957. Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to have caused 1900 civilian deaths from thyroid cancer — a small price to pay for the knowledge gained, I think we’d all agree.
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WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988. The dangers currenty facing humanity are summarised thus:

The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

Obviously, the precise position is fairly arbitrary — the relative movement back and forth is more significant, i.e. whether the world is getting more dangerous or not — but it’s interesting to reflect on the past movements of the minute hand:
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Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here’s an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare.

Here’s the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter (”Who speaks for Earth?”) of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:

By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons — but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.¹

Compare with Lord Ponsonby in the House of Lords, October 1933:

The next war, if there is one, is going to be as different from the last war as the last war was from the Battle of Hastings. During the four years of the Great War 300 tons of bombs were dropped on this country. In the next war 300 tons of bombs are going to be dropped on the great cities of this country in the first half-hour.²

And with P. R. C. Groves, in Behind the Smoke Screen (1934):

“Whereas in the late war some 300 tons of bombs were dropped in this country by the Germans, air forces today could drop almost the same weight in the first twenty-four hours and continue this scale of attack indefinitely.” That estimate, made by the Air Staff [in 1926], was based on the number and known ‘performance’ of the bombers possessed by France. Since then the striking power of the French Air Force, which is the accepted standard of measurement in Europe, has been doubled. Hence, and given the same supposition as regards the distance of the objective, it has now a bombing or striking capacity of 600 tons daily.³

And finally, with Sir Malcolm Campbell, in The Peril from the Air (1937):

But nobody need think that war from the air next time will bear any relation to the happenings of 1914-18. What must be realized is that the development of the air arm has made it possible for an enemy to drop a 1,000 [sic] tons of bombs on London in a single day and night. That is, four times the weight that fell on the whole country during four years of war.⁴

There are many more examples that I could supply, but that will do. It’s the same rhetorical device, isn’t it: take the awful destruction of the last war, multiply it, and compress it to fit a timescale of hours instead of years. (And as time goes by, and technology progresses and forces expand, multiply it some more.) It’s an effective one, too, whichever war you are talking about: if you don’t find the thought of a world war in a day a sobering one, then you are probably Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris. So here we see an instance where the rhetoric of the Cold War was developed first for the knock-out blow, long before the Manhattan Project.

1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 321-2.
2. Lord Ponsonby, Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1933; quoted in Patrick Kyba, Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 88.
3. P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 147-8. Emphasis in original.
4. Malcolm Campbell, The Peril of the Air (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1937]), 49. Emphasis in original.

Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.¹ One might say it’s a very British ‘kitchen sink’ approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran — so what else is new) leading up to the nuclear exchange, then switching to a relentless depiction of the death, confusion, suffering and struggle for existence in the days, weeks and years afterwards. ‘Harrowing’ is the word usually trotted out for movies like Threads; if you want to feel like you’ve been punched repeatedly in the stomach for two hours then you won’t want to miss it. At the end of it, I let out a huge sigh of relief — it was over, it wasn’t real, I could thankfully escape back to reality again.

The reason why Airminded has a sometime interest in the Cold War is partly because — at the risk of crossing a bridge before I come to it! — it’s an area I may go into after the PhD, but also because the fear of nuclear war is an obvious comparison to the fear of the knock-out blow. The one grew out of and replaced the other. In fact, it seems to me that they are extremely similar indeed: most of the ideas and tropes in literature anticipating nuclear war were used by the writers worrying about the effects of aerial bombardment upon British society before the Second World War. For example, the opening narration² of Threads explains the meaning of the title (over shots of a spider weaving a web intercut with ones showing trucks transporting goods around the city):

In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

As the film goes on to show, a nuclear war would completely sever these connecting threads, and with them, all hope and dignity. (One of the main characters sobs in grief when he finds that he can’t get any water out of the taps to comfort his wife, dying from radiation exposure.) Of those Britons who survive the attack, many millions more die for lack of food, water and medical attention. L. E. O. Charlton would have understood the point immediately. In 1938 he wrote that

Our millions are bottle-fed, and all their needs are cared for, by a system of distribution and supply so intricate, and so haphazardly evolved, that once seriously dislocated beyond the power of immediate repair they would be as helpless as new-born babes to fend for themselves.³

But there are also differences. One obvious one is radiation, and its lingering effects. After a knock-out blow, the survivors could rebuild and repopulate Britain without having to worry about no-go areas or genetic damage. Another, related and more striking difference is that the natural world would be largely unaffected by a knock-out blow, whereas a nuclear war would blight the land and the sky for generations to come. In Threads, the global thermonuclear war leads to a nuclear winter (Carl Sagan and Richard Turco are both credited as advisors), with near-freezing temperatures and stunted harvests. Britain’s population drops to medieval levels. These scenes, mostly of silent people in the bare fields hunched over and grubbing for what little crops still grow, are very bleak and extremely effective. Visually, they are so dark as to be almost black, while the wind howls constantly. Nature itself has been wounded. Contrast this with a passage in Sarah Campion’s 1937 novel Thirty Million Gas Masks. The protagonist is caught in a cellar in an air raid, and recalls a bicycle ride the previous May, in glorious spring:

This at least, thought Judith in December confusedly in the hot horror of her gas-mask, was unconquerable. The bombs might fall; did, in fact, fall at this moment, upon the brick and macadam of the railway bridge outside, upon the chestnut trees and the grassy bank and the dark winter-resisting laurels: the bridge might never be built again, for there might be no men to build it: but the grass would sprout of itself over the brick, and the laurel would put out a startling green bud, pale as water, and the chestnut, though split from top to bottom, would spring up in new life from the seedling now cosily safe at its foot, and bear in April a galaxy of green fingers, and in May a candle-blossom as insouciant as the free air itself. This alone, she thought as a brutal crash turned her world tipsy for a moment, this perennial birth in the face of disaster would go on invincibly to some sort of conclusion, some final flowering, however hazardous.⁴

Unsurprisingly, visions of the knock-out blow could sometimes turn into anti-urban, back-to-nature utopias by the back door. With the cities destroyed or emptied, the population drastically reduced, industry and commerce at an end, people could return to a simpler and therefore (of course!) better way of life, closer to the land and free of the corruptions of modernity. A Threads-style nuclear war would take this a step too far, corrupting the land as well and offering only an unrelenting and probably pointless struggle for mere existence instead. Even this, though, could be paradise to some, as shown by the survivalist fiction of the later Cold War.

There are some very good websites devoted to Threads: I particularly recommend Don’t Panic, Mr Mainwaring: Threads, while the site at Action After Warnings is extremely comprehensive. But above all, watch the film.

1. Interestingly, it was co-produced by the Nine Network in Australia; however I don’t remember it being shown here, whereas I do remember The Day After, or perhaps it was just the controversy surrounding it.
2. Actually, the narration was one of the weakest parts of the film: although used sparingly, the documentary-style voiceovers kept pulling me out of the story, a reminder that it wasn’t real. For some reason, the more frequent textual overlays were far less jarring, and also more informative.
3. L. E. O. Charlton, G. T. Garratt and R. Fletcher, The Air Defence of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), 102.
4. Sarah Campion, Thirty Million Gas Masks (London: Peter Davies, 1937), 173.

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States — 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can’t help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren … though I suppose the Defeat Siren (”If you can hear this, you’re already dead”) might not have sold so well!¹

1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still.

In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action¹ of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

This sort of map is quite common these days, particularly in highlighting the danger from rogue states. For example, here’s one centred on North Korea, from a website criticising Clinton’s foreign policy:

The circles here are not the radii of action of bombers, of course, but the ranges of missiles.² But the principle is the same. There’s a subtle difference, though: the Japanese one projects a defensive outlook: it shows the circles encroaching on Japanese territory and so emphasizes how vulnerable Japan is. The North Korean map, on the other, does not highlight the threat to any particular country, but instead demonstrates how North Korean missiles threaten all of its neighbours — that is to say, just how rogueish a state it is.

Here’s another missile-era map, this time quite an historic one from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (looks like it was drawn up by the CIA). This is more like the Japanese map: though the threat is from Cuba, the centre of the map is shifted towards the United States, to show just how much of the country would fall under the shadow of Soviet missiles (but by the same token, de-emphasising the threat to South America).

I haven’t come across many other pre-Second World War examples, though I’m sure they exist. The only other one I currently know of is British, and is very early, dating from 1913:

This time it’s not bombers or missiles that are the threat, but Zeppelins. (Love that OTT title!) The map is centred on Heligoland, which another map in the same magazine claimed was the site of an airship station. The caption says that the outer circle (600 miles) represents the radius for Zeppelins; the 300 mile circle is for aeroplanes. It ’should bring home to every patriot the vital necessity of Britain putting her house in order forthwith, by the grant of adequate provision in the nation’s Estimates to enable us to make up the heavy leeway from which this country already suffers’. Indeed it should; those circles are very dark, aren’t they? Though that might just be the poor quality of my photocopy …

Image sources: National Archives of Japan; Clinton Foreign Policy Page; John F. Kennedy Library; Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

1. No more than half the maximum range of an aircraft, assuming they return to the base from which they took off.
2. As missiles don’t return to base, their radius of action is equal to their range.

Twenty years ago this week, Sting’s song “Russians” entered the US top 40:

In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets
Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too
How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
There is no historical precedent
To put the words in the mouth of the President
There’s no such thing as a winnable war
It’s a lie that we don’t believe anymore
Mr. Reagan says we will protect you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us me and you
Is that the Russians love their children too

Although I didn’t really encounter it until a year or two later, this song expressed a lot of my fears (and hopes) about nuclear war and the end of the world (which as you may have noticed, hasn’t happened. Yet.) Despite the peacenik overtones, though, it’s essentially an affirmation of mutually-assured destruction: our being able to kill their children is the best way to make sure they don’t kill us.

Did anyone ever write a “Germans”? Was light entertainment used to comment on the shadow of the bomber in the same way that Sting, and many others, later used it to comment on the shadow of the Bomb? Did popular music express popular fears? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find topical references to gas masks and searchlights in songs of the later 1930s, for example, but I don’t know that popular singers and songwriters took themselves seriously enough, back then, to try to comment meaningfully on such weighty topics as the next war and what it’s going to do everyone listening to their songs. But then, I don’t know much about popular music in my period — something else to add to the list of things to read up on!

On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though …

Best quotes a 1953 speech by Churchill in the House of Commons, describing it as ’startlingly original’ (p. 39):

These fearful scientific discoveries cast their shadow on every thoughtful mind, but nevertheless I believe that we are justified in feeling that there has been a diminution of tension and that the probabilities of another world war have diminished, or at least become more remote … Indeed, I have sometimes the odd thought that the annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind.

In other words, Churchill was an early proponent of MAD (mutually assured destruction). But there is nothing new under the Sun: compare Churchill’s words with (for example) those of airpower pundit J.M. Spaight in 1938,¹ that the bigger that air forces became, the better, for then

the nations may fear to unleash the monsters they have bred. That would be the greatest, the most welcome contribution that air power could make to the next war - that the next war never in fact comes.

It’s exactly the same idea, that war was now so terrible that another one would destroy civilisation, and so paradoxically arming to the teeth actually makes the world safer, because no world leader could be that stupid. Of course, this didn’t turn out to be the case in the 1930s, partly because bombing wasn’t nearly as devastating as had been feared, but also because it wasn’t actually tried. No country in 1939 had a bomber force large enough to deter other countries from going to war with it.

Anyway, to get back to Best’s article, I don’t think the quoted speech was particularly original of Churchill; he must have been exposed to similar arguments before 1939. But I’m sure that it’s because the article was written for a popular audience, that it wasn’t hedged about with enough caveats to suit a pedant like me - after all, Best was writing books before I was born! And he has a new one out too, Churchill and War, which looks to be required reading.

1. J.M. Spaight, Air Power in the Next War (1938), 175; quoted in Malcolm Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 49.

Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay - more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the 1980s. Anyway, from time to time I may post items on the subject. Here’s one: a map of the continental US showing the probable radiation exposure from a full-scale Soviet nuclear strike.¹ It’s based on data compiled in 1986 by FEMA, and it would hardly have been comforting for policymakers - the ‘low risk’ areas in yellow represent an estimated exposure in a week of up to 3000 roentgens for unprotected persons, which would still kill many people and leave many more very sick. It looks like it was assumed that the Soviets were following a counterforce strategy - most of the heavily populated regions seem relatively unscathed (though you can say goodbye to Hollywood), and the main targets would seem to be in Montana and the Midwest, where most of the ICBM silos were.

1980s pop cultural landmarks of note: Lawrence, Kansas, was definitely in danger, in the high risk zone sandwiched between two very high risk zones. Goose Island, Oregon, doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t look like it could have been ‘just three miles from a primary target’ as the prof claimed. Calumet, Colorado, also doesn’t exist, but would have been at low risk - go Wolverines! And Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, unsurprisingly appears to be in a high risk zone, but they wouldn’t have been too worried about that, would they.

1. Jonas Siegel, “The original nuclear nightmare”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2005, 38-9.