Nuclear, biological, chemical

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There's an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: "On the right wavelength" by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting respectable (not unlike how the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War made CNN's fortune). Before that it seems that in America, radio news was not taken very seriously; but CBS's virtually round-the-clock live reporting of the events in Europe was listened to by millions, and for the first time radio became the preferred news source for most people.

Then in a throwaway line, almost, Culbert links this to the famous Orson Welles broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which took place at the end of the following month. This was done as a mock live newscast, reporting the news of the Martian invasion of New Jersey, and "Some listeners, presumably those who tuned in late, apparently ran from their homes in complete terror. It was felt by many that such fears were related to residual concerns about radio's round the clock coverage of the Munich story". (It should be noted that many accounts exaggerate the degree of panic that occurred -- it's not like millions or even thousands of people headed for the hills. That some people did panic, however, is undeniable.)

This suddenly made the usual explanations for the panic that I've read a lot more sensible. It has often been suggested, for example, that the people scared by the broadcast didn't actually think that the Martians were invading, but rather that the Germans were, and the Mars thing was a mistake or a subterfuge. As one of the listeners reported:

The announcer said a meteor had fallen from Mars and I was sure he thought that, but in the back of my head I had the idea that the meteor was just a camouflage. It was really an airplane like a Zeppelin that looked like a meteor and the Germans were attacking us with gas bombs.Quoted in Robert E. Bartholomew and Hilary Evans, Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 54-5. Italics in original.

But I could never understand quite why Americans would have such an intense fear of Germany -- it's not like the situation in Edwardian Britain, where the German threat was an order of magnitude more plausible at least (though still exaggerated), and was intensively rehearsed in the media for a decade.And leading to the phantom airship scares, a phenomenon somewhat comparable to the War of the Worlds panic. From my admittedly limited knowledge of US history, there was no comparable perceived threat to the American homeland in the late 1930s. That the Munich crisis took place only a month before the Welles broadcast does help make sense of this, to a degree. That there was massive interest in the US in following the course of the Munich crisis helps more. That radio news broadcasts were the favoured means of doing this helps even more. And that the popularity of radio news was very recent, so that more people than ever before were listening to it, trusting it as a reliable source of information, and yet were perhaps not completely familar with its conventions (indeed, those conventions were still evolving) -- that helps the most to explain how it was that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused a limited, localised but briefly intense panic about a German/Martian airborne/spaceborne assault upon New Jersey.

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Japanese ARP poster

Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as it happens my supervisor is a specialist in modern Japanese history,I should add that he had nothing to do with writing this post, so all errors are mine alone! and it seems that there are significant similarities between Britain and Japan when it comes to the fear of the bomber.

Japanese ARP poster - gas attack

As early as the 1920s, Japanese cities were holding air raid drills, and according to George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986), nobody tried harder than the Japanese to ban or limit aerial bombing by international treaty. Quester also suggests that the ongoing deployment of several hundred American B-17s to the Philippines was an important factor in Japan's decision to go to war with the United States -- to take them out before they could become a big enough force to deter Japanese actions at a later date, or indeed to attack Japan itself. (Though I don't know whether this idea is sustained by more recent scholarship -- Quester originally wrote in 1966.)

Japanese ARP poster - incendiary attack

Anyway, I was surprised that there was such a fear of the bomber in Japan, as any potential aerial enemies were much further away than they were for Britain -- so the fear seems that much more irrational. Some possible reasons might include: a similar psychological reaction to the negation of the ocean barrier which a naval power like Japan had relied upon for protection; the perception that as a relatively highly-industrialised country, it had more to lose by aerial bombing than did less-industrialised countries like China or other neighbours like the Soviet Union or the United States, whose main centres of population and industry were out of Japan's reach; or the terrible example of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which potentially foreshadowed the scale of devastation that might be suffered in an aerial knock-out blow.All of these ideas have some parallel with the British case: the first one is actually identical; the second is similar to the British conception that unlike Berlin, say, London was a uniquely vulnerable target, due to its size, importance and proximity to potential enemies; and the third is similar to the British drawing upon, and exaggerating, their experience of bombing in the First World War, particularly in 1917. In this last case the devastation in Japan was far greater, of course.

Japanese ARP poster - home-made gas masks

I can't read the writing, but this last poster is evidently about how to make your own gas-masks, and the image of (presumably) the mother leading her child enveloped in a home-made chemical protective suit is very poignant. Japan escaped the horror of gas attack, but it suffered the others depicted in these posters, and more besides.

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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!

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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,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. 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.

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

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This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War and the strain was eventually made available to the Americans, who then passed in on the Iraq in the 1980s. A major reason for the British research was the fear that Germany would develop and use biological weapons against the UK, most likely from the air. Therefore, British fears of air attack in the mid-20th century helped fuel American fears of terrorist attack in the early 21st century.

Well, it works for me!