The bomb, Hiroshima, Berlin and San Francisco

Here are some links to other recent San Francisco Chronicle article on the atomic bomb:

HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Thank God for the atom bomb -- or not? / Historical reasons for, against use by William Burke San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/05.  Burke's article gives the historical background of the war with Japan, and concludes:

Among other achievements, the American occupiers imposed a major land- reform program, which brought prosperity to the Japanese peasantry and thereby made it possible for conservative politicians to gain a one-party stranglehold over the national government. The American occupiers also wrote, in a week's time, a new Japanese constitution, which is now one of the world's oldest (and most popular). It contains a prohibition against most military activities.

The American occupiers set Japan firmly on the road to postwar prosperity. In 1949, they sent a Detroit banker to administer a dose of root-canal economics, and the following year, with the onset of the Korean War, they flooded Japan with military contracts (Japan's "Marshall Plan"). The rest is (economic) history. With its export orientation, Japan has delighted generations of American consumers but brought despair to generations of American manufacturers -- and in the process has accumulated hundreds of billions of American IOUs.

But all this could have been accomplished without the firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Victory, and Japan's post-war success, didn't require our compatriots 60 years ago to transform tens of thousands of families on Tokyo's streets into blazing torches.

 HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Nazi nuke program spurred U.S. A-bomb development by Cynthia Bass San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/05.  As the title implies, this piece is about the German atomic program and what the Americans thought of the threat it represented.

Thus did the fateful combination of respect for German physics and distrust ofGerman physicists drive Albert Einstein and his compatriots, just as war erupted, to write a letter of warning to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That led to the creation of the Manhattan Project. the top-secret Allied effort to build the atomic bomb before what the refugees feared most of all could happen: that Hitler would build it first.

For three years, [Werner] Heisenberg and his Uranium Club made sporadic progress toward a self-sustained chain reaction designed to breed plutonium for an atomic bomb. But in June 1942, Albert Speer, Minister of Armament and War Production, asked Heisenberg pointedly whether this newfangled weapon, which was costing the Reich a lot of money, was going to be ready anytime soon. In typical fashion, Heisenberg dithered and said probably not -- but could he please keep getting the money anyway, just in case?

From then on, the Uranium Club was engaged in research only. It never produced a reactor, let alone an atomic bomb.

But with no Allied spies inside the German bomb projects, neither the émigré physicists nor the governments that had taken them in knew how poorly the Nazi A-bomb project was doing. They acted on what they did know (or thought they knew): The brilliance of German physics, combined with the already well-demonstrated compliance of German physicists, equaled an excellent chance for a German nuclear arsenal.

And here is a grim reconstruction of what a Hiroshima-strength bomb would do to San Francisco today: HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / Dropping the bomb on S.F. / What-if scenario tells a tale of mass devastation, loss... by John Else San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/05.

Within the first second, a massive pulse of neutrons and gamma radiation would instantly kill every living thing in the open within a radius of a quarter of a mile, and severely burn every exposed person within half a mile. The flash would be visible from another planet, and anyone unlucky enough to be looking directly at the fireball from as far as 20 miles away would suffer permanent retinal burns. The blast would destroy or badly damage every building within a mile wide circle around ground zero -- at least 100 square blocks -- within a short time.

As the blast wave front hammered its way through cars, people, buildings -- even the largest reinforced steel structures -- much of its force would channel blizzards of debris down "urban canyons," at hundreds of miles per hour. After blasting though block after block, the shock wave, chaotically amplified and dampened by San Francisco's hills, would finally begin to exhaust itself only about five seconds after detonation, battering houses a mile and a half out, and finally blowing out all the windows three miles in every direction. By then the initial pulse of heat would have ignited everything flammable within the mile wide circle of devastation, and the conflagration would begin. How long and how far the fires would rage is unknown.

The churning cinders, dust, and vapor of what was once a square mile of San Francisco and its population would rise 20,000 feet into the air, only to begin blowing eastward and drifting down as lethal radioactive fallout within 10 minutes. At least 20,000 people would already be dead, another 20,000 would die within the day, and 150,000 more would die within six months from their injuries and from the incurable effects of radiation sickness.