WHAT THE ATOM BOMB WOULD DO TO US

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP64-00658A000100310002-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 17, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 11, 1999
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: May 1, 1946
• Content Type: NSPR

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Reader~lligest
Many experts, scientific, medical
and military, surveyed the damage
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among
them were 114 technicians of the
U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey,
who questioned, measured and took
photographs bn the spot for periods
up to two months. As a result of
their elaborate studies, they can
judge pretty accurately what such a
bomb would do to cities elsewhere
in the world. Unanimously, and
An article a day of enduring significance, in condensed permanent booklet form
0 0 0
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What the Atom Bomb
By
Robert Littell
Would Do to US
V HAT would have happened if one
of the atomic bombs we dropped
on Japan had been used on New
York? Specifically, on the Empire
State Building?
I asked this question of Major
General Thomas F. Farrell, who was
second-in-command to Major Gen-
eral Leslie R. Groves on the atomic-
bomb project and officially inspected
the catastrophic damage done to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"If fused correctly,"
General Farrell said,
"one of those bombs
could blow the Em-
pire State Building to
hell. There might be
a sort of stump left
for a few floors above
the ground, but it
would be completely
unlivable. And it's al-
so quite possible, if
actly where one wanted it to, that it
would push the whole upper part
of the Empire State Building right
over." Not even one of our largest
preatomic bombs could have done
anything remotely comparable.
often violently, the
experts take issue with
Major de Seversky's
estimate* that, if
dropped on New York
or Chicago, one of
these bombs would
have done no more
damage, and killed no
more people, than a
ten-ton blockbuster.
And they believe
11 117 that Major de Sever-
sky's article dangerously minimized
the menace of atomic bombing and
tended to lull people into a false
sense of security at a critical time.
*See "Atomic Bomb Hysteria," The
Reader's Digest, February, '46.
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"
Over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
the bombs were purposely exploded
rather high in the air, in order to
subject as wide an area as possible
to the crushing waves of pressure
from the blast. The center of the
explosion was perhaps 2ooo feet up
the exact height is secret. Even at
that distance from the explosion,
some reinforced concrete buildings
were totally destroyed, among them
a prison with eight-inch walls. Other
concrete buildings a little farther
away had their upper stories bashed
in. Multistory brick buildings were
flattened out up to a mile; one-story
brick buildings up to a mile and a
half. At Nagasaki, factory chimneys
were displaced, cracked or over-
turned up to 4000 feet. Some bar-
racks collapsed at four and a half
miles. At seven miles, ten percent of
the glass was broken. Some glass
was broken up to 12 miles.
When we raise our eyes to the
proud towers of American city sky
lines, it is easy to believe that they
are far less vulnerable than the flimsy
cities of the Japanese. It is easy to
forget that nine tenths or more of
even our greatest cities are composed
of low brick, masonry or wooden
buildings not much stronger than
those which crumbled at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
General Farrell, now back at his
former job as Chief Engineer of the
New York State Department of
Public Works, has been a construc-
tion man for most of his distin-
guished career. When I asked him
to enlarge upon what would happen
If a single
in New York, he replied:
atomic bomb were detonated at the
right height above a typical New
York City area, I believe that the
radius of severe blast damage alone
would be a mile or more." That
means over three square miles of
dwellings crushed or made unlivable
for whatever inhabitants survived.
But wouldn't our great office build-
ings withstand the blast? With Dr.
Philip Morrison, a physicist on the
staff of the laboratory at Los Alamos,
New Mexico, where the bomb was
assembled, I sat gazing out on the
canyon of a midtown New York
street. "American skyscrapers," he
said, "look stronger than they are.
They are made of panel upon panel
of brick and stone facing, each panel
resting within a frame of steel. If an
atomic bomb, Nagasaki model, went
off in the air nearby, these buildings
would shed their panels of facing as
a tree sheds its leaves, killing or
wounding the people inside, block-
ing the streets with rubble. And if
the bomb went off near enough the
ground, the bricks and ,stone would
become artillery."
General Groves, in hearings be-
fore Senator Brien McMahon's Spe-
cial Committee on Atomic Energy,
was asked what the bomb would do
to Washington. "If dropped in the
center of the Pentagon," he an-
swered, "there wouldn't be any Pen-
tagon left." And General Groves
ought to know, for he supervised the
Pentagon's construction. "If dropped
in what would probably be the goal
of any enemy," he went on, "so that
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would destroy an area maybe two
the offices of the Government, it
miles in diameter." In other words,
damage and kill enough people to
make the Government of the United
it would probably cause enough
States put up a sign, "Closed for
Re airs."
"wildly exaggerated.' I-Ie was shocked
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been
effects of the bombs dropped on
taken place, and asserted that the
In his Digest article, Major de
Seversky refused to believe that a
revolution in military science had
by the contrast between what he
set by the direct heat of the bomb.
and secondary fires at that, not fires
ties were caused by "fire, just fire" -
ally intact"; the damage and casual-
concrete buildings were "structur-
could not have been "unusual," for
twinkling of an eye." The blast
matter had been "vaporized in the
There was no "bald spot" where
accounts had led him to expect.
saw and what "hysterical" unofficial
explode, at such a height as to flatten
bomb was fused to explode, and did
the result intended. The Hiroshima
found so disappointing was precisely
tion. The result Major de Seversky
the. target and of Japanese construe-
bomb was dropped after long calcu-
lations based on detailed studies of
reply, "So what? Fire may be no
novelty, but it did the job. The
To this last complaint the experts
the maximum number of Japanese
By exploding the bomb near the
ground, such weird a ects as vapori-
zation could have been produced,
more concrete buildings could have
been smashed, a small area could
have been burned to a crisp by direct
heat from the bomb. But that would
have been wasteful, pointless. We
were not out to create `bald spots'
and other tonsorial effects on the
Japanese landscape. We were out to
end a war. And we did. With two
bombs. If that won't impress Major
de Seversky, then he's the kind of
man who will find fault with dooms-
day."
Major de Seversky, the experts
believe, viewed all too casually devas-
tation which had caused an empire
to surrender. They point out that
apparently he did not see the long
concrete school building, 2400 feet
from zero point, with half of its two
upper stories crushed in by the blast.
Nor another building, down the con-
crete walls of which diagonal zigzag
cracks show how the whole structure
suffered a gigantic push. He does
not mention the 21 concrete build-
ings close to the blast at Nagasaki,
four of which were destroyed, ten
of which were structurally damaged.
His findings omit the fact that many
Japanese buildings are more strongly
built than any similar buildings in
the United States, in order to with-
stand frequent earthquakes. He saw
flag poles, air-raid sirens and other
frail objects undamaged by blast or
heat, but he did not seethe 20 flag
poles that were bent, or the paint,
glazed by heat from the bomb's flash,
on a gas tank 6500 feet from zero,
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or the scorched vegetation on hills
7000 feet from zero.
Major de Seversky's opinion that
if dropped on a large American city
one of these bombs "would have
done no more damage than a ten-ton
blockbuster" seems to the experts
grotesque on the face of it. Such a
than five tons of TNT, while the
atomic bomb released energies equal
to the forces loosed by the explosion
of 20,000 tons of TNT.
I looked at the photograph of that
ponderous Nagasaki school with
in at 2400 feet, and asked General
"A blockbuster," he said, "is by
definition a bomb that can `bust' a
whole city block. That's four acres.
Let's be generous and assume that
in a typical low-building area and
`busted' or severely damaged 16
acres. That's one 4oth of a square
mile. If detonated on the ground
among the same kind of buildings,
an atomic bomb - speaking conserv-
atively-would do at least 8o times
as much damage as a blockbuster;
if exploded at the proper height in
the air, at least 120 times as much."
Dr. Morrison thought the atomic
bomb would do at least i oo times, per-
haps 300 or a thousand times, as much
Bowman, a civil engineer on the staff
of the USSBS, put the atomic bomb
at 100 to 200 times more effective
flimsy Hiroshima. aaul . i ze,
vice chairman of the USSBS, con-
sidered Major de Seversky's' state-
ment "completely out of the realm
of any reasonable relationship."
In contrast with the thousands of
man-hours of investigation and cal-
culation by the 114 USSBS experts
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Major
de Seversky admits that he made no
calculations, and was in each city
two days, "not time enough, of
course," as he told the Senate Com-
mittee, for "a detailed study."
Major de Seversky's article urged
us to make our decisions "without
doing violence to ascertainable facts."
The experts reply that Major de
Seversky is himself guilty of doing
violence to the facts, and that mis-
information on the subject of the
atomic bomb is peculiarly dangerous.
For if the Hiroshima bomb would
- as he said - do an American city
no more harm than a blockbuster,
we can afford to shrink our fears
down from their nightmare size, and
crawl back under the eiderdown of
fatuous. complacency, and be less
determined to fashion a world in
which this fearful weapon will be
controlled by global law.
"There are men living who know
how to make a single bomb as destruc-
tive as a million ten-ton blockbusters.
One such bomb, dropped on Washing-
ton or any other major city, may be
expected to destroy its buildings utterly
and wipe out its population."-Dr. Ed-
ward U. Condon, consultant on the
bomb project and Director of the Na-
tional Bureau of Standards.
Printed In U.S.A.
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