We've Gotta Talk About the Bomb

00:00:00:02 - 00:00:26:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

If you add up all of the places it's hundreds of places across the United States are feeding materials and labor and research into the Manhattan Project. I mean, again, it's not like two facilities. It's an industry that gets created overnight and ties together in the same way, like the auto industry has. How many contractors are go into every part in your car?

00:00:26:05 - 00:00:32:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

it's the same thing, but they're doing it with something that doesn't preexisted.

00:00:32:15 - 00:00:57:17

Chris Keefer

Welcome back to the Decouple podcast. Today I'm joined by historian of science at Stevens Institute technology professor Alex Wellerstein. Professor Wellerstein studies the history of nuclear weapons. And, for those nerds who like to play around on the internet, on cool websites, he's also the creator of nuke map. Doctor Wellenstein, welcome to Decouple. It's a pleasure to have you here.

00:00:57:21 - 00:00:59:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Happy to be here.

00:00:59:05 - 00:01:19:00

Chris Keefer

All right. So, you know, I've decided that decouple were, you know, something like 240 episodes in. you know, we do talk about, well, I delude myself by saying we talk about a broad array of topics. We're pretty, pretty nuclear energy focused here. we have not done an episode on the bomb yet. we did cover with, a scientist named James.

00:01:19:00 - 00:01:43:03

Chris Keefer

Conquer the history of the megatons to megawatts, program. you know, arguably one of the greatest, swords to plowshares activities. but, you know, we've not unpacked that. And that maybe betrays, you know, phenomenon within, the nuclear advocacy community, of sort of putting up a psychological blocker between, the sword and plowshares aspect of the technology.

00:01:43:03 - 00:02:06:13

Chris Keefer

So, this is late in coming. but, Dylan Moon, who's a former student of yours and a close collaborative mine, said, you know, you've got to get Professor Wallerstein on to, to chat about this. so maybe by by way of introduction, could you take a second to, explain yourself, doctor Wallerstein? Explain how, every, every, you know, academic becomes obsessed with a certain field.

00:02:06:15 - 00:02:16:20

Chris Keefer

what what drew your attention to nuclear weapons? you know, to this area, because, it's it's it's fascinating area, but, I'm curious.

00:02:16:22 - 00:02:34:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

so I came at this from the position of history of science, which is primarily, you can think of it as, as studying the history of how people know things and what people do with that knowledge. And so I had a lot of interest, not just nuclear weapons, but but all sorts of stuff. I used to do a lot of history, biology.

00:02:34:21 - 00:03:08:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I did a lot of history of physics. And when I started working on, I had some reasons that I took some classes and had some advisors, even when I was an undergraduate, touched on nuclear weapons topics. The thing that I thought was really interesting about nuclear weapons was that so much of it is, is done in secret, that there's so much classification that from the beginning, the scientists themselves were trying to, enact certain amounts of secrecy and then also pushing back on the secrecy that these are taking place.

00:03:08:18 - 00:03:31:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

a lot of this is taking place in, democracy, where secrecy and is somewhat antithetical to good governance. and what was interesting to me initially is that nuclear weapons are sort of if if the normal course of science is about spreading knowledge. a secrecy regime is a secret. Science is the sort of antithesis, the antithesis of that.

00:03:31:17 - 00:03:50:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

You're trying to only spread it so far. And then how do you control it? Spread, elsewhere. So that's sort of what initially got me interested in it. But it's also one of these topics where one of the nice things about being a historian, especially a historian of science, I could study all sorts of stuff. I could turn around and study medieval stuff tomorrow if I wanted to.

00:03:50:19 - 00:04:11:09

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

but I just have never gotten bored with nuclear weapons. There's continuously more stuff to find and to learn, and the stakes are really high. And so maybe someday it'll bore me and I'll work on something else. But, it hasn't so far. It's been a long time, and and I'm just always finding more interesting things the more I look.

00:04:11:09 - 00:04:30:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So, But I don't have some people. When they ask me why I study it, they expect me to say, like, I grew up inside of an atomic bomb or something like this, and I didn't. There's no, there's no, like, deep personal connection in that way. It's mostly intellectual. And yet over time, I've gotten more, you know, I've more political opinions about it.

00:04:30:10 - 00:04:32:18

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like, these things have come out of the intellectual interest.

00:04:32:22 - 00:04:50:03

Chris Keefer

Can I ask how old you are? Just just purely because of getting a sense of, you know, when did the, how old were you when the Berlin Wall came down? And, you know, my my dad did duck and cover drills, during the Cuban missile crisis. It's interesting how, you know, your age impacts, your perception of of, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, for instance.

00:04:50:03 - 00:05:05:18

Chris Keefer

So, I usually don't ask my guest this question, but, yeah, I'm just curious about how old you are. And, I don't know when it first started to cross your mind. yeah. The idea of of nuclear weapons, we'll get into fears of nuclear apocalypse and how that maybe forecasts, fears of climate change and other apocalyptic threats.

00:05:05:18 - 00:05:08:05

Chris Keefer

But, yeah, just how old are you, Doctor Wilson?

00:05:08:07 - 00:05:31:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Yeah. I'm, we'll just say early 40s. I'm. I'm an old millennial. So I was born in the early 80s, and, I'm one of that sort of micro generation of millennials who sort of lived out a bunch of their childhood without the internet. And then got to experience the internet as it was sort of becoming more popular and things.

00:05:31:17 - 00:06:00:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so, have sort of a, a toe in the two worlds, the zany, the Gen-X and the millennial. but you mentioned the Berlin Wall come down. That's my first political memory and my first memory of something that's like a world scale. Politics is being told that the maps we had just we had just learned which was the good Germany and which was the bad Germany, which is confusing because the bad Germany has a very good name, you know, Democratic Republic of.

00:06:00:20 - 00:06:01:08

Chris Keefer

Right.

00:06:01:10 - 00:06:17:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Of Germany. You're like, that sounds good. And it turns out those are the bad guys. And then they came in and they said, oh, there's no two Germanys anymore. The map is wrong now. And for me this was like, what do you mean the map is wrong on the map. Wrong, right. Like, okay, how was that a possibility?

00:06:17:17 - 00:06:37:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I thought the map was the source of of truth and knowledge and I don't know, it was like a big moment for me to realize that these things can be outdated, very quickly. And I remember the, when and I remember watching on TV the, the stuff about the shelling of the Russian parliament and, and so, like, those are very formative for me.

00:06:37:22 - 00:07:00:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But I did not grow up in a state of, like, nuclear fear. I'm one of these people who grew up in these 90s, late 80s, 90s where we weren't that we thought everything had been fixed in the world, and that if we just recycled and picked up trash, we would fix all the problems. And, and then 9/11 happened and change everything and so like that.

00:07:00:13 - 00:07:19:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I think that I do see, as a historian, I try to know my own context as I study the past, because obviously I'm bringing a subjectivity to it when I imagine what's going on inside people's heads and what's going on that's not written in the documents. And what tone of voice the documents reflect and things like this. And I definitely think about that quite a lot.

00:07:19:20 - 00:07:44:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But being in that particular place has given me, a sensibility that is not the same as a lot of historians who came before me, who were much more Cold War and is also not the same as some of the ones who were younger than me, who are, I don't know, they take things like the war on terror for granted because it's always been there was for me, definitely have this period of like, not that everything was great.

00:07:44:15 - 00:08:01:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

There were all sorts of issues, but like, they were not focused on the foreign politics as the major threat. And then suddenly with nine over 11, it was like, oh no, we're vulnerable again. Oh no, oh no. Our government might be overreacting. And like, that sensibility is, is that I definitely bring that to a lot of the stuff I study and how I think about it.

00:08:01:12 - 00:08:21:10

Chris Keefer

Yeah. And I was just asking because I think there was this sort of, great, you know, breath we could all take, when, when the Berlin Wall fell and particularly when it comes to, to nuclear fear. But let's, let's jump into, the matter at hand. Now that we've gotten to know each other a little bit, established ourselves as, you know, brother, children of the early 1980s here.

00:08:21:12 - 00:08:45:14

Chris Keefer

so, yeah, let's, let's let's go back to, I guess, where this all begins in terms of, some of the early discoveries of, of fission. And I'm imagining, in terms of the earliest applications, you discover that you can unleash the strong nuclear force that's going to tend towards the idea of a bomb rather than a, you know, the idea that you could tame this force and control it and sustain it and, you know, create power with it.

00:08:45:14 - 00:08:57:10

Chris Keefer

Is am I accurate in that were the first sort of thoughts from amongst the scientists that were discovering the phenomena immediately going to the power and horror of of what this, what the strong nuclear force could be deployed for in the form of a bomb.

00:08:57:16 - 00:09:24:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It was both. And it depends on who one looks at. There were only a few who immediately saw it as a bomb. There were definitely a lot who saw it in terms of reactors and some of the earliest work was done by people who were mostly thinking in terms of reactors, even as military, and which we should point out, this is happening in 1939 as and and the world is ramping up to war.

00:09:24:00 - 00:09:43:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So definitely military implications are on people's mind. The the initial thoughts about reactors were also, oh, maybe you could power a big boat with this or something like this, right. Like which could have a military. Maybe you could generate electricity. We need electricity in war for a big factory or something, right. but it's kind of a mix.

00:09:43:14 - 00:10:27:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

You do have some people who immediately jump towards the military, the bomb stuff. One thing I find really interesting, and it's relevant to this whole story, is when I say it depends on who you're looking at. It also depends on like what's their place in the world at that moment. So the people who immediately start thinking about weapons and are afraid of them are people, usually Jewish, who fled Europe because of the Nazis and are now in the United Kingdom or the United States and are seeing this discovery coming out of Berlin, and they're the ones who start to immediately start to try to raise the alarms all over the place, because they are the

00:10:27:18 - 00:10:48:05

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

they find it utterly plausible that the Nazis could make and use this weapon. If there's a weapon to be made, they don't want them to do it, and their fear is really high. Whereas some of the American scientists who are, you know, I don't want, say, Native American born and bred American. Right. Ernest Lawrence, that type.

00:10:48:10 - 00:11:07:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They're often more skeptical that there's a military thing to worry about because they're like, we just discovered this thing on a experimental apparatus the size of a dinner table. You know, we're not going to get a weapon out of that within the next couple of years. It takes a decade for these technologies to mature, and we don't. There's so many unknowns.

00:11:07:19 - 00:11:31:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Why are you worried about this? But it's the people who are already in this state of fear because they've already had to, like, flee and lose things that are the ones who push initially. And I'll just throw in because it's it's kind of interesting spoilers. The Germans don't make a bomb. One of the reasons they don't make a bomb is they are not as afraid of an American bomb as the Americans are afraid of a German bomb.

00:11:31:22 - 00:11:56:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

There's a fear asymmetry there because the Germans are sort of confident. Yeah, yeah, we'll do great. We're fine. We're the best. They're not as afraid of Americans as Americans are afraid of Hitler. And so that's one of the reasons there's so much drive from the United States and the United Kingdom, pushed by these people who are even more afraid than the other people in the country, and convincing them they should be afraid as well.

00:11:57:00 - 00:11:57:19

Chris Keefer

I guess in the early days.

00:11:57:19 - 00:12:17:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So, like people who think about reactors, like the French are thinking about reactors, they don't realize the Germans are at their door. Right? Like they don't realize what's about to happen. Like they're like, oh, this would be very cool if we had a reactor. Like, they are not afraid enough. Basically to immediately think the bomb is going to be the first thing, it's going to come out of this.

00:12:17:05 - 00:12:29:10

Chris Keefer

And in terms of kind of wrestling with the morality of the destructive power, etc., that becomes a lot easier to do if you're a Jewish refugee worried about the Nazis getting this ultimate destructive power. So that that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, we chatted a bit.

00:12:29:11 - 00:12:53:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

This is why you get somebody like Einstein involved who is a pacifist, right? Like, this is not a guy who wanted to use the bomb. and this is not a guy who is in favor of war or making at all. He's explicitly a pacifist, but he is willing to send out a warning about German atomic interests and he's willing to do that.

00:12:53:23 - 00:13:08:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

you can't neglect the fact of he's in a position to take that stuff more seriously. Then again, even other physicists who are not yet ready to acknowledge the horror of what is about to happen into the world.

00:13:08:18 - 00:13:19:01

Chris Keefer

So you mentioned there, I think, some scientists in the US playing around with these apparatuses the size of a dinner plate and saying, hey, you know, bomb would be a long ways off the table. But yeah, dinner table. I mean, it is extraordinary.

00:13:19:01 - 00:13:19:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

That.

00:13:19:17 - 00:13:35:15

Chris Keefer

It is asserted that a bomb was actually not a long ways off. And so I do want to. Yeah. Without diving into all the depth of Manhattan Project, because I understand you're a scholar of, I do want to get a sense just of this incredible scientific and industrial mobilization that that led to these crash timelines of producing this weapon on time.

00:13:35:15 - 00:13:53:08

Chris Keefer

So, I mean, maybe we'll start with the industrial side of things. I mean, you hear rumors that a certain percentage of all U.S. electricity production went into that gas diffusion plant. And, I think Oak Ridge is. But I don't know if you can wow us with some more stats about just, you know, how ambitious this project was, how much, how much resources it consumed.

00:13:53:13 - 00:14:08:12

Chris Keefer

I guess ultimately, that's one of the reasons why the US was able to, to seal the deal. in terms of the Nazis just sort of starting to run out of, run out of resources. But yeah, it hit us with some entertaining factoids and stunning facts we haven't considered.

00:14:08:18 - 00:14:25:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Well, what I would just and during the run up to this, what I would say is you have the discovery efficient in 39 you have like the Einsteins a large letter and then you have this like not really a bomb program. This is the Uranium Committee. This is this is what I would just call a straight research program.

00:14:25:20 - 00:14:40:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like the output is going to be a report. It's not going to be a bomb. Right. It's tiny. It's not well-funded. It's not well run. It's like a baby. Could you make a bomb program which is not the same thing in, the launches?

00:14:40:22 - 00:14:42:02

Chris Keefer

When when does that launch?

00:14:42:07 - 00:15:06:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

39, 39 into 39, like October 39th? And that doesn't really do much. I mean, they do a few little things, but it really doesn't get that far because there's no drive behind it. The British have their own version of this in the UK, and they come to the conclusion that you, you could make a bomb with very little fissile material if you purified it.

00:15:06:09 - 00:15:27:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And even the fact that like, that's obvious to us today, that's how we talk about it. But they didn't really have that squared up until that moment. They weren't sure if a bomb was going to have enriched uranium, or if it was just going to be basically a big reactor. they had ideas about it like it's a bomb, something different than a exploding nuclear reactor.

00:15:27:07 - 00:15:46:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

and they were confused about this at all levels of the American program. The British are the ones who said, no, no, no, they're totally different. If you enrich uranium, you could make a bomb with they they they lowball it. But a few pounds of material and to enrich uranium, we could probably do it with a few of these methods if you scale them up to industrial scales.

00:15:46:22 - 00:16:08:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And the United States and the Germans could probably do this. And so that report gets sent to the United States. It's promptly lost in a filing cabinet because it's very again, the American program was very poorly run. The British hear nothing back. They send an emissary, Mark Oliphant, to the United States to find out what's going on. He ends up meeting with the people who are doing defense research.

00:16:08:12 - 00:16:33:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Geneva, Bush, Ernest Lawrence. They have no idea what he's talking about. He tells them what he's talking about. They take the program away from the people who had it and immediately start a pilot program to find out and confirm. Is this true? They confirm that like, yeah, it seems plausible. The math checks out more or less. And also we could, at small scales, probably make a reactor.

00:16:33:15 - 00:16:53:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

We could probably do some enrichment. And then they go to Roosevelt by by 42 and say, we think we could actually make a bomb if we put this in charge of the if the Army in charge of the industrial side of this and Roosevelt says, okay, FDR literally writes that and it's done. And so that's the Manhattan Project.

00:16:53:11 - 00:17:11:04

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And I just point that out because, one, there's a lot of slippage, like the Germans had a nuclear program. They did, but it was mostly in those like first two stages. They never got to a production. They never okayed. Let's do a thing. So their stuff is literally a thousand times smaller on every scale than the American stuff.

00:17:11:06 - 00:17:40:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The Manhattan Project is such. That's the crash program. And in some ways that's even more amazing because they go from mid 42 to mid 45, and what they are doing is building an entire nuclear industry and they're building a full fuel cycle, having never done it before. And, you know, essentially two and a half years. And that's that's still the world's fastest nuclear program.

00:17:40:08 - 00:18:02:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I mean, out of even though they didn't know what they were doing, they didn't take shortcuts at all. They did redundancy. So what they were doing, they didn't know whether enrichment or plutonium were going to be the best shot. So they were said, let's do both. They did things like they were pretty sure they were going to use graphite as the moderator, but they built three heavy water production plants just in case they needed it.

00:18:02:13 - 00:18:27:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Right. Like that's the extra step they took in terms of wowing you with numbers. there's one number that's really interestingly consistent among a lot of statistics, including the electricity one, which is about 1%. So they used about 1% of all American electricity for the Manhattan Project. You'll see sometimes bigger numbers out there for K-25 or whatever.

00:18:27:19 - 00:18:46:09

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they're either confused or they're referring to something more specific. It's the camera. Cameron Reid is a physicist and historian, is like, done the math on this and figured out it's about 1%, which I think makes sense. The total cost in terms of the war was about 1% of the total war budget, which again, 1% is not the biggest percentage.

00:18:46:09 - 00:19:13:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But for the entire World War two, 1% of that is going towards the Manhattan Project. in terms of, patent applications filled out, it's 1% of all patent applications during those years are related to the Manhattan Project, which that's just a phenomenal amount. That's a whole industry, right? That's, that's that is literally an industrial sized, scale.

00:19:13:18 - 00:19:36:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And then in terms of how many people worked on it, this is one of my favorite statistics. So at its peak, in 1944, they had 125,000 people working on it. But if you actually look at how many people were at one time working on it and then like, left the project and then got replaced with 125,000 is going up each each month to that point.

00:19:36:17 - 00:19:56:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But they're also losing huge numbers each month, in part because the working conditions were really bad. And so some of these big places like Oak Ridge and Hanford, they could have as many a 20% loss every month that they're replacing when they're then adding more people on. So the total number of people is more like 500,000 to maybe 600,000 who worked on this.

00:19:56:22 - 00:20:17:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So that's 1% of the U.S. civilian labor force at that time. So if you were old enough to work and not drafted in the war, there's a one out of 100 chance you worked on the atomic bomb and probably didn't know it. And I think that's kind of an amazing so but that 1% mostly goes through though at times.

00:20:17:13 - 00:20:36:01

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

At one point in 1944, the United the Manhattan Project was using 50% of all the steel that was, allocated to the Army. I mean, like, that's and this raised eyebrows. People said, why are we doing this? What is this project? We could be use for a lot of other things and like, no, we need the steel.

00:20:36:03 - 00:21:03:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Yeah, yeah. So but but that's the way I would think about it. It's not a science project. There's science involved, but it's an industrial project. And what's amazing about it is there creating a significant large industry from scratch with almost no in-between stages. So they go from Fermi's first reactor, which is put together by hand in the squash courts.

00:21:03:12 - 00:21:27:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The University of Chicago, two industrial sized reactors at Hanford in almost one step. They have one little diversion. They also make the X-10 reactor. But like, they're going from the pilot scale to the industrial scale without much in between and trying to do that without knowing a lot. So they just have to sort of guess on some of the numbers.

00:21:27:14 - 00:21:52:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And Groves, like with the reactors at Hanford, famously made them a little bigger than the scientists thought he needed to because he just wasn't sure they were right about all these numbers. And it turned out if he hadn't done that, they wouldn't have worked correctly because there were effects they hadn't considered. And like, there's stuff like that, but they have sort of the limiting factor they have is time, not money, not personnel, really not resources in the end.

00:21:52:10 - 00:22:01:23

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So what they do is they just spend all the money, get all the resources they possibly can get so that they can fit everything within this very small amount of time.

00:22:01:23 - 00:22:09:22

Chris Keefer

I mean, it sounds like there's only one country in the world at this point that that could have pulled this off, that wasn't, you know, under threat of bombardment or partially occupied or anything like that.

00:22:10:00 - 00:22:10:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I agree, it.

00:22:10:14 - 00:22:31:07

Chris Keefer

Just just that stat on 50% of, U.S. Army steel production. Like, I want to get a sense of what infrastructure was being built. You mentioned there's heavy water facilities that were built. There were Hanford piles, which I guess a bunch of, you know, graphite. And, I'm not sure if that was more for the plutonium side. I understand the, the gas diffusion building was the largest building in the world at that time.

00:22:31:09 - 00:22:44:18

Chris Keefer

just just from, you know, 30,000ft perspective, like what needed to be constructed in terms of physical infrastructure that was consuming, again, 1% doesn't sound like a big number, but when you consider the whole U.S. in a ramped up wartime effort, it's pretty big.

00:22:45:00 - 00:23:15:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The biggest facilities are Hanford and Oak Ridge. Hanford has three industrial sized nuclear reactors, graphite, nuclear reactors. it also has and these are even bigger than the reactors. The chemical processing facilities to extract the plutonium from the, exposed fuel that they are using the reactors for. These are gigantic. They called them Queen Mary's because those are the approximate same dimensions of really a cruise ship.

00:23:15:09 - 00:23:36:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

and. Yeah. Yeah. And they are huge. They're they're fascinating. Like, they're they're a big, nasty chemical, you know, process that gets worked out by Glenn Seaborg and his people. and it's not super efficient, but it works. It's uses really caustic acids. And who knows what all sorts of things. a lot of it has to be automated.

00:23:36:21 - 00:23:57:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so they're pioneering a lot of automation technology for how to use that, because they're taking out very fresh spent fuel and trying to just strip it of the very small amount of plutonium. So their efficiency just because figure you find this find it's interesting for every ton of uranium they put into a reactor, they got 225g.

00:23:57:17 - 00:23:58:07

Chris Keefer

Wow.

00:23:58:07 - 00:24:08:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Wow. So it's not super high efficiency. Yeah. And they could process I think it's 30 tons a month. And so that gets you, you know, and are.

00:24:08:08 - 00:24:18:05

Chris Keefer

They starting with natural uranium? And then the challenger is extracting the plutonium versus in the uranium bomb production. It's it's enriching up to 90%. Okay. So Hanford is the plutonium side.

00:24:18:07 - 00:24:43:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They're using totally on enriched and and by the way, to even get that, they have to figure out how do you make uranium metal at scale, which had never been done before. So they have factories elsewhere. Now, this is a lot of this is handled by existing industry. They're not building it for the Army, Mallinckrodt, Linde Chemicals etc. but they figure out what we get a bunch of uranium in and we turn into uranium oxide.

00:24:43:11 - 00:25:03:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they have all these uranium sources coming in all over, and they have this whole flowchart of how do we end up with uranium metal that can go into a reactor and won't have impurities in it, like boron that is going to screw it up like they don't have a uranium industry. I recently was looking this up because I was trying to edit the Wikipedia page on the Manhattan Project, and there's some jerk who keeps removing all of my edits.

00:25:03:15 - 00:25:32:04

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's really annoying, but like the total annual uranium requirement or like usage in the United States before the Manhattan Project was about 100 tons of uranium, and it was mostly for like glazes to like make Fiesta wear and things like that. And so what the Manhattan Project acquired over the course of it was about 10,000 tons, and their initial goal was something like 4000 tons of uranium.

00:25:32:04 - 00:25:53:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like they already went in and just said, we need just like several orders of magnitude of what the what the total production of this is. it's that's kind of an amazing aspect by itself. So I just want to point out every one of these things, even producing the graphite, like there aren't existing facilities to just make really pure no boron graphite.

00:25:54:00 - 00:26:14:04

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so they have to work with chemical engineers and often existing companies like DuPont to, like, manufacture the every little piece of this and create a sort of sub industry that leads you to eventually having something like Hanford. So that's Hanford, which was, I don't know, I think it's about 40% of the cost and construction labor. Oak Ridge is about 60%.

00:26:14:04 - 00:26:37:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

That's for enriching uranium. What they build at Oak Ridge mainly is, they build a, a somewhat useful research reactor, X-10, which is sort of before Hanford is up and running. They they get X-10 so they can do some experiments again. graphite I believe they build, several methods of enriching uranium, thermal diffusion plant, which is not that big.

00:26:37:17 - 00:26:54:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

the gaseous diffusion plant, which is that's the one where it's the largest building under this factor in the same roof in the entire world. And even then, through the project, they authorize an expansion of it. So they build K 25, and then they realized maybe we need some more. So they built k 27, which is like an add on to K-25.

00:26:54:21 - 00:27:15:23

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

they build Y-12, which is the electromagnetic. They build two sets there. They have the alpha racetracks and the beta racetracks. Different ways of doing this. They initially build all of these with the idea that, well, one of these will pan out better than the other. And it turns out they all have initial problems. And so they figure out that what they can do is chain them together.

00:27:15:23 - 00:27:34:01

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So they use thermal diffusion to get you from natural to, I don't know, like point one or something like that, something very low, but still like it's some of the work. Then you put it through K-25 and you can get it up to, I don't have a number from like 70% or something. And then you put it through Y-12 and you can get it up to 80 to 90% or something like this.

00:27:34:01 - 00:27:58:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so they end up chaining these together, and that becomes that's 60% of the project, 60% of the labor, 60% of costs. It's a huge facility. Tens of thousands of people are living in this rural Tennessee area. and again, they're going from very small research to, yeah, I guess this diffusion auto work to industrial scale, which leads to some funny moments at one.

00:27:58:17 - 00:28:19:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So so they're using uranium hexafluoride, which, by the way, they do a whole research program on on hydrocarbons and fluoride. They don't have experience with a lot of these chemicals at this scale. Right. So they have a whole they're funding all this research into like how does uranium hexafluoride even work chemically. And so they do all this and they can, you know, it's super caustic.

00:28:19:06 - 00:28:37:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It'll eat through stuff and they know that nickel is something it won't eat through. And so they say, okay, we'll make all the pipes out of nickel. And then somebody actually does the math and they're like, that's way more than the world nickel supply. Like we cannot make hundreds of miles of nickel in the pipes. And so somebody has that, well, what if we just played it the pipes?

00:28:37:22 - 00:28:59:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Okay. That makes a lot more sense than a little thin layer. They famously this is one of the things at Y-12. They need electromagnetic uses. These gigantic magnets are things that can conduct, magnetic and electricity and things like that. and they initially want to use copper, but that's so much copper. It's going to put a drain on the war program because copper is used in shells and bullets and things like this.

00:28:59:06 - 00:29:18:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So they go to the Treasury and they borrow the amount of silver they need because on loan. And they said, well, give it back. But silver is conductive as well. And so they just like basically take out these tons of silver. And there's this funny exchange where the guy who sent to do this is talking to the chairman of the Treasury or whatever.

00:29:18:14 - 00:29:42:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And he they say, well, how much silver do you need to borrow? And he, he I don't remember what the number. It's some tons, you know, tons. And then he says, my man, we refer to we measure our silver and Troy ounces. Right. Like it's just they don't. And finally, just as an aside, the silver program is fascinating because they are, the security is really high around the silver, maybe even more than around the uranium, because you're one they're not making that much uranium.

00:29:42:08 - 00:30:06:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And then two, nobody at Oak Ridge really knows how valuable enriched uranium is, but they all know how valuable silver is. And so the theft problem is really high. And so this is actually one of the few places I just there's so much weird stuff. They introduce polygraphs into screening military people at this for the silver program to make sure people aren't stealing silver.

00:30:06:03 - 00:30:34:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's like the first time this gets used for this purpose. And then also they keep such close records that they end up that silver. It is not coming. It's coming them and bullion and they need it to be in wire. So there has to be a place that melts it and turns it into the wires and wraps them and you know, and at every stage they're keeping such close analysis, they end up returning more silver than they borrowed because of just the differences and how well the, the weighing was.

00:30:34:06 - 00:30:49:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It turns out, the final version of it. I don't know if it had any extra added or if it was just like the numbers are so close, but they they get it down to the Troy ounce like a literally return a little bit more. And but they are also aware that if they don't do this, it'll be a scandal, etc..

00:30:49:06 - 00:31:07:23

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So anyway, this is just to give you a sense and I say these things, these are the big places if you ask where. And also there's Los Alamos which are very small compared to these things, but whatever, it's still there. Like if you ask like the Manhattan Project, this is where people say, all of these places are being fed materials from other places.

00:31:07:23 - 00:31:39:18

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I mentioned the uranium in the silver, but like the glass where the the switches and every little part and also specialized chemicals, they need bismuth, they need polonium. They have a whole secret facility for making polonium in Ohio. So, they have all these different inputs. If you add up all of the places, it's hundreds of places across the United States are feeding materials and labor and research into the Manhattan Project.

00:31:39:18 - 00:32:01:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I mean, again, it's not like two facilities. It's an industry that gets created overnight and ties together in the same way, like the auto industry has. How many contractors are go into every part in your car? it's the same thing, but they're doing it with something that doesn't exist. And just to finish this long thought, that's why it's the Manhattan Project.

00:32:01:14 - 00:32:15:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They set up the initial office in Manhattan because that's where the headquarters of all the major industry companies are, and that's how they're going to tie these things together. And then it turns out that's a very convenient, misleading sort of name because most of the actual work is not taking place in crazy.

00:32:15:19 - 00:32:36:01

Chris Keefer

So, I mean, this this does sound like the world's largest scientific industrial mobilization. I mean, how does it compare to something like the space race? you know, in the Sputnik anxiety and gearing up to, you know, understand rocketry and develop ICBMs and things like that, is that just, a drop in the bucket of of the kind of efforts that were put into, into the Manhattan Project?

00:32:36:02 - 00:32:57:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

No, no, those are those are very big and actually, like, like the rocket programs, the space programs, those are bigger. but you have to remember, those took place over longer time periods, and we're doing more than just trying to make, like, two bombs and we're not crash programs in the same desperate. We're going to put stuff together with duct tape.

00:32:57:13 - 00:33:12:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

We're going to invent duct tape. I don't know, remember if they went up there, but we're going to use it to hold everything together. I mean, the Manhattan Project is also cutting corners. And in all these ways, what I would say about the Manhattan Project, in a sort of putting perspective, it's not the biggest project of all time or anything.

00:33:12:19 - 00:33:36:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

There are bigger ones. It's probably the fastest of that scale. Like to do all that in two and a half years. That's the thing where it's it's mind blowing that they pulled that off. it's also the most secret, like the space race is not secret. It has secret parts. Right? But they announce, here's our Gemini. astronauts.

00:33:36:08 - 00:33:54:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They, like, tell everybody we're gonna go to the moon, right? Like they announce the intention. The Manhattan Project, the fact that it even exists. That's the secret. That's not like after they drop the bombs, they can then say, oh, yeah, we have the Atomic Energy Commission. It makes nuclear weapons. And people go, oh, yeah, I know it does.

00:33:54:00 - 00:34:10:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's big. It's makes nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project, the very existence that there is a project is the secret. And so I don't think it's the biggest thing in in when especially when you start talking about like the later. Anything with rockets is is big and making like lots of rockets is gigantic. Each of those kinds of things.

00:34:10:11 - 00:34:36:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's not even the biggest for World War two. Like the B-29 program was more expensive than the Manhattan Project, but also the B-29 program made thousands of bombers. not one weapon, and not I mean, they end up making essentially four nuclear weapons, over the course of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Two, testing one of them, using two of them, and they basically had a third by the time the war ended.

00:34:36:16 - 00:34:57:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

but like, I think the speed and the secrecy are where it really distinguishes itself. And also it becomes a model for other projects. And that's what I think, like when people start thinking about space races, they're looking at things like the Manhattan Project. They're like, oh yeah, we can actually do this kind of stuff. So that sort of thing has not happened.

00:34:57:16 - 00:35:14:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

You don't have something either that fast making a new industry, but definitely not going. I like to say the size of a dinner table, which is true if you look up like the Han Meitner experiment. They have the layout at the Deutscher Museum in Munich. It's like a large dinner table, the whole thing. Discovery of nuclear fission, right?

00:35:14:21 - 00:35:36:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

To go from that level of tabletop science to that level of application for something that is a game changer. It's not just we have a slightly better thing than the previous one that is kind of unprecedented. And the US government tries to chase that that high for the rest of the Cold War, and they never quite pull it off.

00:35:36:22 - 00:35:50:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like there there aren't other. Oh, we made a fundamental discovery and boom, we've changed the whole nature of international order. It doesn't happen again. It's kind of the one time that happens. and so that's kind of let's,

00:35:50:06 - 00:36:14:00

Chris Keefer

Let's switch gears a little bit, and talk about, the actual use of the bomb, the motive for that, the justifications for that. I mean, I've heard a variety of things, obviously. the Japanese fought valiantly or fanatically, depending on your perspective. lots of lives could be saved, potentially by forcing an early capitulation. I've also heard that, I think it was Operation August Storm and the Soviets.

00:36:14:00 - 00:36:34:20

Chris Keefer

Actually, a few days after the the bombs were dropped. Storm Manchuria inflicted the largest military loss in Japanese military history. I think a million casualties in a month, may have tipped the balance. So the bombs were necessary. I mean, obviously, this was a big show of force. Maybe a new way to assert, you know, this is going to be the American or the end of the American century or the beginning of American hegemony.

00:36:34:22 - 00:36:40:22

Chris Keefer

What are your what are your thoughts? Obviously, a very controversial area and probably a whole bunch of different truths here, but help us distill those out.

00:36:41:03 - 00:37:06:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's complicated. Yeah, there isn't one. There's a lot of stuff that we'll just we don't know. Can't know. There's what what was going on in a counterfactual. We'll never really know. Right. We can't rerun history like a simulation and take one out and see if it's enough and stuff like that. and even knowing why people did what they did or what they thought, I mean, they can tell you, but they will sometimes tell people multiple things for multiple reasons.

00:37:06:13 - 00:37:34:18

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And we all know from our own experiences that we don't always know why we do things. We can rationalize them later. But like, for example, on the question of like, what ended the war? Was it the bomb? Was it the invasion of Manchuria? In some contexts, the Japanese high command cited the atomic bomb to their own people as a reason, and in some contexts they cited the Soviets and my belief is that, both of these are probably somewhat true.

00:37:34:20 - 00:37:56:18

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They don't have to be mutually exclusive if you get in. So there's two separate questions here. There's why did we drop it? Did we need to drop it? And then there's the like, why did the Japanese surrender? Why don't we start with the Japanese and we can back up to the first one. There were the the bad version of this that a lot of people have been told and told largely by people who want to justify the use of the bomb.

00:37:56:23 - 00:38:14:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

There's two bad versions of this, depending on what your argument about the bomb is, you'll get one of either of them, but they're both bad. One is the Japanese are fanatical, and they wanted to fight to the death, and they have no interest in peace. And thus, like we have, there was nothing that we could do other than an invasion or something big and dramatic.

00:38:14:16 - 00:38:33:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And that's why we use the bomb. And that's why they surrendered, because they recognized that was going to work. The other version is the Japanese were desperately trying to end the war, and had even offered to surrender before the bomb was used. And so the bombs were just a show of force. Maybe it's the Soviet Union, and, we're not necessary at all because the Japanese want a peace.

00:38:33:07 - 00:38:54:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And the reality is, within the Japanese high command, there was there's not a monolith. There's a spectrum of views that are getting worked out. There are people who are called the peace party who want to end the war on some terms. They recognize this is not going well. They do not want to fight to the death. They'd like to end the war.

00:38:54:10 - 00:39:24:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

What are those terms? They're not sure they are not the majority on this council. The majority are the militarists. And these people who are not the majority, know that if they play their hand too strongly, they will get cued. So like they are not they're they're very delicate. And so they are doing things like behind the scenes officially, unofficially floating ideas about, you know, maybe the Soviets, maybe they could set the diplomatic table and we could have a talk about ending the war.

00:39:24:02 - 00:39:46:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But and the Americans know this. They've tapped their communications. And also the Soviets tell us this kind of stuff, as well. we know the Japanese are doing this, but we also know that one the Japanese are still talking about, like the terms where as the Americans don't want to talk about terms, they want unconditional surrender. And then also they know that this is not an official position.

00:39:46:06 - 00:40:07:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

This is like a minority trying to figure out what the options are, that maybe they can sell it to the majority, but they know they're not. They're not being presented as terms or surrender agreements or anything. They're being sort of tiptoed around and they don't want to play that game. They also think that if you start to play that game, they'll try to bargain you to death, and they don't want to do that.

00:40:07:12 - 00:40:31:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They want the surrender or not. so their view is that the Japanese were not ready to surrender. The militarists, they have a spectrum. You have the actual fanatics who believe that somehow, through some magical mysticism, Japan could still win this thing. Which is nuts, right? Like that's not a sane position. But this is like an honor thing, right?

00:40:31:08 - 00:40:50:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And then you have the ones who I think of as like the pragmatic ones who are like, look, America is a democracy. They're not going to want to like, suffer huge casualties. So if we they invade and we put up a big show, make them bleed, they'll go to the bargaining table and we'll get more favorable terms. Like, that's a terrible calculus.

00:40:50:13 - 00:41:14:09

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But you can see the logic. It's not a crazy one. Right. And so like that's their situation. And the people who want to end the war, when the bomb happens, they go, great. This is a perfect reason, right? We can say it's not. We've been losing. It's not these other leaders have defeated. It's like, wow, the universe is against us.

00:41:14:11 - 00:41:32:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

We should just end the war. I would not be a smart thing to do. We? This is our good excuse. Save some face when the Soviets invade. That does have a big effect on the militarists, because they don't think they can put up with the Soviets and the Americans. And also the Soviets are not democracy. So they don't care about losing people.

00:41:32:06 - 00:41:51:09

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And also, if you're going to get occupied, you don't want to end up like Poland, which they're watching that happen in real time, right, where people are getting real killed by the Soviets. And so, that has an impact. It's also another for the people who are already in the peace party. It's another great reason to end the war, like, let's do it.

00:41:51:11 - 00:42:13:01

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so in both of these situations there there are people who are looking for an excuse. The militarists, I do think, are some of them seem affected by the bomb, some of them don't. Some of them seem affected by the Soviets. But either way, I think it's easy to make the argument that there is in the timeline we live in, it's both.

00:42:13:03 - 00:42:39:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

That's not to say that I have strong feelings about, well, what if you deleted one and reran history? I really just don't know. It's actually very dicey. Even the both in the timeline we lived in, it almost didn't happen. I mean, you could imagine a junior officers tried to do a coup when they found out this was being floated, essentially, and the head of the military shut them down before he killed himself.

00:42:39:16 - 00:43:03:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And like you could imagine, a world in which he doesn't do that and instead militarists do run the coup. And the war keeps going on like it's that slim of a margin. And I don't say that to discourage people from saying, well, you couldn't have used maybe the bombs shouldn't have been used. I don't know. but I just point out that, like the world we live in is still a thin margin, so I don't it's hard for me to say what would be a better world.

00:43:03:19 - 00:43:04:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

At the end of both of those.

00:43:04:15 - 00:43:25:11

Chris Keefer

I learned a tremendous amount from that answer. so it's not honestly, thank you for it. I mean, you talked about secrecy, and I, I think one of the biggest secrets here is how many bombs do they have? And you said I think they had four. how many were uranium type, how many were plutonium type. And once they had this huge industrial infrastructure moving, what was the timeline on making more bombs?

00:43:25:11 - 00:43:33:19

Chris Keefer

Because, you know, the threat here is these are just the first two. There's more to come if you if you mess with us. So what are we looking like there in terms of kind of production.

00:43:33:21 - 00:43:54:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Yeah. So they they get the first plutonium core together in July 45th. That's the Trinity test, right. They then, are able to have another plutonium core by early August, and they have, enough uranium for a little boy bomb by early August. That's just a coincidence. The fact that they had two ready at the same time, that's happy coincidence.

00:43:54:17 - 00:44:14:23

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They did not really know that was going to happen, and it just worked out. So those are the two that end up getting used in the war. they had planned to have another plutonium core by like August 21st or something like this, like late August, but they were able to speed up the timeline on that a little bit.

00:44:14:23 - 00:44:44:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they have that more or less, ready to go. They would have been able to have that ready to ship around August 13th. So right at the end, there's two interesting things here. One is that after Trinity, Oppenheimer went to Groves and he said, so Trinity just would point out it's just worth pointing out, the test, the implosion bomb.

00:44:44:20 - 00:45:02:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Right. And they have Trinity because they don't know how well implosion is going to work. Like little boy gun type. Dead easy. It's going to work. They're sure they can do tests that show them the rate of the reaction up until the point of explosion and, you know, stop the test then. And and so they're very confident about little boy.

00:45:02:10 - 00:45:20:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They're not confident about implosion. They think implosion is probably not going to work that well. They think maybe 4 to 5 kilotons at most, potentially none. and so that's why they do Trinity to just even see is this plutonium thing going to work out. Because they discover in 44 you can't use plutonium in a gun type bomb.

00:45:20:14 - 00:45:43:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so this is the only way Hanford makes any sense, is with implosion. So they redo everything around implosion. at Los Alamos. And it's much more successful than they thought. It's 20 kilotons, not 4 or 5. It actually works. They're thrilled. They're excited. This is why it's a big deal. it there's a lot one could say about, like, what's the impact of Trinity being so successful?

00:45:43:21 - 00:46:11:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

I do think it affects negotiations and decisions to use the bomb and decisions to negotiate with Japan. It changes a lot of calculus because the plutonium production rate for, you only need six kilograms of plutonium per plutonium bomb, you need 64kg of uranium per uranium bomb. The rate of production, is about 21kg of plutonium per month from the three Hanford facilities when they're going at full steam.

00:46:11:05 - 00:46:29:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

and the rate of production at Oak Ridge at that time is about a kilogram a day, so about 30kg a month. So that's, one uranium bomb every two months, more or less, versus three plutonium bombs a month. But if you can't use plutonium, you have just a slow weapon that only you get once every couple of months.

00:46:29:17 - 00:46:53:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But if you have plutonium now, you've got three and a half bombs. A month after Trinity, Oppenheimer sends a letter to Groves and says it could be more what if we took apart Little boy and don't use the gun type because it's so inefficient? And instead we make what they called, combination bombs. Composite bombs that were a mixture of plutonium on high and highly enriched uranium.

00:46:53:06 - 00:47:18:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So you would use maybe half of the plutonium that you would normally use, and then you would use a little bit more than half of enriched uranium in your core. And, they think that'll work. They haven't tested it, but they're pretty sure that's going to. That would be explosive. And Groves says that's a cool idea. But we don't have time to do that because Oppenheimer tells him it'll put everything back by about ten, ten days.

00:47:18:07 - 00:47:54:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Probably. And Groves is thinking, yeah, and Groves is thinking, it's not gonna be okay. Groves. Groves is thinking it probably more, but even ten days to Groves. At that moment feels like a lot because of stuff that's going on at the Potsdam Conference and so on. So they shelve that idea. But if the war had gone on beyond that fourth, that's the third plutonium core or the fourth total core they had, right, that I mentioned the mid-August one, they would have been producing and were already starting to produce composite cores if you do composite cores, depending on your ratio of plutonium to uranium, you can change it to be more like eight bombs a

00:47:54:16 - 00:48:15:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

month or ten bombs a month, which is a real difference over three and a half. And so they are starting to think about, okay, well, if the bomb doesn't in the war, can we use these on more cities? We're going to run out of cities pretty quickly. what about tactical uses for the invasion? Do we drop it on a bunch of military bases on the beaches, and then wait for the, you know, radiation to go down a little and then invade?

00:48:15:10 - 00:48:42:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like, this is conversations that are being had. No decisions were made between before the end of the war came, in part because Truman on August 10th shelved the, the next bomb, somewhat indefinitely. So that's a whole other the first two bombs get used. Groves writes The Truman on August 10th and says so day after Nagasaki, and says we'll have another bomb in a week rated a drop.

00:48:42:17 - 00:48:58:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It'll be cast in a few days, and we have to get it out there and assembled. But by August 17th, we can probably drop another bomb. And Truman sends back the message stop atomic bombing. You don't have authority to do this anymore. The only atomic bombing that can be done can be done with express approval of the president.

00:48:58:12 - 00:49:17:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

He. This is a whole other thing about the who is in charge of making calls. But he was not that connected to the ordering of the use of the bombs. before this, at this point, he takes all that power and he doesn't order the use of the bombs. If the war had gone on, there was pressure building to potentially that he might have done it.

00:49:17:06 - 00:49:35:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But anyway, it's a whole other thing. So if the war had continued, they could have had a lot more bombs. Sometimes people will say like, oh, it's a bluff. It's not a bluff. They not only had another bomb in the wings, but they had a production program that could produce a bunch of bombs. And even more like it is not a bluff that they could keep.

00:49:36:00 - 00:50:01:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they thought they were Groves thought that they were going to probably have to drop five bombs before Japan surrendered, like so. They were not expected in one bomb to do it, or to even, but what actually happened was the war ended and the whole Manhattan Project thing fell apart, and they stopped producing bombs, essentially, like they produce fissile material.

00:50:01:12 - 00:50:24:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But even then, Hanford had problems and had to be basically put a half power. And they had all these issues. So by 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission actually takes over from the Manhattan Project, finally they have like only 13 cores in the stockpile, and they're all just pieces, and they have no assembled weapons, and they don't have the ability to even put them together.

00:50:24:20 - 00:50:45:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They have like zero bombs ready to go. And that's the big scandal of the early Cold War, the big secret that the U.S. doesn't have a stockpile, because everything kind of the Manhattan Project was not built to last. It was built to be this temporary solution. And then everybody went home and, like, they didn't have a plan, really, for the.

00:50:45:17 - 00:50:52:18

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It took them a while to figure out what the peacetime existence was. So I think that's pretty, you know. Yeah. Anyway, that's the long.

00:50:52:21 - 00:51:12:14

Chris Keefer

So I'm conscious of how much time we have left, but I want to take us a little further forward in history. We'll have to have you back for part two if you're willing and able. But, yes, it's here in this moment of, U.S atomic hegemony. I've just been sort of reading up a little bit about, you know, people will argue that we haven't had another world war because of atomic weapons.

00:51:12:16 - 00:51:33:12

Chris Keefer

You know, the the Red Army had mobilized, Soviet production was was crazy. Western Europe was devastated. There's ideas that Stalin wanted to expand further and was held back by the bomb. I also heard that, the allies jointly occupied Iran partially to to have a supply line to the Soviets from, from America largely, I guess, to supply them with weapons to fight the Nazis.

00:51:33:14 - 00:51:49:05

Chris Keefer

Maybe the Japanese. I'm not sure. but that the, Soviets said, you know, we'd really like a piece of this Iranian oil, and we're not going to withdraw. I'd like to stay. there's rumors that Truman said if you don't move, we're going to bomb you in terms of those that that early period where there was sort of U.S. atomic age Germany.

00:51:49:06 - 00:52:03:14

Chris Keefer

what do you think about those sort of theories of, of that, that impact in terms of, moving out of the kind of Sino sphere into into Europe and Iran? Did that shape, you know, some of those early decisions until Soviets themselves did their test and got their own nuclear arsenal?

00:52:03:17 - 00:52:25:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Well, I will first just plug my my next book is All Truman and the bomb for his whole presidency. So starting with the whole Hiroshima and Nagasaki stuff, but actually then going through these early years of really formative years to to a lot about the American national security, state and nuclear. So, I mean, Truman is president until, early 53.

00:52:25:22 - 00:52:51:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

That was a pretty important years, 45 to 53. and so I'm trying to do all that, including the Korean War and why we don't use them in the Korean War and, and all sorts of stuff that's going on. So I'll just plug it. It should be out summer 2025. People interested. You should check it out. you can have me on back then, but, generally the thing that I think gets lost when we look back at a lot of this and it's something that, even I am sometimes struck by when I'm doing my research.

00:52:51:15 - 00:53:14:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

They didn't really know what the deal was in much of the 40s. Like they weren't really sure what the meaning of the bomb was for National security, for the world where we in a Cold War, are we not? It's easy to read all that back into it and say like, okay, atomic diplomacy, we're against the Russians. We know they're the bad guy.

00:53:14:17 - 00:53:38:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they clearly did not. This was not universally. Not only was this not really understood for a lot of this period, like we don't really have a nuclear stance until about 48. That's around when they start getting serious about, okay, we have this bomb. What would it do if we used it? How many do we have until then?

00:53:38:08 - 00:53:58:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The military doesn't actually even know, which is hilarious. They have these very initial war plans that they could draw up that involve fake numbers of bombs that are way higher than what the U.S has, and you're just like, oh, that's really sad. That's really out of whack. Like, because they don't know. They're not briefed on this. Congress doesn't know like these things are kept very tightly secretive.

00:53:58:18 - 00:54:22:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

and around 48 is when they start getting more it's things like the Berlin Airlift. They start to actually start thinking about this as a weapon, weapon and start really getting more serious about what is the strategy, what is the goal of using this? Truman is not a cold warrior until about 48, 49, maybe even like 50, right?

00:54:22:22 - 00:54:49:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Korean War really changes his stances on things. But his belief in like 47, for example, is that Stalin is a good guy and that the problem is all the guys around Stalin and that Stalin is, quote, honest as hell, direct quote, Harry Truman. and if you could just get through to him, man to man, we would find that we and the Russians and the Soviets, we actually like we don't actually need to be in competition.

00:54:49:00 - 00:55:22:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

We don't have mutually exclusive interests. They're not probably trying to take over the whole world. We all just kind of want the same thing. Right? And it's shocking to read this stuff later because you're like, wow, Stalin, honest as hell. That's a wild take, man. And he keeps that attitude for a long time. And it takes a while before he's just like, no, actually, the Soviets are terrible, they're intractable, we can't deal with them, etc. etc. and I just bring that up because it's the kind of thing that, like, gets lost after the fact when you know how things are going to work out.

00:55:22:10 - 00:55:43:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

so my sense you don't have you have things that get interpreted as sort of atomic diplomacy, like, again, the Berlin situation, they move some B-29s to England and the idea is like, okay, they'll know those are the atomic bomb aircraft, and maybe there's a little bit of gamesmanship gaming going on there, but it's it's pretty unserious in my opinion.

00:55:43:17 - 00:56:16:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's not until 5051 that there's some more serious stuff. And even that is bluffing more than real. So for example, and this is a big part of the book, Truman doesn't give the military access to nuclear weapons. one of the things the Atomic Energy Act does, and that initial order he does about not using them is, is it centralizes that in a civilian authority, and only the president can transfer them into, the military and the military fully expects, when this happens that they're just going to be able to get the weapons right, like, obviously it's be a pro forma thing.

00:56:17:01 - 00:56:38:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And Truman Truman refuses repeatedly in, in 47 and 48 and 49 in 50. He just won't do it. And they are totally befuddled by this. They don't know what they're supposed to do. They're not allowed to have the bomb. Truman is extremely uninterested that in using nuclear weapons after World War two, which is a fascinating thing that my book gets into, like, why?

00:56:38:19 - 00:56:59:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Why is this? But, it's only in 51 that he authorizes them to have nine nuclear cores out of 200 or so that have been built, to be stored in Guam that the military can have, but they're not allowed to use them, but they're allowed to have them. And it's really there's a whole why nine? It's supposed to be ten.

00:56:59:11 - 00:57:16:12

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But they they had ten non-nuclear assemblies at that base. He had authorized that. But then in transferring one of them, they crashed the plane and destroyed it. And we're not able to replace it because they had so few. So they only had nine, so they only got nine. Wow. Right. Like what a what a weird thing. But and it turns out he only does that.

00:57:16:14 - 00:57:38:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Why is Truman authorized that? He's nine. And in 1951, it's not because he's actually trying to threaten the Soviets or planning to use them or threatening the Chinese. It's because he's firing general MacArthur. And this is how he gets the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side to do that. And it's just like, this is. But and I love that episode because it's very what Truman is about.

00:57:38:00 - 00:58:19:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

He's seeing this mostly as a domestic political thing, and he just is not interested. He's not thinking like we would think a Cold Warrior would think in this. So anyway, do the Americans try to bluff and use threat? Yeah, for sure. But they're not very serious about nuclear weapons, certainly not before 48. And even then it's it's really under Eisenhower that you start getting actual means of making nuclear war that don't look really, I would say clunky, like the war plans of the 40s are things that are along the lines of, well, on day three, we'll move all the cores out to bases so that by day seven we'll be ready to drop them.

00:58:19:22 - 00:58:40:09

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's not like the whole war goes on over five hours. That's in the 50s. and so it's really a shift that happens. So in to your general question, did the bombs stop World War three? I don't know, like it's really hard to say. There's you can look at any one of these incidences and try to see like what's the influence of the bomb.

00:58:40:09 - 00:59:12:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But the bomb is like one thing among others. It certainly is not something that these people are unaware of, but it's also not the only consideration. And what they're learning in the 40s also is what's the limits of having an atomic monopoly. They feel like that's going to get them a lot. And then it turns out, well, like with Korea, there's a lot of reasons they don't use them, but one is their own advisors are like, you know, if we use them like one, the tactical situation isn't such that using them is really going to get us a lot.

00:59:12:08 - 00:59:32:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And if it doesn't lead to some sort of decisive end, have we devalued the weapon which we otherwise gives us all this prestige, or is this worse for us in the long run than just not using it like there's real problems that come up if you actually start thinking through whether using it's a good idea or not. And also our allies will be mad at us and all this kind of stuff.

00:59:32:13 - 00:59:35:00

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And so they start to really feel like, how.

00:59:35:03 - 00:59:53:16

Chris Keefer

Afraid are people of the bomb at this time like, and how special is radiation in terms of that fear? I've played with nuke map and I've done the airburst versus the ground burst, and seeing just how profoundly different that is in terms of, the kind of radiation illnesses. But, you know, we're going to have to cut this off probably in the next 10 minutes or 15 minutes.

00:59:53:16 - 01:00:13:11

Chris Keefer

But I am just curious, maybe in going back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, you know, we can have numbers of people killed. But very understanding is that with that airburst explosion, most of the casualties were from your classic blunt trauma, thermal burns, concussive injuries, that kind of thing. So maybe clarify that for us. And then, you know, how how big of a psychological impact did it have?

01:00:13:11 - 01:00:24:06

Chris Keefer

I mean, obviously in Japan it did. But more broadly, because what you're what you're portraying here is that, hey, I mean, if we use these in Korea, maybe it's not going to be that, you know, the menace, the value of the weapon and the shock. The shock and of it.

01:00:24:11 - 01:00:45:10

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So in the era of just fission weapons. So up until publicly, it's still about 54, but we'll say it till about 52 or so. Right. you're talking about weapons that have a maximum yield of maybe 100 kilotons or so, which is still that'll ruin your day. But the blast, the damage of a weapon doesn't. As you can see with nuclear, it doesn't scale linearly.

01:00:45:10 - 01:01:11:03

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So 100 kilotons is a little more than twice as damaging as like ten kilotons. So it's not at the scale of later ones. And to be sure, those are still big. But they're not endlessly big. Like Hiroshima was really destroyed by 15 kilotons. Hiroshima is a medium sized city. You can use that bomb on other cities and say, oh, okay, that you're talking about punching out Wall Street.

01:01:11:03 - 01:01:36:11

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

You're not talking about destroying all five boroughs, right? And in New York, for example, which does lead, I mean, Hiroshima or effect casualties in terms of radiation deaths, it's hard to know what's pure flea from radiation and what's from, like, hybrid. So radiation plus burns. Not good. Right. but the Manhattan Project people end up estimating that it's maybe 10 to 15% are purely radiation.

01:01:36:12 - 01:01:52:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

it was not expected that a lot of people would die from radiation because they figured the, the the radii that the distance from ground zero that you need to be to die of radiation generally puts you in a zone where you're probably going to die from something else. and so they figured that wasn't going to be that big of an issue.

01:01:52:14 - 01:02:10:13

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But of course, the real world is complicated, and people can be in places that end up shielding them from the fire and the blast, but not the radiation. the radiation is interesting because, like, dying from Burns is terrible, right? Dying from having your house collapse on you. And then a fire comes through your neighborhood and burns you alive.

01:02:10:13 - 01:02:31:05

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Jesus. Right. Like the stuff is horrific, but the radiation gets us into what sometimes they call like the dread. Like we don't understand it. It's not normal. You can't see it. It taps into, like, deeply primal fears of that, you know, reflected in myths about like, magic and and also a damage that can damage your children. Future children.

01:02:31:05 - 01:02:57:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Like it gets into our potency. Like there's a lot going on culturally, psychologically with radiation. that makes it feel, more dangerous than a fire. Even though fires kill way more people than radiation does. As you know, the radiation that kills people at Hiroshima is all acute. So it's it's radiation released by the initial fission reaction, or maybe just the, the still some of the fission products in that cloud, right?

01:02:57:16 - 01:03:21:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

As they're fresh. It's not by fallout the delayed radiation. there's tiny a little bit of delayed radioactivity at Hiroshima and Nagasaki from rain out mostly. And it's just very small. And the studies the Japanese have done have shown that if it had any effect on mortality, we can't pick it up. Right. It's so small that it falls into the noise of just regular cancer rates and stuff.

01:03:22:00 - 01:03:46:14

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The main problem is being there when the weapon going off and getting this blast of gammas and neutrons and things like that. There is a horror about the bomb in American understanding, but from the beginning. But it's not that big compared to what it becomes, because it still feels like our weapon. They are damaging, but they are not like existential at that point.

01:03:46:14 - 01:04:05:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

There's not that many of them. The Soviets are really far away. They don't have a bomb. Maybe they'll never get a bomb. Once the Soviets get the bomb, then you start to get this bubbling. what's going to happen? Well, they still are far away. There's bombers. We could try to shoot them down. Okay, some cities might get hit, but most of the country will be alive.

01:04:05:20 - 01:04:36:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's all right. The thing that changes a lot is the Castle Bravo test in 54, which is our second H-bomb test. It's the one that has a big fallout accident. Giant plume that in Japanese fishermen get affected by it. Marshallese? lots of stuff goes wrong. And it's public because the Japanese get impacted by it. And when you superimpose that fallout plume on like the Easter East Coast of the United States.

01:04:36:23 - 01:05:02:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Okay, Washington's gone from 15 megatons. The whole metro area, sure. But like the fallout plume, if you drop a 15 megaton bomb on Washington and have the wind blowing in a north east direction, you get you kill Philadelphia, you get fallout in Boston, you might kill people in New York, right? The fallout from a thermonuclear weapon is orders of magnitude more than the fission weapon, as is the the weapon itself.

01:05:02:21 - 01:05:28:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And you start at that moment having this possibility of like, oh, this is not that survivable. This is not a duck and cover situation for anybody. You couple that with ICBMs by 57 and, you know, Sputnik and all that. And now you're like, oh my God, there's going to be thousands of these metro area destroying and then the metro areas are gone.

01:05:28:17 - 01:05:50:21

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And then the fallout kills the Midwest and kills everybody else. So this is this why you start to see in the mid 50s on the beach Godzilla them I want the giant ants. You start to get all of this stuff that's like, oh my God, this is not survivable. All you get little bits of that in the early 50s, late 40s.

01:05:50:21 - 01:06:04:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

But it it's sometimes a little surprising. It's not that people aren't thinking about the bomb in the 40s, but it's not as they're thinking about when they're scared of the bomb. They're scared about the future. By the 50s, they're scared about the.

01:06:04:06 - 01:06:27:07

Chris Keefer

Wow, wow. And so in terms of that, follow it again. You have, this, this web based tool, nuke map, where you can dial in, the size of the bomb, whether it's a ground burst or airburst, there's a few other parameters. it's the thermonuclear device. Production of fallout. Just because it's a higher yield. Or it can just walk me through because the fallout side, I think everyone can get a sense of, you know, fire and explosion and blast injuries and things like that.

01:06:27:07 - 01:06:39:08

Chris Keefer

But just on this question of fallout, because I think that's where we get not into necessarily nuclear winter type fears, but in terms of those kind of apocalyptic radiation based fears, which sound pretty valid when it comes to follow. You can explain the follow up thing to me a little more.

01:06:39:14 - 01:07:10:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Sure. So the main fallout is your bomb goes off as your bomb goes off. It has this nuclear reaction take place in a fireball. The fireball, is this this? It's a ball of extremely hot particles, right? The bits of the bomb spent fuel. So fission products are in there, right? Unspent un unreactive material. Whatever was, you know, parts of the bomb that have been, like, vaporized, etc., etc..

01:07:11:00 - 01:07:29:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's a in a, in a sort of gaseous form. It's hot physically and radioactive because it's got a bunch of fresh fission products in it, and it rises up through the atmosphere because it's low density and it's hot. Right? So it's like a hot air balloon. And as it goes up, it's going to start cooling. So it's going to stop looking like a fireball.

01:07:29:16 - 01:07:49:20

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And it's going to start looking like a cloud. Right. And eventually it'll stabilize at whatever the the density as it's sort of growing. It's like a bubble. Think of it that way. And eventually it goes up and up and the atmospheric pressure decreases and it hits the level. And this will change for whatever yield it is where like the cloud is now, the same density as the surrounding atmosphere.

01:07:49:20 - 01:08:13:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And it just is they call stabilized. And then it's blown with the wind. And as it blows with the wind stuff in the cloud over time is going to start falling out of the cloud. So that's why it's called fallout. It's the stuff that that at one point in the 40s and they're in the Manhattan Project, they called it outfall, which I think it's funny that they switched it at some point, but it's the stuff literally falling out of the mushroom cloud after the mushroom cloud stops looking.

01:08:13:17 - 01:08:34:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Mushroom. I'll just point out, I mean, sometimes this is surprising to people because they don't really think about what happens to the mushroom cloud afterwards. Most of the pictures you've seen of mushroom clouds are from the first 30s to a minute of the explosion. It's actually very difficult, to find late stage mushroom clouds like ten minutes. It takes about ten minutes to stabilize, and they don't look like that.

01:08:34:17 - 01:08:59:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Nice mushroom. They look like a column of just ugly stuff. And then as they're blowing, they're like a slanted. And then eventually they just look like regular clouds. But they're not. They are full of of stuff. So the problem with fallout is, is twofold. One is that, the main component to the fallout that we worry about are the fission products, the plutonium.

01:08:59:15 - 01:09:23:04

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's not the best, but like plutonium, as you know, has a relatively long half life. So does uranium. Like these are not the acute hazards, radioactively that fresh fission products are or even on fresh fission products. Strontium 90 or something like that, medium range ones. Right. So that's what you're really worried about. So the intensity of your fallout is going to be related to the fission yield of the bomb.

01:09:23:06 - 01:09:41:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So you can make bombs, thermonuclear weapons that have a very small amount of fission and a large amount of fusion. Fusion does not create significant fallout, in this respect, there's other things about delayed. There's also like activated products and those just don't play that big of a role in this compared to this fission products. So I'm just gonna ignore them all.

01:09:41:08 - 01:10:01:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Acknowledge them now, but they're not important for thinking about civil defense and survival and shelters and things like that. They just don't add up to enough, you could have a clean bomb. And we tested some in the 50s that are like 99% clean, 99, 99, 97% clean, like very high levels where the amount of fission. What that just means is out of that yield only 3% was fission.

01:10:02:03 - 01:10:27:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

So, that ends up being very low intensity. We didn't really produce those because to do that, you end up with a heavier weapon than you would have otherwise. Like for the same weight, you could get twice the yield by adding another simple, cheap fission stage. So the way this works in an H-bomb, the fusion produces a lot of neutrons, especially high energy neutrons like 14 MeV.

01:10:27:17 - 01:10:51:02

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

If you wrap it with uranium 238, uranium 238, as you know, not fissile, but it is fissionable with high energy neutrons. And so wrapping your bomb part of the internal part of your bomb that's going to expose these high energy airtran's uranium 238, uranium to 38 is cheap, right? It's it's it's the byproduct of the enrichment. So just throw that sucker in there and you can double your yield basically.

01:10:51:02 - 01:11:16:05

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Or more like some of the early bombs are like 80% fission because they get a lot of extra. And almost all of that comes from those, those that last fission blanket essentially. So h-bombs produce more fallout because they have a very high fission yield. I mentioned that the damage scales not linearly. Damage from a nuclear weapon scales as a cubic root because it's a sphere, basically.

01:11:16:05 - 01:11:41:22

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Right. You're filling a sphere with volume, the intensity of the of the radioactivity after the in a in the fallout does scale linearly with fission yield. So those 15 megaton bomb is, if that was 100% fission, that is a thousand times more efficient than a 15 kiloton bomb, right? It's a and they wouldn't be 100%. But you get the math.

01:11:42:00 - 01:12:05:15

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

That's the math I can do in my head. so like that creates orders of magnitude more fallout, even if you're not necessarily creating orders and orders of magnitude more damage in that situation. the other thing that really matters about the fallout. So the yield, the overall yield matters because it determines the size of that fireball, which will determine the, like, the maximum width of the plume and how far it's going to go and things like that.

01:12:05:17 - 01:12:25:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

The, the fission yield matters because it's going to determine the overall intensity of stuff in the cloud. And then the height of burst matters, because if it's an airburst, that fireball is going to say its particles are going to stay pretty light, relatively speaking, and they're going to stay in the cloud form for a longer amount of time.

01:12:25:20 - 01:12:45:07

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And they will eventually fall out, but it'll be over the course of days, weeks, months sometimes. And by the time they've come down, the short half life fission products have burned out. They're gone. And you've also diffused them over a massive area. So no individual place is going to get that much. You'll get a little 1 or 2.

01:12:45:07 - 01:13:06:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Strontium 90s. Who cares, right? Like that isn't a health threat. if your weapon is close enough to the ground that it can suck up dirt, debris, you know, vaporize a tower, for example, you vaporize a city, all of that stuff. You vaporize a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands where you're testing it. You're not really vaporizing it, per se.

01:13:06:17 - 01:13:27:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

You're breaking stuff into often macroscopic chunks. Maybe the size of snowflakes or little or grains of sand. Those are big enough that the fission products will adhere to them, and they will fall out within the course of several hours, not several days. So that what this is what they call local fallout. The other one where it falls out of everywhere they call global fallout.

01:13:27:20 - 01:13:53:16

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Local fallout is that plume. You see, that's the the cloud that went up and then it dumped it all back down again. And it's still really fresh. There's nasty stuff in there. It's going to be really intense in the short term. But even in the long term it's the the the density of medium range fission products is going to be high enough that, you know, the strontium 90 could be in effect for the next hundred years that you don't want in your food supply.

01:13:53:16 - 01:14:10:19

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

And, you know, it's a calcium seeker and it gets in your bones and your leukemia goes up. So it's a chronic threat as well. So this is there's a few other conditions that can make it dump it faster. Like if it happens to rain while that cloud is there, etc.. But like that's the real issue with the fallout.

01:14:10:21 - 01:14:37:08

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Ground versus and airburst makes a big difference on what you get on the ground. So the Trinity test had local fallout, which they mapped and tried to make sure didn't go on. Too many people living nearby Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not. They were high enough up that they had just a little tiny sprinkling of yeah, it rained a little bit here, but again, not that significant compared to like the Trinity test, even the Trinity test, it's so little fission yield 20 kilotons of fish and yield.

01:14:37:08 - 01:14:52:17

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

It's just not that much that like over the long term, it's not that much of a chronic health hazard. Whereas megatons of fission yield can be a chronic health hazard for for decades. So that's the.

01:14:52:21 - 01:15:10:09

Chris Keefer

Logic. I played around with nuke map. And then I watched a documentary called Command and Control about the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion. not a not a nuclear explosion. and that was a, I think a nine megaton, warhead. And again, it didn't go off it. If it had of it would have been a ground burst.

01:15:10:11 - 01:15:28:22

Chris Keefer

like, it's it's absolutely incredible to think about the ramifications of, of that. professor. Well, I've seen so much from I'd like to cover. Got to be respectful of your time. I've got an image shift to get off to. Not too long as well. this was this was a lot of fun. I learned, a gobsmacking amount, so, thank you for taking the time.

01:15:29:00 - 01:15:45:06

Prof. Alex Wellerstein

Happy to talk. And, yeah, I there's a lot about the stuff that I think there's a lot of confusion about the stuff out there, and some of it requires a little bit of explanation, but I think the, the, the actual explanation is more interesting. Absolutely.

01:15:45:09 - 01:16:05:23

Chris Keefer

And, you know, it really illuminates, the anti-nuclear mind for me. I had the pleasure and honor to debate, Gordon Edwards, who's a long standing, anti-nuclear activist in Canada. I debated him something like 49 years, to the day that he debated Edward Teller in Toronto. which was pretty fascinating. But, you know, one can certainly understand his motivations.

01:16:05:23 - 01:16:22:14

Chris Keefer

We were talking earlier about, you know, what generation we belong to. this is some scary stuff. and, again, you know, I've sort of kept my head in the sand a little bit, having danced around this technology for the last 4 or 5 years and not sort of deep dived, the, the weapons side of it, the sword side of it.

01:16:22:14 - 01:16:41:14

Chris Keefer

So, it's it's illuminating. and, yeah, really looking forward to to following up, you know, some more questions. I have just this kind of teaser is going forward as you know, not too many countries have developed nuclear weapons. They're expensive, delivering them credibly or making sure you have, you know, the means to do so is expensive.

01:16:41:14 - 01:16:52:09

Chris Keefer

I want to get into that much, much more anyway. I won't, I won't, and, belabor the point any further, but, thank you again, professor. And, looking forward to your next appearance on the couple meter.