City on fire

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 32-37

  Eden, Lynn ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55449110086     PISSN: 00963402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2968/060001011     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. I have written this in close consultation with Theodore A. Postol; Alex Montgomery also provided technical guidance. Sources include: Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, eds., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1977);
2. Theodore A. Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires following Nuclear Attacks in or near Urban Areas," in Fredric Solomon and Robert Q. Marston, eds., The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986), pp. 15-72;
3. Theodore A. Postol, "Targeting," in Ashton B. Carter, John D. Stein-bruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 373-406;
4. Lachlan Forrow et al., "Accidental Nuclear War - A Post-Cold War Assessment," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 338, no. 18 (1998): 1326-1331;
5. R. D. Small and H. L. Brode, Physics of Large Urban Fires, PSR Report 1010, final report for Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C. (Santa Monica, Calif.: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., March 1980);
6. H. L. Brode, G. P. Fisher, P. F. X. Konokpa, A. Laupa, and G. E. McClellan, Fire Damage to Urban/Industrial Targets, vol. 1, Executive Summary, and voluminous unclassified material from vol. 2, Technical Report, PSR Report 1936, prepared for Headquarters Defense Nuclear Agency, Washington D.C. (Los Angeles: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., 1989).
7. Glasstone and Dolan, Effects of Nuclear Weapons, list the yield of the bomb at Hiroshima as 12.5 kilotons; in United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992, DOE/NV-209-Rev. 15 (Las Vegas: Energy Department, Nevada Operations Office, December 2000), p. xi, the Energy Department lists the yield at Hiroshima as 15 kilotons. Both publications list the yield of the Nagasaki bomb as 21 kilotons.
8. See, for example, "Preview of the War We Do Not Want," special issue of Collier's (October 27,1951).
9. Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires," pp. 59-66.
10. Harold L. Brode and Richard D. Small, Fire Damage and Strategic Targeting, PSR Note 567, sponsored by Defense Nuclear Agency, Washington, D.C. (Los Angeles: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., June 1983), pp. 10-21;
11. Brode et al., Fire Damage to Urban/ Industrial Targets, vol. 1.
12. On Tokyo, see U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan, a Report on Eight Cities (n.p., April 1947), pp. 65-117.
13. On Hamburg, see Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires," pp. 52-53;
14. and the broader treatment by Horatio Bond, "The Fire Attacks on German Cities," in Bond, ed., Fire and the Air War (Boston: National Fire Protection Association, 1946), pp. 76-97.
15. See Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
16. On the power of a single forest fire, see the American classic by Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
17. Brode and Small, Fire Damage and Strategic Targeting, pp. 32,22.
18. These figures are based on a decade of hourly weather observations at Reagan National Airport. See Federal Climate Complex, Asheville, N.C., U.S. Navy - U.S. Air Force, Department of Commerce, International Station Meteorological Climate Survey, prepared under authority of Commander, Naval Oceanography Command, Version 1.0, October 1990. I thank Benjamin Olding for finding these data.
19. Harold Brode, phone conversation with author, August 11, 1989; see also Small and Brode, Physics of Large Urban Fires, p. 18;
20. H. L. Brode and R. D. Small, "A Review of the Physics of Large Urban Fires," in Solomon and Marston, The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, p. 83.
21. Robert Nathans, "Making the Fires That Beat Japan," in Bond, Fire and the Air War, p. 141.
22. I draw on a copy of the handbook marked "unclassified" (originally classified as confidential) from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
23. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003),
24. chapter 7, for discussion of how VNs were used to produce the VN coding system, which has been used in all the physical vulnerability handbooks after 1954. See also the explanation of the VN system in the detailed study of U.S. nuclear war planning by Matthew G. McKinzie, Thomas B. Cochran, Robert S. Norris, and William M. Arkin, The U.S. Nuclear War Plan: A Time for Change (New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2001), www.nrdc.org.
25. DIA, Physical Vulnerability Handbook-Nuclear Weapons, AP-550-1-2-69-INT (Washington, D.C.: DIA, 1969, with change 1 [1972] and change 2 [1974]), p. I-3.
26. Physical Vulnerability Handbook-Nuclear Weapons, Ibid., p. I-20.