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Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth
Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth
“I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.”
These words of Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre, quoted by Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, refer to the Trinity blast on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., the first atomic explosion in history and, so it appears, a turning point for all life on this planet.
The atmosphere didn’t catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre’s words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history’s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.
Turns out the Trinity test set into motion something even more profound than the nuclear era. The bomb didn’t just “defeat” Japan and define the Cold War, with its suicidal nuclear arms race. It is also, at least symbolically, marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene: an era of profound climate and “Earth system” destabilization caused by human activity and therefore, like it or not, establishing humans as co-equal participants in activity of the natural world.
There’s more to this “co-equal” status than nuclear weapons, of course. They may be the tip of our arrogance, but we’ve been exploiting and rearranging the planet for nearly 12,000 years, since the beginning of the era we are now leaving, the Holocene, an era of climate stability in which human civilization and all written history emerged.
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US aimed to nuke civilian populations in enemy cities during Cold War – declassified document
US aimed to nuke civilian populations in enemy cities during Cold War – declassified document
The Strategic Air Command (SAC) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956, was published by the National Security Archive on Tuesday.
Totaling almost 800 pages, the document details targets in over 1,200 cities, including Moscow, Beijing, and Warsaw. The list for each city contains details on targeting the population, along with industrial and infrastructural targets.
Moscow and Leningrad were marked as priority one and two, respectively. Moscow had 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs), while Leningrad had 145, in addition to “population” targets. In both cities, the list identified air power installations such as Soviet Air Force command centers, which the US would have demolished with thermonuclear weapons early in the war.
The document also includes lists of more than 1,100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base. The Soviet bomber force was the highest priority for nuclear testing, and the list labels Bykhov and Orsha airfields, both located in Belorussia, as priority one and two, respectively. Medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers, which would have posed a threat to the US and NATO allies, were present at both bases.
Soviet airfields were to be targeted with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons, which were capable of inflicting heavy damage. The US also hailed the necessity of a 60-megaton bomb (4,000 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb’s 15 kilotons), which was capable of delivering “significant results” in the event of war with the Soviet bloc.
The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, obtained the nuclear target list through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process.
