Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth

This paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.

4. Race for the H-bomb

America’s monopoly on atomic weapons was shorter than expected. ‘Race for the H-bomb’ details the development of the hydrogen bomb and the political developments surrounding it. The Soviet Union developed an atomic weapon faster than worst-case scenarios had predicted. Stalin appeared at first to dismiss the bomb, but it is likely that his understanding was more nuanced. What else could America have done with their short window of opportunity? Some argued for preventive war, but this went against the national character. The development of the hydrogen bomb took war out of the realms of logic and human control altogether, and anti-nuclear movements began to gather force in the 1950s.

The CIA and the Bomber and Missile Gap

This chapter is concerned with analysing the Soviet strategic threat. It opens with a discussion of how technological innovations creating relatively small movable weapons ensured that modern warfare had forever changed. Atomic intelligence became a matter of the highest priority, as did spying on the aircraft and missiles that would deliver these weapons. US intelligence underestimated the speed at which the USSR could develop and test an atomic weapon and overestimated the number of bombers capable of delivering such weapons. Developing better intelligence became a principal national priority. Document: AQUATONE Briefing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff RE Guided Missiles, Atomic Energy, and Long Range Bombers.

Jacob Bronowski: a humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956

Jacob (‘Bruno’) Bronowski (1908–1974), on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era.

NUCLEAR STRUCTURE OF 97Mo FROM THE (d, p) REACTION

The reaction 96 Mo (d, p)97 Mo has been studied at 12 MeV using the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator and a multi-channel magnetic spectrograph at the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment, Aldermaston, England. Angular distributions of protons are measured at 12 different angles from 5° to 87.5° at an interval of 7.5° and the reaction products are detected in nuclear emulsion plates. Thirty levels in the energy range from 0.000 to 2.458 MeV have been observed and absolute differential cross-sections for these levels have been measured. The data are analyzed in terms of the distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA) theory of the direct reactions, and spins, parities and spectroscopic factors are deduced for various levels. Ambiguity in the spin assignments of d5/2 and d3/2 which is allowed in ln = 2(d, p) transition is removed by using the corresponding L-value of the 95 Mo (t, p)97 Mo reaction at Et = 12 MeV . Determined value of the sum of spectroscopic factors for transfers of d5/2 neutrons suggests configuration mixing in the ground state of 96 Mo . The properties of the levels in 97 Mo are compared with previous experimental results and theoretical predictions.

NUCLEAR STRUCTURE OF 99Mo FROM THE (t,p) REACTION

The 97 Mo (t,p)99 Mo reaction has been studied with the triton beam energy of 12 MeV obtained from tandem Van de Graaff accelerator at the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment, Aldermaston. Proton spectra were obtained at 12 different angles from 5° to 87.5° at an interval of 7.5° and were detected in nuclear emulsion plates. Angular distributions for transitions to 46 levels in the energy range from 0 to 2.054 MeV have been measured. Absolute differential cross-sections for the levels have been measured. The experimental angular distributions are compared with the distorted-wave Born approximation calculations (DWBA) to determine L and Jπ values. The present results are compared with the previous experimental results and model predictions.

A STUDY OF 97Mo FROM THE (t, p) REACTION

The 97 Mo nucleus has been studied with the reaction 95 Mo (t, p) 97 Mo using a multichannel magnetic spectrograph. The isotopically enriched thin target 95 Mo was bombarded with the 12 MeV triton beam obtained from the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator at the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment, Aldermaston. Proton spectra are obtained at 12 different angles from 5° to 87.5° at an interval of 7.5° and are detected in nuclear emulsion plates. Forty-eight levels in the energy range from 0.000 to 3.189 MeV have been observed. Absolute differential cross-sections for these levels have been measured. The angular distributions are compared with the theoretical distorted-wave Born approximation calculations to determine L and Jπ values. The nuclear properties of 97 Mo are compared with previous experimental results and model predictions.