The last week of August, this dropped into my inbox forwarded by Gerry Pollett: The Sierra Club Grassroots Network Nuclear Free Team is offering the third of it's Nuclear-Free Film Series events, with a free online showing of the Pacific Northwest documentary film,“Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance” available free online from Sept. 1 through September 30th, and concluding with a webinar on Monday, Sept. 30, 5-7 pm PST.
This 46 minute long film is available on Eventive, free with registration from September 1-30th, 2024 LINK: https://watch.eventive.org/scnuclearfree/play/65df9b811095cc004ea923de
The Eventive screenings include a webinar on Monday, September 30th, 5-7 pm PST
Moderated by Mike Carberry, Co-Chair, Sierra Club Nuclear Free Team
LINK: https://sierraclub.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2CNxDUwVSGWZvzFEpIpwEwPlease Please share these links with your contacts and networks.
Having already been made aware of the film by Joshua Frank, I reached out to Pollett, saying I would most definitely share and to please make a note to read my latest blog post.
A week or so into 2024, I caught up with author and professor, Alex Wellerstein, a tenured academic at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
Alex Wellerstein, at Stephens University, 2022
Before our chat, I had played around with one of his many projects, NUKEMAP. At just under 350 million hits to date, NUKEMAP allows one to choose a target, specify the warhead yield in kilotons, and detonate. India’s test in 1998 was at 60 KT, but most strategic weapons today are over 1000 KT.
I’d chosen San Francisco, setting the kilotons at 1000, and boom! The projected explosion took out the city, the fallout extending to Berkeley to the north and part of San Bruno to the south.*
A screenshot of KSB's NUKEMAP scenario, 2024
Wellerstein also worked as a consultant on Manhattan, the 2016 dramatic series set in Los Alamos during the early days of the Manhattan Project. Wellerstein beamed an infectious smile via Zoom as he recounted the call from the show’s producers who asked him to consult.
“They pitched me the show as a sort of Madmen at Los Alamos.” He goes onto to explain the process of developing a TV script around a well-known historical period. “Things get turned around, like another dimension of history. Things that are not seemingly significant at the time, get “turned up” in intensity in a dramatization, in a way that didn’t happen in real time.”
I sit back in my chair, thinking that’s exactly what I did in TANGLES, my debut novel.
Wellerstein continues. “So certain events or occurrences were amplified in the show.” But all “these things (that Wellerstein would suggest to fit their script needs) actually happened in the broader timeline.”
Logo of television drama series, Manhattan, 2016
During production, Wellerstein developed a list of deaths (and their causes) that had occurred at Los Alamos between 1943 and 1950. Very few had to do with the effects of radiation, but the reality-based incidents added great authenticity to the television show.
Wellerstein cited another example. “In Season Two, they needed one of the characters to interact with a judge. I can’t remember exactly why, but they needed this character (and someone from Los Alamos) to end up in a courtroom.” Taking a page from Hanford’s history, Wellerstein suggested land seizures as a legal issue that might have been contested. Many such cases were heard in the contentious early war years when the U.S. Army forced many folks off their land in Eastern Washington for minimal compensation.
“I like works of fiction that approach the substance of the past in this way. The truth is weirder than people know it to be.” He grins again. “If you try to generate fiction from nothing, either you end up with something that is unrealistic, or you end up underestimating the weirdness of reality…making things a little too pat, a little too clean.”
He continued. “I like to explore that space with a deep understanding of what happened. Form the (fictional) possibility space, but not limit the fiction to just repeating what happened.” He’s currently developing a video game with his grad students. A multi-disciplinary project, the game takes place in an imagined post-apocalyptic world.
“This is very interesting for me. A totally different job (to write this game story).”
I note the futuristic subject matter, and ask, “Aren’t you a history professor?”
“Well, I’m a tenured history professor,” he winks. “So I can pretty much do what I want.”
Wellerstein was a computer programmer at one time. “But, I’ve never made a game before.” He notes that games as a medium have interested him for a while. He was also a game player in the 80s and 90s and still plays a bit.*
“To imagine [future] history is intriguing,” he says. And that is what he and his students are doing, imagining the possible world that arises after a nuclear war.
“There’s that word again, possible,” I say.
He points to a shelf full of literature that has done this before and says, “You have to make a lot of choices – like how much gasoline is available in the world post-nuclear war? You have to use your car to get places, but what does the infrastructure look like after a bomb?”
“And then,” he explains. “You have to build that into code.” He scrunches his face, “I mean, how do you communicate about nuclear weapons?” This is a big theme in his career: the language used in the History of Science.
“And how do you craft a game to do that effectively.” That is Wellerstein’s current challenge. The last three years, he’s been having fun meeting it.
I ask about how he approaches the inevitable waste that would be left from such a cataclysmic war, and he segues into how he is staffing the project. At Stevens, he says, “Honor students can get paid to work for professors.”
A scene in Wellerstein's game-in-progress.
His students, familiar with project or team applications, can work remotely to build out the game. And video games, as Wellerstein explains, require lots of different skill sets. “Programmers, writers, researchers, artists, even management of people. I have some students in charge of every aspect.” The student team numbers between 30 and 40 graduate students any given summer.
Wellerstein offers. “Things feel very ripe for games to be used as a medium by experts in a more intentional way.”
“Gaming for good?” I say.
He nods. We segue to his new book project. Besides walking the dog on Thursdays (he's currently on sabbatical), he is working on a new book. “Truman and the Bomb” is a working title. “A new take on that important period.”
“In researching my novel,” I offer. “I learned that one of Truman’s first decisions was to shut down nuclear production, although that didn’t last very long.”
“Truman’s a very complicated guy,” Wellerstein muses. “The bomb, and arguments about him…my hope is that [the book] will make everyone unhappy.” He smiles, “Which is the space I like to occupy.”
I show my delight in that with a thumbs up.
“My take [on Truman} doesn’t fit the norm,” Wellerstein continues. “He’s not the hero and he’s not the villain. He’s a very unsure person, but by a quirk of history, he ends up having a disproportionate influence on how the systems around nuclear get set up.”
President Harry S. Truman, circa 1946
We chat about how Truman’s presidency is sort of glossed over. “Right," agrees Wellerstein.“So many things were going on and his views were not the views of the culture or his advisors.” He pauses for emphasis. “If you put someone else in that position (the presidency) at that time, you would get very different results (global outcomes).
Wellerstein credits Truman for putting a hold on nuclear weapons. “His uncharacteristic restraint and ambivalence about the atomic bomb” played a big part in the fact that Nuclear bombs have not been used since Nagasaki.
He shares an interesting little-known fact about Truman that amused him: “The presidential seal doesn’t get codified until late August 1945. They made it official under Truman.” Wellerstein shoots me a wry smile. “And Truman says, let’s have the eagle face the olive branches – not the arrows – because the war is over. But he also suggests they add lightning bolts to the seal. To signify the U.S. has atomic energy.
Official Presidential Seal of the United States
Truman’s advisors talked him out of that, but Wellerstein finds that kind of idiosyncratic energy fascinating about Truman. “It signaled that the presidency was now indelibly associated with nuclear energy, and Truman thought we should bake it into the seal. Weird.”
I offer how many classified documents I’ve read in horror in my research. We laugh, and I ask Wellerstein to talk about the generation of the idea that became Restricted Data (publication date April 2021).
Book cover of Restricted Data, published April 2021
Wellerstein backs up. “I came to all of this stuff – how to talk about nuclear in history – through an intellectual route. Unlike folks who were scientists concerned about the use of the science, or activists who had a personal experience with nuclear fallout, Wellerstein’s journey was an academic route. “In a serendipitous way,” he recalls.
At Berkeley in 1999, he worked as an editorial assistant in a tiny sub-discipline-department: The History of Science and Technology. He put the professors’ journals together. Few of his peers had heard of the department, but Wellerstein was drawn to it. He adds, “No one in my family had a PhD. My father was a public defender in the Central Valley and my mother was in human resources for the State of California.” But these professors opened up a different world to him.
Logo for the department of the History of Science and Technology
He holds my gaze through the Zoom lens. “How do we know this or that? How do we know – as a society – anything really? And what do we do with knowledge? How does that drive decision-making in other domains like politics?”
Wellerstein dove into a variety of topics during this time, but he was most interested in “applying scientific knowledge in social spheres.” He also did a lot of work around the history of eugenics.
I note that multiple historical fiction novels have centered on that topic. Wellerstein found it fascinating, but admits he is “terrible at science and much better at historical research.” He confesses that he got hooked on the History of Science when he read a paper on the history of thermometers.
I roll my eyes.
“I know, you think, how boring would that be? But the thermometer was invented well before they had a good theory of heat. So how do you invent an instrument that measures a thing you don’t understand?” He grins. “I find that kind of thing really fun.”
He also had a professor who studied German nuclear research, during and after WWII. So he became more interested in atomic history, took courses, and ended up writing a thesis on UC Berkeley’s role in managing the nuclear weapons laboratories (built during the Manhattan Project and Cold War years).
The University of California originally managed both Los Alamos and Livermore (the federally funded research and development center named after Lawrence Livermore, originally established in 1952 as the UC Radiation Laboratory in response to the Soviets’ detonation of their first atomic bomb (1949). Both labs are autonomous now.*
Aerial view of the Livermore National Laboratory
He’s fascinated by “the contradiction of Berkeley being this very left-wing anti-nuclear, nuclear weapons-free zone, but also one of the major players in the development of nuclear weapons.” In graduate school, he discovered the topic he enjoyed writing about the most was nuclear weapons.
He explains that mandated secrecy is a conflict. “Science is about how you spread knowledge and secrecy is the opposite process.”
He pitched his doctoral advisor at Harvard on the implications of that: nuclear weapons and secrecy.
His advisor asked, “Has that been done?”
Alex replied, “I don’t think so.”
And his advisor said, “Alright.”
Wellerstein wrote his dissertation on that in 2005-2006, which was the genesis of his book Restricted Data.
I interrupt him to say. “Wait, you’re my protagonist.”
I explain how Luke, in my debut novel, decides to write his dissertation on nuclear waste, including the secrecy that was still in place in the fall of 1963. I tell Wellerstein, “Now, whenever I’m reading my book out loud, I’m going to have your face in my mind.”
Wellerstein and KSB in conversation via Zoom, January 2024
Alex confesses he sort of “wandered into this situation of being a (history of nuclear science) expert, but it’s worked out pretty well.” He’s involved in policy discussions now, and public communications work.
I ask if those policy discussions include the new modular nuclear reactors and the inevitable waste. “I don’t do things that have to do with nuclear power,” Wellerstein offers, but he has “a lot of colleagues committed on both sides, pro and con.”
He’s more concerned with “what kinds of checks are in place to avoid the use of nuclear weapons.” He’s been doing a lot of policy work around presidential powers, i.e., singular authority to use nuclear weapons, and the oversight in place to guide that sort of decision.
A faux 'red button' scenario
“How do you prevent - not just inadvertent nuclear war - but very poorly considered nuclear war?” In light of today’s burgeoning conflicts, that question, though rhetorical, gives me pause.
He asks if I know Allison MacFarlane, the former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An expert on nuclear waste, MacFarlane holds a doctorate in geology from MIT. She was on the Obama Blue Ribbon Commission on Yucca Mountain, and is not a fan of the storage at Yucca. She is anti-nuclear power, citing the problem: “Most of the nuclear sites in the US were chosen before the scientific community accepted the theory of plate tectonics.”
Allison MacFarlane, former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
“As in,” Wellerstein intones, “are these seismically good places to put nuclear reactors? “ And the Feds’ answer is: “Well, that’s not why they chose them.”
“What I always tell my students about Hanford [the thinking of the time], is, “this waste stuff? Someone in the future will figure out how to handle it.” He shoots me a sardonic smile. “Or, they thought, we’ll just put it in these temporary tanks, and someone will come put it into real tanks.”
He cites his favorite part of J. Samuel Walker’s book, The Road to Yucca Mountain. “Walker, the former historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recounts this moment when Oppenheimer is making these decisions about waste management.” Wellerstein explains, “I think it’s specifically about Hanford.”
“This guy who is a sanitation engineer tells Oppenheimer, “Frankly, you just don’t know what you are talking about. You’re a very good physicist, but this is not about nuclear physics. This is about water movement. This is about how materials handle being in dirt after years and years.”” The sanitation engineer knew this was going to be infinitely more complicated than the physicist who thought, “Oh, just isolate the waste and nothing will happen to it.”
And the sanitation engineer educates Oppenheimer, saying, “Eventually water will get to it, and the waste will leak out and there is no easy solution to that.” *
Wellerstein loves this scene. “It’s the perfect example of folks making decisions without having knowledge of the long-term consequences of the decision. The decision-makers often don’t realize the complexity of the issue. And it’s no surprise things don’t work out the way they thought it would.”
Wellerstein elaborates on why he likes Walker’s work. “He always comes in with an analysis at the end that’s doesn’t spare-punch it.” The Road to Yucca Mountain includes Hanford references.
“Walker concludes that the AEC bungled this (the waste issue) one hundred percent, and why exactly. It’s not that they are evil SOBs. But they overestimated their competency. They had a paternalistic attitude toward all the people and places they dealt with. They didn’t listen to critics. They didn’t peer review anything. They didn’t take the issue seriously as a political issue. So, by the time they (the AEC) realized how sensitive this could be, it had become something they couldn’t control.”
Wellerstein continues. “The AEC attempts to control it were heavy-handed. They failed. Took shortcuts where they shouldn’t have. And made this problem much worse than it needed to be.”
Wellerstein goes deeper. “You can’t guarantee that the waste would be isolated from the world for the next 10,000 years. But you could handle it in a way that the odds of the waste doing harm are very low compared to whatever benefit you might get from it (the nuclear production).”
“They could have messaged this in a way that was professionally and politically understood.” Wellerstein sighs. “But they didn’t do that.” He adds, “And now nobody knows what to do with the waste.”
I shake my head. “Nobody knows. What a mess.”
Alex agrees, “It’s a mess not only technically, but politically. And no one knows the way forward.” He stares off. “It’s like the worst of all possible worlds, right?”
I nod, thinking of my seven grandchildren, and what they are inheriting. We talk a bit about the current issues at Hanford regarding the cleanup.
Wellerstein offers, “If there was one aspect of the American nuclear system at a high policy level that I would change – if I could wave a wand- it would be [over] the contractor system...the capitalism, the government largess – you would be better with a pure government solution - a civil service approach.”
Eliminate the profit motive,” I say.
Wellerstein nods. “If there’s no profit motive, then, if people screwed it up, they get fired.”
He continues. “But private contractor screw-ups become a political liability. And everything the contractor system touches – especially national infrastructure – turns to S&@$! Gaming of the contractor system, including lobbying and patronage problems, scads of money being spent on what?”
His voice raises with alarm at the waste of it all. “These contractors get a bonus (for meeting some contract goal) and then the next month it turns out: Oh, oops, none of the cameras worked and this tank is leaking and we didn’t know.”
“My one personal interaction with the system was very minor,” he says. The DOE funded some of the work of the History of Science Department. Wellerstein shakes his head. “It was bizarre. I’d been hired by these professors, but I was paid by the government contractor. I was technically an employee of this little-nothing corporation that handled payroll.” The company took a cut for doing this even though the University had a payroll department.
“But at some point in the 90s, they had passed a law where these contracts would go to a woman, a minority, or a veteran-owned small business. A well-intentioned idea, but larger companies split up and offered someone who fit the criteria to be the figurehead of a company who could qualify for the contract.” He grins. “Pay them to do nothing.”
“So, money is being siphoned up into some larger holding company…the whole thing is a scam.” Wellerstein continues. “It's not surprising. Create the conditions, folks game the system.”
He rolls his eyes. “Couldn’t we just make a better world?”
We both laugh. And I pivot to asking about the compartmentalization.
Wellerstein agrees that “it was the biggest negative during the war, and after as well.”
What came up for him was how many folks in the system think they know what is going on. “They have clearance or access, in theory,” he explains. “But because of the compartmentalization, not just at the sites, but between agencies and other government entities,” he says (think the President, the FBI, the AEC, the workers on any site). “Nobody was able to see the truth of the big picture.”
Some classified documents are still redacted. “Which pushes back on the theory that those with clearance knew what was going on.” He shakes his head. “Clearance didn’t mean that.” In his work now, he says that viewing formerly secret documents, and knowing what happened, gives him a perspective that was not available to those at the time.
“Even to the President of the United States.” He sits back in his chair. “So, my Truman book, a lot of it is about what Truman does and doesn’t know.” He goes on. “Trumans thinks he knows, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
Another rabbit hole, I think to myself as Wellerstein continues.
“There’s a great moment, in late ’46 or early ’47, when Truman explicitly does not know how many nuclear bombs are in the arsenal.” Wellerstein rubs his forehead in wonder. “And tells his cabinet that he'd rather not know.” And Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace circles back to Truman, and says, “We think that the President should know this. maybe you can designate who shouldn’t know, but you should’ve asked.”
Wellerstein rakes his hand through his hair. “It’s an amazing idea that a president would rather not know something like that.”
In July 1945, Truman authorized the bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. “So Truman approves of that test, not knowing he has authorized the detonation of one-third of America’s nuclear arsenal.”
Alex shrugs. “That’s a pretty big percentage but Truman thought they had more bombs than they did.”
We talk a bit about how the scientists at Hanford tested everything, the soil, the river, the groundwater, the air. Alex says he didn’t know about a lot of that testing, but when he teaches, he often reiterates “that the level of complexity when you are talking about radiation in the environment is much higher than you might imagine if you’re only talking about radiation as a little atom being shot out of a little thing (think accelerator).” He reiterates that the physicist’s view is limited.
“When it comes to the environment you are talking about a chemistry and a biology. And an etiology, and how things move through a world. Something goes off here, and now, over there, it’s concentrated in utters of cows.” He spins his hands in a mixing motion. “And this is how it gets into your baby’s teeth.”
He talks about how things concentrate in your body, your bones, your thyroid. “It’s one of the hazards and one of the really stupid things - that came out of Los Alamos and building the bombs - is it elevated the physicists. “Here’s the guy who can tell you how this works. But very few have any expertise on health and the environment.”
He says, “Radioactive material can move into the environment in ways that can lead to long-term chronic health problems. And half-life is less significant than the dose. The dose matters. And also, whose bodies are we talking about? Are we talking about babies? Pregnant women? That’s a different long-term outcome than say, old men.”
“When people talk about animals, they say – well why aren’t the deer getting cancer? Well, A. There are no deer families weeping about it. B. Deer don’t live long lives compared to the gestation rate of the cancer. But humans do.”
Wellerstein remembers he never answered my question about how fallout was modeled in the game project. “We modeled the fallout very realistically. We created tremendous amounts of things the gamer will never see, which is annoying.”
He laughs. “But the war scenario is modeled in a detailed way, and we’ve seeded in reasonably accurate dispersion models and all sorts of things, so that climate-wise and health-wise, it’s plausible.”
He hopes to show realistic health outcomes if you survive the whole thing. For example, how much radiation a player picks up along the way, which the game measures constantly.
I ask what else he hopes to achieve with the game.
“One of my goals for the game is to give that kind of information in a non-didactic fashion.” He doesn’t want to lecture folks on how fallout works. “But I want players to come away with a fairly accurate understanding of the practical impacts of fallout.”
In summary, he hopes the game will deliver that information in an easily consumable fashion. “The practical side of it.”
Practicality is a big part of this game’s space, and some folks may be unhappy with it. But that’s okay with Wellerstein.
*More info on the specifics in this post at the follwoing links:
Comments