| Review of: | Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation by Lynn Eden |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Lawrence S. Wittner |
| Reviewed in: | Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: | 27/07/2004 |
| Published in print: | Volume 29, Issue 3/4, Pages 580-611 |
Book Reviews
In this well-written, carefully crafted book, Lynn Eden seeks to explain a curious phenomenon: the fact that, although there have been many detailed U.S. government studies of the explosive effects of nuclear weapons, there has been no substantial U.S. account of the devastating effects of the "mass fire" that they produce.
Eden, associate director of research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, observes that, in most cases, nuclear weapons cause considerably greater damage by fire than by explosion. Indeed, for the higher-yield nuclear weapons that traditionally have dominated U.S and Soviet/Russian arsenals, damage from mass fire ordinarily "would extend two to five times farther than blast damage" (p. 2).
If an average-size strategic nuclear weapon were dropped on the Pentagon, she observes, an area of "approximately 40 to 65 square miles ... would be engulfed in a mass fire," which "would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else" (p. 26). She explains, "Average air temperatures in the areas on fire after the attack would be well above the boiling point of water, winds generated by the fire would be hurricane force, and the fire would burn everywhere at this intensity for three to six hours. Even after the fire burned out, street pavement would be so hot that even tracked vehicles could not pass over it for days, and buried unburned material from collapsed buildings could burst into flames if exposed to air even weeks after the fire" (pp. 35-36). Furthermore, "those who sought shelter in basements of strongly constructed buildings could be poisoned by carbon monoxide seeping in or killed by the oven-like conditions. Those who sought to escape through the streets would be incinerated by the hurricane-force winds laden with firebrands and flames. Even those who could find shelter in lower-level subbasements of massive buildings would likely die of eventual heat prostration, poisoning from fire-generated gases, or lack of water. The fire would eliminate all life in the fire zone" (p. 36).
An important consequence of omitting mass fire effects from U.S. government analyses of nuclear war is to underestimate that kind of war's destructiveness. And this underestimation, in turn, has at least two effects. First, it leads to unnecessarily increasing the number of nuclear weapons developed for national security purposes (i.e., overkill). Second, like fallout shelters and national missile defense, it gives government officials and the public the comforting illusion that nuclear war might not be so bad.
Eden focuses far less on the consequences than on the causes of the omission of mass fire from U.S. nuclear war analyses. Explaining the neglect of mass fire effects in the very extensive U.S. nuclear war-planning operations, she points to organizational inertia-what she and other social scientists call "path dependence"-within the U.S. government. During the 1930s, she argues, U.S. military planners were advocates of strategic bombing, and this laid the groundwork for later developments in which nuclear blasts were considered more useful (and much more easily measured) than the phenomenon of mass fire. She also considers and rejects seven other explanations for the neglect of mass fire, ranging from the alleged unpredictability of fire damage to moral qualms on the part of government officials. In developing her case, Eden makes good use not only of organizational theory but also of numerous government studies and documents (many of them previously classified) and of interviews and correspondence with over 60 U.S. scientists, military officers, and civilians who had been connected with some aspect of nuclear damage prediction.
Although this is a very well-researched, well-argued book, Eden has not considered some other promising explanations for U.S. government negligence. One is that government nuclear war planners did not want to make nuclear war appear even more nightmarish than people already thought it was. After all, government officials refused to acknowledge radiation dangers from nuclear testing and nuclear war on just this basis. Another explanation worth pondering is that nuclear war planners, when confronted with the full catastrophe of nuclear war-a war that, on some level, they realized would thoroughly engulf their friends, families, and themselves-went into what psychologists call "denial." Harold Brode, one of the few scientists who insisted upon examining the effects of mass fire, recalled that when he gave a briefing to a key government agency, it "made a kind of horror story" (p. 228). Is it really surprising that U.S. officials preferred studying the less threatening, more traditional effects of bomb blasts?
Despite the limitations of her organizational analysis, Eden has performed a real service with this book. Those persons interested in bureaucratic behavior will find her insights of considerable interest. And those more focused upon the nuclear arms race and threats to human survival will find considerable reason to conclude that under the presumably reasonable calculations underpinning nuclear war planning lies a deep level of irrationality-perhaps even a kind of insanity.