Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (review)

This is a grim but fascinating book, with a seemingly simple question at its heart: Why, despite extraordinary resources and a near half-century of gruesome practical experience, did U.S. war planners manage to ignore or dismiss the effects of fire in their studies of the effects of nuclear weapons? But Whole World on Fire is more than just another with-how-little-wisdom-is-the-world-governed complaint. Lynn Eden methodically examines the reasons why this rather monumental lacuna existed, and indeed persists. It is, predictably, not a pretty story, from any perspective. Arguably the most arresting, and disturbing, part of Whole World on Fire is the beginning, where Eden describes the effect that a 300-kiloton bomb exploded directly above the Pentagon would have upon metropolitan Washington, D.C., and its environs.

In retrospect, the talent, money, and resources that went into the government's official thinking about the unthinkable during the cold war is, by itself, a story worthy of a book. Although a scary tale, it is not without some elements of comic relief. Fifty years ago, in the remote reaches of the Nevada desert, pigs were dressed in army uniforms to test the flammability of fabrics exposed to the heat from exploding atomic bombs. (One cannot help but wonder: if enlisted men were assigned the task, did they suit the animals up as officers?) Because of the bomb, the federal government and its contractors also got into the unlikely business of interior decorating. Seeking verisimilitude in the houses and furnishings it burned or blew up, an Illinois-based testing laboratory became "the biggest customer of Goodwill in Chicago" (p. 212).

The protagonist of Eden's tale is Harold ("Hal") Brode, a physicist and nuclear-weapons-effects expert at the peaceful-sounding Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation, a think tank that does classified work for the Pentagon. For decades, Brode has been involved in a crusade to get the U.S. government to recognize a fact that, after the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Toyko, and Hiroshima, should have been obvious: large-scale aerial attacks, whether with conventional or nuclear weapons, cause mass casualties not only from blast damage but also from fires. The worst case is when atmospheric conditions and available fuel conspire to create a firestorm, a holocaust of flame that bakes or sucks the life out of even those huddled in deep underground shelters. After its devastating effects were demonstrated, almost by accident, at Hamburg, fire became the weapon of choice for Allied air forces over Germany and Japan.

Brode did eventually achieve some success in getting U.S. war planners to face facts, but his was something of a pyrrhic victory: the cold war disappeared just as he was beginning to make some headway, and with it the likelihood of massive nuclear attack.

Whole World on Fire is likely to appeal to a rather specialized audience, one attracted to chapters with titles like "Solving the Puzzle of Air Blast Pressure." That said, it should also be noted that Eden has carefully sorted through and analyzed an impressive number of technical studies, declassified government documents, and secondary sources on weapons effects. The framework of the book is her lengthy correspondence and interviews with Brode. Yet, notwithstanding Eden's earnest scholarship and the sociological theories that underpin her study, one suspects that there may be less to the story than is presented here. The ideological blinkers of entrenched bureaucracies like the U.S. Air Force seem, on balance, the most likely explanation of why a phenomenon so big and well demonstrated would be ignored for so long. Air forces, then as now, were built to drop bombs, and the effects of those bombs are what planners like to and know how to measure.

Not surprisingly, Eden's study shows that organizations tend to continue doing what they think they do best and can repeat predictably. But the effects of fires—dependent as...