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Technology and Culture 45.4 (2004) 764-777



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The City as Communications Net

Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal

Civilian defense, particularly the security of large cities, has lately been a prominent focus of government and popular attention. This article deals with a manuscript by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert Wiener that dates from an earlier period in which such concerns spurred vigorous debates over the value, moral direction, and appropriate social role of technology. In the months following August 1949, when the Soviets broke the American monopoly on atomic weapons, contention over weapons policy and the role of civilian defense reached new heights. Willing, even eager, to engage, and confident in the power of rationality, scientists and engineers began to apply their expertise in what were, for them, unprecedented ways. Encouraged by their successes during the war, some turned to the problems of cold war defense and winning the peace in the atomic age. Wiener's manuscript is one of numerous efforts to put forward applied knowledge as an antidote to technology's own destructive potential.

In 1950, soon after finishing his cybernetics manifesto The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener drafted an impromptu article on a subject ostensibly far removed from his primary interests in feedback control and information theory. It was a radical plan to redesign American cities in an attempt to solve problems of industrial concentration and urban congestion that he believed made them vulnerable to atomic attack. After completing the draft, he enlisted as collaborators two MIT colleagues and friends, the political scientist Karl W. Deutsch and the historian of science Giorgio de Santillana, who fleshed out Wiener's prose with some of their own. The trio also consulted with members of the MIT urban planning department and others concerned with civilian defense. [End Page 764]

The manuscript apparently never made it into print, despite the collaborators' efforts. Its only public trace was a December 1950 feature in Life magazine, in which the three authors were interviewed about their "preparedness plan."1 Life's interest had been triggered by the unforeseen entrance of Communist China into the Korean War, which suddenly raised the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. The plan referred to in that interview does not appear in Wiener's bibliography as one of his publications, but we were able to track down the manuscript among his papers in the MIT archives.2 The undated document, almost certainly composed in the months leading up to the Life interview, appears in several drafts, the final version of which bears the title "Cities that Survive the Bomb." Although Deutsch and de Santillana are named as coauthors, Wiener was the principal writer and originator of the plan.

To our knowledge, the manuscript represents Wiener's only foray into this subject, even though he wrote passionately at times on the Manhattan Project and the social and scientific significance of the Bomb. Except for this essay, his main writings about society revolved around information theory, the new doctrine of cybernetics, and automation.

Though urban design was not at the center of Wiener's interests, we see evidence in this manuscript of broader moral concerns coming out of the war, both his and those of other scientists and engineers. Moreover, the manuscript opens a window on the reactions of both contemporary urban planners and scientists to the implications of the atomic bomb. Among other things, it has led us to a little-examined series of publications by atomic physicists and other scientists about the dispersal of cities under the shadow of the Bomb.

Post-Hiroshima Angst

The stunning and dramatic end to the war in the Pacific continued to imprint itself onto American public life in the years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon after the bombing, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey raised an "insistent question": "What if the target for the bomb had been an American city?"3 It noted that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because of the concentration of activities and population...

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