Plesset knew that Frank Collbohm, RAND’s president, loved a good secret and this was the greatest of the decade, maybe the century. Plesset told Collbohm that the H-bomb was soon to be a reality. Then he made a proposition. What if a few RAND analysts got together and analyzed the implications of such a weapon—its physics, its destructive magnitude, its technical and strategic and military implications. RAND could time the study so that it would be ready for briefings at just the moment that Los Alamos officially announced the weapon’s feasibility to the Administration. Everyone would be interested in hearing the briefing—the Air Staff, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, probably the President of the United States. RAND could make a substantial dent on the course of history.
Plesset had already arranged such a deal with Los Alamos director Norris Bradbury, using a similar sort of appeal. When you announce the bomb’s feasibility, Plesset had told Bradbury, Los Alamos should be in a position to interpret its implications, and that’s where RAND comes in.
Bradbury had agreed. So, predictably, did Collbohm.
The physics division was generally not on good terms with much of the rest of RAND. For security reasons, an electronic door separated the physicists from all the other divisions. Physicists looked down on social science and economics: their attitude was that doing things like designing a bomb was real science, and that the business about analysis was peripheral at best.
By the early 1950s, even John Williams was disappointed with the social science division. It wasn’t turning out to be what he had envisioned its becoming. He privately referred to Hans Speier, the division’s director, as “that Prussian staff officer.” He thought that Speier was running the place too much like some Teutonic library, that too many of the people Speier hired were using RAND as a base from which they could research their doctoral dissertations.
The physicists were particularly scornful. They had no use for even the best material produced by the social science group. Once, Hans Speier approached Herman Kahn, a frantically voluble analyst in the physics division, thinking he would score points on Kahn by raising the subject of a book that Nathan Leites of the social science division had written, The Operational Code of the Politburo, which had been hailed by reviewers as the first systematic analysis of how the Kremlin makes the decisions.
“Doesn’t something like the Leites book change your opinion of the social science division?” Speier asked.
“I read The New York Times,” Kahn responded. “What the hell should I read Nathan Leites for?”
In return, many of the social science and economics divisions looked upon the physicists as arrogant elitists who knew nothing about politics, who foolishly thought that all problems could be solved by hardware, and whose inbred tendencies and extreme secrecy were inimical to the pursuit of scholarship and to the very purpose of RAND.
Still, for this project on the implications of the hydrogen bomb, Plesset knew that the other divisions of RAND would be of invaluable assistance. He picked three other analysts to work on the project with him: Charlie Hitch, head of the economics division; Jim Lipp, head of the missiles division; and Bernard Brodie, a new employee with social science.
The choices were the obvious ones to make. Hitch had assessed bomb damage in World War II. He would be ideal for calculating how much damage the hydrogen bomb could do to the Soviet economy. Brodie had written the book on the strategic implications of the atomic bomb, The Absolute Weapon, and had done targeting analysis for General Vandenberg. He would be best for thinking through this new weapon’s strategic impact. Lipp, a highly competent scientist who had directed RAND’s project on earth-circling satellites, was assigned the task of figuring out the tactical implications of the H-bomb in a European war. Plesset gave himself the job of presenting details on the Super’s technical aspects, with assistance from others in the physics division who would do some calculations for him without knowing of this particular project’s existence. It was a very secretive affair.
In December 1951, the four-man team began work. At the beginning, it was a rather mechanical task. Plesset knew from Los Alamos scientists that the H-bomb could release the explosive energy of one million or five million or ten or twenty million tons of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb, by comparison, had released the equivalent of twenty thousand tons—or twenty kilotons. A new term had been invented for the grander scale of the H-bomb: megaton. Plesset and some others in physics drew some “lay-down” circles, indicating the radius of various types of damage—blast, heat, prompt radiation (nobody as yet knew about fallout)—produced by bombs of one to twenty megatons. Hitch, Brodie and Lipp took these circles and laid them over maps of various kinds of targets—cities, built-up industrial complexes, battlefields—scaled to the same dimension as the circles.
Suddenly the work was not so merely mechanical anymore. It became, for some on the project, the most dissettling and gruesome work they had ever encountered.
Charlie Hitch had grown somewhat inured to looking at the consequences of strategic bombing while working at RE-8 in England during World War II. But the analysts at RE-8 had measured the damage in terms of thousands of square feet. Plesset’s damage circles showed that a five- or ten-megaton hydrogen bomb would kill people within 50 square miles of ground zero, and would severely burn people’s skin and topple buildings within 300 square miles. At RE-8, Hitch had dealt with bombing raids involving hundreds of airplanes, producing thousands—at the very most, tens of thousands—of civilian casualties. Laying Plesset’s circles on various maps revealed that a mere fifty-five H-bombs of twenty megatons each would completely wipe out the fifty largest cities of the Soviet Union, killing thirty-five million Russians, all in a matter of minutes. And that assumed that the urban population would have the protection of World War II-type shelters. Even when Hitch, along with Brodie, tried to simulate attacks that would damage the most important industrial complexes while minimizing casualties, ten or eleven million Soviet civilians would die.
A later generation of defense analysts would toss these figures around with casual aplomb; but in early 1952, nobody had ever dreamed of such massive destruction. Nobody had ever killed 35 million people on a sheet of paper before. To those who did it for the first time, the experience was shocking, disturbing and painful.
Charlie Hitch’s wife called John Williams’ wife one morning and asked, “What’s happening at RAND? Charlie comes home, he barely says hello, he’s uncivil, and after dinner he just locks himself up in his study. Something terrible is going on there.”
For Jim Lipp, it was too much to bear. He was a gentle man, the sort of person who told friends that when it came to nuclear weapons, he cared about his grandchildren and his grandchildren’s grandchildren. Lipp laid Plesset’s damage circles over a map of Western Europe to see how many soldiers and civilians would be killed if H-bombs were used on the battlefield. After doing some calculations, he discovered that, even under the best of circumstances, nearly two million people would be killed. He nearly threw up. After three weeks of this sort of work, lasting late into the night nearly every night, Lipp dropped out of the project. (His work was taken over by Ed Paxson of RAND’s mathematics division, and was eventually incorporated into Brodie’s portion of the briefing.)