Comments on Lynn Eden’s Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, & Nuclear Weapons Devastation

Abstract

In a book well deserving of the Merton Award, Lynn Eden (2004) lays out her overarching thesis imaginatively, clearly, and with impressive scholar ship. She asks: why has the US government seriously underestimated for more than a half-century the damage that nuclear weapons would cause? Why did it develop detailed knowledge about blast damage, but fail to develop it about the even more devastating effects of mass fire damage? This asymmetrical government approach persisted despite the history of shocking fire damage during World War II in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden. Professor Eden searched for an answer in count less relevant reports and interviews carefully documented in her prodigious footnotes. Eden concludes that shortly after World War II those in the USA analyzing and predicting nuclear weapons damage concluded that fire damage involved too many variables to allow prediction. The relevant agencies remained committed to this conclusion for reasons Eden takes pains to explain. Yet I find also persuasive a reason that she does not emphasize. In a subordinated section of her book, she asks if most of the military and the Pentagon civilians responsible for predicting nuclear bomb damage ig nored fire because they found the effects too horrible to contemplate. Or to put it differently, did the US government's announced policy of precision bombing of military and industrial targets and its emphasis upon blast damage make nuclear war more acceptable to those who would wage war and to the public? Eden does acknowledge, 'After World War II, U.S. war planners did not want to think of nuclear weapons as incendiary weapons and therefore did not attend to the problem of developing a methodology to predict fire damage from them' (p. 46). On the other hand, I can imagine that many of the military and civilians analyzing the effect of nuclear weapons may have been mainly concerned about moral repugnance on the part of the citizenry. If in formed about fire damage, it might have effectively opposed the build up of nuclear weapons during the Cold War out of fear of reprisals.