How Ironic if the Cold Warriors were Right about Russia

All the time I was at RAND and in all the years afterwards, when I read the views of the "cold warriors", I dismissed their arguments that Russia was in some sense evil. Yes, they were an adversary and Stalinism and Marxist/Leninist doctrine caused a lot of (to my mind) needless suffering of their own people and many people who were in some real sense "innocent". But I never really bought the "evil empire" schtick. How ironic, if the Cold Warriors were "right" and Russians turn out to be barbarians who are a threat to civilization. How ironic and disappointing.

 

Norton Sales and Equipment from the Apollo Program

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In the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley is a warehouse that contains elements of the now-distant space program of the 1960s.  Remember.  There was a prophecy that going to space would capture the hearts and minds of the world and give our civilization a sense of being great.  When science mattered.  When people and nations could be better than they were.  When racism and poverty could be eliminated and we could "reach for the stars".  Belief in the possibility of peace on earth.  There was such a time.

But projects end and some of them get terminated early and that was the case with the Apollo program.  What happened to all those people and all that equipment and those dreams?   The people were discarded.  The equipment was sold when regulations allowed.  The dreams were postponed.

So in the distant past, someone by the name of Norton was able to navigate the incredibly complicated regulations around buying used government equipment.  Maybe he knew someone and he must have had some money.  So at some point trucks containing equipment of various types was moved to a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley and various people sorted, disassembled, scrapped, and repurposed equipment that once had a lofty purpose.

Today what is left of this equipment is still there, in the back of the warehouse and can be rented as props for movies, tv shows, etc.  Three very nice people and one cat work there.   They let Jill and I wander at will through their warehouse and it made this history seem more real.

 

Norton Sales, inc.

7429 Laurel Canyon Blvd

North Hollywood, CA 91605

Carlos Guzman, President

(818) 765-1087

www.nortonsalesinc.com

company email: nortonsalesm@aol.com

 

The Death of Stalin

A fun movie about the shenanigans that occurred when First Secretary Joseph Stalin died.  It helps to have a sense of humor about mass murder.  Not too much blood on screen.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/

Introducing Alisa Elega Shevchenko Glamourous Russian Cybercriminal

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We end 2016 on Global Wahrman with a note of hope in a world otherwise diminished by death, war, greed, and hypocrisy.

The Obama Administration, in one of its final acts, has published a list of Soviet, I mean Russian, firms and individuals implicated in the DNC hack. Those of us who are concerned about the lack of women in computing, particularly the important new field of Cybercrime, can take heart by the inclusion of poster child Alisa Elega Shevchenko on this list.

Although she modestly claims to have no idea what people are talking about, adolescent men and some women can be encouraged by her excellent photograph which could have come right out of Soviet Vogue.

Please give a warm welcome to Alisa Elega Shevchenko.

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/12/accidental-mastermind-dnc-hack/134266/?oref=d-river

New Russian Super Torpedo and the New Cold War

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Today we are going to ask some questions about this alleged Russian Superweapon, the Torpedo From Hell, the Status-6. Get your booties on, because we are going to slog through some messy Cold War logic in a few paragraphs.

If you know nothing about this latest scare from Russia, the best article I know about it is on Foxtrot Alpha and can be found here.

Here is what you are supposed to gather about this torpedo. First, it wasn't an accidental leak, the Russians want us to know about it. Second, it may or may not exist, and if it exists, it probably doesn't do everything that it claims to do because some of those things are *really hard* and if you could really do them you might want to keep it a secret. Third, we already knew that they had nasty ways of blowing us up and spreading radioactive death for a long time.

So what is this all about then? The Russians have made it clear that they do not like our little missile shield. Why is a bit of a puzzle and is discussed below but it is very clear that they do not like the shield at all. But we have refused to stop deploying it for whatever reason (also discussed below). So my guess, purely a guess, is that they are presenting this torpedo (underwater missile) as a way of saying “See! We don't really care about your missile shield because we can blow you up anyway! So there!”

Now, what is a little weird about this is that the missile shield that we have and are likely to have in the next decade or so falls loosely into two types. One type is a tactical “Patriot” missile type, developed in part by the Israelis. The other is a strategic missile type developed on our own that uses the Navy SM6 (Standard Missile 6) to the best of my knowledge. The tactical missile defense is a pretty good defense against a fair number of tactical missiles at one time. These missiles that they defend against can certainly cause a lot of damage but they will not destroy Tel Aviv without an awful lot of work.

The strategic missile shield is what we are probably talking about here. The thing about this is that the Russians have nothing to worry about from it. Why? Because in time of nuclear war, the Russians could easily launch enough missiles to overwhelm this shield. This shield is good for a few missiles, maybe, certainly not the tsunami of missiles one would expect if we were in a nuclear war with the Russians.

So what is this shield good for? Two things. The first would be one or two missiles that were launched by mistake or in some way were launched by a rogue site that was not under control of its nominal government. And the second thing it could be useful for is in defense against a few missiles from a country like Iran or N. Korea who only has a few nuclear weapons available at one time and maybe also only a few relatively primitive intercontinental missiles to deliver them with.

So the point of the Status-6 may be to say something like, “We spit on your missile shield! See, we can go around it with our nifty torpedo!”. Ok, fine, but the missile shield was not aimed (so to speak) at Russia, so its all a little puzzling.

Maybe it has more to do with influencing people who are not very sophisticated at this, like the populations of Europe and Asia who are easily frightened? Of course people should be frightened about nuclear war, but I do not see how defending against loony toons like Iran and N. Korea could possibly threaten Russia.

But one thing you can be sure of, this is the kind of nuke vs nuke, spy vs spy thing that happened in the Cold War all the time. And maybe it is about prestige and appearances.  Or maybe it is about something I know nothing about. So welcome to the new Cold War.

Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Coast? Don't Worry.

updated 11/6/2016

Apparently, a few weeks ago a diver off the coast of British Columbia was diving in a place he did not normally go and came across something really weird. It was a big metal artifact with large hemispheres the size of basketballs on it. It looked like a prop from a Science Fiction movie from the 1950s or 1960s. What could it possibly be?

A Mark IV with all its pieces and covers on

So when he got up to the surface he drew a picture and started asking around. No one had any idea until someone who had been around a long time suggested that he had found “the lost bomb”. You know, one of them nuclear things that the US lost off the coast of Canada when an early bomber crashed.

Golly, what could be more fun than a 60 or so year old nuclear bomb?

If this is the missing bomb, then it is indeed a bomb but not a nuclear one exactly. It would be a dummy Mark IV, a very early type of fission bomb, that did not have any plutonium, although it did have conventional explosives. In fact it is not exactly clear what was dropped, but it was a dummy they tell us.

So the Canadian Navy was interested and said they would check it out and we are waiting for their findings.

But what is fun about the article, other than the discovery itself, is the comments from the readers who are sure, totally certain, absolutely KNOW that the US lied and this is a real live nuclear bomb waiting to go off.

I have no doubt that the finding, if it is indeed the lost dummy bomb, should be treated with care and disposed of, as it is quite possibly an environmental danger of some sort, leaking nasty stuff into the water, such as a whole lot of decaying conventional explosives.

But it is almost certainly not a live nuclear bomb. How do I know this?

Because we (the USA) may not always be right, and we may lie about stuff from time to time, and, yes, we may do stupid things now and again, but, generally speaking, we do not leave unexploded nuclear bombs lying off the coast of the Pacific Northwest in shallow waters.

Honest, we don't. If it had really been a nuclear bomb, we would have spared no expense to find and dispose of it. We may be stupid, but we are not that stupid.

See the article at the Guardian website here.

_____________________________________


Updated 11/6/2016.  OK, I have done a little more research.  The released dummy bomb from the February 1950 event exploded on impact with the ocean.  It contained the HE (high explosive) and uranium elements but not the plutonium core and thus had zero chance of causing a nuclear explosion.  This explains why they did not search for and retrieve the dummy as whatever they dropped would have been destroyed in the HE explosion.

If we can believe what they tell us, and I think in this case that it is likely that we can, then whatever was found is unrelated to the B-36 crash and the dummy Mark IV.


_____________________________________


Wikipedia page on the Mark IV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_4_nuclear_bomb

Wikipedia page on the bomber that crashed, the B-36 which was a really weird airplane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker

Photoshop and the Ethics of Reverse Manipulation

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At this point we are all inundated with obviously and not so obviously faked images that have passed through a photoshop session.  What would Facebook be without a suitably cropped and modified photograph per day with some obnoxious political agenda attached? Even so, although our news media outlets are notorious for manipulating the news and evidence, there are some of us who would like to think that they keep it to a minimum and unconscious level.

But what happens when we have a news story with an attached photograph that is almost certainly, obviously modified?  Should it be used anyway, or modified, faked if you will, to be less apparently false?

Is lying allowed if it increases the likelihood that an otherwise true story will be believed?

We have a particularly egregious example in the photograph used in the Reuters article about a recently convicted arsonist, see German Man Convicted of Setting Dozens of Fires in Los Angeles.

Oh, those fiery eyes! 

This is an entertaining example of a photograph that looks faked for editorial purposes even if, by some strange chance, it turns out not to be faked  How likely is it that the alleged (and now convicted) arsonist should happen to get "red eye" in this circumstance?

Anyone looking at it, though, might reasonably think it had been modified, and therefore, perhaps it should have been modified, possibly for a second time, to make it appear less manipulated even if by doing so it was in reality more manipulated.  Or would this be even worse, hiding from the public as it were the evidence of the original modification?

For those of you interested in the history of manipulating photographs for evidence or political purposes and are unaware that it has a long tradition, you could do worse than start by reading David King's acclaimed book “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia” which you may find on that great evader of Austrian sausage taxes, Amazon.com.

https://www.amazon.com/Commissar-Vanishes-Falsification-Photographs-Stalins/dp/0805052941

Believe it or else, this is an important topic in the aesthetics and practice of visual effects.  In visual effects we often have the problem that something  that is correct (either in real life or because our simulation says it is correct) looks wrong.  And in visual effects, something that looks wrong will not achieve its purpose with the audience and will call attention to itself in an undesirable manner.

Now on the other hand, if our purpose was to show our convicted arsonist had been possessed by the Devil, then this photograph, modified or not, would have been just fine.

The Flawed Approach to Man From UNCLE (2015) or Will They Ever Learn?

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About half way through the Warner Bros film “Man from UNCLE”, Illya Kuryakin tries to make the case for a Russian architect having designed and built the Spanish Steps in Rome. It seemed out of place somehow in the movie I was watching, but when the movie was over I realized where this anomaly had come from.

It would seem that the one character trait unique to any of the characters in this film that actually had its origins in the original TV series was this particular running gag. Whenever some invention, or creative work, was part of the story, Illya would always explain how it had actually been composed, or invented, in Russia. This running gag, used once, the names of some of the characters and the title of the movie itself were the only references to the original show to be found in the movie.

You might think that if you were going to bother to do a reboot of a 1960s TV series, that you would want to carefully review and select elements from the original and use them in a reboot, doing a best of, as it were, and make a contemporary entertainment product that properly also captured and moved forward what it was that made the original show notable.

Furthermore, you might choose to do this and do it well not for the sake of creative integrity but for hard core business reasons. The success of your roughly 100M $US investment depends on creating a powerful version of this property, to both get the original viewers, the teenage viewers, and as many of the inbetween that you can. There are models for this sort of thing, where it has been done successfully, and where it has not. And what we learn is that where it has not been done well, the movie has flopped. But when it has been done well, the marketing has been straightforward and the movie has been successful.

The lesson is, do it well or not at all.

The good news is that a certain amount of this can be checked before production begins. You can make use of a time honored but now sadly neglected feature of the traditional cinema which is called “the script”. Yes, you can write a script and have it reviewed by people who know the original, as well as by people who know modern action movies.

Having done this, it is also useful to cast actors who bring the script to life, and for that matter, a director who has a feel for the property. This is your job, I emphasize, your means of making a livelihood, and it is always good to remind the studio executive of their supposed expertise.

So what do we get instead? What we get is a script that ignores UNCLE, has the conceit of being a backstory to the TV show which if that is the plan, they badly fucked it up. It uses none of the anticipation and recognition, setup and payoff, available to them. The actors cast are boring, unlikeable, uninteresting. It is in places beautiful, yes it looks like a yacht advertisement from 1960s Italy, but who the fuck cares? Thats nice and all, and it would be a wonderful touch if they had a script and some actors with passion, but without them it is just a bunch of pretty pictures.

But if every silver lining has a cloud, the reverse is also true, and there is some silver lining here. Because the lead actors are so fucking boring, the women of this piece completely capture the movie. We have exactly two of them, one is a 20 year old who is completely hilarious in a scene where she tries to get Illya drunk, to dance, and to sleep with her. The other is 40 something Italian billionaire and femme fatale who jumps Napoleon Solo and then drugs and tortures him.

Yes, the parody of effete Italian manhood is entertaining, but whats the point?

Almost none of the elements that were notable about UNCLE were in this movie. No NYC tailor shop with a secret door, no THRUSH bad guys, nothing.

Its not enough to say that you are going to reboot a property, you have to actually do it well or you should save your money and make another Die Hard movie or something. As it is, it is all a giant waste of effort, of money and of an opportunity.

________________________________________________

1. You may wonder, as I have wondered, what the word THRUSH stands for. If UNCLE stands for United Network Command Law Enforcement, then surely THRUSH stands for something as well. At a Westercon years ago I came across a “bible” for the original UNCLE. A bible is the guide issued to all the writers of a TV series to give them enough background to write, or propose, a story for the series. In it we learn that THRUSH stands for Technical Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity. Well it sounds a little forced to me, but its ok.

CIA Digs Tunnel from Richmond Virginia to Berlin

Back when we had patriotism in this country and before we collapsed into political acrimony and paranoid hatred of our own government, we all worked together to focus our paranoia outward and against the spectre of Marxism. Marxism and its cousin-in-law Communism, if left unchecked, promised to inconvenience our rich and self-entitled elite which could only lead inevitably to the empowerment of the disenfranchised whose lives were hopelessly crushed by poverty and racism.

To fight this Socialist evil all true Americans, North and South, black and white, came together and did their part to fight the Cold War and maintain our way of life.

I am proud to report that even my adopted home city, Richmond, Virginia did its part to fight the cold war.

One of the triumphs of the Cold War was the CIA's Berlin Tunnel in which they dug a tunnel from the US Zone to the Soviet Zone in Berlin and were able to tap some telephone cables that carried military communications from Berlin to Moscow. The tunnel was in operation for 11 months and was a giant success in its time, but its real value came afterwards when, to everyone's surprise, the Russians made the discovery of the tunnel public in order to show the perfidy and lack of good faith of the West.

The tunnel

One of the great moments in “unexpected consequences” this revelation increased the status of the USA in the eyes of Europeans who did not believe that we had the sophistication to pull such espionage off. In fact, we really didnt, and relied to a significant degree on the British, but that is another story.

Many years afterwards, since the tunnel was hardly a secret, the CIA published a report on the tunnel, its genesis, execution and aftermath.

For a summary, see here.

For a discussion of actually building the tunnel, see here.

And what should I find but in that latter report the news that Richmond Virginia, where I grew up, had a role to play in this effort:

I can only hope that the people who dug this trial tunnel ate at Waffle House or at the Commonwealth Club, perhaps even at the Country Club of Virginia.

I have confidence that even today, Virginians would rally to their call and work to support the CIA in their efforts.

______________________________________

For another discussion of the tunnel and its discovery, see 

http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Ba-Bl/Berlin-Tunnel.html

Secret Cables of the Comintern

Those of you who aspire to be a faithful student of the cold war will be pleased to hear about a fabulous online resource, the Journal of Intelligence and Security, apparently published by Taylor Francis. The archive is online and I think that by jumping through hoops one can get a certain number of articles for free.

But even if you do not read the journal articles themselves, they make available their book reviews of the current literature and I have found that very useful as a guide or index into subjects.

In particular they review a new book that has resulted from the brief period when certain archives of the Comintern of the former USSR were public. One result of that openness is a collection of secret cables from this organization, the Communist International, sometimes also known as the Third International, which was the organization that worked for Communist revolution in the world.

Our reviewer has something amusing to say about revisionist history in the 1970s and 1980s when it was discovered to the horror of many in this country that the accusation of Soviet control of the American Communist Party and the work of various people such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs was not merely right wing paranoid conspiracy theories but were based in fact.

Here is an excerpt from that review.

You can read the full review here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2014.952933

The Russian Pageview Anomaly on Global Wahrman

Something rather odd has happened to the Global Wahrman pageview statistics over the last few days. Although these events are as yet unexplained, no reasonable person could look at them and not see the influence of some covert menace, a menace that may even at this moment be conspiring against the Free World and Democracy.   

Although I try not to obsess about my audience, like any writer I am gratified to have an audience at all. Google/Blogspot provides several mechanisms to track one's readership and from the very beginning I noticed a certain underlying activity, a murmur if you will from such places as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, China, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Pakistan and of course Russia.

But as time went by and as I presumably built up a readership, this poking and occasional comment spam reduced until I barely noticed it.

Well in the last three days, someone in Russia seems to have become very, very interested in Global Wahrman, to the point where it far overshadows my normal readership. In fact it overwhelms the exceptional readership that happens from time to time (such as when someone in France seemed to notice my post about SIGGRAPH (see here) and my pageviews from the country that invented Semiotics skyrocketed for a week or so which makes a certain sense to me, somehow.

But Russia all of a sudden can't seem to get enough of Global Wahrman. Could this be Putin interested in the history of Computer Animation?  Perhaps they are interested in my analysis of secret aerospace programs? Or on the archaeology of the Cold War?  Am I being recruited by Russian Secret Intelligence?

Should I mysteriously disappear or hang myself in my cell, please notify the appropriate authorities that I may be a victim of some sort of Russian conspiracy.

[10/12/2015 The interest in Global Wahrman from Russia is continuing.  I wonder why?]

Is that you, Vladimir, reading my blog?

Enola Gay Smithsonian Exhibit Disaster Part 2

In this post, I review the book that historians wrote about the issues involved in the disaster of the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, a disaster that was very public and very embarrassing for the historians involved. You can find this book here.  You can read a synopsis I wrote about some of the issues here.

This post is likely to be only interesting to those of you who are interested in museums, or historiography, or possibly how the history of the cold war is interpreted for the public.  The rest of you should skip this and move on to more entertaining posts.

There are four questions I had in mind when I read this book. The first was whether the accusations that veterans made about the historians during this encounter were in any way validated by this book. The second was whether the historians were disingenuous in how they presented the issues here. The third was about whether the historians gave any serious credence to what people who had been involved in the event told them. And the fourth was whether the historians involved should have realized that they were about to cause a major controversy and whether they took reasonable steps to prevent it.

1. During and after the Enola Gay exhibit controversy, which you had to be deaf not to have heard about at the time it occurred, two accusations were made by the veteran associations about the historians writing the exhibit. The first was that the historians were adamant that they were going to present revisionist conclusions about this event whatever the veterans thought and the second was that the historians involved were incredibly, unbelievably arrogant. After reading this book from the historians point of view, I can tell you that without doubt the historians involved were adamant that they were going to present their revisionist point of view and that furthermore as far as they were concerned that was the only legitimate point of view, period. And the second impression I got, dripping from every page, was exactly how superior the historians thought they were to anyone else involved. Exactly like the veterans said. No misunderstanding there, whatsoever.

2. One of the things I look for in reading arguments from one side or another of a debate, is how well they present issues that I happen to know something about. If, let us say, there are 20 issues discussed and it just so happens that I know very well what is involved in two of them, I look with special interest at those two. It lets me judge to what extent those other 18 issues are presented in good faith. This is especially useful in the situation where one side admits honestly to something that does not help their argument, but they do so anyway in the interests of fairness. This may be a lot to ask, but I do it anyway.

At one point, the argument is made that the B-29 was an uninteresting airplane technically or aeronautically (is that a word?) and in and of itself had no particular justification for being in the Air & Space Museum. They even trot out an Air Force Officer to make that comment and then leave it there in the book as being decided. The B-29 was uninteresting.

This is an astonishing misrepresentation of the facts. It is so outrageous as to call into doubt anything else the authors of the book say. The B-29 was not only an incredible technological achievement, it was an achievement that had to be reached in order for the Army Air Corps to make their argument that they deserved to be a separate service and this is all intertwined with the history of aviation and the theory of strategic bombing. The B-29 was the technology that was going to prove this principle and it was the second most expensive R&D project of the war.  In other words, it was not only technologically interesting, it was of tremendous importance to the history of how we fought the war and how we planned the future of aviation. Without doubt, this plane and the effort to create it, deserves a place in the history of aviation.  The B-29 deserves to be at the Air & Space Museum.

 It makes me wonder just who they thought was going to read this book that they would make such an outrageous misstatement.  But this behavior fits the model that says that the historians of this period live in their own world and believe what they want to believe.  

Years after this disaster, the Smithsonian restored the Enola Gay, presumably over their dead body, and exhibited it at their secondary location outside Washington.  They still have not told the amazing story of the 509th Composite Group to the best of my knowledge.

The second issue is a bit more subtle but without doubt demonstrates bad faith on the part of the historians. At one point, they talk about how much money was spent to restore the Enola Gay with the implication of “there, are you happy now” referring to, in their opinion, the childish wishes of the veterans. What the book fails to tell you, but I happened to know, is that the Enola Gay had been treated like garbage by the Smithsonian, and left to rot and rust for decades in spite of the complaints of the veterans and the Air Force. The reason it cost so much to restore was because the Smithsonian had treated this artifact with contempt. But this was not mentioned.

In other words, the historians who wrote this book were completely ok with misrepresenting the facts to try and win their argument. Lying was not a problem for them. This is a bad way to get credibility, it seems to me.

3. If there is one thing that this book makes clear, the historians involved did not give a fuck what the veterans thought. As far as the historians were concerned, the veterans were unintelligent, ignorant children relative to a brilliant academic historian. They were given no credible voice in the dialog until the veterans and the Air Force forced the issue..

4. Should the historians have realized they were walking into a touchy situation and somehow avoided it? I think that they did know that what they were saying was controversial but they thought they would come out OK for one very good reason. They assumed that everyone understood going in that there was one truth, and only one truth. And that truth is what the historians said it was. Period. There could be no other truth, no other truth had any credibility. The veterans were just children, immature children who did not want to admit, naturally, that they had murdered all those innocent Japanese for no reason. That was the only conclusion, a historian conclusion, and that was that.

So, to ask the question, were the historians involved in this disaster arrogant?

No, not arrogant. Not merely arrogant. Unbelievably arrogant.

The book was a fabulous eye opener for me. It brought doubt on the credibility of the academic field of history and of historians, at least historians of the modern period. In that sense, the book was very successful beyond its goals.   It not only explained the disaster of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit, it lowered the credibility of the field of academic history in general.

Good work, guys.

Enola Gay Smithsonian Exhibit Disaster Part 1

draft being rewritten

I can not imagine why anyone would care what. I think about anything related to the issues discussed in this post, unless they had some interest in the "popular understanding of history by a citizen" or something of that nature.  I recommend you skip this post unless you happen to be specifically interested in the issues discussed here.

I read a book about the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Enola Gay exhibit, a disaster of monumental scale, a nuclear explosion if you will, in which the veterans, the Air Force, the US Congress compelled the Smithsonian to back off from an exhibit which they were far along in creating.   The book is called "History Wars" and it presents the historians point of view on the subject and the larger issues of the interpretation of history.

I expected the book to be a balanced discussion of the issues that also showed that the situation had spun out of control and that the Smithsonian certainly was not planning to do an exhibit that would have presented the veterans or this country guilty of all sorts of nasty things.   But in fact the book did not do that, the book instead presented the very clear point of view that there was one way to interpret history, it was the historians way, and any other opinion was wrong.

So I wanted to write about this book and the exhibit but to do so I felt I had to explain something about the situation that the book describes and to do that is a Vietnam-like morass of complicated issues.  Issues that do not lend themselves to simple sound bites.

And so this post is the attempt to get a basic synopsis of the issues behind the incident.  I am sorry.  Feel free to ignore it and don't think worse of me because of it.   I don't know whether we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima or what would have happened if we had invaded the home islands of Japan, or whether the Japanese would have surrendered immediately anyway, or any of dozens of other fascinating and unanswerable questions.   I know that the dropping of the bomb was not a casual decision and I know what the veterans thought about what the sudden ending of the war meant to them and their lives because they were very clear about that topic both at the time and now.

So forgive me, here is the background, and then there will be post on what my impression of the historian side of the story.

The book discussed here can be found on Amazon.com at  "History Wars" 

To recap, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum planned an exhibit about the mission on August 6, 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The centerpiece of that exhibit would be the Enola Gay, the highly modified B-29 that actually dropped the bomb (there were 7 B-29s on that mission that day, but the Enola Gay carried the bomb itself). It might sound straightforward but it was anything but straightforward and here are some of the reasons.

1. The Smithsonian had the Enola Gay for decades but had refused to exhibit it. It was literally left out to rot in the rain and snow getting progressively more decrepit and rusted. Their actions were perceived for what they were, contempt for the history of this country, contempt for the veterans. The Air Force begged for the Smithsonian to give this historic plane to them so that they could restore it and show it in one of their museums, but the Smithsonian refused. The plane stayed in the rain and snow and rotted.  This did not exactly endear the Smithsonian to the Air Force or the veterans.

2. The dropping of the atomic bomb was an unusually specific event that could be said to end one era and begin another. Usually these transitions are more amorphous and take place over years or decades. But because the atomic bomb either was apparently the immediate cause of the end of WW 2 and the beginning of the cold war and the nuclear age, it presented many difficult historical problems that any exhibit either had to address or ignore, but a decision had to be made about them and no decision could be a decision. Realize also that accomplishment of dropping that bomb was the culmination of at least three different important efforts that we, the United States, took during that war.   Most people know of the Manhattan Project, but the creation of the B-29 and the story of the unit that dropped the bomb was no where near as well known.

3. There are very strong differences of opinion about the value of dropping the atomic bomb and its role in ending the war in the Pacific. But there was no doubt in the minds of anyone in the US armed services in the Pacific that it had ended the war and that it had saved their lives by doing so. But many Americans who certainly know we dropped the bomb that day are not as aware of why the veterans thought it had saved their lives.    (3)

4. The people at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum determined that their exhibit about the Enola Gay and the dropping of the bomb was going to be a "balanced exhibit", in their words, that talked about many different points of view about the event.   From the veteran point of view, this meant that they would be portrayed as heartless killers of children who had dropped a bomb for no good reason. . If America had not had to drop the bomb and if it was an immoral act then arguably America could be accused of committing a war crime in doing so and this was obvious to the veterans who were not amused by this.

5. It should be remembered that this was no mere article in a magazine somewhere, this was the premiere United States aviation museum passing judgment on the morality of dropping the bomb on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the event and the end of WW 2.

Before I go further in describing the controversy around the exhibit I want to digress for just a moment on the role of the bomb in causing Japan to surrender and whether Japan knew it was defeated and was planning to surrender anyway.  Both of these issues are fabulously complex and controversial.   Most of all it requires the historian, professional or otherwise, to put themselves into the position of what was known at the time vs what was known later.   And to understand things outside the experience of most normal people (like what is involved in invading the home islands of Japan and what it would mean to delay such an invasion to let things evolve). (2)

6. But drop the bomb we did, and shortly thereafter began a firestorm of controversy about whether the bomb needed to be dropped to end the war. 50 years later, the Smithsonian wrote a draft of the planned exhibit, and that exhibit was leaked both to the Air Force and to various veteran groups. Of course it should have been leaked, it should have been sent for review by those groups. Surely the Smithsonian did not think they could just surprise people with the exhibit and their interpretation of the event?

7. The resultant explosion was everything that could be desired and more so. The veterans went nuclear, so to speak, and called for the Smithsonian's blood. The Smithsonian retaliated by ripping the wings off the Enola Gay and exhibiting it without an exhibition. No interpretation or story at all. It just hangs wingless in the Smithsonian (it has since been moved to the new gallery outside Washington and had its parts restored). The head of the Smithsonian and a few specific historians returned to academia. The veterans got nothing, the historians got nothing, the Smithsonian had completely dropped the ball. 

The Enola Gay without its wings, with one propeller on the wall, and no discussion of what happened

It was an unmitigated disaster for the Smithsonian as they had failed, utterly failed, to represent in any reasonable way the event, the technology, the end of the war, the story of the dropping of the bomb, anything.

A total failure.

But it wasn't over yet.

End of part 1.

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1. The other two are on the origins and legality of the American Civil War and a post on writing the genre of prediction with special reference to lessons learned from Nostradamus, a very misunderstood writer of fiction.

2. There are many, many controversies. A partial list includes: (a) that we were about one month away from the invasion of Japan and we knew this was going to be very bloody (b) that Japan knew we were very close to invading and had every intention of fighting and had worked with initiative to prepare and had done a very competent job of that given their situation at the time, (c) that the bombing of the Japanese cities had caused vast destruction and misery to all sectors of Japanese society and yet had not apparently destroyed their determination to fight and there is no doubt that situation caused many Americans in leadership positions to wonder what exactly was going to be necessary to cause Japan to surrender, (d) that Japan leadership knew they had lost the war but hoped to negotiate an end to the war that allowed them to keep their empire in Korea and Manchuria, although the extent that this is true is certainly debatable, (e) that the American people wanted this war over now, (f) that the USSR having completed the war in Europe was now moving to assist us in the far east in Manchuria and people were sensitive to the role that Stalin and the USSR would play in the post-war world, and some historians consider it immoral for us to consider this issue in the decision to hurry the end of the war by dropping the bomb, (g) and last but not least, unlike Germany, the Japanese armies were undefeated in the field in China and Korea and did not see a terribly pressing need to surrender all that they had been fighting for. Yes, the home islands were suffering, yes in fact they were all suffering, but from their point of view they were far from defeated.

3. It should be no surprise that the average American does not know their own history on this matter, but it is odd that the historians do not. There are those who claim that this is because historians are ignorant of the fundamental issues that they study and there is quite a bit to support that argument. At the time the bomb was dropped, we were in a terrific struggle with the Japanese and people were dying by the scores every day, both Americans and Japanese. We never had a defense against the suicide attacks on ships. They never had a defense against our incendiary bombing of Japan or the unrestricted submarine war on their merchant shipping.

By far more Japanese were dying than Americans, but that was about to change because we were literally within eight weeks of an invasion of the Japanese home islands that would probably make the invasion of Normandy look peaceful in comparison.  Projected casualties varied wildly depending on who did the predictions. When Truman took office after Roosevelt, probably his single most important issue to address was how to bring the war to a successful conclusion with a minimum of casualties.  What you, the non professional, need to understand is that for an invasion of this scope 8 weeks is almost no time at all, its not even a weekend. You should think of it as 15 minutes before midnight. It means that all the ships, planes, munitions, etc are built and in place, and all the men are trained and in position (not quite, but almost, I exaggerate here a little). It means that the hospital ships are built, and the doctors and nurses trained, and most of the medical supplies are ready to go, or nearly so.

When the bomb was dropped and the war suddenly and unexpectedly ended, there were several million Americans in uniform getting ready to storm the beaches and support that activity. These people to the last person, as far as I can tell from reading mostly secondary sources and a few primary ones, believed that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved their lives because it made it unnecessary to invade the Japanese home islands.   For those who believe that the war was over, and that Japanese knew they had lost, you are invited to learn about the invasion of Okinawa and what that entailed.

But since we did not actually invade Japan, the number of casualties is of course not known, and many people who have studied the issue (but who were not there) have a different opinion of what would have happened had we not dropped the bomb.

Has One of John Holland's Submarines Been Found?

One of the problems with being mortal is that you do not know how some stories end and one might really want to know. In science of course, this is obvious but maybe more dramatic than people realize. For those of us of a romantic nature, in the classical sense of romance, there are an amazing number of such stories. Where lies a missing ship? What happened to that expedition. For those of us with a particular interest in matters that involve what is called “intelligence”, then we are well aware that it is unrealistic to expect to know the real story for at least 50 years or more and most of us will not be alive by then.

The age of exploration, however you might define it, is filled with such stories. War, for better or worse, is filled with such stories. Sometimes no one survived to tell what happened. A missing platoon, a missing airplane, no one knows what happened or where. Then 50 or 100 years later a wrecked airplane is found in a field in the middle of the Ukraine or at the bottom of a lake and we have closure.

Some mysteries are partially solved, of course. If an airliner goes missing for over a year and no person or piece of that airplane is found, then you can be quite sure that a tragedy has happened even if we do not know what it was, where, when or why. If a ship goes on patrol and is never heard from again, then unless it really did go to the Twilight Zone or on vacation with the Space Aliens then something very bad has happened.

Sometimes you know in general what happened but not exactly where, and the bodies of your friends are never recovered.

Last week something happened off the coast of Sweden that helps to complete one of these stories. It happened in a somewhat amusing way (assuming the death of sailors can ever be said to be amusing). Sweden has recently been troubled by what they believe are incursions by Russian submarines up to some mysterious activities in Swedish waters. Their Navy believes that they tracked such a submarine for quite a while and that it may have escaped. The defense budget has been increased, people are on the lookout, there have been all kinds of false sightings.

Then, a week or so ago, a diver found a wrecked submarine off the coast within Sweden territory. A private firm was engaged by Sweden to investigate and found the wreck of a Russian submarine which went down with all hands. They thought the submarine looked modern, and they assumed it was a modern Russian midget / spy submarine, perhaps on a mission, perhaps being tested, and that it had experienced some disaster.

They were right that the submarine was Russian and that it had gone down with all hands.  Two officers and 16 crew.  Furthermore, the submarine was approximately 20 meters by 3 meters in size, very cramped quarters.

But it was not a modern Russian submarine. It is almost certainly a submarine in the Imperial Russian Navy which went down and which was lost with all hands in 1916. Not only that, but this may be a very famous submarine.

A model of the Royal Navy's Holland 1.  This would not be the same submarine design as the one that has been found, but it would be similar.  .

As readers of my blog know, the history of submarines is deeply interconnected with our culture, especially the tradition of American Musical Theatre. What you may not realize is that the people who built the original Russian submarines were Americans (well, immigrants to America) from Connecticut.  Designed in America, the first of class was built by Holland's Electric Boat Company, shipped to Russia, and assembled there.   

To briefly recap the history of submarines, they were a technology that came to fruition very early in the 20th century and which saw a lot of contributions from all over the world.  One of the pioneers of this field was John Holland, an immigrant to America from Ireland, who designed and built what is recognized as the first modern submarine.  That is, it was the first to have the important design elements that a modern submarine would have for the next 50 years.  Furthermore, he founded the company that built these submarines for many different countries, including the United States, Great Britain, and Imperial Russia.

In many ways the development of the submarine was similar to the development of the airplane.  It was an international development that achieved success at the beginning of the 20th century and was being used in a major war within a decade.  Airplane use has wildly expanded of course but submarine use, although in most navies worldwide, remain an eclectic tool used mostly for military and research purposes. 

Here is a biography of John Holland in the US Navy's Undersea Warfare magazine: 

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_19/holland.htm

The first of the Som class was built in Connecticut, shipped to Russia, and assembled there. This may be that submarine. If so, there is other history here as this submarine may be the repurposed Fulton, an early Holland design that was built and then sold to Russia.   The articles suggest that is the case, but I am withholding judgment until we know more.

The sailors who manned that submarine are almost certainly still inside having gone down with the ship. In a submarine, this is fairly easy to determine without looking very hard.  If a submarine is at the bottom of the sea and its hatches are still closed, then very likely no one got out.  When leaving a distressed submarine, very few sailors bother to close the hatch behind them.

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Notes:

John Philip Holland on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philip_Holland

Wikipedia articles on the discovery and the Som Class of Submarines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Swedish_submarine_wreck_discovery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Som-class_submarine

News story on a possible fragment from Amelia Earhart's plane

http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment-appears-to-belong-to-earharts-plane-141028.htm

Update on Secret Aerospace Projects May 2015

Perhaps now is the time.  Perhaps now they are ready to have the esoteric knowledge revealed.  The truth behind the rumors of the various secret aerospace projects discussed on the internet.

But are they worthy of this knowledge?

Probably not, so we will only discuss a few of the more obvious ones.  The really interesting ones about the CIA reverse engineering the alien anti-gravity drive will be held for another day.

Now students, prepare to be enlightened but first a little philosophy.

These are no mere secret aerospace projects produced at hideous cost and hidden out of a desire to thwart the enemies of freedom and justice!  No!  These projects demonstrate our national will and character. They are more than mere airplanes, they are nothing less than flying metaphors.

But first let us build a little anticipation by reviewing basic principles:

1. A black project is generally not outed unless it is no longer necessary to keep it secret or, on occasion, when there is an explicit decision to make something public as part of an elaborate and foolish hope that doing so will put our enemies off their stride for some imaginary reason, in other words, when there is real (perceived) value in making it public. 2. Most black projects are technology demonstrators that do not become production vehicles, or if they do, not as secret programs.   3. Usually it is the case that if they do not want you to see something, then you won't.  But sometimes operational necessity or safety issues throw a wrench into that and it is possible for a knowledgeable observer to see things that they really should not see.  This is particularly true for large, loud things that fly in the air.   4. The fact that a black project is announced does not mean it is totally obsolete and will no longer be used. The U2, SR 71 and B2 are examples of formerly secret projects made public yet still in use.

That said, I think that there are three black programs that we can be certain exist and are likely to become public eventually.  Two of which are technology demonstrators and one that is probably in limited production, and they are (a) two different prototypes of the new bomber, (b) something that involves a repurposed Valkyrie XB70 as some sort of mothership for a project probably cancelled, and (c) a limited production flying wing similar to the B2 in shape, but probably for tactical reconnaissance although we don't really know.

First, we know that there are demonstrators / prototypes of the next generation bomber, whatever they are calling it these days. We believe there are two competing vehicles, possibly one of each or possibly several of each. These prototypes will probably only become visible when the details of this new plane become known as its prototypes will no longer need to be kept secret, so that suggests within 5 years or so, possibly less. 

Second, there had been sightings of a modified XB 70 Valkyrie bomber on several occasions. You can not miss a Valkyrie in flight, it is unmistakable. When the first reports started coming in by puzzled observers, the more aerospace-knowledgeable who heard these reports knew exactly what airplane they were talking about.   There has only been one airplane built that looks anything like this.  Since the last Valkyrie is in a museum this is some other vehicle repurposed for another reason. The word on the street is that it was used as mothership for a prototype earth orbital vehicle that was not living up to expectations and was canceled. This seems plausible to me.   So I feel confident that something about these sightings exists and is, or was, a technology demonstrator of some sort, but less confident about when or if they will ever talk about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie

 When people described what they saw it was clear that it was related to a Valkyrie.  Nothing else looks like this.

Third, there have been sightings of a flying wing that (a) is not the B2, (b) is big enough such that it is manned and talking to various control towers, (c) been seen flying in groups of three which suggests that it is not a technology demonstrator and is in limited production. That means it pretty much has to be a black aerospace project of some sort. 

For the best writeup of the sightings, see

http://deepbluehorizon.blogspot.com/2014/03/mystery-aircraft-photographed-over.html
and
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/so-what-were-those-secret-flying-wing-aircraft-spotted-1555124270

There are many theories out there for what this is but I am just going to jump to the one that makes the most sense to me.

In the 1980s, when “stealth” was being pioneered, there was a perceived need for a variety of airplanes based on that technology. One mission was for strategic bombing, and that became the B2. One mission was for a stealth fighter and that became the F-22 and F-35. One mission was for a variety of stealth UAVs some of which have been announced and others are in development. There was also a need for a tactical ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) vehicle that could linger unseen above a battlefield for many hours and deliver real time information on the battle taking place below. This vehicle would be very valuable for any military operation on the ground whether regular US Army, Marines, or special forces. It would have a multitude of uses if it was stealthy enough that the enemy would not realize it was there. We know that there are several UAVs in development to serve this role. But there were also some rather well known, quirky 1980s technology projects along this line that were canceled and nothing seemed to come of them. 

One particular project, a technology demonstration, was called Tacit Blue and it was made public a decade after it took place in the mid 1990s.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Tacit_Blue

So many people suspect that in the 1980s they canceled the technology demonstrator and went black to develop a stealth tactical ISR airplane.   This airplane would have started flying in the 1990s. Because of when it was developed it would be manned. Because of what it was to be used for there would have been a significant advantage to keep it as secret as possible. The best situation is that the opponent does not even realize the airplane exists so they are not looking for it.

If I am correct, it would have become operational in the mid 1990s and therefore have been in service for 20 years. It is being supplanted by other vehicles now in development which we know are in development. Furthermore, it has been used on many occasions and is therefore likely to be known about by our various opponents such that there is less need to keep it secret. Even if they know it exists, that does not make it trivial to detect and shoot down.

So that is my guess for what is flying out there as a production black aerospace project and which is likely to be announced in the next few years.   Beyond this, we can be fairly sure there were other secret technology demonstrators such as, for example, tests of exotic propulsion technology.  But there is no particular evidence that suggests any of these are about to be made public, or even that they were particularly successful although of course it is the nature of these things that we do not know.

We will see what happens.

Of course what is important about these things beyond a purely techno-archaeological viewpoint is how these devices are used to implement policy and what those policies are.   But that is a whole other kettle of fish.

There.  I hope you are happy now.

Dangerous Toys Beneficial For the Education of Youth

I want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is, but other countries may be way ahead of us in educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.

What a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and rewarding life, if you call this living.

What are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the latter skills and education should be tailored for the different classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.

But all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.

And that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them. Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.

Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are.  In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I think.  By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe.   This experience so early in life is priceless.   

We shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is where this ill-considered policy leads.

But by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.

VAC-U-FORM gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a 3D printer ahead of its time.

The smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled. Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.

Now that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that would send parents of today screaming in rage at the borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers were just trying to make America that much stronger.

I hope that America will come to its senses and return to these educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!

The future has so much promise if we just embrace it.

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Here is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvgvWiZNe8

The Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vac-u-form