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CIAO DATE: 9/5/2006
Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Devastation
Lynn Eden
November 2004
Center for International Studies University of Southern California
Abstract
Whole World on Fire is about a puzzle that is morbid, arcane, and consequential. Morbid, because it involves the devastation caused by nuclear weapons. Arcane, because it involves secret and obscure calculations by a government bureaucracy tucked away deep within U.S. military intelligence. And consequential, because it involves decisions at the highest level of government about using nuclear weapons.
The puzzle begins over a half century ago, in the years immediately following the end of World War II, and it continues to the present: How and why, for more than half a century, has the U.S. government seriously underestimated the damage that nuclear weapons would cause? How and why did the government, in devising its plans to fight strategic nuclear war shortly after World War II, develop detailed knowledge about the blast damage caused by nuclear weapons but fail to develop knowledge about an even more devastating effect? That effect was mass fire (popularly termed "firestorm"), such as the fire that burned down Hiroshima.
