The images above date from May 1953 at the first test of an artillery shell nuke fired from a gun at the Nevada Test Site https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1090226/view
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Roughly fifty years ago, in 1973, a little book about nuclear proliferation was published that soon became a cornerstone in the debate against the industry’s expansion. Entitled The Curve of Binding Energy, author John McPhee introduced his public to the work and ideas of visionary physicist Ted Taylor, the man who miniaturized warheads into ‘tactical’ nuclear bombs small enough for an individual to carry around like a band instrument.
“Musing once over a little sliver of metallic U-235 about the size of a stick of chewing gum, Ted Taylor remarked, ‘If ten percent of this were fissioned, it would be enough to knock down the World Trade Center.’ The United States Atomic Energy Commission has set five kilograms of U-235 as the amount at and above which the material is ‘significant’…Five kilograms is an arbitrarily chosen figure… In the frankly bellicose days of the somewhat forgotten past, the term used was not ‘significant’ but ‘strategic’. Unofficially—around the halls and over the water coolers—five kilos is known as ‘the trigger quantity.’ “ –p10, The Curve of Binding Energy
By the early 1970s, knocking down the World Trade Center with unimaginably small quantities of nuclear weapons-grade fuel became the persistent muse of Ted Taylor. ‘The Curve’ begins with Taylor’s WTC statement on page 10 and follows it through at the end of McPhee’s book, where author and subject together went for a ride into downtown Manhattan and ended up making their assessment in person: “Driving down from Peekskill…we found ourselves on Manhattan’s West Side Highway just at sunset and…seeming to rise right out of the road were the two towers of the World Trade Center, windows blazing… We had been heading for midtown but impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward two of the tallest buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and parked… We looked up the west wall of the nearer tower. From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe touching the earth from the darkness of space. ‘What an artifact that is!’ Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off. We went inside, into a wide, uncolumned lobby. The building was standing on its glass-and-steel walls and on its elevator core. Neither of us had been there before. We got into an elevator…pressed at random…[and] rode upward in silence broken only by…Taylor’s describing where the most effective place for a nuclear bomb would be… ‘The rule of thumb for a nuclear explosion is that it can vaporize its yield in mass,’ he said. ‘This building is about thirteen hundred feet by two hundred by two hundred. That’s about fifty million cubic feet. It’s average density is probably two pounds per cubic foot. That’s a hundred million pounds, or fifty kilotons—give or take a factor of two. Any explosion inside with a yield of, let’s say, a kiloton would vaporize everything for a few tens of feet… Thermal radiation tends to flow in directions where it is unimpeded,’ Taylor was saying. ‘It actually flows. It goes around corners. It could go the length of the building before being converted into shock… I can’t think in detail about this subject, considering what would happen to people, without getting very upset and not wanting to consider it at all,’ Taylor said. ‘And there is a level of simplicity that we have not talked about because it goes over my threshold to do so. A way to make a bomb…so simple that I just don’t want to describe it. I will tell you this: Just to make a crude bomb with an unpredictable yield –but with a better than even chance of knocking this building down—all that is needed is about a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, high explosives (I don’t want to say how much), and a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store. An explosion in this building would not be completely effective unless it were placed in the core. Something exploded out here in the [open] office area would be just like a giant shrapnel bomb. You’d get a real sheet of radiation pouring out the windows. You’d have half a fireball, and it would crater down…’ Walking to a window of the eastern wall, he looked across a space of about six hundred feet, past the other Trade Center tower, to a neighboring building at 1 Liberty Plaza. ‘Through free air, a kiloton bomb will send a lethal dose of immediate radiation up to half a mile,’ he went on. ‘Or up to a thousand feet, you’d be killed by projectiles…People in that building over there would get…Gamma rays… Next the neutrons. Then the air shock. Then missiles. Unvaporized concrete would go out of here at the speed of a rifle shot. A steel-and-concrete missile flux would go out…and…include in all maybe a tenth the weight of the building, about five thousand tons.’ He pressed up against the glass and looked far down to the plaza… ‘There’s no question at all that…a half-kiloton bomb on the front steps where we came in [would cause] the building [to] fall into the river.’ We went back to the elevator…” pp163-165, ibid.
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Freight elevator # 50
“There were 2.1 and 2.3 Richter scale seismic events 14 seconds prior to the collapse of each tower. There were documented nuclide isotopes following the event. A nuclear bomb with an “absorbing tamper” can reduce gamma rays and amount of isotopes. Freight Elevator #50 was the only basement to roof continuous vertical shaft in the building. Placing a 0.4 kiloton nuke in the floor of this shaft would direct the gamma flash, then shock, then heat wave up the core of the building. Firewalls around the elevators and stairwells would contain the energy as material was vaporized. As the core collapsed into the basement crucible, it would pull the exterior wall inside the building footprint. Seismic data and radioactive isotopes exclude the remote directed energy hypothesis. The WTC basement remained molten until Dec 2001, excluding thermite or directed energy causes of vaporization.” –Joseph A. Olson, PE
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/07/30/joe-olseon-on-9-11-nuclear-unequivocal/
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“The Curve of Binding Energy is dense and yet topical; its subject…[in] plan…begins with two parallel story lines, one describing special nuclear materials and the other depicting Ted Taylor’s growth as a physicist and bomb designer. Those lines finally converge when McPhee and Taylor retreat to a Maryland cabin and there pursue, ‘in its many possible forms, the unclassified atomic bomb’,” wrote William L. Howarth, editor of The John McPhee Reader, in 1976. Though a major departure in subject matter from McPhee’s previous writing, The Curve demonstrates a street-smart point of view on the unbridled production and trade in deadly technology. In addition to heading the government’s effort to build a nuclear-propulsion “starship” called Orion (1957 to 1963) under contract with General Atomic in La Jolla, CA, a division of General Dynamics, Taylor worked on the TRIGA ‘research’ reactors that were dispersed around the world and spent seven years working at Los Alamos.
Taylor’s friend Freeman Dyson said of him, “He was the first man in the world to understand what you can do with three or four kilograms of plutonium, that making bombs is an easy thing to do…” Taylor mastered the making of lightweight artillery-shell nukes that were later called ‘Bluebirds’ and found among the alleged munitions ‘heist’ weaponry seized by the FBI outside New Orleans in the summer of 1963—on a tip, perhaps, from Lee H. Oswald. At least one of these ‘bluebird’ shells was found in David Ferrie’s apartment at the time of his death in 1967. Nuclear munitions, World Trade centers, and a colorful cast of characters have a long history together. More of that story when Atomic Agent Oswald returns.
For his part, Ted Taylor deeply regretted his role in weapons-making. Removing the genocidal threat of megaton nukes, in favor of small tactical weapons, seemed like a supportable moral and patriotic choice. “He said his belief in deterrent postures had eroded to zero. ‘I thought I was doing my part for my country. I thought I was contributing to a permanent state of peace. I no longer feel that way. I wish I hadn’t done it. The whole thing was wrong. Rationalize how you will, the bombs were designed to kill many, many people… If it were possible to wave a wand and make fission impossible –fission of any kind—I would quickly wave the wand. I have a total conviction –now—that nuclear weapons should not be used under any circumstances. At any time. Anywhere. Period. If I were king…” p332, The John McPhee Reader, by John McPhee and editor W.L. Howarth, 1976
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