Reading Blog: August 2022
Books read at home and while traveling to Las Vegas for DEFCON.
Unintentionally two of these are pandemic-related; I will cut back on that in the future.
The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out (Sam Cohen, 1983)
The concept of the neutron bomb is that its short burst of radiation high in the atmosphere kills people on the ground but leaves property standing with little fallout afterwards. It’s the spiritual opposite of the cobalt / salted bomb. In a bizarre artifact of the Cold War, its inventor recounts developing the neutron bomb, advocating for its strategic use, and warns that military and political leaders are botching strategy.
Cohen gives a short biography of how he was picked for the Manhattan Project and became a physicist at RAND. He recounts that Oppenheimer gave a talk at Los Alamos after Hiroshima, accepting cheers and regretting not developing it in time for Germany — only weeks later discovering somber feelings over it.
As time went on, the Air Force wanted hydrogen bombs to deliver a devastating bomber strike on the USSR, and Oppenheimer advocated politically for smaller, tactical bombs. This flowed into a power struggle between various branches of the military, the White House, Congressional committees, etc. about how to control atomic energy policy and plan for a nuclear war over Western Europe.
Cohen describes a ‘Hiroshima syndrome’ as a mindset against ever again using nuclear weapons in Asia — most websites cite this book for publicizing the term — clumsy as it might be, this might be one of the better explanations of how the Korean and Vietnam Wars did not spark a nuclear war.
Sent to Seoul during the Korean War, Cohen assesses the situation from a nuclear tactics perspective. Seeing a bridge which had not been destroyed, he thought of it as “an ideal spot to hit with an atomic bomb”. Where in the 2000s the US would probably use a precise guided missile, 1950s-1980s era Cohen figures that a smaller nuclear weapon would knock out the bridge without the multiple, city-wide bomber runs which had so recently destroyed Seoul and large parts of Europe. Upper-atmosphere explosions had potential to wipe out bomber raids and carrier groups, greatly worrying branches of the military (this led to development of more missile submarines and missile defense with neutron bombs).
Describing RAND coworkers as hesitant or self-interested, Cohen begins pitching neutron bombs at the Pentagon. Then as news of the invention leaked, various Congressmen and Senators would ask for a briefing. At a time when the US and USSR were seeking a mutual nuclear test ban, Cohen’s criticism of test bans and advocacy for a more acceptable, less-detectable nuclear weapon was alarming. Cohen fails to meet Eisenhower while in office (couldn’t be interrupted while on his putting green, his son said), or Kennedy (after receiving briefings from the AEC, he spoke out against any tactical nukes). During the Kennedy years, Nixon wanted to leverage the neutron bomb issue to bring nuclear politics to the forefront of a future campaign. Cohen is impressed by Nixon, and blames Kissinger for not allowing discussion to go forward. Khrushchev would call the neutron bomb a ‘capitalist weapon’ designed to kill people and not property, and this mindset spread throughout public discourse, the UN, and the Carter administration. Change and deployment finally came about with Reagan’s election and Brezhnev’s acknowledgment of a Soviet neutron bomb test.
The second half of the book is less narrative and I mostly skimmed it — print version of the neutron bomb pitch, sections on the ethics and misconceptions, and harshly criticizing NATO. Cohen’s view is that European countries have always been consuming each other, and NATO will inevitably draw the US into conflict. At the same time, European allies have refused to host enough missiles and especially neutron bombs. He finds it incoherent for Europeans to anticipate another conventional land war or a full-scale nuclear attack on the USSR to keep the peace, when the most defensive tactic for the US and their bases would be to explode neutron bombs over any invading tanks to stop an advance in Germany.
Ultimately Reagan’s plan to arm troops with neutron bombs was converted to a plan to store them in the US and deliver them to Europe just before a conflict, which luckily hasn’t come about.
A recent episode of the Arms Control Wonk podcast also focuses on a history of the people who developed nuclear strategy at RAND: The Wizards of Armageddon, also published in 1983. It’ll go on my list, but I’m trying to work through my current backlog of books.
Severance (Ling Ma, 2018)
This wide-ranging satire (one review calls it “A zombie apocalypse tale, a workplace comedy, and a classic coming-of-age story all in one”) has the misfortune of coming out shortly before an actual pandemic and a popular TV show of the same name. It was already recognized by the New York Times as a notable book, but since March 2020 it has gotten renewed interest as vintage pandemic lit, along with Station Eleven and The Stand. This became known as the one where people keep working through a pandemic (and as such, became an especially painful satire).
This read-through made me remember New York fondly.
By choosing to set the book in 2011 (odd sections bring up Obama, Occupy Wall Street, and a hurricane Irene or Sandy), Ma is revisiting a particular moment in her life. Main character Candace discusses the immigrant experience, her family history, a work trip to Shenzhen, frayed connections to uncles and aunts in Fuzhou, go-tos in Chinatown, being berated by her mom for not living up to multiple cultural standards and skincare routines.
The early pandemic: mask etiquette, Fashion Week, stilted CDC press releases, travel bans, essential workers, and flight from the city, now feels familiar. It’s unfortunate that the strong themes of the book, particularly the immigrant experience, get lost in today’s pandemic lit discussion of the book.
When we get to the nature of the sickness (people trapped in routines, often wasting away repeating actions until death) the book is heavy on symbolism and light on explanation or conflict. My most direct read would be that fear of the sick represents a young adult who vows to never be another office drone or clique, but sours on chaotic romance, craves stability, overcommits to work, feels trapped by her pregnancy.
When Candace joins a band of survivors, I was expecting their office jobs to lead to an explicit reveal that they were already a type of worker-zombie. Two dramatic reveals are telegraphed a few chapters ahead. We don’t get an answer about sickness or survival, and the obvious signs of being sick get blurred later in the book only for plot purposes.
The later action and author interviews bring up memory and nostalgia as the characters’ downfall, which doesn’t sit well with me (it’s not consistent with how the rest of the world got sick, is it? it’s not wrong to be nostalgic for pre-pandemic life is it?).
I also end with no idea why Candace’s job was in publishing Bibles (Wikipedia says that Ma worked at Playboy in 2011, so maybe a cheeky mirror universe?).
Books & Boba, an Asian-American book club podcast, review from 2019:
The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest (David Quammen, 2015)
Quammen expands and updates a chapter from his book on zoonotic diseases to tell the origin story of HIV. At 170 pages, this makes for a travel day read.
The core of this book is a trip to the corner of Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo where chimpanzees SIV samples were found in 2005-06 which closely match HIV-1 Group M [Wiki says: 90% of HIV infections]. There are interviews with scientists who found out how to sequence SIV samples from urine and feces, and a research facility which held the 1960 sample which helped build the virus family tree. Quammen learns about the ethnic groups who live in this area, and the continued shady logging, poaching, and bush meat trades. It’s believed that HIV passed from individual to individual here for decades.
His group takes a boat down the river toward the cities where HIV first became an epidemic. Unable to tell much about life here 100 years ago, the author invents characters: a hunter, a chief, and a fugitive poacher unknowingly passing on HIV to the city. This was a weird section and should’ve been omitted.
The author discusses (and maybe titled the book in reference to) the 1,100-page polio-vaccine-caused-HIV book The River which I read in 2017. The accusations were debunked, and the genetics of a 1960 sample put the cross-over of the virus to humans as early as 1908.
In recent years, I’ve been grateful that I read The River, because it traced specific cases to explain the science of how you know when and where the virus emerged. It also countered competing conspiracies (that HIV had ‘never been isolated’, or is not the true cause of sickness) which appeared again in Covid.
In the case of HIV strains, the appearance of HIV-1 and HIV-2 in the 20th century seemed unlikely after hundreds of thousands of years of SIV. Quammen shows that SIV is much newer in chimpanzees — it appears to be a hybrid of two other species’ SIVs and does not appear in Ugandan chimps (Kibale shout-out!). The multiple groups of HIV-1 are likely separate crossover events, showing it is not too rare to get infected.
HIV-2 comes from sooty mangabeys, is less virulent, and spread mostly in West Africa. If not for HIV-1 Group M, we’d know little to nothing about this related virus, which leads me to think there are many retroviruses which we just don’t know about, and viruses that didn’t make it to the last population bottleneck (Toba supervolcano?).
Mid-century Congolese cities had multiple vaccination and injected antibiotic programs, which inspired non-official injections, all using shared needles (pre-mass-production).
Not only would this accelerate the spread of a few HIV infections, the theory is that this passed HIV through a chain of human immune systems, helping it adapt and creating the pandemic Group M strain. Later political amity between Congo and Haiti, and a blood plasma program sourcing in Haiti, would multiply cases of HIV and (allegedly) carry it to patients across the US.
Updates to Previous Reads
- Matt Yglesias (author of One Billion Americans) shared a paywalled essay “I’m worried about Chicago” on Substack. This enraged many Chicagoans, but I enjoyed one reply: “The answer: One Billion Chicagoans.”
- An insider cryptocurrency trade spotted on Twitter led to Coinbase reporting an employee. But now the SEC has added security trading charges, and Coinbase is asserting that they don’t list any securities.
- Behrouz Boochani, Kurdish-Iranian author of No Friend But The Mountains, posted in support of Salman Rushdie:
Of Rushdie’s work, I have read only Joseph Anton, his memoir of going on the run, living under UK police guard, being banned from most airlines, and continuing life and romantic interests under the dark cloud of the fatwa.
