Would dirty bombs have been useful in WWII?

Great Debates
1

OK, we all know that conventional nuclear weapons were used to great effect in WWII. Obviously the scientists of the world knew something about the effects of radiation on human beings (or else nobody at Oak Ridge or the Manhattan Project would have bothered with any kind of shielding, and all of them would have learned about the deleterious effects the hard way). WWII was also known for unrestrained warfare against civilians, fanatical and utterly inhumane régimes, and very intense asymmetrical warfare (partisan guerrillas and undermanned and undersupplied conventional units).

So, why did nobody think to use a dirty bomb?* Or Heinlein’s proposal of airdropping large amounts of radioactive powder? (“Solution Unsatisfactory”, published 1940) Would a dirty bomb or the airdrop method have been at all useful on any front?

*(Including relatively exotic things like V2 rockets or 500 lb. bombs salted down with radioactive isotopes.)

2

I can’t imagine that it would have been of any military use. The scale of the war was such that it would have ended up as a footnote, trivia for military historians.

3

What if the people using them targeted farmland or municipal water supplies?

4

Dirty bombs are mostly useful as terror weapons. They’re simply too slow and unpredictable (you want your enemy dead now, not a few months from now) to use directly as a weapon. While both sides undeniably did operate terror campaigns, for the most part they focused on military objectives.

Also, the harmful effects of radiation were poorly understood at this stage. I don’t think anyone thought it would be good for you, but I also don’t know if people realized that radioactive material all by itself would be of any really effect at all.

Finally, that’s a little too close to chemical weapons, which were justly shunned by all sides after the WWI experience.

5

[QUOTE=Derleth]
What if the people using them targeted farmland or municipal water supplies?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think it would make a difference. For the most part, radiological weapons involve long-term problems and consequences, which are low on the priority list when your immediate concerns are not being shot, blown-up, or starving to death.

6

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Finally, that’s a little too close to chemical weapons, which were justly shunned by all sides after the WWI experience.
[/QUOTE]

Italy and Spain used them in the period between the world wars.

It’s been suggested that the USA might have ended up making widespread and massive use of chemical weapons against Imperial Japan if they had not surrendered and the United States had been forced into a slow and bloody invasion of the home islands.

7

It was actually a big fear of some the British Atomic scientists during the blitz (according to this book which I just finished reading). One British scientist would even sneak out with Geiger Counter after German air raids, and check bomb craters.

Though personally I don’t think they would have been particular effective in a military conflict (particularly compared to chemical weapons). The impact of a dirty bomb is primarily economic (it can leave world famous chunks of real estate pretty much uninhabitable for a long time) and psychological (every one in the vicinity of the bomb would be convinced they had been given a fatal dose, even though only a few have).

8

It was considered.

In My Tank Is Fight! a text on the subject of never-completed WW2 secret weapons, German plans for a dirty bomb were made very plain. The transatlantic bomber being developed was intended to carry chemical, biological, radiological & (if available) nuclear weapons. Its payload was too small for conventionals.

9

Hmm…I can’t find my copy right now, but I think Richard Rhodes Making of the Atomic Bomb mentioned that some of the Manhatten Project (Fermi and Teller?) scientists played with the idea of using dirty bombs to poison the German food supplies, but came to the conclusion it wasn’t practical.

I’ll poke around and see if I can find a better cite.

10

Malodorous is right (except about the spelling of Manhattan :D). In April 1943, Fermi suggested the idea of dropping fiercely radioactive isotopes on German cities to Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer discussed it with Teller, and they decided that the best candidate was strontium-90, “which the human body takes up in place of calcium and deposits dangerously and irretrievably in bone.” The Allied scientists were seriously concerned that their German counterparts might be ahead of them in developing an atomic reactor, and even if they couldn’t develop a fission bomb first, they might be able to make a dirty bomb.

Oppenheimer seriously considered the idea, but didn’t want to proceed “unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of a non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this.”

Rhodes comments, “There is no better evidence anywhere in the record of the increasing bloody-mindedness of the Second World War than that Robert Oppenheimer, a man who professed at various times in his life to be dedicated to Ahimsa (‘the Sanskrit word that means doing no harm or hurt,’ he explains) could write with enthusiasm of preparations for the mass poisoning of as many as five hundred thousand human beings.” (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 510-511).

On the German side, Hitler and other top leaders were suspicious of “Jewish” physics and much more interested in their glizty V-1 and V-2 programs. Although the Americans couldn’t know this, the German nuclear program wasn’t advanced enough to have undertaken even a minimal dirty bomb. In fact, captured German scientists, when they first learned about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flatly refused to believe that the Americans had developed a real fission bomb. As recorded by hidden microphones, they theorized that we may have dropped reactors on the Japanese cities.

11

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Dirty bombs are mostly useful as terror weapons. They’re simply too slow and unpredictable (you want your enemy dead now, not a few months from now) to use directly as a weapon.
[/QUOTE]
Absolutely. With a grounding in the basics of risks of exposure to radiation in the populations, provided by newsreels and which they did not have, they might have been useful as terror weapons but to really get people’s attention you need a BIG bang. This would not come from dirty bombs.

12

What Rhodes also mentions is the discussions in an S-1 subcommittee of Conant, Arthur Compton and Urey that were taking place at the same time as those between Fermi, Oppenheimer and Teller. He correctly notes they concluded that the Germans were extremely unlikely to resort to radiological warfare and that the tactic would be ineffective if they did so. What Rhodes omits is their other recommendation that “if military authorities feel that the United States should be ready to use such weapons in case the enemy started to use it first, such studies should be initiated immediately” (as quoted by Hershberg in his Conant biography). Since I’m not aware of any such follow-up studies, never mind later active preparations, I presume that the military authorities decided this was indeed not an eventuality they had to prepare for.
The set of preparations that were adopted are given their own chapter by Groves in Now It Can Be Told: the measures to ensure that any German attempt to disrupt Overlord by dropping radioactive material on the beaches would be quickly, but discreetly detected. Under the codename Operation Peppermint, about a dozen Geiger counters were distributed and various orders (reprinted at length by Groves) were issued. Thus medical staff were told that a problem had occured in the manufacture of some X-ray film, with the effect that they looked foggy after being developed and that they should report instances of this. Similarly, they were told that there had been “a few cases of a mild disease of unknown etiology” with specific symptoms and, again, that further instances should be reported. Without saying so, the symptoms were those of radiation poisoning.
Nobody thought this was a likely outcome, merely an eventuality that had to be covered. This is particularly clear from the exchanges between Eisenhower and the British, particularly Ismay, in May 1944: it was a low priority issue and the minimal action taken by the Americans already had it covered. (See the summary of these letters in Vol. 3, pt.II of Hinsley’s British Intelligence in the Second World War.)

Over the years, Barton Bernstein has written a number of articles on US thinking about radiological warfare during WWII.

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Also, the harmful effects of radiation were poorly understood at this stage. I don’t think anyone thought it would be good for you, but I also don’t know if people realized that radioactive material all by itself would be of any really effect at all.
[/QUOTE]

The subject was a lot better understood at the time, at least by the specialists, than most people nowadays realise. Particularly for the sort of exposures you’d be thinking about in this context.

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
In My Tank Is Fight! a text on the subject of never-completed WW2 secret weapons, German plans for a dirty bomb were made very plain. The transatlantic bomber being developed was intended to carry chemical, biological, radiological & (if available) nuclear weapons. Its payload was too small for conventionals.
[/QUOTE]

While I’m not familiar with that particular book, every other claim I’ve seen of it having been envisaged to use Nazi rockets or bombers to rain nuclear destruction down on the US has been pisspoor history. This seems entirely a postwar fantasy.

13

In the made-for-TV Day One there is a meeting of a Presidential Advisory Council where dumping large amounts of radioactive material on Germany is discussed. The film implies that there is a mildly racist reason for not going through with the plan, but agreeing to use it on Japan. IIRC, that particular scene is taken either directly from government records or the comments of the gentlemen at that meeting.

Much of the Truman Presidential Library’s papers are on line and freely searchable, so if one was so inclined, they could probably find something there if they wanted to do a search.

14

The thing is, we’re paranoid about dirty bombs today, but they weren’t in the 40s and 50s. Sure, people knew radiation could make you sick, give you cancer, or even kill you, but take a look at the above-ground nuclear tests done in the 50s. While some of the scientists and doctors involved might have known that the soldiers near the tests were going to have a much higher risk of cancer a couple years down the road, no one was sufficiently concerned to actually stop the tests, or make sure the soldiers got what we would today consider adequete protection.

Nowadays the thinking is that any radiation exposure, no matter how minimal, is to be avoided. But back then they didn’t think that way, and a slight increase in cancer rates a couple years down the line would have been and was dismissed as negligble. Remember x-ray machines in shoe stores? The nuclear science set for kids? The above ground bomb tests?

The damage from a dirty bomb set off in, say, Manhattan, is that it would take millions or even billions of dollars to clean the site to modern-day acceptable levels. But you drop such a thing on 1944 Berlin and people shrug and get back to work, and the people who survive the war and die of cancer 10 years later haven’t helped the allies win the war. You need to kill them in 1944. And acute radiation poisoning isn’t that big of a threat, compared to being blasted apart by conventional explosives. And chronic radiation poisoning that manifests years later isn’t helpful unless you imagine the war is going to drag on for decades.