spinning nukes
Yesterday’s New York Times ‘Week in Review’ section features a front-page, top-of-the-fold story by Philip Taubman called The Trouble With Zero about the nuclear disarmament movement. On first read it appears like a straightforward-enough status report on that subject. But turning to the story’s continuation on page 4 I was immediately struck by the accompanying photograph — a picture of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb from 1945 ironically captioned ‘New Weapon’!
Why did the editor select a photo of a nuclear warhead over fifty years old, when there are thousands of more modern weapons in the U.S. arsenal? Photos are not hard to find — here’s one of the B61, a light weight, intermediate yield bomb with variable yield options, of which the U.S. has several hundred stockpiled. Or this one of the newer W87 intermediate yield strategic ICBM MIRV warhead. Or the beautiful photograph of neutron pulse tubes for the W76 undergoing testing at Sandia National Laboratories (which I’m using to illustrate this blog entry).
I can only guess that the editor’s motive in selecting an ancient history nuke instead of a contemporary one is to lull the reader into complacency, by portraying nukes as quaint and old rather than presenting a picture of current reality; viz. scores of thousands of modern high-tech weapons of much greater megatonage deployed in U.S. silos and submarines, ready to be used on command.