Every nation denied A-Bomb by America should fall on its knees and thank God (and Washington DC)

The biggest single attraction of the A Bomb for America, circa 1945, was how expensive it was.

So expensive that only America could seem to afford it.

A de facto economic atomic monopoly.

Only America couldn't afford it, could it ?

The Path not Taken : Pax Penicillia ,1945

How different our world would have turned out to be if the selfless and open morality of the Manhattan Yellowmagic project had been the path 1945 America had continued down.

Instead it chose to turn to the selfish secrecy of the Manhattan Yellowcake project as its reigning ethos.

Japanese human germ warfare experimentation , too, becomes 'Born Secret' in the Yellowcake Pax Americana

In 1945, two possible approaches to implementing the Pax Americana lay before America : the selfish secrecy of the Manhattan Yellowcake project or the selfless openness of the Manhattan Yellowmagic project.

An early test of 1945's Pax Americana was how American's scientific establishment would handle news of Japan's truly horrific germ warfare efforts from its UNIT 731.

my Dalhousie University Bicentenary / Bicentennial (1818-2018) project : Martin Henry Dawson and his selfless penicillin

As an alumnus of Dalhousie University (Halifax Canada) , which will be two hundred years young in 2018 , I have long wanted to honour its 200 years of achievements in an unique way.

When the amazing wartime penicillin story of Dalhousie graduate Dr Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) fell into my lap in 2004 , I felt a thorough exploration of it would be a wonderful contribution to the bicentenary/ bicentennial celebrations.

Here, I felt , is truly someone who exemplified the "selfless service to greater humanity" that the university tried to instil in all its students and staff.

The SOFT POWER War : 1945-1992

In 1945-1946, the USSR was too weakened by the recent war to want to fight another big war right away - and all of America should have known it.

At least some of America's top leadership did understand.

Meanwhile the USSR understood that , despite Hiroshima, nothing had really changed in terms of fighting and winning big wars against opponents with large territories.

Atomic warfare treated differently from Chemical and Germ warfare because of its commercial potential

The western Allies spent more on chemical and germ weapons than they ever did on atomic weapons - yet they never used them.

But surprisingly, the only thing that left and right wing historians of the decision to drop the Bomb agree upon is that part of the reason why it was dropped was the fear that Congress would wonder why a $ 2 billion war-ending weapon was never used to prevent massive American soldier casualties in any invasion of Japan.

But billions were also spent on germ and chemical warfare weapons and they too would have ended the war quickly.

So why weren't they used ?

Why was it unacceptable to kill Japanese babies by gas poisoning or germ toxin poisoning , but acceptable to kill them by boiling them alive and by radiation poisoning ?

Yellow Magic , not Yellowcake , marked the shift from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana

I argue that Pax Britannica lingered on into the end of WWII , but as soft culturally-economic power, not hard military- economic power.

The British brand had a lot of strength against the America brand - it still had a lot of moral capital.

Not the least because Britain had stood all alone defending the world's Four Freedoms while isolationist America had yawned like a bored bystander watching a schoolyard bully beat up a pre-schooler.

Winston Churchill had led that fight but in the Fall of 1942 - unknown to most - his party, the Tories, had thrown away most of the global good will , all in an instant.

Tragically for Pax Americana , "Could we keep the Bomb a secret ?" misheard as "Should we keep the Bomb a secret?"

Recipe for a world tragedy :

In one bowl : top American scientists , privy to the details of the Manhattan Project and well aware of the long ongoing world-wide scientific quest for the atom's inner secrets.

In the other bowl : the top American political leadership, extremely well versed in conventional military thought , economic hardball and winning elections (but who knew rather less than zero about the current hot topics in the scientific world.)

Mix the two at a top secret meeting and stand back.

FDR's 'Freedom of Thought', it turns out , is "BORN SECRET" : Pax Yellowcake, 1946

From early 1941 to early 1946 is only five years but that was long enough to kill FDR's "Freedom of Thought" stone dead.

The McMahon Act said that whole classes of thoughts, even if they are thought uniquely by one person inside their head - or assembled from various information already in the public domain - are born secret and to be known only by the government.

1984's Thought Crimes had arrived in America , not in Orwell's Britain , and arrived 38 years early !

This is what happens when Pax Americana is built around the deluded groupthink (Pax Yellowcake) that the atom bomb was ever an intellectual secret and could ever remain so.

Observing the rise of Pax Americana doesn't begin to explain HOW it rose...

What a difference one lifetime can make

One of the key wartime leaders of WWII was Marshal Petain of Vichy France.

When he was a young child , Europe had four times as many people as all of the Americas - when he died, almost a century later , the Americas were well on their way to having as many people as all of Europe .

They will soon have twice as many people as all Europe.

1940's "Destroyers for Bases" exchanged on the neutral ground of Halifax - midway between Potomac and the English Channel

To assure both a still isolationist America and an uneasy British Conservative electorate , the 1940 'destroyers for bases' deal had to be consummated at a place both parties felt equally at home in : Halifax, Nova Scotia.

WWII's non-Triumph of the Will-ful scientist : Norden bombsights , Atomic radiation and Synthetic penicillin

If Man's mental Will inevitably Triumphs over Nature, WWII is no place to offer proof :

For example , Mother Nature's salmon, eels, butterflies , swallows et al seem to navigate great distances far far more accurately than WWII pilots using Newtonian physics' Radar and Norden Bombsights.

In 1945, 2/3 of the UK didn't vote Labor - or didn't vote

Only one third of the potential electorate actually went out and cast a vote for Atlee's Labor Party.

Why write about someone dead seventy years ago ?

Why I write about Henry Dawson :

HENRY DAWSON's story is actually about all of us.

In fact ten billion of us , so far, since 1940.

 All of us enjoying better health because of a single selfless act of Agape: a dying Manhattan doctor putting the saving of ten other lives above his own life. 

WWII Britain self destructs to second-rate status by trusting its airplanes more than its empire

By far far and away the potentially largest army power of WWII was not Russia or America - it was the British Commonwealth!

Yellowcake factories visible from Space - Yellow Magic factories barely visible in microscope

After the Jews , what being did the Nazis plan to 'holocaust' next ?

My view is that the natural Atlantic Lobster couldn't have been far down their list.

Gladys Hobby, penicillin pioneer, on the arithmetic of the enemy "PERSISTERS" of the First Strike Doctrine

Gladys Hobby, the 1940s penicillin pioneer, was a mere bacteriologist, albeit with an excellent grasp of elementary school arithmetic but not someone with the higher math that qualifies one to 'plan' (sic) the world's nuclear weaponry levels.

By contrast, the nuclear boys all seemed to have had excellent higher math skills but to have no intuitive sense of elementary school arithmetic at all !

Memo to Nazi nuclear spies : read the student newspapers ...

ADDENDUM :

I wrote this post in haste on my way out the door and re-read this morning - at leisure. So :

I didn't mean to imply that Alex Wellerstein was only interested in how secret the WWII Bomb was but rather that he is interested in the various (usually negative) affects secrecy had and is still having on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy issues around the world.

And I wondered about the accurate spelling of Norman F Ramsay's last name - it is really "Ramsey" and he ultimately won a Nobel prize and headed the team set with actually dropping the Bombs over Japan.

Of greater interest to me,  he thought a Canadian-made Lancaster would be a far better Bomb dropper than the American-made B-29 , which at that time of the war was almost more lethal to its air crew than the enemy.

Americans would probably would have marched off quietly to the Nazi ovens rather than admit the Canadians built better airplanes than themselves - so this idea was a total non starter.

General Groves had been well coached by his ultimate bosses, Bush and Conant , on the need for an all American Bomb , (after the other Allies had provided most of the ideas and much of the materials needed to make it work.)

My revisionist point being that the Ally cum commercial and scientific rival the Americans really seemed most worried about was the British Commonwealth - not the USSR.

********************

Alex Wellerstein is a historian and blogger (RESTRICTED DATA) intensely interested in examining whether nuclear bombs were ever as secret as general opinion holds them to be.

His blog is highly informative and great fun to read.

As part of my overall interest in whether 'secrecy' is ever truly possible or easy, I am casually interested in instances when nuclear secrets were revealed inadvertently , despite heavy security efforts to contain them.

But I must admit that my real interest in secrecy is whether the other Manhattan Project, wartime penicillin, was ever as secret as it too is reputed to be.

University precincts : from the safest Republican polls to the safest Democratic polls - as science accepts Nature as dynamic, not static

In FDR's day, the safest polling districts for rock-ribbed Republicans were around the universities - and this was something generally repeated all over the world.

Tenured professors of the physical and social sciences in particular were once among the most politically conservative of all voters.

Well !!!!!!

Today of course the situation is completely reversed.

Why ?

1945 Nobel prize for FAILURE in Medicine to Fleming and Florey

Admittedly , complaining about the Swedes and their awarding of Nobel prizes is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

But their famous 1945 rewarding of a Nobel prize in medicine to some of the pioneers of penicillin has to rate near the top for ineptitude.

First ever use of penicillin IN humans vs first ever use ON humans

ON vs IN 

Alexander Fleming should be credited only for the first ever use of penicillin ON humans : penicillin-the-antiseptic.

The first ever use of penicillin IN humans , penicillin-the-antibiotic , should be rightly credited to Martin Henry Dawson.

Which PAX AMERICANA : 1945 America's moral descent AND ascent

At the very beginning of WWII, America's leadership wwas convinced that, morally, only the Norden Precision Bombsight would allow it to win at war with minimum civilian casualties for the other side.

But by 1945, America's leadership had decided that its new chief weapon was to be a weapon of mass terror and mass destruction, The Bomb.

Its only truly unique capability was its ability to burn alive all the residents of a large city at one go.

And with only America possessing it, America could become God's terrifying Avenging Angel over the whole world .

From plan A's Norden precision killing to plan B's Yellowcake mass killing, it is easy to see a steep moral fall in America's moral leadership.

WWII : when Massachusetts ran the whole world

The secretive team that ran the OSRD and ran the Manhattan Project and ran America's go-it-alone atomic bomb foreign policy that ruled the postwar world were not elected officials of course.

(We are talking America , after all.)

They were instead five white protestant native-born well paid male scientists, further linked together in a consensual intellectual circle jerk by all having very strong Massachusetts-based academic connections.

The most powerful figure in wartime America vs an unknown dying doctor

It wasn't a fair fight : the unknown dying doctor won.

It was a classic Hollywood-type story of powerless, selfless , agape-good triumphing over all-powerful evil of the most banal kind.

Yellowcake (and Yellow Magic) Diplomacy : Plan B of a Plan B

It never was supposed to end up like the way it all did in 1945.

The original Plan A for America, from 1938 to late-1942, was to rely on the Norden Bombsight and the Sulfa Drugs to see America safely through any dangerous faint echoes from a possible European war.

Both inventions failed to work out anywhere as well in the field as they had been touted they would work by their starry-eyed promoters.

So, from late-1942 to mid-1943, there was an improvised Plan B.

The Jekyll and Hyde Manhattan Projects : Yellowcake or Yellow Magic ? (Pax Americana 1945)

Many US cities are much better than New York at symbolizing various facets of America but none is capable of symbolizing, all by itself , what the rest of the world sees as both the best and the worst aspects of America.

It truly is Janus Manhattan ; truly is Jekyll and Hyde Manhattan.

Equally part Gordon Gekko and part Emma Lazarus.

"Seven Days To Noon" and "The Third Man" : atomic diplomacy vs penicillin diplomacy

"The Third Man" and "Seven Days To Noon" were filmed so long ago they are old enough to be old age pensioners,  but these two gripping films remain classics of postwar british cinema and fine time capsules into the mindset of western civilization post-1945.

Seven Days is an allegory about American 'go-it-alone' atomic diplomacy while the Third Man , Harry Lime , acts as a stand-in for Josef Mengele in a film allegory that sees the ultimate expression of evil being the murdering of innocent children by the doctors they trust - in this case , a corruption of penicillin diplomacy.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 2 : FDR's WPB restores the human fabric ...

If is not just ordinary Americans who find America's political system 'inside the Beltway' to be overly complex and confusing.

Outsiders - some as presidents with hands on nuclear red buttons and some as terrorists with hands on cellphone detonator buttons - find the daily mass/mess of signals coming out of the Beltway totally confusing.

Perhaps never more so than during FDR's 12 year reign when he closely mimicked Adolf Hitler's policy of setting up competing powerful bureaucracies and letting the strongest and most determined claw and elbow its way to the top.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 1 : FDR's OSRD rends the human fabric ...

Memo to basic scientists :

General Leslie Groves doesn't deserve your bad press, for the same reason that Vannevar Bush doesn't deserve your good press.

It was Bush, the head of the wartime OSRD (and reputed to be the most powerful un-elected man in Washington) who carved in stone America's selfish postwar determination to keep the atomic bomb and atomic energy a secret American monopoly -- General Groves was merely following Bush's orders.

I repeat - it was a scientist, one of your own, who carried on the old Republicans' policy of selfish Isolationism (albeit in a new guise).

'Millions of Lives Lost' : because first penicillin article not peer-reviewed ...

Alexander Fleming's very first article on penicillin, supposedly a masterwork of basic science , had a fatal flaw - for itself and for untold millions of innocent patients between 1928 and 1943.

Fleming submitted it for publication, even though he hadn't done a fundamental test that every potential new anti-bacterial drug should have performed upon it, before any sort of valid scientific judgement can be passed.

Fleming , in a pique of hubris , rushed to judgement , prematurely and unfairly, on his new child - penicillin - and his erroneously wrong assessment almost strangled it before it was even born.

Fleming had totally failed to test how penicillin actually worked (or not) inside a real living body 'protecting' that body from a real disease.

Penicillin (and its many kin in the beta lactam family) will probably always remain, on balance, the world's best ever bacteria killer to be discovered.

However most of its advantages are also the source of its odd quirks cum grave disadvantages.

(For completeness, I will mention - in passing - that penicillin is a broad spectrum killer of many of humanity's most dangerous bacteria and that it originally didn't really work when taken orally.)

Now onto its really unusual features.

It is extremely extremely non-toxic for any drug , let alone a lifesaver, (only a tiny fragment of one percent of us are dangerously allergic to it - and this not an issue of toxicity , per say anyway.)

It is non-toxic partly because it diffuses extremely readily.

A failure to diffuse readily was a sometimes-fatal-to-the-patient flaw in its rivals the sulfa drugs.

A diffuse drug also kills better by reaching into the tiniest of places in a body to kill bugs hiding out there.

It diffuses well partly because it is reluctant to bind to most body bits - this reduces its potential for creating new toxic compounds and ensures all its killing power is saved for the bugs.

But a drug that diffuses well and doesn't bind to other chemicals also leaves a body very quickly - penicillin's biggest flaw.

And penicillin does not kill rapidly on contact like say sulfuric acid kills instantly on contact and it is (relatively speaking) a slow bacteria killer, or so it seemed at first.

But this is actually a bonus, not a bug , as computer programmers say.

It is rather stand-offish and only acts upon bugs that are actively growing ( ie actively killing us) and so does not waste its killing powers upon harmless bugs that co-exist with us and reproduce slowly.

Nor, as I have said, does it waste its strength by binding onto our own various body bits and creating dangerously toxic new compounds in the process.

So, if injected into the blood stream of a healthy young living being, penicillin will be seen leaving the body very soon afterwards via the urine, seemingly long before it has time to kill all of a bunch of normally reproducing bacteria.

As Fleming suspected from his basic science studies and so put into his dismissive 1929 report.

With the result that Fleming claimed penicillin as had absolutely no value as a life-saving antibiotic.

He thought penicillin could only work as an antiseptic - ie , useful when poured into body cavities or wounds that are 'unconnected' (relatively speaking) to the body's blood and kidney systems.

But we know in fact - from real life experience - that penicillin-the-antibiotic can knock the deadliest bugs off their feet in really sick people - clearly Fleming went badly, badly, badly wrong.

What's the explanation for penicillin's unexpected 'in-sick-bodies' success ?

Well, for a start, in seriously sick people the body systems slow down and penicillin rarely leaves as fast as in healthy young people - so penicillin can hang about longer to work its magic.

Sickness also causes inflammation that lets penicillin cross body barriers that normally bar it in healthy people.

And if penicillin is constantly dripped slowly slowly into a muscle instead of being rapidly shoved all at once into a vein (by IV injection) it will have a much longer time to work its magic before leaving via the urine.

And when Fleming said penicillin was a slow killer he really meant it took a while to kill all of his bacteria sample.

But penicillin actually begins killing some of the rapidly reproducing bacteria at once (and remember that rapidly reproducing bacteria is the best single definition of a really dangerous, as opposed to a relatively benign, infection).

Inside a real living body with its own anti-bacteria defences, even slowing that rapid bacteria growth a little helps breaks their stride and often the body can finally catch its breath and kill the bug mostly by itself.

(This is believed to be the reason that in the early days, incredibly tiny amounts of penicillin seemingly 'stopped' all-out bacterial infections that were judged certain to kill the patient in a few hours.)

Because penicillin was reluctant to bind to blood serum or pus, while it stayed only a relatively short time in the body even when slowly dripped into a muscle, it was also 'all work and no play' during its short shift on duty.

By contrast, the hard to diffuse sulfa drugs hung about for hours but wasted most of their strength binding uselessly to pus and such instead of hindering our bacterial foes.

All of this was determined years after the fact, in part via basic science research.

But for a real life clinician MD ( ie a front line ward doctor) this basic science work was a  luxury - merely icing on a cake.

She or he simply had to learn how to improve lives - now - with a new medical tool without necessarily knowing fundamentally how it actually worked.

A medical tool can remain forever a big 'black box' to both doctors and basic scientists and yet improve the lives of millions.

For example, for years I helped give mental patients ECT "shock treatment" and saw it as the only thing that really improved their individual lives - even though we didn't know then - and don't know now - how it actually works.

Exalting "basic science" is a vastly overdone disease.

Frequently it really means "exalt those academic scientists who don't work helping people" over "honouring their lesser brethren who actually do dirty their hands helping humanity directly with applied science".

Because real families tend to feel a lot more grateful to the frontline doctors saving their mother at midnight than they do to back room lab scientists working a nine to five regular shift.

This tends bugs the basic scientist no end and they over-compensate by claiming an exalted role for basic science in laying a foundation for all applied science.

History fails to support this claim , by the way.

Doctors Fleming and Florey , the two best known penicillin pioneers, shared a fatal common revulsion for the clinical side of being an MD - they much preferred being in the lab and away from people suffering.

(Today, they would be just plain PhDs without the humbuggery of pretend MD licenses --- but back then non-MDs got no respect in medical science or biochemistry.)

Their revulsion was fatal for penicillin patients because much of the drug's behavior in sick patients (its only really useful quality) simply could not be predicted from its activity in Fleming's test tubes or in Florey's healthy young lab animals.

Dawson , by contrast, liked being with patients and simply did his 'basic' penicillin research while stuffing what little penicillin he had into very sick people and closely watching the results.

He learned its basic nature while also saving lives and he did so steadily from 1940 to his death in 1945.

But far as we know, Florey never did ever stick a single needle of penicillin into a patient and Fleming is really on record of doing so only in August 1942.

Peer Review and Alexander Fleming 

So what does this all have to do with 'peer review' ?

I do not believe that the editors of the journal that accepted Fleming's first penicillin article actually put it out to a realistic peer review.

If it had been , at least one of the reviewers would have called for a basic 'protection test' ( seeing if penicillin could protect from a disease in an animal and then perhaps in a human patient) before urging the accepting of the article for publication.

Peer review is much criticized today - but who doesn't wish that it had been applied, in full strength , in 1929 to Fleming's article ?

If a basic protection test had been tried - and seen to work - penicillin would probably been rapidly put into clinical practise by 1930 ( remember that before 1936 and the sulfas , there were no anti-bacterial drugs).

And yes - it need to be much better known that one of the editors who so shoddily accepted Fleming's article was Dr Florey !

Because Florey and his many powerful partisans have made so much of Fleming's failure to try a basic protection test upon penicillin.

But editor Florey failed to request one in 1928 and failed to do such a test himself for 12 (twelve) more years - doing so only after his underling Ernst Chain dared to try something similar in March 1940.

Wartime penicillin is often described (by the British mostly) as a twin triumph : British science and American industry.

I think in the case of this refusal of both Florey and Fleming to do a simple protection test with penicillin for 12 wasted years , British science was hardly shown at its best...

Janus Manhattan 1945 : Atomic ISOLATIONISM & Penicillin's NEW DEAL

Janus Manhattan Island had something for everyone in 1945.

The spirit of ISOLATIONISM , last seen going under in the wake of Pearl Harbour, was back stronger than ever , albeit in a new Easter bonnet.

For God's America had decided its role was no longer to stand above and away from a wicked, wicked European-dominated world.

Rather it was to become God's avenging angel , benevolently ruling over a badly fallen world , with a velvet fist in a nuclear glove.

FLOREY-FLEMING feud dreamed up by a bunch of bored press agents in a bar , to cover fact that both Brits screwed up penicillin

Who, besides atheists and the BBC,  produces hagiographies any more ?

BBC FOUR's "BREAKING THE MOULD" is - intellectually - filmed through reverential gauze, with blessed petroleum jelly on the lens for added good measure, only this time it is penicillin pioneer Howard Florey it is busy beatifying when earlier BBC types did the same for  another penicillin pioneer, Alec Fleming.

A matter of redress , the producers claim.

But actually, the supposed FLOREY-FLEMING rivalry and highly public "feud" , on matters where it really counted for the lives of the dying millions, never ever existed.

It always had more than a whiff of Hollywood press agent handiwork about it - a feud dreamed up by a menage a trois of Hedda Hooper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell.

Success is a meal eaten alone : Survival is shared together ...

Janus Manhattan, 1939-1945 , indeed.

How on earth to conform two wildly variant images of Manhattan (and America) that originated in the same place and time (the eighty acre spread in upper Manhattan between the Nash Building and the Lutheran Hospital , in the summer of 1943) ?

The selfish secrecy of the atomic Manhattan Project , as America schemed to keep The Bomb from even its closest allies.

Set this against the same America's selfless sharing of the penicillin Manhattan Project with the whole world - even with former enemies !

Summer '44 : Dodgers stiff , but Brooklyn shines in extended roadtrip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold & Silver : more than just a tree grows green in Brooklyn ...

I am not saying such a headline ever appeared in a Brooklyn newspaper after it was learned that 90% of the penicillin that saved so many lives on D-Day was the naturally green stuff grown in the Brooklyn plant of Pfizer  --- but won't it be a great succinct prose poem if it had ?

Did Joshua Lederberg learn about Dawson's DNA transformation from Gladys Hobby ?

It has always been a bit of a mystery .

"Only re-Connect" : Henry Dawson and the Human Fabric

In 1928-1929, (Martin) Henry Dawson fell upon an explanation for something the Era of Modernity definitely felt needed explaining.

How, in the name of Darwin , if the bacteria were so small, weak and stupid , had they survived on the Earth dozens of times longer than their next nearest (and much larger and much more complex) rivals ?

Allied+Axis+Neutrals' moral war against 'social medicine for all' overshadows the minor military war amongst themselves

Just like the fog of night for murderers , the fog of war is a wonderful time for bureaucrats and politicians to do all the bad things they lacked the courage to attempt in peacetime.

WWII can be seen as a continuation of a mid-Victorian battle.

REAL chemists finally gave us natural penicillin - while wannabe chemists wasted decades on synth penicillin

One of the saddest ironies of the fifteen wasted years before the world got the best lifesaver ever known - penicillin - was that it was real chemists who finally delivered natural penicillin in time for D-Day and to save the millions under threat of epidemic deaths in the aftermath of WWII.

Let us then honor them - names like Glaxo's Harry Jephcott , Pfizer's John L Smith and the WPB-OPRD's Larry Elder.

By contrast, it was chemist manques - chemist wannabes - who wasted decades, millions of human lives and millions in taxpayers' money in a hubris-fueled chase after the mirage of man-made penicillin.